This is my first post here so pardon me if it sounds noobish. Been tracking this thread for awhile but whenever too many numbers appear, I just get lost in the seas of data. Would appreciate if someone could answer my question without involving too much math.
We normally run our 25mans with 3 feral druids, 2 Prot warrs 1 dps warr, 1-2 rogues, 1 enh shaman. Based on some of the information gathered from here, I've asked the other 2 ferals what their DPS cycle usually is to determine if it'd be worthwhile having 1 of us as the "mangle-bitch". It turns out 1 of them has basically the same dps cycle as me (with the exception of me using FF every so often).
Our gear is fairly similar, however, my T4 has been socketed for tanking rather than DPS so it's probably not the best one can get but suits my raid-role. SO, my question is this: Is it worthwhile to have 1 person assigned to mangling in this scenario where we have 3 feral druids?
A rough example of the class numbers and raid DPS we run our 25mans with is here. This was our 1st Lurker kill, but I am hoping to see our druids do even better on fights like this in future.
As stated in several recent posts, a "mangle-bitch" is useful even with 2 Feral-Druids. So yes, you should assign one of your druids for the aforementioned role, preferably the least-geared one.
Boevis, I was saying that you can get away with having the first use a normal cycle, and the second use a pure-shred cycle, and have even more DPS than one being an actual mangle-bitch. The point is, if the one who is using a pure shred cycle is paying attention, they shouldn't have to waste any energy or anything else (as the maximum downtime for mangle 'should' be ~4 seconds) - obviously Mag isn't the best fight to use as an example in the first place, because (a) We use a similar strat (but last tank gets no.3 MD and I grab that to kill third) and I've never had a problem with using full DPS gear, and (b) because of earthquake and clicking, you can't really have a proper cycle in the first place.
I also assume neither of your ferals have Savage Fury, which both me and the other feral in the guild does, and it means mangle isn't as much of a hit to DPS in the first place (and if you continually have the same person being mangle bitch, you should consider getting them to spec it). The ashtongue talisman also comes out as being better than bloodlust if you do end up having a mangle bitch doing 2 per cycle, so if you can get it then that person should be using it (very few guilds that can, but its worth pointing out).
Edit: Just checking armoury: Who is vanquashing and why does he only have 1 point in shredding attacks? Even for PvP its probably the best talent you can get :/
It also appears Cowking, Praetorius and Vanquashing all have savage fury, while you don't (not sure if all of them are mains or not, but they're all the 70 ferals I could find in your guild). In that case, you end up with them having:
Just soing a bit of math - if you have X Feral Druids in your Group, all similarly (for the sake of less math, equally) geared, the difference between one manglebitch and all using standard cycle would be:
(I'm assuming a 20s Cycle as normal - it's pretty much worst case though)
Mangle is effective damage loss, as for pretty much the same energy amout you can do a much more damaging shred, if you are using a standard cycle, you would do 3 mangles per minute (60s/20s). A mangle bitch would do exactly 5 mangles per minute (60/12).
So you are saving (X * 3) - 5 mangles per minute by using a mangle-bitch (X being the number of druids). Each mangle per minute saved is worth
(Average Shred Damage - Average Mangle Damage) / 60
DPS. At 3000 AP and 35 % Crit that would be about 12.5 DPS increase with 2 Druids and 50.0 DPS increase with 3 Druids - pretty significant if you ask me.
Having Proc-/Critluck and thus a shortened cycle or having one druid that is worse geared or in tank gear even increases the gap.
Odd question, are any of you here becoming threat limited? I've been in the Melee DPS supergroup with a Warrior, feral, enhance, and two rogues and I end up having to take a break once the fury warrior 1% ahead of me on KTM gets demolished. My point being that on threat sensitive fights maybe the highest geared cat should be keeping mangle up (or that I need to cower more).
I don't know what fights you're talking about being threat limited on, but on Teron Gorefiend without having Salv (or using cower), I came 5th on damage meters and was well behind the tank threat-wise. Maybe it's a tanking issue more than anything else (or you need to get 5 minutes salv for the first part of the fight at least). The only fight I can think of where threat should realisticly be an issue is Void Reaver.
