Ideas for more meaningful major glyphs.
- New glyph that removes the need to extend rip. That is, rip now lasts an additional [6/8/9 seconds, depending on how they fix the extension bug] and can no longer be extended. (Cleave glyph, analogous to sweeping strikes, splitting ice, chain lightning, and others.)
- Change glyph of barkskin to also increase AoE damage reduction (by, say, 20%) while barkskin is up. (Survival glyph, analogous to cloak of shadows or fade.)
- Change glyph of dash to have a more noticeable effect. E.g. reduces cooldown to 1 minute and duration to 7 seconds. Or gives dash two charges.
- Glyph of cat form can stay, though maybe reduced a bit. It wouldn't be such an outlier if there were compelling alternatives. (Would be a general damage reduction glyph option, analogous to inner sanctum or feint.)
- Glyph of savagery doesn't necessarily have to go. It would be an option for fights with downtime. Might be too weak though.
I changed the boring level 100 talent to the following:
Feral
Vicious
Passive
Mastery now instead affects direct damaging abilities. Increases damage of direct damaging abilities when none of your bleeds are affecting your target (higher(40%) for shred, less(20%) for ravage, swipe, and bite).
I'd appreciate a number crunch from you, though, sten, as I think this could be phenomenally broken for burst damage in pvp, and your ideas for how a meaningful and interesting shift from bleeds to direct damage could work while still giving a competitive throughput increase vs the other level 100 talents.
I also liked your ideas for major glyphs and added them as I saw fit. You're right that with enough powerful competition, glyph of cat form and savagery might be fine remaining, although with the latter I'm still a tad worried. How big of a dps increase is it to have roar for the opening of a raid fight, especially when crit and haste ratings will be so low at the start of next expansion?
Still trying to think of fun minor glyphs.
Last edited by hullaballoonatic; 2014-02-18 at 06:07 PM.
One could rephrase this - and I'm more inclined to favor what Maximum mentioned earlier - to state that at the beginning (when energy is scarce) it is much more important to get a feel for your rotation and not waste your resources (ie. going nuts on Thrash and FB in early MoP). Then at the end-tier you start gearing up and you enter an entire new arena of skill-cap which was totally unavoidable: doing the fight correctly with minimal downtime, minimal deaths and making sure you're assigned to a task where you can be most optimal so that you have no opportunity loss when reacting to trinket procs. In the end, encounter design is a huge factor in this. We might be more inclined to think badly about early-MoP due to the sheer amount of ridiculous target swaps, downtime and aoe on the first two tiers (all bosses in MSV, 4 bosses in HoF, don't get me started on ToES).
Rune is a good example for this. Even if you picked it up in LFR with ~510 ilvl it would still be extremely difficult to pull off optimally, especially with the old 20-second Renataki. Add to that the huge amounts of target-swaps and aoe during ToT progression and you end up with a class that's hard to play and ends up mid-pack. However, once you gear up and start developing your muscle memory and throw that against a ton of singletarget-heavy fights with damage modifiers (ok, and a random buff to rip) and you get the single highest dps class in the game. Unfortunately, the skill-cap at this avenue consists of playing "defensively" to make sure you do not incur any opportunity cost (so you can reapply bleeds) while reacting to a specific boss encounter.
This can cause a lot of toxic behavior during progression though, especially in a utility-heavy raid like SoO (towers on Galakras, add duty on Sha, Siegecrafter Belt, nazgrim adds, ...) where target-swapping and boss downtime are the norm. I'm happy blizzard decided to scrap this negative feedback loop and re-evaluate our dps rotation and capabilities but it's more than likely that they're going to over-simplify us for the first couple tiers until they figure out the do's and don'ts of whatever they'll come up with. This might shy away a lot of people from an already under-represented spec but the alternative might be worse by ditching all performance-increasing trinkets and leaving us mid/low-pack with zero fun.
There was absolutely no skill involved in my immerseus rank. My guild lets people pad on the adds one at a time haha. Some guilds are doing that because farm is long and boring so its fun to spice things up. As far as other guilds I think the most effective strat if that boss is difficult at least int he beggining was tanks tank them for vengaence for more damage. so they were stacked up. Thought the fight is a joke so we just aoe on top of the tank.
