There are several updates to the Druid Class Tree coming in Season 2. We’d like to share some of the design thinking behind these changes. Overall, our hope for this tree design is that you are able to painlessly take the core abilities and defensives you need for your spec, and that you have some interesting choices you can make with the remaining points, especially in the middle and bottom gates.
Nodes that Don’t Benefit Your Current Specialization
The top feedback we heard on the Druid class tree is that it’s frustrating to take nodes for abilities you never use, or that provide bonuses that don’t benefit you. We have rearranged and redesigned talents so that druids never have to take more than one node that doesn’t benefit them in the normal course of play of their spec, and most druids won’t take any.
As part of making these changes, we’ve changed a number of damage nodes like Instincts of the Claw and added some new ones. We’ve adjusted the balance of several spells and abilities to account for these changes. Overall you shouldn’t see big changes to your spell damage or damage composition in appropriate builds for your spec (with the exception of Restoration - see below).
Utility and Interrupts
We wanted to make it easier for Druids to access important class utility. We’ve made Remove Corruption easier to access for all specs, and moved Skull Bash to make it less expensive for Restoration Druids to reach. Balance Druids can no longer take Skull Bash - instead, Light of the Sun has been moved from their spec tree to Skull Bash’s location in the Class Tree. Fluid Form now also affects Skull Bash, shifting the druid into Cat Form if necessary when they cast it.
Restoration Druid Damage
There are a couple of aspects of Restoration Druid damage that we’re not happy with:
It’s demanding to play, requiring Druids maintain magic DoTs and shift in and out of Cat Form while healing.
When Restoration Druids take all possible damage talents, they don’t have enough points to invest in defensive talents or useful utility.
We have made some changes in the tree to encourage Restoration Druids to specialize in either physical or magic damage (if they choose to deal damage at all), but not both. The Circle of the Wild / Circle of the Heavens choice node gives a massive 25% bonus to the damage type of their choice. We hope this change frees players up to take more defensive talents and makes the spec easier to learn and pilot for players who are interested in playing it.
What about Wild Growth?
Do you know any feral/boomie that even has this ability on their bars while also being FORCED to take the talent for it ?
And i also wonna ask- will Berserk ever. Ever be a singular talent, and not 4 talents, for which you gotta also waste 2 talent points into [Frantic Momentum] even when you play Bite focused build like Convoke for example ?
My first impression is that the class tree is better, but still not great.
When I did a quick Feral build similar to my Live build I get a net gain of 2 talent points. The 5 points I gained from dropping Rejuvenation, 2x Nurturing Instinct, Rising Light Falling Night and Lore of the Grove (now only 1 point), I had to spend on non-negotiable new damage talents Grevious Wounds, Instincts of the Claw and Circle of the Wild.
The class tree overall still feels very disjointed. A few examples include:
Too many mandatory talents that give the illusion of choice
Hibernate being stuck behind Remove Corruption while Cyclone/Soothe is a prominent choice node
Fluid Form’s placement feels wrong to look at. It feels primarily like a Resto Druid talent but is situated away from the Circle of the Wild/Circle of the Heavens choice node.
Movement talents, Defensive talents, and Utility are scattered across the tree. A fairly simple change for symmetry would be to swap Feline Swiftness with the Incapacitating Roar/Mighty Bash choice node on the left side of the tree. This will align it with Forest Walk and Mass Entanglement/Ursoc’s Vortex on the right side of the tree.
The new talent Symbiotic Relationship looks like a poor man’s Dream of Cenarius (WoD talent) made even worse because Feral’s self healing has been utter garbage for numerous expansions.
The new talent Lycara’s Meditation seems lackluster as well. There’s a missed opportunity here linking it with Fluid Form and encouraging power shifting during an encounter. Or even making it a choice node and increasing the duration of the bonus to encourage occasional shapeshifting during combat.
On the plus side, it’s nice to see Gale Winds/Incessant Tempest back as a choice node to improve Typhoon and the passive Aessina’s Renewal is a nice addition.
For feral specifically it doesn’t really feel like we are using any different talents than we are currently we are still talenting the exact same thing except with this new talent tree we are using the extra talent points on damage buffs to our damaging abilities which were baseline. This just seems like the tree was specifically made with resto in mind taking these talents and the other specs are just left with no difference. Would have loved to see more ideas for unique talents than just baseline ability buffs.
first things first merge all berserk nodes into 1 please and make more talent choices for feral ingeneral , make predatory swiftness baseline for feral , i still don’t know why is this a talent since this has been part of feral since forever and i think its stupid to have that as talent…
killer instinct and lycara’s teachings should be max and 1 node , i think as a hybrid its stupid to have so many 2 point nodes that are just illusion that you gain something …
tireless energy should be 1 node and maxed out , i feel like every class gets full potential node and ferals get half , bring back stuff like ursocs might , also what i find baffeling that there is a talent that only benefits 2 specs out of 4 and that is Astral influence -.-
just put 5 yard range on abilites and spells like it used to be .
