Feral in M+

So I’ve been doing keys casullay in 10.2

My only questions is why does the Feral spec still exist?

is it mean to be a worldquest / atmosphere thing?

How in the five hells can the same design team, put specs like feral & dH in the same game?

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extreme burst spec burst down mobs in low keys

more news at 11

ret pal, BH hunter, ENH shams, define low keys.

Okay, now on my Druid - I don’t really see the problem. Feral is pretty strong in dungeons and has been throughout DF. May be not “meta” but certainly good.

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If you’re struggling to do damage as feral in keys, it’s a you thing, not a problem with the spec.

Your talent choices are… unusual. I’m guessing you’ve taken Lion’s Strength rather than Blood Talons because you’re inexperienced, but you’re also lacking Apex (which is a must have talent for M+) and you’ve taken Rampant Ferocity (which is weaker than spamming Primal Wrath in most AOE situations) instead of Sudden Ambush.

Also (and still assuming you’re inexperienced) feral has a steeper learning curve than some specs. You need to learn snapshotting, how to optimally apply bleeds to multiple targets, the best time to refresh bleeds, how to maintain Blood Talons (when talented), optimal positioning for Primal Wrath, etc.

Additionally, you only have the 2-set so far.

For comparison, my feral is 15 ilvls below yours, still using last season’s 4-set, and I’m doing plenty of dps for +18 keys. But I have been playing it since SL s3 when it truly was bad.

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You will never beat a good Havoc, but Feral can still do good damage. Get the 4p, try a better M+ talent build and run higher keys (because you won’t be happy as a Feral when trash is dying too fast).

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Its not. You need targets to live for a certain period for PW/Rip to do any decent dmg and whilst you apply Rake, Rip and Thrash to everything a DH, Ret, WArrior, BM have already done 3-4x your damage due to them being so frontloaded and without the need of cooldowns. Boomkin are somewhat the same problem as Feral.

Dont need to be meta but AoE bite does no damage whatsoever. You dont pull 5 mobs at a time anymore.

The beforementioned specs can have no downsides and can do high dmg on every pull due to not dependant on CDs. Whereas Feral fx even with Incarn cant keep up with a DH outside of Meta or a Ret w/o wings.

Its poor design. No spec shud be good at ALL scenarios - it makes for boring gameplay. If devs cant see this they are in the wrong line of work.

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Okay, that is probably true if you are blasting through low keys for which your group is massively overgeared. But in such a scenario, what does it matter? You will +3 the key in any case.

If you do keys that are at least somewhat a challenge, mobs will last long enough for your dots to do damage.

Turning Feral into a non-dot front loaded spec so that it can compete when doing way too low keys would be much worse than underperforming somewhat in scenarios where DPS does not really matter.

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This!

The other issue is our talent tree. We have to sacrifice several ST talents for AoE, meaning that we have to decide between more AoE or more ST oriented builds, while our pure ST respectively pure AoE isn’t even the best of all specs.

100% agree.

I’ve been in some 18-20 keys on my s2 geared feral over the last couple of weeks. If everyone is similarly geared to me (including the DH, ret, warrior, BM), I can easily top the meters on big trash pulls and I’m not far behind on everything else, resulting in similar overall dps.

If there’s just one ‘front loaded’ dps in the key who is overgeared, my overall damage drops because trash doesn’t live long enough for my dots to tick their full duration.

Spec balancing and tuning should ALWAYS be done based on appropriate ilvl for the content.

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im just gona leave this here , since DH is brutally broken in m+

everything below 20. and even 20s are considered low this time as they should be more around the level of 17-18

according to this forum everything below 45 is considered low.

20s are not low… it is the highest content the game wants you to do. Above that is just unbalanced fluff.

that is also because feral is not anymore a spec that needs targets to live a very long time.
This is due to primal wrath instantly proc Rips dmg, at least 50% of it. Therefore targets really only need to live 10-15s to do quite solid dmg.
Of course feral is great at prolonged sustained aoe dmg but actually this scenarios are not even existing in 25 keys because even there the trash mobs die rather quickly and won’t live 2 mins.

If you want burst dmg you could also spec convoke which is certainly viable for those situations you cannot get great value out of incarn.

One problem dot specs have in general is that no matter what, the dots are just gone when the target dies and lost its complete value.
They fixed it with assa rogue doing execute dmg for their bleeds, which is an amazing solution. It begs to question why they didn’t do it for Affli and feral respectively as well.

it isn’t really that bad anymore. The difference between ST and AoE build is some more energy regen and Swarm instead of incarn. It was much worse before.

Please don’t come here and make claims unless you know what you’re talking about.

ToW doesn’t “instantly proc Rips dmg, at least 50% of it”. It consumes up to 4 seconds of Rip damage on the target and applies 50% of it immediately. That means, if Rip still has 10 seconds to run (entirely possible during Incarn), only 4 seconds is consumed and half of it applied immediately, leaving the remaining 6 seconds to be overwritten.

Of course feral has more burst damage that it did in SL, but let’s not pretend it can compete with front-loaded specs like havoc, fury warrior, and even BM hunter (which is not as front loaded as the other two but can still apply damage faster than feral).

