The State of Feral PvE DPS in 4.06

Apologies if this reads a little wish-listy, was originally posted on the official forums before I decided to cross post here. Suggestions aside I feel it still highlights the current issues with Cat DPS.

I wanted to lay out the current issues I feel are affecting Feral PvE DPS. I know there are a couple of threads around already that cover some of these but I wanted to do it anyway, if only to get it off my chest. The perspective I’m typing from is that of a semi-casual 25 man raider at 4/13 heroics. Some of these issues are less pronounced in normal but I feel they’re still there.

Feral DPS is in a pretty bad state at the moment. Simulationcraft.org puts it very low both in 4.06 and the sim based on the 4.1 PTR data. If you strip out the duplicate specs we’re at 19th out of 23 specs in the 4.06 sim and in 4.1 due to other classes being raised up, we drop to the very bottom 23rd out of 23 unique specs (the only ones below us are 1h Unholy, Frost-frostfire and fire-frostfire, but 2h unholy, normal fire and normal frost are above us). Obviously this isn’t the only thing that should be looked at when assessing it because that assume a fight you stand still the whole time, but it gives a rough idea. You can also consult stateofdps but that is less accurate due to Dark Intent, the sample size and the ease of obtaining (H) Malevolence compared to other classes 372 weapons. But on a stand still fight we sim at over 5k less than the number 1 spot. This is bad not only because of our low standing, but because typically our single target DPS is our strong point and our AoE is where we’re weak.

I personally believe the spec needs a ground up redesign but I can’t see that happening mid-expansion. So many things feel like holdovers from the past from Feral being almost unplayable (the odd off tank role) in vanilla, to strong tanks and poor DPS in TBC, to a viable, complicated and fun DPS spec in WotLK, to a viable and less fun DPS spec in Cata. We still are plagued by scaling issues that we had back in TBC. We still have fewer abilities in form than all other similar DPS and Tank specs.

Outside of the pure numbers, we’re also plagued by quality of life issues either as a hangover from the journey the Feral tree has taken from vanilla to now, straight up bugs that have gone unfixed, to the boring playstyle the spec has suffered since 4.06. I’ll start with the bugs and quality of life stuff and move on to broader problems further down.

1) Rip: I think the first thing to say is that Rip, and Glyph of Shred, are currently bugged in a pretty bad way. Rip, which isn’t affected by haste, yet it will frequently tick a varying number of times, usually 1 more or less than normal, per application. This is almost certainly a problem caused by Glyph of Shred’s renewal of Rip and adding two seconds to it. It will also frequently drop off the target before it is supposed too. That is to say a Rip ticking on a boss with anywhere from about 2 seconds remaining can and often does just disappear. Not only is this an issue for bleed uptime, it has an especially annoying interaction below 25% with Ferocious Bite via Blood in the Water where you’ll be trying to refresh it with FB but it drops off, your FB goes off and you’re sat on zero CP with no Rip up, although the 4.06 fix to Blood in the Water at least makes this less frequent.

Glyph of Shred seems to be a continuing source of bugs and it’s never really worked properly.

A further issue with Rip is that you can’t overwrite it if you applied it with a more powerful buff like Potion of the Tol’vir. This is not how Rake works and I believe almost all classes already had the “A more powerful effect is already on your target” errors removed. I should be able to overwrite Rip whenever I want and not be restricted. The two problems caused by this are that when pre-potting your first and maybe second Rip will get the potion, but then you have to wait for it to completely fall off to reapply it. The other point is if a boss is going to an air phase (Say Atramedes) and I’ve got 4 CP on it and a 5 CP rip with a few seconds left, we should be able to overwrite it as we please. There is no need for hand holding here, let Rip act exactly like rake in this regard and let me overwrite it with however many CP I choose.

2) Strength of the Panther: This is our T11 bonus. A lot of people have a problem with this being from Mangle and not Shred. Personally I’m okay with it being off Mangle, because it makes the spec at least a bit more interesting with 1 more thing to watch. What I’m not okay with is the fact that it drops off when I leave Cat form. If this is to prevent some shenanigans with keeping it in Bear form, make Bear form clear it. Although I more suspect it is just an oversight as we’ve had in the past with other self buffs, Idol buffs and the like dropping off in caster and they were all fixed. This too needs the same treatment, it needs to persist in caster form to allow us to utilize Combat Res and Innervate without having to ramp up again with 3 mangles.

