How much aoe dps is acceptable as feral in 5mans?

[Trollsaft]

You missed my point about Soul of the Forest. Of course, if you are doing M+ and going to be multi-dotting, you run SotF

[Tradu]

You can't even multidot properly due to energy limitations on abilities like Rake. Add that to the fact that Thrash takes up half your energy bar, and good luck getting a Savage Roar, Thrash, and multiple rakes up before all of the mobs are long dead. You may as well buy some tombstones for them and paw at them for all the good you'll be doing.

For 2-4 mobs, you can multidot well enough. After that, you just don't have the energy without popping 3 minute cooldowns on trash.

On the other hand, Balance not only has automatic cleave on Lunar Strike (which is free, for all intents and purposes), automatic spread on one of our dots, and their other dot does not have any sort of energy cost, and can be used from range. Oh, and we don't have a self-buff to keep up.

Feral can do okay on AoE fights if you're good at your spec. The point, however, is that every other class in the game is a lot better.

Which is why you can go SotF to have effectively infinite energy, allowing you to do very well on multitarget(and luckily for Feral, in any relevant M+ level you can't pull giant packs, so low target sustained damage is great). Balance is just as "bad" as Feral when it comes to multitarget.

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Savage Roar costing half an energy bar is almost criminal for how much we struggle to maintain all these dots up

Yeah, you clearly didn't read what Trollsaft posted. For higher M+(the only ones where comp sort of matters), you'd go SotF rather than SR.

[Deleted]

Wanna share my experience, i'm 875 feral with 3 leggies (haste procc ring, belt, and boots).

In my experience, if you do mytics+ that you are overgeared for (aiming on 3 chest) then definitly run predator for tiger's fury resets, savage roar and brutal slash.
Yes, you lose boss damage not taking bloodtalons but on overall i believe you gain quite a bit having brutal slash on bigger trash pulls.

See some people complaining on savage roar and ramp up. Dunno how you play it, but this is what I do on trash pulls:

Make sure you have some CP left over from previous trash, pref 4-5
Use them on SR before you stealth
Rake 1 mob, then aoe, trash + BS.
tab dump 5 CPs rip on higher targets
tab rake 3-4 targets
Use rest BS charges, dump CPs rip on high HP targets
Make sure you procc predator to get tigers fury resets when target dies off
Make sure you save 4-5 CP for savage roar on next pack, not worth spending them on bite (unless your group is close to wiping or something like that)

Usually keep up quite well with the average pug guys in dps with this. Even the stronger classes & speccs like fire mage/ww monk etc.

Almost exclusivly run maw (unless going for weekly +10) there I usually have around 350-400k dps total when the dungeon is done. And just shy on 1 mill if the group pulls all the trash up to the first boss.

For higher mythics+ where you don't do as big pulls the ST specc works to. Although is not as friendly aoe/cleave specc. But just tab bleed everything with bloodtalons. You will loose dps taking brutal slash on higher ones, but it makes the rotation easier.

Overall feral can be specced to be solid on either fights that have few (1-3) targets over a long time. Just go ST specc and keep bleeds up.
Or fights that have many (5+) targets that live short, brutal slash is a really strong burst.
Worst fights are the ones in between, targets still up when your out of BS charges, but they are not alive long enough for your bleeds to tick out.

[Deleted]

Which is why you can go SotF to have effectively infinite energy, allowing you to do very well on multitarget(and luckily for Feral, in any relevant M+ level you can't pull giant packs, so low target sustained damage is great). Balance is just as "bad" as Feral when it comes to multitarget.

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Yeah, you clearly didn't read what Trollsaft posted. For higher M+(the only ones where comp sort of matters), you'd go SotF rather than SR.

SotF is 50k dps single target loss which means feral loses its advantage in only thing its good. And with SotF feral is still average at most in cleave damage and horrible bad in aoe. Ramp up time is too long to get rip on all targets to do really good (relative to other classe) cleave damage.

