Low representation of Feral

[teddabear]

25 man Heroic Lei Shen

Mage - 16.78%
Warlock - 15.59%
Hunter - 12.12%
Rogue - 11.21%
Feral - 01.30%

[Grubjuice]

I recently decided to finish leveling my Druid (who for months had been stuck at lvl 75) after I finished my Rogue.
I thought 'Hey, Assassination was really easy and effective, Feral should be a piece of cake! Right?'

WRONG! Feral has literally twice as many buttons to press as Assassination, It was too much for my weak mind to grasp (having to keep up three timers instead of two and no auto refresh for any of them [think Cut to the Chase and Deadly Momentum], casting healing spells on predatory swiftness procs, relying on procs and cooldowns to get energy back instead of getting energy passively from my DoTs and when targets died [Venomous Wounds], I just couldn't handle it)

So I switched to Boomkin. So much easier, especially while I finish leveling i can just chain pull MF/SF(treant)> MF/SF(treant)> MF/SF(treant) indefinitely which is actually closer to how i leveled Assassination (Mut/Mut/Rupture> Mut/Mut/Rupture> Mut/Mut/Rupture)

[TomGreen]

Problem with feral you gotta work twice as hard for what others can do and with no reward. Fun, maybe. If they could make the spells flashier or more gore like a angry feral cat ripping and tearing something up, yeah that would be fun.

They tried it with fiery cat form (imo looks shit) but still didn't work out well because blizzard of course choosing the easy way rather than doing an overhaul.

[Deleted]

Problem with feral you gotta work twice as hard for what others can do and with no reward. Fun, maybe. If they could make the spells flashier or more gore like a angry feral cat ripping and tearing something up, yeah that would be fun.

They tried it with fiery cat form (imo looks shit) but still didn't work out well because blizzard of course choosing the easy way rather than doing an overhaul.

While that might be true, it isn't the reason for low representation of ferals in raids.

[rijn dael]

I mained feral for wotlk, and cata. I went back to my tbc lock for panda, because well.. ranged dps rarely gets sat out, mechanics don't hate them as far as doing competitive dps, and a single bad nerf on blizzards behalf, or failure to properly scale with gear doesn't invalidate the only spec I have gear for.

As things stand in panda, destro spec was good initially but didn't scale, so I specced demo which does. What would I do if feral didn't scale? And from what I have seen so far, it didn't - at least not as well as casters.

[Elunedra]

ppl who think ferals are difficulyt should not use DoC, i use HotW and my dps is fine, i cant top meters but its stll fine

[exochaft]

ppl who think ferals are difficulyt should not use DoC, i use HotW and my dps is fine, i cant top meters but its stll fine

The theoretical damage difference between HotW and DoC as Feral is miniscule compared to the potential damage spread based on RNG of one talent's DPS (especially using a Rune). On the once-in-a-blue-moon chance that I do go Feral, I tend to use HotW so I have a useful raid CD... be that as it may, sometimes I'll beat the DoC ferals in damage on an encounter, sometimes I won't. Having good RNG with Rune/trinket/weapon procs and timing seems to have a much larger impact on our DPS compared to HotW vs DoC.

Be that as it may, Feral is likely one of the harder rotations to pick up and master. Being able to keep up your buffs/debuffs is one thing, realizing when to optimally use abilities to maximize DPS is quite another. If you asked an average Feral which would have a higher Rip and/or Rake damage output by itself when you had TF up, a Rune proc, or a high stack of Renataki's (let alone if it's worth clipping a bleed at what point to maximize damage if you cannot wait for the full duration before losing a proc), they'd likely have absolutely no idea. Considering the snap-shot nature of Feral bleeds, mastering the class with the mechanics currently in place is rather rough compared to pretty much any other class. Can you imagine if our bleeds dynamically updated with our stats? Not advocating this, but playing Feral would be MUCH easier.

We could also blame the rollercoaster of adjustments made to Feral for a disproportionate population. It took quite a long time for Feral to actually become a viable DPS spec that was used in raids. Furthermore, quite a few people got rather sick of adjustments made to pre-MoP Feral, since changes to Feral tanks and DPS often overlapped and had unwanted side-effects. Even post-MoP, there's a crowd of people that don't like the changes to what used to be Feral. Just the unique nature of how the class specs and the abilities intertwined is enough to have people either love it or hate it.

