After looking at more BC feral loot, I think they're still using 1h weapon DPS as the baseline for increasing feral DPS, but they're using 2h weapons to eat away at the item's base DPS, since it probably costs less to do so (and druids don't care about that), while still being able to provide the amount of stats of a 2h weapon. (Basically, so they don't have to put melee-only "equip in offhand" items.)

Does this sound about right to you?

Also, they all seem to either be quest rewards with other options for other classes, or BoE items. So my argument still stands: They don't want druids to be added to the list of classes that want every single melee item they can equip. Heh.

I don't know why people cling to the idea that itemization to limit loot to certain classes is a good thing. Taken to its logical extreme, every item in the game would have Class: X on it as an equip restriction.

Think of two scenarios:

A] Boss Grendel has a 66% chance of dropping a dagger (rogues and warriors want) and a 33% chance of dropping a feral dagger.

B] Boss Grendel has a 100% chance of dropping a dagger that all three want.

Either way if you run the instance with a warrior, rogue and feral druid your chance of getting the dagger is 33%.

Except if you run it with a feral druid who already has the dagger you still only have a 33% chance of getting the dagger in Scenario A. In scenario B you have a 50% chance. And since most of the people on these forums I imagine belong to raiding guilds, you'll be running a lot of instances over and over again with the same people. So this is a very likely scenario.

Class specific itemization only fools you into feeling like you have a better chance of getting loot - they play on that fallacy that "I deserve loot more than you" that a lot of players have. In practice they make it harder and result in a lot more wasted drops.

I don't think that takes into account that bear form druids have far less abilities than other classes that can wield 2h weapons. In bear form, we have maul or bash. Warriors have heroic strike, hamstring, rend, disarm, shield bash, overpower, sunder, and etc, to use to make their overall offensive prowess more effective.

Take into consideration, if a druid's target dodges, we lose that rage. Warriors get a free hit when their target dodges. Warriors also have a stance they can use to become immune to fear...

The reason Druids get tons of armor in Bear form and +feral AP gear is because our dps is dependant the fact that we do 'miss' a lot (especially in PVP) and we have practically no CC in melee form.

Why not take it a step futher, and do away with +dmg on weapons? DPS could be normalized against a spell's cast time and provide an equivalent amount of effective +dmg, and then casters, melee, and druids could compete for the same high damage weapons.

I guess you could say I'm not fond of this idea. While it is preferable, as Oaken noted in his scenarios, for an item to be useful to many, I'd say that some amount of rot needs to be present in the system to make the acquisition of new weapons more exciting.

Isn't the spell damage and the feral AP based on two different iLvl values being you can't use both at the same time? I thought I remember seeing a post on this, but when I do a search I get
As far as lore goes, how is a druid supposed to get his pawns around a health pot? I suppose there are other pots you could take, but that kind of takes away from out healing ability if we're just going to chug pots rather the popping out for a heal.

Last time I read about this mechanism, it turned out that you get 10% less DPS from FAP than you would have expected going by FAP DPS + Paw DPS = Weapon DPS if the Weapon had no FAP.

Ironically the difference was exactly 10%, and behold, Druids have a talent that gives you +10% physical damage called Natural Weapons. Once again we see a Druid stat that assumes you will have a specific talent specced for it to work out at 100% effectivity. Oh well.

Since I saw the math only done for live Weapons, I'll try to do it for the beta Weapons:

We'll use the Gladiator Maces, since there are two version of them available with the exact same stats except that one has lower Weapon DPS and +FAP (Normal DPS: http://thottbot.com/beta?i=911, DPS with FAP: http://thottbot.com/beta?i=913)

114.6 DPS vs 46.7 FAP DPS +x Paw DPS. Ideally the two values would turn out the same, if it was not for the reason mentioned above (see NW).

Unfortunately I don't know what the base Cat DPS is in TBC (without Natural Weapons), I can only assume that it will be 61.11 DPS (55 DPS @ level 60 - sounds about right) because (114.6 DPS - 46.7 FAP DPS)*0.90 = 61.11.

Can anyone help me confirm/debunk this theory for beta by telling me the Cat DPS at level 70 (nekkid and without NW) please? :)

Hey now, Shaman had the same thing when we had Windfury nerfed drastically in AP and a talent added to boost total damage done with weapons. =P

Doing a quick math from those naked stats, that cat got 87*2 + 75 = 249 ap = 17.78dps from stats. So his base paw dps should be 97.5 / 1.10 - 17.78 = 70.86 dps

So using the gladiator mace his FAP + paw dps = 46.7 + 70.86 = 117.5 dps, which is a little above the 114.6 dps of the warrior 2h. But only by 2%, so it's almost the same indeed. Nice catch.

One thing I noticed about that mace is that it's melee dps is lower than the warrior 2h by an ammount that it's melee dps + fap dps = exactly the same as the warrior 2h. So a moonkin would hit for exactly the same using one or the other.

But indeed I agree with the OP, they could simply get rid of FAP and add weapon melee dps to forms. I suppose they only didn't do it because they were afraid of unexpected colateral effects such retroactive change could bring to lower levels.

So... going by that, if they just made all the weapons drop back down to those stats, and change the FAP to all AP, they'd have their universal weapons.

Correct?

(Not suggesting they'd do that, nor that I want it, but just asking the question)

Exactly. FAP would be converted to weapon DPS, not AP. But yea that's the idea.

If cat really has 70 DPS at level 70, that's a nice (stealth) buff right there :)