In reading some of the new gear lists, specifically Tangedyn's calculator and Toskk's, the recommendation is now 4pt rips. Is that accurate, because it seemed like they were horribly frowned upon?

The only link I can find is to the talk: rip page on wowwiki that doesn't really talk about it.

Did I miss something?

The fifth combo point on rip yields no additional ap-bonus, it has a fixed difference of about 400 damage compared to a 4cp rip, regardless of your ap.

Imo it's still worth getting the fifth point as long as you have the mangle debuff.

It threw me for a bit too. Think about it this way. What if the following happens:

Your mangle crits (2 combo points)
Your first shred crits (2 combo points)

Now you're sitting at 4 combo points. Your last rip probably has a lot of time left on it. What do you do? Keep shredding, or wait for your rip to run out? What do you do?

Toskk's new model suggests that you keep shredding, 2 more times. The old model suggested that you wait for your old rip to run out, which introduces the possibility of wasted energy.

Regarding the Crit Modifier Issue - i looked at out WWS of today's run (5 MH, 4 BT) and i'm fairly certain we do only 200% white hits as of now, while specials do 220% and 226% respectively with meta gem.

This is by no means accurate (i was wearing different gears as well as meta gem sometimes and sometimes not), however, the trend is more than obvious:

Maul: Avg 658, Crit 1487 - 226%
Swipe: Avg 220, Crit 490 - 223%
Mangle (Bear): Avg 689, Crit 1532 - 222%
Mangle (Cat): Avg 783, Crit 1726 - 220%
Shred: Avg 1445, Crit 3179 - 220%
Autoattack: Avg 402, Crit 800 - 199%

A mere coincidence ? I highly doubt it.

Source: Malazaar - WWS

It's probably better to test on your own. You had an enhancement shaman in your group, and that intermittent attack power buff probably muddies it up a bit. And if you powershift, that might throw it off even more.

However, I looked at YOUR log from Teron Gorefiend, using the same methodology.

Autoattack: Avg 294, Crit Avg 687 - 234%
Shred: Avg 1574, Crit Avg 3506 - 223%
etc.

So maybe you're right, but it's hard to conclude from raid data.

I got the following averages/percentages over a ~3 hour SSC. Mostly Bear with some Cat thrown in on trash and Hydross/Leotheras. I don't use a Relentless Earthstorm Diamond but was grouped with an Enhancement Shaman.

Maul: 588, 1311, 223.0%
Melee: 256, 577, 225.4%
BMangle: 598, 1309, 218.9%
Shred: 960, 2217, 230.9%
Lacerate: 28, 62, 221.4%
Swipe: 189, 413, 218.5%
CMangle: 503, 1164, 231.4%
FBite: 1183, 2772, 234.3%

Was that with or without a Relentless Earthstorm Diamond? If you were using one, can you go back and retest without it? It's possible that the fixes to the gem interact weirdly with crit damage talents (in which case Rogues Warriors and Hunters might also be affected).

Without, i'm relatively certain that with it it would be 200% / 226% (autohits / specials), but atm i'm too lazy to make another testrun.

Ouch, that's really gonna hurt =/

If you're too lazy to test without the gem I suppose the same applies to testing in Bear form? =x

edit:

Quote from Drysc in this thread. It's the same for all classes at the moment, only working for specials, not for white damage.

The two could be related.

Did they change Rip damage or is it just in my head?
best Gorefined try last night, WWS
The ticks just felt so low with an average of 581

From Devo Aura and Commanding it looks like you were in the tank group. Are you usually in the tank group? That's more or less what it DoTs for in my experience with minimal group buffs.

Apparently the way powershifting worked on the PTR does not apply to live. I shift, get to 40 energy and wait 2 seconds for my energy tick every single time. Most of the times, this takes me out of my Mangle duration and, while still being an increase, it's minimal at best. My understanding is that on the PTR you'd get an odd number of energy when shifting in the middle of an energy tick (2+ is what I'd need for an instant Shred) which can still make you Shred instantly which was 50% of the force of powershifting if you ask me. This is not to mention what kind of a PvP nerf this is. ^^

So... I've looked through this thread and some of the others, and it seems that there is a feral druid DPS problem that hasn't been discussed much. And that is, Feral Druids in Arena.


I do some 2v2 w/ a resto shaman, and we do OK... except that I can't seem to kill people fast enough. We can run any team out of mana, and easily beat no-healer teams, but wow, is it slow.

Basically, my question is, should I:
a) FB when they get low?
or
b) keep Ripping?

Any other tricks and suggestions you use would be welcome as well.

