The speed is subjective but I wish they would prune some of the energy talents. Smooth energy regeneration feels good. Does anyone really notice or enjoy clear casting procs? They could easily convert that extra energy into more regen and I doubt anyone would care. You don’t have to go back to spammy gameplay. Just somewhere in the middle. Give us something like they gave Fury Warriors where you can choose faster gameplay or bigger hits.
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Just play bear OP, even if you never plan on tanking. Maybe run feral in content that doesn’t matter.
You’ll be happier I promise. And when the least played spec in the game (outside of pvp) drops to levels of participation that no longer justify the devs even bothering with it, maybe we’ll start to see some fun changes to it, instead of the piss poor decisions they’ve made this xpac.
I don’t oppose your idea of turning clearcasting into energy regen, though I’m not sure if there is a functional way to make it a choice with a DoT spec. The entire reason why having low energy on hand works is because a significant portion of our damage comes from DoTs; we don’t need to fill every possible GCD with an ability to have competitive output because we’re still getting damage from the GCD we hit 10 seconds ago. If Blizzard speeds up the spec, it would necessitate tuning our bleeds down as well. I’m sure this would be possible via talents, but I don’t particularly want a significant portion of my talents to be a choice between energy and throughput which I worry would be required in order for there to actually be a choice.
If you have some ideas in mind for how it could work, I’d be happy to discuss. Having more choice is never a bad thing.
This is the most fun I’ve had with feral since at least Wrath, if not ever. I get the changes aren’t for everyone, but not everyone agrees the decisions Blizzard has made with feral have been bad. I truly don’t know why players insist on having two flavors of assassination rogue rather than allowing the two specs to feel distinct from one another…
Agreed.
I just feel like people who aren’t happy with feral changes should just let Blizzard see the truth in metrics.
Play bear. They’d be happier than whining on the forums and elsewhere about being unhappy, and the meteics might actually cause a change in direction.
Arguing nonstop with yourself and Grizzle about it in these threads certainly isn’t going to accomplish anything.
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I won’t speak for Grizzle, but the main point of contention I have is the presentation of subjective measures as being objective. We have no way to measure whether the decisions with feral were good, bad, or neutral, regardless how each of us feels about those decisions; we don’t even know what the design objective was with their changes. They may have been bad for your enjoyment, and I will never try to suggest you should find the same thing fun that I do. I am just uncomfortable tying the fun I am having with the quality of the decisions Blizzard made.
I actually don’t agree that metrics are the answer here. I don’t think that the energy pooling style of Feral is going to be more popular than the energy-flooded style of Feral, but I also think the game is healthier for allowing that playstyle to exist. We have 39 specs, there’s room to allow people who enjoy unpopular playstyles to have access to the style they enjoy. We don’t need every spec to be generically popular.
Put another way, I think the existence of Assassin is an excellent reason to not turn Feral into Assassin.
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I disagree.
I’m not sure with talent builds why we can’t accomplish both.
I played feral until TWW. It was my main since the start of MoP.
I have also played an assassination rogue. I did not enjoy it.
If a large percentage of feral players suddenly gave up on the spec (presumably because they are unhappy with the direction) as I’d advocate for, would you then be more comfortable with my sentiment?
The biggest reason is that I don’t trust Blizzard to be able to juggle two different identities for one spec. With energy being a central resource to the spec, the entire talent tree has fluctuating value based on whether you go for an energy-limited or energy-rich build. When you keep the range of energy regeneration tighter, you can make better assumptions about how much individual talents are worth. Especially those that care about Bites since energy-availability most directly affects how often we Bite.
No. Because I’m not willing to compromise a playstyle I enjoy for the sake of players I don’t know. I’ve never played Feral because it was popular and I don’t care whether or not Feral is popular. If Feral changes playstyle and becomes more popular as a result, that’s all well and good for the people who pick it up. But I would drop it. Selfish as it may sound, I only care about Feral insofar as I am able to enjoy it myself.
The second post you quoted there was to Delk, but I’ll reply anyway;
Then you should have no problem understanding why those of us who are not happy with the energy starved playstyle are calling Blizzard out for it, and that your opinions on the matter/arguments for why it should stay mean next to nothing to us.
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Oh I absolutely understand it. I’m just confused as to why you can’t play Assassin. My big issue here is that I find a lot of the suggestions to be to take the meme of Feral being a Walmart Rogue seriously. We don’t need to make a fourth Rogue spec and we don’t need to sacrifice a unique playstyle in favor of creating another copy of one that already exists.
Speaking for myself, because I don’t want to play an assassination rogue. I tried it, and it wasn’t for me. And you calling them the same, doesn’t make it so.
Being an advocate of only caring about what is fun for yourself, I would argue that you shouldn’t need to have that explained to you.
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Help me to understand then. Why didn’t you like Assassin and why do you think that changing Feral to match Assassin’s pacing would make Feral a more desirable spec to you?
My main issue is that I don’t see what the difference is between Assassin and an energy-rich Feral. They both have a builder and a spender bleed to maintain and otherwise spend the majority of their time building up to repeatedly cast a big direct-damage spender. If there’s a significant difference I missed that’s causing your disconnect then I’d ask you to help me see it. Because as it stands, I don’t see how we can’t both be happy since it sounds to me like you’re asking for a playstyle that already exists. You’re telling me that it doesn’t but aren’t helping me to understand why not.
I will always have heartburn around calling a decision a mistake without understanding the information that was available at the time and the design goals that drove the decision. Negative feedback is always going to be more prevalent than good, and it’s fully possible there were more people asking Blizzard to go back to slow feral than there are people complaining about slow feral today. The decision Blizzard made may have been objectively correct based on the information they had when they made it.
I would certainly be far more amenable to discussing how the spec needs to change for modern players if this were to happen, however. Without any of these metrics, it’s just different camps of unknown size throwing their personal preferences around. But even then, I stand by the idea that the feral we had from SL and DF isn’t good for the game. It is better for the game overall to have feral be clearly distinct from other specs, and what we had the past few expansions was too close to the play style of assassination; if that means feral is reworked to be completely different from today and assassination, so be it.
Still better than BFA Feral where Sabertooth made Rip have functionally infinite duration.
Sabertooth was a mistake and I celebrated heartily the day it died.
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Oh for sure, but with me shifting more heavily into M+ in BFA compared to raid, Sabertooth wasn’t nearly as egregious since I was spamming Primal Wrath for 80% of my finishers regardless. Overall, I feel it was unhealthier for the game when energy was completely irrelevant than when Sabertooth made took Rip out of the rotation in single target. I would certainly understand if someone who was still focusing more heavily on raid might feel BFA Sabertooth was worse than unlimited energy.
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That would certainly describe me. I was much more interested in raid than in M+ in BFA.
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I’ve already wasted more time on this then I intended. As I said; An endless diatribe back and forth accomplishes nothing.
To reiterate; To those who feel like the OP, but want to keep playing their druid, just play bear.
If the spec ends up languishing because participation in the spec drops to the point of being a waste of development resourses perhaps we’ll see changes.
Going back and forth here certaintly isn’t going to bring them.
I disagree. If Blizzard is of a mind to make changes to Feral I think it pays to have threads like this one for them to reference. Certainly some awareness for the pain points of Feral is good to have when changing it. I would even say threads like this are why we got the energy change in the first place because I certainly remember seeing multiple comments about how people didn’t like that Feral was losing its energy management identity and a lot of those same concerns were paraphrased in the blue post when the energy changes were made.
So never say never I guess.
As someone who plays Bloodtalons, I absolutely do notice and am thankful for them