Dying breed

[teddabear]

Most people raid 10 man and Feral has serious issues in 10 man. For example on Heroic Council I imagine most Ferals in 25 man tunnel the boss. In 10 man you have to switch for both empowered Bosses and adds until the encounter is on farm. That absolutely destroys Feral DPS to the point where they really should not be in the raid. When you have a spec that is so bad in certain situations it's far easier to just replace them with a class that doesn't have those liabilities.

Feral is one of the worst choices in 10 man from a buff and Raid CD perspective. If you are going to bring 2 leather DPS to a 10 man you are better off bringing 2 Rogues. That is a pretty damning indictment when you are better off with 2 of the same spec rather than bringing 2 different specs.

Rogues have been significantly better than Feral for almost 3 years now. By this point it is readily apparent that is how Blizzard wants it. The ones that have stuck with it probably love the play style and find other classes unappealing. I imagine most would rather quit than switch.

For those that regularly trounce the Rogues they play with congratulations. I am sure you are aware there are plenty of Rogue parses on WoL that trounce you by a lot more. I'm not trying to denigrate your performance I bet you are indeed quite talented. I also bet you would do even more DPS playing a Rogue .... blindfolded with 1 hand behind your back.

[Paloro]

I find it funny that there is one 25man elitist giving slack to 10mans not wanting to take feral druids. Here is my answer to that: Having raided both modes this current tier: You can bring about any dead weight to a 25 man raid and carry them. That is coming from someone who was in a 25 man guild that on a weekly basis killed Jin'rokh with 12 people dead. Hell, in the current tier, you'd probably be alright carrying 10 bad/average players in a 25 man raid up until Dark Animus hc.

Who exactly is the elitist?

Have you raided both modes this tier at or near cutting edge progression? (Meaning you have finished 13/13H ~1 month ago)

I'm positive that my guild couldn't afford to sacrifice someone with frostbite while progressing on 25H Council. Jin'rokh is by far the easiest heroic boss in the instance. How does that make the raid comp for 25 irrelevant? 10 bad/average players in a 25H guild at this point in progression might be up to DA, but that is after tons of normal kills and seeing lots of important heroic drops from earlier bosses in the tier. When that is the case, those groups severely outgear the encounter anyway and can essentially ignore things b/c taking an extra tick from something won't kill them now.

[Deleted]

Who exactly is the elitist?

PErhaps a bit ill worded, I do admit, I've changed that statement after giving it a bit more thought.

Have you raided both modes this tier at or near cutting edge progression? (Meaning you have finished 13/13H ~1 month ago)

I have raided 25man Heroic up until 25H, making council that 6th boss, then laft to form a 10 man guild with old friends also because the 25 man raiding group felt like we had to carry half of the raid group.

I'm positive that my guild couldn't afford to sacrifice someone with frostbite while progressing on 25H Council. Jin'rokh is by far the easiest heroic boss in the instance. How does that make the raid comp for 25 irrelevant? 10 bad/average players in a 25H guild at this point in progression might be up to DA, but that is after tons of normal kills and seeing lots of important heroic drops from earlier bosses in the tier. When that is the case, those groups severely outgear the encounter anyway and can essentially ignore things b/c taking an extra tick from something won't kill them now.

Oh no, trust me, I can give you logs of both my 25 man kill and 10 man kill. In the 25 man kills they opted for rather than to do it properly or if the person in question didn't have an immunity to simply let the person die and ress them later in the fight, since you had enough abled bodies anyways to throw away. It was easier than have the bad players attempt to do it correctly (and since there was about a 50-45% chance of a bad player getting frost bite), the raid leader felt like it was hard to keep up and that the dps loss from doing it wasn't big enough to have the bad players learn the fight.

[Viromand]

Have you raided both modes this tier at or near cutting edge progression? (Meaning you have finished 13/13H ~1 month ago)

Whats the difference and does it matter for ferals? Kinda does yes on some bosses where you can leave some melee tunneling, but overall it doesnt matter cause its impossible to compare 10 to 25.

In 25m ferals are fine cause you can take more melees and utility is not as important in 25m (not saying its unimportant).

