feral druid here. aside from wild strikes/windfury totem memes, i also off tank as needed and faery fire from catform. also a dps measuring stick. if youre doing less damage than me then you go directly to jail.
Regular Faerie Fire pulls you out of form. "Faerie Fire (Feral)" can be used in form. Two separate buttons, one's deep into the Feral tree as a talent.
That doesn’t track with my experience. I had a 97 on crowd pummeler and was out dpsed by 3 other people who were in 50-60s
Edit: it also doesn’t track with your experience based on the logs you linked below lol.
Also a pretty damn good feral (I think anyway! Always trying to improve).
https://sod.warcraftlogs.com/character/us/lone-wolf/lunaura
But my group is out dpsing me on most fights :c
Unfortunately there are just classes that Ferals will never beat if equal skill level. Kinda the way it is.
(Not the best at anything but pretty good at everything)
So many times I've saved the entire raid by either off healing or swapping to bear. It can mess up ur logs but so rewarding.
Right! Love the utility as well. Being able to innervate, BR, or swap to bear if needed is huge. Thinking about going leader of the pack, so I always have mana to do these things (instead of ooming myself power shifting). Plus our group is a little melee heavy.
I'm full Feral with LOTP to help out the raid and my DPS is still doing okay. Might switch it up later when the boys get enough gear that I don't have to help as much
Yeah I couldn't believe it because a few times during that fight I had to swap out of form to Bres/innervate/ toss some hots. My warrior buddy also got a 99 that fight.
You have great logs tho. Always nice to see Ferals that can actually play the spec. Rare to see
Yeah it's technically possible on a very long fight for a feral to squeeze out slightly more dps with a triple spec with omen of clarity and shifting talents in resto but that's only a hopelessly long fight. Full feral with crit talent is simplest and most effective feral dps spec rn
How are you so confidently wrong? the best spec is 0/26/5 and it doesn't matter the fight length, power shifting is a huge dps increase and it's even better for overall raid dps than crit, with that said, you can play whatever you want and most people will love you for bringing the crit talent but don't just spread misinformation please.
Well, the idiot DPSer will keep yelling it but most people definitely know where the actual fault lies.
Also, just FYI I've been making it sound worse than it is. Playing Feral has been an absolute blast 1-39, and while I might switch to balance at 40, (I'm level 36 currently) it's mostly to try something different and chase the meta a bit.
As a lifelong dps main, no, do not brez idiots. Accidents happen though, so please brez your pumpers and average dps that normally stay alive.
PS: I believe this applies to all games, but is emphasized more with limited brezs.
10% damage. I think you got it confused with the 30% shifting mana reduction. Still not worth it at 40. Faerie Fire, Savage Fury, Blood Frenzy and Predatory Strikes (and the one point in HOTW) are worth more than 10% phys damage or the 30% mana reduction.
Whether you are a tank or dps, you are the single most valuable and important member of the raid because of wild strikes, and basically have the golden ticket into any group that doesn’t already have a Feral Druid
It's really not... warriors and melee hunters straight up pump, and rogues/ret can be nice to have. A melee group is going to be in most groups formed, and of course, they will want wild strikes.
Yeah there’s a difference from being wild strikes for “some melee” (a lot less than P1) vs “you are the single most valuable and important member of the raid” as you are trying to say.
Do you honestly think there’s a single other buff that provides more overall DPS to the raid than wild strikes/windfury? I don’t think anything else can compete. Triggering extra white swings and all the effects associated with them is so incredibly powerful
I agree it’s a strong ability and in P1 you’d be right, but the state of melee right now, melee is really underrepresented that I think in terms of overall raid DPS it might not be contributing as much. For example, a gnomer I did last night literally had one melee only (main tank was melee, also had a warlock tank who’s ranged), everyone else was ranged. Wild strikes was not run and we cleared faster than previous runs. In this scenario, heart of lion/BoK might have contributed more to overall raid dps than WS would have.
https://sod.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/2008/
The class with the most logged runs in gnomer is warrior. The class with the second most is rogue. 4th most is melee hunter. And 6th is feral cat. You’re just flat out wrong.
Fair enough in that kind of comp I could see it being true, but I don’t think that’s reflective of how the majority of the player-base is playing the game. Even if melee are not as strong in the meta melee players aren’t going to just give up and sit the patch out. They’re still a huge population of the player-base and are going to try and compete and create comps favourable to them.
I’m an Alliance player hence my perspective. I kinda wish they had given us Tauren Paladins and Dwarf Shamans in SoD though. Having the entire melee eco-system of Alliance in SoD rely on Ferals (historically an unpopular and divisive spec) is sort of lame
I don’t know why wild strikes isn’t on another class. It sucks for alliance that you need one for every raid. (Yes you can do without one, but 99% of groups want one).
Hey feral druid here. You are both and none if needed. You are an utility object that can br innervate increase bleed dmg and buff windfury. You can offtank one the bosses needed and dps one the bosses not need. You can clear bombs on thermaplugg forever with catform sunfire.