- - - Updated - - -
I completely agree with what you just stated.
That was kind of my point with proc snap-shotting: its loss in terms of skill required to execute properly as Feral to trinket procs is really low on the totem pole compared to other factors, and what actually causes the challenges changes as we gear up or the design of an encounter. Adjusting to encounters via things you can control takes skill, adjusting to RPPM is luck since there's very few times you can predict when a trinket will likely proc (namely the start of an encounter and extensive downtime). Regardless, I believe that the majority of skill for a Feral lies with adjusting to encounters/mechanics while performing the Feral rotation.
However, we might be looking a little too far ahead or making too many assumptions about what lies in the future for Ferals. Some people are worried that the snap-shotting removal will put Feral damage in a bad spot, but I'm fairly confident Blizz will adjust the damage output to make it work in the end (the procs, although not snap-shotted, still have the potential to alter the basic Feral rotation anyways depending upon how abilities are scaled). Some people are worried about the complexity of the class will disappear, however Ferals are still likely one of the hardest specs to execute properly even without snap-shotting... and that's probably a huge reason why the spec is under-represented or generally less played regardless of content.
While having fun playing a class/spec is important, is it more feasible to believe the majority of people that try Ferals would not have fun and/or abandon the spec because it was too easy or too hard to function at an acceptable level?
“Society is endangered not by the great profligacy of a few, but by the laxity of morals amongst all.”
“It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights — the 'right' to education, the 'right' to health care, the 'right' to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are the rations of slavery — hay and a barn for human cattle.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville
Mages have had similar issues with Ignite-rolling since vanilla (ie. being either too addon-reliant or too easy) and they've now been left with an iteration which is more or less brainless. I believe the fear is justified. People who found ferals and druids in general fun will probably still cling to their classes due to the uniqueness it offers but...
[cont'd] ... but I believe the more important factor is how attractive a feral is to a raid (leader). Throughout all expansions we've seen the least raid utility and raid cooldowns of all melee. Right now, we're pretty much the highest single-target DPS in the game which essentially makes us "wanted" in a nit-picky 25man environment, but if the so-called raid cooldown arms race continues and we end up with either a) sub-optimal (low/mid-pack) dps, b) static or constrained rotation (bad at target swaps, no ranged dps capabilities or high rampup aoe) or c) low utility we'll be facing some TBC-esque discrimination again.
Hullaballoonatic is trying to come up with suggestions which build our strengths in the latter two categories but ultimately Blizzard's decision on how much time and brain power is invested in "fine-tuning" our new models along with encounter design is going to make or break a lot of people's enjoyment of the game (unless you're willing to dish out 60 bucks and cater your guild with an under-represented raid spot).
Last edited by mmoc22f09fe318; 2014-02-18 at 08:46 PM.
The only way feral will become a desirable melee class for WoD is one of two ways. 1) get a proper raid damage reduction CD (pigs might fly) or (what I'd personally like to see) is 2) all raid damage reduction CDs except healer and tank ones are sodded off to make it an easier selection for guilds who want to make the most of each person in a progress raid. All of this is said with a view that a guild wants to pack as much as possible in to a raid in terms of CDs.
And if we aren't doing insane dps then we, unfortunately, aren't that much of an attractive option to our old adversary, ze rogue given higher competition for raid spots in WoD.
I'm cautiously optimistic that Blizz will manage to get us in a decent spot after some time on the beta but I fully expect it to make me cry the first few months of testing it until they hit a good balance. Fingers crossed!
The shadow priests I know think that their previewed direct damage talent is terrible because of how badly it trivializes a single-target rotation. That said, the one interesting thing about Divine Clarity is that it doesn't actually make your DoTs any weaker -- so you can still DoT some targets and use direct damage against others. All you're giving up is a different talent in the tier.
Your proposal is different because it would also make bleeds much weaker (by removing the mastery effect), taking away even that option to use direct damage against some targets and bleeds against others. All you'd have is direct damage with a greatly simplified rotation, and I don't think there's anything interesting about that.
