I am very anxious about the planned changes to Feral Druids in 7.3, and plan to check them out on the PTR as soon as they are deployed. Since AMR is so incredibly useful to me, will these changes will be available to simulate before they go live?
Here’s the post outlining the changes: World of Warcraft Forums
I will implement the changes once they are on the PTR and we can download a new talent tree.
We will need to make a new rotation as well, should be interesting!
Awesome! I’m definitely looking forward to seeing how the changes affect the talent balance. With the change to base damage, all unaffected talents are buffed relative to the nerfed talents – so, Soul of the Archdruid (the legendary ring enabling Soul of the Forest) will likely have an increase in value, while Ailuro Pouncers (adding one stack of predatory swiftness for Bloodtalons buff) will be reduced in value.
With the talent tree, on the level 75 tier, I’m wondering how the new Incarnation stacks up against the new Jagged Wounds, since both were nerfed. I don’t think that Soul of the Forest will stack up against either. If it does, I expect it’ll be nerfed, since it’s available on a legendary. The level 90 tier becomes quite interesting with buffed Sabertooth, nerfed Savage Roar, and unaltered Brutal Slash all on the same tier. I’m not sure how these will shake out in the different scenarios they are obviously targetting. The level 100 talents seem to be a no-brainer on the surface; with Brutal slash leaving the the tier, Bloodtalons, even in it’s weakened form, likely won’t be challenged by MoC or Elune’s – but I’d be very interested to be wrong.
When I try to run the numbers, the patch seems amazingly well balanced. When the class is played in optimal mode, the patch seems to keep damage roughly the same, the source is just shifted from from buffed damage to base damage. The end effect of this implementation means that errors shouldn’t be as devastating, though still reduce damage done, and sub-optimal play damage is boosted. I’m excited to see how this plays out.
Again, thank you for all your hard work! I appreciate everything done by the AskMrRobot team!
Yeah, I’m just happy that the changes to Savage Roar will allow for more Ferocious Bite use even with Jagged Wounds now. It is kind of weird (and not that satisfying, imo) to spend almost all your combo points on buff/dot upkeep.
Completely agree. Spending less time on maintaining self-buffs and dots should hopefully result in a more enjoyable play style - or so we hope.
This, too, seems very well thought out (or a great accident). If we’re running the feral trinity, we’ll be spending ~335 energy/minute to keep up SR/Rip/Rake instead of the current 421 energy/minute, freeing up 85 energy/minute to spend. Additionally, it takes 12.2 actions/minute (apm) in 7.2.5, and the proposed change results in only 9.8 apm, this frees up 2.4 actions per minute. Additionally, instead of needing an additional 23.4 combo points/minute (cpm) to maintain the buffs, we only need 17.5 cpm to keep up the buffed bleeds; meaning, if things work now and we do everything the same, we’d have an additional 5.9 cpm to spend.
So, at this point, every minute, we’ve freed 85 energy, 2.4 actions, and 5.9 combo points. With that, we can do approximately 0.5 shreds and 1.3 ferocious bites which should consume our energy and combo points, while reducing our overall apm by a trivial 0.6.
It all seems very well modeled / thought out.