How To Improve As Feral Druid — Dragonflight 10.0.7

The first and foremost mistake many Feral players make is not adjusting their rotation to minimize empty Global Cooldowns as much as possible. This is slightly different from other melee specializations. Feral will naturally have downtime in its gameplay, and the goal is to condense these into cycles of pooling and spending. Wasting Global Cooldowns in situations where you want to spend efficiently, however, will slow down your cycle and, by extension, the output you have. Making sure you have a plan for the next few seconds of gameplay at all times to fill the time most efficiently will always be a net benefit.

Having a dual resource system that interacts with each other means that ensuring you do not waste is twice as important. Each depends on the other, with a strong link between when you will spend one or the other. Due to the steady rate at which Feral gains Energy with a small number of extra burst generation (mostly via Tiger's Fury), you need to use the periods of low Energy to plan your next cycle, pooling Energy and then spending Combo Points on a finisher. This will lead to a quick burst of builder spells, and the cycle begins anew.

Omen of Clarity injects an additional unpredictability to your Energy generation, providing a free cast of one of your builder spells. This should be used to smooth out the build-then-spend gameplay loop, treating it as a free Combo Point generation tool to mix up your cycle and alleviate some Energy juggling if you are beginning to feel starved when it procs.

Make sure that you have enough Energy available to keep your Bleed effects, such as Rake, active and the dual requirement of both Energy and Combo Points to maintain Rip is the core of optimizing your output. Planning around both resources to ensure you can do this efficiently is essential. Do not over-commit to casting excess Shreds or Ferocious Bites if it will get in the way of this.

While the Sabertooth effect is powerful, micro-managing it is often going to lead to mismanagement of resources or over-committing to the effect, instead, treat it as a passive boost to Rip whenever you would naturally Ferocious Bite. This extends even further to AoE, in these situations, you should rely on Primal Wrath to provide the majority of your AoE damage in fall back on Apex Predator's Craving, instead of trying to weave extra full-cost Bites into your rotation.

The crux of using Tiger's Fury efficiently is to make sure you drain your excess Energy in the lead-up to it coming off cooldown, allowing it to refund 50 and refuel your pool. This also grants a surge of resources at the most critical time — during the damage increase boost, it provides for 10 seconds after cast. You also ideally want to refresh both Rake and Rip whenever possible within this window to take advantage of the snapshotting effect. Treat this as a rotational 30-second cycle ability that you need to plan around both during the buff and as it is about to come off cooldown.

Ideally, you want to be aware of when it is coming off cooldown and dump resources, using it to refill back up. If enemies are dying and the Predator effect is in play, be aware that you have a much larger Energy pool than it looks like because you can use this freely to keep generating resources. When playing with Raging Fury, in some circumstances, you can also run into the cooldown coming back up with the original buff still active, and in these cases, drain your Energy and recast it as soon as possible.

Currently Feral has a heavy focus on the Incarnation: Avatar of Ashamane window, meaning that it needs to be played optimally to perform well. You should ideally be casting this on cooldown, and thanks to cooldown reducing talents it should be ready roughly every 2 minutes which should be your aim. When this is active, you shift to a maintenance mode playstyle and, if you are pairing it with Lion's Strength, most of your gameplay will be a one-two cycle of Shred and Ferocious Bite throughout. While this is active, still maintain Rip and Rake, but avoid wasting a GCD on Thrash.

The most common mistake many Feral players will make, especially in single-target situations, is not efficiently managing Bleed effects. This goes hand-in-hand with the above sections regarding resource management. Usually, the cause of this is not keeping track of when you should be refreshing them. This is a mix of not knowing the Pandemic timers (which is covered in our Rotation page) and not predicting resource requirements and Global Cooldowns needed to maintain them. Ideally, you should plan around when you expect them to fall off rather than reacting to the duration ending. Addons can be very helpful in tracking this, and we have some options on our dedicated page.

Remember that if you expect a long downtime period due to upcoming mechanics, you should aim to refresh your DoT effects before you lose the chance to do so. This means refreshing Rake, Rip, Thrash (where applicable) and Moonfire (if taking Lunar Inspiration). This will, in most cases, net more damage and allow your resources to regenerate during your time away from the target.

If you take Bloodtalons, it heavily emphasizes cycling your Energy and Combo Point expenditure. To trigger the effect, you need to use three different builders within 4 seconds (this includes Shred, Rake, Swipe, Brutal Slash and Thrash). That means you need a healthy Energy pool available to trigger it in a quick burst after spending your Combo Points. You should always ensure that any finisher you cast with this talent taken is buffed by the effect, as any cast without it significantly reduces the value of the pick.

Depending on if you have Tiger's Fury ready, effectively triggering this quick 3 spell burst can require pooling to make sure there are resources available to activate it, as it will cost a full Energy bar (not accounting for passive generation or talent choices) to activate. Omen of Clarity procs also make this easier to execute if they come at a reasonable time but cannot be relied upon, so you need to assume you need enough resources to manually cast all 3 builders in quick succession.

It is challenging to optimize your character without first accurately using Raidbots to sim your own character to identify a fixed start point. This will allow you to quickly determine the ideal gear choices you have available to equip, and due to the variables of different gear interacting with each other (and the War/Titanforging system causing unpredictability) should be the go-to tool to decide what you use.

On top of this, simming is now very easy, with no need to understand SimulationCraft APLs or installation yourself. All you will need is the in-game SimulationCraft AddOn and the Raidbots website. Below you can find a video on simulating your character using the website.