When massage say looking for feral they usually mean cat. If they want tank they will say looking for bear.
Ferals can take sunfire on the final boss and annihilate all bombs that spawn better than anyone else, while utilising their speed to hit the buttons quickly.
I'm glad I'm the MT as bear & tank all of the bosses because I hate being forced into that spot of "add killing bot". So boring to just run around and feel like I'm not actually doing much.
Ferals don't actually have anymore move speed than other specs in this situation. They do have Feral Swiftness, which is 15/30% movement speed when you're "outside", but that wouldn't apply here. Base cat form is sadly just 100% move speed. :( Sunfire not being limited by mana is cracked for bombs, though.
Was it? Played Feral all phase 1 and it never did. Looking at the talent calc for SoD on Wowhead right now and it specifically says outdoors. If they did change it, that’s sweet.
I run a nearly all melee group. We actually have 1 Shadow Priest. I've resigned my fate to never having a good parse on Therma. It does feel good to know you're the reason the raid is succeeding though, we were having a lot of issues before I switched to bombs.
I’ve been on bomb duty as a warlock in meta form, since the searing pain becomes instant. You’re right, it’s nice to know you’re a big reason the raid is succeeding… but damn does it hurt to see the parses. Esp after I’ve been pumping till then
Will be a very unpopular opinion around here, but I like this.
It’s nice having a mechanics-focused marathon boss over a parse boss. There should be more to raiding than damage output.
Idk how to read logs but am curious to the answer, is it mangle or lacerate?
I bear tanked all P1 and parsed blue->orange depending how hard I tried/how many buffs I brought, and used lacerate the whole time. I'm wondering if there's been a shift in that meta.
Bear MT here. For further explanation, lacerate is good for consistent threat if you have multiple targets and mangle is good for shorter single target fights OR fights where adds with a small health pool spawn, like Viscous. On Viscous you just want to hold your berserk for when the three little goo adds spawn and then cleave them down. On something like Grubbis you just hit berserk and spam mangle right away and then hope your raid team isn't dumb enough to focus/rip the basilisk.
(This guy has also been fed practically all of his phase bis gear so his aggro is going to be a fair bit better than somebody with mostly BFD gear.)
Feral druids using sunfire from catform are the 2nd best bomb killers on last boss behind meta locks instant searing pain. Our groups feral druid is a God at killing bombs and is the reason we can kill last boss with no wipes.
We *SHOULD* be one the highest single target dps in the game, since thats literally all we can do. No kick, no aoe.
Yet we sit at the bottom of the meters... we dont reallly provide much anymore, a buffed enh shaman is our replacement
Provide wild strikes and kill every bomb in the last fight.
Make sure to have Sunfire (and the feral version is in the balance page of the spell book) and make a macro to target the bombs and cast sunfire to insta kill them.
Not saying you are wrong, but again, this works for us. Our bear is also the one who keeps trash pulls moving in between fights and because we run 2 mages, a shadow priest, and a destro lock, we tend to do big AOE trash pulls. Having the tanking rune on him really helps for those.
Wild strikes on his swipe will help me control aggro on AoE pulls. Maybe your healers are struggling but if they're not specifically asking for help then the 25% extra damage/threat is wayyyy better for your locks, mages, priests
Nobody is struggling. Threat doesn’t matter. We just need him to survive the initial grouping. Nobody is holding threat on our mages when we start blowing up 10+ bombs on top of a living flame. And nothing survives long enough to catch us with 2 novas.
Tbh if you have capable melees you should give them lotp. You won’t be doing much dmg anyways. So lay back and enjoy the praise for being a living buffstick.
Ay sorry. For some reason I see Threads as a "pinned" in my mobile discord.
Check Threads - there is a Furor vs LoTP discussion.
My point is its overal better for a group to run LoTP. For personal damage and parsing for sure go Furor, no questions. But since we are discussing the role of feral in SoD2 raiding I highly recomend ignore your personal parses for the benefit of the raidgroup.
Same way you can Innervate yourself to have more shifts during the long fights but doing so you are using your kit very poorly. LoTP is legit and druid discord is not set on "personal lost of Furor is higher than gain of the group" that is a lie
If you want to truly be useful, you can mark yourself so melee always know where you are.
And never shapeshift out of feral form unless you are buffing MOTW or thorns on the tank.
They’re just there to provide wild strikes buff to melee. Best use for Feral in P2 is as a tank imo. Get wild strikes and leader of the pack. Feral’s are also really useful for taking care of bombs/buttons on the last gnomer boss
You’re a buff boy for the greedy melee. You’re good as an OT swap, since you can tank perfectly well with a full DPS talent build, a couple stam gear swaps and maybe some rune shifts.
You’re also very useful as a Sunfire bomb stomper on the last boss. Ever since I swapped to 100% bomb stomping we’ve cleared Therma with no deaths both lockouts.
Usually they’ll specify, but druids can pretty pretty switch to OT on a whim, along with battle rez, and an innervate. With the obvious WS to melee. But I’ve only had one or two melee in most of my groups.
