DRAGONFLIGHT Feral Talents Feedback [also video]

Community General Discussion
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To address this argument - it’s fine to have them as talents. It is overall a change I agree with, especially when there’s no longer a gold sink associated with obtaining skills and respeccing. Happy?

You seem to forget a lot of limiting factors that exist in Classic and must be taken into account when discussing this system.

The Dragonflight talent trees assume you can respec just like you can in Shadowlands - all the time and at no cost. So they can afford to ask of us to have more specialized builds, because there’s no cost associated with having a build anymore.

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You can respec on the fly and you can have multiple loadouts.

2 Likes
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Exactly. So having more specialized builds is fine. In Vanilla, it cost gold to respec, the cost went up exponentially with each respec, and you needed to wait weeks without respeccing for the price to drop to a reasonable price. I liked that system, don’t get me wrong. But the Dragonflight talent trees are not designed with that restriction in mind.

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I didn’t even think of that. But yeah, in the old days talents hardly got changed (and most were far from interesting in the first place, so I don’t get the “I have to choose things I don’t want” while at the same time praising classic’s tree that some people do)

I can see alot of fun combinations to try out on feral.

Where it also shines is having points to spend when levelling new characters and build your own class.

1 Like
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Looking at your live spec and your DF spec we can see what extra talents you had.
Here is compared to live, i’ve bolded and numbered what was gotten from the DF tree:

(talents 15) Predator / 1. Sabertooth / 2. Lunar Inspiration
(talents 25) Tiger Dash / Renewal / 3. Wild Charge
(talents 30) 4.5 Restoration Affinity : Ysera’s Gift, Rejuvenation, Swiftmend, Wild Growth, Ursol’s Vortex /
Balance Affinity : Astral Influence, Moonkin Form, Starsurge, Starfire, Sunfire, Typhoon
4. Guardian Affinity : Thick Hide, Frenzied Regeneration, Incapacitating Roar(except this)
(talents 35) 5. Mighty Bash / Mass Entanglement / Heart of the Wild
(talents 40) 6. Soul of the Forest / 7. Savage Roar / Incarnation: King of the Jungle
(talents 45) Scent of Blood / 8. Brutal Slash / 9. Primal Wrath
(talents 50) Moment of Clarity / Bloodtalons / 10. Feral Frenzy

Bonus as opposed to Live, extra talents:
Lunar Inspiration, Savage Roar and Primal Wrath
On live you also had Guardian Affinity, you have that except Incapacitating Roar from it, since it’s exclusive with Mighty Bash in DF. But you took out of Restoration Affinity: Rejuvenation and Swiftmend.

You have chosen Well-Honed Instincts which is part of borrowed power from live that will be gone after SL, it’s currently a conduit. So it’s extra in DF, as it will be part of select-able character power.
But why would you chose this and spend 2 points on it for a 90 second cd 20% heal over 3 seconds, less than 7% hp per second, instead of spending 1 point in Renewal which is 90 second cd 30% hp instant heal… and you can go further and use the other point and select Heart of the Wild.
You’d gain an extra 2 more abilities from the current talent tree, if you dumped the lesser conduit as opposed to the better talents, bringing the total up to 12 from 7… so 5 extra talents from the current tree.

This is not even mentioning getting extras such as: Draught of Deep Focus - lego, Cat-Eye Curio - partial lego effect, since you know, after this expac is over, you’d have lost them. + also Berserk: Frenzy which is another lego - Frenzyband from live.
And you’re getting Adaptive Swarm… which again, you’d have lost as it is a part of borrowed power.

And extra:
Increased Armor and Physical Damage - 6%
Increased Healing and Magic Damage - 6%
Lycara’s Teachings - 3% crit in cat
Sudden Ambush - 3% per combo point to make your next Rake or Shread deal dmg as though you were stealthed
Taste for Blood - 6% extra dmg from Ferocious bite per bleed on the target

And you’re losing out on Hibernate and have to chose between Mighty Bash and Incapacitating roar? Well i’m sorry but you’re gaining so much and losing so little.

