Feral <---> Guardian split

[FAILoZOFF]

I was devastated when they split Feral because I loved the ability to switch between cat and bear and be good at both.

Yeah well, you play "bear" so you are a tank, but not a druid, you play "cat" so you are a dps, but not a druid. It feels so wrong.

It worked better with the old talent system, but even then you couldn't actually have all bear talents and all cat talents, so if you wanted to go hybrid there was a built in trade off somewhere (not to mention which stats to prioritise)

I started in "vanilla" and there was really a noticeable split between bear and cat builds, It was fine to time being but definitely the most fun as feral I surely had in WotLK and Cata era, by far. It was actually when both forms were supported almost equally and whole spec felt really mature and versatile. Not saying they were perfect, just nearly ;P Damn, It felt so brutal so... feral... loved it ;3

These days I'm pretty happy with the affinity talents as recognition that Druids should be able to fill a bit more than one role. Though I tend to pick resto affinity because I miss my heals more than I miss my cat abilities. Having only Regrowth feels bad.

I don't even know why are people praising affinities so much. They are all about the passive, for most part. Some returned skills don't even make much sense as they lack any interaction with... anything, no talents, no artifact traits, no mechanics, no scaling- nothing.


One of my hopes for the future is that I'll get to play true feral once more. I am well aware that community is so one dimensional at this point that is pretty much happy with the state of druid design (ie as long as it works for raid's it's fine), even tho it's such an aberration in my eyes, but perhaps they will release some classic WotLk/cata servers one day? ;P

[Mystikal]

I don't even know why are people praising affinities so much. They are all about the passive, for most part. Some returned skills don't even make much sense as they lack any interaction with... anything, no talents, no artifact traits, no mechanics, no scaling- nothing.

This. I've been saying it since beta. The only affinity that I feel really 'works' is Resto with Feral Affinity. I do somewhat feel like a healer Druid with a powerful Cat form, but I still have a few Balance spells to throw around and Bear form combined with my HoTs is a decent defensive. It's the closest I've felt to an "all-rounder" in Legion. My preferred main spec is Balance, but each affinity choice for that is really a choice of "which passive is the most useful for me at this time?". I would love Balance + Feral Affinity to be an actual, moonkitty hybrid. I don't know why Balance's version of Feral Affinity even has the active skills to use, because there's never a good time to use them, due to the way Balance's abilities and defensives work.

[FAILoZOFF]

I would love Balance + Feral Affinity to be an actual, moonkitty hybrid. I don't know why Balance's version of Feral Affinity even has the active skills to use, because there's never a good time to use them, due to the way Balance's abilities and defensives work.

As I have been saying, affinities were from the very beginning a bad idea. Resto with balance affinity or balance with resto affinity feels good because they are both ranged/casters, same goes for feral/guardian (cat/bear) as they are both melee, so there is this element of seamless experience. Going from ranged to melee or vice versa just doesn't work really.

[Whitepaw]

As I have been saying, affinities were from the very beginning a bad idea. Resto with balance affinity or balance with resto affinity feels good because they are both ranged/casters, same goes for feral/guardian (cat/bear) as they are both melee, so there is this element of seamless experience. Going from ranged to melee or vice versa just doesn't work really.

Feral with off-healing capability has worked until Legion was released. That's 12 years of successful hybrid gameplay. It now doesn't work, because Resto Affinity sucks.

[patrins]

I don't understand what you want.

Do you want to be able to kitty effectively in guardian spec? Well that would be really unfair to every other tank. You CAN cat weave in guardian spec while not tanking, its just not super effective.

Do you want to be able to tank in a pinch while in feral spec? You certainly can for a little while. Seen it happen multiple times in clutch situations.

Do you want to be able to do both of these rolls equally well at the same time? We'll that would just be completely unbalanced and OP.

You say you want flexibility? It literally takes <5 seconds to switch specs. How flexible do you need to be?

From what you said it sounds like you would prefer to sort of be a tank AND sort of be a dps but not be particularly good at either. Well you might just be the only person on earth who wants to be mediocre at everything they do, and blizzard isn't going to make hundreds of thousands of people angry just to appease a single insane customer.

