Feral WoD wishlist

[hullaballoonatic]

I agree on the skill/timing involved with getting a proper Rip off, but the choice is pretty binary: 5-pointer or bust, only rarely apply a 4cp rip.

I think you're undervaluing the depth of rip. It's not that it's a simple matter of requiring a 5 cp application, but the planning required to get there at the right time. I'm just not sure I want to give that up.

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I've been making a lot of changes to the op in the spirit of the discussion, though too many to recall. Could you reread it and consider what issues you have with it now?

[Rioo]

Symbiosis was briefly mentioned above and I just want to make a quick remark. I know a lot of people don't like it, but the sorts of immunity abilities it provides -- dispersion, divine shield, ice block, deterrence, cloak of shadows -- have become really important in the raid composition metagame, and it would be a pretty serious blow to druid viability on a variety of fights if symbiosis were to be removed.

What are people not liking about Symbiosis? I think it's a really fun ability.

[Zstr]

Hey now, is that really necessary? Everyone who has replied to your posts here has done so with consideration and respect, even though we don't agree with you.

I don't like the fact that a person who barely plays spec, trying to revamp it for it's personal liking, not thinking about consequence it would cause, trying to remove core abilities and put useless elements in rotation in side from only PvE prespective and making spec completly useless in PvP
atleast some ranking ferals comes for the rescuse to cover his non awareness...

I said MY opinion, on his thougts and made a conclusion of whom this coming from

[hullaballoonatic]

What is occurring here is merely a difference of opinion. And nothing more abrasive. I have played feral for years and years in all aspects of the game. I absolutely love the spec. If I were allowed to run wild and change the spec to behave precisely how I want it to barring any consequence, I assure you the spec would look much different than I outlined in the OP. I am instead attempting to address faults in the spec, tempered within the realm of possibility given all we know about the direction in which blizzard intends to take the game moving into WoD. Unfortunately for you, all signs point to blizzard removing positional requirements come next expansion.

[Deleted]

I would honestly be shocked and a little appalled if it wasn't.

... or maybe they'll introduce it to rake as well.

[Zstr]

Faults? only faults I see is people minimized UI where they can't fit abilities in so they wants them remove,and it doesn't mean they were completly useless, I still missing Thorns ability ;(
You played many aspects? how the hell you are then want to remove Bash the only reasonable CC we have left after Cyclone to the ground nerf and Maim a life saver.
And repeating myself about position requirements which are already neglited to nothing in MoP[what to remove if there none] (from the whine after bosses like Ultaxion and Sinestra), you just have choice now to use mangle or shred in rotation(cheaper and faster or more damaging with high cost CP builders), like for caster if you move you use instant spell or casting while standing still.
And common for all be behind of boss is going to stay anyway, even with removing of expertise they will still parry.

giving TF 2nd charge could be a nice set bonus, instead dull dmg % to ability
and CP on player instead target would help target switching and less leaving targets, the only weakest side of feral, and will save a space in action bar for revange button

[Deleted]

I think you're undervaluing the depth of rip. It's not that it's a simple matter of requiring a 5 cp application, but the planning required to get there at the right time. I'm just not sure I want to give that up.

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I've been making a lot of changes to the op in the spirit of the discussion, though too many to recall. Could you reread it and consider what issues you have with it now?

But isn't the planning part already out of the window if they're removing dot snapshotting and making secondary stats more equal, ie. devaluing mastery?

[hullaballoonatic]

There will still be stuff like tiger's fury, savage roar, and dream of cenarius to buff rip.

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You played many aspects? how the hell you are then want to remove Bash the only reasonable CC we have left

Then you'll be happy to know that mighty bash is the only stunning CC I left for Ferals in this set of changes, which hasn't changed since I first made the thread. I suggest reading the entire OP.

[aggixx]

After looking through the OP again, couple points of feedback:

1. Critical strikes from stealth seems a bit clunky, because it greatly incentivizes opening from stealth with a Rake instead of a Ravage (remember snapshotting is gone so you don't care about proccing your trinkets first). That Rake would be buffed by DoC as well if triggering the buff pre-pull is possible as well. I want to say that it would make more sense for it to only increase the critical strike chance of direct damage, but that's also kind of venturing into the territory of overcomplication, so maybe it would be better to change the mechanic entirely.

