Blizzard
Hi Cats,
We have a number of changes to Feral Druids coming soon. The general goals of these changes are:
- 1. Reduce (but not necessarily displace entirely) the dominance of the big three complexifying and powerful talents: Rugido Selvagem, Feridas Feias, and . Each of those talents is (on live) winning by a large margin in terms of throughput against other talents on their rows.
- 2. Balance out the power level of the last 3 talent rows, allowing more talents builds to be viable.
- 3. Increase the skill floor and reduce how punishing it can be to error when playing the rotation.
- 4. Compensate for power-level-reductions of talents with baseline damage increase to the spec so that at the highest level, performance isn't really affected, but the bottom of the spec is brought up.
The most major changes:
- All damage done increased by 33%.
- Feridas Feias reduced to 20%. (down from 33%)
- Rugido Selvagem duration increased by 50% at all combo points. Damage bonus reduced to 15%. (down from 25%)
- damage bonus reduced to 25%. (down from 50%)
Looking back at the development of Feral Druid in Legion: when
Rugido Selvagem was moved from a baseline ability to the talent tree, in order to bring the power level of the ability closer to most talents (+25% damage to everything for a long duration is far stronger than most talents are), rather than reducing its damage bonus, its duration was significantly shortened instead. This contributed greatly to the overconstrained and overly punishing Feral rotation that you see on live today. Additionally, Jagged Wounds was added as a new talent, reducing the amount of free combo points Ferals had available to finishers such as
(which was basically pushed out of the rotation entirely). Both talents probably would have been fine on their own, but taken together (because they were the strongest) at the live tuning values led to a more pressured Feral rotation than we felt was right.
Additionally, a few talents are being rearranged in the talent tree:
The primary gain here is moving
Talho Brutal to a sort of multitarget/AOE lvl 90 talent row along with
Dente-de-sabre (which can be well-utilized in a sustained low-target situation), giving the lvl 90 row a solid talent for dungeons. For now, we want to go with an arrangement that keeps
Feridas Feias,
Rugido Selvagem, and
on separate rows so the current most common live build is still possible.
Other less major changes include quality of life and tuning adjustments to some talents to balance out the rows:
- Espreitar cooldown reduced to 6 sec (down from 10 sec) for all Druid specs.
- Renascimento is castable in all forms, and consequently, is no longer affected by or consumes Velocidade Predatória.
- Dente-de-sabre damage bonus to increased to 20%.
- Encarnação: Rei da Selva energy cost reduction reduced to 50% (down from 60%) and only allows the use of Prowl once. This it to balance out that talent row with the new Feridas Feias and to reduce the frequency of Espreitar Aprimorado stuns in PvP while still allowing Encarnação: Avatar de Ashamane to function as an effective Sumir.
- Momento de Clareza now causes Presságio de Clareza to trigger twice as often and increases the damage of the affected abilities by 25%. This is to better space out what is essentially a large energy proc and reduce slightly the impact that a single talent has on the resource income and pacing of the rotation.
- Orientação de Eluna cooldown reduced to 30 sec (down from 45 sec) and combo points granted reduced to 5 + 5 over 5 seconds (down from 5 + 8 over 8 seconds).
Overall, with these changes, balance for the last 3 talent rows and consequently overall should be better in general. We expect the current most common build/playstyle of
Feridas Feias +
Rugido Selvagem +
to still remain one of the strongest builds, but it should no longer win by a huge margin over other competing talent builds and also should be a little less strenuous to play.
These changes should be available in an upcoming PTR build. As usual, we may make further adjustments – especially tuning – as PTR progresses.
