While all this might be true (It's personal opinion mainly) it still doesn't relieve me of how I think of DPS'ing as compared to before. Having 4 combo points just before a Mangle duration would run out and powershifting fast enough to pull the Shred off in time was the fun part about DPS'ing as a feral druid. Now, powershifting is just... not the same 'feel' you got before. I'm not convinced that the DPS loss is huge, it just takes a lot of the fun out of DPS'ing.

Using a Rogue and a Druid DPS calculator, and using the gear of a rogue in my guild as well as my own gear, using common raid buffs, I came across the following numbers.

Druid DPS without Totems, Unleashed Rage or Shout: 1195,87 DPS.
Druid DPS in Tank Group (Bshout): 1261,83 DPS.
Druid DPS in Melee Group (Shaman buffs and Bshout): 1392,02 DPS.

Difference between Melee and MT group for feral: 130.19 DPS.

A rogue gains ~54 DPS from LotP.
A Shaman gets ~47 DPS.
Let's say a warrior gets 50 DPS. I didn't actually check this, so verificating would be cool.
Assume 2 Rogues, a Feral, a Warrior and an Enhancement Shaman in the melee group.

130.19 + 108 + 47 + 50 = 335.19 DPS.

A rogue loses 249 DPS from being in a tank group (Eg no Shaman buffs).
335.19 - 249 = 86.19 DPS.

It seems that replacing a rogue with a druid in the Melee group, and putting the rogue in the MT group, increases raid DPS by 86.19.

Please correct me if and where I'm wrong.

I really don't understand how someone can call feral DPS fine when a druid can rock 5k ap and still not crack 1300 dps. Meanwhile a rogue with half of that can push what 17, 18, 19? Even the apparent "weak" and requiring buffs Enhancement Shamans are receiving buffs coming next patch to their mana efficiency, spell damage and threat management, the last often being the only thing holding them back from nearly matching or even surpassing rogue dps.

Infact our dps is so unwanted at this point in tier 6 that we rarely if ever see an enhancement shaman or even a battleshout using warrior with our underutilization of group buffs, limited gains from battleshout and complete waste of windfury to name a couple.



On a side note clearly the pvp devs are aware of the massive amount of success Feral is seeing within the 2v2, 3v3 and primarily the 5v5 brackets that, for some reason, none of us have seen.

And replacing that Feral Druid with another rogue or fury warrior is what, a +200 or +300 gain?

The workings seem correct Wings, however is there another feral in the tank group?

The overall theoretical DPS of the raid may be higher, however this is useless if the MT doesn't have enough threat for everyone to go all out.

Your tank group should still have a shaman. I understand that this isn't the case for a lot of alliance guilds (good shamans are hard enough to find on horde), but you should still have one in the tank group. If you find people are threat capped on an encounter and you're putting an elemental shaman with the casters and don't have any shaman for the tank, you'll probably find an overall RDPS increase from swapping the elemental for windfury + SoE for the tank for extra threat gen.

When the RDPS gain is so slim (80 out of a potential 30k or so (when we're talking theoretical numbers) is nothing) you'll probably find that it's easier to just let it go than to try and keep arguing the point.

The last thing they should do is give us more AP via changing HotW. That's just a band-aid. The real problem is the scaling is far too low. Increase the AP-scaling on our attacks in cat form massively, and (perhaps) only give us 1AP per strength in cat form.

Scaling is clearly the problem, not our overall levels of AP which are already the highest in the game.

I personally do agree with you Dukes. I have a heal set with +1600 odd healing and +110 mp5 (and I'm sure many ferals have much better) that I can bust out on any fights where we need crazy healing. I'm not going to be the awesome healer that I would be with 31+ points in resto, but by chain-chugging mana pots I can be a pretty effective rejuve & LB spammer all the same. In between that, innervate, combat rez & some pretty passable (if not top 5) dps, and we are the ultimate hybrid at the moment - along with Pallys we are the only class able to fulfill 3 roles (and it's arguable whether they can dps at the moment).

Where I would say we could use some help is in arena, I tried out arena as feral, and it was absolutely depressing. If I have to arena now I respec to 8/11/42 and then respec in time for raids again. Expensive, but for the added effectiveness and enjoyment it is actually worth it.

Increasing the way our stats give us ap/crit is a form of scaling. Adding % increase to AP allows Str to scale (just like currently) but also allows AP to scale better as well as Agi.

From the thread with the cross class AP numbers (which I cant seem to find anymore), it was something like .2 DPS per AP for druids and .3-.32 DPS per AP for Rogues.

Now take 2 simple items at same ilvl:

Item 1:
100 AP
25 Agi

Item 2:
50 AP
25 Agi
37 Str

Based ONLY on AP item 1 gives rogues a 40 DPS upgrade and item 2 gives druids a 35.76 DPS upgrade (assuming HotW gave 20% AP instead of 20% Str). Including a better ratio of crit:agi for druids this scaling is pretty decent from what I can see.

Of course changing the scaling to be scaling based on AP only works if we ALSO get proper itemization which is another large problem.

Someone asked if scaling our well itemized blues to epic item level proportion helps with scaling. The short answer is: No.

The long answer is: Yes, epic [Clefthoof Hide Leggings] would rock but after you are hit capped and get more than 5 Feral Combat Skill (granted, more than 5 still adds DPS but not as much as the first 5 points) you basically run out of stats to itemize. The more stats an item spreads it's itembudget on, the better it scales because you will get more total stats from that piece of gear (i.e 30 str vs 20 str and 20 agi - these are made up numbers, but this is the system it works on). Let's see which stats work for Ferals:

- Str
- Agi
- Crit Rating
- Haste
- AP
- FCS
- Hit (limited use due to hard cap)
- Haste

Str and AP are never itemized together, so I will go will stick with Str since it's better for us.

So that leaves us with Str, Agi, Haste and Crit rating. That is 4 stats an item can spread it's budget on for Druids. A Rogue's list would contain AP, Agi, Haste, Crit rating and Hit (since you don't get hitcapped as easily as Rogue). That is 4 stats vs 5 and at the high end this difference matters alot.

Also add the fact that Crit rating and Haste are alot worse for Druids than every other melee class and you will see how we will still lose the epic scaling game even with better itemization.


On an unrelated note: Where the hell are the JC patterns for 12 Agility?

Whether giving us mind-boggling tooltip stats is the way to go or not, if heart of the wild gave a bonus to attack power rather than to strength, we'd suddenly become super dependant on agility.