My Feral druid whishlist

Classes Druid
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First of all, I am generally quite happy how Feral plays at the moment. There are certainly still problems and pain points but compared to where we were in Shadowlands (Convoke bots) let alone BfA (Feral, haha, you gotta be joking!), I would say that, for PvE at least, Blizz has been developing Feral roughly in the right direction.

Just to be clear, I am aware that there seem to be issues for very high keys and PvP(Feral in M+ - #31 by Razorchaos-argent-dawn) - I wouldn’t know, never done anything beyond 19 and haven’t done any PvP in DF.

Here is an unorganised list of things that come to my mind that I, personally, would like to see changed and improved for Feral in some future patch.

  1. Class tree

This has been said so often it should not need repeating. Still, here it goes: the Druid class tree is a mess and this is probably one of the most annoying thing for Feral players (other Druid specs, too, I guess). I am not gonna write much, others have explained it much better than I ever could, see here e.g. https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/the-druid-class-tree-a-comparative-analysis-of-why-it-fails-and-what-it-needs/1754052

  1. Defensives

A long time ago, Survival Instinct had two charges. For some inexplicable reason, this was nerfed. But now with Feral self-healing also nerfed, I feel we lack in survivability. Simply giving us a charge of SI baseline and having the talent in the spec tree give a second charge would help, considering also that we do not have any immunities.

  1. Regrowth healing is weak.

There was a time we had only mana for 4 Regrowths but at least these would heal. Now, Regrowth direct heal is about 10% of our HP tops and the HoT part is so low, it really is negligible. It seems Blizz wanted to nerf DPS self-heal across the board, so I am not sure how realistic a buff to Regrowth is (at least the HoT part really could use one). However, talents like Protective Growth or Forestwalk could help increase the value of Regrowth but are so awkwardly placed they hardly see any play. Moving those talents to a point where they are easy/easier to pick increase Regrowth’s relevance and also aid us with survivability.

  1. Bees are awesome, but…

I really like the idea of the Beekeeper playstyle with adaptive swarm. It sacrifices a bit of DPS but adds quite a bit of healing over the course of a dungeon. However, loosing your stacks (e.g. because of a wipe) really hurts a lot. I would like for Unbridled Swarm to have a split chance that depends on the number of swarms you have active. 100% if only one swarm is out and then slowly down to the current 60% at, say, 5 swarms or so. This would help ramp up beekeeper style much faster and make wipes or other long interruptions much less punishing.

The awkward interaction with Circle of Life is also still a minor problem. May be change it that the talent only buffs Adaptive Swarm’s damage and healing without changing duration.

  1. Berserk

Having to select four talents to build a full strength berserk feels very bad. I think this should be condensed a bit, may be also helping to free up talent points for Protective Growth.

  1. Innervate

I don’t like the 8 second freecast variant. I would rather this reverted back to a spell regenerating mana for a friendly healer.

  1. Rebirth and Incap Roar

No, these still taking us out of cat form is not interesting friction, it is just annoying. Please change.

  1. Heart of the wild

Has any Feral ever used this? I would like this to be changed so it buffs an alternative form much more frequently but for a shorter time, thus really encouraging a more hybrid style. For example, give the benefits upon shifting for, say, 6 seconds, maximum once per minute. Something like this, tune as needed. Or remove it and put Convoke here.

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what they could buff imo is matted fur that only absorbs 50k of your hp when our hp pool is 800k instead of 50k it should be based of 25% of your hp so it scales with your hp, i think that would be a really good solution and also duration of survival instinct increased from 6 seconds to 12 ,

should be casted in cat form costing 30 energy if bears can do it so should feral.

could be used if they merged well honed instinct into 1 single node instead of 2 and with the current build im playing with 20% healing recieved during barkskin it would be huge with protector of the pack talent since heart of the wild increases your healing by 30%

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That is a good point, I forgot about Matted Fur. A HP percentage would definitely make much more sense.

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Agree with most, except I am not happy with how Feral plays at the moment.

The rotation / synergy between ST and AoE is terrible.

I can’t stand Brutal Slash - that we have to basically give up Swipe to get an attack that is energy efficient and high damage for ST.
But it is limited in charges, so you can’t really use it to full extent, sitting without a button to press in AoE, and having to weave with Shred, that is so freaking expensive that you feel energy starved all the time.
In addition, the charges don’t interact with Omen procs, which sucks.
Also, due to it being still an AoE attack (that you use for ST) there is a high risk that you damage the wrong enemy and break CC.

Then there is Primal Wrath, which nerfs our Rip damage due to it interacting with the same spell.
It feels awful having to spend talent points on this and Double Clawed Rake, since being able to cleave / AoE is just fundamental to being able to play most content.
It is just an extra keybind for no reason, when Rip itself could have had the same mechanic built-in baseline, that only triggered on “nearby” bleeding targets for example (which would incentivize use of Trash).

This, on top of the crappy survivability, makes me rather go Guardian. It just feels a lot better and a lot less work.

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I appreciate blizzard trying to give us a say in what we’re going to use in season 4 but really you should have just replaced the the tier set drops with a charge in the catalyst so that we could use it to get any one of the 3 previous tier sets but here we are hitting feral frenzy every 30 secs for another season just so we can still do less damage than most other classes. Seems to me like this set caters for pvp just like every one of our class updates this season.

Happy to play the season 3 tier set again as it’s better than season 2s but needs to be longer than 8 seconds of a buff, you get like 2 spenders off in that time maybe 3 if you get lucky with a free bite but a pretty boring tier set that doesn’t add much excitement to the class unfortunately, definitely would prefer set 1 as i can’t see how having more crits and a constant 6% + 10% bleed buff isn’t better than 1 or 2 spenders getting 20% every 30sec (providing you don’t save feral frenzy as it cooled down towards the end of a pack) but that’s just my opinion.

Also brutal slash needs to have its cool reduced and actually work with omen of clarity I don’t care about the 15% buff it does just make it not need a charge. genuinely ridiculous that I have omen proc and can’t use it on brutal slash because I have to wait 7 seconds which renders the 15% useless anyway because I’ll hit shred or thrash to save the extra energy cost.

Its even worse that the whole class is based on aoe and we have one aoe move (that’s not finisher) that has a lengthy cool down and isn’t affected by procs, thrash doesn’t count because it might as well not do damage for how little it does and should work like it does in bear form where it stacks and that way it would give the high energy cost some kind of pay off other than being another bleed for bites to be affected by.

Not sure if I’m exactly right on my last point but I’ll say it anyway, tear open wounds needs to use all of the 4 seconds it consumes and not 50% this could help sort some of the damage problems we’re having alongside making double clawed rake hit a target not already affected by rake if ones available as I’ve seen it sometimes hit the same target twice which doesn’t help spread bleeds on large packs and to me that’s not how that talent should work.

In the way of survivability I think we need ours move set more like paladins, maybe have barkskin have a big shield baked into the talent (spending a talent point for 50-60k isn’t enough) but still just reduces damage and regrowth should heal more based on missing heath. I’ve been out healed by some other classes leech talents which is crazy. I can’t see why you should have to go into bear form and loose all dps output just to not die when most dps are topping the meters and passively out healing you.

Feel free to comment and tell me where I’m wrong but I don’t take it to serious, i would like the class that got me into the game a year ago be properly compensated in the damage department for how hard the spec is to play.

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