Net result is that this is fake news. ^

2 Likes
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We don’t use the term “Fake News” enough on this forum. I’m going to bring it into my vocabulary.

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While I agree with most of your post, well-honed instincts is incredibly strong. Having an autoproc heal while you are stunned is, especially for feral, incredibly valuable.

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So it’s better in some situations, sure.
But Renewal is better in others, yes?
But in this case you’re trading off Well-Honed Instincts against Renewal AND Heart of the Wild.

You have to take that into account as well.

And i’ve been meaning to ask, but wouldn’t it be better to get Berserk: Relentlessness instead of Lunar Inspiration? Seems like that would give more sustained burst.

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It’s a solid pick if you focussed on bites instead of bleeds.

The problem with the bite build, as it is now, is that you do no damage when convoke is on cooldown. The bleed spec, in combination with draught/circle has constant pressure and it has good burst damage.

As to your other point, yes, there are alot of options that could work extremely well. I can’t wait to test it. Personally I would still go for well-honed instincts, ferals tend to die in stuns when caught in cat form. The autoproc heal is insanely valuable. Not sure why they removed it from WW, they had the same problems aka dieing in stuns.

Again, I’m extremely excited to try it out. There’s combinations I now have acces to that weren’t able before, you mentioned them yourself already.

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So that would move part of the constant pressure, over to more burst. Guess it’s a choice.

Sounds like players have choices to make, doesn’t it? Cause i’d chose to go for Renewal and Heart of the Wild instead.

Still… they’ll move some stuff around in future iterations, can bank on that.

1 Like
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And that’s exactly what I like about it, choices. Yes, hibernate gone and having to choose between stun and disorient is a bummer, but I’m gaining alot of things as well. I’m pretty excited about it and try all kinds of combinations.

1 Like
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Can’t wait until they finally release the other classes too… the wait is killing me.
Wanna see what possibilities they have too!

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Tell me about it, I’ve been refreshing wowhead the last 2 Fridays constantly, thinking we would be getting them weekly.

Recently picked up my ww again, and I would very much want to know how that’s gonna look. If I get acces somehow to healing elixirs again, oh my…happy happy joy joy. Perhaps we can now have both the karma talent and ring of peace together now, that would be great too. So blizzard, if you’re reading this, hurry up.

Edit: just thought about this, but with lunar inspiration you also can get combopoints while kiting, I can’t stress enough how useful that is.

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Oh, and come to think of it, I haven’t even stepped a foot inside arena after getting my set bonusses on my feral. I had already signed out because of the simple fact that fighting people with a 4 set vs no set was a miserable experience. So that makes your comment even more dumber than it already was. :+1: thumbs up for the effort though, better luck next time.

p.s. circle still melts people.

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Subjective. I think they messed up SOME things in BfA and MANY things in Shadowlands. Legion was near perfect imo.

And sure; each to their own.

But honestly; not everyone needs their own thread about this topic. Just post your thoughts in Blizzard’s OFFICIAL preview thread (because that makes the most sense, right?).

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You didn’t address it. You just said it’s fine.
You haven’t offered reasoning why it’s good.
“It doesn’t affect me that negatively” isn’t really an argument and is not reason for it to be that way.

Primal Wrath is ability I wished to avoid and is not worth dragging to Action Bar in PvP.
So it’s not really bonus.

That’s incredible and very important ability.

I had to, because I wanted Cyclone, I don’t consider these bonuses as I never wanted them in first place.

I’m comparing Shadowlands Feral vs Dragonflight Feral. It’s irrelevant if you have the ability because of borrowed power or not. I chose to give feedback for how the end result feels.

That will get balanced out. If Feral is doing too good, it gets nerfed, if it’s doing too bad, it gets buffed. That’s why these passive effects are superboring waste.

That’s something that’s so bad you try to avoid it in Shadowlands, but you have to spend 3 talent points into it in Dragonflight. Another thing that feels superbad.

Nope.

No.

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Due to the lack of restrictions for changing talents that was present in classic, the need for limitations in order for the system to even function, and the ability to save loadouts, making the main limitation the access to abilities is fine.

