I am glad to see that the "minority" of players that seem to want feral to be viable spec for the actual high end content, by having answers to real scenarios that are presented by the encounter developing team (M+ or Raiding), outnumbers the comments in here; Regardless if this is a mere WoWhead discussion thread.I am glad to see that the "minority" is capable of rational and thought-out comments. Not wanting to force our opinion on to others. But rather wanting to present the other side of the coin that we think seems to be non represented in a misleading review.I can say that my goal with my own post was to simply bring forward an alternate opinion, opinion that I am clearly glad to validate and see is not only "some" have. Numbers speak for themselves, and I dont speak of the DD vs Bleeds preference numbers, I would guess only Blizzard has such data, but I speak of presence of Feral in high end content. Using the most recent expansion in which we got to see both iterations play out, you can see how in the broad picture Feral was completely irrelevant and non existent, providing no raw damage power and no utility, the only exception with ToV raid in which very simple and mostly ST fights existed. It was with Antorus and 7.3.5 plus the usage of Soul ring (Boy I loved that item) that we became an effective DPS; Even if it were to be a single guild within the top 10 race that happened to use the spec for progression bosses, to me that was a moment of joy.As I mentioned in my previous post, the spec does have the tools nowdays to answer more situations and hasted bleeds change the game completely, but it will be up to Blizzard to keep tuning things effectively and keeping bleeds (that seem to be harder to work with based on past tiers) in check, alongside those other talents we may pick depending on fights, so that we are competitive and relevant. I can say I remain somewhat hopeful regardless of playstyle and my own preference.The biggest fear I have is if Blizzard's approach is to indeed have the spec be in the low end for AoE no matter what. I fear that it will be a stigma feral will have to deal with again, specially as we all can see that the game is moving towards M+ being the possible future flagship of PVE content in game.It is funny how the opinion has indeed changed, remember when the community did say the fantasy of being a feral druid was the power to shapeshift and do different things while others simply wanted to be rogues with a cat costume. It is almost indeed as if opinions change, and most definitely everyone has their own.I suppose that I saw this "review" more as a report, reason why I would had expected it to be less bias. It does say in the title that it is a review, but it also says on the article that it comes from the Feral community so by all means whoever gets to stamp their name on it, is clearly speaking for it as a whole. Sort of as much rather have a factually checked article than a piece written as it belonged in a personal blog. Perhaps I expect too much, we all most likely love this spec and can be passionate about it.But if the answer to other people having a different opinion to yours is: Go play another spec. All I can say is... Yikes, certainly dont want to see you in a different more controversial argument with real life subjects that may be far more meaningful than what ultimately is just a videogame.***Edited, seems to had been missing a paragraph, dont know if flagged due to the use of specific word or just scuffed the update.
This comment was better than the post. This was the first 8.0 class review that I read. Just now I read some of the others and had to go back to this post to reread it because I could actually agree with the other class reviews, while this one just sounds completely off.Like many others have commented here, I've had more fun with Feral in Legion than any other spec in any other expansion. I'm very sad to see it take such a drastic step back to "it's olden days"—a very unwelcomed change for me.
