Well, I play feral from Vanilla if you could call it "feral" in Vanilla, it is my main character for 12 years, so I played it every expansion to its full, and somehow now it seems that it has lost it's identity and uniqeness but I hope it will be recovered in BfA...
Am I the only one who misses mangle?
I have mained a feral druid since I started playing in WotLK, and the high APM playstyle in 7.3.5 has been my favorite iteration so far. Definitely not looking forward to this return "to its former glory". To me, the Bloodtalons playstyle has always been more annoyingly high-maintenance than fun.
feral again have dead times and aoe problems
One of the few here too. My feral will be sidelined if SR/BT is the only viable talent play. Glad I was around to have experienced feral at it's most fun time.
Guiltyas has written a nice review. Unfortunately, it is heavily biased towards the playstyle he prefers: The bleed heavy playstyle. And it mentions nothing about the hybrid gameplay, which is the true core of paying as a Druid - and therefore, as a Feral. There are some mistakes mentioned in the comments we have to fix. They are connected to the review to some extend. Feral hasn't been a bleed heavy spec since it was invented. That's simply false. Until MoP, Feral was mostly balanced between the damage from bleed and the damage from direct attack abilities. That balance made the spec MORE challenging to play, as you had to master every aspect of the rotation. MoP changed that, and some people liked the change, mostly because they could use knowledge and addons from the community to deliver overpowered DPS, without any serious balancing done by Blizzard, who accepted this state of affairs because the spec was "hard to master". In reality, the spec was way harder to play during WotLK, simply because there were more variables and preconditions to be met to max out DPS. The second misconception is that the majority of players prefer the bleed heavy spec we're now getting. That's a claim which is impossible to proof. However, data from Legion seems to suggest that a lot of players prefer to play the more direct damage Feral we've had since 7.2.5. That's quite understandable: A more balanced spec, with good burst AoE, is simply more flexible and with a higher DPS output. The post 7.2.5 Feral has simply been a much better spec, measured by DPS output and usability. Oh, and please remember: 30% of our DPS was still from bleeds, so you still had to be good at that to max out your DPS. But the one core aspect of Feral gameplay lacking from this review is the hybridity. This has never been important to Guiltyas, but it should be, because shapeshifting had been and should be the most important aspect of playing a Feral. No, not because you should shift in and out of cat all the time - but because shifting into another form and do important stuff before returning to cat has been important for Feral since Vanilla - with the very sad exception of Legion. But that seems to have changed! Our Regrowth seems to heal more, even without Resto Affinity chosen. We have Mangle baseline in Bear form. We have gained an AoE heal with Resto Affinity. And since we will now try to prioritize Haste, we will have a better secondary stat when changing role mid-fight. I would have liked for Guiltyas to have covered that aspect of Feral, but I honestly don't think he cares.
Haha, burst its not weak, there is no burst :) Right now, feral is really low in pvp, everyone can beat them.
After spending the last week leveling a feral 60-100 it feels like blizzard really dropped the ball yes all classes are hurting because of the scaling mistakes but feral feels much weaker and energy starved to the point predator is a requirement just to feel useful in pve. I loved pre patch druids, I haven't played a class this long in years and i was looking forward to playing druid in BFA... Horde and ally but now meh I'm still going to but more turning needs to happen. Yes I know blizzard doesn't pay much attention to anything under existing content levels anymore but feral was enjoyable 1-60 then the patch landed and then overall things felt weaker even when compared to other alts at the same level.
I personally loved the faster-paced Feral from late Legion, or at least having the option to play either that, or a bleed-management spec. Hopefully, we're given the option to do either/or at another point, as hybridization is a core fantasy of the Druid class. Maybe if we ever get some of those dead talents pruned?
I do not dislike slowly and surely advancing rotation now.But, the biggest problem is that it is very difficult to get maximum performance without addons.(e.g. WA2, MaxDPS, CatRotationHelper etc...)I think that dependency on AddOns is Feral's (and DoT spec's) biggest problem.
I see around a third of the damage from bleeds as fairly balanced. In Legion, before 7.2.5, bleeds were 60-70% of our damage. That is unbalanced. In some raid logs, Ferocious Bite was around 1% of total damage done, basically making an all-time low for that ability.
