Feral Druid needs a complete overhaul

Community General Discussion
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This spec is, quite frankly, a mess.

A completely disjointed, poorly thought out, clunky abomination that is stuck together with so much glue and sellotape I’m surprised it even functions.

Where to begin?

Blizzard have no idea what they want Feral Druids to be

Feral Druids were originally designed to be a DoT spec with Bleeds comprising the majority of their damage. Over time (mainly due to Mythic Rush +) this has shifted to a direct damage style of play where direct damage abilities like Shred, Swipe + Ferocious Bite reign supreme.

As a consequence you’re left with this unwieldy toolkit of DoT damaging abilities that are, at best, supplementary. I can just imagine someone coming from Mists of Pandaria era WoW and being completely baffled at their appalling damage as they frantically apply DoTs that tickle their enemies. If there was actually some inter-connectivity between the bleeds and the direct damage abilities, or perhaps applying the bleeds empowered you in some meaningful way, I could possibly take a more forgiving stance but they add nothing meaningful.

Ferals are essentially an Assassination Rogue attempting to play like an Outlaw Rogue. It does NOT work. The spec needs an actual identity rather than being caught in the middle between two.

Balance, Guardian and Resto have all forged identities of their own and have a distinctive niche and playstyle. Feral Druids are literally gimped Assassination Rogues with terrible DoTs and Symbols of Death shoehorned in. It’s time for a rethink.

The Energy regen system was based around a slower playstyle and does not work whatsoever in the fast paced modern WoW

As mentioned, Rogues were originally meant to play like Assassination Rogues with bleeds being the bulk of their damage. Primal Fury and Moment of Clarity were fine back in those days as once you applied your bleeds - rapidly restoring energy wasn’t much of an issue. These days, with the focus on dumping as many resources into direct damage abilities as possible, this archaic system falls to pieces and Feral Druids with bad gear feel absolutely shambolic to play in dungeons. Imagine if Demon Hunters had a 6 second CD on Demon Bite? That’s we’re dealing with.

Assassination Rogues were blessed with the elegant system of Venomous Wounds which generates huge amounts of energy when played well, keeping the rotation as smooth as possible. Ferals on the other hand rely on crits and luck, leaving massive downtime during fights as their DoTs tick for practically nothing. Blizzard it does NOT feel good to play.

Talents that actually make the playstyle worse

What do you get if you take Lunar Inspiration, Savage Roar, Primal Wrath and Feral Frenzy? An absolute mess. I cannot even begin to comprehend how this monstrosity would play in a dungeon environment. All while having to deal with rampant energy shortages to desperately try and make your clunky rotation work. Factor in the Azerite Trait that sticks Maim into the damage rotation and you have the true Frankenstein of WoW gameplay.

That’s all I can think of for the time being but I am personally of the view that the entire spec needs scrapping and Blizzard need to start from the ground up. They clearly have no idea where they’re going with Feral Druids and starting from scratch may be the only way they can salvage something.

I’m sure there are people out there that love this spec and if you do, all the power to you.

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In Legion I enjoyed feral a lot. It was supposed to be my main in BfA. the speed, the fluidness, the performance. It all brought me back to my original warcraft character i loved most - druid.

But Oh my … BfA … oh my what bfA did to feral. The loss of artifacts given cds and energy gain were like drowning the kitten to 1st fel lake found in Azeroth. The kitten was held by its pink/blue/green tail and tossed against nearest castle door in Stormwind, or spikes in Orgrimmar.

I tried 1st months of BfA to make it work, and it failed miserably. Slow… Even paint did dry faster than my kitten did its base rotation.

I came from fast Legion, very reactive game play to this monstrosity and lobotomy. My kitty was my most played 2ndary character in legion. more M+ and PvP done than any of my characters combined. feral druid has always been master of complex rotations, speed and it has always felt wild. Crazy cat… and that crazy died with BfA prepatch.

I pretty much agree with this topics premises. I prepared 2nd half of Legion for this reroll, I tried half BfA to get the feel of the kitty. In 8.3 I also tried… and I dislike it. What happened ? From super fun of Legion to super dead-slow- where even blood dks snail movement in wheelchair in combat feels faster than feral druid game play.

