I LOVE wildstalker and wish to play it in keys more but currently its so far under DotC that playing it is just trolling your group. When simming, if you have all the same druid talents and feral talents, WS is simming upwards of 34% less than DotC in AoE. I was thinking of how Blizz could fix this and something I thought about was Increasing chance random vines spawn on targets your have hit by 5% AND make rip from both normal Rip casts and Rip from Primal Wrath proc the AoE damage from vines instead of only Ferocious Bite causing the AoE. This wouldnt do much in ST because you are getting procs of the vine damage from bites anyway but it would help even out the damage in AoE. The vines being able to do AoE damage from Rip ticks make it where when you get a vine on a random target that isnt your prio target in big pulls, you are still getting a little extra aoe damage out towards the pack from bleeds/AoE vine damage while not losing too much prio damage.
I know some people would think that it is too strong but when looking at other classes for melee, all melee classes have good AoE damage WHILE also doing crazy ST damage. I feel like this change would make WS more competitive in M+. I also dont feel like this would be too crazy due to the fact that playing WS with this change would even out damage but wouldnt give you extra survivability that DotC gives you.
How does this change to WS sound to yall? do yall think there is a better way to even out the damage split between them?
I actually love that feral is one of the few specs where I get to switch between the hero specializations depending on the situation (and yep it’s determined by how many targets I’m facing). I understand it’s frustrating when you have a strong preference for one playstyle over the other but my sin rogue main has never once switched out of Deathstalker since hitting 80 and I’m so bored with it.
I think the changes you suggest are reasonable. Archon.gg shows only 4.9% of feral druids use WS in keys.
Almost like they’re different set ups that would require different talents to optimize each hero tree.
Hmm…couldn’t be though right?
It would actually lower ST because they’re not going to let Bursting Vines do as much damage as it does now with every single Rip tick lol
Due to the nature of how Vines work, this doesn’t really happen all that often, and if it does, it doesn’t happen long enough for you to ignore a priority target to lose out on much priority damage
The talents used for WS M+ and DotC M+ have MAYBE one talent difference, other than that it is the same build minus the hero talent. I get 4-5 random vines in every big pull when i play WS in keys. Bursting vines does nothing in damage compared to ravage. ravage does the same damage in both aoe and single target so why not for WS? average bursting growth damage is 400-600k. my ravage hits 5.8-6.5mil damage every time i hit it. so having 2 procs of bursting growth damage per random vine with primal wrath would make bursting growth do around the same damage as dotc in aoe.
My boy, you are trying to argue with me about feral hero talents and damage breakdown while being a 619 balance druid.
They both do base damage in ST and increased damage in AoE.
But as for why not for Vines. Because Bursting Growth can be detonated with every Bite, for as long as a Vines is up, whereas Ravage is entirely RNG based and doesnt fall under that “deterministic” value. Plus damage on expiration. But this leads me into my suggestions:
increase the rate Bloodseeker Vines proc (rarely see the overlap thats allowed to happen)
increase the damage or bursting growth and/or allow bursting growth to proc on mobs that die with the debuff active (i dont think this happens, ive never truly paid attention)
and my personal favorite: allow Rampant Ferocity hits to work on Bloodseeker Vines (may have to limit the amount of vines available or how often they proc) - wouldnt have any effect on ST though
Kinda get some UH DK AoE/cleave happening with these suggestions.
I’m an open world/delve/LFR hero, so make of that what you will, but I’m glad to see someone at least is still plugging ideas for (non-pvp) feral this expansion.
Spec has been trash IMO all expansion. Seeing the class writer on WoWHead basically saying the the new tier set is garbage hasn’t done much to inspire any hope for a change either. Instead, it’s looking like we still don’t have a class dev, and those that occasionally work on our class seemingly still have absolutely no clue what they’re doing.
Hopefully, some of you wonderful theorycrafters can come up with some innovative solutions and gameplay that end up being fun(<-key word here) , and manage to actually get the devs to pay attention.
This actually already happens. It’s part of the tooltip for Bursting Growth.
Yes please. I actually don’t think they’d need to change the damage all that much. I already monitor my vines and make sure my Bites go into a mob with vines. I want to say I’m successful 85% of the time. Bursting Growth is a good portion of my damage but I’m not exactly running away on the meters compared to other players of my ilvl. I don’t think this sort of QoL change would have a huge impact.
Edit: no wait, I’m dumb. It would have a huge impact since it means EVERY mob with vines explodes, not just one.
I just tested it on some world mobs. I bleeded up exactly one target and ignored the others. Then when it proc’d vines I got it low and let it bleed out without using Bite.
Looks like it does proc Bursting Growth. The animation went off and I saw floating numbers appear over everyone else’s heads, and it shows up in my Details despite me never using Bite.
Me too. If for no other reason than I’d like to stop frantically monitoring nameplates looking for someone with vines on them every time I want to Bite.
Duuude right? I like that with the focus of snapshotting it kinda doubles down on the change of us going back to being a funnel/priority target spec, but having to frantically swap off for a Bite and back again is unnecessary stress in a fast paced environment lol
Can even add the “Reduced damage beyond 5 targets” on Bursting Growth if they truly want
So second dumb question… Does Bursting Growth trigger for EVERY application of vines on the target? Like, should I be looking for whoever has the MOST vines on them when I bite? Surely not because that would make me go insane.
like i said though, if it does go boom when mob dies with it active, then ignore that one.