3) Ferocious Bite: This ability simply isn’t worth using at the moment, except to refresh Rip through Blood in the Water sub 25%. This in no uncertain terms has killed the Feral playstyle. There is no more John Madden, no more skill in weaving in FB’s between Rip and SR refreshes without losing uptime on either. The heart of the spec has been ripped out here. The Cataclysm changes to extend the durations of our buffs and debuffs made the spec more newbie friendly, with which I was okay if not thrilled. But this is a step too far and the spec is just too dumbed down.

Ferocious Bite needs a buff to once again be in our rotation. I’ve heard some fears it may be too strong for Arena if buffed, but as I understand it Ferals were removed from Arena anyway so it would be unlikely to change anything. Another suggestion thrown around would be that SR affects it, making it tougher to pull off in PvP whilst not really mattering to a PvE Feral.

4) Savage Roar: Whist I’m okay with the extensions to the duration to make the spec easier to pick up, the change to SR just makes it feel too inconsequential. If in WotLK I let Savage Roar drop my DPS plummets and I’m punished for it. In Cata it is the last priority to get up now, and even if it falls off it doesn’t make that much of a difference.

I’m not sure what I’m asking for here or even whether something should change, it may just be a case of me wishing for the older style Feral DPS.

5) Shred: The positional requirement on Shred is an antiquated relic of an older time. It either restricts boss design in having to ensure that a boss’ back can be accessed or you put Ferals at a huge disadvantage. I’ve not got to Sinestra yet but I’m unsure whether you can Shred on her, it doesn’t look like it from the video but maybe a more progressed Feral could fill us in there. What I have experienced is Heroic: Maloriak which whilst irritating for a whole phase of AoE to be covered later, the Red phase involves spending a lot of time in a group in front of the boss. You can run behind in between but it just feels like an unnecessary annoyance to have to use Mangle fillers when waiting for him to use his fire breath attack. There are also a ton of bosses that will constantly spin around to cast spells or hit the raid in some way. For other melee this usually doesn’t mean a thing, the odd parry as they finish maybe. For us it means our Shred suddenly gets an error message and we either reposition, cap energy or mangle. Of course this can be avoided by spending energy before hand but it just feels like another unnecessary annoyance.

It isn’t just the loss of DPS in the difference between Shred and Mangle either. Glyph of Shred extends Rip, in a situation where we have to Mangle, it also means we must reapply Rip much more frequently.

6) Skull Bash: Whilst I don’t want to sound ungrateful for finally receiving a viable interrupt, Skull Bash is plagued by issues at least from a PvE perspective. For a start, its base CD is far too long. I don’t feel we should have to invest two talent points just to make it a weaker and more expensive version of Kick. If the worry is about Resto getting a 10 second interrupt, this seems to be out the window now anyway with Holy Paladins getting one. If it is a concern, add it into the Feral talent bonus. You can keep the talent adding the extra seconds on stuns and the mana increasing effect as a PVP talent.

I’ve also found the interrupt has a very noticeable delay on it. I presume this is due to it being baked into a charge and there being some small travel time no matter how close you are to it. This makes it worse than other interrupts (I believe Mind Freeze suffers the same issue however?) again.

The energy cost is absurd at 25 energy. We need to wear the PvP gloves just to make it viable really. I can see this cost is probably due to the charge component which is why I suggest below a glyph to separate these two parts, or you could have Brutal Impact add the charge and make it just a melee range interrupt as a base spell.

Lastly, when I last checked the interrupt still isn’t properly tracked in the combat log. Not only does this mess up recount, it messes up certain mods that will announce who interrupted and the like.

7) AOE: Our AoE is pretty damn awful right now. After the 4.1 buffs it will be the worst, or second worst there is. Other classes that suffer poor single target generally can at least compete on AoE fights, but not us. Swipe simply isn’t sustainable for a prolonged AoE situation like Maloriak’s Black phase. The ability is pretty similar to FoK but they seem miles apart. At the moment I’ve found Swipe useless in the Black Phase and have resorted to simply continuing single target rotations on whatever slime has the highest HP. Pre-4.06 tab-raking provided a somewhat okay way to keep up in AoE situations but since the nerf its fallen behind. The other option to all that would be some sort of version of Pestilence to spread weaker bleeds to nearby targets.