Last edited by Aseyhe; 2014-02-19 at 11:44 PM.
But you'd have to change the mastery without the talent significantly devaluing mastery for ferals that take that talent (to nearly nothing).
There is, however, a clear desire for damage to be shifted from dots to direct damage, and I'm wondering how best to accomplish that. Plus, in the proposed model, bleeds would be weak, but presumably worth casting.
Last edited by mmoc22f09fe318; 2014-02-21 at 11:26 PM.
I don't want direct damage buff in cost of mastery, it is good as it is, don't understimate almost-undispellable dots power, no need to reinvent a bicycle and change things that working well..
I don't want to smash buttons like dk or warriors do, same ability but with different names though, bleeds bring unique DoT element in our melee gameplay
especially in pvp, putting bleeds and runaway with trollface, saving your ass from big hits and let target die eventualy...
I will say it again, OP you don't like how class played, you go choose from other 11x3 specialization.
Last edited by Zstr; 2014-02-20 at 03:52 PM.
Alright, thoughts on this one?
Feral
Vicious
Passive
Using Ferocious Bite causes your next two Ravages to be free.
That would certainly create a more interesting rotational change. Think about it at the end of an expansion though, when cp's are pretty easy to come by, wouldn't that make it the default choice? It would also give us some sort of reverse execute (if they keep increased crit rate >80% target hp).
Assuming that ravage without stealth is too radical change I would give this 100-level talent downvote.
Also, I forgot to mention that some sort of chance to proc would have to be added to it so people don't use a 1 cp FB
Feral
Vicious
Toggle (off the GCD obviously)
When toggled, in addition to increasing bleed damage, Razor Claws also increases the damage of combo point building abilities and Ferocious Bite.
Viciousness (passive of Vicious only if toggled on)
When building combo points on a new target, points stored on previous targets will automatically be redirected to your current target, Additionally Ferocious Bite refreshes all the Rips and Rakes within 100 yards by 2/3 seconds and consumes the bleeds on the target damaged by the ferocious bite, when the target is below 25% bleeds will no longer be consumed for that target. (last part is so vicious is not used to boost single target above execute)
Rake and Rip periodic damage cannot be critical hits. while active.
Vicious-less (debuff after toggling Vicious off)
Rake and Rip periodic damage cannot be critical hits.
Duration 3 seconds.
(So you don't just apply tons of rip and rakes to a council fight, refresh bleeds, and turn vicious off so they all crit and once they're about to run out you turn it on and hit FB... well it sounds like something awesome to min max but it also sounds clunky, its just an option, I would say no to this debuff)
Pretty much an "advanced" form of blade flurry that allows you to switch from normal feral rotation to target switching machine with a ton of burst that also keeps your rip active on the "main boss(es)" while you're off biting stuff, so switching like a good kitty increases your overall damage.
It will also eventually help ferals excel in council fights as more gear is available by keeping all but one target with bleeds active.
Council fight example.
Picture protectors, apply rip and rake to rook and he, turn vicious on and spam bites on sun forever until they go away.
Nazgrim example.
Normal rip and raking boss, defensive stance pops, you leave nazgrim with at least a few seconds of rip and rake left, pop vicious switch to shamans or whatever and start biting them hard with no ramp-up or loss of combo points, while bleeds are still hurting the main boss.
There will also give you a fine balance of crit, mastery and maybe even haste who knows, with the 2 free ravage idea its pretty much ALL CRIT FUCK MASTERY.
Too complex?
Well it better fucking be, I'm losing MUH snapshotting.
Surprise change, Glyph of Fearie Fire
Increases Fearie Fire range by 15 yards.
Ravage critical strikes automatically applies 3 stacks of weakening armor (not fearie fire or else rogue pvp moaning ensures).
Last edited by Skadovsk; 2014-02-21 at 03:06 AM.
@Skadovsk
Wouldn't it be an idea to make the talent you're suggesting make a portion of the damage of our direct damage abilities(mangle, ferocious bite, etc.) do some instant bleed damage? For example Mangle does 500% weapon damage as pure physical melee right now, but let's change that to let's say 400% weapon damage as physical melee and 100% bleed damage(just random number here).