Because it does not only improve Frenzied Regeneration but also Barkskin.
I mostly played around with the following calculator
https://birdh.at/talent/druid/feral
Bigger picture view.
Pros.
- I really like that we are getting more interesting, more complex talent trees. So big thumbs up.
- Since all Druid specs share the general tree, it will to some degree alleviate the extremely annoying imbalance between utility brought by different druid specs (Feral can finally get Innervate and 1min Stampeding Roar, if desired)
- Mark of the Wild makes a return (yay) as a poor menâs Leader of the Pack (not so yay). Still, I will be so happy every time I can actually do something during buff phase!
- some of the cooler Covenant and Legendary abilities have been retained (yay Convoke plus Adaptive Swarm) - this is really nice. BUT: I know Kindred Spirits was mostly considered boring but I liked the idea of it. May be bring it back in some form, too?
Cons.
- I really dislike that so many base skills are locked behind the talent tree. I think this will not feel good: instead of having a complete kit that you can augment and improve, half of the talent points you spend will just feel like âI am getting back to where I wasâ. This is bad. I donât mind some high impact skills being locked behind talents (Convoke for example) but not base skills like Swipe.
- Why cannot I not unlock talents âfrom aboveâ ? For example, if I move up to Infected Wounds through Brutal Slash, I should be able to go down from there and pick Primal Wrath. While playing with the tree, I often thought this would make it feel much more smoothly.
- Further, having so many skills hidden behind talents means I will essentially have to rearrange my whole UI every time I respec. Right now, it is a mild annoyance to have to move abilities every time after switching Covenants and Moonkin form and abilities every time after switching affinities (seriously, how has this not been fixed yet) but with these new talents this will become really, really aggravating.
TLDR: With very few exception, talents should improve abilities, not unlock them.
More detailed comments.
- Generally, situational abilities like Iron Fur, Soothe, Hibernate, Infected Wounds, etc should be on âdead endsâ of the tree, so you are not forced to pick them just to unlock other abilities.
- I donât like that Berserk is so all over the place. Make it one talent with up to three points invested.
- Since Brutal Slash replaces Swipe, it needs to be a âdead endâ talent.
- Blood Talons / Feral Frenzy is awkwardly placed, move it more to the center so that it can be picked independent of whether you go down the tree on the left or right.
- Apex being on the right side of the tree while Primal Wrath is on the left makes no sense. Apex needs PW to work.
- Predatory Swiftness needs to be more central, not so far on the left tree. Why do I need to pick Primal Wrath to get to PS? It makes no sense for raids.
Fix: Move PS where Infected Wounds is now. - Wild Charge / Tiger Dash needs to be more accessible and not locked behind Soothe.
- Why no Sickle of the Lion for Feral? Should be one of the Berserk options really.
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Just a few things that came to mind as I read your comments:
The trouble with that is that it removes the component element of it. Youâre forced to take the point one effect before you can access 2 and 3, for example. And unless itâs on an end node, youâre forced to take every effect to access whatever is locked behind it.
It isnât certain that it will continue to be a replacement for swipe. Now that we donât get swipe by default, it may be possible to take both. I agree that weâll need clarification on that because itâs terrible design for mythic plus (or any AOE heavy encounter) as it is.
It isnât behind soothe. Itâs a top level talent that can be picked independently as soon as youâve picked enough above it to unlock that level of the tree. (This came up in the other thread here.) Soothe is behind WC/TD.
Iâd like to see sickle baked into incarn, in place of whatever it is we have that no-one ever picks. That would make the incarn/convoke node an actual choice rather than convoke or nothing.
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- Adaptive Swarm does not fit with the Feral toolkit/style. It should be replaced with Mangle, giving the same, undispellable, increasing bleed damage by x% debuff.
- Thereâs too much focus on Berserk. There are like ~4 talents which all influence the one ability. Just remove them and realize that Berserk is not a strong cooldown, and wonât be.
I know, but why would they then call it âImproved Frenzied Regenerationâ?
