I am always loyal to my feral druid no matter how bad it is, was not that good in SL so i hope for better times in Dragonflight.
Bloodtalons is in the same boat as sabertooth. Mandatory, non-optional and boring af.
Agree with Darlik and author, the class tree with its 'previously baseline spells' is just pointless, you have a line to follow and and can slightly dip into the adjacent tree but many paths are blocked so there's not a choice, so there is no point to a class "spec". Put rake, rip, TF, rejuv, starfire and Moonkin form etc BACK into baseline spellbook with the class identity. That is all the choice you have anyway - with or without the class tree. Were you really going to give rip to a Moonkin? No. So whats the point of making what is essentially a 4 spec class spellbook on one page. Do something imaginative with the spec:Utility, pvp, burst throughput, sustained throughput, Off target dot throughput, long CD, short CD, proc/passive and cleave/AoE bulding and allow people to make choices on where the spec is good in the right activity/type. How anyone can design two trees from four specs and give less flexibility overall is frightening. Not all those stupid legendary bonus generic types have to be used. Remember the days when you could spec mastery -bleeds or haste-arpen and the class would play differently? How do we miss that with all the time gone by and full time employees given class design and a history book of what worked?
My main problem with this talent tree if I want to build for bleeds, I'm forced to waste 4 points on Ferocious Bite buffing talent. I don't like "big bites" I'd like to play with the old moar dotz build, and I don't understand why I need to buff FB to reach the dot talents. At least make that talent point a "choose one" talent between the FB buff and a "gain more value from haste" or give back old cat Mangle which added +30% bleed damage taken debuff for the target... or something. That would be better i think.+ as a pvp main I don't like I have to pick AoE rip to gain access predatory swiftness.Also I hoped I will see again that legion artifact power which gave us 100% dodge for a few seconds after leaving cat form. Or a talent for making Predatory Swiftness effect on Cycone, or give the old Faerie Fire back (armor reduc/anti stealth), or a chance for make a shadow thrash after using thrash... But all I see is shadowlands conduit powers, shadowlands legendaries and shadowlands class abilities... And for the bleed build, I really liked the idea of dual wielding daggers back in legion. After Blizzard made the dual one-handed fury warriors and the 2 handed frost death knights I think that would be great to make a talent for ferals (and guardians?) to use dual wield 1h weapons / fist weapons. Imo it could be great if we want to build for bleeds with lot of haste / attack speed. Dragonflight would be a great opportunity to make use of a weapon we are able to wield, but never used.
I was underwhelmed when I first saw the Feral druid tree, namely because about 95% of it was retreads and things that should be baseline aren't actually baseline still, and that none of the core issues with Feral have been resolved.Wondering what I mean by that? Why does Bloodtalons exist still? Why isn't Sabertooth only applying at 25% or less on the target but being a free refresh then? Why is Savage Roar still here when it doesn't mesh with anything or the way the game is played now? Why bother with Feral Frenzy (especially when it competes with something forced to be non-optional like Bloodtalons, which itself sucks in terms of fun)?Then they introduced new nonsense, like splitting Berserk up. Its neat you can customize it, that's great and all, but why is baseline Berserk split up like this to the point you cannot even pick up synergistic effects? Why are things split so randomly instead of clustered toward similar, related abilities that combine well together? Why is there basically nothing new here?I am still all for talent trees but this is ridiculous, it's all just an illusion of choice and somehow less coherent than the talents and builds of Classic. Especially with Wrath of the Lich King coming out, you actually have more various cat options there than you do here. And I get almost all of these are callbacks and meant to be "substantial choices" but seriously, is that worth it? Half of this should just be integrated to the class, same for the druid specific talents. Speaking of druid talents, the Feral side of the tree still offers a whopping nothing for everyone who is Balance and Restoration as this topic shows to begin with.I agree with a lot of what has already been said about it, that what really needs to happen is that you need some differentiation here. Why there isn't the Armor Penetration power from the Fangs of Ashamane versus Mangle bleed debuff is beyond me. Why not a Feral Frenzy versus Primal Wrath option? There really should be a dichotomy in your options and flavor. For Feral that's basically "Haste and Armor Penetration" for lots of claws and bites versus "Critical Hits and Mastery" for huge bleeds and lots of ticks.Also, all these throwbacks and nostalgia appeals and no Leader of the Pack, Blizzard?