You act like being a good tank or topping the meters is a bad thing. That's literally the roll of the spec you are playing. Doing it well helps your group/raid be successful. Not wanting to help your group/raid be successful is something only shitty people could comprehend.

[Mystikal]

Patrins, the problem is that Blizzard wanted Druids to remain the most hybrid of the hybrid classes, because that has always been their niche. That is the whole reason that the Affinity talent row was invented for Legion.

However, what we got did not live up to what was promised. We give up a whole talent row for what is essentially a bunch of passives, and then we have also had almost all non-spec abilities pruned away. This applies to all four of the Druid specs. You can clutch-tank without Guardian Affinity perfectly well, Guardian Affinity doesn't enable that. So, you pick whatever passive you want, and then you're sad because all your off-spec forms have no abilities to use.

The Affinity talent row needs massively redesigning, so that it fulfils its intended purpose - and if Blizzard cannot do that, they need to restore the pruned abilities and come up with a new 45 talent row for Druids.

[Whitepaw]

@patrins

Hybridity is the ability to change roles WHILE IN COMBAT. We have always been able to change specs when not in combat - the current system just makes it that much easier and more convenient.

You seem to be entrenched in the “Hybridity = mediocre” paradigm. This is false. I want to be able to tank effectively in bear form - and shift to cat form when not tanking and deliver non-trivial dps. Or out of Cat Form to deliver non-trivial healing. Or from Cat Form to Bear Form to deliver non-trivial tanking. ”That is OP!” No, it is not. We have spent the greater part of WoW being able to do just that. Since TBC and until end of WoD, I have been able to deliver non-trivial healing and/or non-trivial tanking, as a Feral. While at the same time delivering competitive dps.

In Legion, all melee hybrid specs have been hit heavily on their hybridity. The off-healing capability of WW Monks, Enh Shaman, Ret Paladins and Ferals have been trivialised. At the same time, the immunities for Mages, Rogues and Hunters have elevated those classes to the best for progression raiding. And the sheer dps and uber survival CD of dps warriors also guarantee their raid spots.

Personally, I would like the PvE game in WoW to centre a LOT more on intelligent gameplay: Positioning, CCing adds, close-knit cooperation involving ALL abilities we have. Instead, it has devolved into an AoE dps fest. A true dumbing down of the gameplay. I mean, today you even fight the reward system in M+ if you start CCing, because speed is all-important!

WoW has been different before. In TBC, you needed to CC in PvE to simply complete 5 man HCs and all raids. If you didn’t, you ran the risk of wiping. That was odd, because not all specs had CC. We got a LOT of CC in WotLK - but at the same time, most PvE content was made super easy, so we got used to AoE’ing shit down. In Cataclysm, 5 man instances became hard again - you had to use CC to complete without wiping. It was a shitstorm, naturally! So the devs nerfed 5 man - AoE ensued. In WoD, 5 man were once more made hard, so we had a while where CCing was necessary again (especially in some of the challenge mode instances).

I enjoy intelligent PvE gameplay. That includes hybrid gameplay, changing roles WHILE IN COMBAT, and using CC to survive and win. But I am also aware that most people prefer the gameplay to be more simple. Why? Because when you use CC, you typically have to constrain the use of AoE and your tempo in pulling goes down. But the excitement of actually running the risk of being wiped if I am not playing intelligently is for me way more important than getting an erection from my dps addon.

And it has formed my memories from WoW. The moments I remember are the time I wiped for 4 hours straight in Magister’s Terrace HC back in TBC, because our uber geared group didn’t have reliable CC (the second-to-last encounter was a bitch back then if you didn’t have at least 2 reliable CCs). We cleared the instance, frustrated and happy at the same time. My days in Black Temple in TBC doing clutch off-tanking to save us from wipes. My hail-marry moment in TotGC (WotLK tier 9) in the PvP-like encounter, when I CC’d 2 mobs, ressed a pally healer, tanked the 2 mobs in Bear Form (as Feral) and slowly turned a near-wipe into a win. Off-tanking adds at Ragnaros in Firelands. Clutch-healing with Tranq at Deathwing in DS HC. I could keep going on and on. - there have been so many of those moments.

