Feral Changes First Impressions | The War Within Alpha 

Just a note for any newer watchers, since making this vid they are bringing back Rampant Ferocity (RF), which is not only exciting, but also fixes a couple of other things I complained about like Sabertooth and Taste for Blood. Overall while I was somewhat negative here, it's already looking better and only more to come I imagine. Plus have come around to some other changes.

Im fine with a slower feral (maybe even as slow as currently on alpha) as long as we get bleed that hit like a truck in return. Failing that feral is dead to me in tww

I agree with pretty much all of your points. "They're just putting core functionality behind talents" is so true even in the class tree. There are so many buttons in there that almost any other class would just get baseline (maim, thrash, hibernate, cyclone, stamp roar). While i'm definitely pro slowing down the spec and making tiger's fury feel like a real button, one thing I am going to miss with the resets, is not having it up for the start of every pull guaranteed, especially seeing that upcoming "first tiger's fury in combat massive attack" hero talent. I do kind of understand why they went to flat cdr on berserk since they got rid of it on all 3 warlock specs too semi-recently, so it seems like it's something blizzard are trying to prune in general, and i can't lie I do personally enjoy having a consistent timing on cds even if you have to take big downtime in an m+ dungeon or something. I really do hope they keep the dynamic of having flexible cd timings in some other way though; it's a very cool choice for all the reasons you stated. Also it's a bit strange to see them say they don't like rampant ferocity because it's hard to use optimally without a guide and adaptive swarm is untouched because tracking that and optimizing that button in raid feels so convoluted to me, especially with the semi random travel time when it hops back and forth from a ranged playing 40 yards.

As a primarily M+ feral, this is super sad to see they are taking the biteweaving rampant ferocity funnel builds to this simplified 3/4 button PW aoe spam... hope they listen to your feedback!

This is looking like one of the trees where the early changes aren't bad, but they don't necessarily get me excited either. I usually bounce b/w feral/ww/havoc/enhance- although I always try to play feral. What concerns me from a big picture POV are: The class tree just feels like it's too point intensive to get your standard slew of utility/defensives. I'm worried there's going to be too much tension between DPS/utlity/defensive points. This is likely less of an issue depending on how they overall balance defensives/utility across melee DPS. However, class tree overall at first glance just looks like I'm being punished for the 4th spec. For M+... I was personally annoyed with again needing to tab rake, but did enjoy the funnel bite / PW stuff. I'm not sure what I want here as usually I just stuck to PVP and raid on feral and then would pick an M+ alt like enhance/ww/havoc. Overall, effectiveness felt bad in M+. And I hated the strain between ST/AOE. And really disliked how useless my AOE could feel alongside other specs just vommiting damage out so fast and hard that mine didn't matter. Perhaps the slower playstyle will shine more in M+ assuming tuning is there. PW spam... I like the button. But if its just literal spam and begins feeling like I'm playing ret paladin spamming divine storm... that's gonna get boring too. One thing I hate to recommend since it is "homogenization" but I'd really like double claw rake to work more like assa garrote where I can mass apply it from stealth or on pull from TF or something. For me I just super fucking hate tab rake tab rake tab rake. It will lilkey feel less shit if the damge is there so that it doesn't feel like I'm getting it out of the way before I get to start really getting damage out. I don't feel this strain as much on boomie even though their ramp is even higher. B/c I know I'm going to ramp insanely hard off getting things setup. That inevitability doesn't come through on feral gameplay currently. So hopefully it does with the slowdown. Overall, my big worry is they really seem to mishandle the DOT specs in DF. They dont seem to like bleeds being too strong. But with this gameplay change bleeds need to hit hard or else you are going to feel energy starved bc you'll want to shit out more globals to get damage. Honestly, I dont know what I want. But I'm not sure what I'm seeing is it.

Complexity goes up with bear weaving at least. It’s hilarious seeing people complain that Aldrachi Reaver is making havoc too complex when it’s still less complex than feral druid will be if all these changes land.

Excellent video Cheesey. Spot on so many points.. unfortunately I dont have faith in devs to make it better.

what if ToW was affecter by bite instead and have synergy with Rampant ferocity or some thing. Id like Taste for blood but maby limit it to rip rake and thrash to make it easier to tune, but have i have more inpact on the bites so it's more imoprant to have all DoTs up before biting

With the additional Predator changes incorporating Haste and less overall Bite spamming- Do you see a shift in Primary stats? Seems like M/H would be strong but this would make our damage only strong during those tiger fury windows.

