My Feedback for Feral Shadowlands/Dragonflight

Classes Druid
223

Correct, no Legendary/Covenant stuff. I don’t think any of those are available on the PTR anyway. Only boost was Tiger’s Fury and Mastery.

/E: Also, just running some numbers on legendaries. There is the one that makes all your DoTs deliver their damage in 25% less time. If my math is not mistaken, this translates into roughly a 33% DoT-DPS increase. Of course, you will loose some non-bleed damage since you need to refresh your dots more often at the expense of other abilities, but the legendary seems to support a bleed play style quite well.

224

i just want them to rework heart of the wild to not only benefit resto but when you use it your damage is increased by 30% and gives you the affinity bonus that it has now for example.

Buff bleeds every bleed by 30%

dont put Heart of the wild in same row as bash and mass roots

feral should have bash baseline and when you chose feral affinity you would get bash not troll maim that is ridiculous

affinities should all be baseline if you want druid to feel like a druid

Leader of the pack no doubt needs to be baseline

Incarnation baseline replacing beserk

revert nerf from infected wounds 20% to 50% slow since rogue can spam slow with poison knife

we could also get innervate baseline

3 Likes
225

Checked out Moonfire in Cat Form with Lunar Inspiration talent: they changed how it scales (cannot remember the details) but in terms of tool tip damage I get

Moonfire in cat form with LI: 6%
Moonfire in Tauren form: 1.2% (in Feral spec of course)

So on top of better bleeds, Lunar Inspiration might be actually useful, giving us another dot! And Moonfire gets buffed by the +30% DOT on single target legendary as well.

/E: Also linked this thread from a new thread I started with PTR-specific observations regarding Feral.

226

i’m not a big fan of another dot to watch. i played with LI in legion and yes maybe its a good talent choice when you have 2+ enemies and/or you can not always be at the enemies. but i like rather see our core abilities to get better then add another dot too my rotation

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227

I don’t think we should have a ranged combo point builder though, so I’m not quite as happy as you seem to be :frowning:

228

I hadn’t even considered that MF gives as the possibility to build CP at range. Mostly, I am happy because it seems there could actually much more variety in what are viable talents and playstyles in SL.

Can I ask, why do you think a ranged CP builder is bad?

/E: Small addition to the numbers I reported above. Just did one of the world bosses on PTR. Rip was 15.5% of my total damage and Rake 9% (but I didn’t get an opener from stealth). Moonfire from Lunar Inspiration was 11%.

229

Because I think most melee classes/specs should be purely melee (in their DPS rotations). Feral being one of those specs.

I don’t think the solution to Feral’s poor mobility is to bandaid us with ranged abilities (nor do I think that should be the solution to anyone else’s mobility problems).

Replace LI with “Mangle: Increases all bleed damage to the target by X% for Y seconds.” and I wouldn’t have any problems with the talent row at all. In fact I would welcome it. 1 ez-mode option, 1 aoe option, 1 st option (honestly though, all this DPS rotation stuff should be baselined, except SbT and LI ofc which should both be removed).

EDIT: Mangle proposal.

1 Like
230

Preach it.

Baseline Wild Charge (replace talent with Cenarion Ward or Swiftmend), Mighty Bash (replace talent with Faerie Swarm or Innervate), LotP and most Affinity abilities (replace talents with Typhoon/Ursol’s Vortex/Incap Roar).

Not sure I agree Incarnation should be baselined, but something has to be done about Savage Roar and SotF, they’re too underwhelming. Replace with old Force of the Nature from MoP maybe.

231

I’d take Mangle buffing bleed damage over LI any time! But I doubt that this kind of change is in the books before Shadowlands… I don’t want LI for the ranged option (though I don’t mind having it) but because I hope to be able to have an effective, powerful DoT build.

232

I agree to this, Rogue and other classes will need to lose survival spells or Feral need the buffs for competitive PVP from what I can see from Beta arena and duels

2 Likes
233

Honestly in my humble opinion, which I have been saying for years on these forums, there are two easy fixes to berserk and it boggles my mind why one has not been implemented.

