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I think expecting a feral druid to perform to optimum potential is a pretty stupid thing to do anyway. The majority of my time I spend tanking, which I try and do my best at because it heavily impacts the raid. Feral DPS I've been doing since TBC came out, in the limited encounters which I can, and things like Lurker are hardly the best places to muck about with cycles/etc. When you're competing against rogues who have some of the best gear (including haste items which druids get marginal benefit from), and have been DPSing as a rogue for over 2 years in raid situations, as well as make heavy use of the Rogue DPS spreadsheet (which is a lot more accurate than anything I think we could actually produce, let alone have) then you can't expect perfect performance.
Then again, some rogues do badly even with 2 years experience, so it just depends, and if you have a "mangle bitch" then you should expect to do pretty comparable/better DPS at a similar gear level.
LotP generally makes up for the majority of the deficit of our DPS in any case, so it doesn't worry me that much. However, slacking because you think LotP should make up for the difference isn't the way to go - try and prove yourself to be a good DPSer and you should be able to do well if you have halfway decent gear (although I doubt you'll top the meters if you're anywhere past Vashj/Kael).
CD: If you can get in the MT group, do it. On fights where the MT doesn't need commanding, you can get BS (which should be quite a few), and you should even be getting GoA/SoE on top. You might miss out on Unleashed Rage, but at least you'll be getting a decent amount of extra buffs and you give the tank an extra 5% crit (~3% more threat or so I believe).
Boevis: True about the cycles - I'm just wondering now whether it's actually worth the one who isn't mangling using shred without the mangle debuff. The one who is keeping Mangle up loses ~600 damage by using a mangle instead of a shred, while the one who is using Shred purely only loses ~350 damage by using a non-mangled shred instead of a mangled shred. Losing one per cycle isn't much of a problem when you consider it in that light, but it depends on if you end up losing Rip ticks aswell, as a single rip tick could be another 200+ on top of that, which brings them much closer together (and surpasses once you lose more than one tick without mangle up). I suppose the "safe" way to do it is just have the one who is mangling do it every 12 seconds regardless of what else is in their cycle, but I'm still not entirely convinced that it's the very best way to get the most DPS out of it.
I certainly don't have many qualms about the class as it currently is. There's a lack of itemisation at top end, but that can be said of other classes/specs (I'm not saying it's acceptable, just that we're not in isolation).
I've finally got around to getting a DPS meter, and I may get SWS too just to monitor my own damage on some fights and be able to see whats going on mid fight/post fight without having to have people spam guild/raid chat with a wall of text. I'm pretty sure I was past the 1k DPS mark on Teron, will have to see how it goes next week (and hope I don't get shadowed or else it screws it up anyway). I might even combat log it, just for wws.
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