Hi, so I’ve been playing some feral recently and while I haven’t done any high keys with him, I found some major issues with the spec in terms of its aoe output. I understand that the spec was meant to be played in a similar fashion to assassin rogue but the thing is that assassin rogue at least has its niche in raiding (ridiculous dmg output). Feral in raiding is good, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not its niche at all. Feral is a pvp one-trick wonder spec but I’d say I found one simple trick(idea) to solve this issue and attract more players into playing it in PvE content such as dungeons aswell. Going through Feral’s AoE rotation I found out a re-occuring issue which is your combo points, half of the time are being spent on single target ability: ferocious bite. Now that may not seem like the end of the world but if you think about it, having to deal with 5-6 target pull and being stuck on using single target abilities as your main damage feels weird, unrewarding and makes you wanna reroll to something that actually makes the numbers go fly on the screen on each pull. My idea for solving it is a new talent:
“Tearing Strike” - last row talent which now replaces the talent “Moment of Clarity” (which nobody uses anyway).
The ability costs combo points and does damage to 6 targets around the caster and reduced damage beyond that. Hitting at least 1 enemy grants you 10% more damage on your next Tearing Strike, stacking up to 3 times. Also optional effect: Enemies affected by Tearing Strike, take 3% more physical damage.
1 combo point: x % of attack power
2 combo points: x % of attack power
3 combo points: x % of attack power
4 combo points: x % of attack power
5 combo points: ~150% of attack power
I’d say this is a great idea that by the way does not affect how powerful feral already is in pvp and its raid damage will largely remain unchanged while also giving ferals a nice chance to buff their raid member (with that optional effect of 3% more physical damage).
Also give ferals mark of the wild:)
Let me know what you guys think about it, this idea is mainly targeted towards situations where you fill up your combo points 2-3 times after you have already used your Primal Wrath. It would give ferals a chance to possibly compete with god-cleave specs like Frost Mage or literally any other melee spec in the game. Also with this change, Primal Wrath’s Rip appliance could be extended by extra 3 seconds just to have more fun using Tearing Strike!
I have a pet theory that someone at the designers’ office has a bias for balance druids; that spec is almost always overrepresented in the best guilds’ rosters.
I was playing a feral in pandaland and while it was extremely easy to rotate: it was a pain in the butt to switch to remote targets.
Then again druids can play 4 (FOUR!11) roles; they deserve to never be great at any of them; but they often are.
There is literally no reason for it to be that way. I mean extending its potential from pvp to pve might actually bring more than those 200-people-who-religiously-play-this-spec-for-fun to playing it and actually enjoy it somewhere else than pvp. Also that argument is really bad, especially this patch where Sub Rogue is top melee spec for dungeons along with WW monk. Even BM hunters are doing “fine” in high keys. So is survival which simply does well and as a kind of PvP-one-trick-spec has really good cleave! Arms also found decent representation in keys. Why can’t feral? Out of all of these “PvP specs” feral has arguably the worst cleave in the game and the only thing that actually makes it “at all playable” in keys is the wackiness of convoke. That’s not very fullfilling gameplay, is it now.
They are also the most god-like spec for levelling (and solo questing) I’ve ever seen. Nothing complex to keep track off and almost always available to spam max possible damage.
Then again they are a copy pasted rogue spec with deleted abilities so a good rogue will usually beat them.
If only blizz could be bothered to give then a few new skills. How they just leave specs to rot is beyond me. It’s not exactly hard to give them some proper on demand AoE, and a bit of unique utility. Could give permanent +10% run buff speed for the party, avoidance, have a different version of shroud, AoE magic defensive like smoke bomb (dust cloud or what ever they wanna call it). It’s literally a few hours of work to fix the class, that’s been avoid in m+ since it began in legion. And it’s so easy to fix it would cost nothing.
I don’t necessarily think that giving everyone huge raid utility would be the move here, however, I think that giving a reason to bring at least 1 representative of each spec should become a complete baseline for every spec in the game. I don’t mean “we have to bring the spec” kind of reasons(like DK’s AMZ or Holy Pally’s immunities) but “we could bring it so it provides “this and that” unique tool”, like enchancement shamans and their windfury totems (uniquely empowers melee specs).
Good ideas but it might be hard to buff bleeds without breaking the spec in pvp. That’s why I wanted to introduce a new AoE talent in place of one that nobody uses anyway
Maystine said:
Talking from a specifically MDI perspective, the spec needs to have an AoE burst somehow, or just way more Rip damage if you want a spec to be good for MDI particularly, it needs short bursty CD for AoE and ST, that or really good consistent damage, even more than what we have right now, it needs to be reaaally good.
I think if Feral ever does get something bursty for AoE, it can be one of the top specs for MDI. I’d also like to see PW baseline and add a new talent instead in that row.