The alternative is to adopt classic’s system, in which builds can be slightly more open, but talent swapping has an exponentially rising gold cost that can get prohibitive if people change talents multiple times a day.

While in Classic, you’re expected to maybe change your build once a week, or if you need to role swap for a night, in Retail, you are expected to change talents between bosses, to change your talents based on your enemies in arena, or even between trash pulls. So the system is fine and the way they chose to implement the restrictions that are needed for it to even function, especially in the long term, are fine. Happy now?

And to say you have to sacrifice fun, when fun isn’t currently present in classes at all is an asinine thing to do. All the FUN in WoW comes from borrowed power, because classes are bland… LoL heroes basically. It’s so bad! And the FUN doesn’t lie in having many abilities, but in building a character as a tool for a purpose and then blowing away the challenge that was put ahead of you. The FUN is in struggling with progressing a boss and swapping talents to do something differently, which results in killing it.

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I’ll give you this, aoe dot in pvp isn’t rly useful.

Maybe that’s why Blizz placed it against Mighty Bash.

Yes they are there and can be used in PVP. It doesn’t matter if you wanted them or not.

Doesn’t matter, there are lots of borrowed power that will be forgotten as well, do you count those as lost as well? In the end they’ll balance with or without them, like you said above for Armor and Physical Damage.

And it’ll be another ball game in DF, seeing as for example we’re losing 10% stamina we had from the covenants… the deep bond or whatever it was called, along with several other soulbind passives.

We’re all getting “nerfed” in passives in this area, whatever you gain in the trees is extra, that’s why you shouldn’t count on borrowed power.
At lvl 60 we’re going to still have most if not all our borrowed power… so we’re losing all the passives equally after lvling or stepping foot into DF.

It is, you’d also get Heart of the Wild alongside it, imo it’s better to get those 2 instead of Well-Honed Instincts.
But it’s fine, since that’s where personal choices come in.

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Or have open system AND talent swapping. Easy.

Not necessarily, because “fun stuff” like Cyclone and Hibernate were baseline since Classic.
Now they’re prunned.
They were not borrowed power.

Hibernate, Remove Curse and Soothe definately should be baseline, and if Cyclone is supposed to be in talents, it should be similar to Wild Charge pickable without requirements.

I don’t mind that one that much.
It’s sort of a choice, and you don’t lose DPS picking one or the other.
Yes, you end up being worse, but it doesn’t feel as bad as losing DPS to pick Cyclone, which you previously had baseline, while having to spend multiple talent points to get there.

In your opinion it might be better. But realistically and objectively it’s worse. Main kill opportunity in PvP comes from killing something in stun. You may be immortal outside of stun and it doesn’t matter.

So my main points stay:

  • overal damage % increase sucks and are boring, too many required boring talents
  • it doesn’t feel good when utility goes against DPS
  • it feels bad to not be able to pick main abilities you wish to have, but having to spend so many points on abilities you wish to avoid
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But you’re not losing dps getting cyclone, you’re weighting it against other utility, there are enough points there to do that.

Or you may survive the stun and have an oh-crap heal to get to a safer point and Heart of the Wild as a cd.
Or you may use it pre-emptively and avoid getting killed in the stun.

There are possibilities and possibilities in PVP.
Imo no way an activated self-heal(especially as heal over time) at a % hp point will out-weight a personal decision for an instant greater heal, not even counting on Heart of the Wild as that’s the cherry on top.

But no point in debating this further, it’s just one of the personal choices to make from the new trees.

I’m not opposed to Blizz replacing them with some things that change your rotation somehow. For ret as an example, even haste is good since it speeds things up, it lower cd’s and it lowers the gcd.

  • For PVP you’d have to decide which is worth more to you, for PVE you’d go full dps. For feral you can get anything relevant in the Druid tree at least, as opposed to DK’s (unholy at least) which is much harder.

It wouldn’t feel like much of a choice if you could cherry pick all that you want.
And in the end it’ll be balanced around your best build/s anyway.