[Feral] Ghostcrawler's challenge

by Deltronzero | 08/09/2008 11:56:23

Ghostcrawler recently challenged us in a neighboring thread:

Q u o t e:
This is intended to be a sincere question to help me understand: What is it you're missing?

The intent of this post is to consolidate the big issues that are repeatedly brought up and make a list.
Some discussions will be tabled in this post because we've had the same reply about them repeatedly: we're not there yet.
Namely, questions about intent in scaling and numbers. They have dials and whatnot.

Example:

Q u o t e:
Cat form dps will be competitive with other dps classes. If you can't take my word for it, I understand, but I'm not sure what else I can offer in that regard.

Like it or not we're waiting, so focus elsewhere. That said, I don't want to short-sell how important it's going to be to all ferals that Blizzard keep their word on this. The way raid buff changes have currently worked out, vast upgrades in dps will be mandatory to bring ferals for any slot other than MT .

I'll try to update this post a few times a day. The idea is to bring up either very specific suggestions about gaps, or core design suggestions about talents and how the class plays. Itemization trends are fair game too. I'll use some discretion in adding ideas to the list, but my hope is to make these things we all want easily accessible and visible to the devs. Please feel free to add to the discussion.

To start are things I've been seeing in dozens of posts a day, for a while now.

1. 51-point talent revision
The effect for the cooldown does not seem to be living up to its potential, becoming underwhelming. Most people are suggesting shorter cooldowns since these are rehashed low-tier talents from other classes.
Additionally, the usefulness of the aoe threat aspect of bear berserk seems heavily marginalized by a 5 minute cooldown. One idea has been to move that component to King of the Jungle and make Bear Berserk a more worthy 5 minute move.

2. Better Tier optimization
The current Naxx 10 gear is confusingly itemized and far from optimal for either spec. As part of the efforts to keep both feral roles scaling over time in LK (that you keep asking us to have faith in), extra care will have to be taken to make our tier sets *optimal*. They were our staple in BC. The Naxx 10 set needs a lot of work. Namely its weird spread of expertise and crit, and AP instead of strength. My personal suggestion has been to make cat and bear feral tier sets seperate, it goes with your roles design philosophy and is a perfect opportunity to give 3 different leather specs (cat, bear, rogue) each their ideal gear. But I'm just one man.
A side note about gear is that we could also use differentiated cat/bear staves (since we are slaves to feral AP). I'm sure I speak for everyone when I say we deserve staves to be kept up to date throghout the raid tiers. Thats in the future, but no more Wildfury Greatstaff in SWP please.

3. Form skins
If for no other reason than the fact that I'm sick of hearing about it. In all fairness we deserve some diversity, and please keep it off glyph slots.

4. Mana in feral PvP
It's gonna be an issue, and there are a million posts about it. I assume you've seen the memo.

5. Talent bloat
It's getting better over time, but its still there. Its hard to spend the 5 extra in resto for MS. And there are still talents that people view as "meh" - such as primal precision, nurturing instinct and ilotp.
As part of the problem, here's a list of core ("must take") 5-point talents eating up a lot of everyone's spec: Ferocity, Heart of the WIld, Predatory Instincts, Naturalist. Making some of those smaller while making cat/bear defining talents stronger could shrink the tree but maintain variety.

6. Tank boredom
Parity in the quest to make tanking "less boring"... there was some quote about reactive abilities, and a show of skill in tanking aside from threat races. We'd still like to see it, just a reminder that we look forward to these developments.

7. Eliminate party requirements on Mother Bear.
Even in the best case that it isn't affected by disconnects etc., it's not overpowered to have that solo mitigation. No spec is likely to have it pvp, not even feral if you keep the tree interesting in further builds. It seems unnecessary, and sometimes its cool to challenge yourself to see what a party of 2-3 can do in 5mans or old raid content. Seems like an unwarranted nerf on a core tank characteristic of an MT spec.

8. Defense
Much support has been expressed for the idea to give us greater dodge/miss returns from defense than other classes that benefit from stat types. The idea is to make it equally useful for all 4 tank classes.

Q u o t e:
If I can let you in on a little secret, there are a number of rabid druids at Blizzard who really have a vested interest in seeing the class succeed. You're in good hands. :)

Our people would like to meet your people.

[ Post edited by Deltronzero ]