Feral druid can do ok damage. It sure can. No problems, but game play …

Yeah, BfA feral feels boring as the sylvanas plot. And not sure which was worse - the feral game play or SL announcement trailer with helm of domination being broken.

Long story short, I loved Legion kitten so much that i wanted to abandon my DK theme for good, but BfA made sure that this was a nope no.

Disclaimer : yes, this was a rant. But been a while I have wanted to rant about kittens !

2 Likes
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It’s not what BfA did, it’s legion that did it, bound half of your character to item. We all knew how it was going to end, if you want to blame expansion, blame legion.

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stops and stares

… you are correct actually. And this does in a way highlight the problem with those temporary powergain systems. In case of some classes (i.e. dk) they did transform from legion to BfA without great issues. There were certain problems with all 3 dk specs, but never too shabby and now I can honestly say - I quite do like modern DK in BfA - despite all the azerite, essences etc.

But feral never transitioned well to BfA format. I did enjoy Legion feral a lot. True a bit more after aoe change they got on 2nd half of the expansion. And running around as kitty in Tomb was pure fun.

1 Like
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Heh… Legion did not kill feral gameplay. What killed feral gameplay is the loss of artifact weapon effects. If devs transfered these effects in some way to BFA (azerite traits were supposed to do that but… lol. I actually chuckled IRL while writing that)…

Anyway, what does feel boring right now as feral?

I kinda miss the Savage Roar gameplay. Sure I could still use it right now, but… It’s not that SotF is so much better… Don’t get me wrong, SotF is so much better right now. But SotF also only barely changed since Legion. And in Legion it was average at best. Savage Roar in Legion was THAT good. Now, it’s SotF that is THAT good, but SotF is also average at best according to legion standards.

I also miss strong bleeds and a meaningful blood talon. Right now BT is 25% increased damage. That was 50% before. And 50% actually made sense whereas 25% doesn’t.
If you use BT, you’re going to “waste” one attack every now and then out of 3 attacks (because casting regrowth or roots costs a GCD).
So, if BT increase the damage done by the next two attacks by 50%, you’re actually dealing 0% (regrowth) + 150% (first attack) + 150% (second attack) = 300% damage.
And if you don’t use BT, you’re just dealing 3 attacks: 100% x 3 = 300% damage total.
This is not completely equivalent though, because BT basically gives you the opportunity to increase damage done by attacks of your choice. And depending on the situation, at least in BFA, the stronger attack was not always the same. So that required some thought in order to be played to its maximum potential.

In BFA the damage bonus from BT and SR are so weak that you can even get it wrong for a long time and it won’t affect your DPS that much. So, that doesn’t require as much thought as it did. Hence, feral is less forgiving… But that also mean less rewarding and overall more boring, because I can basically watch something on my second screen while feraling and still play ok enough (ok enough means: gets job done. So… Nothing more required).

Something I really really miss and only hardly ever got is the ability to do something that is both significant and last over time, so I can do something else.
Basically, it’s not really a problem that druids have to change forms in order to have access to their abilities and that there is a GCD tied to changing forms, if and only if your forms are strong and the effect you caused while in form last even when you leave said form.
For example, strong bleeds as feral is good for druid, because it would allow them to leave cat form, do something else while their strong bleed continue dotting, hence losing some DPS but not too much DPS. So you can afford doing something else, like managing mobs or damage taken by your group or anything that you cannot do without stopping DPS, because of the core design of forms, whereas other classes can typically continue DPS and do their utility stuff.

Now that said, there is also the problem of scaling a dot based class vs direct damage class.
Because if your main source of damage ability is a DoT that last 24-30 seconds, that means you really can only apply it effectively every 24-30 seconds.
Now, compare that to a pure direct damage class where its main source of dps is a direct damage (DD) spell that he can spam every 6 seconds, for example.
How are you going to balance the 24-30 sec DoT and the 6 sec CD DD ?
Let’s say both account for 30% of total damage done.
So, you, as feral, have a rip that deals 30% of your overall damage but is a Dot that is applied over 30 secs (let’s say 30 for the sake of simplicity).
On the other hand, you have a whatever DD class that have a strike that deals 30% overall damage but has a CD of 6 sec.

