feral druid = worse rogue? (pve)

[Antimals]

with our aoe style being basically tab> rake and combo points being on the druid, we're essentially a rogue or warrior but worse

we've lost our thrash>swipe spam snap AoE, we've lost the HUGE feral damage we've seen in expansions past, so my question is this

how do you justify bringing a feral to a raid and not a different class? what niche do we fill?


I understand "bring the player, not the class" but in a world where that doesn't exist

[Zanzha]

We bring some of the highest raw single target damage despite our cleave, swipe is still viable for short periods of aoe.
Whilst we aren't going to top the meters it's not so bad that we're not worth bringing. Even with bleeds being a smaller portion of our damage, on fights where we need to swap targets, with combo points on player we can keep up most of our boss damage whilst training the new target.
The mechanic of bleeds and energy also means we suffer the least on fights where we are forced out of melle with the boss for a period.

We're also shaping up to have some of the highest potential offhealing capability of any dps hybrid, with rejuv being castable in catform.
Even if it was bring the class not the player, ferals would still have a raidspot in most reasonable guilds.

[Kojo]

I cope by realizing this is untuned pre-expansion patch stuff. Also easy cp makes us worse rogues?

[Antimals]

I cope by realizing this is untuned pre-expansion patch stuff. Also easy cp makes us worse rogues?

being able to switch targets willy-nilly is going to push good ferals into a more rogue-y play style, and who's better at a rogue-y playstyle than rogues

[Zanzha]

If you look at the most recent sims (if you even take that as gospel in the first place) Rogues are only a tiny bit ahead of feral, and that's in sub, which is fairly notorious for not having very good aoe, atleast worse than feral especially on sustained cleave or fights where we can multidot.

Rogues bring smokebomb and we bring healing, overall theres not a huge disparity.
Thinking that ferals = rogues just because they use the same resource system is farcical.
Ferals are a dot class, rogues aren't (whilst they do have a few, it isn't really the core "idea" behind the design of their speccs)

Sorry but you seem hopelessly misinformed about how either class plays and what they bring to the table.

[Antimals]

If you look at the most recent sims (if you even take that as gospel in the first place) Rogues are only a tiny bit ahead of feral, and that's in sub, which is fairly notorious for not having very good aoe, atleast worse than feral especially on sustained cleave or fights where we can multidot.

Rogues bring smokebomb and we bring healing, overall theres not a huge disparity.
Thinking that ferals = rogues just because they use the same resource system is farcical.
Ferals are a dot class, rogues aren't (whilst they do have a few, it isn't really the core "idea" behind the design of their speccs)

Sorry but you seem hopelessly misinformed about how either class plays and what they bring to the table.

if you were capable of reading what I said, I said ferals will be forced into a rogue-y playstyle, IE: kill the adds, do the stupid stuff.
ferals are as much a dot class because of our dots now as warlocks are a melee class because they can swing a staff. dots aren't nearly as valuable anymore

[Eace]

if you were capable of reading what I said, I said ferals will be forced into a rogue-y playstyle, IE: kill the adds, do the stupid stuff.
ferals are as much a dot class because of our dots now as warlocks are a melee class because they can swing a staff. dots aren't nearly as valuable anymore

They aren't as valuable as before, yes, but that doesn't mean that they aren't still valuable at all. So I guess I need to get a better melee weapon for my lock.

[Zanzha]

They are still a core part of the specc, our niche is still going to be multidotting. With the added bonus of being more hybrid than we have been in a very very long time.

http://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/...-done&source=6
http://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/...-done&source=6
http://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/...-done&source=6

Tell me again about how weak our dots our, I'm fairly certain a melle swinging warlock would do less.

I've cherry picked the two council fights in yes, but hey, that's the edge we have over rogues to demonstrate my point. We are still going to be multidotting whenever we can. It's only an increase for us on single target to be using things like ferocious bite. This is why it is advantageous to keep a feral or two on your roster, as it is something a rogue cannot do as effectively. Never mind the additional hybridization we will get at level 100.

Let's just revisit your OP for a moment

how do you justify bringing a feral to a raid and not a different class? what niche do we fill?

I've answered this several times already. So I'm not going to answer it again.

with our aoe style being basically tab> rake and combo points being on the druid, we're essentially a rogue or warrior but worse

Which is nothing like how a rogue or a warrior play, this point makes no sense, at what point would a rogue or a warrior tab to put dots bleeds on targets, that is not how any of them aoe.



Anyway, we are still going to be focusing on training a single target, or two. Maybe even tab over to an add to ferocious bite it, but if it's only up for a short period of time, our damage will be neglible to it and just as before it could be worthwhile for us to stay on the primary target, we can just blow a couple of builders on the add if need be, we now have some target swapping potential, rather than next to none.

The silly jobs that rogues are given are often related to their toolkit, take cloak of shadows and shadowstep for instance. This is why you maintain a rogue or two on your roster as it is something a feral cannot do effectively.

