How To Improve As Feral Druid — The War Within (11.2.7)

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 condense things into cycles of pooling and spending. You need to understand when it's time to pool, and when it's time to dump your resources, and this is often done in waves. There are a couple of key moments to be aware of:

• Bloodtalons - this dictates your cycle when playing. Every three finishers will require you to cast 3 different generators in quick succession, so needs active pooling to pull off consistently.
• 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.
• 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 your 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 others depending on build (e.g. Thrash and Moonfire). 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 direct damage Shred and Ferocious Bite casts.

Both Druid of the Claw and Wildstalker have interactions with Ferocious Bite that benefit greatly from effective juggling of these principles. 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 Energy waste should be avoided, but may sometimes be unavoidable during cooldowns like Berserk. Combo Points on the other hand are 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 to maintain it tends to lead to less efficient Rip casts, which balloons outward into the rest of your cycle. This should naturally maintain itself at the expected rate simply with 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 has a heavy impact on your snapshotting cycle, 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 snapshotted 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 principles of Feral. 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 knowing how strong the current snapshot is, or being in a poor 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 currently is important when playing Feral. In hectic combat, it can be very easy to lose track of when you last applied them.
• 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. We cover each individual timer on our Rotation page.
• Know Your Bleed Power - while it may not be elegant, using addons provide a clear advantage for Feral by allowing you to track precisely how strong each Bleed is on your target. This helps to avoid overwriting a strong Bleed with a weak one, and makes room for more direct finishers. We have an example tracker on our Addons page.

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

Bloodtalons is a staple talent for Feral, and when taken, it heavily emphasizes efficient cycling of Energy and Combo Points. It has a handful of rules:

• It's triggered by casting three different builders within 4 seconds. This can be any combination of Shred, Rake, Swipe / Brutal Slash, Moonfire or Thrash .
• This often requires close to a full Energy bar to do in time, so it may require pooling.
• It has three charges, with one being consumed each finisher. This includes Convoke the Spirits spenders and Apex Predator's Craving procs.

This should always be active when applying Rip - as it snapshots the damage increase for the full duration. You should also, ideally, be empowering all of your Ferocious Bite casts with this as well. You often need to plan ahead when you reach one charge, setting yourself up to refresh it after your next spender.

With how varied modern World of Warcraft has become, it can be a daunting task to accurately assess whether an item or setup is worth it or not. The first place to start is Raidbots, which allows you to sim your own character to know a baseline. This will give you a number to strive for as you learn and improve, while also giving you extensive help when identifying upgrades, knowing what to farm for and much more.

By now, simming has become very easy to get started thanks to modern tools. There's no need to understand code or complex SimulationCraft APLs, nor does it require its own installation. All you will need is the in-game SimulationCraft AddOn, and this will give you the output to add to the Raidbots website.