Patch 7.3 - Feral Druid Changes

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Patch 7.3 - Feral Druid Changes
Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
Hi Cats,

We have a number of changes to Feral Druids coming soon. The general goals of these changes are:
  • 1. Reduce (but not necessarily displace entirely) the dominance of the big three complexifying and powerful talents: Savage Roar, Jagged Wounds, and Bloodtalons. Each of those talents is (on live) winning by a large margin in terms of throughput against other talents on their rows.
  • 2. Balance out the power level of the last 3 talent rows, allowing more talents builds to be viable.
  • 3. Increase the skill floor and reduce how punishing it can be to error when playing the rotation.
  • 4. Compensate for power-level-reductions of talents with baseline damage increase to the spec so that at the highest level, performance isn’t really affected, but the bottom of the spec is brought up.

The most major changes:

  • All damage done increased by 33%.
  • Jagged Wounds reduced to 20%. (down from 33%)
  • Savage Roar duration increased by 50% at all combo points. Damage bonus reduced to 15%. (down from 25%)
  • Bloodtalons damage bonus reduced to 25%. (down from 50%)

Looking back at the development of Feral Druid in Legion: when Savage Roar was moved from a baseline ability to the talent tree, in order to bring the power level of the ability closer to most talents (+25% damage to everything for a long duration is far stronger than most talents are), rather than reducing its damage bonus, its duration was significantly shortened instead. This contributed greatly to the overconstrained and overly punishing Feral rotation that you see on live today. Additionally, Jagged Wounds was added as a new talent, reducing the amount of free combo points Ferals had available to finishers such as Ferocious Bite (which was basically pushed out of the rotation entirely). Both talents probably would have been fine on their own, but taken together (because they were the strongest) at the live tuning values led to a more pressured Feral rotation than we felt was right.

Additionally, a few talents are being rearranged in the talent tree:


The primary gain here is moving Brutal Slash to a sort of multitarget/AOE lvl 90 talent row along with Sabertooth (which can be well-utilized in a sustained low-target situation), giving the lvl 90 row a solid talent for dungeons. For now, we want to go with an arrangement that keeps Jagged Wounds, Savage Roar, and Bloodtalons on separate rows so the current most common live build is still possible.

Other less major changes include quality of life and tuning adjustments to some talents to balance out the rows:

  • Prowl cooldown reduced to 6 sec (down from 10 sec) for all Druid specs.
  • Rebirth is castable in all forms, and consequently, is no longer affected by or consumes Predatory Swiftness.
  • Sabertooth damage bonus to Ferocious Bite increased to 20%.
  • Incarnation: King of the Jungle energy cost reduction reduced to 50% (down from 60%) and only allows the use of Prowl once. This it to balance out that talent row with the new Jagged Wounds and to reduce the frequency of Rake stuns in PvP while still allowing Incarnation to function as an effective Vanish.
  • Moment of Clarity now causes Omen of Clarity to trigger twice as often and increases the damage of the affected abilities by 25%. This is to better space out what is essentially a large energy proc and reduce slightly the impact that a single talent has on the resource income and pacing of the rotation.
  • Elune’s Guidance cooldown reduced to 30 sec (down from 45 sec) and combo points granted reduced to 5 + 5 over 5 seconds (down from 5 + 8 over 8 seconds).

Overall, with these changes, balance for the last 3 talent rows and consequently overall should be better in general. We expect the current most common build/playstyle of Jagged Wounds + Savage Roar + Bloodtalons to still remain one of the strongest builds, but it should no longer win by a huge margin over other competing talent builds and also should be a little less strenuous to play.

These changes should be available in an upcoming PTR build. As usual, we may make further adjustments – especially tuning – as PTR progresses. (Official Forums)

Feral Druid T21 Set Bonus
The current intention of the Feral 4 piece bonus is that you get a 100% free in every way (except a GCD) Ferocious Bite.

This may change as set bonuses go through some more iteration throughout the 7.3.0 development cycle.

Thank you for the feedback. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
This article was originally published in forum thread: Patch 7.3 - Feral Druid Changes started by chaud View original post
Published on 2017-07-07 07:34 PM
88 Comments
Comments 89 Comments
  1. decsis's Avatar
    Ah yeah sure, Feral is the class that needs changes, while a million caster are screwed in PVP....good one Blizz. Fags
  1. Ophenia's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Will View Post
    absolute rubbish. I played feral in WotLK where it was considered (followed by afflic) the hardest spec. Period. Don't you remember the 'john fucking madden' feral rotation picture that circulated? Without an arms warr manglebot it was even worse.
    Wow thanks for this "John fucking Madden", I didn't know about this picture and it's awesome.

    Regarding the changes, as a casual feral, that seems interesting. Now that I'm not raiding anymore, I enjoy playing with sub-optimal talents on some toons if the gameplay suits me better, as long as it doesn't make me useless (that's still a MMORPG, my choices don't have to impact other players' experience). And that was completely impossible to do on the Feral, because suboptimal talents transforms your tiger into a clawless kitten.

    Looking forward to that.