What was good about not being good at swapping targets ? Not that we weren't redirect on the same cooldown, and soulswap have been available to us for some time now, as well as the extra combo points from tigers fury. All that it allowed ferals to do was have an excuse for being bad players, everyone in the raid should be switching to priority targets, being good at swapping isn't a limited to rogues, every class apart from feral could do it.

Ferals will be Ferals
Rogues will be Rogues

The similarities between them are only skin deep.

[ryklin]

as far as pve goes, you could ignore the sharing energy thing and just look at what buffs, raid cds, interrupts, kiting abilities, movement, and raw damage any class brings and call a class worse than another

I guess every dps spec is just a worse warlock or warrior.

[teddabear]

In MoP the combo point change would have definitely favored Feral since so much damage was tied to Rip. Probably still favors Feral a little but to a much lesser degree.

With FB finally being fixed to being a viable finisher Ferals should be in a much better place. Imo the killer for Feral in heroic 10 mans was that every few bosses there would be a fight where the mechanics just sucked for Feral. With all heroics being 20 man and Feral weaknesses being somewhat mitigated that should not be nearly the problem it was.

[Putin-Chan]

we are one of the best, if not the best hybrid healers now, and with nearly all raids being flexible, bringing someone who can do average dps and a bit below average healing is really good, because we can now use rejuv in cat form.

[teddabear]

we are one of the best, if not the best hybrid healers now, and with nearly all raids being flexible, bringing someone who can do average dps and a bit below average healing is really good, because we can now use rejuv in cat form.

That is not a recipe for fixing Feral representation. If Bliz feels that way then they need to decrease Feral healing or the number of Ferals will go from slim to none. Also in addition to being one of the few specs with no raid CD, Feral has 1 defensive CD compared to Rogues 6 defensive CDs which will probably make Dream of Cenarius mandatory. Imo DoC and Blood Talons are both mandatory for Mythic raiding. I'd love to hear some opinions from Ferals in the Beta about that.

I suspect feral healing will not be so impressive once you start looking at Mythic healing meters. Might not even beat the tanks.

[Soular]

Feral druid are better then rogues

[Gurg]

Let me start by saying that your'e doing it wrong son. You are comparing two classes that shares only resource mechanic. Every similarity stops there. Why? Rogue is pure DPS class with three different DPS specs while Druid is Hybrid class which can fill every role spot. Ok.. lets be a bit good willed here and say that you can compare poisons and bleeds, again similarities stops there. Rogue brings one raid cooldown, Smoke Bomb, and several others that help them (and only them) to mitigate damage. On other hand Feral brings battle ress, Stampede Roar, optional offhealing (noone forces you to do so (even so only bad kittiez wont heal)), good CC and several interrupts. Druids also bring three other specs which can easily be swapped and adapted for fight strategy.
Someone already said that from all melee classes Ferals suffer the least if encounter mechanic requires time spent out of melee. I agree on this one, but i would like to add that Frost DKs also do well in similar situations. Also, it was said few time that Ferals bring the best Hybrid healing of all DPS classes, which is true. So. the question is "Do you fell OK by being melee DPS and offhealing a raid?" Im not1 and i dont plan to do 100% offhealing, simply because it costs me a full GCD. Maybe its me, being a jerk and long time, now ex-rogue, speaks out of me greaving for DPS and moar DPS but thats how its gonna be.

I have heard ideology that people choose to roll pure DPS specs mainly because of all three DPS specs one has to be valuable for sure. I agree with this ideology but you have to be extremely dedicated to play pure DPS spec for next.. two years?
Personally.. i would never roll a rogue, a PURE DPS, over druid, a HYBRID class. If you get bored with rogues stabby stabby gameplay what can you do? change spec? hah, its the same stabby stabby just with different rotation, while with druid.. if you get bored from feral.. there are three completely different specs that fill every role in the game.

[averagedrood]

Feral druids = better rogues..

[Ohforfsake]

Really, feral offhealing? Tab rake aoe? Guys, this is meaningless, because feral offhealing is going to a) get nerfed to oblivion because of PvP QQ (it is already wailing aloud) b) quickly become obsolete with little to no scaling with gear. c) does not work in a big scale raiding, we've been through that, it does not work, either you focus on dps and work your bawls off to do good damage with no spare gcds to fool around, or you arent doing your job and get replaced with somebody who does better damage, it is healer's dedicated job to heal, those healers that you bring to raid should be sufficient to cover all the healing the raid would need, blizzard does not design encounters where hybrid healing would be required to beat it.

Tab-rake-aoe and other aoe concerns mean nothing since blizzard has not done aoe numbers tuning pass yet, I fully expect feral aoe to get buffed that pass

worse or better than rogue? apples and oranges or even apples and soup. there are so many reasons why people choose to play rogue or feral, besides raw numbers and so called "versatility". for instance, not everybody wants to be a cat, and stuck with no graphics updates from lvl8 to lvl100 and beyond