Soloing MOP Feral vs Balance

[Pugbot]

I am an experienced boomkin, having played in WotLK and Cata as balance and resto. The last time I played feral was in TBC and it was awesome, I just got annoyed with melee in general is why I switched.

Playing balance in MOP has been frustrating to me. It works, I can kill things and have more or less the same utility as any caster without a pet should, but I just felt like I was lacking true power. Questing was tedious, its not that I was dying it was that it took forever to take down the mobs. My dungeon DPS was also usually not competitive with players who knew how to play. I thought maybe my rotation was off or I was being lazy, so I worked hard on it and minimized my "error" casts where I would cast the wrong spell and tracked my dots better. It was better, but still not competitive.

All of this finally made me switch my dps spec to feral. I hated feral for quite some time because I forgot how to play it, and every time I got bored enough to try it out in the past I failed miserably because it got really confusing there for a while with all the new abilities and different spells for bear/cat.

Well I put together a crappy set of feral gear mainly via auction house PvP leather and read several sites about how to play and set up your spells. I have not looked back. 600k HP quest mobs are nothing for me, dying very quickly in comparison to my balance spec. My downtime is zero, my aoe is solid, I can control the mobs better with maim/skull bash so I take less damage or CC and I can flat out power through several mobs at once when I pop cooldowns.

I can't quite tell if my 5 man DPS has improved but I am pretty sure it has. I know my trash DPS has improved and I think my boss dps has also improved, although I screw up the rotation because I am not quite use to my button arrangement yet. And all of this is in much worse gear than my balance spec had.


So the point of my post is not to complain that boomkins need to be buffed, its to let other boomkins know if you are frustrated with your spec and didnt know if feral was any better, it is.

[Madus]

No moonkin dont need buff, low gear can be frustrating but we are (little) bit more gear dependant like before.
You will feel sick when you get demolished in pve/pvp by some moonkin.

[Auloria]

I'm only just started to get back on top of the damage meters now that I have a couple raid and valor pieces. I was also a bit lazy using my 3 min cooldowns, which are actually kind of useful for plowing through quests.

I think there really is some gear-dependent imbalance there when leveling up, but boomies still end up as quite solid.

[mikoslav]

So the point of my post is not to complain that boomkins need to be buffed, its to let other boomkins know if you are frustrated with your spec and didnt know if feral was any better, it is.

Boomkins are doing well, and feral is not better, it s just different, maybe easier, maybe more forgiving, maybe less gear dependent.




I would not switch to feral for 1000000 gold (in wow)
I just hate melee.

---------- Post added 2012-10-23 at 07:53 PM ----------

I'm only just started to get back on top of the damage meters now that I have a couple raid and valor pieces. I was also a bit lazy using my 3 min cooldowns, which are actually kind of useful for plowing through quests.

I think there really is some gear-dependent imbalance there when leveling up, but boomies still end up as quite solid.

I can see nothing wrong with leveling up as boomkin.
While leveling in Pandaria I died first time when I was 89 lvl, and it was in dung due to some idiots.
and my leveling didnt take unusually long time...

[Auloria]

I can see nothing wrong with leveling up as boomkin.
While leveling in Pandaria I died first time when I was 89 lvl, and it was in dung due to some idiots.
and my leveling didnt take unusually long time...

I don't think I ever died, but I seemed to be going slower than people around me, and had to be more creative in multi-mob situations. It's probably an unfair comparison though, because I had just leveled my boomie to 85 right as Mop hit, and the people around me were probably already in at least LFR DS gear.

I do have a heroic DS geared boomie (I joined a friends guild and didnt want to faction change), and I'm sure that toon will just breeze through questing if I bother to level it to 90. :-D

[Meleti]

I am very comfortable with how Balance is in PvP and raids.

Soloing, though... soloing isn't the best as Balance. I've recently switched my main DPS spec from Feral to Balance, and I can tell the difference when I do my daily quests. My feral druid can pull 30-40k on single mobs, or pop CDs and mow down packs of things. My Balance druid does maybe 20-25k because of how Eclipse works and is much more fragile. What I've started doing is just DoTing and kiting 5+ mobs, which is effective but an awful lot of work. My Feral gear is about 10 item levels below my Balance gear.

I'm not saying something needs to be changed. But don't try to pretend Feral and Balance are equally effective at soloing.

[Fojos]

Feral does have better burst when soloing.

[Williee]

Honestly, I think balance > feral due to the fact melee has a lot of disadvantages such as parry effects or dot stacking abilities such as the one guardian npc for kael thas (granted that raid instance is a joke with our current hp pool). The healing both specs can pull off are pretty close since moonkins can offheal themselves, and for feral, predatory swiftness is godlike!
The one thing i hated when i played moonkin, I always forget about interrupts that certain mobs can do. However, if you are an experienced moonkin, this should pose no threat.
In the end, I think both specs are great for soloing, it all comes down to which spec you are more comfortable using and which spec is more geared.

[apepi]

Soloing is not too hard as boomkin, I kill rare mobs fine. The only one I have trouble with is the panda mobs. So that soloing aspect is not bad.