    I've read all the posts in this topic and I'm astonished by the amount of people saying "Buuh I was playing Feral because it was hard to play and it was highly rewarding bla bla bla"... Did you read the blue thing above ? Those talents will stay there, you'll still deal more damage with your top-tier rotation than low-skilled scrubs, you'll still be able to trash-talk on the chan when you'll deal 0.2% above everyone else. The only difference will be that players with lower skill than you, or simply without the will to play with 47 WAs, won't be left too far behind. That is the same reason behind the change they made (after/during MoP) with nearly all DoT snapshotting. The difference between a perfect rotation and an erroneous rotation was way too high.
  1. Ontis's Avatar
    Seven years of mockery. And you still fail to do things right.
    Seriously. You made a spec with an overcomplicated but rewarding performance back in WotLK. Ever since then you've been trying to disgrace and neuter said spec. Have you no decency?
    How hard is it to comprehend a simple fact: if you're 'casualizing' ALL damage dealer classes' rotations to literally three core buttons (or even 2 for some of them) and making Cats even more complicated at the same time, You Are Doing It Wrong.
    The person who came up with the idea of "Savage roar: duration reduced, cost increased" must die.
    The person who still refuses to copy ability text from Stealth to Prowl and keeps trying to play around it must be deported back to Mexico.
    The person who reduced damage done by Cat's AOE abilities to zero (spamming singletarget Rakes is usually more rewarding than Thrash-Swiping packs) must die.
    The person who gave the spec with SINGLE TARGET DAMAGE ONLY an artifact ability that deals SINGLE TARGET DAMAGE ONLY must die.
    The person who designed Jagged Wounds must die.
    His teammate who didn't bother removing GCD off instacast heals must share the abovementioned fate.
    The person who designed Elune's Guidance must die. The corpse must be burned to ashes. The ashes must be dumped into a pool of H2SO4. His very existence must be denied and forgotten. Such sheer stupidity must not be allowed to leave ANY trace.

    Do it. And for the love of god, START PLAYING YOUR OWN GAME.
  1. Elif's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Tradu View Post
    You have to be joking. Like, you literally have to be. There's no way you can be serious. Feral is still almost the same spec it has been since at least Wrath of the Lich King(which imo is a good thing). Elemental got a full rework this expansion.
    YOU have to be joking. Have you played feral at all the past few expansions? You know, how it was in Wrath where we could use Mangle once a minute to improve bleed damage, but then it changed to where we had to Mangle spam certain bosses that couldn't be attacked from behind by Shred? Shred now no longer requires you to be behind a Target and Mangle disappears. Do you not remember Savage roar being a base spell learned rather than a talent while Incarnation was preferred? Wasn't it just this expansion where they condensed nearly all of feral druid's main abilities into three so you don't need a separate bar of abilities for Prowl (e.g. Ravage is now Shred in Prowl)? Remember when you could use Ferocious Bite without having even the slightest concern your "rotation" would fall off timing (more so than in previous xpac at least)? Where the hell did my Symbiosis even go?!

    I also hope you're not playing the elitist game and claiming the feral rotation today isn't as punishing as players claim. I have been playing feral since BC so I was quick to pick up and balance all of the abilities including moonfire when it was still competitive, but the moment the boss does a massive AoE effect around himself or I have to switch to adds, it becomes "punishing" due to the amount of bleeds I have still ticking. I also am unfortunately out in the boonies and my internet is less than desirable. If I start the fight off with lag or hit large lag spikes midfight, then I am almost forced to start my rotation again from scratch (i.e. refresh SR, Rip, and Rake) before Shredding again.

    I'm looking forward to the change; anything is welcome. We'll see where it goes from here.
  1. Epoch's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by decsis View Post
    Ah yeah sure, Feral is the class that needs changes, while a million caster are screwed in PVP....good one Blizz. Fags
    A few things:

    1. Feral is not a class, it's a spec. Pay more attention before you start a incoherent rant.
    2. Feral is and has been the least touched spec in the game when it comes to long overdue needed changes.
    3. Please don't ever procreate. Have a nice day.
  1. mmoc5be3929c9d's Avatar
    new mage animations are really nice !
  1. Jenkyl's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Tradu View Post
    People massively overexaggerate how hard Feral is to play. It requires understanding of a few basic concepts, which are very different to most other classes(or at least more pronounced), after you get those basic concepts it's not hard to execute.

    EXACTLY!!!! Try an Orbweaver and you wont have a problem with this class. All it needs is a small dps buff and to fix SR. SR should be castable with 0 CP like it used to be and that would fix some of the issues.


    People need instant gratification so they are dumbing it down enough for anybody to play and ruining it for those that like it.

    Incarn/SR/MoC is now the highest DPS numbers ive seen in some brief PTR testing. Um that is 40% or more of Shred usage. To me this is now a button mash with these changes.

    - - - Updated - - -
  1. Thorim's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by bjlight1988 View Post
    Did you ever stop to consider that nobody wants to develop things around people like you because you're goddamn cancer?
    What does this even mean? I'm serious...what was going through your head when you typed this? Perhaps if you write in complete and coherent sentences I could reply.

    All of your posts are just total garbage and moaning about others moaning, which leads me to believe your old account was banned for abusive posts and this is your new one?
  1. Ravingmad's Avatar
    Im very happy with the changes. The current best spec, SavageRoar+Jagged Claws+Bloodtalon is so tight to play and punishing. I've always respected Feral players because of the gameplay. I just leveled a Feral because of this change. I've always loved the spec, but I just couldnt play it to a HL level. Ferocious Bite will now be something to use somewhere else then during BloodLust or good Omen of Clarity procs, which is good and makes more sense.
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