Clausm

Sry for question, if already answered, but what is better, [Chestguard of the Conniver] or [Shadowprowler's Chestguard] for Cat DPS?
I'm already hitcapped.
Thanks alot.

 

Daenerys

Shadowprowler's by a mile.

 

frdrk

More attack power, more crit, more gain from BoK, irrelevant hit difference. Is there even any competition?

 

• sadris

And yet loot tables are polluted with piece after piece of DPS plate even though feral druids are more "useful" to a raid than fury warriors. Hell, there are even multiple options for every slot in every raid tier in the category of DPS plate; yet for some reason I still use blues.

'[The main argument against gay-marriage] always revolves around ... "the gay agenda"... Apparently all these gays only want to get married so they can adopt children, turn the children gay (probably using their mystic gay voodoo, passed gayly down from one gay generation to the next), and perpetuate their gayness.'
-- rantingkitten

 

Daenerys

Probably a dangerous topic to explore here, but I just wanted to say that while I agree there is too much DPS plate in the loot tables, I don't think that means they should "pollute" the tables with more feral stuff. In my raid, we have 1 feral Druid, so once I get something, it's rotting past that (gg 2x Idol of the White Stag on 2 Supremus kills so far - yeah, its not a great item, but I was happy to have it for farming at least =P).

In general, loot that is tailored to only one spec of one class is bad, but there is TONS of it in raid instances (though sadly, not a dearth for our chosen spec/class). So far in T6, my guild has seen maybe 20% of our drops go to waste (3 weeks; 3/9 and 4/5 so far) because they were too specific to certain specs of certain classes. It's really a shame, and I know there are a bunch more drops on bosses that will also go to waste.

Rather than add Feral drops, I would much prefer Blizzard make an effort to reduce the number of class/spec drops and shift to loot with more options. The T5 Druid trinket, while not an excellent piece, is at least a good effort to address the issue. They could do this with a lot more pieces in raid instances.

 

Allev

The big problem is not when there's a piece of gear that one spec of one class wants. It's when that piece of gear is so bad that it's not even worth using in many situations. See BWL trinket, Hydross trinket, all expansion feral tanking idols, perhaps the Ashtongue trinket (not a drop but still), Pillar of Ferocity... Heck, it took a massive revision for our tier sets to be balanced in a worthwhile manner. If an item is only useful to the undergeared/improperly geared, it shouldn't be in a raid instance.

But, this derail already has its own thread over in general discussion.

 

david0925

Item Integration is much more practical than diluting a already crappy lootable that PvEers have. Heart of the Wild working on AP for cat form rather than strength will fix the loot hole considerably, and making a high DPS weapon with Strength and Agility that are only active in Feral Forms will further help the undesirability of additional feral weapon dropping in raids.

 

Liar

I doubt anyone would complain for more items via the crafted recipe drops/rep vendor way. Why aren't they doing that? It's so easy and doesn't step on other people's toes at all - if we ignore the DKP meta game for a moment here (and this is hardly something that should stop Blizzard from doing it).
That is the one way of doing it (via items).

The second way is related to something we talked about a looooooooong time ago, so maybe some people remember it.
The point was about Bear/Cat hybrid items which basically all our Tier items are. I didn't think it was that great of an idea (and for weapons it is asisine, sup Pillar of Ferocity?) but I came to terms with it. I would still appreciate special Cat and Bear items but I understand that doing this avoids cluttering up the loot tables.
Bear form scales exceptionally well with stats like armor, agility and stamina already and this is why hybrid Cat/Bear items work at all. Let's face it, if they itemized properly for bear (i.e., increase Stamina, swap Agility with Strength and so on) we'd put other tanks out of their jobs. Like I said, that is because of all the scaling modifiers they gave Bears.

Now to finally get to the point: Why aren't they doing this for Cat? Where are the scaling mods for Cat? HotW is outdated in it's current form as mentioned above - I am talking about stuff that scales from Rogue stats. You know, stuff like "Increases your Agility/AP by X% while in Cat form".

If they did that, it would not only help to reduce loot problems because then there would only be "Feral leather" (Bear/Cat hybrid items) and "Rogue leather" which now works just as well for Cat because of the new modifiers. It would also give Ferals item options for every slot which aren't outright subpar as they are now.

 

david0925

Frankly speaking if they do Feral stuff right, drops or vendor or rep, no druid will roll on other classes' stuff

 

Forcei

This might seem like a stupid question. My guild is going to be attempting Void Reaver soon and the current strat is to have me tank first since my threat gen is better.
My question is after the deaggro would I be better of staying bear or going cat to try and get my threat back up?

 

oldmandennis

Bear because of the multiplier. Rage isn't a problem with all the poundings you take.

Also, its best to have your warrior go first. The question isn't who is #1 on threat, it's who is #2.

You want the threat meter to look like

Warrior
|
You
|
|
Rogues

and not like

You
|
|
Warrior
Rogues

Your offtank warrior will be limiting the rogues.

 

SS_Keera

I can't see the point of you beginning, because as druid you can create good thread without getting hit but your warrior buddy cannot.
So he is the limiting factor for your raiddps cause all others have to be at least on the third place in the aggrolist to not get aggro when you are kicked.

Therefore the warrior starting to tank is the better idea in my opinion. *shrug*

And for your question stay in bearform. You shouldn't have much problem with rage or threat generation.