As for cycles - if you have 2 piece Malorne, OoC, and 40%+ crit raid buffed, you should have an average cycle time of around 13-14 seconds. Sometimes you get rubbish luck, sure, but you also get good luck occaisionally and end up with having to use an extra shred once you hit 5 combo points and waiting for rip to run out.
Odd question, are any of you here becoming threat limited? I've been in the Melee DPS supergroup with a Warrior, feral, enhance, and two rogues and I end up having to take a break once the fury warrior 1% ahead of me on KTM gets demolished. My point being that on threat sensitive fights maybe the highest geared cat should be keeping mangle up (or that I need to cower more).
Never had an issue with threat unless I have an insanely lucky crit streak - assuming that the tank is actually trying instead of being lazy. Our DPS warrior can (if he really tries) occasionally get high enough for the boss to smack him down, but definitely not on a boss where the tank has no external things to worry about apart from generating threat.
I'm curious as to how much dps a t4/t5 geared druid can put out. Assuming you're in a group with a dps warrior and enhance shaman with full raid buffs and a single feral in the raid, can anyone easily break 1k dps on a straight up tank and spank?
Reason I ask is I'm pretty well geared now, at least as well geared as our rogues, yet while they seem able to break 1.2k dps without breaking a sweat I struggle to hit 1k even when fully focused on dps only and powershifting my whole mana bar. Usually I average about 800 and while this is partly because I often switch out and throw a few regrowths on melee, I'm slightly worried that with the lack of any real feral itemisation past SSC rogues and other pure dps classes are just going to leave me in the dust.
The thing that bothers me is that a couple of months ago when we were working through Gruul/Magth/SSC I was reasonably competitive with dps, particularly prior to the consumables nerf. Which leads me to believe that we simply don't scale nearly as well as other classes.
Now, and to a more noticable extent, as gear progresses, rogues and warriors will surpass you in dps. This is partly due to the lack of nonset itemization past SSC, mainly due to better overall scaling of the other classes.
And, to be honest, this is how it needs to be - if i could do as much dps as a rogue, why even bother bringing a rogue ?
Our extremely good ability to offtank (and do reasonable dps afterwards), as well as combatrez, innervate, lotp, motw and other unique abilities (such as our sick threat generation, even when rage starved) are still making up for the dps loss.
As it is now, i can reach 1k dps on a straight tank and spank, our top rogue is doing 1.5k - and i expect that gap to widen.
Apart from that - is there really ANY fight where you are purely dps ? (the one fight i can think of is solarian, and even that only if another druid is tanking) I almost exclusively offtank in bossfights at some point, so i can't afford to wear full dps gear anyways.
Edit: I have to say though that if i had equal gear as the mentioned rogue and an agi totem i daresay i would reach 1.2k dps.
Boevis, I was saying that you can get away with having the first use a normal cycle, and the second use a pure-shred cycle, and have even more DPS than one being an actual mangle-bitch. The point is, if the one who is using a pure shred cycle is paying attention, they shouldn't have to waste any energy or anything else (as the maximum downtime for mangle 'should' be ~4 seconds) - obviously Mag isn't the best fight to use as an example in the first place, because (a) We use a similar strat (but last tank gets no.3 MD and I grab that to kill third) and I've never had a problem with using full DPS gear, and (b) because of earthquake and clicking, you can't really have a proper cycle in the first place.
I also assume neither of your ferals have Savage Fury, which both me and the other feral in the guild does, and it means mangle isn't as much of a hit to DPS in the first place (and if you continually have the same person being mangle bitch, you should consider getting them to spec it). The ashtongue talisman also comes out as being better than bloodlust if you do end up having a mangle bitch doing 2 per cycle, so if you can get it then that person should be using it (very few guilds that can, but its worth pointing out).
Edit: Just checking armoury: Who is vanquashing and why does he only have 1 point in shredding attacks? Even for PvP its probably the best talent you can get :/
It also appears Cowking, Praetorius and Vanquashing all have savage fury, while you don't (not sure if all of them are mains or not, but they're all the 70 ferals I could find in your guild). In that case, you end up with them having:
It's not as clear cut as that anyway, but I'll leave it there as I'm still waking up atm.
