We all know it's too early to tell, but I'm excited for Feral pvp in WoD. So far. We're getting some solid perks, some 'must have' glyphs and new abilities/changes that make Feral more attractive. Before going on to my concerns I want to echo some thoughts by poster Predatoria on the official US forums.
With merging pounce & rake into one and essentially ravage, shred & mangle into one we're actually gaining a fairly powerful opener. Here it is summed up:
- Our opener stun will now cost 35 energy rather than 50.
- Our rake will now potentially hit harder out of pounce, meaning our openers in pvp will potentially be more deadly than they are now.
- We no longer need to use rake in our opener, since it is applied when we stun, once again potentially making our opener more deadly with an extra shred.
- Shred has been tuned to hit as hard as ravage from prowl or with incarnation up, yet costs 40 energy rather than 60. This means we can potentially use more abilities during incarnation before running out of energy. The same can be said for using rake with incarnation up, rather than an expensive 50 energy pounce.
- Our first move of the opener (rake, not pounce) now has the potential to crit and yield two combo points, increasing the likelihood that we will gain 5cps before our opening stun is over.
Concerns
- Will this make NE too strong for shadowmeld reopeners?
- Will this make Incarnation too strong or either too weak?
- If our openers are strong will we have good consistent, heavy hitting bleeds the rest of the time?
- We seem to have too strong survivability going into WoD, what with double charge SI at 70% (amongst other things) this may lead to overnerfing Feral after the first patch - something we're all too familiar with in previous expacs.
- We've pretty much lost the ability to CC meaningfully in 'competitive' 3v3 gameplay (and RBG too). Does this mean we'll still be boring dmg bots with no other compelling gameplay aspect?
- What will the pvp 4pc set bonus be changed to? Hopefully something related to better CC.
Thoughts?