Well isn't that a better situation than most other classes to be honest? I mean as you allude to, the stat spread on [Staff of Beasts] is really fantastic, I was really surprised to see that the Feral upgrades didn't stick to the same sort of stat allocation. I'd rather be in the current situation where a nice spread of stats works well, rather than say the position that hunters were in pre-TBC (and still are in to an extent) where agi>>> all else.

It's been said several times now, all our feral weapons passed Kara are tanking sticks, and are mediocre DPS upgrades.

While I like having armor sticks, I would also love to see a decent Str, Agi, Stam, and Hit/FCS stick placed somewhere in the mid 140s ilvl or low 150s.

If one is to believe this thread (Cross-Class Numbers Request - AP:DPS), an itemization point of str (1 str) gives us less DPS in the end than an equally itemized point of AP for a rogue. Or AGI, for that matter, let alone the fact that AP isn't even a rogue's best stat.

So, no, we don't get more from stats.

However, from that thread, one can conclude FAP doesn't scale us properly simply because STR (and consequently, all AP) doesn't scale us the way AP scales rogues, even after 2 talents and a blessing multiply what we get from it.

Edit: The mechanic that made us so good was not that we "prefer" core stats; it's that we benefitted tremendously from a wide spread of stats on properly itemized items. The [Clefthoof Hide Leggings], for example, was HUGE for us because it spread its stats out a ton. We don't get stat spreads like that anymore.

Actually a BM using Wolfslayer Sniper Rifle downgrades his DPS by moving to the Serpent Spine. Hence why I was drawing comparisons for hunters/druids on itemization being equally poor, and how we might see warriors react if they had to start "sharing" their weapons with druids. (Hop over to Cheeky's spreadsheet and switch ranged weapons around if you doubt me about it being a downgrade Hunter Spreadsheets -- In development)

Now can we please stop harping on this, my original post essentially says, "holy hell, druid weapon itemization is terrible if it's even worse than hunter's." I am not here to debate about how awesome hunter itemization is or is not. If anyone has anymore points about hunter gear, for the love of god just PM me.

Rogues are a pure dps class. We are not. Ergo this is a pointless argument. We are not supposed to scale as well as them.

uh, if we did 80% of rogue DPS in Karazhan, we should be able to do 80% of Rogue DPS in Hyjal/BT. So we're scaling at the same pace, hence 80% advancement that Rogues are making.

As it is right now, we can do 90% of Rogue DPS in Karazhan and probably 60-70% Rogue DPS in Hyjal/BT, that's not only unfair but also deceiving (so should we do 10% Rogue dps after 3 instances? probably not)

The entire problem comes from lack of itemisation, as previous stated many, many times. If they were to reitemise or introduce new items which were actually optimal for druid DPS, then we might see some silly DPS coming out of druids.


I would also like to point out that rogues, although similar mechanics wise to cat form, are not a good comparison class. If you look at rogues in comparison to other classes, they outscale them in similar ways to druids, and I feel that it is not them we should be comparing ourselves too.

That is kind of a problem in itself as there are a lot of different factors at work in every fight which make one class better or worse for that encounter.

Take for example all melee on Azgalor, they get friggen destroyed by the RoF and as such if they don't die, they put out like half the DPS of warlocks and mages.
Kaz'rogal on the other hand utterly destroys Enhancement Shaman for the meters, mana pool to get burned off as well as melee cripple and stun.
Archimonde for Mages and us Druids is ridiculous as we are basically just mobile Decurse totems.
Supremus and Melee again.

I could go down the list, the only real classes we can compare ourselves to is Rogues in most fights, Fury Warriors in most fights, and Enhancement Shaman in some fights, as these are the only classes that share our mechanics of having to melee to deal damage. Ranged usually have their own mechanics and obstructions to dealing damage that they have to work around that may not affect us.

Problem still remains that in encounters where we are able to go all out for the entire fight, we are being destroyed by the other melee classes and usually most other ranged classes that are there to do the same role, we cannot justify ourselves in a melee group unless one of the following is missing, MS/Fury Warrior, Shaman, or 3 rogues. Shaman, let alone enhancement shaman are a rare commodity in any other group, therefore our dps drops from not having one. So its sort of a revolving circle of suck, we can't dps because we are so low on the meters, we are low on the meters because we don't have an optimized dps group, we don't have an optimized dps group because we have sub par group buffs and we don't get anything from windfury, we don't get anything from windfury and we don't give good group buffs so rogues get that spot of ours, rogues get that spot of ours so we can't dps.

