Edit: Only discovered this after making this thread, so knock yourself out, way more informative than the post below.
Disclaimer: I’m only making this thread because I haven’t seen a thread on the EU forums about it yet and I’ve only done the most rudimentary testing on this, there are ferals out there who know better.
So, as any feral DPS knows Blizzard has repeated a mistake of the past and scuffed the energy ticker for feral druids. But while we wait for a fix for it there is a clunky workaround that may be worth looking into testing.
Apparently, if other sources like mana or health regeneration change while in cat form waiting for a tick you can force the game to reset the tick and refund energy you lost with the tick reset much like in the hotfix on pre-patch just before Blizzard completely broke the energy ticker.
So as an example I slapped a mana oil on my Warden Staff (I got my reasons : 3) and added it to my powershift macro, so I cancel form, enter form, equip staff to get my buffed source for mp5 and then swapping back to my main weapons makes the game reset the energy ticker and refunds me a bit of energy.
So with good timing I can get 84 energy in 2,4 seconds. 60 + 4 when I change weapons 0,4 seconds after shift to make the game reset the energy tick and then just the normal + 20 from waiting 2 seconds.
This works with all kinds of things like removing blessing of wisdom or trolls’s blood potion. As described in this US post.
So by all means while we wait for a proper fix you should get to testing so we can make the most out of this mechanic while we are stuck with it. : )
Yup, duels, pretty clunky but doable, probably better when using the troll pots or some other method. Not here to give an expert’s guide but to spread awareness.
Even the slow clunky method I used allowed for faster shredding than just waiting on two ticks over 4 seconds, now comes the time to polish up and master this.
Blizzard implementing this when aware of the consequences for feral dps is just ridiculous. I was planning on rerolling druid for tbc but there is no way im playing a class being nerfed like this when it was already struggling to keep up with other classes while also being one of the/the hardest spec to optimize.
Blizzard manages to both nerf the actual dps and the engaging rotation of the spec with one small patch.
I’d suggest you try a well positioned mana spring totem; moving in and out of it’s aura range might be actually feasible in combat, at least on static bosses
Well the system works its the same energy over a longer time same way adrenaline rush now works to. Its the normalization of resource generation system. So if they change one part of that normalization then why not change the other ones? Its like adrenalish rush you don’t get 40 energy if you pop it right before tick now but over the duration you get the same amount of enery.
And regarding bloodthirst change that had nothing to do with resource generation system and was a minor bug that was not in TBC. Unlike normalization of resource generation which was in TBC.
If they are gonna revert changes from TBC back to previous resource generation systems. Then might aswell replace the horrific normalized rage generation to for warriors. Complaning about 1,5 seconds longer sometimes I have to wait 4-5 seconds to do one Bloodthirst (Without world buffs that is). Whats the point of having a new expansion if we gonna revert all changes. New rage generation for warriors is horrific and will suck in TBC. Does that mean it should be changed? Nope. This is how it is supposed to be so leave it be.
I would guess you never played feral dps (well) since your comparison is extremly off.
Rage management is a part of playing warrior and if you fail to have enough rage for BT you are playing it sub optimal.
Re-setting the energy ticker with shapeshift is not how shapeshifting worked during most of tbc. It was an unintentional nerf that players who planned to go feral werent aware of, or they would choose another spec/class in many cases.
Warriors being nerfed from vanilla to tbc has never been a secret or dependant on a minor patch with unintended consequences.
And its an extra second of waiting for a tick in a rotation that is 4 sec long. thats a +25% increase in rotation (lowering your shred dps by 20%) and it can mess up your uptime on mangle and rip.
All for a patch that was meant to increase the mana gained from evoc/innervate by a tiny bit if it happens to be badly timed. I have never hear of anyone complaining about missing out on a evoc/innervate-tick. It was a non issue, while the “fix” is a major issue for feral dps.
Actually, the current way is how it worked throughout the majority of the lifespan of TBC.
There is nothing unintentional about powershifting resetting the energy ticker and giving less than 4 energy. Blizzard was aware of it and left it in the game for over a year without changing it. They even mentioned in the patch notes that it would affect energy users.
You not bothering to read up on the class you wanted to play is not a reason to buff it. The information about the nerf and how it affected powershifting was available out there long before even classic launched.
No, it was done to improve the functionality such as evocation and innervate. That does not mean those were the only abilities intended to be changed. As it turned out, it wasn’t even a great fix for evocation, so that got changed again in 2.3 to no longer rely on regular mana ticks.
I guess you have spent about as much time reading up on mages as you have spent reading up on druids then. Close to none at all. Information about it is easy to find. Heck, any half serious mage will have been paying attention to it throughout classic to avoid having it happen.
You keep saying this but you can hardly measure the lifetime of TBC stictly by days instead of content. Let’s look at the original timeline. TBC launches and has 5 raids in it, only 127 days later Hyjal and Black Temple come out, in another 176 days we had Zul’Aman which lasted 111 days before Sunwell, and how long did Sunwell last? 257 days…
The sunwell patch alone only falls 46 days short of lasting as long as not just the first 5 raids of TBC but the first 7, you can’t claim it didn’t drag out and pad the game, not by any fault of its own but purely because WOTLK took blizzard a long time to release be it because they wanted it out at a certain time or because of development taking a long time. If we end up with a WOTLK classic, I have some serious doubts Blizzard will wait 257 days to release it after they release Sunwell in TBC classic.
Honestly I don’t even really have to go into the dates, the only truly relevant info is that proper powershifting was relevant for 7 raids as they were current and the broken mess at the end was around for when 2 raids were the current end game content.
Should just give us the pre 2.2 powershifting and get the pot spam out of the game, simple fix. But knowing Blizzard… they will address it near the end of TBC by making the pots not work xD
Anyways, yes, its a work around, but a horrible work around.
Of course you can, and especially when people such as Warulv use words that implies that he is talking about a period of time. Then it is the only meaningful way to say it. In addition, for the majority of people playing the game the regen change was in place for most of the PvE content. Then there are arena seasons, Season 2 (out of 4 seasons) ended 62 days after the change.
Actually, Hyjal was technically available at TBC launch. And the regen change was implemented 108 days after the first Archimonde kill, 49 days before a nerf to Kael’s advisors and weapons which enabled many more to kill him, and 182 days before Blizzard deemed it necessary to remove the Hyjal and BT attunements.
Including WotLK prepatch doesn’t make much sense. The prepatch made pretty much everyone faceroll even sunwell. There wasn’t really any content at all in 3.0.2 Sunwell alone lasted 203 days, not counting the prepatch. That’s only 5 weeks less than Naxxramas lasted in classic before the prepatch
The vanilla regen system lasted 253 days. Even with Sunwell lasting half as long as it did you would end up with the 2.2 regen system being how it worked for the majority of the duration of TBC. The issues with TBC raid durations wasn’t that Sunwell lasted too long, it was that All the 25 man raids except sunwell was released within less than 6 months of release.
Powershifting was never relevant for raids, and it never will be. It did however work for the entire duration of the expansion. Using number of raids as a measure for how class mechanics should work makes absolutely no sense. Blizzard must choose one patch and stick to that. They cannot cherry pick class mechanics from all the different patches when the mechanics in the chosen patch is working as intended. If they do start to cherry pick class mechanics TBC classic will end up as an even bigger mess than the prepatch currently is.
Considering that rogues can also explot the “workaround” I would expect it to get fixed fairly soon.
