Feral Druid Midnight Gearing Guide

Midnight Season 1 Tier Set Bonuses:

• (2) Set Bonus: Gaining Clearcasting from Omen Of Clarity increases your chance to critically strike by 5% for 4 sec.
• (4) Set Bonus: Rake damage increased by 20%. Clearcasting increases Shred or Swipe damage by an additional 15%.

Tier Set Discussion:

Overall, the set is entirely passive in terms of gameplay. For talents, it means we’re always taking Moment of Clarity to gain additional Clearcasting procs in order to gain more from the set.

You should always prioritise the gear you use by running a sim for your character, but the lists below will give you a good idea of what items are considered good for Feral Druid, and help you target the right content for each piece of loot.

As Feral, you generally want to have 1 on-use stat trinket to use with your cooldowns.

Algeth'ar Puzzle Box can be farmed from dungeons and is by far the strongest trinket you can get. Even on champion track, it is better than any other trinket in the game. If for whatever reason you decide you do not want to play it, the next best stats-on-use trinket is Emberwing Feather, but it's not unlikely that going double-passive is better. As always you should sim this to know.

As for your secondary trinket, or your ‘stat stick,’ if you raid, then you’ll want either Radiant Plume or Gaze Of The Alnseer. Plume is ever so slightly better than Gaze, but Gaze is significantly easier to get given it’s from an early boss. Both trinkets are much better than every other.

From M+, your options are Heart of the Wind or Solarflare Prism - and as always, you should sim to find out what’s best for your setup.

Honorable mention for your passive slot is Crucible Of Erratic Energies, which comes for free from the Voidstorm reputation, and despite being champion track is strong enough to compete with all hero track passive trinkets. Just make sure you get the console buffs, which work in all content.

Cantrip Items

These are items with special effects or stats that come for free. These items are better than every alternative in the slot because some damage > no damage, and sometimes even worth it despite a loss in item level.

Necklaces:

• Amulet Of The Abyssal Hymn - extra socket slot
• Eternal Voidsong Chain - <0.1% extra shadow damage (conditional)

Rings:

• Eye Of Midnight - extra socket slot
• Occlusion Of Void + Omission Of Light - ~0.5% extra shadow damage

In the cases of both slots, the extra socket is much better than the damage.

The best embellishment is Arcanoweave Lining. It not only provides the most stats to you, but even buffs allies.

If you’re crafting a weapon, you’ll want Darkmoon Sigil: Hunt on it.

Loa Worshiper's Band effect is as good as Arcanoweave Lining and once you have max sockets it becomes marginally better.

It's good to remember that embellishments in general are quite minor, so even if you don’t craft the best one it’s really not a big deal. Most of the power of crafts early comes from the item level bump.

First Crafts

As is the case for most classes, weapon item level is incredibly important for us as well. This means crafting a 285 weapon early will definitely be the biggest upgrade you can get.

If you raid Mythic: consider that both Vorasius and Chimaerus drop a weapon, and they can be farmed very early given their difficulty. This means you can acquire a 289 weapon quite easily and a crafted weapon is potentially wasted sparks/crests.

If you do not raid Mythic: Your only option for a 289 weapon is Mythic+ vault, which is a massive gamble, and because of this a crafted weapon is heavily recommended.

Besides a weapon, the benefit of crafts early is that they are 285 item level, which will be higher than farmable gear. This means you’ll want to prioritise higher stat budget items if your goal is short term gains. Helmet/Chest/Leggings are a good choice once you acquire tierset (do not craft on tier slots before you have 4set!!!!), as those give the most stats.

Socketable slots (Helmet, Bracer, Wrist) provide a good mixture of short and long-term gain, because if you’re forced to take a socket from vault you can put it on one of those and use it for the rest of the tier.

Don’t forget you can and should sim all of this through Raidbots droptimizer and topgear when making decisions.

BIS Crafts

Long term, you’ll want to move your crafts to lower stat budget slots, like bracers / cloak / ring, since you’ll have myth track items everywhere and crafted items are lower item-level than that. In some cases, replacing secondary stats on one item might be better than the minor gain from stat-budget optimizations, so crafting gloves can be okay too.

The highest simming profile utilizes a crafted bracer + ring (Loa Worshiper's Band). The ring scales with the amount of sockets you have, so it's only worth it if you have both the rare neck & ring from L’ura. Until then, you can do bracer + cloak and wear the Nexus Point Xenas ring combination.

Missives

You should always sim to find out what secondary stats are best to put on your crafted gear. This can be done via Topgear, where you can add items through the search bar and change the stats of crafted ones. Stats can also be changed through the little + icon on the item itself.

If you don’t want to bother with simming, the safe option is haste & mastery (Thalassian Missive Of The Feverflare).

Nebulous Voidcores (Bonus Rolls)

Recommended acquisition order:

1. Myth Algeth'ar Puzzle Box - by far the most important trinket plus it comes from m+ so it’s cheaper to roll for it compared to raid items.
2. Any Myth track Weapon - if you do not already have one, you should consider getting one asap. There are two in the loot pool of Algeth’ar Academy, which lines up well with farming puzzle box.
3. Gaze Of The Alnseer - easier to get between the two best passive trinkets, can be worth going for on Heroic as well but since the mythic Chimaerus can be pugged quite easily, it's recommended you do that.
4. Rare Neck / Ring from L’ura - prime targets for this system given the ability to guarantee them. Can be worth going for on Heroic, or even Normal, depending on your situation. Remember to use sim to help you with the decision.

Once you have these items, you can spend your bonus rolls however you want. Targeting the last few slots you don’t have a myth item on through Mythic+ is always good.

Ascendant Voidcores

Given that there are no special weapons, and the trinkets are basically locked in to puzzlebox and gaze / plume, the upgrade priority is fairly straightforward:

1. Weapon - by far the most important slot to have the highest ilvl possible in, so naturally you want to upgrade it asap. If you’re still using a crafted weapon instead of a myth track one, you might consider spending some Nebulous Voidcore on getting one first and upgrading that.
2. Trinket - upgrading your passive trinket first (Gaze Of The Alnseer or Radiant Plume / Umbral Plume) is marginally better than Algeth'ar Puzzle Box, however it might depend on which one you have acquired already. Similarly to weapon, you may want to save the upgrades until you get the items on myth track through Nebulous Voidcore.