I would love to see what a full feral, with all the top gear, actually taking that spot of a rogue in a real melee group would be capable of, but i doubt they would cap 1500 dps while rogues are passing 2k.

However, we are working on Mother Shahraz right now, I am kinda wishing I wasn't MT for it, as it seems the closest thing to a well optimized Feral Encounter in the Dungeon so far and it looks like barring some legendaries, Feral Druids can actually compete on the meters.

What would you consider the optimal druid group? My first inclination is Shaman, Druid, MM hunter, BM hunter, (shadowpriest for the hunters? - nothing really seems to fit for a druid in the last spot).

Umm, that's a pretty easy 5th. Battle Shout is the best melee buff in the game still. Well, it's really really close to Unleashed Rage for us, but that's only because of our stacked AP.

Battleshout (especially skilled and trinketed) is a real sick dps buff. Even though it usually means windfury and no agi totem it's a huge net gain. Combine that with an Enhancement Shaman and, if you can have the luxury, either an BM hunter or an retribution paladin for additional 2% damage.

Sorry for the late reply, but I felt this was worth addressing as this is the "cat scaling thread".

I meant 2 AP for rogue > 1 str for druid, which cost the same number of itemization points. My mistake for not further clarifying.

Druids do get more crit per point of AGI than rogues-- but the math is 1dAGI ~= 2.9dAP *.2DPS per dAP = .58 DPS. Whereas for a rogue, 2rAP * .3DPS per rAP = .6 DPS, as you said. So a non-optimal rogue stat helps a rogue more than the most optimal druid stat.

Str is not our most beneficial stat, as this and the other feral DPS thread have illustrated. The real return in raids after kings is closer to 2.7 DPS per STR, or .54 DPS per itemization point, which puts us at .54/.6 = 90% of a rogue's return. Perfect! If our other DPS stats were present and scaled as elegantly as that, things (probably) would be fine. The problem is, the current mechanics and itemization don't.

STR and AGI are all we get for itemization-- even on rings and cloaks. "Pure" DPS classes get AGI/hit/AP, or AGI/crit/AP, or AGI/haste/AP, or hit/crit/AP, etc. All that needs to be done is give us a third decently itemized DPS stat and we'll be doing fine. If they replaced or supplanted INT, we'd be fine.

And again-- it's a definite problem when the best PVE DPS weapon in the game for any character that is reasonably expected to DPS in fights is from PVP, and ESPECIALLY when that PVP item isn't close to optimal (crit rating instead of AGI, and strong investments in STAM/resilience). But (not counting FAP) it's got 3 DPS stats on it, and 5 total. The "hybrid" Pillar has 1 DPS stat on it. And 2 tank stats, which make it fine for that role, but it's only 3 stat groups total. A "hybrid" item NEEDS its stat stretched to be anywhere close to viable.

If you undo the nerf, all rogue gear with significant AGI/STA becomes obvious druid bear gear, to the point where you seriously infringe on the rogue gear overlap. And you'd have to re-itemize all the druid-specific gear anyways. The itemization solution exists in the current system-- itemize like pants, with a third DPS stat feral-only gear. This can be done at the expense of INT. It requires re-itemization, but at this point it might be more constructive to just design these in Zul'Aman/Sunwell/WotLK. When it comes down to it, bear is fine.

Also, don't enter DKP into the discussion, as it's so system-dependent as not to matter. For instance, if you're in a bidding system and are the only feral druid, you get all druid-specific items (like weapons) for minimum costs, so you only pay where you need to fill in DPS holes (effectively less than other classes). Refunds-for-sidegrades systems also alleviate the DKP drain rather well. But that's for a DKP thread issue. If your guild is not employing a system that reasonably gives you what you need to fill your role in it, then that's a guild problem for another thread.

And with the way you'd have to optimize gems/enchants for DPS, you really SHOULD at least consider two pieces of gear for each slot already.

It would be trivial to convert 'rogue' gear to scale as well for druids as it does for rogues.

Take a piece of gear with 60 attack power. Say 60 attack power is the budget equivalent of 30 strength, for druid with raid buffs that means 30*1.2*1.03*1.1*2 attack power, approx 81 attack power.

Change 60 attack power on the gear to 47 attack power and 12 strength. A rogue will still get approx 60 attack power (59 without kings, 60.1 with kings) while druid will get 79.6.