So am I the only one disappointed that:
a) We got no feral loot in the new trash that dropped in hyjal in 2.2 (yet prot warriors, perhaps the most overitemised class of all, got one to fill their only real gear hole).

b) We've had no announced pve changes for 2.3, and the only pvp change we've had announced was "Druids are fine, l2p".

With the changes to Bloodthirst with TM in 2.3 I'm sorely tempted to throw my feral away in place of my warrior, go fury or arms, and enjoy 2-3 items for each slot at T5 and 6.

Sorry for the whine, needed to vent!


I think its in your head. At least I was doing normal rip damage last night (around 581 funnily enough).

WoW Forums -> Can we get some 2.3 Feral news?

:/

I wouldnt be so mad about it, but it definetely feels bit like a kick in the balls with 2.3. It is bit odd that they stated few weeks / months ago that they are looking into druid / rogue / hunter balance in arena (source could be found with blue tracker I guess) and then they leave druids as they are with comment "druids are fine, we dont want to make them OP". And we all know how overrepresented druids are in 5v5 or generally top arena brackets and how well they tear dps meters in pve instances...
I hoped for windfury in feral forms atleast if not gear to fill the gaps, but oh well..

Even then Liar it would be way behind what other dps classes get at T6 in terms of iLvl.

Well I'm not prepared to bet the farm on that being the case, and it also begs the question of why the itemisation in in there rather than in the main 25 raid instances.

The whole lack of buffs has got me rather pissed off. I even started reading the wow druid forum. I was kind of surprised with the quality of a lot of what was said there. Of course there was still a fair bit of noise going on.

Anyhow I have a bit of an interesting question, why do other (melee) classes scale better than we do? For warriors the the superior rage generation with better gear is pretty obviously a factor, but what other factors come into it?

If you take the current ruleset and gear the raid with instance blues and throw it at gruul's lair, how much better off would we be than our current position?

Secondly what happens if you take well itemised feral gear and scale it up to T6 level, would that help?

I did some more BL tests this morning WITH the meta gem as you requested and the result was (over 3000 swings):

White Crits: 200%
Yellow Crits: 226%

I didn't test bearform yet but i seriously doubt that it will work there.

Scaling up gear would definately help.

Melee scalbility comes in several forms, the number 1 being Windfury. As the only melee class that can't benefit from WF, we have a lot of scaling issues right off the bat, even post-wf nerf.

Other classes also gain a lot more from AP than we do. To my understanding a flat 200 ap increase to a rogue is going to be a lot more dps than a 200 ap increase to a feral druid in cat form. This comes out when you've got things like Battleshout, BoM and Unleashed Rage which has bascially muscled us out of melee groups. Even as raid leader I can't bear to put myself in the Warrior/enh shaman group over a rogue so I tend to run the group with 3 rogues instead of a feral and stick the feral in the misfit group that runs 2 hunters, at least they love lotp

I'm going to say this: Our Feral AP mechanic is broken and silly. They should go back to the drawing board and rework it. Remove the stupid 55 base dps and make it based on weapon damage like all other classes. Then we can ditch FAP as a stat altogether and start putting out some competitive DPS numbers with a lot less AP. It also removes the need for niche feral weapons as they can just add a few 2h maces which help many more classes than just us, even if its just as a pvp or farming item.

Then re evauluate HotW and the way feral stats scale. Remove the focus on strength and retune it to AP. This way we actually can get a lot of beneift out of what is traditionally dubbed as rogue gear, that with agi/crit/ap/hit on. Again, you remove niche items allowing you to better itemize our class without "wasting" item slots on one spec.

But this is going off tangent now I think and maybe would be better moved to the FAP thread.

In closing though I'd like to say that I feel blizzard is very worried about HotW and if they gave us properly itemized Tier 6 gear, that we might scale too well with HotW. I think I'll make that my new project, to create a set of Tier 6 equivalent cat focused DPS gear and see what sort of numbers we'd be putting out by theory crafting.

It seems that they did modify it, yes. It's no longer based on a "global" energy tick, but an individual one (which I assume they did for adren rush, innervate and evocate). It still means my post stands because it's still effectively the same system, it just means you can't instantly shred.

I'm also not surprised they left ferals as they are in 2.3. For a class that is supposed to be primarily healing oriented (as blizzard have now stated) with feral and balance as alternative routes that still keep some decent healing power, bear tanks and cat dps are very comparable to the other hybrids. Itemisation is what we need (in a PvE sense) not stronger talents/abilities, and ferals are currently well balanced for PvE that they probably don't want to upset that by making changes for PvP.

Don't want to argue too much dukes but if they really wanted too they could easily add ways to increase our pvp ability whilst having minimal impact on pve, see hunters 2.3 arcane shot.