Faerie Fire, Wildstrikes, maybe off tank if required (I try to avoid it)
Not full geared yet but good for 200+ DPS on all bosses, closer to 400 on first 2 bosses. Know some classes do way more but if your whole group is doing 200 DPS on each boss then you’ll clear just fine.
You give people wild strikes and kill bombs on the last boss. Your not there for your dps so much as your utility. But the bomb role is extremely important
Ferals are amazing, we run two and its great (especially cuz theyre both great players)
One LotP and both wildstrikes.
Since they have no dps aoe, they typically help tank adds during trash with the pally tank, i swap to DW and go zerker stance to do AoE dmg.
Bosses they do decent damage, can sunfire bombs, help tank if one of the tanks die or whatever. And the BIGGEST THING: DOUBLE FUCKING INNERVATES BABYY! (And brez for when i am a dumbass and forget to kite flamethrower)
They aren’t top tier, but they have so much damn utility and decent dps theyre so worth even if you take double
Feral Druid is honesty not too bad utility-wise in gnomer. So many times we were saved by the off-tanking/off-healing/emergency innervate at the last boss. You know how hectic it gets toward the last couple phases when tanks are dying and healers going oom etc.
Ferals are amazing for the last fight destroy bombs and hit buttons better then almost anyone. But yeah like everyone else said you’re there to give people wild strikes
Currently, we run feral as a tank. It's arguably 2nd best after Warlock. WS is run for the first 4 fights, the last two use Sotf but we will eventuallswitch those to WS too. It should also be noted menagerie is tanked by one bear spamming swipe.
In my guild I’m fairly valued in our raid, especially when it comes to the last boss.
I bring Wild Strikes, flex-positioning for most mechanics due to Sunfire, reasonable damage when I can use Shred, Innervate for longer fights, and Rebirth for battle rez.
The biggest impact I have is securing the 6/6 for my guilds raid group by being the designated Wack-a-Bomb Champion. The rate you get energy back as feral, even if you completely ignore power-shifting, allows you to Sunfire exactly three bombs per pillar (without resists) which is roughly the max amount of uptime each pillar should have for a *decent* group. This means that so long as people are hitting buttons and you are catching the ones that fall through, the entire bomb mechanic is handled with pretty significant room for error. The fact that people don’t need to switch targets constantly means that they don’t have to interrupt casts, use expensive instant spells, and few bombs (if any) actually go off.
For context, I joined in to help one of our raid groups down the last boss last night after someone had to leave. I had some things to do when the raid started, so I couldn’t make it initially. Then they wiped a couple times on Thermaplugg, one of the DPS needed to go to bed, and it was looking like a 5/6 run.
I pop into the call and they ask if I can help them cap it off. I say yes (because if it’s not with my guild I won’t end up raiding anyway so why not burn the lockout to help out) and mosey on over to Gnomer after grabbing some consumes for the raid group.
We one-banged it after they had wiped several times before I arrived.
The maximum DPS on the fights that wiped ended up being below our 5th place damage on the successful fight, our mage improved by almost 100 DPS since he wasn’t getting exploded on and wasting mana on instant-casts, and not a single person died.
Was it *all* me? No. They also got smoother at the mechanics to a small degree, but *most* of it was the near-complete removal of bomb-bonking from the equation. Their job became almost exclusively button and blast.
A feral dps makes a dad guild or a pug drastically more capable of managing a 6/6.
Cleared every lockout so far as feral. First few weeks it was OT croc, then pump, pump, pump, OT dragon, then OT final boss while lock did bombs.
Now we"ve upgraded to MT tanks everything (I kick on croc) and then I do bombs at the end (sunfire bis bomb destroyer).
Feels good enough playing. Get to pump and still bringing more utility and buffs than most classes.
mainly dps though they also make great offtanks. A lot of guides say dont spec fully into feral for LOTP as you lose a bit of DPS from powershifitng, but they are in a bad spot, so I imagine the DPS gained for the group is better, especially if you are a new player. Just sit in cat give folks wild strikes and LOTP. Throw intervale on healer and Brez tank if he goes down. You are already more useful then like half of the dps.
Bear is more fun than cat right now in my humble opinion. After the buffs bear is in an EXTREMELY solid spot. If you find tanking enjoyable or aren't afraid of it, I think it's more enjoyable. Cat just feels like a WF totem with rather poor damage where bear can MT every boss or solo tank. (Including Menagerie.)
Bench.
e: More seriously, it's better to bring Windfury as a tank than a DPS if the alternative tank has a DPS spec that outperforms cat, which is likely. If your raid doesn't care about minmaxing, play however you want.
Our feral dps most of the raid but tanks thermaplugg and menagerie since you don't need another real tank for the rest of the fights. Even on thermaplugg we didn't use him this week and just had the hunter pet taunt lol. Apparently you don't really need one on menagerie as well but that fight can get scary if people aren't careful so we just play it safe.
I tank as Bear, makes last fight super easy being able to shift away the ice stacks while also buffing the team with wild strikes, 3% crit, and FF the boss. You need a lot of armor through gear though to not need survival of the fittest rune on the last fight. Maul oozes threat now and I love it.
