#1 - July 6, 2017, 6:47 p.m.
Item - Druid T21 Feral 2P Bonus - Shred Increases Rip Duration (New) Shred has a 0% chance to extend the duration of Rip on the target by 0 sec.
Item - Druid T21 Feral 4P Bonus - Rip Ticks Proc Free Ferocious Bite (New) When Rip deals damage, you have a 0% chance to cause your next Ferocious Bite to be free and count as if you spent the maximum amount of Energy.
The 2pc
Back before Warlords of Draenor feral used to have something just like this, shred would extend the duration of our rip, it was a guaranteed effect, but only happened a few times before you needed to apply a new Rip. It proved to be rather buggy and was finally removed.
Extending Rip like that never felt great, it put an even larger burden on maintaining Rip on 2 targets properly, and I was glad to see it go.
While this bonus isn't inherently bad in a vacuum, the Feral spec is not a vacuum. This set bonus becomes meaningless once your target reaches 25%, at which point ferocious bite refreshes rip, and the extensions mean nothing. This problem is also extended to the Sabertooth talent, and basically just makes it a bad pick.
If I could offer a fix to the issues with the 2pc, it would look like this:
Druid T21 Feral 2P Bonus - Shred has a x% chance to deal extra damage equal to a tick of Rip on your current target.
You could alter this to be more than 1 rip tick per proc, or scale the proc chance accordingly to get the intended value. And the change would prevent the bonus from being worthless during execute or with the Sabertooth talent. Hopefully the damage proc would still count as a rip tick for the purposes of the 4pc.
The 4pc
The intention of the 4pc is rather clear, to help us cast Ferocious Bite more, and doesn't have any real clashes with anything preventing it from doing so. But I would like to suggest that the 4pc should make the Ferocious bite also cost no Combo Points if possible.
The main barrier to using Ferocious Bite is more the combo point cost rather than the energy, and during the normal rotation you might get a free FB proc and not have the combo points ready for it, only to get another proc before you could spend the first, resulting in lost value for the bonus, and making the "lucky" proc feel bad rather than good.
Random procs should be something that you can react to immediately, not something that you may have to wait 5-10 seconds to use, and have the potential to waste. And making the Ferocious Bite truly free would alleviate that concern, while allowing the actual chance to proc to be changed to tune the set bonus as needed.
