Feral Druid PvE

[positiv2 952]

This thread is for comments about our Feral Druid Shadowlands Guide.

[Raz415 0]

Just to clarify, when taking Primal Wrath you do not use Ferocious Bite or Rip at all? Do you only use it to maintain Rip or is the damage that it does up-front good enough in AoE to make it the only finisher you use? Do you "waste" damage if you cast Primal Wrath too early?

[wordup 37]

13 hours ago, Raz415 said:

Just to clarify, when taking Primal Wrath you do not use Ferocious Bite or Rip at all? Do you only use it to maintain Rip or is the damage that it does up-front good enough in AoE to make it the only finisher you use? Do you "waste" damage if you cast Primal Wrath too early?

In AoE you won't be using Rip at all, Primal Wrath should be the way you sustain it on multiples because it's also dealing some direct damage & is completely uncapped. Because of the lower duration of the Rips too you generally won't be generating enough resources to weave in Ferocious Bites without putting that uptime at risk. Depending on your generation rate you can waste damage if you lose uptime on the Rips, but otherwise nothing is really lost. I'll write up a few more specific notes re: playing it in the rotation page.

[Guest drainage]

I'm here from the dps tier list that puts Feral at rank 22 out of 24.  I'm trying out Shadowlands after falling in love with Feral Druid on Classic so I'm accustomed to the spec doing bad damage, but I'm worried that it will be difficult to find groups who'll actually bring a Feral on board. When a dps spec is rated that low, is it even worth playing? I want to push Mythic+ keys and do Mythic raiding for context. Is there any indication that we might scale well into to the expansion? Thanks.

[Guest Cloud]

On 10/31/2020 at 3:15 AM, Guest drainage said:

I'm here from the dps tier list that puts Feral at rank 22 out of 24.  I'm trying out Shadowlands after falling in love with Feral Druid on Classic so I'm accustomed to the spec doing bad damage, but I'm worried that it will be difficult to find groups who'll actually bring a Feral on board. When a dps spec is rated that low, is it even worth playing? I want to push Mythic+ keys and do Mythic raiding for context. Is there any indication that we might scale well into to the expansion? Thanks.

Do you want to be invited to every group? Then don't play it. Can you find a group as Feral or "insert unpopular spec here"? Yes. There are still people who use their heads instead of blindly staring at lists. Even better, everyone has a key(including you), so you can make your own groups. This is what I did playing prot warrior in early Legion when it was considered one of the worst tank specs in the game, yet I always did well with it. Every spec is completely playable in today's game if you're good enough with it.

[Guest Silly]

In terms of the legendary for cat eye is it better to craft ring or necklace and what missives do I want?

 

[Guest Jin]

First of all thank you for the guide, some questions:

How do you play with bloodtalons and apex predator legendary? Do you treat it as a bonus or when you cast a finishing move and are left with just one stack of bloodtalons look into get two so if apex proccs you have one stack for apex and another for your finisher? 

 

When you get to 4 combo points do you bite so if you would crit on the next generator you wouldn't waste the extra combo point or you bite at 5 combo points every single time? 

 

The "get out of cat, cast moonfire, get into cat" macro is kinda buggy for me, am I pressing it too fast? 

 

Thank you in advance :>

[wordup 37]

On 12/18/2020 at 7:32 PM, Guest Jin said:

First of all thank you for the guide, some questions:

How do you play with bloodtalons and apex predator legendary? Do you treat it as a bonus or when you cast a finishing move and are left with just one stack of bloodtalons look into get two so if apex proccs you have one stack for apex and another for your finisher? 

 

When you get to 4 combo points do you bite so if you would crit on the next generator you wouldn't waste the extra combo point or you bite at 5 combo points every single time? 

 

The "get out of cat, cast moonfire, get into cat" macro is kinda buggy for me, am I pressing it too fast? 

 

Thank you in advance 😆

You want to aim to be consuming Bloodtalons with this - though it can depend on when it procs. Sometimes procs just don't line up and you only have one stack, but it's worth just resetting back to zero CP with an unbuffed Bite and starting over to generate the stacks again rather than waste so much Energy and Combo Points that could lead into another subsequent finisher just to buff the original second Bite.

Shredding at 4 to get to 5 is still on-average worth it instead of gambling that it will Crit for the waste, vs. wasting the multiplier on the 5th CP for the energy investment so still gen to 5 here.

The macro here isn't one we have, if you're talking about the one floating around regarding using Tiger's Fury macro'd to re-enter quickly then some of the problems I've seen involve action bars shifting between forms but not updating - it's largely latency based so your mileage may vary with it.

 

[Guest Phalk]

The guide should not state that Kyrian is the best covenant for Feral when it's clearly not.

Night Fae is the best on all ST situations and very competitive on AoE with Owlweaving.

[wordup 37]

13 hours ago, Guest Phalk said:

The guide should not state that Kyrian is the best covenant for Feral when it's clearly not.

Night Fae is the best on all ST situations and very competitive on AoE with Owlweaving.

Thanks for catching this - the original update was only partial (can be seen in the opening sectiion here:)

 

The other sections should have been removed & altered at the same time but I forgot to push them, they should be in asap which addresses the swap to Night Fae. Apologies if this caused you any issues.

