BfA Feral Feedback (cont'd)

#1 - Aug. 25, 2018, 3:41 p.m.

First one reached its limit. Wouldn't let me quote. Here's a popular post.

Posted by Gontier
First and foremost I'd like to say that for the past six years I've been a Blizzard Entertainment Forum MVP over at the European region*, so I'm quite knowledgeable about how your communication works, I'm well aware of how to communicate with our fellow players with a "Blizzard mindset", so to speak, etc. I'm also a feral druid, obviously.

Every Voice Matters.
Commit To Quality.

These words.. they're part of what you call your "company core values" that you so proudly claim to hold on to, the points that you aspire to meet when creating new games and/or new content. Today you failed us at both these points.

You've had plenty of time to listen to our feedback, our voices that you claim matter and respond accordingly. You've had alpha, beta, PTR, pre-patch, and now even on live. You know what's even worse? Not once during this time did we receive a post from one of your Community Managers/Developers explaining your thoughts about feral, no matter the sheer value of constructive criticism we gave you, but finally when we're worthy of your attention and get it, you gave us hope with the promise of a "tuning package" which turned out to be a flat damage increase to three abilities, two if you consider that one of said abilities nullifies the other. Not to mention that these fixes does not rectify any of the true, real concerns that we have and want, and even need, fixed first and foremost. Our energy regen, our ST and AoE, our lack of burst, our lack of effective DPS cooldown and how Berserk is almost a dps loss to use due to the GCD (can you just remove Berserk and replace it with Incarnation already, an actual DPS cooldown, please?). How Feral is still the least changed specialization throughout World of Warcraft's history. We're practically the same as we were back in The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King, while most other classes have received substantial updates and big class changes that make them easier live up to today's version of World of Warcraft. We do not.

You took what, most Community Managers would call, a "constructive and well-thought through thread" and didn't treat it with the attention and care that it deserved. It's a good, well explained thread that describes some of our current issues that we, feral players, experience with your game. If you don't find this thread particularly interesting there's plenty of others both on this forum and other social media that we know you take feedback from as well, not to mention the in-game feedback and suggestion tools.

"Takes on the form of a great cat to deal damage with bleeds and bites." That's your definition of the feral specialization in the game and I fail to see where we live up to this anywhere. We're not great, we certainly don't have the bleed damage nor the teeth to have an effective bite. Hell, I'm not sure we can be considered to have claws.

With the Battle for Azeroth pre-patch you removed the artifact and with it everything that made feral even viable and competitive to begin with. Everything that made feral work. I'd like to strongly ask you to review Legion's patch notes for the feral specialization and see that it took almost an entire expansion for you to make us viable in Legion, and that is not okay a second time around.

Learn and Grow is one of your other company core values. Please take that to heart and learn and grow when it comes to feral and what needs to be changed. We really can't bother with band-aid fixes every expansion.

Q&A EDIT: Ion specifically said that we, feral, should not triumph on Aoe, not every specialization is supposed to be superior in every area of the game(hey, I can buy that), but the problem is also that we don't triumph on single target either, nor utility or bring anything "wow" to the table when it comes to raids or Mythic Plus. There's still plenty of fixes we need to see for a long term solution instead of band-aid fixes.

*The MVP program is held by the Blizzard Community Team on their forums, Blizzard Forum MVPs are NOT employees of Blizzard Entertainment.

Can Blizzard please please remove our +50% haste then do a tuning pass around that?

#195 - Aug. 30, 2018, 12:33 a.m.

Feral Druid changes coming soon (this week):

Energy regeneration rate increased by 10%

Rip damage increased by 15%

Berserk duration increased from 15 to 20 sec

Brutal Slash cost reduced from 30 to 25 energy

Swipe cost reduced from 40 to 35 energy

Thrash cost reduced by from 45 to 40 energy, and damage reduced proportionally

We’re reducing the energy cost of Thrash but also proportionally reducing the damage. The goal is easier ramp-up time in AOE situations, while avoiding causing Thrash to be added to the single target rotation (since it's close to Shred's Energy to damage ratio), which we think wouldn’t make for a better overall rotation.

The spec's hidden 50% increase to Haste secondary stat value reduced to 25%.

This helps alleviate a secondary stat scaling issue, and both the Energy and damage loss should be overcompensated for by the increase to base Energy regeneration rate plus the other changes listed. We eventually want to remove this hidden bonus entirely, but since players have already made gearing choices based on Haste being their best secondary stat, we don’t want to upset that in the short-term, so we’ll do this in two parts.

The sum of these changes is intended and expected to be a increase in Energy income, pacing, and damage in all situations.

Other issues we've been talking about (future patch timeline):

Better consolidate Energy-increasing and heavy pacing-impacting talents into the same row, and reduce the pacing impact that a single talent hasThe goal is to reduce the Energy/pacing swing between different talent builds, which allows us to bring up the bottom without letting the highest Energy/pacing talent build with endgame/late expansion gear to get near overflow range
Better separate Single Target talents and Multitarget Talents into their own rowsThis is slightly more of a challenge on Druid specs than most specs, due to Druids having only 4 throughput talent rows (compared to most specs having 5), but it's a goal we have for all specs.
Provide better AOE talent optionsEchoing suggestions - a combo-point spender is a possible direction. There may be an additional opportunity to do something with Thrash here. It functions as an enabler, but could be doing even more for the spec.
BloodtalonsBloodtalons does a great job at adding complexity to the rotation, but we're not sure the method in which it does that is right for the spec long-term. Bloodtalons asks you to frequently cast a Regrowth in exchange for its buff, which in a group/raid, means either you're required to keep an eye on group/raid frames (which is a lot to ask) or you make a macro to mindlessly cast Regrowth on yourself (which isn't great).
Remove the spec’s bonus to Haste secondary stat (currently on live 50%, soon to be 25%) entirely. Re-adjust Energy/pacing to compensate.Mentioned above, but now that Bleeds scale with Haste, it's both no longer needed to make Haste a relevant stat for Feral, and is also contributing to expansion-wide scaling issues.
Remove cat form’s 40% bonus to auto-attack damage.This contributes to feedback that abilities don't hit hard enough and have low Energy to damage conversion ratios.

Note that as we've mentioned before, we're watching overall class tuning and plan to make a general tuning pass later next week.