[MashTactics]

Which is why you can go SotF to have effectively infinite energy, allowing you to do very well on multitarget(and luckily for Feral, in any relevant M+ level you can't pull giant packs, so low target sustained damage is great). Balance is just as "bad" as Feral when it comes to multitarget.

I guess this is probably a good example of my issue with Feral. You have to sacrifice a massive boost to your single target/cleave DPS (which, who are we kidding? SR should be baseline.) just to perform passably in an AoE situation.

Balance does not do anything as well as Feral does single target, which means that while they don't shine half as bright in their 'niche' situations, it does mean that they don't look as poor/have to sacrifice is much in every other situation.

Feral can do passable AoE DPS, but the things they have to sacrifice to do it are outrageous, and the lengths they have to go to just to compete with what other classes generally do passively is a major issue with the spec.

[McTurbo]

the emphasis on cleave is unfortunate. the problem is blizzard could easily counter the cleave issue by giving time bonuses to players who kill bosses faster through single target. right now it is bring the cleave class not the player.. and that is painful especially for a druid.. some of the post earlier in the thread are trying to tell people how to achieve decent aoe.. but at most its laughable.

(not a full list)
Hunter Barrage
Demon Hunter Charge + Eyebeam
Monk Fist of Fury + Warlords
Outlaws Blade Fury

You are not going to compete with these abilities as a druid.. to much high on instant demand dps by pressing 1 or 2 buttons that gets exponentially higher the more targets there are. now i am talking players of equal skill in comparable gear. the druid has to jump through 7-8 buttons to even get started.. by the time we hit our 5th button the above are hitting 1 million+ dps or higher depending on number of targets.. can they sustain that? no.. but in short fights on trash.. it makes you as a druid feel useless and with the emphasis on clearing trash.. well.. you can see why their are better choices than bringing a druid.

[Jon]

Feral can do passable AoE DPS, but the things they have to sacrifice to do it are outrageous, and the lengths they have to go to just to compete with what other classes generally do passively is a major issue with the spec.

Agreed, it's amazing how anyone (especially Blizzard) could think this is even remotely OK, which is why for the first time ince TBC I'm slowly phasing out Feral as my "main" char.

I'm quite happy with the ST performance of cats, but with this expac since our guild (which is basically just a group of friends at this point) has shifted away from the HC mythic raiding into more casual raiding with 5man Mythic+ dungeons being the main focus, I just can't justify bringing in feral and hindering our groups performance.

And really, I don't think people who want feral aoe to be buffed a bit are asking for too much.. currently it is just way too far behind of even what is the middle of the pack performance.

[McTurbo]

And really, I don't think people who want feral aoe to be buffed a bit are asking for too much.. currently it is just way too far behind of even what is the middle of the pack performance.

thats pretty much it.. i am not asking to be top of the pack on aoe.. i am just asking to be viable so that i dont feel like the group is being punished for bringing me..

[teddabear]

Agreed, it's amazing how anyone (especially Blizzard) could think this is even remotely OK, which is why for the first time ince TBC I'm slowly phasing out Feral as my "main" char.

I'm quite happy with the ST performance of cats, but with this expac since our guild (which is basically just a group of friends at this point) has shifted away from the HC mythic raiding into more casual raiding with 5man Mythic+ dungeons being the main focus, I just can't justify bringing in feral and hindering our groups performance.

And really, I don't think people who want feral aoe to be buffed a bit are asking for too much.. currently it is just way too far behind of even what is the middle of the pack performance.

The other issue is that Blizzard has screwed Feral over in the AoE department ever since Lich King so the reputation and perception is so bad right now that Feral is automatically a pariah on any fight requiring AoE. Every Feral has experienced this for themselves over and over, especially any Ferals that have tried to use the Premade group tool.

It would require something extremely dramatic for Feral to escape that reputation and meanwhile you have the lead developer saying niche specs are fine and it is ok that Feral has bad AoE because they have single target like no other. (The veracity of that statement I will leave to the reader)

[MaddyLif3]

Ramp specs are always going to perform poorly compared to burst specs in short lived aoe situations. They start to shine again in long lived multidot and sometimes in st.