2. I feel like the energy refund range on Ravage would make a lot more sense being at 80%+, it would make it less negligible on bosses and adds alike. If it's only 90%+ then you would probably have a hard to consistently getting 2 ravages in on very high priority kill target adds which could be frustrating.

The other issue is that the refund becomes significantly more effect during Berserk, as it would only cost 30 energy and each cast would refund half of that, meaning you would be GCD capped for the entirety of Berserk. At first I didn't think this was really an issue, but it does pretty much defeat the purpose of having a high energy spender during Berserk, at least at the start of the fight. I think it would make more sense to have Ravage refund 1/4th of it's cost instead of 15 energy so that the refund wouldn't be vastly more effective during Berserk.

3. Rip being able to extend Thrash feels like a bandaid fix on a somewhat archaic mechanic, I don't know about most people's opinions but I know I would rather just have Rip extensions be gone and the base duration be increased accordingly (and I know someone had said that earlier in this thread).

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There will still be stuff like tiger's fury, savage roar, and dream of cenarius to buff rip.

True, although without any changes to Savage Roar, that's assumed to be a constant (even moreso if you take the passive SR). Dream of Cenarius is an optional mechanic which means we're left with almost exclusively just Tiger's Fury as a snapshotted damage increase.

[hullaballoonatic]

3. Rip being able to extend Thrash feels like a bandaid fix on a somewhat archaic mechanic, I don't know about most people's opinions but I know I would rather just have Rip extensions be gone and the base duration be increased accordingly (and I know someone had said that earlier in this thread).

I think this was applied as a pvp restriction to begin with. It would certainly be a buff to Feral Druids to remove it. I have no qualms. I'm just not sure Blizzard would ever do it (Not that that entirely matters for the purpose of this discussion).

1. Critical strikes from stealth seems a bit clunky, because it greatly incentivizes opening from stealth with a Rake instead of a Ravage

I just don't see much of a problem with this. With the suggested change to DoC, you won't be able to have it ready for the start of the fight, making being in stealth pretty trivial. Perhaps a better approach, though, would be to remove prowl's effect on movement speed by default, and the glyph can give the guaranteed crit chance.

Concerning your thoughts on Ravage, I agree straight up.

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Actually, the biggest problem I have with my suggested changes so far is that feral can get really, really easy. Lining up a tiger's fury with a rip will be trivial when you have a stack of two of them. Feral druid could legitimately be talented to the point that it is as easy as Assassination to play. The most complex would be taking Dream of Cenarius and Blessings of the Ancients, therefore contending with moonfire, wrath, and their effect on the rotation as a whole.

[aggixx]

Fair points. I guess I'm making a bigger deal of the stealth thing than is really necessary, I was actually thinking yesterday or the day before how our kit as a stealth attacker is pretty much non-existant in a PvE context. Of course we're no rogues, but it should still be a key feature of the spec, so in that context I don't think making stealth more combat relevant is the end of the world.

The glyph approach isn't bad, though.

On difficulty: I personally don't think that's the end of the world as long as the harder options are generally superior (for a skilled player) but that puts a bigger burden on Blizzard to keep the tiers balanced appropriately, so it's not a complete non-issue.

[hullaballoonatic]

I wonder if there's a way I could inject more difficulty in there, though. Perhaps make the second charge on tiger's fury a glyph, but that seems to be absolutely mandatory.

[Aseyhe]

A quick remark on the idea of moving clearcasts to the RPPM system:

Clearcasting is currently a 3.5/60 ~= 5.83% proc chance on autoattack hit. Since autoattacks are already evenly spaced, moving clearcasts to RPPM wouldn't be much of a change. It would have the following effects:

• Higher chance to proc after downtime;
• No haste scaling unless explicitly added (but it would make sense to explicitly add it);
• Nonzero miss chance no longer reduces proc rate (no longer relevant in Warlords);
• Proc interval is slightly more consistent (this is a pretty marginal effect: it's the red line vs gray line in this picture).

Of these, the only appreciable difference is the improved ability to deal with downtime, and we're already one of the best classes for that. So I don't think there's much reason to make this change. (But it certainly wouldn't be harmful either.)

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Now let me talk about clearcasting more generally. What is its purpose?

