Originally Posted by Friedrich
Perhaps it's not intended that you get to scale as well with ilvl as the "pure" DPS classes? An analogy could perhaps be drawn to the itemization issues that Fury Warriors and Enhancement Shaman have to deal with. The former get Agility on their sets which is very inferior to crit rating for DPS purposes; the latter get int and mana/5 instead of more Str/Agi/crit/hit. In both cases item budget is being spent on a stat which has less DPS use but more some (marginal) utility. The result is that as ilvl increases, we won't scale as well as rogues or mages do. C'est la vie.
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Druids have non DPS stats on their gear as well. Our Tiered sets have Intellect that does not increase DPS, and extra armor, which while necessary for the tanking role, does not increase DPS either. We can grab non-set gear, but many of these items are not itemized to maximize our DPS, as they usually have Attack Power instead of strength and too much hit rating because they were designed more for rogues. Zierhut's Lost Treads are one of the few non-set items that really has feral druid stats on it, but even that item is a little stamina heavy for DPSing.
The point that Sadris is making (and it's a good one) is that for melee classes wielding normal weapons, upgrading a weapon is the biggest single slot upgrade that you can make for increasing your DPS, and Feral Druid weapons are quickly falling behind in this respect. The fact that other melee classes can grab Blacksmithing weapons that are generally far above the other gear available at the same level of progression is putting all other melee classes far ahead of feral druids in DPS output potential. I think someone above made the comment that the damage from our special attacks was high, and above that of other classes, but that is only because our white damage is far less compared to any other dual-wielding (and probably even 2-hand Warriors) melee combatant. Druids are not seeing the same benefits from weapon upgrades as other melee classes are, because as Sadris shows, we're not getting FAP equivalent to the DPS increase a similar weapon is giving to those other classes. On top of all that, we don't have these multipliers (that are necessary to scaling feral DPS) on our white damage attacks. Meanwhile other melee classes are getting weapon upgrades that are substantially increasing their white damage, plus getting better and better procs on those weapons to push their DPS even further.
And they can get mongoose, something that will forever put any other class ahead of feral druids in DPS output potential.