So, the feral DPS for this rip is 1% overall DPS.
And the other class DPS for this strike is 5% overall DPS.
Or if you prefer thinking in terms of fight duration and actual damage… On a 5 min fight:
As a feral you would effectively apply rip 5 x 60 / 30 = 10 times.
As the other class, you would strike 5 x 60 / 6 = 50 times.
Now considering that both abilities in that thought experiment deal the same overall damage (30%) for both classes, that means the other class deals 5 times more DPS with this main ability.

So… Either the feral has plenty other abilities that make up for the difference and the other class is mindless boring spamming strike.
Or… Rip has to be 5 times more powerful than strike.

1 Like
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I really wish feral druid inherit sin rogue playstyle, main damage in dots, ferocious bite as envenom 2.0, increase damage from bleeds by x% lasting longer per combo point etc, then i would defo play it.

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The ‘unpruning’ of SL will apparently see the artifact ability returned as baseline for many specs. Paladins get Wake of Ashes for example.

It feels very odd to have them made talents as it is the case for most classes atm.
I think Feral should be a bleed spec over the typical Ferocious Bite spam. It’s quite mindless like others have also said. I think everyone benefits from having more complexity added to their class. Skill ceiling should always aim to be higher, not lower. There’s an entire class for that and a few alternatives too. Retribution Paladin is one of them - Obviously the other I’m referring to can be no other than Demon Hunter :smiley:

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Hot news my friend, Wake of Ashes is already in game as talent :slight_smile:

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I know that.
It’s not baseline. That’s what I was talking about.

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Ah, i understood you talk about abilities which will come back in shadowlands :slight_smile:

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I’ll admit that I would be embarrassed if I didn’t know that having played Pala on and off since WoD :smiley: I like to stay in touch with the class even when I don’t play it. Unfortunately, Wake of Ashes is virtually mandatory for Paladins both in PvP and PvE for BfA.

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This.
/thread

btw, same thing coming to SL as soon as Feral lose azerite traits. Same old same old.

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Wake of Ashes is mandatory and is nice, Retribution suffers from downtime and it helps with it granting 5 holy power straight away :smiley:

can’t wait for sea of salty tears on forum when people will realize that specs who were strong just because of azerite traits are trash tier now, new cycle of whining - fixing will start, boring as hell.

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Problem imo is that Blizzard don’t even know “where to start” to fix some classes.

This is pretty evident with shadow priest when they got asked question about it they said:

“we want to wait until the full picture is out before making changes because what if there is an item that enhances the gameplay…”

And that is the problem they should address. The class should feel fine without the “full picture”, that should be an extra to an already working class, not a bandaid fix to something not working.

Atm in shadowlands you stay in Voidform because it is there, not because there is much meaning to it, and It is boring.

Same as feral, shadow have completely dead row where 1 talent is literally must have to make the spec flow acceptable.

Problem is yet again they will try to fix it with bandaid.

1 Like
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People who plays feral just plays - regardless of nerfs, rotation and dps output.

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I think i have many people with me when i say that they should start bringing class design from MOP first, then they would start little tweaking, if any.

Blizzard problem is that they feel urge to constantly change things, even if those things were perfect, they have to change it (for bad 90% of the time).

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I have always liked the feral, sweet little kitty stealths up and ,rips your face off

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Ferals aint doing bad, yes the spec feels little outdated because few past expansions changed nothing major for us so it’s obvious some poeple find it boring.

Problem with Feral since the release of the legion is, the spec is balanced around Azerite just as it was balanced around Artifact in Legion. Take this away from feral and you have completely gimped and unplayable spec.
Blizzard tends to take away core feral “perks” and give them via stuff such as Artifact or Azerite gear.
One example would be nerfed base crit chance by 5% and then lack of secondary stat on azerite gear, that hit feral really hard because we were spec that was dependant on crit so what did they do? introduced Jungle Fury which ended up so powerful that no feral would pick anything else. if crit was left alone for Ferals we’d probably have more choices now.

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Turn cat into DPS stance of Bear and remove Feral :joy:

1 Like
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Least Unholy dk gets their most overpowered azerite-voodoo brought back in SL, and if I am not mistaken one of the essence effect as part of talent… or least that they were discussing. But you never know with Blizzard of what they are thinking and doing.