In Wrath of the Lich King, it was mostly just a tool to help our haste scaling -- indeed, this was actually the explicit reason given for changing it to trigger from only autoattacks. Through Wrath and Cataclysm, from the player's perspective it was just a proc to do more damage, with no real decision involved other than consuming it ("shred on clearcast" was a common suggestion, but it was generally at least as good to just continue with whatever you were planning). Now in Mists, the proc has become a little more interesting due to the viability of mangle and the addition of thrash: "shred on clearcast" is more meaningful, and thrashing on clearcast is sometimes an even better option. And further, the tier 16 2-piece bonus has added another dynamic to the ability in cleave situations: now when you get a clearcast, you often want to cast a few swipes.

The suggested changes to ravage, obviously, are an attempt to expand (or at least preserve) the gameplay of reacting to a clearcast proc by casting a different spell. I wouldn't call it a particularly interesting mechanic, but there's at least a skill element in the reaction check. It's fun, too. If you've played elemental shaman, you're probably familiar with the awesome feeling of getting a string of lava surge procs. I get the same feeling getting a string of clearcasts during AoE, and clearcast ravage would likely be similar.

So, I'm certainly fine with clearcasting being something you react to by casting ravage. But for the sake of ideas, is there a way to make this proc more compelling?

In fact, while composing this post, a particular idea came to me that many people may find very interesting. What if, instead of its current effect, clearcasting were changed to greatly boost the damage of all bleeds cast within the next 10 seconds? We'd have DoT snapshotting back, but as a clearly designated ability, rather than the set of stat increases that we have now. (The proc rate would need to be appropriately reduced from its present value of 3.5 hasted PPM. With this kind of change, it would also make more sense to move to RPPM for its slightly improved consistency.)

Now, I've mentioned at various times that DoT snapshotting hurts our damage-dealing versatility. It punishes depriving yourself of resources, which harms your ability to burst-damage secondary targets. It leaves us with little control over when we do our damage -- our burst is tied up in random procs. So perhaps this would work best as a talent. Maybe it could compete against some versatility options, like tiger's fury having two charges.

This is just a very rough idea. Something to think about. Maybe it's better to leave DoT snapshotting dead. It's fun, but I still don't like what it does to our versatility.

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There's another element from the history of clearcasting that it may also be interesting to look at. In Wrath of the Lich King, it was possible to "force" a clearcast in two ways. First, casting Gift of the Wild in a 25-man raid had something like an 80% chance to proc clearcasting (depending on the number of pets -- it was a small chance on each player or pet hit). Second, casting wrath on predatory swiftness had something like a 60% chance to proc clearcasting (this was totally undocumented and I still have no idea why it happened). Due to the shapeshifting required, it was generally break-even to cast GotW and a slight loss to cast wrath in most single-target situations, but they could be advantageous for AoE, during downtime, or if you were at a point in the rotation where you badly needed combo points.

Forcing a clearcast in this fashion was never intended gameplay, but it afforded some interesting choices and I thought it was fun at the time. You could squeeze out that ferocious bite and then use GotW to recover combo points fast enough to refresh that rip. Or perhaps you had a burst-damage (or cleave) phase coming, so you'd prepare a clearcast in advance by casting GotW.

So maybe it would be interesting to bring back a way to force a clearcast for future use. Something expensive enough that you wouldn't usually do it in a single-target rotation -- an example might be hard-casting wrath. Anyway, this is just another very rough idea, and it's probably incompatible with the earlier idea (if you could forcibly trigger a bleed buff, that's dream of cenarius all over again).

[mmokri]

What if, instead of its current effect, clearcasting were changed to greatly boost the damage of any bleed cast within the next 10 seconds?

Blizzard removes snapshotting. You want more snapshotting.

[Aseyhe]

Blizzard's objection to stat snapshotting was its opacity. They have already decided to leave Tiger's Fury snapshotting in. My suggestion would be no different: an obvious element of the rotation, well-documented in tooltips.

[Deleted]

I wonder if there's a way I could inject more difficulty in there, though. Perhaps make the second charge on tiger's fury a glyph, but that seems to be absolutely mandatory.