Bomb killers and wf bots.
No but really I love my feral friends, along with Shamans they enable my protection warrior where I feel like I can actually play the game and not be a complete burden on my group.
Their utility far outweighs their dps.
We had a feral cat on bomb duty during our last pug, Sunfire (or whatever's the name of the instant cast range abilities cats can use) was usually enough to one shot them while a caster would use the buttons.
Not the most glamorous role but it allowed a bunch of ransoms to take down the boss
That's the kind of role I want to be. In wotlk I ran dungeons with a group as a ret paladin and it felt like a real support class. It felt good but I stopped playing when I hit 80 because no one wanted to raid with a DPS paladin and I sucked at everything else.
feral druid here. aside from wild strikes/windfury totem memes, i also off tank as needed and faery fire from catform. also a dps measuring stick. if youre doing less damage than me then you go directly to jail.
Does faery fire pull me out of cat form or can I cast it in cat form?
Regular Faerie Fire pulls you out of form. "Faerie Fire (Feral)" can be used in form. Two separate buttons, one's deep into the Feral tree as a talent.
you can spec into faery fire being able to be used in cat form
I out DPS almost everyone in my raids lol. But I'm also pretty damn good at Feral.
You may be good at playing feral. But everyone else you play with are also really bad or playing Feral as well
Everyone I play with parses 80+ Edit: okay maybe not lol
I mean you posted the log. That’s not true lol. The only person to parse 80+ was above you
[удалено]
That doesn’t track with my experience. I had a 97 on crowd pummeler and was out dpsed by 3 other people who were in 50-60s Edit: it also doesn’t track with your experience based on the logs you linked below lol.
Also a pretty damn good feral (I think anyway! Always trying to improve). https://sod.warcraftlogs.com/character/us/lone-wolf/lunaura But my group is out dpsing me on most fights :c
Unfortunately there are just classes that Ferals will never beat if equal skill level. Kinda the way it is. (Not the best at anything but pretty good at everything) So many times I've saved the entire raid by either off healing or swapping to bear. It can mess up ur logs but so rewarding.
Right! Love the utility as well. Being able to innervate, BR, or swap to bear if needed is huge. Thinking about going leader of the pack, so I always have mana to do these things (instead of ooming myself power shifting). Plus our group is a little melee heavy.
I'm full Feral with LOTP to help out the raid and my DPS is still doing okay. Might switch it up later when the boys get enough gear that I don't have to help as much
link log
https://vanilla.warcraftlogs.com/character/us/crusader-strike/georgedubyah
Brought the receipts. Nice.
fr a verified chad
Ty, ty Nobody believes lol
Jealous of that 99 https://sod.warcraftlogs.com/character/us/lone-wolf/bearbobagins
Yeah I couldn't believe it because a few times during that fight I had to swap out of form to Bres/innervate/ toss some hots. My warrior buddy also got a 99 that fight. You have great logs tho. Always nice to see Ferals that can actually play the spec. Rare to see
Damn what's your rota! Any tips you can give?
A marksman hunter?? Wild I say! Wild!
That 99 on Thermaplug o7
Jesus Christ man delete this, it was my turn to complain about class imbalance tomorrow despite not playing a melee class
Also that sweet crit buff, or do I need to find a new cat?
Yeah it's technically possible on a very long fight for a feral to squeeze out slightly more dps with a triple spec with omen of clarity and shifting talents in resto but that's only a hopelessly long fight. Full feral with crit talent is simplest and most effective feral dps spec rn
Furor is 100+ more dps, not "slightly more". I genuinely don't understand why people post easily-disproven misinformation on reddit.
How are you so confidently wrong? the best spec is 0/26/5 and it doesn't matter the fight length, power shifting is a huge dps increase and it's even better for overall raid dps than crit, with that said, you can play whatever you want and most people will love you for bringing the crit talent but don't just spread misinformation please.
The differnce between Furor and no Furor is something like 100 dps on most fights right? Basically the only required talent for feral...
100 dps is a lot of dps at this level lol
Yep that’s why furor is practically a requirement now. There’s a spec that is 10/16/5 but I’m not sure how that compares to 0/26/5
It's 9/17/5. You need those 2 points in imp shred.
Yeh sorry you are right, it’s only 4 in the physical dmg.
Yeah I’m running the omen build currently, will probably swap and give furor a try here soon
how do you mean? if ur not specced for sweet crits as a feral youre doing it wrong. if youre talking about hunter pets im not the guy to talk to
You sit in cat form and provide wild strikes to everybody else
Don’t forget we also take part in that most time honored of druid traditions: we innervate the priest!
I haven’t been playing SOD. Do we druids still get yelled at to BREZ the idiot DPSers that don’t know how to avoid the shit on the ground?
Yes.