Using only 1 mangle on the mangle bitch, and all shreds on the other druid doesn't really work because as you said in the other post our cycle times change. There's so very few fights where you could sync your cycles to the point where you could have a normal cycle and a pure shred, a single dodge and you're 2 seconds off, if they crit one more time than you, next cycle will be 2 off, etc.Taking luck and skill into account, it's entirely possible for one druid to get even 2 full cycles ahead of the other druid, that's quite a bit of lost mangle time.
Vanquashing is usually our 2nd Feral, he's taking a break for the time being so Cowking (who usually heals) is filling the spot. Vanq is Bulgarian, and I've given up trying to explain logic and math to them (we have a fairly large bulgarian presence, either they just like pissing me off, or they just don't seem to get the concept of cycles for DPS). With Vanquashing, I usually run my own cycle just because I don't trust him to do mangles, With Cowking, I already have him doing the mangles since his gear isn't as good so I figured SF+Worse gear would make the difference, forgot to do the math on SF though since I figured no Tank would take that over other talents.
And jesus, thanks for bringing up Vanq's talents ... I'll have to make sure that's a PvP spec, since 0/3 SotF is pretty retarded for tanking.
Edit: On the note of DPS, my guild rarely has feral druids on a pure DPS duty, even on Leothrass I end up tanking just because our Prot Warriors need to wear DPS gear to kill their inner demons. The few times Vanq or Cow have been on full DPS duty, or I cut out my tanking time (like on maulgar) we're pretty consistantly 750-900 DPS depending on fight conditions. Personally I think we should be at 75%-90% of a rogue instead of the 60%-75% I'm usually seeing (low end being in OT gear) But I'm much happier with the feral situation than I was after the 1.8 "Class review"
Now, and to a more noticable extent, as gear progresses, rogues and warriors will surpass you in dps. This is partly due to the lack of nonset itemization past SSC, mainly due to better overall scaling of the other classes.
And, to be honest, this is how it needs to be - if i could do as much dps as a rogue, why even bother bringing a rogue ?
Our extremely good ability to offtank (and do reasonable dps afterwards), as well as combatrez, innervate, lotp, motw and other unique abilities (such as our sick threat generation, even when rage starved) are still making up for the dps loss.
As it is now, i can reach 1k dps on a straight tank and spank, our top rogue is doing 1.5k - and i expect that gap to widen.
If you assume the difference in DPS between a Feral Druid and a Rogue/ Fury Warrior is 500 dps then is that insignificant in terms of overall raid dps? I'd say no.
What can a Feral Druid add apart from dps in an encounter where we don't get to fulfill our niche of tanking for part and DPSing for the other part?
MotW - assuming you have 0 resto Druids.
Innervate/ Rebirth. Rebirth is unique, Innervate isn't really significant at all these days.
LotP- assuming you can be placed in a group (Melee dps, hunters or MT group).
In a typical raid these days my guild has 3 Rogues, at least 1 dps Warrior, 1-2 resto Druids and if I'm not tanking I'll usually be in a "leftovers" group- sometimes giving LotP to hunters, but adding very little to the raid except for Innervate and Rebirth.
Our current progression fight is Kael'thas and I feel like an asset, but for a fight requiring fewer than 3 tanks I'd probably be a liability and if we were to face a block on something like Gorefiend in the future would the raid be better off replacing a feral Druid with a pure dps class? Is rebirth worth 500 raid dps? I'm not so sure.
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.
This isn't about slacking or sucking or whatever - it's just that our class has it's limitations. I'm not going to say i play my druid perfectly, however, i doubt, that anyone could get anything near 5 % more out of my druid.
As i already stated in my last post, the rogue has several pretty significant advantages over me - he almost always wears full dps gear, he is always in a windfury group and he has some of the best gear available to us (we're at kael atm).
So theoretically making up for the handicap i have - me having better gear and being in an optimal dps group for me (featuring agi totem) - the difference would definately not be 500 dps.