Edit: to late :/

 

david0925

Druid going second is probably better due to the fact that the warriors cannot build as solid threat despite pounding when compared to the druid's capabilities.

when in cat form, you receive passive -29% threat generation, so unless you're doing like 1.2k dps gear in tank gear (i assume you're wearing that), you will generate less threat than you would have in bear form

 

Bloodwood

A few pages back there was a mention of a debuff filter that could sort out mangle, yet I can't get it to work or it just seems plain incompatible (I suspect using x-perl ui frames could be the cause). Is there any other solution? I've respecced feral after being resto for the past 6 months and it's making my life hell in a new guild with multiple feral druids when I can't tell whether mangle is up or not.

 

seminarca

I recently starting using FeralDebuffList which I believe is just a stripped down version of (?) pDebuffFilter. Link to the Cat Druid page in case the direct link dies later.

It tracks Mangle, FF and demo shout/roar/CoW.

Coincidentally, I use X-Perl player/target/party unitframes as well, and have not had any issues getting it to work. I don't use the X-Perl raidframes though.

 

Dalamar

Heh, I was able to go first and tank the entire thing from 100% to 0% this week. Void Reaver is a lot easier when you don't have to tank swap or have to worry about another tank being second.

 

Dalamar

NECB works great, I use it to track my debuffs while tanking and DPSing as well as my HoT timers on my alt.

 

dukes

I just have pitbull set to filter debuffs, so that the only things I can see are druid debuffs. You could use DFilter though, which is completely configurable as to what it shows.

 

Bloodwood

Thanks, I've installed it, just need to wait until Sunday night to test it out.

Is there some sort of options menu that can be opened?

Also, I've looked through this thread and found nothing conclusive, is +crit better then +hit? Right now I'm tossing up between putting a 4+ crit/4+ agi gem in Edgewalkers instead of the +4 hit/+4 agi gem I have in now.

 

SS_Keera

I bet it was not your first kill where you did tank him from 100-0% without tankswitch, which was the question from Forcei
I suppose you have to "outgear" the fight for a bit to be able to generate that much threat, while being in "tankgear".

We had our firstkill when i was wearing 2/5 T4 and some clefthoof tanking pieces (yeah no attunements). Nevertheless he doesn't hit that hard and tanking him was rather easy from my point of view. The "hard" part is not the tanking imho, its more ranged avoiding the orbs and melee the pounding and get enough dps with that much running around.

@Debuffs: I use Chronometer for this purpose and it serves me quite well. It goes beyond mangle debuff, showing me the duration of every of my "over time spell" (e.g. Demoshout, Mangle, Lacerate...) and when I'm backup healing its also nice to have an overview of my HoTs.

 

onkl

I switched from Chronometer to ClassTimers because its more accurate. Chronometer sometimes shows bars for spells that were resisted. So you allways have to double check if the debuff is applied or not.

 

Vaccine

Everbloom idol makes perfect sense.

You'd switch to everbloom after you got the mangle buff from white stag to get bonus on your shreds. Then repeat.

That is were it worth it, which its not due to the gcd on idol swaps.



As for the idea of converting HotW to benefit from rogue leather, its a brilliant idea in principle but I can't see Blizzard making such a massive overhaul of a class at this point.

I guess we'll just have to see which path they take with Zul'Aman, the Sunwell and the new heroic badge rewards. I cannot see them making the same mistake again of underitemising ferals or any other raiding spec so our answer is going to be in the items we receive there as to what direction they want us to be heading.

My prediction is simply more and more bear/cat items mimicking our Tier sets and crafted items. Whilst this isn't nessecarily a bad thing would have been nice to get some specially tailored cat or bear items.

 

Allev

Our AGI modifier is already overpowered-- we get a much better crit ratio from it than rogues do and as much AP. It's just that they insist on giving us hybrid stats (hello, INT!) on items which we don't want in lieu of giving us 3 DPS stats on DPS items like rogues get. Heck, I counted a hunter item the other day with 5 stats relevant to their DPS on it. Cursed Vision of Sargeras has 4 for rogues (and the few druids who get to roll on it). But the only gear you see STR, AGI, and another DPS stat is feral pants.

 

• Falk

I think I actually like how the mechanics of the class design works. From what I perceive, druids were given insane scaling based off certain stats EXACTLY so that hybrid gear works out.

As it is, Str and Agi are THE stats to look out for catform (like, 40-65% better than AP/crit?). Those two stats benefit druids more than rogues. Yes, Agi does - crit benefit from agility for druids are pretty high. Sta/Agi/Armor are ridiculously good for bearform, as you've pointed out.

Making scaling factors for AP would probably homogenize gear too much, which can be both good and bad. However looking at how tanking gear for warriors/bears (on slots like rings/trinkets, naturally) have panned out, I'm personally leaning towards diversifying itemization as the more elegant solution.

What I mean to say is, the class mechanics seem fine to me for the most part. It's just the itemization to -take advantage- of the class design which is missing.

Honestly... nothing outside tier pieces and a pair of boots? Nonexistant bracer pieces? No epic options for DPS cloak/ring/neck other than SSC/SSC/Karazhan? Come on. :/

(p.s. no 'options' referring to items which take advantage of class design. I'm well aware that some drops are (albeit really marginal, sad really) upgrades off the cloak/ring/neck I'm talking about)


((p.p.s. on the topic of Idol of the White Stag, farming has become so insanely fast with it, 2pc T6, and the Ashtongue trinket. 4 Mangles for 140 energy, keeping in mind that this means you wait at most 1 second for enough energy for the 4th mangle,, while having the chance to proc a cartload of AP, usually leaves most non-elites near dead in 4 seconds. Pounce-mangle-shred doesn't even seem worth the effort anymore. :P))

 

Daenerys

I meant the name doesn't make sense..."everbloom" for a DPS idol. Sounds more like an Idol that would increse the healing done on Lifebloom, no?