Feral is pretty weak right now, and has been getting fairly regular buffs or fixes.  Honestly though it seems like it’s going to need quite the rework and I’m not sure why it hasn’t happened before now.  Many classes have gotten more and more simplified as times goes on and feral just hasn’t.  For example in MoP it was so complicated to play, I literally could not do it.  You had skills to use in front of a target, another for behind, another while only in stealth, that kind of thing.  Then in WoD they baked in a few skills together and I could play it much  better (I keybind around 30 skills) and it was frankly OP.  Now I did not play it in Legion, but I’m maining druid with feral/resto in BFA and it feels no different at all.  Nothing was made easier.

Of course I don’t play ALL the classes but I play a number of them.  I played fire and frost mage, I played hunter MM and BM, I played disc, shadow, and holy priest.  I’ve previously played MW monk, holy/ret paladin, resto shaman, and even rogue a bit.

What gets me about feral compared to other classes, is how complicated it is. To start with, your skills all use energy and you have only 100 to work with.  Some build combo points, but many use/require combo points.  Honestly at this point in the game it’s TOO MUCH.

Here’s an example of a regular rotation, ok? You’re in prowl and you open with Rake (35 energy) to apply the rake bleed and stun the target, that gives you 1 combo point (cp).  Then I would Shred (40 energy) for another combo point, and Moonfire (30 energy) for another cp  and we’re at only 3 cp’s right now.  Maybe we get lucky with a proc that gives us a free Shred and we’re at 4 cp but we still need another to do the BEST.  And mind you, this entire time everything we hit is eating up our energy and we’re tracking the Rake and Moonfire dots.  If we want to then apply Rip, we want to be at high energy and 5 cp. That means doing a bit of auto attack to get the energy up or using Tiger’s Fury. Rip does the most damage at 5cp and takes another 30 energy and takes all your CP to use.

Now you’re probably needing to refresh Rake and Moonfire (65 energy) and work your way up to another 5cp to use Ferocious Bite which eats up 5 cp and 25 energy. If you also took the talent, Sabertooth, it would refresh Rip saving you all that energy and cp to apply it again.  Now, let’s say you didn’t take that, but instead used Savage Roar.  Well in addition to having to keep up Rake, Moonfire, Rip (and possibly Thrash for aoe) you’d have to manually keep up Rip AND use energy and cp to apply Savage Roar.  I’m not sure how it’s even possible to juggle ALL OF THAT.

On top of all that, it doesn’t even stop there.  We also have a stun called Maim which  you guessed it, takes energy, 35 of it, and does the best with 5cp.

So basically EVERYTHING you do eats at your energy like crazy  and half of the skills eats your CP and  you have to juggle all your bleeds on top of that.

We’re getting a 5% buff coming up but seriously, just redesign some stuff, please?  I mean it would be like when I get a Flurry proc on my mage, it would empty my mana bar or something.  It’s just outdated at this point.

In my opinion, make it one or the other on some skills.  Ok fine Shred, Rake and Moonfire take energy to create CP.  And Bite and Rip and Maim take the CP.  But ffs, make bite, rip, and maim NOT use energy!  Or… give us Savage Roar as baseline like we had in WoD.  Or something!