In 10m most guild only take 1-2 melees maybe 3 on some fights, sure feral are really strong on some bosses but overall the other melees are equal or ahead in dps or utility. Sure hotw trang is awesome, but a enhancement heals more on fights with high aoe dmg like megaera/jikun/council/ironqon/twins and they are beeing buffed right now. Plus crit is buffed by casters aswell. but rogues enhancer dks buff, haste and ap. which are more unigue. Sure if you have a hunter that problem is sovled.

Monk can autoattack while casting the frontal heal burst. Dks get AMZ buff, shamans get huge healing buffs. warriors already have better raidcooldown than ferals.
So we still have Roar, but if you take a warrior and have another druid jsut give symbiosis to the warrior and he gets it to.

Ferals are on good in dmg especially with RoR, but utility wise they are the worst and next tier even more, that why other melees are beeing favoured in 10m. The only thing where a druid ist the best melee class is are selfcooldowns and not even counting symbiosis here. Just from using their Cooldowns druids can more than double their EH, no other melee class can do that.

[Paloro]

@Viromand
I asked the question b/c it is important to understand the level of progression that Rocketbear was proceeding at to get a better understanding of his point of view. For instance, if you are a top 50 guild, comps are more strict. If you are anything beyond top 50, the rate of which you outgear the content increases and comps are much less strict.

@Rocketbear
I suppose a better question would be, at what date did you kill council on 25H?
There will always feel like you are carrying more people in a 25 vs a 10 (mind you I'm not trying to have any sort of 10v25 debate) because there is 2.5x the amount of people.
Since you reworded your previous statement, I still suspect that you are talking about me that thinks feral is fine in 10m. I haven't raided in a 10m since FL, so I can't really speak much to it but I can say that if you are being dropped for a different melee b/c of one raid cd, someone else in your comp can also be dropped to still complete the encounter.

[Tarazet]

Most people raid 10 man and Feral has serious issues in 10 man. For example on Heroic Council I imagine most Ferals in 25 man tunnel the boss. In 10 man you have to switch for both empowered Bosses and adds until the encounter is on farm. That absolutely destroys Feral DPS to the point where they really should not be in the raid. When you have a spec that is so bad in certain situations it's far easier to just replace them with a class that doesn't have those liabilities.

Feral is one of the worst choices in 10 man from a buff and Raid CD perspective. If you are going to bring 2 leather DPS to a 10 man you are better off bringing 2 Rogues. That is a pretty damning indictment when you are better off with 2 of the same spec rather than bringing 2 different specs.

Rogues have been significantly better than Feral for almost 3 years now. By this point it is readily apparent that is how Blizzard wants it. The ones that have stuck with it probably love the play style and find other classes unappealing. I imagine most would rather quit than switch.

For those that regularly trounce the Rogues they play with congratulations. I am sure you are aware there are plenty of Rogue parses on WoL that trounce you by a lot more. I'm not trying to denigrate your performance I bet you are indeed quite talented. I also bet you would do even more DPS playing a Rogue .... blindfolded with 1 hand behind your back.

It's not really as bad as you make it out to be. We can use Soul Swap/Redirect if they are available through Symbiosis for target swapping, or we can delay a little bit to make sure we can keep Rip/Rake/Thrash ticking on our target before we swap. The fights that really hurt a Feral are the ones with squishy adds, because our cleaves come at a very high cost.

As far as bleeding edge performance, there's no question there's a difference. Ferals don't parse as high as Rogues or Monks and lack their raid utility. Guardians suffer the same way in comparison with Monks - they have tools that simply outshine ours.

Symbiosis has its heart in the right place, but it really should be a pure utility skill and not something that improves our performance in our core specialization. When some classes can help us do better numbers and others can't, it makes it feel mandatory. If Symbiosis was used purely for utility, then it would become more situational and less of a "you will always put Symbiosis on this class first." Rather than giving a Protection Warrior Savage Defense (which they will rarely, if ever, use in place of Shield Block) and getting Spell Reflection (generally useless), I'd rather get Disarm, which is very useful in particular situations, and give him something I can't use in Bear Form, like Remove Corruption or Hibernate. It might not sound impressive, especially since you would give up some options which are currently very good, but this way it would be more balanced and would be more in the spirit of the spell.