Strongly disagree. This will make these, highly situational, talents just not picked up at all (because theyâre competing with other much stronger talents). Really the best solution is to just make them baseline.
Does it though? Both Swipe and Brutal Slash are talents, but you donât need to pick Swipe to get Brutal Slash. Iâm not sure what theyâre thinking here. So, is Swipe just a dead talent point if you get Brutal Slash?
Blizzard, please donât do this. This will force Bloodtalons into every single bleed centric build. With it being out of the way there are multiple, potentially BiS, bleed builds that could be made without it.
Predatory Swiftness and Infected Wounds should simply be baseline.
They arenât. Soothe is (semi-)locked behind Wild Charge / Tiger Dash.
This. Iâm a PvPer, if things work the same way as they do now (with it being possible to change talents in the starting room of BGs/Arena) Iâll have to practically re-make 1/3rd of my UI every single game.
I really think this is a mistake. Mark is class-wide. Feral needs something to stand out compared to other melees and Druid specs.
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Hm, I see your point. However, being forced to take utility talents in situations where you do not need them (say Iron Fur as Feral) also does not feel good. If they were dead ends, you could pick precisely those utility talents that you really need in a given situation (say, Skull Bash if you do M+). Of course that would mean you will get some players that go into dungeons without Skull Bash, without Soothe, without Remove Corruption etcâŚ
Well, something unique to Feral would be great but I donât know how realistic that is. Are there any spec specific buffs in the game currently? At least with the new system, we can have the same utility as the other druid specs, not a strictly smaller set of utility.
Oh, that is good news! I was misusing the talent calculator then, I thought you needed Soothe to go to WC/TD.
Just because you have presumably never played necro feral, donât try to take it away from the rest of us. Adaptive swarm is what makes the bleed build that so many people have been asking for possible.
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He doesnât want to take away bleeds he wants to replace swarm with mangle that we had before that did the same thing
Last time Blizzard failed completely. Big announcment about the return of SootheâŚthe problem was it had no use in game (BFA).
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You mean exactly the same thing as swarm? It jumped from target to target, both enemy and friendly, the enhanced version could split, and you could build up a huge swarm that buffed your bleeds on every target? I donât care what itâs called as long as it does that. (Iâm not sure why youâd want to call it something else, though, when itâs obviously a swarm. And commanding a swarm of insects fits very well within the druid fantasy, in my opinion.)
Honestly, I donât see a problem with swarm either. Iâd only change it to nature school instead of shadow, because shadow magic is not really a thing for druid archetype.
I know that these covenant spells had their magic school based on the covenant. It has itâs niches for some classes though, especially for casters, which have more to do when they are interrupted on their primary school (like Soul Rot for Warlocks, Divine Toll for paladins, etc.). On the other hand, these spells can have more limited synergies with class core mechanics only because itâs not the correct magic school.
With covenant abilities being reused in talent trees, Iâd redesign them a bit to fit more within class archetypes. I love Fae Guardians on my priest, but itâs not that flavorful for priests. For druids, making swarm nature spell is just fine.
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Tell me you didnât understand what was said without telling me you didnât understand what was said.
I like Necro Feral as much as the next guy, but you clearly donât know what Mangle does/did.
Of course Mangle, a classic melee Feral ability which interacts beautifully with bleeds makes a ton more sense than a Shadow school ability which suffers from being on GCD (despite doing nothing on its own), being dispellable, highly RNG and ranged (we are a melee class and Blizzard needs to start addressing this by giving us proper Powershifting and Infected Wounds back instead of half-assing it with 1-2 optional ranged abilities).
On top that, the 2 extra points could definitely be made to do something fancy with Mangle, akin to Locust Swarm.
But hey, if youâre all for Adaptive Swarm then letâs replace Bloodtalons with Adaptive Swarm, so we at least have one less awkward RNG ability/mechanic.
PS: Replacing Bloodtalons with Adaptive Swarm + Locust Swarm is actually a good idea. You should do it Blizzard.