I try not to view an individual tier's raiding content to blame for a potentially long-standing representation issue. If anything, content has become a little bit kinder over time for ferals (not perfect, nothing is perfect). Unfortunately, many people view problems from the snapshot of the current raiding tier and apply it to larger time frames, expecting it to stay relevant. Even going so far as the mentioning of heroic Lei Shen 25man clearing... heck, we use two to three Ferals and do fine, probably not as easy as class-stacking for the perfect comp. The reason many of the classes have a larger representation is because they have unique abilities that are awesome on that fight, and you are forced to bring in a certain amount of ranged in order to not have deaths due to mechanics. Ferals by themselves may not be the go-to option, but being present certainly doesn't hurt or hinder the raid.

If a Feral can show their worth and what they can do for a raid group, there's likely no reason they will not be brought to an encounter. Feral likely takes much more effort than other classes to show their worth, but that's the way Feral DPS has been for quite a while. Working hard is not everyone's cup of tea.

[Themessiah]

I would like to see slightly more reward in terms of dps for the effort feral makes, relative to other specs.

[Deleted]

ppl who think ferals are difficulyt should not use DoC, i use HotW and my dps is fine, i cant top meters but its stll fine

No offense but you're a semi-offtank who has hybrid secondary crit gems mixed in with agi gems without RoRo or Renataki while using heroic spiritstaff for tanking and on top of that a tanking legendary cloak (which isn't even BiS for bears). Your guild is 4/13 HC and had a late start on heroics. You pull about 5% behind dps on your other feral who is using Talisman of Bloodlust and also does not posses RoRo.

On an average wipe night of progressing on Twins/Iron Qon HC you use tranquility perhaps once. While I do not mean to offend you (although that's hard to disregard at this point) or diminish the effort you put into raiding, it is exactly these kinds of situations where a feral just doesn't seem that appealing (especially for fresh recruitment) unless he's playing extremely well and is well-geared (with you representing the well-played, average-geared camp). The point of this topic I believe is to shed some light on how a mage/warlock/shaman of equal ilvl and with minimal effort put into improving would be MUCH more appealing for a raid leader than even one or two hybrid feral/guardians playing HotW.

[Elunedra]

well thanks for offending me lol, hope you feel better now

truth is i am tank mainspec. feral is my offspec atm, but iv played it as mainspec up until a few months ago, and i still go dps sometimes so yes ofcourse my gear is crap, and RoR has sadly never dropped for me or the other feral in my guild
and my guild is 5/13HC silly wow progress didnt update yet, we had a crappy progression due to not having enoguh backups to get 25 man in, but even if we didnt have that we arent all the super hardcore

[Deleted]

Feral has literally twice as many buttons to press as Assassination, It was too much for my weak mind to grasp (having to keep up three timers instead of two and no auto refresh for any of them [think Cut to the Chase and Deadly Momentum], casting healing spells on predatory swiftness procs, relying on procs and cooldowns to get energy back instead of getting energy passively from my DoTs and when targets died [Venomous Wounds], I just couldn't handle it)

I wanted to main a druid in cata (I mained one in BC as feral) but gave up around lvl 74. you get 5 forms, a full bar of cat abilities, a full bar of bear abilities and a full bar of caster abilities + (mostly active) talents and other spells&abilities you can use in all three forms. I believe it's just too much for the average player.

[Dangg]

Melee is the least wanted role in the game
When you have classes that can role a tank/heal/ranged also like it's the case for Druid, Shaman, Monk and Paladin you will be rather unwanted in general.

[Deleted]

Well we were talking about Heroic Lei Shen kills so I would expect almost all the Rogues to be Assassination. It does look like their is a small chunk of Combat Rogues but I believe Assassination has been the top DPS spec for Rogues since Icecrown. One thing I have not been able to figure out is why Feral DPS drops so much from 25 man to 10 man. While some of this is certainly attributable to ignoring fight mechanics the drop seems larger than that.

I found the original post with 25 man and 10 man numbers. Rep was about the same except 10 man saw a significantly larger drop for Heroics which is not surprising. I still think it comes down to "if you are going to bring a melee bring a Rogue" which hurts Feral and Monks badly. The Plate DPS may be brought just so gear doesn't get DE'd. Plate DPS have about 4x the representation of Ferals but still less than half the representation of Warlocks and Mages.

