Feral Druid GuideMidnight Overview
Midnight Changes for Feral Druid
Midnight is coming (read in a dramatic voice), and it's likely the biggest change in Feral's gameplay since the last time they removed snapshotting. Feral isn't the only spec getting significant changes. Midnight is significantly simplifying all specs; some of this shouldn't come as a real surprise. We knew that substantial changes have been coming since the Gamescom announcement. Blizzard made a lot of noise about the impact of addons on gameplay, primarily mentioning Outlaw and Unholy. Feral players have assumed for a while that this would likely lead to significant changes to Feral's core gameplay.
Snapshotting
As a brief explanation for a few expansions now, Feral has been one of the few specs in the game with Snapshotting as a gameplay mechanic. Snapshotting was limited to only a few abilities, but it was there. To keep track of snapshotting, we've used custom weakauras that give us an idea of how strong our bleeds are, or would be if applied now. To be clear, these addons weren't essential to gameplay, but they did enhance quality of life and made the spec slightly easier to play. In Midnight, this is being reduced significantly. Bloodtalons, which has been the primary driver of snapshotting since global snapshotting was removed in Warlords of Draenor, is being removed altogether. This isn't the biggest change. I enjoyed snapshotting gameplay, and I'm thankful we got at least some gameplay out of it in Liberation of Undermine. For the most part, in the last couple of expansions, it's honestly been fairly minimal gameplay impact. The main gameplay impact of Bloodtalons has been in diversifying your generators; however, that can be accomplished in other ways.
I desperately do not want Feral's rotation to degenerate to spamming Shred and Ferocious Bite, but hope that with delicate tuning we can avoid this. Blizzard isn't removing snapshotting altogether though. Tiger's Fury will continue to exist, as will Pouncing Strikes and its stealth interaction, though Sudden Ambush will no longer interact with it. When snapshotting bleeds with Tiger's Fury, a new icon will now indicate that it is a snapshotted bleed. As a Night Elf enjoyer it pains me to admit it, however, I'm not entirely sure why the stealth interaction is staying. We can no longer distinguish between a bleed that is applied with both Tiger's Fury and Pouncing Strikes and it will likely be something you want to play around. The stealth interaction only really occurs now if you're Night Elf with Shadowmeld or when playing Incarnation: Avatar of Ashamane.
Additional Pruning
Adaptive Swarm
Snapshotting isn't the only thing that's being removed for Feral; we're also losing a few other abilities. Adaptive Swarm and Brutal Slash are both being shown the door. Adaptive Swarm's removal is unsurprising, while it had a dedicated fan base it's pretty controversial. Adaptive Swarm has been a fan favourite among certain sections of the community since its introduction in Shadowlands with those who enjoy it praising the mini game that came along with it, maximising the stacks out to ensure you get as much damage as possible out of it, other people however dislike how it felt disconnected from the rotation, didn't like micromanaging the swarms vs the rest of the rotation. Personally, I lean more towards the latter; it always felt disconnected from the rotation, and I wished it had some interaction with our resources. However, I certainly didn't have a passionate hatred for it like some Ferals did.
Brutal Slash
Brutal Slash is a different story, however, while it's not been the same since its glory days in Legion at it's peak, Brutal Slash is one of my favourite feral abilities of all time, and it's a bit sad to see it going out on such a sad note. While I understand that the developers would like to reduce the number of Feral's generators, I do wish that they'd taken this opportunity to return Brutal Slash to it's glory days, a longer CD, massively increased damage, and remove a less satisfying button like Thrash, which now has a 6 second CD and a theoretical 50% damage increase (It's in the notes but for some reason has not been applied to the spell, IDK man). Alternatively, we really need to make Thrash a button that feels cool to press again, rather than its current pathetic state. It's stronger than Shred, I guess, but only just, and nobody's ever happy about pressing it.
Berserk
This isn't really only a Thrash problem, Shred our only other generator in single target also feels pathetic. A big part of why generators have felt so pathetic is another removed talent, Berserk: Frenzy, thank GOD this is gone. While Feral's going to need some tuning with the removal of this VERY strong talent, I'm incredibly grateful that it's gone. This talent was such a massive multiplier on generator damage that it was impossible to ever make generators feel satisfying. It's going to take some work to address the interspec ability tuning after the removal of this talent it opens the spec up to be in a healthier and more exciting place.
New Toys
Chomp
Midnight isn't only removing our old beloved spells, it's also bringing some new tools. Chomp is a sick new ability that I'm really excited for, it's the first mechanically new ability for feral since the Dragonflight talent trees. Chomp is only usable at low energy, though it's incredibly buggy at the moment. The threshold seems to scale with your max energy, but server latency often means you're below the energy threshold and still unable to use the ability. It does reasonably massive damage; however, it doesn't scale with any of our stats except for Crit and Vers, so there's a concern that it may be outscaled eventually. I'm really excited for this ability and hope that ultimately it ends up strong enough that you can play it (and also that the bugs are fixed).
Frantic Frenzy
Frantic Frenzy is another cool new spell, this is essentially a Feral Frenzy replacement that works on AOE, it looks very strong and it also gives us some much-needed burst AOE. There are no massive gameplay implications for the talent, but it may significantly impact how we manage talent in certain fights or dungeons. It does speak to a new problem with our talent tree in Midnight, however, there are a lot of cool new talents that work on AOE, but most of them have almost no impact on single target so it's a concern that we're going to end up struggling to justify talenting them in mixed style fights or talenting all of them for Mythic+ and doing weenie hut jr dps on bosses.
Apex Talents
Midnight also has a new combat system in Apex talents, which are talents separate from the tree that are intended to be impactful. These are 4-point talents with a unique 1st and 4th point and a slightly more generic 2nd and 3rd point. Unseen Predator is our new 1st point Apex talent, followed by a 2 point Unseen Predator and a last point in Unseen Predator, yes they're all called the same thing; yes, it's going to be confusing. The initial messaging around Apex talents was that they were supposed to have an impact on our gameplay and feel exciting. If this is the goal then Feral's is very disappointing. It has a pretty cool visual but it's pretty much just our current Druid of the Claw set bonus and boils down to more or less just a damage proc.
Final Thoughts
Looking at the changes and the impact on other specs I think Feral's gotten off pretty lightly, I think there's a lot of potential to leave the spec as fairly enjoyable and with a moderate level of complexity. I'm looking forward to getting a more direct hand on the changes and trying them out myself!