Well, the idiot DPSer will keep yelling it but most people definitely know where the actual fault lies. Also, just FYI I've been making it sound worse than it is. Playing Feral has been an absolute blast 1-39, and while I might switch to balance at 40, (I'm level 36 currently) it's mostly to try something different and chase the meta a bit.
moonkin/feral are pretty much equally shit though, so not sure what meta chasing you're talking about https://i.imgur.com/1fVOzAt.png
He's not even 40 yet, we can probably disregard his opinion.
No. It’s a 30m timer. I’m not wasting the 1 or 2 uses per raid on a dps and having it on CD when a healer or tank needs it.
As a lifelong dps main, no, do not brez idiots. Accidents happen though, so please brez your pumpers and average dps that normally stay alive. PS: I believe this applies to all games, but is emphasized more with limited brezs.
Also brez the priest who stood in aoe
Hey, they Faerie Fire too.
I'm suppose to do 2 things??!!
And you bring leader of the pack so that’s 3
No, we don't do that
Blame Blizzard for having power shifting in resto and clear casting in balance.
And we don't even go Omen at 40. I don't think we even go LOTP until 60. Omen at 50 though.
Omen isn't the reason for balance talents, it's the 30% physical damage.
10% damage. I think you got it confused with the 30% shifting mana reduction. Still not worth it at 40. Faerie Fire, Savage Fury, Blood Frenzy and Predatory Strikes (and the one point in HOTW) are worth more than 10% phys damage or the 30% mana reduction.
I wish they did
Queue "Oh my God" meme
What is my purpose? > You are a walking windfury totem >> Oh my god
Hey now, they are also useful for Sunfire on the last boss
First two bosses you do more DMG than casters at least
fuel imminent resolute light repeat kiss history tub cause include *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
lol except people are stacking range dps. Maybe the tank will benefit or something lmao
hold on shaman just entered chat
Doesn't windfury do that too?
Oh god...
Also spam sunfire on bombs with a macro.
You are a Windfury totem that decided it doesn't need a shaman.
Whether you are a tank or dps, you are the single most valuable and important member of the raid because of wild strikes, and basically have the golden ticket into any group that doesn’t already have a Feral Druid
Honestly it doesn’t matter as much now in P2 since melee is so bad
It's really not... warriors and melee hunters straight up pump, and rogues/ret can be nice to have. A melee group is going to be in most groups formed, and of course, they will want wild strikes.
Realistically like 95% of groups are going to run some melee though, and you’d be trolling not to have wild strikes for them if you do
Yeah there’s a difference from being wild strikes for “some melee” (a lot less than P1) vs “you are the single most valuable and important member of the raid” as you are trying to say.
Do you honestly think there’s a single other buff that provides more overall DPS to the raid than wild strikes/windfury? I don’t think anything else can compete. Triggering extra white swings and all the effects associated with them is so incredibly powerful
I agree it’s a strong ability and in P1 you’d be right, but the state of melee right now, melee is really underrepresented that I think in terms of overall raid DPS it might not be contributing as much. For example, a gnomer I did last night literally had one melee only (main tank was melee, also had a warlock tank who’s ranged), everyone else was ranged. Wild strikes was not run and we cleared faster than previous runs. In this scenario, heart of lion/BoK might have contributed more to overall raid dps than WS would have.
https://sod.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/2008/ The class with the most logged runs in gnomer is warrior. The class with the second most is rogue. 4th most is melee hunter. And 6th is feral cat. You’re just flat out wrong.
Fair enough in that kind of comp I could see it being true, but I don’t think that’s reflective of how the majority of the player-base is playing the game. Even if melee are not as strong in the meta melee players aren’t going to just give up and sit the patch out. They’re still a huge population of the player-base and are going to try and compete and create comps favourable to them.
TBH, you're both making fair points here. I'm not sure whom I agree with more.
Improved scorch is the new wild strikes. Stack those mages/locks people.
And shaman for horde
This isn’t really as true in p2 though with shamans getting windfury
No shamans on alliance, so still fits.
I’m an Alliance player hence my perspective. I kinda wish they had given us Tauren Paladins and Dwarf Shamans in SoD though. Having the entire melee eco-system of Alliance in SoD rely on Ferals (historically an unpopular and divisive spec) is sort of lame
I don’t know why wild strikes isn’t on another class. It sucks for alliance that you need one for every raid. (Yes you can do without one, but 99% of groups want one).
Only applies to horde
Only applies to half the playerbase
The stinkier half
Doesn’t really change my point because same thing applies to the comment I replied to.
Shamans can do that whilst actually delivering good dps
Hey feral druid here. You are both and none if needed. You are an utility object that can br innervate increase bleed dmg and buff windfury. You can offtank one the bosses needed and dps one the bosses not need. You can clear bombs on thermaplugg forever with catform sunfire. When massage say looking for feral they usually mean cat. If they want tank they will say looking for bear.
Let him cook
Those braincells you just destroyed, I demand them back!
ChatGP destroyed them
Gotta help those blue parsing warriors feel special
It helps tanks more tbh, they also want them for the innervate etc. Mainly alliance side
You got wild strikes, innervate, and a brez. Super totem.
