I’m not really sure what’s going on with Feral Druids myself. I play one quite frequently and it was my main for many years, but I can’t really work out what it is right now.
The bleeds really aren’t very powerful, but they’re still powerful enough that they need to be applied properly.
Result is that feral really can’t rot, but the class is fundamentally built around rotting, so it just gets a bit weird.
You kindda have to play Feral Frenzy with drest and bite and Maim to really be able to kill anything on a feral right now. It’s obviously not really where it’s supposed to be.
But more importantly, ferals don’t really have a lot of utility and stuff outside of their main form in general. The class got its identity of the dual role + being a Druid in the background taken away from it and then it got turned into some scuffed rogue.
Due to the total lack of utility and the complex rotation, feral druids are VERY unpopular. I went on the arena ladder and found out that there are literally 19-20x as many destruction warlocks as there are feral druids. That’s just ridiculous.
And then there’s the sound effects. Snuck in there with no patch notes. Sound awful. All feedback completely ignored.
Feral has lost its identity as a Druid, as a hybrid, as utility class, as a shapeshifter, as a rot class. It’s frankly ridiculous.
Shadowlands looks to be fixing some of this stuff, but it’s pretty dire right now.
EDIT: Context on the bleeds to really drive home how weak they are.
TL;DR: I made an addon that divides everything by 100 as a kind-of squish. These are the numbers you’ll likely see in the pre-patch, maybe a bit lower.
Here’s some numbers:
Max health: 5181
Shred: 104 damage
Rake: 62 damage tick
Rip: 50 damage tick
But bites hit for like 1.2k
I mean I’m not really sure what’s going on with those numbers. It just seems pretty absurd to me.