No. the top dps spec switched from mut to combat to sub to mut and will probably switch soon to combat again

[Deleted]

well thanks for offending me lol, hope you feel better now

truth is i am tank mainspec. feral is my offspec atm, but iv played it as mainspec up until a few months ago, and i still go dps sometimes so yes ofcourse my gear is crap, and RoR has sadly never dropped for me or the other feral in my guild
and my guild is 5/13HC silly wow progress didnt update yet, we had a crappy progression due to not having enoguh backups to get 25 man in, but even if we didnt have that we arent all the super hardcore

I understand your situation, been in such a one practically in every guild up until now. Come to think of it, being easily displaced between feral/bear dps-tanking roles during several months of raiding in a guild is probably the biggest and only utility we bring.

I wanted to main a druid in cata (I mained one in BC as feral) but gave up around lvl 74. you get 5 forms, a full bar of cat abilities, a full bar of bear abilities and a full bar of caster abilities + (mostly active) talents and other spells&abilities you can use in all three forms. I believe it's just too much for the average player.

it's not so much that we have many abilities, it's the fact that there's a subset of abilities which are useful FOR by not usable IN all forms and a subset of abilities which is exclusive to a form (or several forms like mangle, thrash, wrath). Pair this up with the fact that the default UI does not support such switches across more than one "shifting" bar it quickly becomes a macro/custom UI nightmare for any serious druid (especially people playing resto with a feral offspec and vice versa).

I'll hop on the bandwagon again and pull in my mage anecdote here. I've recently leveled up a mage and I must say that every new spell I received I immediately incorporated into my questing/dungeon hero adventures and have found a useful place for it in my 2 bar hotkeyed + 3rd off-bar setup. Not only that, but the convenience that goes with sinergies like Deep Freeze, Cold Snap, CoC ... for non-frost mages along with clear and crisp UI effects for all viable rotations made it quite a welcome experience and has probably aleviated some of the pain associated with leveling a character from scratch (TL;DR it was fun). With feral, I usually started receiving spells like hurricane, nature's grasp, etc. before I got to ravage or even MAIM and the dungeoning experience was quite exhausting. Couldn't keep up savage roar, rip wasn't that useful, my aoe was shit, slow and clunky (mages even get a lower GCD on their lvl 75 bombs since they are meant for target-swapping casting).

I'm not saying everyone should go play mages cause they're FOTM, I'm just trying to point that mages and perhaps warlocks received major class overhauls which made them a lot more FUN, a lot more versatile and made all 3 of their specs VIABLE and HIGHLY COMPTETITIVE. The fact that these overhauls or even small design corrections take one or several expansions to correct and the fact that they only do one or two classes at a time is seriously starting to show and starting to drag on the performance, viability and especially fun-factor of the remaining hybrid classes (I'm feeling so vanilla->TBC again after writing this paragraph).

[exochaft]

One of the reoccurring themes popping up in this thread is the infamous "button bloat." Blizz has been commenting about this situations, and while their general definition might not exactly fit what's going on with druids, I do not doubt we'll be subject to such adjustments.

While druids have the flexibility of several forms by nature, the abilities tied to such forms make our action bars literally filled to the brim. While many buttons likely don't need to be pushed, quite a few are sometimes desired or useful... unless one gets into the habit of switching out abilities or going macro crazy (I think Blizz had druids in mind when discussing macro issues, as well), a druid could easily have 4-5 bars filled with abilities. To someone new to druids, that's likely downright intimidating!

I do not believe, however, that Blizz will reduce how many buttons druid have by a large amount without making a serious change to druids. If Blizz wants us to be able to switch between forms no matter our spec, then there will have to be some buttons to push for each form regardless of spec. Even for MoP, Blizz reduced the amount of abilities that all druids shared by a decent amount, although the spell book size is still fairly intimidating.

Those classes mentioned by Alpheus basically had much of their button bloat removed by confining abilities to certain specs, effectively reducing the number of abilities players needed at one time. I remember helping my wife adjust her bars after the Warlock MoP changes, and she was amazed at how little she actually needed on her bars compared to prior expansions. All in all, it made those class(es) more approachable for players and much easier to learn due to a reduced amount of abilities to worry about. Unfortunately, I don't think druids can be easily changed in the manner some classes did, since we're still allowed to hybridize our activities across all aspects of druid specs. A simple solution would be to disallow such activities, but that would be a HUGE change that Blizz wouldn't and shouldn't take lightly.

