Feral Druid Damage Distribution And General Design

Classes Druid
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Feral was always designed around bleeds. This is what people fell in love with, this is what people stuck with the spec for. This is what people spent money for Shadowlands and subscription to play. It is not what we have now. We need a redesign and WE want it to take us back to the bleed-oriented gameplay we miss so much.

Draught of Deep Focus was fixed, which is nice, but Moonfire is still not very good because it doesn’t benefit from our Mastery. Rip is still a sad thing.

Here we go: I have compulsive thoughts. This means that back in Cata and MoP I wrote down dmg of spells in tables in a notepad on my old laptop. From this data I have done some calculatificationizing and found the relationship between our different damaging abilities.

Comparing full duration Rip (11 ticks for Cata / MoP and 12 for SL) with a critical strike Ferocious Bite:

Cata: 2,25

MoP: 2,5

SL: 0,91

So in SL a full duration Rip does 90% of the dmg a Ferocious Bite does (this changes sligthly with armour) while previously when Feral was what EVERY SINGLE ONE of us fell in love with it did 2 and a half times the dmg of a critical FB. Oh yeah, did I mention that this is with the 40% dmg bonus from Draught of Deep focus? Yep… Without The Draught of Deep Focus the ONLY reason to spend combo points on Rip is to make use of the Taste For Blood conduit.

You might think that Ferocious Bite was bad previously, but that is not the case either. From my Cataclysm data, I did up to 40k bites on similarly geared clothies on my character with 132 000 HP. That is a solid chunkeroo of health. Less impressive on a plate-character, but still a third of a clothie’s health. This is similar to the Ferocious Bite damage we have now. I do 9-12k crits on targets with about 36 000 HP, which is a third. We can get stronger with Bloodtalons and Kyrian.

The relationship between Rip and Rake has stayed consistent, except for the 60% dmg-bonus Rake gets when used in stealth. Which leads us to another issue with Feral:

Our dmg-abilities seem to have been forced into a Rogue-like archetype. Feral does not have restealth which means the 60% dmg bonus from stealth on Rake and Shred make no sense and we can’t play to benefit from it. It only serves a purpose during Berserk, which is a time where we use LESS of these abilities than we do normally.

Back then it was all about snapshotting and you couldn’t just press Shred 5 times, Rip and wait for someone to die. In MoP Savage Roar gave a 40% bonus to all your physical damage. Which meant you HAD to, it was completely mandatory, to keep it up at all times and it rewarded you with being able to Tiger’s fury and on-use-trinket into fat Rips.

We can still put a lot of effort into buffing our Rip, but as it happens those things buff Ferocious Bite too, which is already better, which means it stays better and becomes relatively better as it gains more absolute value from the %-bonuses. Meaning Rip / Ferocious Bite sinks from 0,91 to 0,89. The relationship becomes 1,07 in a calculated scenario where Adaptive Swarm has 100% uptime during Rip. Additionally, burst is mechanically better than sustained damage as it leaves less time to react and forces cooldowns and possibly human errors (this is not 100% the case all the time as different healer designs might interact differently with burst and DoT-damage).

The way it is now we are a set-up class in terms of our damage-distribution, not a sustained pressure-class which is what we were. The problem is our entire toolkit outside of our damage-distribtuion is not designed this way. We do not have CC. Set-up classes need CC to be able to kill in their burst windows, but we have fairly lackluster burst windows and no CC. Our CC is a 1 minute CD stun OR spend 5 combo points on a stun which leaves us with no dmg left since all the damage is in Ferocious Bite which also happens to cost 5 combo points. This leaves us without opportunity to cross-CC. Except for Cyclone which takes us out of form and incurs a global CD when we shift back delaying our dmg further. We are not Rogues, we do not even have the combo point-manipulation tools of Rogues which allows them to actually do a proper round of burst during their CC-chains – making them a successful set-up based class.

We now have the same Ferocious Bites we did before, but all our other damage abilities have just been gutted in comparison to previous expansions. To compensate for this we have been given Feral Frenzy and The Eye of Fearful Symmetry to manipulate combo points to let us be dependant on chaining Ferocious Bite instead of a single bite with sustained damaghe outside of it. Even this is failing as we don’t have enough energy-regen to comfortably do this. But wait, even Ferocious Bite is nerfed compared to before as it no longer has a 25% critical strike chance bonus against bleeding targets. Probably removed as they made Ferocious Bite a bigger part of the gameplay.

It seems Blizzard’s intention is to make it possible for us to choose between a Ferocious Bite-oriented build and a DoT-oriented build, but this is not a real choice. Moonfire is not good enough and will become worse over time as it does not scale with mastery.

