Use agility for gems, fits DPS and tanking as well. A tradeoff would be agility/stamina mixed gems.

For your AP concern: i bet most druids have too much AP. The benefit from agility/crit is bigger then more AP. You could insert your values in this calculator and see yourself: Toskk's Feral DPS Gear Methodology

I don't think anyone uses "different rotations" though timing is important to make sure your full rip and every shred gets affected by mangle. The only time to consider a different rotations are if you have another feral providing Mangle, or once you get the Ashtongue trinket it *may* be better to mangle more.

This being the DPS thread, socket everything with +8 Agi unless you have the Relentless Earthstorm Diamond, in which case you'll need 2 Blue Agi/Sta and 2 Orange Agi/Hit, make sure you use these for socket bonus's. Since you'll likely use the same hat (T4) for tanking and DPS for a while, make sure you get your Blue and Orange gems in your other Tank/DPS items.

Just use the CoT Trinket, Ironskin elixir, or the Flask to make up those last points of anti-crit. Never, ever, socket for defense.

What about the enchant to bracers? Isn't it more efficient then the stamina enchant?

If you're talking pure "stat points" wise, then yes. A rare quality gem is 12 stam or 8 def, while the enchant is 12 stam or 12 def.

Both 15 res on chest and 12 def on bracers aren't "bad" enchants if you put them on items that are purely for tanking or for resist gear (I have 15 resillience on my fire res chest). If you use them for dual-role stuff, +6 stats/+4 stats are better choices really.

There's already an entire thread dedicated to this topic, please go there to discuss tanking-items: Bear tank item comparisons

Has anyone noticed that the 2 piece T4 proc in cat resets your energy tick timer (i.e. when you gain 20 energy from Bloodlust, it takes 2 seconds for you to naturally gain another 20 energy)? With the changes to how energy/mana regeneration recently implemented, I can see how this has become adversely affected.

Maybe I'm daft but I don't see how it isn't detrimental for our energy regen. You get 20 energy ever 2 seconds:

Now what happens if you get a proc midway to 20 energy (after 1 second starting from 0 energy)? You will have to wait another 2 seconds to get a total of 40 energy at the 3 second marker (20 natural regen - delayed by 1 second due to the proc - plus 20 energy from the proc itself).
Under the old regen rules, you also would have had 40 energy already by the 3 second marker but the next natural regen tick would have happened in just another second and not 2 like it is under the new regen ticks.
So we are looking at 40 energy vs 50 energy.

Also, not having the 12 agility gems available really pisses me off. Exactly what good did 2.2 do us?

Can somebody confirm these are the current mechanics? That reduces the effectiveness of the T4pc2 Bonus by 50%...

Shadowprowlers chestguard is the only thing I can think of. Oh, and making wildfury better than previously, although it didn't need it (and now makes pillar completely redundant).

im not sure if this has been discussed. and i am sorry if this is a repost. but does the 2p t4 outweigh the the 4p t5 including the stats in terms of dps? i have read reports supporting both sides. any help would be greatly appreciated

How so exactly?

Question for experienced druids, have any of you gone the transition from being a healer to melee dps?

I've been resto for most of my time as 70, minus the times I've gone feral for tanking 5 man heroics. Finally I've found a guild that will take me feral, but I'm having two really big problems with the transition.

1. I'm dying a lot (mostly due to cleaves, whirlwinds, etc)
2. I'm having trouble keeping up with targets, being able to shred consistently.

Will this get better with experience or am I better off throwing in the towel now?

Edit: For example, I died on High King due to staying in during whirlwind, cleaved by Mag after an earthquake, died on lurker whirlwind, occasionally getting whirlwinded by leo (I think this was more of a positioning issue though).

Yes, considering the way in which they made innervate work, I don't see why Power shifting would give us a maximum of 43 energy instead of 40-60 depending on our shifting speed/timing.

Bloodwood - Yes, you get more used to it, you learn to dodge the AoEs, always stand behind a target, you learn which timers you have to watch, and some fights you just don't bother meleeing. I went from Healing pre BC to tanking through ssc to DPS on the last few t5 bosses and now bt/hyjal, i've learned 2 things, the first is that I should have stayed resto because I can't count on healers to keep me alive, the second is that even as feral it is my job to heal my party (through ilotp, tranquility, and regrowths) normally this is where I'd rant about pallies and priests (and warlocks) being able to heal themselves and their party while DPSing.

Regardless, it's important to keep in mind that you are the squishiest, lowest DPS member of a raid (depending on gear), before priests would heal you to keep their IV alive, now the only people who care if you live don't even have mana bars.

On maulgar watch the timer and just leave melee when the WW cooldown is up (moonfire or something), on Magtheridon sometimes that does just happen, and on leo you should be tanking ;p

Sounds like a lack of situational awareness and movement skills. If you're a clicker, try to use hotkeys instead. Could also help to rearrange your UI to make important things like bosstimers or raidwarnings easier to spot.

Sounds like you don't have enough health... Always make sure you are a durable cat if you're dpsing, and don't be afraid to shift to bear if you're in trouble. One of my favorite parts about being a druid is that when the rogues drop dead around me I generally get out alive.

Basically- you need at least 10k HP raid buffed HP in cat. If you don't have that start getting it. As for cleaves and such just stay behind the mob and you'll avoid the majority, You should be back there for shred anyways. For things like whirl its more practice-makes perfect but I reccommend buddying up with a rogue and following him. (When you see the Rogue back off, it's a good sign it's time to get out yourself.) I really support 5/5 predatory instincts for raiding, as well. 15% ae avoidance adds up when you start seeing those 5k shadow volleys and whirlwinds whiff. You shouldn't be getting killed on lurker at all though... because you can still heal! Pop out and heal yourself, never go into a situation where you can possibly take 3-4k dmg without being over 5k health. If your group is taking a lot of ae dmg you may want to barkskin+tranquility- example on morogrim if we get 3 healers graved then I take the responsibility for keeping my DPS group alive after the next quake.

