Feral Druid Frequently Asked Questions — Battle for Azeroth (BfA) 8.1

1. When Should I Refresh My Bleeds?

Many of your effects benefit from the Pandemic effect. This includes the following abilities:

• Rake
• Rip
• Thrash
• Moonfire
• Savage Roar

The Pandemic effect allows you to refresh any of these abilities with up to 30% of the duration remaining without losing this amount. The remaining time will instead be added onto the maximum duration from the new cast, and combine together for an extended uptime. This allows you to refresh any time within this window, at the most opportune time.

2. Should I Pool Resources?

Ideally you should avoid wasting any Energy, which is the primary resource you will pool. Generally, you will be doing this at maximum Combo Points, and wait for your Energy to refill until you need to spend Combo Points to refresh an effect. You should therefore be spending any time in which you have no effects to refresh, and have generated enough Combo Points to use your next spender, waiting for Energy to regenerate rather than casting it on direct damage spending abilities.

3. What is Snapshotting?

Snapshotting refers to mechanic involving Tiger's Fury and Bloodtalons, that will benefit the entire DoT effect of your Bleeds if they are active when you apply it. This will carry over for the entire duration, even after it fades, unlike dynamic buffs such as Savage Roar. Due to this, you ideally want to be refreshing your Bleed effects with at least one of these bonuses active, and attempt to avoid overwriting these Bleeds with unbuffed effects if avoidable.

4. What Piece is Better, X or Y?

The answer to this question in any context will always be to simulate it. This is because what is an upgrade for you may not be an upgrade for someone else. In other words, there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all answer, even when talking about 2 completely identical comparisons from you to another person. Everything in your gear has an effect on everything else.

This applies to gear, set bonuses, trinkets, Azerite traits, and in certain circumstances, talents.

The only exception to this rule is when a specific fight dictates a certain set of optimal talents and gear pieces that enhance their strength. If you are curious about what kind of setup to go for a specific fight, WarcraftLogs.com's rankings and statistics are a good place to see what others are doing.

We have a guide on how to sim yourself here:

5. How much Haste, or other secondary stats, should I have?

For Feral, there is no strict "amount" or breakpoint of any stat that you are required to reach. Nor are there any points at which a stat stops being desirable. In the majority of cases, the specific secondary you have is less important than the volume. This is however, another case of a situation in which a simulation done to check your ideal gear pieces and stat values will provide you invaluable information.

6. Which Race is best for Feral Druid?

Currently, there are not many options available to Druids for each faction. Night Elf and Troll respectively tend to come out as the best options, but only marginally, so this decision will likely make very little difference.

7. How good is Feral in Patch 8.1?

This is covered in the Introduction section of the guide, however the key point is that Feral has gained some key strengths to improve it in Patch 8.1, in different fight styles. Tuning, however, still appears to be slightly low, which is hurting it compared to other specializations.

8. Changelog