[Guest Tornac]

Any idea weather the ptr changes to Cat-eye Curio make it competitive with the other top tier legendaries?

[wordup 37]

On 3/5/2021 at 5:34 PM, Guest Tornac said:

Any idea weather the ptr changes to Cat-eye Curio make it competitive with the other top tier legendaries?

It improves it but doesn't make it relevant vs. the other more tailored options, it's covered in the Legendary section now it's been updated for 9.0.5.

[chibosader 0]

So it says to use Thrash for applying bloodtalons, or brutal slash... but swipe costs 5 less energy than thrash, +20% more damage on bleeding targets, and, unless you have like... 10+ enemies... it'll deal more damage than thrash right?

[wordup 37]

11 hours ago, chibosader said:

So it says to use Thrash for applying bloodtalons, or brutal slash... but swipe costs 5 less energy than thrash, +20% more damage on bleeding targets, and, unless you have like... 10+ enemies... it'll deal more damage than thrash right?

Thrash ignores armor because it's Bleed damage (and scales with Mastery), and also enables Taste for Blood conduit.

[GreenTouch 0]

Hey, thanks for the guide!  As someone who had one of the top guides for Resto Druid like a decade ago I appreciate the work that goes into it.  Coming back after almost a decade away, I'm leveling again.  I like leveling my resto as feral so I was using your guide, and figured I'd try Hekili at your recommendation.  Problem is, on a single target, it's recommending swipe and thrash?  
That can't ever be right can it?  Or am I missing something.

[wordup 37]

3 hours ago, GreenTouch said:

Hey, thanks for the guide!  As someone who had one of the top guides for Resto Druid like a decade ago I appreciate the work that goes into it.  Coming back after almost a decade away, I'm leveling again.  I like leveling my resto as feral so I was using your guide, and figured I'd try Hekili at your recommendation.  Problem is, on a single target, it's recommending swipe and thrash?  
That can't ever be right can it?  Or am I missing something.

This is probably a question best directed at Hekili himself - the best way to contact him is through his Discord here:
https://discord.gg/3cCTFxM

I'll pass it on to him as well to see whether it's something unusual happening, but often times rotation guides don't play very friendly with levelling situations because of things being missing from the kit that endgame provides. As an example - it should be recommending Thrash largely due to Bloodtalons and by extension the Taste for Blood conduit but these aren't really levelling centric optimizations.

[axil777 0]

just wondering if the buff to Celestial Spirits  makes that a legendary to consider for crafting as a late bloomer in the feral druid class ☻

Edited August 6, 2021 by axil777

[wordup 37]

On 8/6/2021 at 1:26 AM, axil777 said:

just wondering if the buff to Celestial Spirits  makes that a legendary to consider for crafting as a late bloomer in the feral druid class ☻

I really appreciate you bringing this up since I hadn't updated the sections regarding it in the flurry of 9.1 notes as the patch got underway, but yes it's absolutely worth crafting now you have access to it. I'll be amending all the pages related to it today, thanks a lot!

[MrSkullcandy 2]

Quote

This does benefit from pandemic and will pool up extra charges when you refresh it

This is not true, Adaptive Swarm does NOT benefit from any kind of pandemic, it does not give you the 30% duration like pandemic does.
The only thing it does is restart the 12s timer and add stacks, it does and I repeat NOT benefit from pandemic like the guide says. 

[MrSkullcandy 2]

On 8/6/2021 at 2:26 AM, axil777 said:

just wondering if the buff to Celestial Spirits  makes that a legendary to consider for crafting as a late bloomer in the feral druid class ☻

It is by far the best Legendary to craft for PvE, you can use it in all PvE content and only loses to Draught in sims, because of the 30s of Mastery every 1m it is also extremely good in M+ especially because you have it up for every Torment MiniBoss etc, very nice to play. 

[Guest Bulltwiggy]

So while trying some dummy testing tonight on my feral i found that the on use weapon from The Nine is unable to be swapped to or from during combat. other weapons seem to swap just fine, but it appears to work similar to the old corruption weapons not being swappable. Just an fyi as the equipment section still suggests swapping it.

[wordup 37]

On 8/23/2021 at 11:39 AM, Guest Bulltwiggy said:

So while trying some dummy testing tonight on my feral i found that the on use weapon from The Nine is unable to be swapped to or from during combat. other weapons seem to swap just fine, but it appears to work similar to the old corruption weapons not being swappable. Just an fyi as the equipment section still suggests swapping it.

While you can still technically swap it the workaround is a bit more dubious so you're right it probably shouldn't be in the recommended section, I'll amend it.

[Guest Talen build error?]

Why should I train Moonkin form as a feral druid?? This is an error right, it should be the Rejuvenation line?

[Xanzara 0]

The primary reason to  go down the balance part of the tree is to get access to the "Astral Influence" talent which depend on Moonkin form. 3yd extra range may not sound like a lot, but it provides a lot of improved dps potential in many practical situations.

[Guest Raid Talents]

The Feral raid DPS talent tree is flagged as outdated on the Pre-patch.