Don't get stuck in the mindset that DPS = catform only. A good raiding feral abuses every trick he has. I think that's really our niche in the raid, we'll never be top 3 DPS, but we are very durable dps with good utility. Hell I've had Gruul's where I went from cat to bear and picked up hurtfuls or once MT when we had an unlucky reverb+crush strings. That isn't going to work as well in t5+ instances of course, but I'm just trying to illustrate how a feral has to think in a raid situation.

For your #2, I'm not sure what you mean? Most mobs are tanked stationary or nearly so, unless you're talking about like Aran/Leo in which case you just suck it up and do your best. Your cat attacks from like its back hips though so if you can't hit something move up until you can. Get Boars speed on your boots, if you don't have it.

Seems like you need practice. Usually that's all there is to it, surprisingly enough. The tip about following one of the rogues around is a solid one. Angle out the best of them, and stick to him like glue. No rogue worth his salt in dps or knowledge will move to the front, or die often, so if you copy him/her you should be doing alot better.

On another note I suspect the Hourglass of the Unraveller is better than your Skyguard Silver Cross if I'm looking at your dps-gear, though I guess that's your solo-gear?

One of the major switches I found helped in going from healer to melee DPS was to hide raidframes until I could get used to not looking for them halfway through a boss fight. Breaking the link of constantly having my main focus on the raidframes instead of on other things (boss timers/actual screen) helped a lot, as it stopped me dying to obvious things (maulgar whirlwind for one). Rearranging your UI to make boss mods more prevalent, raid frames smaller and the clear space for the game larger would also probably help, and maybe having a large unit frame for yourself so you can easily keep track of your own health would be useful too.

To the advice about following a rogue - you need to be paying attention. Our best rogue does some pretty suicidal things and gets away with them because of evasion and vanish in case of emergencies. Sticking with a good rogue isn't bad advice, you should just be careful and still pay attention to what's going on.

You should also be looking at stamina as a secondary stat - I won't give a target because it depends on how good your healers are as to what kind of value you're aiming at. If you have the choice between, say, a neck with 70AP and 1% crit but no stamina, and one with 60AP, 0.8% crit and 30 stamina it should be obvious that the one with stamina is probably going to be more useful on random target bosses. Stacking a lot of stamina should always get you through boss fights as long as you're paying attention. Switching out of form and having both healthstone and health pot on binds will also save you sometimes, as well as not forgetting that you can heal (and having a decent unitframe/mod that will show your mana in forms). Having agility rather than hit/crit/ap is also better, because you can get up to a decent dodge percentage too.

If you generally use the keyboard to turn, I'd advise changing that too. Coming from a guild that has a lot of FPS players in it, we generally ridicule anyone in the guild that doesn't use the mouse for turning (most of us use an FPS setup with WASD being strafe bound instead of turn bound). It helped a few people who joined us to stop dying stupidly to things which they had been previously, as you can actually get out of the way instantly instead of waiting 2 seconds to turn round and then moving. If you click abilities this would obviously be a bit more of a problem, but switching over to a more FPS style setup certainly helps for melee classes.


Deathstorm, from Wowhead (assuming you're asking about the Wildfury):

from
731 Feral AP, 500 Armor, +70 Stamina, +50 Dodge (ilevel 128)

to
773 Feral AP, 500 Armor, +75 Stamina, +54 Dodge (ilevel 134)

Previously it was about equal to the Pillar. Now I'd say that it's slightly better (although fight dependant).

It might be nothing, but i was browsing the unofficial patchnotes on Worldofraids forums :: 2.3 Unofficial Patch Notes, Changes and Daily Blue and saw :

•'Form' added as a synonym to 'Stance'. (src)
on the UI/Macro department

Think we will be able to change from cat to bear straight away same as warrior stances? (with the help of improved /cancelform) or im i just getting my hopes up...

You will be able to change from Cat to Bear with one press but it'll need to be a macro.

/cancelform
/Cast Dire Bear Form()

will work from any form and immediately put you into bear form. The adding of "Form" as a synonym for "stance" is merely a syntax issue to facilitate coding in the LUA language.

Yeah it is, using Bloodlust+Crystalforged, Edgewalker's Longboots and Necklace of Trophies in my dps gear.

I played CS for 2-3 years before I started WoW, so this wasn't really a problem, just wish the awareness transferred over to WoW.

Also very annoying is when you have 2 (or more) ferals in the raid, all in cat form, all dps-ing, all looking exactly the same, in almost same position, sometimes i have no idea which cat is mine (if for nothing else, this is the reason we should be able to modify our looks)... And with pets and rogues alongside, and mass spells animations... I do kinda understand that you might be having troubles, plus, changing from ranged to melee is a shock.

What I did is get some experience as a cat in 5mans - if you can find a tank, a nice option would be that is a druid, so you don't have to think about applying mangle, but a warrior or paladin is also good because it makes you learn your mangle+shred rotations (though I doubt any trash mob in any 5mans has enough HP to sustain a full 5cp , but bosses do), this way you will get a feel for the "horizontal" cat movement and melee playstyle.

For raiding, try and record the fights, and watch them after, most of the times you will be able to see your mistakes and what you could have done better. And of course, heightened focus is most important, until some things "get into your blood"...

Everything else I could have added was already covered by previous posters.

Do any of your ssc/tk feral druids have WWS and your armory to show me? I can't seem to get past 830 sustanied dps, seems like a cap i am stuck on