How To Improve As Feral Druid — Midnight Pre-Patch (12.0)

Welcome to our How to Improve page! Here we go through some of the most common pitfalls new Feral players make, and provide some actionable tips on how to avoid falling into the same trap yourself.

The most common mistake many new Feral players (and most melee in general) make is surprisingly simple: not adjusting their rotation to minimize empty Global Cooldowns. Compared to other melee, this is slightly different for Feral, since it's designed to have some downtime during gameplay.

Your goal is to make sure you always have a plan with what to press, making sure you don't run out of resources to use things when you need to. There are a couple of key parts of the rotation that influence your decision to either pool up resources, or dump them aggressively:

• Omen of Clarity - adds in some mix-ups to your resources, effectively banking a "free generator". When these trigger, make a mental note that you have an extra 40+ Energy in the tank for your cycle, but you don't necessarily need to rush to spend it.
• Panther's Guile - single-target Combo Point generators have a chance to fill your Combo Point bar, so you need to react to this happening and adjust your next global.
• Tiger's Fury - refunds a large amount of Energy when used, and is off the GCD. Ideally, plan your dumps around these moments to avoid capping out on either resource.
• Berserk - resource generation is significantly amplified during cooldowns, and tends to eliminate empty GCDs. While up, you need to very aggressively spend to maximize its value.

The key principle is that wasting Global Cooldowns (and by extension resources) has a cascading effect on how frequently you can access your strong abilities. You need to be planning ahead for the next 4-5 abilities, having a long-term plan of what your goal is in the current cycle.

Due to Feral having two resources that feed into each other, it means it's twice as important to avoid waste. Since Combo Points fuel your most powerful tools and are generated using Energy, wasting one is implicitly wasting the other as well. Each of them have special considerations for dealing with them:

• Energy - since this is gained at a steady rate passively, you can always have a plan in place that extends long term. Mix-ups like Tiger's Fury and Omen of Clarity are bumps that can change that plan, but try not to let it derail your place in each cycle.
• Combo Points - are ultimately the main goal of the rotation. You want to be generating as many as possible throughout an encounter, and wasting any of these is indirectly wasting Energy as well. Your goal is to maintain Rip using these, and then generate as many as possible after that to fuel Ferocious Bite.

Your primary goal is to always cycle through these two resources efficiently, and underpins everything within the rotation. Secondary to this is your Bleed management, and while these two principles rarely conflict, they're both relevant. Rake needs to be maintained (via Energy), as does Rip (via Combo Points), alongside Moonfire when playing Lunar Inspiration. These are the limiting factor in how much of each resource you have, so inefficiently managing these (or your resources in general) cascades into less casts of Shred and Ferocious Bite for direct damage.

Both Druid of the Claw and Wildstalker have interactions with Ferocious Bite that benefit from juggling these principles correctly. The rule is that worse Bleed management directly reduces their frequency, it's just not quite as obvious. Optimizing this mindset is especially important with talents like Saber Jaws that place even more pressure on managing your Energy correctly.

A rule of thumb to follow is that Energy waste should be avoided, but may sometimes be unavoidable during cooldowns like Berserk. Combo Point waste on the other hand is a significant loss, and you should avoid this at all costs.

While the Sabertooth effect is powerful, micro-managing it often leads to poor resource management. Over-committing to Ferocious Bite usually means inefficient Rip casts, which in turn throws off the rest of your cycle. This should naturally maintain through standard Ferocious Bite casts, so don't overthink it.

Tiger's Fury tends to follow a fairly simple rule: always use it on cooldown every 30 seconds. Since it's your primary snapshotting tool for Bleeds, any delays will lead to desyncs from your other cooldowns as well. Since you can expect that 50 Energy refund on this fixed timer, you want to plan your resource dumps around the build-up to this to make room. This then leaves you with the resources to apply a freshly buffed Rake and Rip as it activates.

Berserk has a large number of effects while active, and influences your resource state in almost every way. While it's up, you become GCD locked due to this, so you need to stay on your toes to avoid waste and still maintain the above goals. The big things to be aware of are:

• While active, 1 Combo Point is generated every 1.5 seconds.
• Any Combo Point generated above 5 is stored as Overflowing Power, up to 3. When you use a finishing move, generate Combo Points equal to your current stacks.

This means that finishers become significantly easier to access, often leading to back-to-back casts. Always aim for 5 Combo Point spenders here as there's little risk to burning any, but also be wary of your Bloodtalons - it's easy to lose track of where you are in each cycle.

A common mistake Feral players run into - especially in single-target - is mis-managing their Bleed and DoT effects. Often, the cause is losing track of how long is left, not keeping in mind the current snapshot state from Tiger's Fury, or losing track of their resource state. Things to know are:

• Track Your Bleeds - it may be simple, but having an effective way to know that your Bleeds are even active is important when playing Feral. In the middle of an encounter, it's very easy to lose track of when you last applied them, so set something up in the Cooldown Manager to remind you.
• Leverage Pandemic Timers - all DoT effects can be refreshed up to 30% early, and the previous duration will be added to the new one. This will carry over into any new snapshots, but if you overwrite a previously buffed DoT without Tiger's Fury, it will be overwritten. We cover each individual timer on our Rotation page.
• Know Your Bleed Power - while it may not be elegant, in Midnight the only way to consistently know your Snapshot power is using the dynamic icons on your debuffs. These will show whether they were cast with an enhancing effect like Tiger's Fury, so use that to indicate whether refreshing is a good idea or not.

Making sure that you're always in control of what state your DoTs are in is vital to learn. Once you have a handle on this, intuiting how much spare resources you're working with becomes much easier as well.

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