[Aboubacar]

Under-representation is not a valid argument for a class or spec being weak. In terms of damage and overall package warlocks and ret paladins have been the only outliers (strangely for the entire xpac...) representing the high end and the low end of the spectrum respectively.

I wish people would be more constructive in their posts/threads. It's disheartening to see a thread entitled 'qq no one plays my spec' near the top rather than the discussion on 5.4 changes or a thread on set bonuses or a thread on DoC/talent tier. Nothing constructive comes from complaining or comparing your spec to another or making an assumption that too few people play a spec.

[Paloro]

Under-representation is not a valid argument for a class or spec being weak.

True

It's disheartening to see a thread entitled 'qq no one plays my spec' near the top rather than the discussion on 5.4 changes or a thread on set bonuses or a thread on DoC/talent tier.

That is of your own opinion. The Fluid Druid is a much more theorycrafting based forum that discusses those sorts of topics.

Nothing constructive comes from complaining or comparing your spec to another or making an assumption that too few people play a spec.

Historically, feral has always been an underrepresented class. There is no assumption about it. Constructive things can happen from making comparisons. Everyone has different views and can bring up points that others might not have thought of.

[Skadovsk]

It's not really as bad as you make it out to be. We can use Soul Swap/Redirect if they are available through Symbiosis for target swapping, or we can delay a little bit to make sure we can keep Rip/Rake/Thrash ticking on our target before we swap.

That reminds me, how awesome would it be if they removed the rip extension by 2 seconds and just gave rip 22 sec duration.
It would make bleed cleaving with rip actually superior and less painful, it would make soul swap a better choice.
And more importantly, the rip expiring at 2 sec bug would cease to exist, fuck everything bout that when inching close to 25% on the boss with a super buffed rip and bloop, just disappears 1 millisecond before casting a FB and now you're energy starved and with no rip.

I mean why is that thing still even there?
It went from glyph to passive ability mechanic for no reason?
This is the sort of stuff that makes feral unattractive to some people.
Or Ferocious Bite 100% extra dmg energy thing, sure it works but it sort of feels like ass to use the ability, it just does. What about a short bleed to replace FB, kind of like Monk's enveloping mist but dot edition, now you can make it hit harder without fear or bursting down people in pvp.

Or having 2 almost identical CP generators, or having to use 1 GCD to go into cat, why cant cat be off the GCD or let us cast everything while in cat?
The slow ramp up time to do dmg, why can't we have a 2 min CD or something like DK's outbreak spell that automatically puts rip and rake on target.

Or some new kind of AoE, Thrash is the exact same thing as swipe, and swipe is boring, why can't they just copy paste Lynx Rush and let it apply rake to everything it hits, its not like feral has too many CDs already, and its not like rake will burst anyone on PvP.
Just an example but there are so many godamn things you can do to feral and nothing is done.
Well besides trying to break talents that we like on the PTR.

[Redpanda]

That reminds me, how awesome would it be if they removed the rip extension by 2 seconds and just gave rip 22 sec duration.
It would make bleed cleaving with rip actually superior and less painful, it would make soul swap a better choice.
And more importantly, the rip expiring at 2 sec bug would cease to exist, fuck everything bout that when inching close to 25% on the boss with a super buffed rip and bloop, just disappears 1 millisecond before casting a FB and now you're energy starved and with no rip.

THIS X 10

I didnt make this thread to qq about anything. It was a observation I made and for everything to keep doing what youre doing. We are all cats brothers and sisters after all

[Viromand]

Under-representation is not a valid argument for a class or spec being weak. In terms of damage and overall package warlocks and ret paladins have been the only outliers (strangely for the entire xpac...) representing the high end and the low end of the spectrum respectively.

Still warlocks got maybe one of the best questline ingame that even changes their spellcolor and form. Just cause they were to under represented. And like you said they are the best class atm.
With the ret buffs they are fine in dmg and with clemency they can be really strong in 10m aswell, but i would say feral better than ret.

It's disheartening to see a thread entitled 'qq no one plays my spec' near the top rather than the discussion on 5.4 changes or a thread on set bonuses or a thread on DoC/talent tier.