@DrathosThonda No, Feral has not always played as it did at the start of Legion. Far from it. It didn't play like that in WoD - the closest to being that bleed heavy was during the later half of MoP. So when people say that they prefer Feral gameplay to change into something less methodical and plainly more fun, they have every right to do so. Telling them to "play a different spec" is akin to "shut up, I like it, so it should stay that way", which is pretty arrogant - especially when your whole approach is based on wrong assumptions. It's quite clear that the very slow, extremely bleed heavy (70% of the damage, when you include AB) and very inflexible playstyle of Feral during first half of Legion catered to very few people. A lot of Ferals simply stopped playing the spec, because it became boring (bleed damage is less fun than direct damage), stale (no new abilities with any kind of wow-effect introduced with Legion) and inefficient for the dominating meta (primarily lack of competitive AoE, a detriment in both M+ and most raid content, but also a lack of utility, especially compared to other melee specs). And just to be clear: The bleed heavy playstyle did NOT make it harder to perform the best possible dps rotation. Instead, it essentially nullified using Ferocious Bite (except below 25% health on target) to the point of FB being a trap and made it way less efficient to use Swipe in AoE situations (and that's also a trap - having an ability clearly made for AoE, and then nerfing it to have less dpe than a single target ability in an AoE situation is bad design). Since Blizzard also decided to nerf Feral utility into the ground (especially off healing abilities, which were nerfed at the start of Legion and then several times during Legion), we ended up with a much easier - and much more boring - version of the spec, which since Vanilla was the flag-bearer of Hybridity in WoW. A few numbers of how efficient our off healing was in WoD: I could do 50,000 dps and 10,000 hps (healing per second) continuously on a raid boss. I had to use low-energy periods, together with Rejuvenation and Dream of Cenarius, to achieve that - but it worked really well. I could also choose Nature's Vigil or activate Heart of the Wild to switch roles during a fight. It was brilliant and added a lot of complexity to my setup (including macros), playstyle and situational awareness. Legion basically bombed Feral hybridity and utility back to the Stone Age. Most "pure" dps classes have better self-healing now - some of them even have immunities. So, I completely agree - we need to discuss utility. What I would like would be for Feral and Guardian to be merged again, let us choose if we want to tank with a talent. But the devs won't do that. So instead, we need serious buffs to our Affinities. We actually did get some of that in 8.0, but I fear that we will still only be able to deliver trivial healing, off-tanking or laughable ranged dps. We should be clamouring the devs, on every platform, for more utility and hybridity. Keep asking them to fulfil their stated design goal for our class. Instead, we have people who keep asking for Blizzard to pigeonhole us into being a single target bleed spec with the longest ramp up time of all dps specs in the game.
I feel like most of this post will sound like a repeat with only little bits of added explanation at this point, but oh well probably last one since I keep making them so long!>High end.Mostly speaking about EU when speaking about high end progression, but leaving that aside since US guilds were brought up, I can always remember what I think may be good example back during WoD on which Midwinter had high goals to be competitive even against other regions, Sten was playing there and I may not know the true reasons of him quitting but I can certainly say that back then, the fact that running a Feral instead of absolutely anything else was already setting them behind. Not to mention seeing some of those that at the time during Beta argued in favor of snapshotting heavy bleeding and ST niche just end up rerolling to Warriors or Rogues because Feral just was not useful enough to justify its poor damage, something similar happening with Legion after the very bad aftertaste for sticking with Feral during WoD.By no means I meant that Feral earned a spot 100% in all bosses, but at least it was better than in previous tiers.Point I was trying to get across was, more often than not it has been seen during most tiers in the last 2 expansions that the playstyle feral has been attaching to simply cant compete, not when encounters are designed the way they have been designed in all this time. And without any relevant utility it becomes a disadvantage for your group to bring one over something else. This of course if your group cares that much into making the best use of time during your raiding hours on that level. Was it viable? Yes, ALL specs are viable to a degree. they would not allow one to be completely left behind.