And even if it were, i feel like rebirth is worth a lot - look at Teron Gorefiend for example (as you mentioned him). I didn't do the fight myself yet, however, from what i gathered people are going to die early in the fight, no matter what you do. Casting rebirth on anyone dead early effectively adds his dps to your from now on (as he would be dead otherwise).
Apart from that, i don't know how many protection warriors you are taking to your raids. We usually have 1-2, and with rare exceptions, feral druids are heavily favoured over dps warriors in terms of offtanking. And even if i don't do 1500 dps, i definately do a lot more dps than a protection warrior or dps warrior in half tanking gear.
I think our role is somehow comparable to shadow priests. They rarely top damahe meters nowadays (heavily depends on the fight), usually i end up somewhere between them. However, their utility - mana- and healthreg - is worth so much, that their effective dps is a lot higher than what it shows up on any damage meter.
I'm curious as to how much dps a t4/t5 geared druid can put out. Assuming you're in a group with a dps warrior and enhance shaman with full raid buffs and a single feral in the raid, can anyone easily break 1k dps on a straight up tank and spank?
Reason I ask is I'm pretty well geared now, at least as well geared as our rogues, yet while they seem able to break 1.2k dps without breaking a sweat I struggle to hit 1k even when fully focused on dps only and powershifting my whole mana bar. Usually I average about 800 and while this is partly because I often switch out and throw a few regrowths on melee, I'm slightly worried that with the lack of any real feral itemisation past SSC rogues and other pure dps classes are just going to leave me in the dust.
The thing that bothers me is that a couple of months ago when we were working through Gruul/Magth/SSC I was reasonably competitive with dps, particularly prior to the consumables nerf. Which leads me to believe that we simply don't scale nearly as well as other classes.
I've seen as high as 1250dps with a flask but I have a few holes in my gear so the actual potential should be greater. Even so it is still less than rogues, fury warriors and even enhancement shamans, and the gap will get bigger with the haste items in Black Temple. However the fact that leader of the pack enhances 4 other people's dps by a non trivial amount along with things such as innervates on shadow priests (with some tier 5), and battle rez means that the raid dps should be higher with the feral than without, or at least close enough to justify his presence in a no offtank fight.
Ugh, I'm sorry if I contributed to starting this lame discussion about the value of feral druids in raids, can we seriously drop it and not bring it back up, if there's anyone doesn't get that we are the best at OT then I don't think they ever will. This thread should be devoted to doing the DPS side of feral better, be it in farming PvP or raiding.
In a typical raid these days my guild has 3 Rogues, at least 1 dps Warrior, 1-2 resto Druids and if I'm not tanking I'll usually be in a "leftovers" group- sometimes giving LotP to hunters, but adding very little to the raid except for Innervate and Rebirth.
If you're not in the main DPS group you cant compare the damage. I'm usually in the top 5, if the fight is not melee unfriendly. An enhancement shaman is most important if you want to be competitive. with a warrior+enhancement shaman you can get over 5k ap with your trinkets. (i have a screen from a vashj try a few weeks ago).
i calculatet what the enhancement shaman alone gave me:
+241 AP (str totem), ~+500 AP (10% ap buff), 20% less :p (we had salvation too. XD) = ~~+740 AP ! (with my trinkets on)
with an additional agi totem it would have been +98 AP and ~4% crit
If you want to be effective DPS you need to have a warrior+enhanc. shami in your group. the +10% ap buff is huge for us, since we already have massive AP compared to other classes.
We are at Kael'thas right now and i still can hold up with all the DPS classes.
As far as I can tell this hasn't been asked yet, I apologize if it has but in rereading the thread I failed to notice it. When dpsing on a boss that is bleed immune (so no rips) like Void Reaver and Hydross would it be better to just consistently shred and forgo ferocious bite altoghether? While there are times FB can do some nice damage I'm not sure you wouldn't be better off from on overall dps standpoint just continuing to shred.
Ferocious Bite only takes 35 energy to use. It hits harder and crits higher when at 5 combo points than Shred will. I can't think of a reason not to use it when your energy falls within 35-41. I could be wrong though.