It used to be that we kept a fat Rip on one target and had a solid, SMALL burst window during our 6 second (!!) Tiger’s Fury where we could get off a Ferocious Bite and some Shreds if we found a good window to try to secure a kill and maybe even refresh a Rip with the Tiger’s Fury. Ferocious Bite used to have 25% increased crit chance against bleeding targets which meant that each Ferocious Bite was, most likely, a solid chunk of burst and was good on its own, without chaining them. Which was a good design because we had good damage outside. We could use Ferocious Bite more often at the cost of not being able to keep Rip or Savage Roar up to secure a kill in a tight situation. This brought depth to the spec that was very enjoyable. The fun part of Ferocious Bite was that it hit hard and was used fairly rarely, only when it would make a big impact or if we happened to have some spare combo points.

Feral is not the only problem in this situation. The whole game has been pushed towards a state where baseline damage is lackluster and most of the damage is concentrated within windows of stacked damage-modifiers. See Mage’s Combust or the entirety of Balance. Even Affliction Warlocks are about burst Cds with their honour talent Rapid Contagion which is a whopping 30% DoT-haste on 30 sec CD in addition to their good, old Darksoul.

I’ve lost the overview of what I was going to say, but we need to fix Feral by concentrating dmg into Bleeds (not Moonfire). Remove the stealth-damage-bonus from Rake and Shred and put them into the baseline abilities. Bringing back Savage Roar might be an idea, maybe not.

The pruning of Pounce was great though, love the stun being on Rake.

Please, Blizzard, I want a healthier way to do fat Rips, let us have them back!
And please, fellow kitties, if you have any input speak up.

Edit: tl;dr: buff bleds plez

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That is a separate issue, the issue with bleed damage is a gameplay and PvP-thing.
Balance-wise we could have 1 damaging ability and be completely fine as long as it was tuned correctly, I was trying to comment on the design for general gameplay and PvP-gameplay - not our issue with getting into M+ or raids.

I don’t know what that utility should be, if not LotP, but 5% crit would probably be going into mandatory-territory as you say.

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Raiding is a completely useless metric to determine if a DPS is good or not mechanically since everything is always under perfect conditions.

Demonology is fine in Castle Nathria, yep, no changes needed, Demo is A-ok, but in reality, in the world, in M+, in PvP it’s useless, because the game isn’t just a target dummy simulator like raiding.

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Don’t forget about the 1.5sec CD to shift back into Cat Form, so if the Cyclone attempt is ended early you’re just stuck in Caster Form.

Completely unrelated to what you were talking about, but related to the clunkiness that has been plaguing Feral ever since Legion (when the clunkification reached new heights) is the mobility and effectiveness of Feral in general.

We no longer have powershifting and we don’t have a proper passive slow on our main combo point ability. Instead we have a 12sec 20% slow on Rake. This means that in PvP we’re almost always going to be slower than whoever we’re facing (if they have a proper slow, which most do), and if we want to try to catch up through shapeshifting we’re stuck in caster / other forms not getting back into Cat forever.

Basically, almost everyone can kite a Feral - that wasn’t the case and isn’t supposed to be the case. Monks and DH have miles better mobility than Feral, and even Warriors arguably have better mobility than Feral. Even Rogues are close.

With the way our DPS is designed (Rake+Rip should be maintained) not having near 100% uptime is devastating.

This gameplay is so toxic I can’t even believe it. I rolled Feral to be the bleed king, what am I though? A bite bot.

Moonfire doesn’t have to exist, it shouldn’t - as it’s a ranged DPS ability. Feral shouldn’t have ranged dps abilities, especially not combo point builders.

This. This is what they are intending, and it’s bad.

This is all due to Bloodtalons, or well at least mainly due to it. It’s really because:

  • Blizzard has decided that the core DPS profile of a spec should no longer be baselined (since Legion)
  • Bloodtalons is extremely toxic and divisive (and straight up doesn’t deliver an acceptable user experience in non-PvE content, or even non-raiding content), and since it dominates the “bleed build” this implies that the entire bleed build must be toxic, awkward, incredibly slow and overcomplicated
  • M+ (lower keys, or at least the keys that the majority of players play) doesn’t favour bleed / ramp-up specs. Thus Feral had to have a direct damage sub-spec to be viable. This is no longer true since Feral can be compensated by e.g. having strong AoE with uncapped abilities (unlike most other melees), but its influence on the spec design leading up to where we are today cannot be understated
  • Some people like to RP that Feral is a “direct damage” spec, Blizzard really likes this RP fantasy

Since Bloodtalons is so toxic and divisive among the playerbase Blizzard was basically forced to add other viable-ish options. For M+ reasons along with the idea that the core DPS profile isn’t baseline and some people having an RP fantasy based on big bite Feral that choice is obviously not also bleed based.

