You realize if you're mangling that much Idol of the Wild is better than Idol of the White Stag right?

IotWS: Adds 94 AP which = 6.71 Damage to a white attack and 12.9 damage to a mangle (assuming savage fury).

So you're mangling 4 times in what 5 seconds? That means you get:

12.9*4 + 5*6.71 = 85.15 damage

IotW: 24 damage per mangle:

24* 4 = 96 damage.

Idol of the White Stag is a piece of crap, there's really no way around it. Its better than Idol of the Wild if you're constantly killing things and not having any spare time to let energy regen without white attacks hitting something.

IotWS: 12.9 + 6.71*3.5 = 36.385
IotW: 24

Both of these are when you are constantly mangling over long term. Which really shouldnt ever occur anyways...

Thought i'd show this to you guys. Was our WWS parse of lurker this week. My little brother, vroth, got top dps.

He had a fury warrior (calgra, aka me) and an enhancement shaman in his group. Full dps gear, which you can see here Vroth

He also had the other feral druid keeping mangle up for him the whole time too.

The parse Feral > Lurker

I was fairly impressed, especially considering the other 2 ferals in the guild are always dead last on DPS, even when in full DPS gear.

The maths behind that is sound, but if any of those mangles crit, I'm finishing up with a 4-pt bite instead of a fourth mangle which closes the difference. In either case, though, it all adds up to extremely minor difference - (also discounting the fact that that I vendored IotW some time back. Don't ask >_>) I do agree that the White Stag is pretty much a useless piece of junk as it is though, especially considering where it drops.

Welcome to the world of someone that leveled moonkin. Oh well, I'm only a tier behind getting an idol for grinding.

Disclaimer: I am basing my post on this thread: Cross-Class Numbers Request - AP:DPS
I assume the numbers listed in there are accurate, if they are not the conclusion may be off for obvious reasons.

According to the thread listed above, 1 AP increases the Druid's DPS by 0.2 DPS and a Rogue's DPS by 0.3 DPS. This by itself isn't surprising since we all know that 1 Str > 2 AP for druids since we do better with raw stats. The problem is this: People think Cat scales so well from stats, and while that is partially true, it is also misleading. Let's see why:

1 Str equals 2 AP item budgetwise.
2 AP gives a Rogue 0.6 more DPS.
1 Str equals 2.7 AP in Cat form (HotW, SotF and Kings included), which gives us 0.54 more DPS.


So even with our the scaling mods Cat already has (HotW and SotF), Rogues still get more DPS from their specialized item than we would if we had a specialized item for that slot ourselves. This just is not about calculating how much less we get from an item intended for Rogues which we have to use because there is no other optionat all, this is comparing their best to our best (for Str anyway).

I don't know about you, but this did shock me the first time I thought about it. I always thought that Cats do scale well with stats, and while it is true that Cat scales best with stats it is not true that Cat scales better with stats than Rogues scale with AP/Agi/Crit rating.

You can argue that Agility is better for Cats anyway but unfortunately I don't have the math for that (how much DPS do Cats/Rogues get from the crit 1 agility provides for example*) so I am sticking with Str/AP for the moment being.

*WTB a working DPS spreadsheet for Druids

I just wanted to mention that one point why most druids go for agi instead of str/AP is that it is also the most usful dps stat if you have to offtank something for a short period throughout the fight.
And even for a dps only role you have to find a sweet spot between AP and crit, because i think its commonly agreed that the value of crit increases with increasing AP and vice versa. And since crit rating is for us worse than agi the way to go is clear.

Regarding the spreadsheet i agree

Working on it Liar, lots of real work to do though.

But you hit the nail on the head there, the common statement that druids have "Insane scaling" is a bit of a fallacy, all we have is superficial "bigger" numbers that result in much smaller numbers than other classes in some cases. This is of course, completely from a DPS perspective, as I have no complaints whatsoever about bearforms Sta/Armor/Agi scaling.