I have also ranked as a dps. I remember having done that - but I don’t remember anything special from those fights. They were all farm nights and quite uninteresting.

[FAILoZOFF]

I don't understand what you want.

Do you want to be able to kitty effectively in guardian spec? Well that would be really unfair to every other tank. You CAN cat weave in guardian spec while not tanking, its just not super effective.

why on earth? Its not hard to imagine druids dealing less damage while in bear form than every other tank but it would be off set by doing more damage than every other tank while in cat form

Do you want to be able to tank in a pinch while in feral spec? You certainly can for a little while. Seen it happen multiple times in clutch situations.

Let's give rogues a taunt and they will be able to do exact same thing... "for a while"

Do you want to be able to do both of these rolls equally well at the same time? We'll that would just be completely unbalanced and OP.

yeah, pretty much, doesn't have to be strictly "at the same time" changing forms takes time... ;]

You say you want flexibility? It literally takes <5 seconds to switch specs. How flexible do you need to be?

I want to play a HYBRID, something I decided over a decade ago; saying I am flexible cause i can just respec is like saying warriors are hybrids because they can respec to tank/dps; no Its not "that"

From what you said it sounds like you would prefer to sort of be a tank AND sort of be a dps but not be particularly good at either. Well you might just be the only person on earth who wants to be mediocre at everything they do, and blizzard isn't going to make hundreds of thousands of people angry just to appease a single insane customer.

not being #1 on damage meters doesn't directly indicate that one is "mediocre", it certainly MIGHT in certain scenarios
besides, even in this threat you can clearly see that I am not the "only one" nor I think I am in any way "insane"

You act like being a good tank or topping the meters is a bad thing. That's literally the roll of the spec you are playing. Doing it well helps your group/raid be successful. Not wanting to help your group/raid be successful is something only shitty people could comprehend.

nowhere did I say that, nor I have idea how did you came with that but "I don't understand what you want." might have something with that

- - - Updated - - -

Patrins, the problem is that Blizzard wanted Druids to remain the most hybrid of the hybrid classes, because that has always been their niche. That is the whole reason that the Affinity talent row was invented for Legion.

However, what we got did not live up to what was promised. We give up a whole talent row for what is essentially a bunch of passives, and then we have also had almost all non-spec abilities pruned away. This applies to all four of the Druid specs. You can clutch-tank without Guardian Affinity perfectly well, Guardian Affinity doesn't enable that. So, you pick whatever passive you want, and then you're sad because all your off-spec forms have no abilities to use.

The Affinity talent row needs massively redesigning, so that it fulfils its intended purpose - and if Blizzard cannot do that, they need to restore the pruned abilities and come up with a new 45 talent row for Druids.

I the way I see it is it could be done this way, both specs merged together, so have access to every skill of both forms, current affinity talent is changed to something like "Ferocity" "Versatility" and "Tenacity"
1st one heavily boosts Cat form
2nd is a balance between both
3rd one heavily boosts Bear Form
This way Ferals would kind of return to pre MoP state, where this spec is indeed about shapeshifting and not strictly about Cat form and Guardian being all about Bear Form
People that are interested in tanking or dpsing only would take 1st or 3rd talent, people that want to play hybrid would take 2nd
for how strong each talent is, it would have to be tested yet

- - - Updated - - -

snip

that's exactly what I am talking about and the reason why I rolled a druid In the first place, If I wanted to be a pure dps/tank I'd go for rogue/warrior back then instead

[Khrux]

Unfortunately, the reality is that "hybrid tax" was a term used to argue why classes that can perform multiple roles needed to be weaker at each individual role to make up for the fact that they can "do it all" versus pure role classes.