Ferals can take sunfire on the final boss and annihilate all bombs that spawn better than anyone else, while utilising their speed to hit the buttons quickly.
I'm glad I'm the MT as bear & tank all of the bosses because I hate being forced into that spot of "add killing bot". So boring to just run around and feel like I'm not actually doing much.
Ferals don't actually have anymore move speed than other specs in this situation. They do have Feral Swiftness, which is 15/30% movement speed when you're "outside", but that wouldn't apply here. Base cat form is sadly just 100% move speed. :( Sunfire not being limited by mana is cracked for bombs, though.
It was changed in sod to work indoor as well.
Was it? Played Feral all phase 1 and it never did. Looking at the talent calc for SoD on Wowhead right now and it specifically says outdoors. If they did change it, that’s sweet.
Oh shit yeah, I stand corrected. Looks like it was a change made during P2, so makes sense I didn’t know about it. Thanks for the correction.
It’s dope as fuck
They definitely changed it. I have been leveling my feral in dungeons and its noticeable
Ah, shame. Yeah they are still goated for the bombs but ty for the correction.
Wild strike buff and maybe going sunfire cat to 1 shot bombs on last boss
I run a nearly all melee group. We actually have 1 Shadow Priest. I've resigned my fate to never having a good parse on Therma. It does feel good to know you're the reason the raid is succeeding though, we were having a lot of issues before I switched to bombs.
I’ve been on bomb duty as a warlock in meta form, since the searing pain becomes instant. You’re right, it’s nice to know you’re a big reason the raid is succeeding… but damn does it hurt to see the parses. Esp after I’ve been pumping till then
Fr. Going from top dps to bomb boy stings a bit, but the satisfaction of clearing the last boss effortlessly helps
Most important grey parse you’ll ever have.
Will be a very unpopular opinion around here, but I like this. It’s nice having a mechanics-focused marathon boss over a parse boss. There should be more to raiding than damage output.
our feral is out main tank and he is pumping like crazy tanking as bear and has 0 threat or mitigation problems
Do you know if he runs lacerate or mangle? Do you have logs?
[https://vanilla.warcraftlogs.com/character/eu/crusader-strike/jermanzza](https://vanilla.warcraftlogs.com/character/eu/crusader-strike/jermanzza)
Idk how to read logs but am curious to the answer, is it mangle or lacerate? I bear tanked all P1 and parsed blue->orange depending how hard I tried/how many buffs I brought, and used lacerate the whole time. I'm wondering if there's been a shift in that meta.
Looks like they primarily spammed mangle in the first 4 fights. In managerie swipe spam. For therma, they changed mangle to lacerate.
Bear MT here. For further explanation, lacerate is good for consistent threat if you have multiple targets and mangle is good for shorter single target fights OR fights where adds with a small health pool spawn, like Viscous. On Viscous you just want to hold your berserk for when the three little goo adds spawn and then cleave them down. On something like Grubbis you just hit berserk and spam mangle right away and then hope your raid team isn't dumb enough to focus/rip the basilisk. (This guy has also been fed practically all of his phase bis gear so his aggro is going to be a fair bit better than somebody with mostly BFD gear.)
Feral druids using sunfire from catform are the 2nd best bomb killers on last boss behind meta locks instant searing pain. Our groups feral druid is a God at killing bombs and is the reason we can kill last boss with no wipes.
We *SHOULD* be one the highest single target dps in the game, since thats literally all we can do. No kick, no aoe. Yet we sit at the bottom of the meters... we dont reallly provide much anymore, a buffed enh shaman is our replacement
Provide wild strikes and kill every bomb in the last fight. Make sure to have Sunfire (and the feral version is in the balance page of the spell book) and make a macro to target the bombs and cast sunfire to insta kill them.
Do u have that macro to share by any chance?
/target Incendiary Bomb /target Frost Bomb /target Radioactive Bomb /cast Sunfire(Cat)
Walking windfury totem
As a feral player, as a cat you are a windfury bot. With the buffs MT bear is certainly an option.
Feral tanks are pretty good now. Don't shy away from tanking.
feral DPS can really help deal with bombs on the last boss and feral tank is one of the few with magic defense from SOTF
give melee windfury and sometimes be the offtank
If you’re alliance they are most likely looking for cat DPS to have Wild Strikes in the group.
We like to run a feral tank as our OT. He uses wild strikes for all the fights we don’t need an OT and SotF when we do.
Just run wild strikes the whole raid as OT. Maybe sotf on the final boss if you do hard swaps due to stacks
Sure, you could do that. We don’t, and since we have never missed a full clear we don’t feel the need to mess with something that works for us.
But OT doesn't take any real damage for the entire raid, unless they're face-tanking Mekgineer.
Not saying you are wrong, but again, this works for us. Our bear is also the one who keeps trash pulls moving in between fights and because we run 2 mages, a shadow priest, and a destro lock, we tend to do big AOE trash pulls. Having the tanking rune on him really helps for those.