It's probably hard to judge what kind of utility talents and glyphs might be useful without knowing what the new FotM boss mechanic would be. MoP introduced a plethora of movement-based boss mechanics (notably Helm of Command) which required a full tier of movement talents for nearly all classes. Knockbacks and grips have also been popular since Cataclysm and classes who had these effects usually had one or several glyphs to modify their spell.

Glyphs imho should be something like making skull bash AoE and put it on a longer cooldown (or have a talent choice for Disorienting Roar to act as an interrupt instead), like making cyclone an aoe slow instead of immunity (giving it some PvE application) or making tranquility disperse faster and further or tick harder in a small aoe.

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As for difficulty, I believe that it's a lot "healthier" to enable class design which allows several different play styles with different characteristics so the skill cap is set by the player's ability to understand these characteristics and how they scale and attribute them effectively for a specific encounter. A good example is the difference between Affliction and Destruction Warlock (Or combat vs. sub rogues, BM vs Surv hunters) styles with different burst capabilities, control, sustained dps, aoe spread, movement, etc.

Of course we can't hope for a similar treatment since there's no more room to extrapolate the feral spec into more specs but there is room to enable different kinds of "rotations" either by talents or glyph choices to allow us to trade shift into a more burst-heavy or sustain-heavy build while maintaining the core idea behind the spec. At the moment (in MoP) no matter what you're doing - whether it's pull-burst, heavy aoe, multi-boss bleed cleave or even the occasional target swap onto a high priority target - we are always just juggling procs and self-buffs in order to maintain a not-so-useless rake and rip on whatever we're clawing.
There's literally no alternate playstyle available and most of our current difficulty or skill cap which everyone seems to love so much comes from the fact that the game makes it so hard to track bleeds and plan your combat in advance. Some of this is alleviated by rich UI's, 3rd-party addons like SimC or Catus and even learned responses (like pooling energy, learning to react to procs, what procs to use treants on. ...) but it still creates an atmosphere where everyone else on your team is playing a hard packed match of Ice Hockey while you're playing poker in the background to prevent the ice from melting.

[hullaballoonatic]

What if, instead of its current effect, clearcasting were changed to greatly boost the damage of all bleeds cast within the next 10 seconds?

I like the concept of maintaining some of our snapshotting, but my biggest issue is that clearcasting is a substantial source of our combo points. perhaps the talent tier i offered involving extra cp would offset this.

You also suggested such a mechanic could be a talent up against an extra stack of tiger's fury, but ideally these two mechanics would work in unison.

[Aseyhe]

You also suggested such a mechanic could be a talent up against an extra stack of tiger's fury, but ideally these two mechanics would work in unison.

I think having TF available for every proc would kind of trivialize the whole system. It would be pretty hard to not make maximal use of every proc.

(That's also the reason I didn't want the bleed effect to be additional to the normal clearcast effect: that would make it too easy.)

[Williee]

General
All positional requirements removed. -- I'll welcome this change anyday anytime
Hibernate works on all enemy types but not players or player controlled creatures. -- As someone stated, if cc will be a huge requirement involving mythic mode and dungeons, I'll gladly welcome this change
Omen of clarity reduces energy cost of next ability by 50 instead of making it free. Switched to the RPPM system. -- Reducing next ability by 50% is ok, don't see this change being much
Pounce no longer requires stealth, but has a 1 minute cooldown. Bleed component removed. -- this change is a bit weird because it will allow druids to not take mighty bash or have 2 long stuns if needed which will in theory clash with your crowd control reduction. I think the way it is is perfectly fine, an opener which is what is it meant for imo
Prowl no longer reduces movement speed. - there is a glyph for that
Nature's Swiftness made baseline for all druid specs, and no longer affects cyclone. - Haven't played much since they removed NS, but not being able to ns + hotw healing touch sucks, i miss my kitty lay on hands wanabe macro
Tranquility now ticks twice as often for half as much per tick. -- I would not mind this as many times I have to interrupt the channel in middle of a tick
Shred made baseline for druid. Energy cost reduced to 35 (down from 40) -- If mangle is still in the game, this change shouldnt come through. Also, if positional requirement is removed or not becomes a factor. If it is removed, then make mangle or shred our primary move, no need to keep both of them.
Soothe removed. -- I am hoping with mythic mode, it becomes useful or something you can actually keep on your bars such as ICC lich king add enrages.
Effects that change the appearance of the druid (i.e. change into Mr. Smite) will persist through shapeshifting. -- Will make me the happiest druid ever if shapeshifting doesn't break disguises, I miss when the fireland daily pendent that changed you into the fire night elf persisted through shapeshift but then Blizzard broke it one patch and I became a sad cat

