12.1 Feral Druid: Blizzard Forgot the Cats

[00:04] it comes to the ferals of the world of Warcraft. And by the end of the video, you will know 100% what I am talking about. But until then, let's see what feral is going to be like in the next patch with the tier set buffs and nerfs,

[00:18] patch with the tier set buffs and nerfs, mostly buffs, and some talent changes. Like actually new? Not much. Feral has been consistently well designed for a

[00:32] but also biggest weakness [music] and Blizzard's first crime. Not giving feral new gameplay mechanics is the first offender of that crime, and the tier set is an accomplice. Your new two-set bonus says that when Berserk or

[00:48] Incarnation ends, you deal 10% increased damage for 1 second for each combo point spent during Berserk or Incarnation. Testing this on the PTR so far has seen people move away from Convoke and play the 1.5 minute Incarnation build to get

[01:03] more value out of the set bonus, which makes a lot of sense. Now, I've only played this in plus 10s on the PTR because my kitty claws can't handle anymore, and it still seemed that Convoke gives you more damage. That's

[01:16] concentrated more efficiently in low-level keys. However, I expect the 1.5 minute Incarn to slowly pull ahead in higher keys, especially with the reduction of the burst damage Blizzard has been squeezing in the classes in

[01:31] season two. More on that later. The four-set bonus makes Berserk and Incarnation last 10 seconds longer. Very straightforward, a build-up on the two-set making the effect stronger and giving you an even bigger reason to have

[01:44] more Berserks or Incarns. If anything, the fact that neither the two-set nor the four-set have any interaction with Convoke makes me want to move away further from it even more. But as I mentioned, none of these bonuses change

[01:59] anything about your gameplay outside potentially taking Convoke off of your bars. If they make the post-Berserk buff strong enough, maybe we get to actually play Convoke and use it when Berserk

[02:13] ends for [music] the added damage bonus. But, 10% doesn't live up to the 15% you get from being inside Berserk, so no soup for you just yet. Lastly, a small change comes from the Merciless Claws and Rampant Ferocity

[02:27] talents swapping positions in the tree. This is a slightly subtle one where your talent builds could be influenced by the difference in pathing. It doesn't seem most talent builds not being influenced by this change because [music]

[02:42] you take both of these in AoE. In single-target, this change seems like a [ __ ] change since you are forced into an AoE talent that you cannot escape from. If you want to build your cat for pure single-target damage, you now have a

[02:55] dead talent point in Rampant Ferocity since it adds no single-target benefit, and you cannot advance to the mid part of your talent tree without it or Primal Wrath, another dead talent for single-target. So, this is kind of a

[03:08] negative change for no apparent reason unless I am missing something. new season we will get more item level which scales our damage differently from

[03:23] season 1, new trinkets, and new tier sets. The numbers in the buffs cannot translate one-to-one with what we do right now in season 1. However, they can paint a picture of where Feral is headed. First, Apex Predator's Craving

[03:36] was nerfed to a 4% chance to proc down from the previous 5%. Since this has become a staple of Feral's gameplay for years, maybe it makes sense. Not sure I like it considering it's one of the only cool procs that Feral has with a few

[03:50] resource economy implications. Saber Jaws damage bonus increases 60% per point, was 50 before. This wasn't taken so far on live, neither in raids nor in dungeons. Granted, the raid tier in season one has been fully AoE, so there

[04:04] hasn't yet been a pure single target fight to benefit single target focused talents. Maybe this buff will change that. Chomp was also buffed by 30%. This was one of the new toys for cats in midnight that ended up underused or not

[04:18] used at all. Feral have been playing Wildstalker in raids, which makes Lunar Inspiration, its counterpart, make more sense, despite since never stopping the tuning to make counterintuitive abilities be better anyway. The capstone

[04:32] part of the talent tree is very expensive, and if we end up taking Ashamane's Guidance for the 1.5 minute convoke, then we have even fewer points to spend here. To help with that, Focus Frenzy was also

[04:45] nerfed to increase the damage of Feral Frenzy by 15% down from 20. Maybe this was made to make Chomp more competitive, despite Feral Frenzy just fitting better in your rotation. Rip and Tear damage bonus increased to 20% from 15.

