We break down all the reasons you should consider playing Feral Druid in Patch 10.1 and even throw in a few reasons of why you might not. From all the changes since launch to the new tier set bonuses coming in 10.1, join us as we explore Dragonflight Season 2 Feral Druid!
Why You Should Play a Spec in Dragonflight Season 2 Series
Preservation Evoker
Beast Mastery Hunter
Arcane Mage
Assassination Rogue
Protection Warrior
Dragonflight Season 2 Druid Tier Set
Why You Should Play Feral Druid in Dragonflight Season 2 (and Why You Shouldn’t)
Dragonflight was probably the most optimistic I’ve been for this spec in an extremely long time, the new talent trees and the statements by the dev team promised a return to a better era of feral, it really felt like the issues that people had with the spec were understood by the development team and were being addressed. The new talent tree promised a return to a more iconic feral playstyle.
Unfortunately for a variety of reasons across season 1 this proved both true and untrue. Feral was a very strong spec in M+ across the entire season and a very lackluster spec in Raid, I don’t think a lot is changing in Season 2 but we’ll talk about both the positives and the negatives and what it means going forwards into season 2. I don’t want to be overly negative but at the time of writing this article I’m definitely feeling a bit negative about the spec going into Season 2.
Why you SHOULD play Feral Druid in Dragonflight Season 2
If you enjoy how feral currently plays on live then good news, very very little is changing. The spec’s receiving some changes to how Berserk Functions but the spec largely plays the same as it currently does on live.
What does Feral Bring
I know this is technically the section about why you SHOULD play feral but its important to be honest I think. Feral is in a bit of an odd spot, I actually think it brings a lot of tools and utility, and it even has a raidbuff! However it’s a bit awkward because everything it brings it shares with a healer, a tank, and a ranged dps spec on the same class. So while this spec has a lot of tools its quite frequently not the best way to bring those tools.
However feral does bring a lot of tools, Dragonflight is really the first expansion where we’ve been able to share everything that other specs on the class bring, Feral has been locked into Balance Affinity for, well actually pretty much always since affinities were introduced. With the Dragonflight the class tree we’re finally free to pickup some of the utility locked behind the other Affinities. Incapacitationg roar, Ursol’s Vortex, and Typhoon are all obtainable providing a solid boon to the control feral brings to a key or a raid.
Of course I can’t forget to mention the big one. Innervate, feral finally once again has access to Innervate, it’s been a while since this was the case but finally we can rejoice. Nature’s Vigil is another returning talent, in fact in keys this might be a significantly stronger gain than Innervate. This is an extremely powerful utility option for dungeons since a lot of feral’s aoe damage is actually secretly single target damage.
The druid class also has a Raid buff in the form of Mark of the Wild, which will continue to encourage groups to use at least 1 druid, being more of a boon in mythic + content where not all groups can expect to have a druid present.
Where is Feral Strong?
Currently Feral’s niche is largely in sustained AOE, the more targets the better. The way the tree is set up and the way Feral’s abilities function mean that sustained AOE is really where we shine, our Single target is pretty mediocre and where we really sink down is when burst AOE is required. Because our strengths are focussed around sustained aoe it means that M+ is the area where feral currently excels the most. Almost everything in our kit really excels in the environment that M+ provides. This is a bit of a shift from almost all of the spec’s lifetime but starting in season 1 and going further into season 2 I think it’s even more so the case now. For raid this is a bit concern, the bosses we’ve seen so far are largely very single target focussed and there’s very little sustained AOE.
The Berserk Change
Berserk is being changed in 10.1 for Season 2, rather than the current live iteration where you count as stealthed for the duration (and thus only affected shred, rake, swipe) and finishing moves refund 2 combo points it now “Go Berserk for 20 seconds. While Berserk: Generate 1 combo point every 1.5 seconds. Finishing moves restore up to 3 combo points generated over the cap. Shred and Rake damage increased by 50%. Combo point generating abilities generate one additional combo point.”