I mean if a Feral could do 100k dps in melee, then blink to 30 yards and do 100k dps at range, then the tank dies and you blink back in go bear and tank the boss..... why would you play anything else? They become the most versatile class, useful at every role in an instant. You lost Tranq in most forms for this reason.... and if you got a Cloak of Shadow type spell you could prob raid mythic progression as 20 druids only

It was clear hybrids were doomed to be "shit at everything" because they can do everything, unless Blizz added a means for you to "lock in" your role through specialisations. Affinities still let you tank for a while, or do mediocre ranged dps for a while but you're not a melee, ranged, healer, tank all in one all the time and thats fair right?

I remember the old talent you had at one point, similar to affinities that let you swap to any role for a limited time. I can't recall the name, was it an older version of Soul of the Forest or something? Where you gained X agi or X int if you went into those forms while the spell was active, essentially giving you time limited effectiveness in your "off-role". So maybe affinities just need to be reworked in a way that they are actually fully viable off-role performance wise for a limited time.

So if you play feral and the boss has a period where melee have to back off, you can actually go moonkin and do proper top tier dps for 15-30secs which still gives you an advantage over classes like warriors/rogues that do next to zero dps outside of dots when not on target?

[Mystikal]

I the way I see it is it could be done this way, both specs merged together, so have access to every skill of both forms, current affinity talent is changed to something like "Ferocity" "Versatility" and "Tenacity"
1st one heavily boosts Cat form
2nd is a balance between both
3rd one heavily boosts Bear Form
This way Ferals would kind of return to pre MoP state, where this spec is indeed about shapeshifting and not strictly about Cat form and Guardian being all about Bear Form
People that are interested in tanking or dpsing only would take 1st or 3rd talent, people that want to play hybrid would take 2nd
for how strong each talent is, it would have to be tested yet

This could work, but I want it for all the Druid specs, not just Feral. Honestly, pre-nerf Heart of the Wild in MoP essentially worked. However, rather than tune the numbers, Blizzard just slammed it into near-obsolescence with the nerf bat, and then spent the rest of the expac adjusting it to compete with Nature's Vigil.

The hybridity element could easily be brought back by:

A): restoring some of the active abilities from the Affinity talents to all Druids (my thinking; Rejuvenation, Maul, Shred and Ferocious bite all become baseline again);

B): give each Affinity a Heart of the Wild style active ability that further boosts that Affinity's speciality. For example, Feral Affinity would increase Agility by X%, energy regen by Y% and cause Killer Instinct to be active outside of Cat / Bear Form for the duration of the active ability.

Obviously, this would need numbers tuning, but each Affinity could then have a dedicated active that makes it more powerful. Something like, say, 25s duration on a 4 minute cooldown. This would restore the hybridity in-combat that has always been the Druid core, without making it always (or even regularly) available, and thus OP.

- - - Updated - - -

I mean if a Feral could do 100k dps in melee, then blink to 30 yards and do 100k dps at range, then the tank dies and you blink back in go bear and tank the boss..... why would you play anything else? They become the most versatile class, useful at every role in an instant. You lost Tranq in most forms for this reason.... and if you got a Cloak of Shadow type spell you could prob raid mythic progression as 20 druids only

Affinities still let you tank for a while, or do mediocre ranged dps for a while but you're not a melee, ranged, healer, tank all in one all the time and thats fair right?

There are two problems with the above:

1): The dps affinities only provide decent dps for Resto, due to how the Int / Agi conversion scales, and the fact that they get a 51% damage increase to their abilities from their artifact weapon. The ranged dps of a Feral or Guardian with Balance Affinity is appallingly bad - you are not contributing any dps of merit. The same is also true of Feral Affinity with Balance - despite the boost to damage that the Affinity gives to your Cat Form abilities, they are still awful, so you trade off defence from Guardian or Resto Affinity for a movement speed increase.

2): Guardian Affinity does not enable clutch off-tanking. Bear Form itself does this just fine. Just last week, I taunted and tanked mobs in a mythic +10 as a Balance Druid so that the tank could drop their stacks. I was not specced for Guardian Affinity, and it worked just fine. A Feral could pick whichever Affinity they feel like and the same would be true.

