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: 야생의 포효, 삐죽삐죽한 상처, 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%.
- 삐죽삐죽한 상처 reduced to 20%. (down from 33%)
- 야생의 포효 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
야생의 포효 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:
- 삐죽삐죽한 상처 moved to lvl 75 row. (from lvl 90 row)
- 야생의 포효 moved to lvl 90 row. (from lvl 75 row)
- 잔혹한 베기 moved to lvl 90 row. (from lvl 100 row)
- 엘룬의 인도 moved to lvl 100 row. (from lvl 90 row)
The primary gain here is moving
잔혹한 베기 to a sort of multitarget/AOE lvl 90 talent row along with
칼날이빨 (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
삐죽삐죽한 상처,
야생의 포효, 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:
- 숨기 cooldown reduced to 6 sec (down from 10 sec) for all Druid specs.
- 환생 is castable in all forms, and consequently, is no longer affected by or consumes 야생의 신속함.
- 칼날이빨 damage bonus to increased to 20%.
- 화신: 밀림의 왕 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 삐죽삐죽한 상처 and to reduce the frequency of 숨기 연마 stuns in PvP while still allowing 화신: 아샤메인의 화신 to function as an effective 소멸.
- 청명의 시간 now causes 청명의 전조 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.
- 엘룬의 인도 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
삐죽삐죽한 상처 +
야생의 포효 +
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.