1/ make berserk a 2min CD and add 15% crit modifier for the full duration.

It’s a bit boring but functional. Certainly makes it useful to actually press.

2/ make berserk a 2 min cd and 30-40% of all damage dealt within the cd gets turned into a dot lasting 6-8sec. Adjust accordingly

Seeing as feral has historically not even been able to press our big “CD” during lust, these actually help with that.
Posted on a Monk for some reason

1 Like
234

I agree that currently it feels like Feral is still just being shafted hard by blizzard.

  1. Buff bleeds by a lot
  2. Remove sabertooth or make it baseline execution mechanic
  3. Give us innervate
  4. Give us leader of the pack baseline
  5. Berserk needs a rework, Feral has no burst damage, or big dps CDs. Which would be fair if blizzard listens to point 1.
  6. Nerf cooldown on wild charge in feral form, and keep it the same in the other forms, so feral can compete with DH in pvp.

I love the changes blizzard has done so far, it’s at least in the right direction, but I would want to see above issues fixed.

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235

or just make incarnation baseline with that 15% crit bonus so we have a burst since feral is only melee without burts

main thing im asking for 2 expansions now , i compared Rip,Rake and Thrash on private mop server and Rip on live is like 53 k over 23 sec and in MoP it was 93k the difference is so huge it is ridiculous .

make it execute baseline like it used to be

would be really nice since they made stampeding roar class wide , that leader of the pack would protect feral and it would get us in groups for raids/mythic plus

not just that but we are thirsty for crit so it would be nice to have some % baseline

Exactly what im saying , it would be an easy fix change , if i would be incharge of fixing this i would make Incarnation baseline , reduce its Cooldown to 2 minutes add 30% more damage buff to it and 10 to 15% crit buff on top so it would feel like a powerfull cooldown.

I agree since we lost displancer beast aka blink we used to have , so geting more mobility would be really nice

what i would also wanna add is that feral really needs GCD removed of forms , we need to have 0 GCD on forms you can go in classic and try powershifting it works there , classic btw when everything is gcd but forms have 0 GCD

i dont understand why , its not fair , i dont care if mages or rogues will be mad cause i can break their snares , im a god damn lion you cant slow a lion like that i mean cmon.

also i would love to have all affinites baseline , affinities are the biggest mistake blizzard ever did to druids , restricting us in everysingle way and now in shadowlands they are like “look heart of the wild , you are going back to druid roots yay!” no blizz we arent as long as GCD and affinites exsist and mana regen being totally bad as feral no , we cant Infact you will only make resto strong with HoTW . Hotw needs to be moved away from level 35 row it would be baseline ffs , and then speaking of level 35 talent row why the heck balance gets baseline Typhoon and feral dosent get Mighty Bash . feral affinity giving Maim is supper kick in the balls for druid players .

Let me ask this aswell they nerfed our Defensives , where are nerfs for rogue cloak and evasion , where are nerfs on rogues spaming poisions from range with poision knife? how the heck is this fair and on top of that you cant even counter them really good anymore since they got 100 defensives and stuns and we keep geting fked over . nerfs on Suvival instinct , nerf there and there .

It feels really wrong , i really dont like where this is going with Shadowlands and for example no your “Souldbinds or Covenants” wont solve this issue because you nerfed our defensives we will be forced to pick defensives now instead of damage increase . i hope other ferals can see what im talking about. i would love to see nerfs on rogues but heh what im talking about ofc Blizzard is Bias towards their rogues ye…

If blizzard decided to read this please fix us

1 Like
236

We got the much asked for buff to Berserk. Yay!

/E: Hidden in Wowhead Datamining is also another cool item: Entangling Roots Rank 2: Entangling Roots can withstand 20% more damage before breaking.

Now 20% is not exactly massive but … every little helps.

/E2: And even more goodies for Feral: Regrowth Rank 2 Regrowth’s initial heal has a 40% increased chance for a critical effect if the target is already affected by Regrowth.
Build 35598: Now available to all specs.

This will improve our seal healing further.