What this leaves us with, is extremely wishy-washy, lacklustre Affinity talents that are supposed to enable hybrid gameplay, but actually don't. Add to that, that whichever spec you main, your other off-spec forms will have either very few - or possibly no - abilities to actually use. If you spec Guardian with Resto Affinity, for example, you have no Balance spells to use and no Cat Form abilities either. It feels very sad.

[FAILoZOFF]

Well, if I were completely honest with you here, I didn't like Heart of the Wild at all. CD based access to "hybridity" doesn't feel like a real hybrid at all, to me at least and I might quite well be in minority here.

Problem is with affinities that 2 of them provide something 2 specs already are doing, damage that is. So there's this awkward design problem of balance with feral affinity and feral with balance affinity overlapping each other. There is very little use for it, because what would it be? Having "some" lackluster ranged capability isn't something unheard of even for other melee classes. On the other hand having it as a powerful CD style where for instance feral would turn into Moonkin for short period of time, where that Moonking would out-damage his main role feels kind of wrong too and in no way "hybridy". It just becomes yet another rotational CD.
Guardians with feral affinity. That's somehow the case too. I mean, in old days where tanks didn't do any significant damage this could work, but now? I don't know, don't feel like it.

So yeah, hybrids are kind of dead at this point, blizzard trued a few times to bring in back in one way or the other but it always seemed "artificial" experience. It saddens me because It was something I enjoyed doing.

[Mythicalchicken]

Even if my dps was godawful, 1.8 was my favorite time as a 25/5/21 balance druid with a warden staff: literally I did everything in one run and single-handedly saved wipes by being a healer/tank/dpser in one battle.

Even in TBC, I saved many wipes flipping between forms or popping out to heal and still doing mage-level deeps to everyone's disbelief (thanks cloth!). Even then druids who used all their forms were rare and frowned upon until raids saw what we could do/prevent.

So the hybridy part of it for me started going away around WOLTK when I was expected to just dps. I liked being the glue of the group/raid and not just cranking out the sausage.

All that said, I think they could bolster are affinity abilities more but I wouldn't discount what the affinities do much, much better than Heart of the Wild (where I was a 1.8 hybrid for 30 seconds).

Cat/Bird issues aside, guardian affinity in particular allowed me to MT in a pinch and I never used cat for more than stealth, dash, and the rare head bash. Resto affinity isn't close to what we had, but it's enough to stabilize the group while you innervate the healer and allow them to take back over -- offhealing at its best. Regrowth + Renewal does what it needs to do. I also like in Legion I've used all my forms more than I have in recent expansions as a balance druid.

So let's keep it in perspective, but I hope with BfA they do make the affinities more robust so you're picking the form, not the passive.

[Scottyjscizzle]

I will admit as someone who played druid for a long time before the split it felt weird, doesn't really bother me now since I changed mains and even when I play I don't feel the need to swap to bear ever. Made being my guilds offtank fun as hell in the past though. That said I do understand the need for the split from a balance perspective just hurts feeling wise.

[FAILoZOFF]

So let's keep it in perspective, but I hope with BfA they do make the affinities more robust so you're picking the form, not the passive.

I don't think it will ever work TBH for reasons I just mentioned. They could at least take the separated action bars offcat/bear for non-feral/non-guardian, looks so damn dumb with 2 abilities as long you don't pick given affinity XD

[FAILoZOFF]

I think that druids could be very cool if instead of 4 specs they had just 2, a melee and caster one. feral would be then a dps/tank hybrid wheres balance would be a mdps/healing spec. In b4 woah woah OP n sht. This all comes down to balance.

[Polarthief]

I think that druids could be very cool if instead of 4 specs they had just 2, a melee and caster one. feral would be then a dps/tank hybrid wheres balance would be a mdps/healing spec. In b4 woah woah OP n sht. This all comes down to balance.

Um, "woah woah OP n sht" indeed. You can't just have a full DPS and full healer in one spec. This isn't Vanilla where Hybrid Tax existed for utility/extra support. The game isn't like that anymore.