While I've been mentioning druids in general, I think the issue is more problematic for Ferals and Guardians. Simply put, if you're Resto or Balance, the likelihood of using Cat/Bear forms and abilities only usable in those forms is rather slim. If you're Guardian or Feral, not only will you be more apt to switch between the two as necessary, there are quite a few caster-only abilities that we will use on top of everything else.

[Elunedra]

about buttons, i also got a ret pally aly (and i /fail at it) but i am bored by the lack of buttons it has
yeeh, jusdgement, crusader strike, templeers verdict....

[Deleted]

about buttons, i also got a ret pally aly (and i /fail at it) but i am bored by the lack of buttons it has
yeeh, jusdgement, crusader strike, templeers verdict....

But that's more an issue of their HP-dominant rotation (same as with tanks) rather than the general lack of abilities which are used while dpsing.

[Deleted]

As I've said before, I don't think we can look at Ferals isolated from the rest of the classes and encounters. I completely agree that Feral does feel clunky and not really smooth to me, but I don't main a Feral so I've kinda just accepted that and thought that the really good Ferals are managing. What I don't get though, is why Blizz seems to put in so much more effort in making Resto and Balance both smooth and appealing to play, while Ferals are starting to feel archaic.

The reason for giving Locks a big overhaul was to increase the representation of the class and that seemed to work quite well, when adding insane utility and dps on top of it. But people seem to agree, Ferals just don't bring anything really unique to the raid, that you can't get from someone else who'll most likely also out dps the Feral at the same time.

You can argue from here to the end of the day, but as a co-GM of a 13/13 Heroic guild I'd never bring a Feral over a Rogue or DK and even if I didn't main a Bear, I'd still not wanna bring a Feral, since I'd much rather have a Resto, Mage, DK, Rogue and Balance on that token before a Feral. Not saying a good Feral can't do competitive dps, but so can the other classes and they just happen to bring more utility on top of it.

[Grubjuice]

about buttons, i also got a ret pally aly (and i /fail at it) but i am bored by the lack of buttons it has
yeeh, jusdgement, crusader strike, templeers verdict....

i am pretty sure you are missing at least 7 spells: Inquisition, Exorcism, (Hammer of the Righteous, Divine Storm), Hammer of Wrath, the tier 45 spells (if you are even going to bother) and your choice of tier 90: HP/LH/ES

not that i saying ret is complex, it's is very easy compared to a Feral druid, but still you are being reductionist.

[exochaft]

You can argue from here to the end of the day, but as a co-GM of a 13/13 Heroic guild I'd never bring a Feral over a Rogue or DK and even if I didn't main a Bear, I'd still not wanna bring a Feral, since I'd much rather have a Resto, Mage, DK, Rogue and Balance on that token before a Feral. Not saying a good Feral can't do competitive dps, but so can the other classes and they just happen to bring more utility on top of it.

This is part of the Feral stigma that likely has a big influence on Feral representation, as well. I'm not going to say if it's true or not, because it doesn't really matter if it's true or not. If the perception is there and maintained by a sizable amount of the WoW population, there's going to be much less reason for someone to try out Feral or bring one to their raids. Add on top all the other topics relating to Feral representation, and the sea of negatives (even if it's just perception rather than fact) just makes the whole situation seem bleak for the spec.

However, I'm personally waiting for the 6.0 beta testing to see what's in store for Feral. From all the recent blue posts with future intents for adjusting classes that will not take place in 5.4, many of them touch on different aspects of Feral (althought not directly mentioned) that may need change. There has also been some hinting with adjustments made on the 5.4 PTR to suggest future changes and the direction Blizz wants to go with Feral. While I believe some changes will likely come directly to Ferals, I also agree there must be changes made outside of the druid class entirely that may address the stigma that Ferals face.

From my perspective, it seems Blizz is trying to find a way to make Feral more appealing and useful to the average player while allowing the skilled players to bring out the full potential, all while making the power between the skill levels not so stilted in one direction to preclude the spec from performing well anywhere on the skill spectrum.