@Guiltyas I agree with all points made, but I am curious to know why you didn't explicitly mention primal wrath vs brutal slash? Don't you find it strange that this isn't a choice node and exists at a place where you might want to go down both paths still? I guess I am coming from a PVP perspective but these two talents seem like you are picking up both AOE abilities right now.
redesign "build your berserk" and get uus old sabertooth that was in cata with increased damage to FB and full rip duration past 35% of hp as execute and at least it will be playable. Also berserkk 2 min cd pretty please
Like why would you need to get Innervate for feral? Druid's class tree works a bit different than what we see the DK's class tree work, in that there's less synergy between the specs using the class tree. That could be a failure, but you don't say that, you insist on feral going anti-synergistically down the moonkin/resto lines to get innervate. You talk about opportunity cost, but you basically gave up 7-8 points in the Druid tree to get Innervate and Nature's Vigil, when I think it's fairly obvious you'd be better off going the guardian/center line.Feral could get back into off tanking like they used to be back in the day, or simply make them a more tanky melee dps. Taking less damage is utility in a sense, you're aiding the healer(s).What's this about sabertooth? I remember it being a problem back when I still mained kitty in WoD, but wasn't that because of snapshotting? Sabertooth isn't the problem, blizzard needs to delete snapshotting from feral as it's the last one using that backwards mechanic.And while I somewhat agree that Build-a-Berserk requires a bit too many points, it is a cooldown that does a lot of different things. Doesn't that mean it should be multi-point? Then again, they added a burst damage component with Moonkin's Celestrial Alignment being 2 points (if you want the added time). Still that does 3 things for 1 point.All and all, I think the assessment of these trees is a bit off. They talk about opportunity costs, then say its worth it to spend 7 points getting some odd piece of utility, strictly because we have it now. Should Blizzard iterate on it so these are more accessible for all specs? Maybe, but innervate and nature's vigil aren't absolutes for feral, survival instincts maybe.
This post is long-winded, overly opinionated and whiney. Doesn't this website have editors?
I think Wowhead is a pretty big site now and it should have professional proofreading, that's what I think. Too many of the longer articles and guides are just an unholy mess of run on sentences and poor punctuation. It just looks amateur.
I can't feel any creativity from this Feral tree...What's great about this for the new expansion? I'm just disappointed.If game developers start to say "new" by rearranging existing ones,I think it means it's time to fire them all and replace them all.
Something I would like to see WoWhead to start doing is to have these kind of writer posts have a disclaimer of personal opinion on title or within it, but that may be just me.Would be nice to not use what is considered the main source of WoW news and resource for players to push your own opinion without a disclaimer or stating the counter side and not sounding one sided. Mostly speaking about the Sabertooth bit as the talent on itself is fine, it gives an easy out on "difficulty" for feral players. There are some that dislike it and some that do, that the talent becomes mandatory? Thats a different problem. The same issue happened with Bloodtalon prior to its rework and still to this day really, also with other talents and even core playstyle of the spec.Everything else is in the post is a valid "concern" that can be brought up as feedback, questioning what are the intentions of the dev team or if they are aware of the possible issues it will cause for the spec without getting into tuning passes.Edit: Would had found far more interesting is a possible list of the great abilities, both the class and spec, that existed and could had been brought into the new talent system. Perhaps checking good posts or running polls on official forums, discords, reddit and such to gauge which ones seem to be missed.
Checked this just to confirm what I was pretty sure of but wasn't 100% on, which is that there is NOTHING new on this talent sheet. Send it back! This spec needs serious attention, as its one of the least played in the entire game. Whatever attention the dev team gave this, it needs to be tripled, cause this is bogus.
These talent trees are terrible. All blizzard had to do was take the old talent tree system and use that as a template and add then add on from the to all the other expansions, they didn't ad made it into some kind of wonky tree that forces you in taking some key talents over others. They refuse to bring back Starfire Stun for some reason, they refuse to bring back wild mushroom for balance and other spells, and they refuse to make Treants relevant at all. Treants in WoD were the best iteration of Force of nature they ever mad.
Very sad not to see Claws of Shirvallah come back, particularly with more spells available to feral now.As for the article, I feel like there could be a bit more concrete statements or more analysis given. For instance, in the Capstones section, the author states that they have a problem with capstones, then talks about psychological drive to rush toward the capstones and opportunity costs. Then they specify if capstones are week, trees become less focused. But no where in that section does the author actually state the problem: only in the next section do they assert that the capstones are underwhelming. Furthermore, there's no actual explanation for why capstones are underwhelming. I would've appreciated just that extra bit of explanation to really understand the author's stance on the tree.
Iron fur and frenzied regen on base druid is gonna make some tanky cats