Introduction
Hello I am Cheesey, and I play Feral druid in Honestly, the top Oceanic guild. I’ve played Feral on and off for a long time, but largely came to prominence in Shadowlands showcasing how other covenants were situationally stronger than Night Fae, particularly Necrolord and my ‘beekeeping’ M+ guide which included a vast amount of theorycrafting based on numerous hours of playtesting. I managed to get rank 1 logs in raid as all four covenants, when it was previously assumed only one was viable, and that kind of sums up my approach: think outside the box and never write anything off, and don’t over-rely on sims, always playtest and be creative! It’s a video game, after all.
I enjoy both M+ and raid and will equally cover both here. You can also find me on YouTube, Twitch, and in the Druid discord.
What has changed
Feral Druid Changes for The War Within
Feral has received some pretty significant changes in TWW, some you may love and some you may need to adjust to, but overall I am very excited and optimistic for TWW, as the spec is significantly more fun than Dragonflight (where it was already quite fun), has a better damage-profile, and has even more options to customize how you want to play.
While the list of changes is extensive, a few key ones include:
Tiger's Fury returns to its more traditional role, offering a small burst window that is more limited in duration, as Tiger’s Fury extending and resets have been removed. This more limited window puts more emphasis on snapshotting once more, offering us more interesting decision-making when it comes to refreshing DOTs, rather than trying to keep Tiger’s Fury permanently up as a maintenance buff. There are also many new enhancements to Tiger’s Fury, such as talents like Savage Fury, Tiger’s Tenacity, as well as new effects from our Hero talents (discussed soon).
Energy has been slowed down slightly, as Feral had become quite ‘spammy,’ where traditionally it involved ‘spinning plates’ and managing resources. However the energy nerfs aren’t that significant, and even with a bit more downtime, you have plenty of things to think about and choices to make. This just allows you to have a bit more breathing space to make those decisions.
We also had some improvements to our Feral spec tree, offering more build variety (for a spec that already had some of the best in the game), and improvements to our Druid class tree which allow us to pick up more defensives or utility (albeit we still have to pick up a few useless nodes). We did lose our bonus melee range, but gaining access to perks like Oakskin, Forestwalk, Improved Improved Barkskin, among other things at least soften the blow.
And most significantly, hero talents! Discussed in the next section.