Feral Druid DPS Guide — The War Within (11.1.5)

Feral, the Melee DPS specialization for Druids, fights in Cat Form focusing on strong Physical attacks and maintaining Bleed effects, creating a more measured gameplay flow focused on resource management.

The gameplay loop is slower than many other melee, often having empty GCDs allowing you time to plan how your next resource cycle will be managed. It is centered around a dual resource system of Energy and Combo Points, and uses them to deal powerful direct damage and maintain Bleed DoT effects. These then used in tandem to create a build-and-spend system with pooling for key moments. As a Druid, it also provides the Mark of the Wild buff to increase your groups Versatility.

Strengths

• Extremely powerful 2-minute burst cooldowns making it a good Raid choice
• Good sustained AoE while still maintaining priority damage, suited well for Mythic+
• Powerful active defensive toolkit
• A variety of mobility tools
• Good group utility, control options, and brings Mark of the Wild and Rebirth

Weaknesses

• Has to make sacrifices to pick up enabling AoE tools and vice versa
• Some AoE tools are more focused on sustain, which can be limiting if burst is needed
• Reliant on cooldown timers and uptime to get full value, so planning is important
• Raid utility is limited
• Resource mis-management is very punishing

Feral starts strong due to always being able to open well from Prowl and only gets stronger with extra levels. It can deal with strong enemies due to its good self-healing, and is also very well suited to AoE pulling and dungeons due to how early it picks up its AoE toolkit.

If you are interested in playing a Feral Druid but have yet to get one at max level, you can look at our leveling guide for pointers to help you along the way.

Feral is one of the more complex specs when getting started due to relying heavily on its resource system and pooling. It has a slow passive resource in Energy that can be converted into Combo Points via generator spells, such as Shred, and then spent on finishing moves, such as Ferocious Bite.

Feral also has Bleed mechanics that apply debuffs to your target that require different resources - Rake needing Energy and Rip needing Combo Points. This creates a spec that is busy at first glance, but in practice plays slower, allowing room to make those decisions. This puts more weight on resource management rather than snap gameplay. Once you grasp the concepts, it tends to click into place and becomes a lot more fluid to manage; it just takes a little practice!

It also has a robust AoE toolkit that links together, making use of Primal Wrath to apply the Rip effect to targets around you, and Rampant Ferocity converts Ferocious Bite into an AoE tool. Finally, Apex Predator's Craving allows us to use those active Rips to proc free additional Bite casts, creating a satisfying synergy loop between the entire toolkit.

If you have never played Feral before and are looking to learn the basics of what the spec has access to, we recommend looking through our Spell Summary first, as well as the Easy Mode page linked below too.

If however you are already experienced with the specialization and are looking for details on ideal talent loadouts and optimizing your rotation, use the links below to jump to our pages covering those.

While we always recommend simming yourself for ideal results, we do provide a dedicated Feral gearing page that lists the Best in Slot items to look out for in the current season of The War Within.

Once you have started to gear, you should also have appropriate consumables, gems, enchants, and more to use with those new items. We have a dedicated page for exactly these linked below, and the stats page that covers our stat priority.