Speaking of adding extra nodes to feral tree , make 1 give extra charge of Survival instincts or make it increase the duration from 6 to 12 seconds , its a 3 min cd with 6 sec duration meanwhile Shamans have almost the same with astral shift but their cd is 1.5 min and it lasts for 12 sec. i prefer being a little bit tanky and having 3min cd i see it being stupid since our regrowth does 0 healing in pvp and pve anyway .
also since you are removing pvp talent king of the jungle , we ferals would also like some new pvp talents , its been ages since we got new pvp talents , i always see mages and rogues get new stuff and ferals legit only got 1 pvp talent that lasted for 1 patch and it got removed . make something like able to cast cyclone or rebirth in cat form , everyone has been asking for it.
New Talent: Lycara’s Meditation – You retain Lycara’s Teachings’ bonus from your most recent form for 5 seconds after shifting out of it.
Can we get a clarification on how this works ? The way it reads, we have 2 options:
Going into cat and then shifting back to caster form, we will have lycara with crit for 5 seconds instead of shifting back to haste for caster form.
The same, but when going back to caster, we get haste from caster lycara and get 5 seconds of crit on top of that.
The first one is okay, the talent is weird, but sure.
The second one will create a degenerate gameplay of shifting into cat via the kick just to gain crit for 5 seconds. This will be an extremely annoying and horrible gameplay.
Class tree overall looks good, although I really wish you would move Convoke out of the spec trees. For Guardian at least, there isn’t even a point in having Convoke in the there, as you would never take it over Incarnation. One of the most fun abilities you’ve ever made for druid, and I can never use it because it competes with Incarnation…
Maybe put Convoke as a capstone choice in the class tree with Heart of the Wild, although I am not sure how that will affect the other 3 specs.
It’d just become a lock in for every spec and reduce available choice IMO.
Overall, I’m fine with the class tree overhaul, it definitely feels like there’s more choice and we don’t have to take things that are useless to us as much. I do however really wish we had gotten an actual cheat death. There’s even perfect thematic Nine Lives naming potential due to Cat form! Well-Honed Instincts just isn’t really cutting it. A cheat death would also really help our survivability, since iirc Ferals and Balance are like, one of the more frequent to die?
I’m also confused why some abilities for Feral got nerfed, supposedly as an offset to the new throughput nodes… but did we really need those to be a neutral change? Do the devs consider the state of Feral as good right now? I’d rather have just gotten the new talents as a minor buff to our currently subpar performance.
The set bonus is also gross, please change it. I get the thematic of RNG lottery jackpot and whatnot, but it’s just really boring and uninspired. Furthermore - and something that is really important - do Ferocious Bite, Rip, and Primal Wrath remove the entire stack of buffs or just one stack of it? Because if it’s the former, this is going to make your entire rotation feel extremely bad.
Why does our 4pc also require Apex? Can’t it be something not bound to a RNG capstone, and also be something far more interesting like other specs in the game are getting? Because right now, Big Winner doesn’t feel like I’m going to be a big winner at all. If the damage part of it is really strong, that just ties your performance needlessly to a RNG talent which will feel really bad as well, and if the damage part of it is weak, the entire bonus is really weak. This needs to change or have an overhaul.
The Feral changes are just weird. You introduce a talent to buff damage, then you reduce baseline damage so we just walked in a circle, gained nothing and are still not viable in anything or wanted anywhere for any reason. The 4pc set bonus is so atrociously stupid in its design, I’m starting to believe all the spec specific changes were designed by an outdated and broken version of a ChatGPT knockoff from Uzbekistan.
The druid tree itself is fine. No longer we have to spec into spells we can’t even properly use in a way that makes any sense. What an astonishing achievement. I know this class isn’t played much, especially feral, but by god, can we get just one person with a modicum of motivation to actually try and improve something instead of someone who just wants to go back to doing anything else but work on feral? How many half-baked disinterested changes that change nothing do we have to suffer through?
Would love to see more innovated ideas for talents instead of gaving us baseline ability buffs which is boring.
For example i would like a talent that gives us two charges of dash because currently dash is still stuck in classic wow. A 2 min cd 60% movespeed buff is extremtly underwhelming since there has been a severe mobility power creep for other classes 2minutes is too long of a cooldown. To balance it with tigers dash maybe you can make it give dash two charges or tigers dash get a -15 second cooldown.
Matted fur: is an extremly weak talent in fact its a bit of a meme amongst the feral community with how bad it is. Either buff this talent significantly so its acutally useful or remove it and give us a new one.
Symbiotic relationship: sounds good in principle but when you put in the numbers for the dps specs its extremly underwhelming, Lets say im playing feral and regrowth myself for 300k, that bonded partner will recieve 30k healing which is nothing and then i recieve 2400hp from that which is extermly low amount of healing this talent was clearly made for resto and seems completely useless to the other specs.
Lycara’s meditation: This seems like a very problematic talent. Theres been discussion already that with this talent we would be shifting to another form just before using cooldowns to gain the lycara buff which no one wants to do.
Capstone Talents: The capstones for the druid tree are probably the worse in the game fluid form has no business being a capstone since its mostly a quality of life improvement, heart of the wild is only good for 2/4 of the specs having no impact on feral at all apart from defensive uses, And natures vigil since it was nerfed back in dragonflight isn’t powerful enough to warrant being a capstone.
However I am pleased with the positioning of talents and the removable of most 2 point nodes theres definitely a very good base here that just needs some more work on it for it to be perfect.