Hello,
I’ve been playing feral for a few expansions now, I’m not the best but I still get late CE when I’m playing.
First weeks of S1 dragonflight was really fun. We had a niche, strong when there was high density of monsters, not the best 2-3 target cleave but real good with sustained 4+ target and middle/low Single target, I was fine with it since we were strong in those cases and I have to say that our damage distribution on abilities felt really nice.
But now, we’re one of the lowest single target damage dealer, We might even be dead last by far next week even worse if we don’t have djaruun / flat damage trinkets.
Also we don’t have that much of a “burst” making us more unattractive compared to other classes. (Yes we do have the convoke choise, but it’s burst value isn’t that big since we have to take 1min convoke for it to be competitive)
Feral don’t particularly shine in aoe either in S2 but maybe “decent” in 2 dungeons (BRH/ULD), since we lost a bit of burst AoE and monsters don’t live long enough/ not enough pack size.
Not to mention dungeon talent where we barely hit SIM ST @100k DPS with full BIS gear meanwhile most classes are at 110-130k.
Sometimes when trinkets / tier set don’t proc often or have bad timings, It’s really close to S1 single target damage even though I have 20+ more Item LVL.
In my opinion we truly need help in single target when playing with dungeon talents, no 90K DPS if everything happen perfectly isn’t enough with 440 iLvl (which hardly ever happen)
I’ll be throwing numbers based on my personal experience, the tier piece changes coming on next reset are fine since it reduce the RNG part + unusable extra combo points but feral needs a little more help.
For a quick fix there is multiples ways to achieve this but a 5-10%'ish buff should do the trick for Dungeon content to not feel terrible.
And for pure raid/ST content way less (I’d say 2%), Maybe a Djaruun buff since WW monks also need help?
We don’t need that much in ST if we keep that AOE/Funnel niche which seem to be blizzard’s vision of feral.
Ashkandur does about 5-6% total on a proc - Djaaruun does mb 4% on a 2.5minute cd. And this is a very rare item vs a non-rare.
Feral ST Burst is horrendous. And you HAVE to play Swarm, cant play Convoke if ur really serious.
Pathetic talent-balancing and design really.
Druid in general needs a class designer who actually has a bright idea - the current ones have none.
Funny thing is that they are recognizing that feral is doing badly in pve side (specialy in raids but the aoe nerf hurt m+ performance quite badly also) and they are now buffing feral tier set. Sadly the buff is currently looking like joke. Around 1% if even that. If they see a problem then they should actualy try to fix it. Many other underperforming specs are getting 5-8% buffs now. There are many quite many issues with talent design currently (my opinnion atleast) and I doubt this will change this expansion.
Blizzard please take note and look more deeply about feral pve situation.
Yeah the next reset is a slight buff to damage and id say better playstyle wise, but on every ranking site/tier list it is going to be dead last, just a bizarre decision to buff it by so little when other underperformers are getting much more while already doing slightly better
Ditch the Convoke design. Make it cast Spec abilities only. Not saying only do bites but do spec only.
Buff some talents so we arent forced into Swarm, perhaps LI? Or take back the nerf to Bite.
Feral has had over 6 pretty big nerfs since pre-DF. Granted most were aimed at AoE but it still hurts out ST.
I reiterate; stop being so bad at balancing specs. Its pathetic to watch.
The PTR has some new Druid changes, especially for Feral:
DRUID
New Talent: Rising Light, Falling Night – Increases your damage and healing by 3% during the day. Increases your Versatility by 2% during the night.
Improved Sunfire has been moved to row 3, connected to Sunfire.
Rising Light, Falling Night occupies Improved Sunfire’s previous location.
Restoration and Balance Druid starter builds have been updated.
Feral
Developers’ note: Dire Fixation is a new talent Feral Druids can take to focus on single target damage. The changes to Rampant Ferocity allow its value to be tuned independent of Ferocious Bite’s damage.
New Talent: Dire Fixation – Attacking an enemy with Shred fixates your attention on it for 10 seconds. You can fixate on a single target at once. Your attacks deal 5% increased damage to your fixated target.
Primal Claws has been removed.
Dire Fixation is located in Primal Claws’ previous location. It is a 1 rank talent.
Rampant Ferocity has been redesigned – When you attack an enemy with Ferocious Bite, you also deal damage per combo point spent to all nearby enemies affected by your Rip. Damage reduced beyond 5 targets.
Hmmm I thought Feral was quite perfect in PvE according to some legends here and the rework it got during beta is the perfect spec rework ever!!1! and anyone who said otherwise is a n00b who does not know how to play?
There isn’t much to talk about I think, those changes hardly do anything yet, but at least we know blizzard might adjust Ferocious bite tuning because they cannot touch RIP damage without breaking either ST or AoE.
I think it would have been healthier for the spec if they would have touched primal wrath’s debuff to be another named DoT entirely.
And in the case that they fear they’re adding too much DoT instances then make the new primal wrath DoT deal 0 damage if RIP is applied.
Also it should be time to put Primal wrath baseline, I find it ridiculous that you cannot even spend CP to do AoE without it.
The design that was happening was very much in a good direction, the issue came in with how said design was balanced.
Also the druid base tree having certain issues. Early on people werent talking numbers, because during a beta proccess such things arent balanced and are prone to changes.
Feral swallowed several nerfs which even wjth its new design hampened it.
Also no one said it was perfect, the issue is they stopped designing, stop fixing the issues and the good direction came to a stop, alike shadow priests, but shadow ended up with better tier sets and more which just kept it competitve even tho their were complaints to be made.