This isn't rocket science. It would take about 1 hour to wrap up a spreadsheet on how to spend item points to get the desired results. There would still be issues with +hit overflow etc. of course. But not making the gear 'good' to druids certainly isn't a question of technical limitations or limitations on how many drops can be put in a dungeon.

This argument is so flawed i can't believe people are still saying this kind of ****

Look up what scaling means. Same scaling doesn't mean we have the same dps. It means we stay in the same range as we progress with content. It's not about feral dps = rogue dps. This is what pisses me off the most, people not understanding what we talk about and posting such things :/

Blizzard has certain item rules that they don't violate, one of which is, "no STR and AP on the same item" as they do effectively the same thing, just to different degrees for different classes. It may be an even larger, overarching rule, like "only two stats that show up on the same socket" (STR, AGI, and AP share red, for instance, so an item only has two of those stats).

Regardless, if you're going to ask blizzard to ignore their current item rules, you may as well just ask for items with every DPS stat on them in the game, in the perfect ratio for druids. The goal, I suppose, is to design solutions within the current rules. Blizz only changes the rules when something is GROSSLY out of line, which I don't think is the case when one half of one spec of one class has a particular issue with scaling to an arguably overpowered class at a point in the game where 2% of the population participates.

I have not read all of the posts, so I hope this isn't a duplicate idea. But, does anyone have any feedback for my easy fix for this issue:

WoW Forums -> New Stat: Feral DPS

Stop the ridiculous AP stats on our weapons and instead add a feral dps stat. We get equal dps on the weapons to other classes (factoring in base feral damage). Then, 1 feral dps = +1 dmg for cats, +2.5 dmg for bears. Moves that are hurt because they are affected by AP and not dmg (rip, fb, rake) are adjusted accordingly.

Correct, we get more from the AP than the other classes get from weapon dps, due to our finishers. If they did my idea, they would have to change the finisher formulae to reflect about a 20-25% lower AP for most druids.

You are correct, it is not a huge difference. My system is mainly a way to make weapon dps consistent, using the same rules for all melee classes (DPS = DPS, not DPS = Base DPS + AP/14 except on moves where they're not).

Right now, balance on the s3 weapons are
126.9 DPS vs 55 DPS + 788 AP / 14 = 111 DPS + extra damage on some moves war/rog + wouldn't receive + some other odd scaling from effects that differ from other classes.

In my system, it would be
126.9 DPS = 55 DPS + 71.9 DPS = 126.9 DPS.

Implmenting items for Blizzard would be easy. Feral weapons receive weapon dps for that item level - 55 worth of feral dps. Abilities and effects would be easier to balance due to using the same mechanics as other classes. +AP would be a seperate stat that would come out of the item budget.

If, because of the ways druids scale, we need less dps on our weapons a) blizzard should come out and say it and b) they could easily do this by giving us some % less dps on the weapon. But, it should be a fixed % less damage, and not a progressively larger difference as gear increases.

WoW Forums -> Feral Attack Power Change?

On a related note, for items that grant attack power in Cat, Bear, Dire Bear, and Moonkin forms, in general we are planning to increase the amount of attack power they give.

It'll be interesting to see how drastically they plan to change this, whether it'll go from pawdps+1h to pawdps+2h equivalent AP or something like a minor ilvl bump.

Isn't this just going to be a band-aid fix though? Ferals need to scale better from existing stats such as AP (Agi, Str and what not), they don't just need more FAP on their weapons. A rogue is still getting more from 1 AP than a Druid does, so all this change does is pushing the line where rogues get much better again by just a bit.

PS: Don't go all "But rogues should always scale better than Ferals" on me. Just replace "rogue" with any of the other melee classes that scale better until you find a class that you feel should scale just as well as Ferals.

hmm - no, its could be a base scaling change - assuming one feral weapon per tier (which seems to hold fairly well) then a better Ilevel-> FaP conversion is potentially a permanent solution.

By Sadris' math in the first post, at most we're missing out on 231 AP from the Pillar of Ferocity, the highest epic weapon currently in the game.

So let's say we get that AP back. 231 x .2 AP/DPS (from the other thread) = 46.2 DPS.

While this may have been "a" factor, it is not "the" factor in our scaling issues.

On the other hand, if they fix ALL the gear, or just add enough properly itemized new pieces of gear (ZA, Season 3 (now without +healing!), perhaps re-itemized T6 while they're at it), the entire package could produce some good results.