This is a pretty positive change for a variety of reasons, While it doesn’t have a significant impact on the rotation it does do a few very positive things, as it’s no longer a stealth tag it now means that we can use talents like Sudden Ambush in berserk rather than completely ignoring it, you’re less discouraged from using abilities that aren’t Shred, Rake, or Swipe. While this doesn’t completely redefine how you play the game it does make it slightly better.
Why you SHOULD NOT play Feral Druid in Dragonflight Season 2
I don’t REALLY mean why you shouldn’t play the spec, I more so want to give you an idea of what the downsides to playing this spec might be and what problems you might face while playing the spec in season 2, its a bit hyperbolic.
Feral Druid Tier Set
Oh boy. The Feral Tier set for 10.1 is so incredibly dull and uninventive that when it was first revealed i was SO CONFIDENT that it was a placeholder. It is insane to me to this point that it wasn’t. There have been trinkets that have been more enjoyable than this set bonus. At it’s core the set bonus is really just stacking agi on auto attacks.
(4) Set Bonus – Druid Feral 10.1 Class Set 4pc: When a Shadows of the Predator application resets stacks, you gain 5% increased Agility and you generate 1 combo point every 2 seconds for 8 seconds.
The set is incredibly dull. When it was first released it was so boring and uninspired that I was confident it was a placeholder. Especially when noise was made in blue posts that sets in 10.1 were supposed to have more of an impact on the rotation. When I looked into it the set bonus was even cloning the berserk spell ID that was added for the new berserk function, this was changed in a very late build to a new set bonus and as a result this is apparently going live
This set bonus is unconscionably BORING, and the only impact it has on the rotation is to introduce a somewhat awkward ticking combo point generation that results in combo points being frequently wasted. It’s spectacularly unfun to play with and almost enforces weakauras to track the combo point timing if you want to get any benefit at all out of that aspect of it. To add onto this though its numerically not even particularly strong while also having pretty significant issues with how it functions, i.e. it’s not uncommon (especially in m+) to have the 2pc drop off without proccing the 4pc.
I still can’t get over the fact that this was green lit to go live as the final product. This set bonus is a huge source of frustration to me and it’s lack of changes is incredibly discouraging. You’ll equip this because the ilvl increase will make it better but you’re unlikely to be happy about it.
The Raid
Where does Feral excel? What’s our niche. Currently we’re good at fights that are sustained multi target with targets that live a long time, we’re OK at fights that are primarily single target, we’re bad to terrible on fights that have one primary target but intermittent low health adds. This is due to the way the talent tree works, with our AOE requiring a pretty heavy investment of points that do little to nothing on single target. Unfortunately the raid looks to have a LOT of the exact kind of fights that I’d point at if i wanted an illustrative example of what fights feral under-performed on.
It seems that to go along with baseline poor tuning the raid looks NOT GREAT if you’re hoping to shine in raid. If this is your preferred content its yet another reason to be pessimistic about the upcoming patch.
How has the Playstyle changed since launch?
At Launch Dragonflight Feral was one most enjoyable iterations of the spec I’ve ever played. I was incredibly positive about it, it was a triumphant return to Feral caring deeply about bleeds, there was an interesting set of abilities and plenty of things to optimise without I think being overly punishing. For really the first time in recent memory Feral had superb AOE to the extent that it looked like it was going to be a huge strength. It really looked like a golden new age for Feral was dawning.
Now of course it wasn’t perfect, the spec still had problems, it was somewhat undertuned on single target, there were some talents that were tuned poorly, the class tree was BAD (still is) but it was an incredibly promising start. Since then however it’s really only gotten worse. The rotation is gradually backsliding to no longer caring about bleeds to optimising almost entirely around bite damage to the extent that we ran Lion’s Strength over Bloodtalons. Fortunately that at least is being somewhat addressed with Bloodtalons making a somewhat muted return in 10.1 however it’s accompanied by talents like Thrashing Claws removing an entire button from the rotation, at the cost of talents like Brutal Slash. The rotation might be marginally better to the live 10.0.7 rotation but it’s a far cry from the promise we had at launch.