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you know that this version of swarm is the bad version. maybe good in arena but thats it. Necro was the worst covenant with and without covenant legendary. The swarm split made it good for resto druid in m+ but thata all.
I understand that what it DOESNâT do is what I specifically asked. Iâll quote for you as a reminder:
Since you havenât confirmed that it DOES do that, the obvious conclusion is that it doesnât. Despite your claim, it isnât like swarm at all.
Iâve looked at the description you provided, and that confirms that itâs an inferior form of enhanced adaptive swarm. It doesnât jump, it doesnât split. It has to be applied to each target individually, so itâs impossible to build up a healthy swarm that you carry with you from one pack to the next.
Itâs great for feral in AOE. I play it in M+ on fortified weeks because itâs a lot more fun, and does the same overall damage as âpress it on CDâ convoke.
Iâll confess that I donât pay much attention to different schools of magic (beyond being happy if I have more than one to use if I get locked for a few seconds), but this does make a lot of sense. The popular term for necro feral is âbeekeepingâ and bees are very much nature.
It buffs bleed damage on the target by x%. Swarm buffs dot damage by x%, and is annoying and can jump to the wrong target.
Just like I claimed, it is very much so like Swarm, except the annoying part where it RNGs around to people I didnât want to put it on.
Jumping doesnât make Adaptive Swarm better. If anything it makes it RNG and bad.
Nor does Adaptive Swarm. Locust Swarm, which requires 2 extra points, does.
Which I conveniently mentioned here:
Did you seriously think you could get away with comparing 3 talent points to 1 and claiming âMangle is not similar to Adaptive Swarm (plus two other talent points)â?
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I compared the link you provided me, the exact thing you suggested adding, with what we have available in the current proposed tree.
Iâm sure mangle worked well when pull sizes were small, and it was viable to apply a 12 second bleed/debuff to every target individually as well as keeping up the rest of the rotation. However, the game has moved on since then.
Once again, it doesnât matter to me that much what you want to call it, as long as it does exactly what it does right now. (Although a bleed jumping around and spreading to multiple targets does seem a bit weird, whereas it makes sense with an insect swarm.)
Would be nice with a Blizzard âreadâ flag or some feedback that they are listening.
You mean you made most unfair comparison you could possibly come up with, and compared three talent points to one.
You made the most dumbed down analysis possible, with zero added value.
âMangle is not the same as Adaptive Swarm plus two other talents hurr durrâ - you donât say Sherlock.
Again: Adaptive Swarm doesnât split. Locust Swarm splits.
OnT: If people care about AoE splitting the bleed debuff then the 2 talent points could very well be made to make Mangle an AoE.
Then YOU needed to add that, seeing as YOU were the one making the suggestion. All you suggested was a ST talent that doesnât jump and doesnât stack. If what you actually meant was something else entirely, you needed to say that. We - and the devs - are not psychic. (I still think itâs reinventing the wheel when we already have something that does that job.)
All I said was to replace Adaptive Swarm with Mangle, a very similar ST ability which is melee based and much more rooted in our lore and history.
You being unable to comprehend that Adaptive Swarm =/= Adaptive Swarm + Locust Swarm is a you issue.
This is true, but since you failed to suggest any way that mangle could be enhanced to deliver the same AOE performance increase that adaptive swarm does currently, it was inevitable that your suggestion would be open to debate. You being unable to comprehend this is very much a you issue.
Mangle is a bleed, adaptive swarm is a swarm (of insects). The effect may be similar in ST, but the concept is profoundly different. Youâve consistently failed to suggest how mangle could be enhanced to provide the same effect that AS does with the current legendary - âjust make it AOEâ is a very, very long way from the depth, complexity, and variety of builds and playstyles that enhanced AS offers.
As far as how itâs âmuch more rooted in our lore and historyâ is concerned, please could you explain how commanding a swarm of insects is NOT rooted in druid lore? We are druids first and foremost, after all.
Everything youâve said so far seems to amount to âI donât like adaptive swarm and donât want to play it, so I donât think anyone else should be allowed to play it eitherâ.
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