Why are you messing with the Feral Druid patch?

[Ânimalman-tichondrius]

Ravage bleed is sick on top of the 1.5X multi on ferocious bite. Dotc > wild stalker. That’s just my opinion.

[Grizzle-eredar]

@Reshyk-cenarion-circle

It came out to 54.9% of my damage.

DoTC, in my last run 44% of all my damage came from bleeds. And this being the Bite focused build.

[Dwelknarr-lothar]

@Lilîth-spirestone

I just wish there was enough flexibility in the talents to have that fast playstyle a lot of us came to like the last few years for M+ or even delves.

In theory I agree with this, I’m a big proponent of allowing players choice so they can find the game that will be most appeal for them. But this is one situation where I’m not really sure how a choice could work in a satisfying way. Every aspect of the throughput for feral has to be tuned around the resources that we have available. The only reason feral is able to keep up with other specs is them retuning our bleeds to deal a lot more damage as we will have far fewer globals at our disposal. Given the power level of any single talent node, I feel like we would need a third of our spec tree devoted to choices between energy and throughput to allow for such a swing between DF and TWW. And that sounds dreadfully boring to me.

Then there’s the risk that one of the play styles becomes strictly dominant in most/all content. There would always be a best option at all times, but at least if the two options are close, it would be easier for people to accept a slightly lower ceiling for fun (like how some people run Wildstalker in M+ despite being technically worse than DOTC). But if one option is 50% ahead of the other, it’s going to just feel bad for those who want to run the inferior option in any kind of group setting.

If there’s a way to get the choice you’re mentioning while avoiding these things, I’m all ears. I’m truly not against there being a choice. It’s just sometimes choice is either not possible or would create such a constraint on design that it’s not practical. I fear this is likely one of those cases.

@Lilîth-spirestone

I feel like since we’re made slower and focused more on maintaining bleeds and things with the occasional spurt of energy to throw some bites out, then the bleeds should hit like a truck. But with the big damage still being based in bites it just kind of misses for me when it comes to anything other than raiding. And it sucks, because I like the theme and most other aspects of feral.

While I personally wouldn’t turn down there being even more damage put into our bleeds, there is still a balance that needs to be struck for several reasons.

First, even when ferocious bite/ravage comes out to our top damage, we still play entirely around our DoTs and snapshots. All of our gameplay decisions are centered around when we should apply a DoT; ferocious bite/ravage is always the fallback option when our DoTs are good. It’s not like many other specs where your decisions center around a big hitting burst ability; we largely wouldn’t even know that ferocious bite/ravage played such a big role in our damage profile were it not for details/logs based on how we prioritize the buttons we hit. Rip is still our highest damage/global by a wide margin.

Second, Blizzard already gives us the choice to make our bleeds shoot up significantly in Wildstalker when compared to DOTC. The choice is already there. And while I know much of the WoW community will tell you that any choice that isn’t mathematically optimal is unplayable, wildstalker even in AOE contexts is fairly close to DOTC for throughput. It’s already possible to get to the point where 50-65% of our damage comes from our DoTs.

Third, even with DOTC, ferocious bite and ravage are nowhere near as high of a percentage of our damage as ferocious bite used to be. There were times that ferocious bite was 70% of our damage on its own. There were times when it was correct to not refresh rip for 20 seconds if the enemy was getting close to dying in favor of endlessly biting. That shouldn’t happen for a DoT spec.