Foresight said:
For me, Feral is in a spot where in M+ it is middle of the pack, and as always it’s more a community perception issue that Feral has had for a long time than an actual throughput/utility issue, as well as (and this is a general issue not just Feral) it is overshadowed by other specs’. Realistically if a spec can do even 1% more than you, it’ll see play over your spec, it’s the way meta and competitive games work, and unfortunately, this has a habit of trickling down to the general playerbase where spec really doesn’t matter for 90-95% of content.
When it comes to changes, you need to be careful to not just have knee-jerk reactions to the state of the meta at that particular time, like Treants & Innervate I see shouted about a lot right now, but throughout BfA Treants was a meme talent that no tank wanted. I’m all for getting these spells, but I don’t think people should see it as a viability silver bullet. Realistically, it comes down to homogenisation vs niche, does every spec bring the same things in different flavours or does each spec have a niche and a spot to fill? Realistically, i’d prefer the “bring the player not the class” mentality so I’m in favour of homogenisation over niche as Blizz have proven they have zero interest in designing fights to favour all specs individual niches.
I’d like to see a Feral modernisation akin to the one that Shadow Priests get every tier or two, things like …
New and interesting interactions between talents and spells, make BrS leave Rakes on targets hit or merge BrS and Thrash, I’m not a game designer so don’t quote me but there’s so much they could do (this should be done for all specs as well, once they’re finished with the 4th or 5th priest rework, obviously).
More abilities baseline to allow for less maths rows and more utility rows. MoC vs BT vs FF isn’t interesting, it’s a numbers exercise, whereas Tiger’s Dash vs Wild Charge vs Renewal is.
AoE row to provide more AoE options based on situation, e.g. Burst, Cleave, Funnell and/or Sustained AoE - for example they could’ve made PW baseline, then replaced it in the tree with Apex, providing a Funnel AoE option.
BrS back to a Legion style BrS where pressing it in AoE mattered.
Berserk should interact with Swipe in some way, for example while in Berserk they could lift the 2cp limit on Swipe to allow it to feel better in AoE, the current Berserk AoE rotation isn’t intuitive and can confuse a lot of new players.
SbT back to an execute.
For a bit of fun, I’d love if Feral had Shroud as it’s Druid-specific utility, aka not give it to the other Druid specs - Ashamane’s Shroud (ty Trem & Kitch) and it behaved the exact same way as Rogues Shroud.
AoE stun (Ashamane’s leg sweep).
Fix Feral Frenzy’s weapon damage and base mastery scaling …… (come on).
As a complete side, I’d have preferred they left incarn as it was, and made Berserk work like BotE or Jungle Fury somehow, as a much more interesting button to press - there’s something about large crit windows that I love as Feral.
Also, target caps are dumb and should be removed across the board, worst decision since the GCD fiasco. At most they should still hit all mobs but have the damage spread across all in range, such a bizarre change.
There’s actually a lot of good points in there, I just wish Blizzard devs could see it. Think our best shot is just to give it enough attention on the forum
that primal wrath is a talent is beyond me. should be baseline in next hotfix asap.
next they are too many math talents if you spend 3 abilities for 90 energy in 5 sec your next 2 finishers deal more damage, while damage in general is very very low. imo bad class design. in aoe situation you need st spells to do more aoe damage w t f
From the ideas above I really like the Primal Wrath being a baseline ability or have some kind of stacking mechanic that would make it not feel bad when used twice or thrice in a row - that’s what I would love to see
It’s not that it’s harder to get into the groups, but it’s that feral has some fundamental issues when put next to literally any other melee spec. Lack of identity in terms of damage profile and underwhelming damage output in AoE situations (lack of burst(like WW monk) or ramp cleave(like frost mage)). Also the spec has very strange CD dependancy while also the same CDs have underwhelming effects in dungeon situations like: Berserk is 3 minute CD that gives you ability to - on avarage - use 3-4 more bites(do I really want to use bites when we’re doing 8-10 mob pull?) or PW’s(really bad flat damage and refreshing DoT’s over and over when their duration does not pass even 50%, feels really bad) in a 20 second window that you would normally be able to do? I guess being able to put empowered Rake’s is cool but you can’t make an argument that it’s worth being a 3 minute cooldown in a dungeon setting. If there are melee specs that have this long of a cd, like let’s say frost dk, it’s because that ability Thanos snaps the pull and you ascend into a dps god for that period of time, meanwhile as feral you’re there target swapping for 20 seconds and struggling to keep your energy up.
Every meele lack aoe burst compared to monk, thats not a feral issue, thats an monk issue.
While i agree with rest, its not that bad. It feels weird, but u still can shine both on, curent and overal dps ( when not compared to broken specs like monk).
I think you need to deal with it just like i did with RET paladin redesign
and i was screaming with a pain and i cried and cried for days after legion release
Maybe it doesn’t have to be that way this time. They are introducing a great amount of fantastic changes in 9.1.5 and they did say that they are working on talents and class balance which means if we can still sneak in Feral mini-rework/changes in there .
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