While I can't answer if Agi is better for Rogues than Druids, one can surmise that it going to be close based on AP being clearly better for rogues than druids (50% better if your numbers are correct) the question would the value of 1% crit for rogues vs 2% crit for druids (I believe we get double the crit from agi they do?)

Hi, I have tested stacking str and stacking agi and I agree on the fact that I benefit fare more from agi than str (for my current gear which brings me to around 4k PA in raid), my question is: is there a hard cap to crit % ?
I am currently at 46% fully buffed and pretty happy with that, If possible I really want to go past 50% to see the results :p.

Since casters cannot get aggro in this fight your numbers are really odd, I seriously wonder what your casters were doing in this fight.

There's no hard cap on crit, though there is an effective limits, for white hits at least. Since there's 25% glancing blows that cannot be moved off the table the theoretical limit would be 75% crit. Of course to get that you'd need to push misses off the table (easy) and somehow push dodge/block/parry off the table too which would require an INSANE amount of FCS items. Im actually doubting there are enough items with FCS out there to do this, but that would be the theoretical limits. Even in practice with standard dodge and attacking from behind the point where more crit would be useless would be in the 70% range so its not likely to actually hit that point.

For yellow attacks it would be even higher, if its a single roll system. In a two roll system I'd imagine there is no limits on crit in which case 100% of your attacks could be crits. I suppose with decent enough gear/buffs this could be tested by getting your crit chance up to 50% or more and then getting the buff from Loatheb.

Based on the DPS presence times, it looks like the casters did almost nothing the entire fight. Were they told to not attack or something strange like that?

This is slightly off-topic, and if you'd prefer I move it to another thread/it's own thread, please just let me know.

We are currently looking for a druid to recruit to help us with BT/HS -- we just killed Kael. I was wondering if the fine people in this thread can give me two pointers re: feral druid dps:

1) Are talented kitties actually out there? How long am I going to have to look before I find a feral who can actually dps as a kitty effectively, and still hit a couple of gear switches and OT trash mobs for me? Our guild is quite serious about the recruitment, but I want to know if it's going to take me 6 years to find a person ... or if they are common. On our server, they're almost non-existant.

2) Are there benchmarks for BT-level feral kitty gear that I should be looking for, in terms of hit/ap/crit? I have a reasonable idea of what a feral bear should be looking like, thanks to experience with our very talented bear-druid (whose fur is tuf, no less , but almost none with kitties. The first 5 pages of this thread are discussion about the value of hit, but I haven't found any post which summarizes for people like me who don't know enough to read between the lines.

Feral druids aren't difficult to find as far as my experience goes with recruitment. Ferals make up around a third of all druids in end game raiding due to our usefulness all round.

Bench marks for a druid solely for dps?
Entering BT you could be looking at
2800AP
32% crit
6-8% hit

Those are really bottom line stats and fairly easily acheivable. If hit looks low to you, check their armory to see if they have any Feral Combat Skill items (Shapeshifters Signet, etc) which go someway to make up for a small lack in hit.

Unfortunately, my dps gear is kinda crap so I'm not worth using as a benchmark in that regard : ) I only just replaced my Clefthoof Leggings with T6 for shame

Just commenting on these numbers. Wearing purely Kara/Gruul and LW gear i'm currently at 2750AP, 30,75%crit and 7.86% hit unbuffed. We are working trough SSC/TK at the moment.
And there are quite some upgrades waiting until i reach BT/MtH i think.

So looking for a feral entering BT for a dps role i would rather benchmark in the direction of >3000 AP and 35-40% crit with about 8% hit. These numbers are just assumptions though cause i have no experience there. But having reasonable upgrades for most of my slots makes me assuming this values.

Unfortunately, those were the numbers I was looking at when first entering BT. But then, I was an OT, and my dps contribution wasn't something that was worried about in that I could throw out some dps when not tanking and still tank most things adequately.

As said, I only replaced Clefthoof Leggings on our recent Council kill >.<, Ogre Maulers Badge with Ogri'la Crystal etc, etc. MY dps gear was (and to a lesser extent still is) pretty damn crap : b

White Stag is the best constant combat solo idol around.