There are some discussions about 5.4 changes and set bonuses. This thread is about why ferals are rare these days. Saying why is the a qq thread is like posting in a 25m thread why it isnt about 10m.

That reminds me, how awesome would it be if they removed the rip extension by 2 seconds and just gave rip 22 sec duration.

Since they make everything baseline now, I can see this change still coming. This will help alot cause 2-3 target fights are were ferals have weaknesses cause they dont have good cleaves. AOE is fine but cleave is bad.

I asked the question b/c it is important to understand the level of progression that Rocketbear was proceeding at to get a better understanding of his point of view. For instance, if you are a top 50 guild, comps are more strict. If you are anything beyond top 50, the rate of which you outgear the content increases and comps are much less strict.

Yeah i got that but it really doesnt matter.
An outgeared Rogue will do more dmg than an outgeared feral for example, sure its a difference raiding 25m due to amount of drops and TF you outgear faster. But that should never be the question if a class is good outgeared or not.


But to add this: There is one thing that I dont believe has been mentioned before. Ferals are the only class that can have a range specc, so if you can play both speccs in 10m that really would help, cause multitarget you go moonkin and single cat. And HotW can also be used to tank or do range dps. can be helpfull aswell.

[Paloro]

Yeah i got that but it really doesnt matter.
An outgeared Rogue will do more dmg than an outgeared feral for example, sure its a difference raiding 25m due to amount of drops and TF you outgear faster. But that should never be the question if a class is good outgeared or not.

It's not really fair to say that a Rogue will always do more damage then a feral. Certain situations it will flip flop to both sides and overall it is about even.

It absolutely is the question since this stemmed from the viability of feral being brought for progression. If you are not top 50, you are outgearing that content and therefore the required cd's needed are reduced.

That reminds me, how awesome would it be if they removed the rip extension by 2 seconds and just gave rip 22 sec duration.
It would make bleed cleaving with rip actually superior and less painful, it would make soul swap a better choice.
And more importantly, the rip expiring at 2 sec bug would cease to exist, fuck everything bout that when inching close to 25% on the boss with a super buffed rip and bloop, just disappears 1 millisecond before casting a FB and now you're energy starved and with no rip.

I mean why is that thing still even there?
It went from glyph to passive ability mechanic for no reason?
This is the sort of stuff that makes feral unattractive to some people.
Or Ferocious Bite 100% extra dmg energy thing, sure it works but it sort of feels like ass to use the ability, it just does. What about a short bleed to replace FB, kind of like Monk's enveloping mist but dot edition, now you can make it hit harder without fear or bursting down people in pvp.

Or having 2 almost identical CP generators, or having to use 1 GCD to go into cat, why cant cat be off the GCD or let us cast everything while in cat?
The slow ramp up time to do dmg, why can't we have a 2 min CD or something like DK's outbreak spell that automatically puts rip and rake on target.

Or some new kind of AoE, Thrash is the exact same thing as swipe, and swipe is boring, why can't they just copy paste Lynx Rush and let it apply rake to everything it hits, its not like feral has too many CDs already, and its not like rake will burst anyone on PvP.
Just an example but there are so many godamn things you can do to feral and nothing is done.
Well besides trying to break talents that we like on the PTR.

It would be a QoL benefit for Rip to be baseline 22 sec, but would buff our "cleaving" quite a bit

I like FB and not having to worry about another bleed, but I do wish that FB would be higher more consistent damage. I generally don't use it outside of Berserk/BitW b/c the risk isn't worth the reward anymore.

Blizz kind of tanked it when they made Mangle extend Rip also. The increase from using Shred now is so marginal that Mangle's reduced energy cost is more favorable especially with the fast turning boss mechanics anymore. There can be some rework there imo.

I'm not sold on complete homogenization. We already act very similar to Rogues. So what if we have some ramp up? We are rewarded with high sustained single target. So what if we can't target switch to squishy adds? Our burst AoE is great and we can maintain a single target rotation during it! Essentially, you can't have a cake and eat it too.

