Feral Energy Flow

[Breadgehog 4]

So I've been running Balance on and off throughout WoD and while it's fun, I'm trying to get some practice on melee DPS this expansion, so when the time came to get my first artifact, I grabbed Feral because I've heard solid things and I've been meaning to pay it some attention anyway.

I've been following the guide more or less to the letter, but I'm finding at L100 I'm having serious trouble with survivability, but primarily with running completely dry on energy - even with Tiger's Fury I'm just running 100% dry and getting down to autos. I'm sure at least SOME of this is because I still have ilvl 650 Balance gear for the most part, so I'm doing subpar DPS to world mobs and therefore taking more damage and using more energy, and I'm assuming Killer Instinct doesn't give me any benefit if I'm IN Feral as it's meant to give Resto and Balance usable abilities if they shift into the other forms, but following the rotation in the guide and using the same talent build (which I've moved away from currently trying a few new things as a stopgap until I can actually get into the swing of gearing and levelling) isn't getting me where I need to be. Is it possible that most of my problem is the gear? Or am I likely just dropping the ball that hard? Any help would be appreciated!

[Sighelm 2]

Feral does have dead spots in the rotation, so running out of energy isn't abnormal if the fight goes on long enough. Weaker world mobs will usually die before then, but gear might be your issue. Are you fighting multiple packs at once? Feral AoE is pretty meh, so as much as you can you want to go from single target to single target, stealthing between pulls and opening with rake.

[Breadgehog 4]

It's usually just single mobs that are a problem for now, I've been avoiding packs like the plague for now because they tend to outright kill me instead of just giving me trouble. Hearing that there is in fact dead spots is encouraging, and looking at my gear again there's just... so much Int that needs to not be there if I'm actually going to continue with this spec, so hopefully between that and actual stat priority gear I'll be in better shape. Thanks!

[PaasHaaS 81]

Are you using the soul of the forest talent when out leveling/questing? I find that this talent helps out a lot with your energy flow.

[bobifle 14]

You're not alone, I'm switching from balance (with resto affinity) to feral.

I can still dsp in feral but damn, I die a lot. I cannot pull an entire pack anymore. In balance I was pretty much invicible.

Regarding energy, it's part of the gameplay, they are time when you rely on auto attacks, but if you do it right, you should have a crapload of bleeding on the target.

[Nanaki 0]

Stealth up rake, moonfire and run to the next add, by the time the other add catches up he will almost dead.  We waste much potential DPS shredding targets down with X ammount of bleed left that we run dry on world mobs.  Use your mobility to the advantage.

[bobifle 14]

slightly off topic but I tried feral in a mythic dungeon...

I was sooooo bad.  My dps was barely above the tank, so frustrating. I'm around 200-220 kdps in balance, I was barely around 140 kdps in feral. 

I then used simucraft  to check how much I should be pulling off: 170 kdps.

Feral is really a weird spec, and it looks like you must *not* spend you energy asap, otherwise you'll end up with 5 combo point and no decent finisher  to use. On the other hand, you mst not hit the 100 energy otherwise you loose resources.