Because we so needed help with chainpull soloing.

Cats scale will with stats because they have to, in order to compensate for the horrible AP to DPS conversion rate we deal with. The original feral tree, way back when, was an example as to what happened when cats didn't scale well with stats. The primary sources of the AP to DPS gap is dual wield and self haste. Plug one of those holes and things look a lot better.

For a feral to use in Tier 6 zones, remember that said feral NEEDS set tokens. There just isn't anything else, and if you won't let or can't get a druid with said set (gemmed and enchanted for dps), that druid won't do good dps. DPS as a feral is pretty simple, and in my opinion if somebody is a quality tank they have the potential to be just as good in cat. But they need gear to do it, and said gear is in limited supply.

Just to add: It isn't a bad sign if the Druid you are inspecting is wearing 2 piece T4 (Helm, Shoulders, Gloves, 2 of those) even though he has access to T5 loot. On the contrary, this is a good sign. 2 piece T4 is only topped by 4 piece T6 (which for obvious reasons your applicant won't have) because it scales nicely (hah) with your gear.

On the topic of hit: He either needs 8.6% hit or 5.6% hit and [Shapeshifter's Signet]. Yes, it's a low level item but we can't really help it either <_<

Well, I've only one BT item (treads) and I'm running at about 2800 AP / 41% crit / hitcap including Shapeshifter's Signet. So yeah, your numbers are a bit better but if the applicant stacks agi you might see 'low' unbuffed AP at the expense of crit.

If the druid takes tier gear for tanking, as I have, and rogue leftovers plus 2t4 for DPS, their stats won't be as great as a full-on kitty; as explained in the bear tank items thread, there's a heck of a lot druids can tank in BT and Hyjal, so I'd advise against recruiting a kitty with top-notch cat gear but pre-Kara tank gear. Obviously depends on your guild though :P We're after a feral for BT/Hyjal at the moment, but our only app was a pure cat druid who'd entirely neglected his inner bear; a no-go for us.

This is what I look at when I look at druid recruits (My guild is 5/6 SSC 2/4 TK)
1. A spec with Primal Fury, Shredding attacks, Naturalist, and Omen of Clarity (There are others they should have, but the crappy druids miss these, most often the last two)
2. The gems in their gear have Agi versus Str.
3. When they are using rogue gear with lots of different drops, like belts, you find the rogue gear with agi on it. Seeing a druid with the bracers from Maiden in Kara is a flag for me. When I see those I check their Ogri'la rep to see if it looks like they are working on that
4. They tell me their primary attacks are shred and rip. They shred to 5 then rip. (Helps if they mention keeping the mangle debuff up)
5. 35 Agi enchant on their weapon
6. They have an everbloom idol
7. Good lower city rep

Generally after that I don't really care if they don't have the 100% best gear for each slot, they're fine mechanically and I won't have to fix that. Gear is easy to fix, especially if you are moving past SSC and still have bolts of soulcloth around.

Just a note, the hit cap has been determined almost certainly to be 9% (or 6% with the signet) not the old 8.6% as it was at 60.

I guess I got carried away by a tangent. Yes, I do understand what you meant. And my opinion thus was that the slightly different itemization needs was a pretty elegant design consideration, even though the itemization availability itself remained/s questionable.

Homogenizing loot, while a solution, would something that would really feel like a cop out, I guess. That's just my opinion.

I disagree completely. No one wants to see 5 different types of armor drops and 4 types of jewelry for melee alone (druid, rogue, paladin, shaman, warrior with the last 2 sharing jewelry. Further, blizzard will never be able to make druids scale as well as the other classes because itemization makes it so that getting something from more types of modifiers is always superior to getting a lot from few (rogues hit+crit+agi+ap+haste+armor pen > druids agi+str+armor pen) Our itemization sucks, and our scaling isn't that great anyway, the most complete fix is a change in mechanics. The only downside would be more rogues crying "They're stealing r lootz"