I can sympathise with the issues faced by the tuning team, after all Feral’s single target and AOE are overly entangled to the point where there are very few areas you can tweak the speak in one without affecting the others and Feral’s strength in M+ means it warrants very few AOE buffs. Really the spec needs the attention of someone who can untangle some of the interactions. Split out Rip and Primal Wrath, reduce some of the areas where the spec is tangled up. It also needs a lot of attention in the class tree area which has been bad for the entire expansion so far.
Final Words
Since Legion there are two times where I’ve been genuinely pessimistic about Feral Druid going into a new tier, I was even very positive about Uldir, (A tier that is now bordlerline legendary for being bad for feral), Sepulcher and this tier are those two times. Sepulcher it turned out we discovered a bug that gave us about 15% more damage than we were expected to have (Jewelled Signet of Melandrus bug that wasn’t discovered until season 4) and so as a result we ended up good. Barring finding a similar bug this tier (unlikely) I’m extremely concerned about Feral’s performance in the next tier.
10.0 Feral was one of the most enjoyable iterations of feral we’ve ever had, it was a little undertuned on st, but it was FUN. Since then the changes to the spec have only made it less enjoyable and to make matters worse they’ve also just made it worse. This is genuinely the first tier I’ve EVER played where going into the tier I wish I’d prepped another class and this is VERY hyperbolic but it does represent my true feelings on the spec for this season. The class tree is incredibly neglected and it seems like they have very little intention to address it, I’ve felt this way since launch but recent reworks to other class trees have only driven home just how terrible it is. There’s massive problems in the spec tree with both the balance of certain talents and the impact other talents have on how the spec is balanced.
While I’ve been very negative about the tier set it’s really just the straw that broke the camels back on a very disappointing patch cycle. The spec is numerically worse than it has been earlier in the expansion, it’s also less enjoyable, shifting back towards a shadowlands era bite spam rotation. Hopefully at the very least feral will receive some tuning before the tier that makes it more attractive but so far the issues I’ve described going along with an underwhelmingly tuned spec have me concerned about the patch.
Since writing the bulk of this post Feral did receive some tuning, the tuning moves the damage distribution somewhat to a more positive place but it’s so conservative as to have minimal to no impact on Feral’s general performance, despite the buffs this remains the most pessimistic I’ve felt about a spec going into a tier. In my 10.0 iteration of this post I made a joke about how feral needed “urgent buffs to be usable in progression raids.” and how i thought that there was “still enough time before raid and M+ opens for feral to get the buffs it needs” unfortunately when I say it this time I don’t think I’m joking.
If you’ve managed to make it all the way here I’m sorry for what was a fairly negative overview of the upcoming patch, the content outside of looking at Feral Druid looks great, hopefully there are some last minute changes that nullify everything negative I’ve read here and we can enter a more positive period.
About the Author
My name is Guiltyas, I’m currently raiding in Pure-Turalyon, where I joined towards the end of BFA. I’ve played Feral Druid since Wrath of the Lich King when I first picked it up as a main spec, since then I’ve engaged in almost all aspects of the game, from RBGs, to Challenge Modes, to Arena’s, and of course to fairly high end raiding (around world 100 at the moment).
I’ve been an active and enthusiastic member of the feral druid community since discord heralded a new era of engagement among spec communities, I’m fairly well respected as a source of information and back that up with a long record of high end feral performance, I’ve claimed multiple rank 1’s across different fights in different raid tiers, I’ve obtained Gladiator in the past (legion season 1), and now have a long history of providing information and help about about Feral Druid.
I’m enormously enthusiast about the spec and you can find me talking about Feral (passionately) in a few different places, Twitter, my stream, and of course the Dreamgrove Discord!
I enjoy walks on the beach and this is really what makes me reliable on the subject of Ferals! I do not own a cat 🙁 but do appreciate them.
For more information on playing Feral Druid, please see our class guide updated for Dragonflight:
Feral Druid Guide