I always loved Feral because how methodical it was, you had to really know what GCD's were important depending on the situation. Dumbing down the spec to make it easier is counterintuitive to why people play the spec in the first place. (imo) If anything I'd prefer the approach like how they did Lion's Strength, easier rotation but less value out of the spec. Let people choose the complex rotation/talents or the simplified one.

Someone clearly cooked here

REVERT THE CHANGES . It’s officially Joever for us

Coiled to Spring is weird because right now, each combo point is roughly 20% (diminishing) more damage (1/5 for 1CP, 5/5 for 5CP) for FB. Yet the 6CP is only 10%. With PW though, its less (2x 1CP, 6x 5CP), how did they manage a 10% buff would be adequate for the loss of a GCD and 1CP? (beginner theorizer so I doubt I'm exactly correct)

i wish they would buff lions strength or keep RF to sometimes take LS. Bloodtalons is alright but idk

Apparently I was the only feral that still had to pool energy? Sometimes just auto-attack for a few GCD's to get a good bite in/proc BT. Now its just a few MORE GCD's, or we invest in haste to make the difference? AND with MoC being 30%, its even more pooling.

Last comment spam (sorry lol) but yeah I do like the idea of less energy, more thought on the GCD as long as the ability hits hard. Making feral really reliant on using GCD's correctly, punishing us for playing improperly, yes please.

If feral becomes very bite centric in burst windows I can see the value of haste / mastery going up big time because being able to spam more finishers (bite with higher energy) and still having the energy to use builders during tiger's fury, just feel;s like this class could now use a lot of haste whille also taking one point in tireless energy perhaps. just seems intuitively mathematically correct but this is just from reading and no calculation. i think that a lot of our snapshotting identity has been simplified or lost. we lose massive berserk rake snapshotting and massive incentives to rip during tiger's fury. hopefully these changes still lead to positive gameplay when its in our hands for the first time and we can make something work, or i might be sitting out for this expansion on feral and just playing something else

I'm not that negative about the change I prefer a flat out 1min reduction on berserk than an inconsistent CDR. Berserk going from 20 to 15 seems ok since they buffed berserk frenzy. Less time to ramp up our frenzy but it will grow faster also. And convoke is still burst and berserk still a ramp cd. I agree with you on ToW I would prefer them to keep RR and get rid of ToW. Just spamming primal wrath seems uninteresting Making TF a strong windows to snapshot is fine but yeah 20s duration is too much. They should rework raging fury. Pvp wise the new tfb seems really good for good burst windows combine with tiger tenacity and feral frenzy. I'm sure it could have use in PvE too on hard some encounters with mob that needs to be killed quickly. Mastery including adaptative swarm and LI is a big YES for me.

I honestly don't mind the berserk reduction change because you were always lining it up anyway, only on select fights llike smolderon you were trying your best to get it up each intermission but it was overshadowed by simply not taking any cooldown reduction at all. Also it always felt like it was coming up before convoke so it was often losing at least one use in a long fight because we were just not using it for 20-30+ seconds waiting to line it up with convoke. But I agree this change does remove sort of interesting gameplay that allows for outplay potential on certain fight lengths and certain situations.

good video, i saw that our tiger's fury would no longer be 100% uptime and push us into more of a 20 second burst window with a 10 second slow window. i agree primal wrath is the most boring thing on the planet, i absolutely despise spamming primal wrath its never been fun and its always been the last thing i wanted to do. i thought that itd get better and we'd see how it is when its in our hands but i already feel from reading these that its not going to feel as fun as it was this season.

I feel like they have a competition in Blizzard who can fucked up the feral spec even more

I still don't see a reason to invite a single feral in any content

If they slow down energy regen, bleed damage goes up, and PW spamming becomes more viable in dungeons and you can maybe stop playing caster druid.

Strong agree, Im super dissapointed. I hope they listen to feedback and fix the spec before it comes out.

Honestly at this point they might as well delete the spec because it's just going from bad to worse with each change

I don't like slowing down the spec at all, These TF changes are very boring i liked the aspect of maintaining it and maybe seeing an add spawn on a boss fight to mark it with a bleed to get an extra TF. The heart of the lion change is also very boring and rewards shit play. M+ will also be very boring as a feral now with just spamming PW now. Just really hoping they change a lot of this feral isn't meant to be played this slow imo. I'm very confused how they went from making dire fixation because that talent spot sucked prior and was not interactive, to completely just giving up on it and making this new spring talent. just very worrisome as a feral main.

hot take remove bite and make it a bleed spec

next fun specc gone. gg blizz