Thus we have the following tree: The newbie talent, the bleed talent and the bite build talent in almost every single row. It’s so incredibly divisive and just causes the spec to feel incohesive and as if it’s missing a clear theme, the kind of theme an experienced player of the spec might expect.

On top of that all the bleed based talents/covenant abilities/legendaries etc have been taken hostage by Bloodtalons (and “spinning plates” lovers) and suffers heavily from Bloodtalons syndrome (i.e. they’re extremely toxic, awkward, user unfriendly and overcomplicated) which makes them unplayable in any content that isn’t raiding or high M+ keys.

Bloodtalons: Completely horrible user experience in any content that is fast paced with unpredictability and CC. Whenever this is the BiS Feral talent (i.e. whenever “bleed build” is the go-to), Feral turns into complete shi*e - which is extremely sad since we all rolled this spec knowing that its core was based on bleeds.

Savage Roar: All the QoL options on that talent were removed since Legion and it’s now such a clunky talent that no one will pick it (on top of that the snapshotting was pruned which is another bad change, albeit irrelevant to this discussion).

Moonfire: Why yet another DoT to maintain (as if SR, Rake, Rip & Bloodtalons isn’t enough)?

Draught of Deep Focus: What if I want to make a clutch Rake stun on an off-target with Shadowmeld, Incarnation or just from a re-stealth - am I just going to lose 50% of my bleed DPS for doing a good play? Horrible design. What if I want to swap targets? I’m just going to do 50% less damage on my bleeds for some ~15 seconds or so (at worst)?

Cirlce of Life and Death: Just reducing the duration of the bleeds (making them do damage faster) is just going to make us waste more energy (which we don’t have) re-applying them. It’s just “spinning plates” levels of stupidity. It’s not going to generate higher DPS, only a horrible user experience.

Adaptive Swarm: Another “dead GCD” just to do normal DPS. Why? It’s just awkward.

They’re all so clunky and awkward, with Bloodtalons being the cherry on-top.

Blizzard needs to wake up and realize that they can’t design this spec around the two extremes of either:

  • The ~100 Mythic raiding Feral tryhards still playing that didn’t quit this horrible spec yet whom keep circlej*rking over spinning plates and Bloodtalons
  • The 10 RP fantasy “big bites” Ferals on the forums who’ve never done more than an LFR or an Epic BG (and rerolled/started Feral since at least after MoP)

That’s giving a massive survivorship bias.

I’m willing to bet a leg and an arm that a vast majority of Ferals (including those that quit because all the iterations since Legion have been horrible) want:

  • All sub-specs (talents + legendaries + covenants etc) to be mainly bleed based.
  • None of the talent/legendary/covenant/baseline abilities or mechanics being incredibly clunky (i.e. spinning plates) providing a horrible user experiences
  • None of the sub-specs to be completely dominant in the bleed based gameplay via their bleed scaling (such as e.g. Bloodtalons being mandatory whenever a bleed based build comes into discussion due its ridiculous X% increase on Rip)

Feral is suffering from years of mismanagement over these issues, and it shows in just how clunky and user unfriendly it is.

Solution:

Remove the talents:

Baseline:

New talents:

Additional changes:

Boom, Feral fixed.

PS: One might even scrap Savage Roar completely as well.

Then all that’s left to fix is the Affinities…

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Thank you so much for your contribution, Ridtur, adding so much to what I had to say and kind of bringing the general clunkiness and the bleed-problem together.

This happens very often, more and more so the higher rated you get and then you just stand around like a moron without access to your spells (if interrupted) or your damage because it’s locked by form.

There is so much to unravel here. We lost powershifting, making things more clunky and reducing our mobility significantly. Our slow is worse at 20%, presumably because we have higher movement speed than normal, which invalidates our movement speed. Our movement speed used to be 155% (130% + PvP-set bonus), it is now 130%. Infected Wounds having a 12-second duration tied to our 15 second Rake is mind-boggling. The duration-difference doesn’t really matter but it goes to show the lack of care.

