i dont raid, but wclogs shows ferals right next to spriest and unholy dk.
My M+ experience has ferals do a decent chunk worse than some FOTM specs like fire mage, but you still hold your own.
Hard to say about feral's difficulty considering I'm used to it... I think it's decently fine in temrs of difficulty, if you stay calm and take your time, which you have considering you can wait on energy regen, youll do fine. Can't just spam buttons and lets dots fall off.
Feral is in in weird spot imo. Feral has high, potentionally the highest, singletarget damage. However, we have no real cleave and while we are one of few who has uncapped aoe, it's very very rarely a thing in raids or m+ if at all. Balance is the favoured spec at the moment, because it brings competative singletarget, burst aoe, the same or better CCs then feral.
I main Feral, I don't think we needs buffs per se, but some changes.
I'd say feral is relatively easy to get into, you have talents like Moment of Clarity and Legendary like Cat Eyes Curio to ease your way into the spec. With bloodtalons and Apex/Circle legendary it'll become the average complexity i'd say. Then theres owlweaving and convoke in moonkin form that might put the complexity up abit if you decide to tryhard.
It is a DoT spec, yes. More specifically, it is the last DoT spec that uses the snapshotting mechanic. Playing Feral revolves around not only maintaining your DoTs but keeping them buffed as much as possible (mostly with Tiger's Fury). The most common playstyle uses the Sabertooth talent, however, which extends your Rip on each Ferocious Bite, so it may not feel too much like a DoT spec. Most of your combo points will be dumped into Ferocious Bites.
This makes it a little bit more of a "mainstreamed" spec than the more advanced DoT spec of the past, but it still sort of keeps the unique, slow and methodical playstyle. You'll spend a lot of time pooling your resources and planning out how to spend them. There are also some advanced tricks that let you squeeze out more DPS if you're willing to minmax (owlweaving, moonfire macro, etc).
Performance wise it is capable of strong single-target DPS and even pulls off impressive burst for once via the new Berserk and Convoke the Spirits ability (if you go Night Fae). It is still lacking in burst AoE, however, making it much less desirable for content like M+ over Balance Druids. It still has the false stigma of being a 'lesser' Rogue too so finding a group for that content will be difficult outside of your guild.
Can Feral compete with the likes of something like monk or unholy death knight? It has potential. On Warcraft Logs, in raiding, Feral is 10th highest DPS (out of 24) making it in the top 42% of all DPS. While Monk and DK are higher (5th and 7th respectively), all the ferals I see are pretty diehard druid fans and have mastered the class pretty well.
Is Feral easy to play? I can't comment too much to it, I've only really used it for leveling and minor things, but I don't think the spec is super difficult. The biggest I hear is that people can easily screw up its rotation, resulting in a big drop of DPS.
Is it really a dot spec like shadow priest / affli lock It is basically a DoT spec, there's not too much else to it aside from a few abilities.
One thing I'd leave on a note is that many people discriminate against feral druids. It is much harder to find a group when you're pugging M+ (and I imagine Raiding as well) so be aware of the fact that the community's perception of it is that it's a weak class and that will, unfortunately, impact your experience of it.
I can see feral being good in high m+ keys since your bleeds will have time run its full duration. But is lower keys its damage is not that great since mobs will most likely die before your bleeds take its full effect. Also you have to maintain rake, trash PW on all tragets in trash to make PW do more damage so is more difficult to play VS a boomy.
Feral is quite good, the problem is that Balance is equally good or better depending on fight (ranged). On pure single target, with the right legendary it can be #1, it's good for 2/3 target fights if you can do a lot of work of mantaining powered (Bloodtalon talent) Rip on each target. Apex or Circle are the 2 most versatile legendaries, Draught is awesome on pure single target. Circle makes your dot tick faster, so you need to be more on top of your game to mantain them on 2 or 3 targets, but generally speaking, adapting to multi dotting takes some practice and nothing more. For mass AoE there's Primal Wrath, much easier.
It takes a while to enter in feral mentality and playing style, but if you can learn to juggle Tiger's Fury and Bloodtalons, you'll do very well. (Ab)using Predator procs in M+ dungeons is extremely rewarding too. Mastering instant cast Regrowths/roots to help the group is fun.
Going Night Fae is a no-brainer for druids now and it's very satisfying to hit that Convoke button every 2 minutes (also thematically perfect!).
As I said, balance is a safer choice right now, but good ferals are never dead weights and they scale quite well with gear too (I think they can top some single target mythic fights in CN).
Easy to play? Not really. It's not super easy, it's not terribly hard, but it requires quite some practice compared to say... Havoc or Beastmaster.
Personally? I love it, it's my favourite spec and it's always been.
Feral is pretty easy, the days of it being a plate-spinning spec are long gone.
All you have to understand are the certain conditions when to press which button, the bloodtalons rework also takes away a lot of own choice and
makes the prio rotation easier. Also, like with any other class, to really push dps you have to understand the fight, the timings and what to do at what point.
Probably only the late legion shred spam feral was easier to play than what we have now.
With the right legendary and practice you can also do pretty good dmg in m+, just not as much as the meta specs while you also don't bring any big support.
If you rely on pugs you will experience the "boomie?" whisper pretty quick, getting into higher keys as feral in pugs is pretty much impossible. Gotta make friends.
I still don't get why they took away instant br, innervate and can't figure out some decent maybe even unique support skills which would make us more desirable in
m+ and raids even.
If you are going for feral, be ready to face a lot of trashtalk and prejudice. But try it. To me it is the most fun spec and convoking as feral feels freaking awesome. Idk how to live without it once they take it away after shadowlands...
Righteous Orbs no longer dropping
Righteous Orbs no longer dropping
May be stop wasting resoures on experiments?
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