[Elunedra]

i think currently feral is in a realy good solo-able state, you can cast a 40K heal on yourself everytime you did a 5CP finisher, and on top of that you also have the NS + HT combo for an extra 50 to 100K heal

[Kioga]

Feral is great on single target and small mobs (1-3) but I would argue guardian is superior to feral for soloing MoP. I typically do my dailies in tank spec with full dps gear. So many dailies require killing multiple mobs that i just charge in and round up 5-8 mobs at a time and then move on. I can usually finish those large packs still over 85% life whereas with feral i might be at less than 40% and would have to stop and heal That doesn't sound like a long time but it adds up after multiple encounters

NV+Berserk followed by INC = pure win

[Matronmalise]

I have leveled so far a Lock, Shaman, And a Hunter so i wanted to switch it up and level a melee class, especially after seeing some of the ridiculous numbers from Melee classes in dungeons and scenarios, i slapped together some starting gear and set out to level as feral. I am pleased with the over all DPS that they have, i can plow through mobs and tear apart rares pretty fast, larger groups of mobs require that you manage your cd's and use them regularly, and GTFO if your CD's are blown. I have a distinct advantage over most as this is my 4th time through however it has caused me at time to get careless and have to learn to use the CD's provided as i feel that the feral form is squishier than before. Ursoc's Might is an awesome get outta jail free card, I have never been that impressed with the Boomkin mechanics and did not want to attempt to relearn that anyway, I have been told by many Druids that the questing path is fine for boomkin's and they believe its faster with less down time than feral. Not sure if it was bias or their first character through. I believe the pure DPS is on par with the Lock, and the survivability without CD's is similar to my elemental Shaman without self heals. The speed of leveling is about the same across the board, the Ele shaman was the slowest due to being first character through but also does not have the same Raw DPS power of the others. However i think it was the only toon i did not die on once through questing. As far as gear dependance, I think all the caster classes are gear dependent which is really to say stat dependent, base damages of many spells is poor until you start buffing it with stats.

[Pugbot]

I imagine a lot of us spend the majority of our time doing dailies or farming than we spend doing anything else besides progression and I think feral is superior for dailies outside of specialized farming. IE I could see balance being equal or better than feral for aoeing large packs of lower level mobs but in no way is feral bad or boring for that.

At a 460 boomkin item level it is more difficult to do dailies than it is at a 451 feral item level with crappy AH pvp gear, and a few days worth of experience playing feral as opposed to years of boomkin. Feral has nice built in CC/Interrupts, and the CC/Interrupts from talents is more effective as feral IMO because you're already in melee range. And the dailies I am talking about are mainly the golden lotus dailies which I imagine most people are doing. 590k HP mobs take forever without lucky starsurge procs and crits.

My heroic 5 man experience is also better as a feral. It is an adjustment playing melee over ranged, you tend to take more damage and get into positions where its harder to see avoidable damage, but my DPS is equal to or better than my boomkin and again with the interrupts and stuns it is much easier to help take control of a fight as a feral. Anything a boomkin has a feral has too but is in better position to use it, except for solar beam, which is nice but id rather have a 15s cooldown skullbash.

Even if I did more damage as boomkin I couldn't see them being better for soloing. Ultimately you will always end up kiting away targeting multiple mobs with moonfire/starfire, which doesn't always work out. Not always room to kite, end up picking up more mobs, end up losing mobs if you don't keep casting on them and etc.

I imagine this isn't particularly new news for most players, but I do find it interesting the differences in the two specs.

[Aodhan]

I actually came here to the forums to see what people were saying about Balance. I am level 88 now, using some quest greens and some of my level 85 epics, and I am finding leveling painful. I was sure I was doing something wrong. It takes forever to kill mobs, and Fairie Swarm fails to apply about 80% of the time, forcing me to cast it 3-4 times in a row, which sometimes still isn't enough. At this point I am wondering if I want to deal with this. Much of the next year is going to be dailies, and doing dailies like this is going to suck ass. I may switch to feral, or just play my mage.

[dexx]

When leveling i found balance to be much slower than feral.

[Madus]

Guys you have no idea what the painful mean if you didnt lvlup moonkin in vannila. There was reason for "oomkin" word.
Yes its little bit slower like feral but who care... its lvling, you can doit by afking in bg.

[Deleted]

Feral with Typhoon/Mighty Bash and you'll make those Pandaria Rare Elites cry when they see you.

[mikoslav]

Dear druids,
I kinda dislike the direction this thread seems to go in.

When it comes to how fast you level, or how fast you kill mobs in dailies,
it depends on your skill, and not - class/role you re playing. (I am not talking about healers here :P)


Being boomkin myself I take pleasure from killing packs of mobs I multi pull in lotus dailies, and they die fast, and I survive (not - barely).

If you say guardian/feral is better than boomkin, you obviously cant play boomkin well.
so please stop saying feral is better cos you lack the will (or skill) to use what boomkins have in their wide range of abilities.

[zagoskin]

I don't know a lot about boomkins these days. As a feral druid i see doing quests is really easy as we don't depend on mana and can kill a lot of lvl 90 mobs. I've done the everyday golden lotus quest "kill 12 mogu guys" several times killing 8-9 (or even the 12) at one time. Just don't be lazy, use all ur cds. While questing, for the most efficiency, you should always have instincs + berserk + TF, you can do insane pulls with that and you get healed with predatory's/ NS (make sure to heal urself everytime you can with this) and you will never have to stop.

The only thing i wish i had as a feral was that FF had more range, making a big pull takes time and most of the times someone tags the mob first.

[Deleted]

If you say guardian/feral is better than boomkin, you obviously cant play boomkin well.
so please stop saying feral is better cos you lack the will (or skill) to use what boomkins have in their wide range of abilities.

I'd like to see a Boomkin down a large pack of mobs faster than Feral with Berserk, NV, Thrash and Swipe spam.