Laser Chicken has significantly better aoe than feral if you can stand playing it and have a decent AP investment in the scythe.

But for dungeon trash packs, bears with their trait ability and thorns up can do murderous amounts of aoe damage every 90s. Your guy could always switch back to feral for the bosses if he doesnt want to tank.

You can't switch specs in a mythic+....

[Myztikrice]

You can if you leave the dungeon

[Deleted]

Savage Roar costing half an energy bar is almost criminal for how much we struggle to maintain all these dots up

They wanted to weaken it so other talents could complete by nerfing it at some point in the beta but it's still the default choice. The last three rows basically are a horrible mess balance wise for ferals so hopefully they can make some corrections there.

[Jon]

You can if you leave the dungeon

Not really something you want to do with the timer running down.

[Miff]

<=mythic 9 = SR and brutal slash - time the BrS's well and pool if you need to. shit just melts at these levels so almost impossible to get 1-2 rips up if your group is decent.
>=mythic 10 = sotf and blood talons - mobs live longer here so you can usually get 3-4 rips rolling very easily

just what i've found to be good and very competitive.

p.s, talents can change depending on buffs

[Yhcti]

I've seen boomkins at m15, do you think feral will ever get there? I'm a casual so all I do is mythic+, and I'm gearing feral as we speak. but if it can't get to the top, doesn't seem like much point. Is there a lot of investment require for guardian/resto to compete in m+ or is up to 20 a decent start?

[Hanede]

I've seen boomkins at m15, do you think feral will ever get there? I'm a casual so all I do is mythic+, and I'm gearing feral as we speak. but if it can't get to the top, doesn't seem like much point. Is there a lot of investment require for guardian/resto to compete in m+ or is up to 20 a decent start?

Guardian needs a minimum of 13 artifact points to get the Embrace the Nightmare golden trait, can go to 16 if you want to take a few extra useful traits. Once you have that you can push mythic+ with relative ease. Also since their best stat is "armor", you can use your highest ilv gear and do pretty well while you get better secondary stats.
Haven't used resto in m+ but I can tell you both guardian and resto are considered among the top of tanks and healers respectively (some would argue they're #1) for mythic +.

[ghostydog]

Feral's nice for 10+ during Tyrannical weeks, where having a good single target DPS can be valuable to help with the stupid high health on bosses. Even without that we're decent, not amazing but good enough, main problem is the stigma and the fact people seem to think that not god tier = trash.

[Low Hanging Fruit]

Feral might cost you seconds on trash packs but it kicks ass on bosses and gains you time there. Not to mention a lot of trash packs do have certain mobs that if they die fast and first really helps your healers mana which in turn allows it to damage more than heal and the tank stays alive. Its primary weakness is perception. People don't like being low on the meters and sorry ass pugs don't like it and use it as the excuse for failure. We have a kitty we bring all the time to mythic+ and truth be told since we understand his strength we understand that he is ok to bring and deserves to be there. Granted you certainly have better options but to say feral isn't worth bringing or is holding you back isn't the case. Maybe the player is or the group isn't adapting to its fellow group mates strengths, but the class itself is perfectly workable. Just use that team work.

[wrathblade]

Sadly feral has a known issue with aoe dmg currently.
You can take the right talents and be decent at aoe.
but a DH can just felrush blade dance eyebeam and hit over 1 million dps.
Meanwhile a feral needs to get so many buffs and debuffs rolling before his dmg really starts...
I mained feral for a while. but in legion feral mostly got nerfed.

Savage roar got nerfed duration cut and energy cost increased.
Incarnation kitty doesn't give a free savage roar anymore seeing we lost the glyph.
and the 33% faster rake and rip only made the rotation harder and more tedious to uphold.

to actually do any aoe dmg it would take long enough that other classes already gotten the trash to below 50%.

If blizzard actually cared about ferals the would revert some nerfs and actually make swipe deal dmg... instead of having it be a wet noodle for another 2 expansions...