3 Likes
237

I really dont know what to say, it feels like someone at Blizzard hates Feral… maybe its the inflated Number of Druids overall that concernes them and want players to go away from Feral. What the Devs are forgetting is that at least 25% of the Druids are just used as multibox-farmbots and are not individual players. I played my Druide through all of BFA, i had to take countless punches in my Face, i STILL managed to get my m+15 achievements without any help or Guild. I really hoped for positive changes… but this just makes my heart bleed… guess its back to my old classic main, at least there i know what to suffer for.

2 Likes
239

There have been a lot of positive changes, Feral is looking quite good for Shadowlands. Not saying there are no remaining issues but overall I am quite happy.

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240

To the DPS rotation, from a PvE perspective, sure. To our underlying issues of utility and mobility? Or our rotation in PvP? Not that much has been done.

As a PvPer I think we’re pretty much at a stand still, or going backwards, relative others. And Feral wasn’t in a great spot to begin with, with only very spotty viability in Legion and BfA.

If I think from a PvP perspective:

Cool. This frees up a talent slot, but frankly there aren’t even that many good talents to pick from, and Cyclone itself is at its weakest since its inception for Feral (relatively speaking) - to the point where often it’s not even picked as a PvP talent.

Well, sure. That’s great and all, but Balance Affinity is a no-go in PvP, and with Swiftmend being nerfed to require 2 GCDs + consuming a HoT to use, Resto Affinity will be considerably nerfed.

That leaves Guardian Affinity which has Frenzied Regen and Incap Roar - which is on Incap DR and forces you into Bear Form. That’s both lacking synergy with other common Feral partners and clunky. Given that we’re losing 1x SI at the cost of 1x Barkskin I think Guardian Affinity will be almost mandatory. Not particularly happy about this one.

It’s great that Feral is being more focused on dealing damage with bleeds again. But this disproportionately increases the value of the BT talent, to the point where it will most likely be mandatory in PvP (and all other ST DPS scenarios). Both the old and the new BT are extremely clunky and un-fun to play with in PvP, so I’ll chalk this one down as a major negative as well.

The new BT also disproportionally increases the value of LI immensely in PvP, something that I will also chalk down as a major negative.

So, instead of giving us powershifting, or an equivalent, back - they give us this, which doesn’t even solve the key issue of being stuck in caster form (or Travel Form, or Bear Form) and not being able to do anything except wait for the shapeshifting CD. It’s better than nothing, but it’s a terrible bandaid fix.

This + a freedom-like effect would’ve been OK. Or just changing Timeless Pursuit to remove the 1sec CD on shapeshifting that’s activated when exiting a form.

As it stands now we’ll just get spam slowed and we’ll be stuck shifting forms very slowly causing us to have a terribly hard time catching up. It will still be incredibly clunky and frustrating. I’d honestly rather sit roots and slows than waste GCDs trying to get rid of them to no avail (because it’s so clunky and awkward).

The more I think about it the more I question whether this will even be picked over other more basic (but effective) control and defensive conduits.

Mobility used to be the main argument for playing Feral. Incredibly disappointed to not see a better solution for this.

This is a pretty obvious aggregated negative. It makes Feral defensives more versatile, but at the same time much weaker.

With this setup, Survival Instinct should go back to 12sec duration, 3min CD like it always used to be when we had SI + Barkskin (prior to the WoD pruning).

Yeah this is extremely clunky, bad and uncalled for - unfortunately.

Did I miss anything of relevance?

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241

We need the MoP feral back NOW!

3 Likes
242

Okay, I admit I was again only looking from a PvE perspective. Thanks for the reminders that PvP is also in the game :slight_smile:

The utility thing is, in my view, the most pressing issue still open. Feral utility still is a strict subset of Balance/Resto utility, this gap needs closing.

This has been mentioned by Guardians a lot, too. A better solution would probably be to keep Swiftmend as it is if no HoT is present but consume to HoT for extra healing if it is there.

2 Likes
243

I wish for 2 things, more than having innervate and leader of the pack.
it is: 5% dmg buff to savage roar, and sabertooth talent swapped with jagged wounds talent.

1 Like