First of all, thank you Blizzard for making so many good games. I only buy your games. SC, Diablo and WoW are more than enough to satiate my appetite for gaming and I am happy. So, because I love you so much, I will make a constructive post without marring it with ridiculous accusations but still address some issues that are relatively poignant.
The Druid forums are on fire right now and even the tanking and arena forums have had a lot of accusations of “Blizzard hate feral” or other such nonsense but I wanted, as a player to try to explain what these posts fail to get across due to their anger and irritation overriding their rational ability to communicate and what you can do to make us feel a TON better with very little effort
The overarching theme of all of our complaints and frustration is that we feel forgotten (by both CMs and devs).
First, why we feel as we do about the Developers:
1. Low Level Tanking--When Cata came out, there were countless changes and it was obvious that a lot of thought had gone into class design all around. 3 out of 4 tanking classes were given excellent, very powerful tools to help them breeze through low lvl dungeons and hold agro from heirloomed mages and warlocks. Low lvl dungeons are not like Cata dungeons. Warriors, DKs and Paladins almost never stop running while they are in them. We can clearly see that thought went into their design so they could do their job. Feral has no such tools. I shouldn’t have to explain how horrid feral tanking is before lvl 81, because I am confident that you already know it since it is your game. We feel like you put thought into the other classes and then just skipped us entirely.
2. Feral PvP—Many classes complain about PvP and nerfs, but the reason it hurts us feral so much is that through our entire existence, we have never been a good class that you would want as your partner in arena. We were always overshadowed by the other melee classes. For a SHORT time at the beginning of Cata, we were strong in large part because our bleeds were stronger than they were in Wrath. In response to this, not only was the bleed problem fixed but we, as a pvp class, lost so much utility that we are now in a worse situation than we were in the 3 previous expansions. In addition, we felt that our most unique abilities were the ones being targeted. Mangle is not unique and bleeds are not unique. But shapeshifting is who we are. But the reason we felt so frustrated about this was how easily it seemed to us that the decision was to throw it out. We made posts with more than 100 pages of feedback that are still active today but we have heard only a vacuum from you regarding this complete change of our spec and our identity.
3. Bear threat—The reason we feel frustrated, primarily, is that in the first patch of cata there were 2 obvious conclusions to be drawn from bear tanking: our single target threat was too high and our aoe threat was too weak (both are relative comparisons to the other 3 tanks). We expected fixes. However, it really irked us that you were so selective in choosing what to address. ONLY our good point was addressed and our bad point has been left untouched even though virtually every player will admit that in a dungeon, you better be EXTRA careful with your dps if your tank is a bear because bears are weaker than the other 3 tanks at holding multiple mobs even if they do everything perfectly. It removes a lot of fun to be thought of as the “gimpy” one especially if there is nothing you can do about it (it also discourages us from tanking which then hurts everyone because of the tank shortage). Again, this can be dealt with by begging the dps to take it easy on you but it is no fun to know you are the only class that has to beg like that. Sure, Cata has less aoe tanking and more CC, but there is no reason for 1 tank to continue to be significantly weaker than the others when the difference is so obvious.
Now, about the Community Managers—Please, please post something about any of the 3 above issues. Make us at least know that Blizzard is aware of them and that you have the desire to do something about it. Studies have shown that people rate their doctors not on how well they diagnose but on how well they show that they care. It’s the same for us. Just tell us that you know about them and are want to do something to fix them. They are 3 issues that have been discussed a TON (feral pvp has had countless posts and an ongoing threads now numbering in the hundreds of page of posts). We don’t want to FEEL ignored anymore and you CMs and do so much with just a very short post.
I think I will leave it like that. I hope you remember how much I love you and your games. I’m not gonna stop playing but I do want you to know why I and many others (there are not a lot of feral players so when you see us post a lot it indicates a lot of ire on our part) are feeling frustrated right now.
I hope you choose to respond in this thread as I kept my promise to discuss a poignant topic but kept the discussion respectful and free from juvenile threats or accusations.
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EDIT: Seems like everyone is in agreement with my bear arguments. Regarding argument #2, warriors have received some attention in the dps forum http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/2057305923?page=4 that is rather interesting. Warriors are in a slightly better spot than feral right now due to the fact that they don't need as much up-time as we do, they have 4 gap closers per minute as that thread points out, and charge is unambiguously superior to feral charge because it stuns the target which allows you to at least do SOMETHING before he can get away. Feral charge only moves you and is easily blinked away from or rooted away from before we can get any hits off.
Warriors from Wrath till now have lost some mobility and gained some (heroic leap and their "new skill" in the next patch. Feral have only lost...and we were worse than warriors to begin with.
I don't plan to attempt to fully explain why ferals are hurt more by our shapeshifting nerf than the other classes but you can read a thread that is still going at 101 pages here: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/1869409947. PvP utility is complicated because a melee class needs more than just "gap closers", there are also all of the other skills such as magic shield that help. Also some melee classes require more uptime to do damage and bursty damage is better in PvP. We are the least bursty and require the most uptime of the melee classes. Feral was designed from vanilla beta to have our shapeshift ability which is why we did not get the ability to get back into stealth easily and get another opener and why our "charge" doesn't stun and why we don't have magic shield. Removing shapeshift without redesigning us the rest of the way is like a surgeon opening a patient but not finisheing the surgery. We need Blizzard to finish what they started with us or at least close us back up rather than leaving up open and under anesthesia that is starting to wear off....
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