>Being effective/relevant.Has it been viable? Yes, ALL specs are viable to a degree. they would not allow one to be completely left behind.But I dont speak about being viable, I speak about being effective, about being relevant. You can be viable without being relevant, while you may be relevant while being viable. Being relevant is that you actually bring SOMETHING into the table that either no other brings or on par with others as well. The easiest solution for being relevant? Do damage, either more or equal than others in the mid-high area. But I would be more than happy to give away that mentality for being the Batman of WoW specs with an amazing utility belt.People like to remember MoP for the snapshotting, how about we remember it as the last time we actually had any sense of being hybrids and relevant? That it was partially broken? Sure, it was funny how it was broken and that got addressed but in the end it allowed the raid group to rely on US as an extra CD. By having Blizzard remove those extra CDs from all DPS specs its clear the mentality that they have been headed since then; Look at Argus, Inmunities were extremely powerful for that fight, what happened? They got nerfed. The nerfs to AoE stuns that have been introduced in BfA as well. If you ask me it would seem that they want all DPS to be measured first by their capacity to do that, DPS. The way they are going at it is making it more of an even playfield, but its very difficult to sustain this "even" playfield when there are so many abilities and variants in the game, between racials, class, spec abilities and any crazy ideas that the encounter developer team may come up with. And as it stands nowdays, Feral doesnt have any sort of abilities that can be exploitable to our favor in encounters as, more often than not, Rogues, Hunters, Mages, Warlocks and now Demon Hunters do (Coincidence that I just listed 4 pure DPS classes?).I find it funny that the best trait of a feral during Legion was that we were pretty much a mid range melee with the use of moonkin affinity and not Stampeding Roar which only became useful in VERY limited areas. Roots and Typhoon are shared with other druids, besides, leaving Antorus out, when was the last time you got to use roots in a very powerful way these past 2 expansions? And its not like we were allowed to keep Vortex.>Back to playstyle since I continue to think Feral's utility is a thing of the past and Blizzard wants it that way.You may ask why should the playstyle change now to accommodate to the demand of the players? I ask then, If Blizzard had the goal to remove snapshotting from every class in the game back in MoP, why make the permanent change in their game philosophy at the time and go to the extend of adding a talent that allowed it to play that way after players brought it up?See? Thats the thing, the big keyword, change, I personally think, understanding some may agree and others may not, that is time for Feral to "change" away of that and adjust to what is truly effective during encounters nowdays, and I think that the easiest solution for that based on past experiences with Blizzard and their inability (until the day of this post, maybe we are fine in BfA!) to balance bleeds properly so that the spec is not a complete hit or miss depending on the fight, is that our playstyle needs to evolve into the mid impact bleed upkeep management alongside with Savage Roar allowing more freedom. Tiger's fury on its own already provides a level of snapshotting, you can see it as the best of both worlds BASIC ability that is part of the spec no matter what, Bloodtalons AS A TALENT just plays onto a very old and dated mechanic that other classes moved past from, and the reality is, there is a reason why other classes manage to do better over time (tuning aside) and thats because they evolve and try to retain some of what makes them that class/spec but at the same time are not being shackled down by old ideologies, this by all means doesn't mean that change is always good, the best example being Legion's Survival, but I think its has been given plenty of opportunities in the past 4 years. Im kind of leaving aside that when a community complains the most they see results, the whole "the squeaky wheel gets the grease".As a side note to Bloodtalons, something I have often thought about to make it somewhat more enjoyable would be to have its procs be out of the GCD just as Tiger's Fury was allowed to remain out of it. Its this kind of change that I want to see, taking something old and making it better.To summarize, one playstyle allows you to still maintain your bleeds that we have always been known for but you are capable of also fast swap to high priority targets (short lived or not) VS. A slow paced playstyle that focuses solely on bleeds and high ramp up even with improvements in Jagged Wounds.First offers you the same bleeds the other does while keeping a fun and fast paced playstyle while the second only achieves to limit you to mostly bleeds and slow you down. One lets you do more for better results in the current idea of encounter designs, the other binds you to a niche role. One allows you to excel at different situations, the other locks you down to a single mindset and answer to everything.<<<AGAIN, all this may very well change with the introduction of Hasted bleeds and our energy regen>>>I like the reference I made earlier about playing Feral in the heavy bleed and no utility situation we are in, Its like wanting to run in a 100m competition but with only one leg.
Honestly really depressed with these changes. At first glance Feral doesn't 'look' any different than it did in 7.3.5, but gods does it feel different. Slow, energy starved, all around stiff and clunky. The fun, satisfying, high APM playstyle is gone, and in exchange, bloodtalons is practically mandatory to get a decent DPS output. I've never understood how and why some people can enjoy bloodtalons, but to each their own I suppose. I mained feral for the end of Legion and fell in love with it. It was so fun to play a fast, zipply little kitty with the zoomies while being one of (if not usually) the top DPS for my guild and getting constant parses in the purple and orange in heroic. Sure, if I change all my talents and gear I could get the haste required to smooth out the gameplay a bit, and I could change the talents to fit what is 'good' now, but after all that I'm left with a playstyle that doesn't feel like a fast and ferocious cat. It feels, ironically, more bear-like; slow and lumbering with the occasional heavy hit.I know there's a lot of feral druids that are happy with the changes, but sadly, I am not one of them. Ah well, at least Mistweaver is fun to play again.