[Kojo]

But to add this: There is one thing that I dont believe has been mentioned before. Ferals are the only class that can have a range specc, so if you can play both speccs in 10m that really would help, cause multitarget you go moonkin and single cat. And HotW can also be used to tank or do range dps. can be helpfull aswell.

Shaman? And moonkin is not really behind feral single target either, if you play that spec you may as well stick with it.

[kaiadam]

There is no question that if DoC is used properly, it is better than HotW.

When was the last time you were able to DoC properly while avoiding various Horridon aoe while kiting a pink dinosaur? Or navigating Durumu's maze while aoeing walls? DoC is better on paper, but for 99.99% of the feral population, HoTW is superior dps while learning the fights. Stenhaldi is a superb feral, the fact that we continue to slot him despite his spec's weakenesses says volumes about him knowing his shit.

You can just look at parses and see that rogues are consistently parsing 20k or more higher than feral on most fights in Heroic ToT. Even if we take heroic Tortos, Assasination rogues beat ferals by about 50k, looking at top 200 parses. The only boss where this gap becomes more narrow is Megaera25H, even then, rogues are coming out of top.

Sampling bias really ruins the rogue vs feral argument. I happen to play with two excellent ferals - one in my 25m guild and one in my 10m, and they are easily competitive with other melee. They are close enough in dps that essentially the only deciding factor is utility, and unfortunately rogue utility is dominant right now. At the least, ferals wreck windwalkers on utility.

No good guardian tank plays with castsequence makro. ... using a castsequnce makro is like playing a feral with RoR and not using the proc.

Honestly, I'm not sure what goes through your mind when you disagree with me, Viromand. I mean, I realize my statements are sometimes slanted and there's a little hyperbole, but by and large, I know what I'm talking about. I play a half dozen characters in three raids that are all 13/13. I consistently ranked top 10 on every fight I tanked last tier on my druid using those two macros - actually, to generalize I think I am/was top 10 on every single fight I've tanked or dpsed to give you an idea of how much I min/max and yet still use those macros. Guardian pride aside, does it ever occur to you that I might, just might, have a clue?

[Viromand]

Honestly, I'm not sure what goes through your mind when you disagree with me, Viromand. I mean, I realize my statements are sometimes slanted and there's a little hyperbole, but by and large, I know what I'm talking about. I play a half dozen characters in three raids that are all 13/13. I consistently ranked top 10 on every fight I tanked last tier on my druid using those two macros - actually, to generalize I think I am/was top 10 on every single fight I've tanked or dpsed to give you an idea of how much I min/max and yet still use those macros. Guardian pride aside, does it ever occur to you that I might, just might, have a clue?

Im not saying you dont have a clue, and I know you are a real good monk and guardian player. And you have lots of knowledge about alot of classes.

Dont get fooled by me only beeing 6/13. Last tier I got alot of heroic ranks too. I raided hardcore with my druid during bc and wotlk. was top 30 feral on every fight in ulduar.

As I even said its possible that to play the guardian with castsequence makro. And using a castsequence makro is a Rage loss, yes some can raid just fine with it, but I doubt alot of druids will gain the max out of using 2 macros. But saying that druids are the easiest classe to play cause of that is really hard to believe cause I play a Monktank, and I know that he is way easier in terms of dps.

Doing dps is not very hard on every tank cause vengeance gives you more dps than a perfect rotation I know that, but I assume your lvl of rage using is better than from most of the druids. you can compensate the rage you lost with good play. And I quess you know that.

And what goes through my mind, I can tell you this. I raided with alot of tanks the last two tiers some were bad some good, most of the time I outdps them take less dmg, overall and on most special ability. our healers found it easier to heal me than a 99% shuffle uptime monk with good usage of 2piece on tortos heroic cause I did good shieldmanagement, it was no problem at all and lot say druids suck ass on tortos heroic. I think druid tanks are really strong, but im not dumb I know that Monks are better and I even let monks tank more get more vengeance to max raidabsorb. Sure tortos is a bit rng but if you manage the shield and SD/T&C you almost never drop very hard, that is not healed by a huge 10 stacks FR heal. I personally think taking every boss this tier monks are the best tanks followed by druids.