Convoke has never been strong in burst AOE because it preferentially applies DoTs and bleeds that won’t tick for their full duration. The primary reason to take it in M+ is for burst damage on big, solo trash mobs on fortified week or for burst damage on bosses on tyrannical week (after you’ve manually applied all DoTs because it won’t overwrite them).

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ye and you come here and want to claim mobs need to live 10mins before ferals can do dmg?
it is bs that mobs need to live very long to do dmg.
it still means lots of rips dmg is applied instantly considering how much you are pressing wrath
you can run low keys and still have high dps, so the claim that feral is garbage in low keys is simply not true.
nobody said it has equal burst with those 3 specs that press 2 buttons for instant dmg. but even in an 11 key, the mobs live long enough to pump dps with dots.

maube you should follow your own adive and dont post if you have no clue?
convoke is certainly not used in a mob group for focus dmg.
it is also weaker for st dmg on tyrannical weeks if you can get full duration of incarn. maybe if you luck out on convoke it will be stronger.
convoke is great for applying stuff which makes it somewhat bursty, at least the most feral has to offer and is a solid choice for non fortified or lower keys.
whatever you can do what you like anyways

You’d better provide a link to your RIO page if you’re going to accuse me of having no clue. I was in the top 50 ferals in the world last season. How about you?
https: //raider. io/characters/eu/ravencrest/Nylendis

im doing high keys and im falling behind dhs ,bms and fire mages, sometimes if im lucky i pull 1.3m aoe with convoke and sometimes barely do 400k and convoke is mandatory and its 40% chance you get lucky with it. rng as heck. st is decent but overall feral needs buffs everywhere , aoe st and survivability no question. im fully bis geared and im pushing for 0.1% . hopefully we see some changes

this

is the main problem atm

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I agree on DH and fire mage (seems like fire has been buffed back into the meta and havoc has never left it), but the highest you’ve done with a BM hunter is +23, which isn’t particularly high. At that level, the trash still doesn’t live long enough to get a good comparison, especially on tyrannical weeks when packs are pretty much dead by the time BM’s CD window is over.

I agree 100% with this. Poor survivability seems to be the main thing affecting my dps. If I live the full duration of the pull, I can do decent numbers, but if the tank pulls big enough I’m usually the first dps to die.

This is not entirely true. DH and warrior, yes, but ret and BM both hit like wet noodles outside of their CD windows (the days of BM doing consistent damage went with the rework). Ret benefits from having burst damage on a one minute CD, but its ST is weak in AOE build, which puts people off taking it. Also, prot pala being in a lot of very high keys means there’s no reason to take an overall middle-of-the-pack dps of the same class.

Yes, feral needs buffs - I’ve never felt as squishy on my cat as I did in the keys I did last week - but making direct comparisons with specs that have different damage profiles seems pointless when those damage profiles matter less and less as keys get higher and trash lives longer.

So let’s just look at averages from the highest M+ keys and look at every single M+ guide out there. Every single guide places feral as a B- or C tier class (C tier is the worst tier). When you look at logs from top M+ runs and average them out, you’ll find Feral at the highest keys is actually one of the weakest DPS (very often 3-5 from the end).

So the numbers show us Ferals deal an average of 188k - 190k DPS at the highest keys. Where DH does 250k+, Warriors 220k, BM Hunter 230k, Destro 230k. I think there was only 1-2 specs outside of Feral that did under 200k DPS on average in high M+ keys. 50-70k more DPS is not a small amount, thats 20-35% more. That is a HUGE margin on average.

You could argue that these “Top M+ Ferals” are not playing optimal or are noobs or something and that’s why their DMG is low, but I would say that if the average is so low it might mean the rotation is too hard, the spec is having problems elsewhere and something should be changed. Maybe buff DMG, maybe make the rotation easier? Maybe make Rake apply to 3 targets making cleaving even easier? Maybe make FB deal some small AoE DMG by default to targets with Rip without the need for a talent? Maybe increasing survivability would help? Maybe moving Swarm + Unbridled to the class tree would help giving you 1-2 extra points in your spec tree? There are a ton of potential solutions Blizzard could look into, they just need to look into it.

Im rank 50 eu and rank 70 world atm , survivability is issue why i cant push myself to do damage since everything can just oneshot , we need damage and survivability buffs and fast

yes

no

would like that we got 2 so far but having more rakes with 1 global would come handy

we have a talent for that but they decided to cap it, i suggest uncaping aoe from bite talent.

Alooooooooot trust me

they should yes , druid tree itself needs a rework imo, talents like predatory swiftness should be baseline not a talent in the first place, having to pick boomy and other useless spells to get to astral influence is so punishing wasting 3 points to get to 5 yard extra range, well honed instinct cost 2 points , should just merge it into 1 instead of putting 2 points into 1 talent that is also nerfed. if they fixed that we could have also had heart of the wild and dispell, hibernate as choice in mythic plus

for example survival instinct is 3 min cd and lasts 6 seconds meanwhile shamans have astral influence that is 1.5min cd and lasts for 12 seconds and 40% dmg reduction, how is this balanced in the first place? playing feral in high keys feels like im playing a clothie in melee

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