Unless the game takes a drastic turn in class design/balancing in the future, this will NEVER happen.

[Halyon]

Oh god no...that would be a horrifying mess of balancing that... It would either be OP as fuck or so shite that people will abandon the class en masse.

[exochaft]

Oh god no...that would be a horrifying mess of balancing that... It would either be OP as fuck or so shite that people will abandon the class en masse.

That's the whole reason why the original Feral was split into Guardian and the current Feral: it was a balancing nightmare. I still remember back in WotLK where it was a constant back-and-forth between buffs and nerfs that trickled over into the differing roles. If kitty had to be nerfed for something, it inadvertently affected bear as well, and vice versa. Or the problem came down to Blizz wanting to buff bear survivability but couldn't because it would cause kitties to be too powerful.

Sure, the affinities have their problems and are mostly used for their passives, but some combos do work to limited effect without breaking the game. While Guardian affiinity is damage reduce passively, it's still quite good to shift into bear form to take massive hits and heal up with Frenzied Regen as a non-Guardian spec. Out of all the affinities, I'd say the worst active is Balance, as either the spells aren't very strong or there's a cooldown on even accessing Moonkin form that's insanely long for specs like Feral... but yay Flap!

I honestly don't want to go back to previous incarnations (slight pun intended) of druid specializations, as their problems vastly outweighed their benefits. That isn't to say there's not a way to bring back the essence of druid hybrid without breaking the game, but I couldn't tell you what that is right now. If the affinities do stay around, there's certainly some tweaks to their functionality that could be improved.

[Halyon]

That's the whole reason why the original Feral was split into Guardian and the current Feral: it was a balancing nightmare. I still remember back in WotLK where it was a constant back-and-forth between buffs and nerfs that trickled over into the differing roles. If kitty had to be nerfed for something, it inadvertently affected bear as well, and vice versa. Or the problem came down to Blizz wanting to buff bear survivability but couldn't because it would cause kitties to be too powerful.

Sure, the affinities have their problems and are mostly used for their passives, but some combos do work to limited effect without breaking the game. While Guardian affiinity is damage reduce passively, it's still quite good to shift into bear form to take massive hits and heal up with Frenzied Regen as a non-Guardian spec. Out of all the affinities, I'd say the worst active is Balance, as either the spells aren't very strong or there's a cooldown on even accessing Moonkin form that's insanely long for specs like Feral... but yay Flap!

I honestly don't want to go back to previous incarnations (slight pun intended) of druid specializations, as their problems vastly outweighed their benefits. That isn't to say there's not a way to bring back the essence of druid hybrid without breaking the game, but I couldn't tell you what that is right now. If the affinities do stay around, there's certainly some tweaks to their functionality that could be improved.

Hybrid doesn't work in a game like this, so yeah...

[Whitepaw]

I believe the answer is pretty simple: Just give some of the Affinities more power!

- Resto Affinity needs to be able to heal for a longer period before going out of mana (right now, it can heal about 80% of your health before going OOM - that’s simply not enough). As I see it, Resto Affinity should make you able to heal a tank to full, or 2 x dps/healers to full. For a char at ilvl 950, that would be around 10 mio hp before OOM. And I suggest giving more mana, as increasing the heals would probably be overpowered.

- Balance Affinity needs to deliver at least 3 x times as much dps. Right now, as Feral with Balance Affinity, I do 15% of my Feral dps, when I am in Moonkin form. That’s pathetic.

- Feral Affinity also needs to deliver more dps. And there shouldn’t be a drop from bleed damage, when shifting out of cat form.

- The limited experience with Guardian Affinity hasn’t allowed me to form a qualified opinion about this affinity.

“But this would make Druids so OP!” Not really. You see, the ‘pure’ dps classes (Rogue, Warlock, Hunter, Mage) have a LOT of utility that Druids do not have (immunities, portals, pets, CC etc), so as of right now, most Druid specs are behind these classes when utility is concerned. This is a unique situation in WoW and buffing the Affinities could solve this imbalance.