Not saying you are completly wrong and pride is a big factor, but If you say stuff like that that or the thread about tanks 1.5 months ago. People believe every word you say, alot is true, cause you are a top tank from one of the best guilds. Well during that Tankthread you were shitting on guardians alot but in that same post you even wrote that its not so bad as you stated it you were just proving a point to another poster. Like 10 pages later people always refered to you even after you posted that druids are not so bad as you wrote there. I dont blame you for that, the funny thing is I had a test raid with another guild and they tested a palatank after that he did less dmg, died to more hard attacks, they took the pala not cause he was a better player but because the raidleader read a forum post about tanks and paladins were better than druids by far. Yes im a bit pissed about that.

But answer me one thing: would you raid with castsequence makro on your druid or monk during heroic progress, in 5.4 or did/would you use them on firstkills in your mainraid? And do you think lesser skilled players will be able to do so aswell.

It's not really fair to say that a Rogue will always do more damage then a feral. Certain situations it will flip flop to both sides and overall it is about even.

It absolutely is the question since this stemmed from the viability of feral being brought for progression. If you are not top 50, you are outgearing that content and therefore the required cd's needed are reduced.

Feral dps is fine, still rogues is better but its not like it miles apart on all fights. And yes the outgearing POV matters, but if you cant take ferals for progression fights when raiding top50(and you can but rogues are better on progression fights due to utility), doenst that state the fact that ferals are in a weak spot.

It would be a QoL benefit for Rip to be baseline 22 sec, but would buff our "cleaving" quite a bit

I like FB and not having to worry about another bleed, but I do wish that FB would be higher more consistent damage. I generally don't use it outside of Berserk/BitW b/c the risk isn't worth the reward anymore.

Blizz kind of tanked it when they made Mangle extend Rip also. The increase from using Shred now is so marginal that Mangle's reduced energy cost is more favorable especially with the fast turning boss mechanics anymore. There can be some rework there imo.

I'm not sold on complete homogenization. We already act very similar to Rogues. So what if we have some ramp up? We are rewarded with high sustained single target. So what if we can't target switch to squishy adds? Our burst AoE is great and we can maintain a single target rotation during it! Essentially, you can't have a cake and eat it too.

Correct me if im wrong but using manlge as CP builder, doenst you use more FB than which already makes mangle better, last time I tested feral mangle made the FB usage much smoother and resulting in a DPS gain cause you will most likely not lose any uptime on bleeds.

The baselin Rip would be really awesome really buff our dmg alot on multitarget fights. I would like to see them make Deathcoil from DKs give a CP too, to have a small range ability.

Is Hurrciane with hotw still stronger as non DoC/ror aoe bleed?

[Deleted]

Ferals need a revamp. Too many buttons for just the basic rotation, which makes a lot of people fail at keeping up the proper rotation or they consider it tedious.

Also, as a feral you play as animal and always look the same. If the animal forms were sorta humanoid like those of the druid in Diablo 2, the class would present a lot more appeal.

[kaiadam]

But answer me one thing: would you raid with castsequence makro on your druid or monk during heroic progress, in 5.4 or did/would you use them on firstkills in your mainraid? And do you think lesser skilled players will be able to do so aswell.

I most certainly would. Beyond globals, rage, energy, etc. there is another resource that most players tend to ignore: attention. You have only a finite amount of attention to pay to everything that's going on during the fight. Some fights you need to focus 90% of your attention on dodging mechanics - sha of fear's platforms, for example - during which only 10% of your attention can be funneled into your rotation. This is part of the reason why I believe HoTW is a far better progression talent than DoC, because despite the miniscule (2-3%) dps difference between the two talents, DoC requires far more concentration and focus in keeping it flawless, attention that you can otherwise spend on the encounter.

Same with the guardian macros. Yes, I'm perfectly aware that I'm not going to be doing 100% of my potential (although, to be honest, I'm never going to do that anyway even on a target dummy), but spamming mousewheel up takes almost zero attention while I optimize my positioning, plan for the next few seconds, and execute whatever mechanic is thrown my way. As a matter of fact, I didn't even take incarnation (used SoTF instead) during heroic Sha progression, the last fight I main tanked on my druid.