[05:01] Merciless Claws was buffed to increase the damage of Shred and Swipe by 25% from the previous 20. Blood Spattered increases bite damage by 8% per enemy affected by Rip up to six total targets, up from 2% per enemy, capped at 10 total

[05:16] targets. Essentially, the buff caps now at 48% more damage instead of 20%, and rolling. In theory, this is one of the buffs I love the most and will tell you why in a bit. Taste for Blood moves damage from Tiger's Fury to outside of

[05:31] it, buffing bite by 16% instead of 12, and another 8% during Tiger's Fury instead of 12. Considering you spend more time outside Tiger's Fury than inside it, this sounds like a buff, but

[05:43] at the same time, the buff to it inside Tiger's Fury would have increased again by the Tiger's Fury itself. I'm sure the math has been done somewhere to explain this. Either way, devs want us to have less burst damage and more consistent

[05:57] damage overall. Since in season 2, our HP pools will be increased by 25% but the damage we take also increased by 25% we will be getting buffs to our self-sustain. Rejuvenation, wild growth, and regrowth healing has been increased

[06:11] by 25% to match the incoming damage output from enemies. Since you can occasionally cast regrowth with predator's swiftness, this is good. The others likely only helping you in open world content. Lastly, overall damage

[06:25] was increased by 3%. These are just the first iteration of buffs that we have for feral with more to come or rather just tuning for now. I'm not a great feral druid and still was able to top cocky cutting-edge raiders and title

[06:40] pushers making them mad in our twitch chat. Oh yeah, we stream all of this as testing on twitch.tv/marcelineandflame and you can check us out, leave a follow to be notified, and catch all of the testing we do live.

[06:55] testing we do live. >> [music] going into the next season. This is both good and bad like I mentioned before and I will explain that in a bit. Something that could potentially change with

[07:09] feral, which is a copium-fueled frenzy I wanted to be on since Shadowlands, is the blood spattered talent or rather what it represents. This is what funnel damage looks like. On paper, funnel damage has been buffed but these buffs

[07:23] usually are big enough to make people happy but small enough to not make any actual mana impact. Funnel damage is something you want everywhere in AoE but especially in mythic plus where feral strives more. Funnel damage was what

[07:38] made arcane mages that were the last in overall damage in their groups to be the most important damage dealer in their groups. the rest of the mobs to increase your damage to it is incredibly valuable in

[07:53] an era where every pack has one dude with sometimes double the HP of everyone else. Not to mention enemy HP levels have also been increased by 25% from the baseline that we have had in season 2, meaning fights last even longer and

[08:07] dangerous mini bosses are even more dangerous or at least tedious. Feral has the kit to be a good funnel DPS and it could become its niche to make it graduate from a meme spec if the devs just buff this enough. We'll need to

[08:21] wait when we can sim and test more mythic plus first though. has been committing. I already mentioned the first one of not getting gameplay

[08:37] changes. Since blood talents have been taken out, Feral has been played more or less the same since at least Battle for Azeroth. And if you look at your calendars and do some math, you would come out with about eight years of this

[08:51] spec being more or less the same. BFA brought primal wrath as an AoE finisher, but midnight took away blood talents. Chomp isn't an interesting or impactful enough ability if it even gets buffed enough to be picked and Convoke can be

[09:06] argued to be the only cool thing Feral received in this eight-year time span. I'm not even sure Feral necessarily needs new buttons or procs, although I would super welcome them. I would be more than happy to have talents like

[09:20] [music] be way more impactful and good enough choices where I can decide if my cat will deal slightly less AoE damage for more funnel damage or explode in Uncapped AoE as the monster we we it can

[09:35] be. But alas, we don't have that choice, and we stopped having that choice in Dragonflight when Tear Open Wounds was taken away, which was the counter pick to Rampant Ferocity at the time. The groundwork is there. These talents just

[09:49] need to be impactful enough where your choices on the finisher feels like it matters outside checking the damage meter at the end to confirm that you did okay. The second crime that I want to point

[10:02] out that has nothing to do with season 2, but rather a lack of love for feral druids and all druid specs to be fair, is that we don't have new cat forms. I will die on the hill that says cats, bears, and owls need a new form every

[10:16] time we get a new tier set. No shapeshifting druid can take advantage of a set's appearance for obvious reasons, and if every class gets a new appearance to match the [music] tier set, why don't we? To be fair to

[10:29] Blizzard, if we had a new form every patch, druid would turn into a Pokémon after three expansions. The devs would run out of ideas of what to make. We already see that in some of these thinker tier set appearances that seem

[10:43] taken out of a failed Chinese mobile game. But maybe at least one per expansion. Leave a like if you agree because we need to find reasons to get you to hit the thumbs up on our video since

[10:55] can't really think of anything better at this point. Outside you watching our most fun melee DPS video we just released in case you want a different flavor, besides the who does more damage. And you can find that right here

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