[Feral] The art of a Kitten: PvE guide

[Elunedra]

i like it, as i am a HotW feral

[Deleted]

That's a common misconception, NS is a huge part of DoC's value as a talent. Sure it's main use in a patchwerk situation on the opener, where that single NS nets you hundreds of thousands of damage (in a raid setting that's easily 1k DPS over the course of the whole fight, minimum), but if that's the only time you use NS on a Rip you're definitely missing something. It's far from unreasonable to use NS on another Rip 3-5 more times over the course of a ~7.5 minute fight, and that's going to add up to another couple thousand DPS as well.

And then arguably even more important than having it for your opener is having it for lining up the best possible bleed for execute. I've had plenty of times where I had a very narrow window to apply an extremely strong rip and having it be DoC buffed where it may not have otherwise been is a massive gain in damage. We're talking potential for millions of damage from just one NS.

Both Catus and SimulationCraft are showing DoC to be inferior to HotW on single-target Patchwerk encounters at the moment. Why is anyone going to take a talent that adds complexity, lacks damage, and severely lacks utility?

PS: If anyone has concerns about this please voice your opinion in this PTR thread as long as it's constructive. I really don't want DoC to be removed as an "option" (yeah yeah, insert "it's still an option there's nothing stopping you from taking it" argument here) as I really enjoy playing it over HotW and I'm sure there are others who feel the same.

The problem is that NS was bound to have been removed as a talent, as you said it was been used as a dps cooldown, and providing too much in terms of healing and damage towards the other two. I am by no means supporting this as NS should just be baseline for all druids, but as you can see from other talents, this isn't how Blizzard fixes things.

Take Incarnation for example, provides absolutely nothing for ferals in pve, yet it hasn't been touched since it was 1st added. Every post I have read is basically bashing on the fact that ferals are loosing something which made another talent viable, and I understand it, I do, I love DoC playstyle, but it's pretty obvious by now that Blizzard are pretty set on the way feral is going right now. I would be majorly surprised if they reverted the changes to NS and DoC.

I would much prefer Blizzard change the other talents for feral. Arguably Incarnation is a pvp talent for ferals, but should talents be set on only 1 use? What about FoN? NV? All these talents are just pushed aside, pretty much provide nothing in terms of pve use. I would love to see more talents be used for feral. Sure SotF will most likely be the better talent, but it can't hurt them to change Incarnation, since it was one of the problems behind Ferals ridiculous burst in pvp, yet instead of changing the talent, they totally removed insta clones.

[aggixx]

Sure, you definitely wouldn't see me complaining if they made Incarnation and FoN viable in PvE, I would actually really enjoy that (as awkward as it would be to lose the energy regen from SotF that I've had literally for the whole expansion).

But the thing is, they just changed a talent that was viable and a lot of people really enjoyed for no reason. Am I a little upset NS is (and probably will stay) gone for feral? Yeah a bit. It is definitely a pretty lame nerf to our burst AoE, and to some degree our target switching, but that's not what I'm worried about. What I'm worried about is that in the current state the talent is essentially completely dead (almost in the exact same way NV is completely dead) and all they have to do is just buff the talent a little (up to like 30% or something) so it's a little better than HotW again and everything's peachy, there is literally no drawbacks to them doing this. It's a simple fix to a simple problem that's sitting right in front of their faces, and we need to make sure they take that step to fix it.

[Elunedra]

there is still 1 big problem wich cannot be solved:

there are teocrafters, if they change for example incarnation, they will calculate wheter its worth taking over SotF
if it is all feral will use Incanation if it aint then all ferals use SotF

there is no in between poeple always choose the best option.

[Deleted]

there is still 1 big problem wich cannot be solved:

there are teocrafters, if they change for example incarnation, they will calculate wheter its worth taking over SotF
if it is all feral will use Incanation if it aint then all ferals use SotF

there is no in between poeple always choose the best option.

They could always make it so different talents are used on different bosses. I'm not expecting them to make talents so close that even theorycrafters can't pick between, but ones that are used in different situations. Our target switching is dire, they could add talents similar to what rogues have where we can save combos past 5 as a buff, instantly generate combos on another target, or even something like DKs where we can spread weaker version of our bleeds around. 2 of our level 60 talents are pvp oriented, they need to overhaul quite a few of them.

Obviously if they do make changes to these talents, it will most likely be in a new xpac, but I don't see them working out, no matter how much they buff them by.

[Skadovsk]

there is still 1 big problem wich cannot be solved:

there are teocrafters, if they change for example incarnation, they will calculate wheter its worth taking over SotF
if it is all feral will use Incanation if it aint then all ferals use SotF

there is no in between poeple always choose the best option.

i like it, as i am a HotW feral

That would depend on the fight, if incarnation and SotF compete for best talent in PvE in an alter universe, then people will take them depending on the fight.
Assuming they're both somewhat close, If burst is needed then Incarnation is the talent to go, if the fight is long and just requires sustained damage overall then you take SotF because it gives you smoother playstyle for a long fight.
It's like HotW and DoC right now, its retarded to say "I'm a HotW feral" so I don't care what happens to DoC on 5.4, or "If you don't play DoC it means you're a bad feral and can't handle DoC."
You're a feral, period. And having the choice between massive utility vs a bit more damage with more complexity, is good.
I'd also love to have the 60 talents all work in different scenarios and bosses, just more options.
Once 5.4 hits, DoC will be only available if your guild for some reason doesn't need the tranq and you can pull it off more than perfectly, in other words, never on progression.
So feral is now forced to play with no options at all... that in my opinion makes for a shitty spec.