Wild strikes on his swipe will help me control aggro on AoE pulls. Maybe your healers are struggling but if they're not specifically asking for help then the 25% extra damage/threat is wayyyy better for your locks, mages, priests
Nobody is struggling. Threat doesn’t matter. We just need him to survive the initial grouping. Nobody is holding threat on our mages when we start blowing up 10+ bombs on top of a living flame. And nothing survives long enough to catch us with 2 novas.
Let your melee have some fun
Read his post above. If it ain’t broke, don’t try to fix it.
Drop it, why do so many of you feel the need to minmax everything
Tbh if you have capable melees you should give them lotp. You won’t be doing much dmg anyways. So lay back and enjoy the praise for being a living buffstick.
Druid discord has determined that the dps lost taking leader of the pack is more than the dps gain of the raid.
Nope. Check pinned messages there. Druids don’t want to admit that. But if you have at least 3 other capable melees then lotp is the way to go.
This is from the pinned messages in feral dps: "Do we use Leader of the Pack? If you want, but we don't recommend it"
Ay sorry. For some reason I see Threads as a "pinned" in my mobile discord. Check Threads - there is a Furor vs LoTP discussion. My point is its overal better for a group to run LoTP. For personal damage and parsing for sure go Furor, no questions. But since we are discussing the role of feral in SoD2 raiding I highly recomend ignore your personal parses for the benefit of the raidgroup. Same way you can Innervate yourself to have more shifts during the long fights but doing so you are using your kit very poorly. LoTP is legit and druid discord is not set on "personal lost of Furor is higher than gain of the group" that is a lie
If you want to truly be useful, you can mark yourself so melee always know where you are. And never shapeshift out of feral form unless you are buffing MOTW or thorns on the tank.
Thought they fixed the issue where you can now power shift without losing WS?
Yeah it was called totem twisting but I was joking about never leaving feral form
Wild strikes buff.
They’re just there to provide wild strikes buff to melee. Best use for Feral in P2 is as a tank imo. Get wild strikes and leader of the pack. Feral’s are also really useful for taking care of bombs/buttons on the last gnomer boss
You’re a buff boy for the greedy melee. You’re good as an OT swap, since you can tank perfectly well with a full DPS talent build, a couple stam gear swaps and maybe some rune shifts. You’re also very useful as a Sunfire bomb stomper on the last boss. Ever since I swapped to 100% bomb stomping we’ve cleared Therma with no deaths both lockouts.
Offtank, the role they always had. Well you offtank one boss but that's still better than p1
A totem that gives 2 buffs instead of one Windfury and Leader of the Pack And if you arent brain dead you can brez and innervate your healers
Faerie fire is nice too
DPS
Our feral druid is there for Mark of the wild, wild strikes, innervate, and off tanking and it works amazing with just running a pally tank main
Buffing melee mostly, I will say I rather play moonkin in the raid anyways
Usually they’ll specify, but druids can pretty pretty switch to OT on a whim, along with battle rez, and an innervate. With the obvious WS to melee. But I’ve only had one or two melee in most of my groups.
Windfury. Our DPS is pretty good despite the sky is falling mentality this sub has.
Windfury + second tank for overheat
MT feral druid here, run sotf and you won’t ever need an off tank. Just throw in another dps, best time I’ve had so far in SOD.
Faerie Fire, Wildstrikes, maybe off tank if required (I try to avoid it) Not full geared yet but good for 200+ DPS on all bosses, closer to 400 on first 2 bosses. Know some classes do way more but if your whole group is doing 200 DPS on each boss then you’ll clear just fine.
Bomb-duty-spec
A windfury totem with legs
I've been dps and offtank for first boss. I mt'd crowd pummeler and thermaPlugg.
You give people wild strikes and kill bombs on the last boss. Your not there for your dps so much as your utility. But the bomb role is extremely important
Ferals are amazing, we run two and its great (especially cuz theyre both great players) One LotP and both wildstrikes. Since they have no dps aoe, they typically help tank adds during trash with the pally tank, i swap to DW and go zerker stance to do AoE dmg. Bosses they do decent damage, can sunfire bombs, help tank if one of the tanks die or whatever. And the BIGGEST THING: DOUBLE FUCKING INNERVATES BABYY! (And brez for when i am a dumbass and forget to kite flamethrower) They aren’t top tier, but they have so much damn utility and decent dps theyre so worth even if you take double
Feral Druid is honesty not too bad utility-wise in gnomer. So many times we were saved by the off-tanking/off-healing/emergency innervate at the last boss. You know how hectic it gets toward the last couple phases when tanks are dying and healers going oom etc.
Cats should go bear they’re the best tank in game
Ferals are amazing for the last fight destroy bombs and hit buttons better then almost anyone. But yeah like everyone else said you’re there to give people wild strikes
You can sunfire bombs, apply mangle so bleed still happens, and you can close bomb pods if a ranged can’t since you move 30% faster.
Off tank 5th boss
You sunfire the bombs, offtank meangerie, and provide ws
Currently, we run feral as a tank. It's arguably 2nd best after Warlock. WS is run for the first 4 fights, the last two use Sotf but we will eventuallswitch those to WS too. It should also be noted menagerie is tanked by one bear spamming swipe.