Feral Specialization
Ravage no longer requires stealth. Increased energy cost to 60. If used on a target whose health is above 90%, it will refund 15 energy. No longer has increased crit chance on targets with health above 80% -- I like the idea of energy refund since feral seems pretty boring in terms of energy. Its usually slow pace other then the random clearcasting proc and tiger fury coming into play.
Nurturing Instinct now increases nature spellpower by 150% of your agility (up from 100%). -- This might or might not be too op as it will give us too much healing, so this number might be testing or tweaking
Tiger's fury now has two charges. -- Assuming it still has a 30 second cooldown, the 2 charges will make it fun especially when you know you got to save a lot of energy to burst down something. Gives feral some more advance play.
Mangle can no longer be cast in Cat Form. -- If your removing mangle and only giving it to bear, assuming shred becomes our primary ability and position requirement removed, then sure.
Ferocious Bite damage increased by 20% per tick of rake, up to an increase of 100%. -- This is an interesting mechanic, would definitely love seeing it in play.
Maim reworked - now reads: Deals y (+x%ap) damage to all enemies within 8 yards of the druid. Deals additional damage per combo point. -- Combo point spender aoe ability... OMG \o/ yay
Rip can now additionally be extended by Thrash. -- Sure
Thrash damage reduced. Thrash energy reduced to 35. Thrash now awards 1 combo point. Spreads rake to all targets affected. -- Not sure about this change, spreading rake to all targets if rake is up on one target is already a lv 100 talent? Making this a passive without talent might make it too strong in terms of aoe situation. Even with lower thrash damage, the amount of rakes going out combined with the thrash ticks and swipes, will make the aoe damage too insane as ferals have very good aoe. Insane aoe when berserking or getting decent chain of clearcasting procs.
Swipe damage reduced. Swipe now benefits from Primal Fury if it crits your main target. -- With the thrash change you want, this might make feral aoe less burst and more bleed aoe oriented, which will be interesting but testing required imo.
Innervate removed. -- f this move
Might of Ursoc removed -- Not sure if removing it is a good thing, maybe make it guardian only ability is good.

[hullaballoonatic]

Willie, I recommend reading the entire OP before commenting, as many of your concerns are addressed throughout the entire system.

I think having TF available for every proc would kind of trivialize the whole system. It would be pretty hard to not make maximal use of every proc.

(That's also the reason I didn't want the bleed effect to be additional to the normal clearcast effect: that would make it too easy.)

Imagine the following rework then. One tier includes two tiger's fury charges, Your omen idea, and the moonfire talent. The other tier includes passive savage roar, supernatural, and dream of cenarius. Thoughts?

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The other change I'm seriously considering is my thoughts on the stuns. Rogues have two stuns: an opener and a finisher. Druids are modeled after that but have 3. We probably don't need three, and I don't think we need as many as a rogue. I suggest pounce that can be used twice (with the glyph). One of my motivations for removing maim is because with the aoe finisher there'd just be too many finishers, but in hindsight I'm not sure that's necessary. This sort of goes to three options:

• Mighty bash goes the way of the dodo. Maim and Pounce maintain their current functionality.
• Mighty bash becomes a talent in the potent CC talent tier, and either Maim or Pounce gets cut.
  
  Potentially it would replace disorienting roar (which would become guardian baseline) or Ursol's Vortex (which could become spellcaster baseline) or even Typhoon. Of the three that it could replace, I'd probably be most happy with roar, since vortex and typhoon have great applications in pvp and pve and roar shares some functionality with bash.
• My current idea, where Mighty Bash is gone. Maim is gone. Pounce becomes a baseline mighty bash, which can be glyphed to also be an opener.
  
  This feels like 1.5 stuns vs 3, which is what attracts me most. And plus, I think when Ferals bemoan the potential loss of mighty bash, they forget that disorienting roar can fill much of its pvp use.

It's hard to consider, though, since I think this is the aspect of my proposed rework that gets the most criticism.