We have been robbed of our niche, which was high-mobility and bleeds. Assassination rogues have poisons and bleeds and almost everyone have better mobility than us, and without the clunkiness. At least we can still get out of slow and roots…

Indeed, we all wanted to be the Bleed King.
You’re right in saying Moonfire shouldn’t be a thing. Affliction locks always had several DoTs to keep up, we should not have to manage that many DoTs ourselves as we have Rake which is whatever, we just keep it on the target, and Rip which costs energy and combo points which also cost energy to get. This was coupled with snapshotting mechanics which meant that it was not too high of a reward for the effort. Moonfire is also weird as Feral…

You are so right about Bloodtalons. It feels bad to use. Imagine a 30% buff to our main ability that feels bad to use. Not just overwhelming like Savage Roar always was for beginners, but extremely clunky and bad (wasting energy and combo points to get the buff). The existence of Bloodtalons also means that Rip can’t deal acceptable damage without it, as a good baseline Rip buffed with 30% afterwards would be ridiculous. Draught of Deep Focus alongside this and it becomes obvious why they have set Rip-dmg so low baseline. We need to have player-power bound to the character and legendaries and borrowed power to be slight enhancers or fun things - not the core of the spec.

Sabretooth adds to the toxicity of it all. 20% increased damage on Ferocious Bite? AND it adds to Rip duration? AND the other talents on the row do nothing? Yeah… And since Sabretooth makes it so Rip is extended we have to use less points Ripping meaning it can’t be as good. Imagine going DoT-build now. You get Moonfire as an extra DoT and lose 20% on Ferocious Bite AND you lose Rip-duration. It is easier to maintain Rip while specced for bites and putting more points into Ripping yields you no more dmg to Rip for it.

A sad state.

Me too. As I explained in the OP we don’t have the inherent tools to make a set-up and Ferocious Bite-based class. The class-fantasy we signed up for was not Ferocious Bite. But even if they decided that Bleed-feral is not a thing anymore, they should do completely away with it so we can quit the game in peace and the non-existant followers of this fantasy can play something functional.

I love the changes you suggest. For the removals I agree 99%, Feral Frenzy COULD be reworked to not give combo points, but only a “burst bleed” like it does already. Could be cool.

Savage Roar baseline and the spec being designed around this ability would be great. Should definitely bring back its snapshotting too, though. Primal Wrath baseline… it is shocking that it isn’t already. It would remove the need for the whole talent row it is in.

Love your suggested new talents. Additional changes are great too. I want to add that Ferocious Bite should have an increased chance to critical strike against bleeding targets. Base-damage of bite would be fairly low, but with increased critical strike chance it would be pretty good.

I hope more ferals read my thread and your post and leave likes and comments.

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Completely agree. “Borrowed powers” can never be things that ought to be baseline, as they will inevitably be removed. Borrowed powers should just be on the level of what set bonuses used to be before they got completely out of hand in like… MoP? Small but welcome modifications and additions - something you were completely okay with losing at the end of the tier.

Yeah, couldn’t agree more. Sabertooth is just bite build > bleed build, it’s a bad design from start to finish given the fantasy of the spec. You described it better than I could.

Sadly they’ll never do this since that would mean losing subscribers, and thus money. Instead they’ll string us along with “but look there’s the possibility for a bleed build there in the talents” (just so happens it’s incredibly awkward, clunky, user unfriendly and just generally not well designed).

Yeah that’s a perfectly acceptable option as well. With my list I just wanted to point out how incredibly easy it would be to make Feral all about bleeds again - without being incredibly user unfriendly and overtly awkward.

I know SR is incredibly divisive within the community, but if it should exist at all it must:

  • Have a longer duration per combo point (in MoP it was ~42 sec for 5 CPs)
  • It must snapshot (again, we’re the bleed spec)
  • Have QoL additions such as auto-applied at ~42sec if Rake is used from stealth, or it being usable at 0 CPs for a 12 sec duration buff - like in WoD and MoP respectively (pick one)

and it most certainly can’t be a talent, it’s either baseline or not at all.

Yeah, I agree with this. This used to exist in the past right?

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100%.

And yes, Ferocious Bite used to have 25% extra critical strike chance against bleeding targets, so we pretty much always had at least 50% critical strike chance on our Ferocious Bite since we have passively very high crit.

Another thing to add that might be obvious, but should be stated. Rip needs to go back to 16 second duration and have combo points scale the damage, not the duration. It used to be 16 seconds always, but you could extend it to a maximum of 22 seconds by using 3 Shreds or Mangles to extend it with 2 seconds each up to a maximum of 22 seconds. This would make no difference in PvE, but would make it so a full Rip in PvP doesn’t come free.

Edit: Doesn’t have to be excactly like before with the Rip, but the design made sense

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