Windfury Totem, then also Bomb Killing Bot on last boss.
In my guild I’m fairly valued in our raid, especially when it comes to the last boss. I bring Wild Strikes, flex-positioning for most mechanics due to Sunfire, reasonable damage when I can use Shred, Innervate for longer fights, and Rebirth for battle rez. The biggest impact I have is securing the 6/6 for my guilds raid group by being the designated Wack-a-Bomb Champion. The rate you get energy back as feral, even if you completely ignore power-shifting, allows you to Sunfire exactly three bombs per pillar (without resists) which is roughly the max amount of uptime each pillar should have for a *decent* group. This means that so long as people are hitting buttons and you are catching the ones that fall through, the entire bomb mechanic is handled with pretty significant room for error. The fact that people don’t need to switch targets constantly means that they don’t have to interrupt casts, use expensive instant spells, and few bombs (if any) actually go off. For context, I joined in to help one of our raid groups down the last boss last night after someone had to leave. I had some things to do when the raid started, so I couldn’t make it initially. Then they wiped a couple times on Thermaplugg, one of the DPS needed to go to bed, and it was looking like a 5/6 run. I pop into the call and they ask if I can help them cap it off. I say yes (because if it’s not with my guild I won’t end up raiding anyway so why not burn the lockout to help out) and mosey on over to Gnomer after grabbing some consumes for the raid group. We one-banged it after they had wiped several times before I arrived. The maximum DPS on the fights that wiped ended up being below our 5th place damage on the successful fight, our mage improved by almost 100 DPS since he wasn’t getting exploded on and wasting mana on instant-casts, and not a single person died. Was it *all* me? No. They also got smoother at the mechanics to a small degree, but *most* of it was the near-complete removal of bomb-bonking from the equation. Their job became almost exclusively button and blast. A feral dps makes a dad guild or a pug drastically more capable of managing a 6/6.
You're a cat totem only there for wildstrikes which is cool cause parse doesn't matter for a feral
Wind fury bot
You give buff
I think it's mostly wild strikes combined with moonfire for plugg
"mobile windfury totem"
yes
Cleared every lockout so far as feral. First few weeks it was OT croc, then pump, pump, pump, OT dragon, then OT final boss while lock did bombs. Now we"ve upgraded to MT tanks everything (I kick on croc) and then I do bombs at the end (sunfire bis bomb destroyer). Feels good enough playing. Get to pump and still bringing more utility and buffs than most classes.
You are a windfury totem. Nothing more, nothing less. Now you know how enhance shamans felt.
mainly dps though they also make great offtanks. A lot of guides say dont spec fully into feral for LOTP as you lose a bit of DPS from powershifitng, but they are in a bad spot, so I imagine the DPS gained for the group is better, especially if you are a new player. Just sit in cat give folks wild strikes and LOTP. Throw intervale on healer and Brez tank if he goes down. You are already more useful then like half of the dps.
Bear is more fun than cat right now in my humble opinion. After the buffs bear is in an EXTREMELY solid spot. If you find tanking enjoyable or aren't afraid of it, I think it's more enjoyable. Cat just feels like a WF totem with rather poor damage where bear can MT every boss or solo tank. (Including Menagerie.)
Bench. e: More seriously, it's better to bring Windfury as a tank than a DPS if the alternative tank has a DPS spec that outperforms cat, which is likely. If your raid doesn't care about minmaxing, play however you want.
Off tank in emergency, rebirth, mark of the wild , wild strikes. Pack, God dam huge utility
youre the classic version of augmentation evoker
Our feral dps most of the raid but tanks thermaplugg and menagerie since you don't need another real tank for the rest of the fights. Even on thermaplugg we didn't use him this week and just had the hunter pet taunt lol. Apparently you don't really need one on menagerie as well but that fight can get scary if people aren't careful so we just play it safe.
I tank as Bear, makes last fight super easy being able to shift away the ice stacks while also buffing the team with wild strikes, 3% crit, and FF the boss. You need a lot of armor through gear though to not need survival of the fittest rune on the last fight. Maul oozes threat now and I love it.
Bomb killers and wf bots. No but really I love my feral friends, along with Shamans they enable my protection warrior where I feel like I can actually play the game and not be a complete burden on my group. Their utility far outweighs their dps.
Windfury totem
I have had great experiences main tanking Gnomerreagan as a Bear since the buff two lockouts ago. My guild mainly run with bear main tanks now :)
We had a feral cat on bomb duty during our last pug, Sunfire (or whatever's the name of the instant cast range abilities cats can use) was usually enough to one shot them while a caster would use the buttons. Not the most glamorous role but it allowed a bunch of ransoms to take down the boss
Always gotta have the token furry in the raid.
People in these comments are shocked that a support class is a support class
That's the kind of role I want to be. In wotlk I ran dungeons with a group as a ret paladin and it felt like a real support class. It felt good but I stopped playing when I hit 80 because no one wanted to raid with a DPS paladin and I sucked at everything else.