It also resets your energy cycle to an even number so that you can build up to 100 exactly. The ideal cycle to use this is based on getting 2 crits in your first 3 attacks.
0.0 Mangle
1.0 Shred
4.0 Shred
6.0 Ferocious Bite at a cost of 36 energy.
Ferocious Bite only takes 35 energy to use. It hits harder and crits higher when at 5 combo points than Shred will.
This is not always true. Shred scales better with AP than FB does. With the Everbloom idol, mangle, and enough AP, Shred will do more damage on average than a 5cp FB. Whether its energy effecient or not and works as well with a powershifting cycle is a slightly different story.
Raidbuffed i'm usually from 3.5k to 5k+ AP (depends on procs/trinkets/group setup) and around 40% crit. i had a look at the wowwiki page and i saw, that 4cp and 5cp scale the same way.
Rip(5) 942 + .24*AP
Rip(4) 774 + .24*AP
Sinsce there is only the static damage difference of 168 there must be a AP/Crit value where a 4cp is better than a 5cp rip for DPE. and i'm really curious where it's at.
PS: this of course is only true if what wowwiki says is right. the damage from the formula seems a bit low
1 point : 300 damage over 12 sec.
2 points: 498 damage over 12 sec.
3 points: 696 damage over 12 sec.
4 points: 894 damage over 12 sec.
5 points: 1092 damage over 12 sec.
That's doing:
(894+(AP*0.24))*1.3*1.1 and then the result/6 for each tick.
The multipliers are for mangle and naturalist, and the 5 cp formula uses 1092 instead of 894. I'm definitely missing something, or it doesn't scale like that (seeing as I normally have around 5k ap with might/kings/enh shaman and get ticks of 650+)
At 5000 AP, DpE is ~100 for 4CP, and 109 for 5CP. At 1000 AP its 54 and 63.5 respectively using this, although I know the numbers are wrong so it doesn't count for much.
Just playing around with it, changing the factor for 5CP to 0.3 gives a value of 617/tick for 5CP, which looks much closer to the truth (but is still some way short as far as I can tell).
In any case, as far as I can tell it won't be worth using 4cp rips ever from a DPE standpoint unless the scaling changes remarkably.
Rip formula without Mangle:
(1092 * 1.3 * 1.1 + 0.24 * AP ) * 1.1 = DMG
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At least that matches up with what my observations are anyway.
Looking at the DPE column it looks like you'd have to go to ridiculous (30k+) AP to even see a significant difference.
Ok thats nice to know. BUT.. ^^
With 5cp Rips you're wasting combopoints. with 40% critrate you waste 40% of the time a cp if you have already 4cp on the target. and as far as i remember the calculation pre TBC was, that the DPE was about the same. so now since we have much more AP than before it should have passed to the better for the 4cp finisher. you also have to consider, that when you have 3 cp on the target you will have a 5cp 40% of the time anyway even if you aim for a 4cp finisher.
with 2k AP the DPE of a 5cp rip is (97/84 = 1.15) 15% higher than a 4cp
with 5k AP the DPE of a 5cp rip is (132/118 = 1.12) 11% higher than a 4cp
is 11% still more than a 40% chance on the 4cp for wasting a cp? or is ripping at 4/5cp better than always at 5cp? XD
i want to know for sure to get max dps out of my druid XD
EDIT: i did some math:
If you have 40% crit you will have (aiming for 4cp)
27.84% of the time have exactly 5 cp
72.16% of the time have exactly 4 cp
now going for 5cp wil get you 28.864% of the time a wastet cp. how much of a DPE loss is that?
Some explanation of where the 1.3 and 1.1 come from would be great
Though i don't know where the 1.3 and 1.1 come from, i can confirm that the stated formula is right (i use a static 1560 myself - calculated using linear regression and some testing).
Back to topic - some time ago i calculated Shred/Bite break even points depending on talent/ap. I recall for an untalented Bite with about 4k AP it was somewhere in the area of 44 Energy (if you have below 44 energy, use bite).
I will post the exact formula as soon as i find it in the mess of my spreadsheet
06/30/07, 12:24 AM
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