I would heartily endorse guardians of any caliber to use castsequences up until the point where they are confident that they know an encounter like the back of their hand, at which point they are free to attempt (but almost certainly will fail) to optimize that last 5%.

[Tarazet]

I most certainly would. Beyond globals, rage, energy, etc. there is another resource that most players tend to ignore: attention. You have only a finite amount of attention to pay to everything that's going on during the fight. Some fights you need to focus 90% of your attention on dodging mechanics - sha of fear's platforms, for example - during which only 10% of your attention can be funneled into your rotation. This is part of the reason why I believe HoTW is a far better progression talent than DoC, because despite the miniscule (2-3%) dps difference between the two talents, DoC requires far more concentration and focus in keeping it flawless, attention that you can otherwise spend on the encounter.

I would agree and always recommend HotW as the progression talent for any Druid, purely for the extra baseline stats which make you operate like you have several extra ilvls. I tried tanking with DoC, and on Megaera progression it was OK for boosting my Frenzied Regens, but in subsequent attempts I've used HotW and kept SD up to keep the melee damage down instead because it doesn't give the healers heart attacks. And I don't like NV in its current weaker/shorter cooldown form as opposed to the 5.0 version.

[Deleted]

Since you reworded your previous statement, I still suspect that you are talking about me that thinks feral is fine in 10m. I haven't raided in a 10m since FL, so I can't really speak much to it but I can say that if you are being dropped for a different melee b/c of one raid cd, someone else in your comp can also be dropped to still complete the encounter.

Pretty much. Ferals suffer a lot from target switching, which is an issue in 10 man where sometimes you simply cannot afford to leave one dps tunneling a mob, at least more so than other melee dps. In 25 man you have that extra fexilbity where your raid composition doesn't really matter, since ferals don't bring any worthwhile raid utility to the table, at least no more so than other melee classes which are able to push out higher number consistently (perhaps DKs as exception here), what point is there to actually bring a feral in a 10 man guild where you already are quite tight on space.

I'm not saying ferals are not viable, but I'm saying they're lacking in comparison to other melee dps specs, in terms of dps and utility. Yes, you can go tank with HotW. Great, how about I give to a rogue and have him or her do that for you as well (Combine this with Evasion, and the rogue will be laughing) without having to go with a worse talent dps wise and sacrifice dps in order to do so. Arguably, this ability can only be given via Symbiosis, and 2/4 specs do not really gain anything of worth out of it linking to a rogue (only boomkins and ferals get something good out of it).
Yeah, you can do decent healing with tranq and Hotw, but you still need that lesser dps talent in order to make the raid cooldown worthwhile, also, most of the time, you are either going to be doing one or the other, not both at the same time, and with HotW on a 5 mintue cooldown, you really don't have a lot of leeway.
Good, you can do crazy Aoe dps, how about I take RoR away from you? Let's see how you do then.

In my honest opinion, it is quite bad when a spec has to rely on a trinket in order to do competent aoe dps or has to a lesser dps talent to have some form of viable raid utility, that will cost him even more dps when using it. A tranq from a feral without HotW is pitiful to say the least, at least in a 10 man environment when flat out better options are available for progression.
I mean, you can easily look at logs and blatantly see that the SMALLEST gap between ferals and rogues on average is almost 30k on Iron Qon (looking at 10 man heroic bosses here), when on most other heroic bosses, you have rogues doing 80k more dps than ferals on average. While feral manages to stay competitive with the other melee classes on most bosses (Unholy DK and Ret Paladin for example), throw in the lackluster raid cooldowns and utility, and you'll have a class that as a result simply isn't very desirable in raids.

[Manhands]

Ferals need a revamp. Too many buttons for just the basic rotation, which makes a lot of people fail at keeping up the proper rotation or they consider it tedious.

Also, as a feral you play as animal and always look the same. If the animal forms were sorta humanoid like those of the druid in Diablo 2, the class would present a lot more appeal.

I agree with the first two sentences. Feral should be simplified. And the dots should hit X% less in PvP, allowing them to buff the hell out of them in PvE. I really think feral's weakness is pvp centered.

And I know many people who like being a kitty. They would be very, very angry at the change you suggested. Very.