For a basic quick fix I’d suggest a slight decrease in the energy requirement of cat swipe to start with, to make it something we can sustain through a minute long AoE scenario like every other spec can. I’d suggest adding a Thrash (Cat) ability that will spread bleeds like the bear version. A final change would be to increase the damage of Swipe on targets afflicted by Thrash (Cat). This would allow both a slightly more interesting (if still fairly dull) AoE rotation and an AoE that in some way scales with our Mastery.

8) Target Switching: I still feel this is a bit clumsy for Ferals. It isn’t so bad as it used to be but I still think in situations where changes are expected we come off one of the worst of all DPS specs. Warlocks got a spell to carry their dots with them. I’m not necessarily suggesting a copy of that, but maybe some consideration would be good, maybe something like Pestilence or a combo point transfer spell. Perhaps this wouldn’t matter so much if our DPS was generally more competitive.

9) Stampeding Roar: This ability has gotten a lot of bashing since its implementation. I’ve never been on the band wagon that it’s totally useless, and the recent buffs certainly make it more attractive, but the biggest problem of all is still present. 10 yards range is simply too small for this to be terribly useful in raids. I’ve used this when corpse running in BWD and had people almost right next to me on the screen miss out the buff. When both targets are moving it seems the range is barely 5 yards never mind 10. A small increase to 15-20 or so would be greatly appreciated, even if it takes a Major Glyph.

10) Primal Madness: The DPS gain on this is pretty awful. A lot of ferals have a problem with this. I don’t personally mind so much as I like the spare points it gives to put into utility and survivability talents which you’d lose were it a mandatory DPS talent. But really it should be looked at, at the very least it shouldn’t remove the energy at the end of the duration.

11) Glyphs: I’ve covered a few glyphs above but let’s go into a bit more detail. Glyph of Shred is a big source of our problems. It causes problems making Rip drop off earlier than the UI tells us it will, and it also causes problems in situations where we can’t Shred. The best change that I see would be to alter it to a flat 6 second increase. This would remove the Rip falling off issue as well as removing the problem in situations where we’re forced to Mangle instead of Shred. If you’re unwilling to do that, and the Shred positional requirement is staying, at least make Shred or Mangle add the duration increase.

Glyph of Ferocious Bite is currently a DPS loss (or was pre-4.06, admittedly I’ve not tested since). I don’t see what the function of this glyph is unless it is to stop your whole energy bar disappearing when used in PvP. It feels broken and seems to need a redesign.

Feral glyphs in general are too few and too weak, especially the Major glyphs. I don’t know if this is a result of us effectively being two roles in one tree, and each tree only got a fixed number or something, but I suspect it’s just an oversight. We could do with a bit more choice here, especially in Major glyphs. This applies to Bear as well.

I’d also suggest a Glyph of Skull Bash that would remove the charge component and make it a flat out kick, as well as reducing the energy to 10 or 15 to match Rogues. If possible too to remove the travel time mentioned above.

12) DPS And Scaling: Feral scaling still seems off. We started this expansion just like we did in TBC, really high raid DPS, and just like in TBC as other classes got more gear they swiftly overtook us due to poor scaling. You can blame some of it in Cata at least on the bleed nerfs we received. I just feel Ferals have never scaled properly.

DPS in general is too low. In addition to the above bug fixes and quality of life issues I still feel like we need a knob turning up to 11 somewhere in our mechanics. Ferocious Bite is actually a good place to start, if it was sufficiently fixed to be better than Shred once more. The other obvious place to look would be Savage Roar, which is tougher to maintain in PvP whereas its almost always up in PvE so were that a concern we could be increased there. Mastery isn’t a viable knob to turn for us like it is for other classes given you already threw in a knee-jerk bleed nerf I can’t see you wanting to tune bleeds back up.

Well I’m all typed out now. I’m sure I’ve forgotten some obvious issues but it certainly felt good to put it down on paper as it were.

So as usual, any comments and additions are welcome.