[Themessiah]

Unfortunately I'm in Europe so I can't post on the American forums without some messing around. This is what I have just posted on the EU forums:

"Responding to this old thread in order to complain about the removal of Nature's Swiftness.

With the removal of Nature's Swiftness, Dream of Cenarius barely, if at all, comes out ahead of Heart of the Wild in terms of competitive dps. I take it to be the case that in order for there to be a meaningful choice between talents that there must be a balance between them. They are balanced in terms of dps. However where they are not balanced is in terms of utility.

Heart of the Wild trumps Dream of Cenarius in terms of utility because it provides the option to be a ranged dps, healer or tank for 45 seconds, effectively allowing for a "save the day" ability. By contrast, a 20% increase to healing from healing touch doesn't have an equivocal brute force impact. If one took all of that extra healing from Dream of Cenarius and compared it to one Tranquility buffed with Heart of the Wild,it wouldn't get anywhere close to equivocal.

The reason for why this will be a problem, but yet isn't a problem on live is because of the removal of Nature's Swiftness. The dps increase on live from Dream of Cenarius requires the use of Nature's Switfness in order to actually be a meaningful dps increase. In order to preserve the choice between talents in the final tier, either Heart of the Wild needs to be nerfed or Dream of Cenarius buffed. Alternately, not removing Nature's Swiftness would also have this effect.

If the simulation craft is accurate, then as the feral druid stands on the ptr, it is not worth taking Dream of Cenarius over Heart of the Wild. This is because it fails to offer as much utility and a meaningful dps increase over Heart of the Wild."

[FeralSynapse]

Nice little change to our 2pc.
Item - Druid T16 Feral 2P Bonus Omen of Clarity now also increases damage of Swipe.

[Deleted]

Nice little change to our 2pc.
Item - Druid T16 Feral 2P Bonus Omen of Clarity now also increases damage of Swipe.

Still takes thrash out of our 1 target rotation!

[aggixx]

You'll definitely still be keeping Thrash up on a single target, it does way too much damage not to.

[Deleted]

You'll definitely still be keeping Thrash up on a single target, it does way too much damage not to.

So we will basically be ignoring our 2 set buff?

[Kojo]

iirc it's worth throwing in thrash when you can afford to even without ooc, maybe i'm misinformed. /shrug

[aggixx]

Yes, in fact most Thrash applications are done without OoC. The 2 set does shake things up a little, but not a huge difference:

"Filler" priority: Thrash with OoC > Rake > Shred with Feral Fury (2pT16 buff) > Thrash without OoC > Shred

Shred being interchangeable with Mangle of course.

[siccora]

But you only use Thrash with OoC when you have 4 or 5 Combo Points or am i wrong?

[Kojo]

I'm not sure why that would matter.

[siccora]

Because Thrash does not give a Combo Point. And it is on the front page guide

Edit "Thrash if Omen of Clarity is up and Thrash is down or below 3-4 seconds"

did not read that, sorry -.-

[Redpanda]

dusted off my feral I havent played in a month this weekend and man it felt good to be up there. a 13/13h guild ran a gdkp and was like wtf where did this feral come from. It was fun

[Deleted]

dusted off my feral I havent played in a month this weekend and man it felt good to be up there. a 13/13h guild ran a gdkp and was like wtf where did this feral come from. It was fun

It's awesome to play it again after a few weeks of vacation, agreed.

[Deleted]

To that end, we’re going to make another change to how RPPM mechanics work on the pull. Starting a raid encounter will set every RPPM proc’s “time since last proc” to 90 seconds. That means the more frequent procs will still be more or less guaranteed to go off, but the rarer (and more powerful) procs will just have a high chance. This should hopefully chill things out a little bit, without changing how you play too dramatically.

Well shit. I can't say that I completely understand what this change is going to do (it's just nerfing most openers in stead of making them less important?), but it seems that Rune and Rentaki proc at the same time at beginning will just be stuff that we can dream about now. I wonder if this will make the valor trinket even more powerful comparably? At least we aren't hugely opener dependant (lol dks and fire mages)

[aggixx]

Eh, yeah. Our opener is pretty lackluster, in 5.2/5.3 we weren't even really getting the most out of our opener because of Renataki's and our need to get a Rip up ASAP, and now DoC's opener will be even weaker with the loss of NS. If anything this is a relative buff for us.

Edit: Once you have access to T16 trinkets this change will have almost exactly 0 effect on us. At a 90 second lead Rune is still guaranteed to proc on pull (not necessarily on the first hit, but before Berserk ends for sure) which is hardly a bad thing. The currently 2nd BiS trinket next tier to pair with Rune is ICD based and will still be up when Rune procs even if it procs the latest possible.