I couldn't agree more man. That Druid is awesome, his LOTP is pulling down almost an extra 100000 if he is grouped with he melee and ranged, Lets even say he is a Bear. A tank pulling down an extra 100K damage? Crazy man.

No, it means that Frozen Shadowweave didn't have wasted points on holy damage (like priest T4,5,6 does). Very very similar to the FAP situation; there is few wasted item points on base weapon DPS in the Terrestrian's Stranglestaff era, but there is a metric fuckton of wasted potential AP at the Pillar of Ferocity era. If a Frozen ShadoweaveT6 came out, the gap between SP/mages would be a lot less.

Wow, stole my line....

I feel violated.

So would the "fix" be to have all weapons based off the same statistic as casters where its 42.7dps (i guess this would be 55 for cat right)+ Feral AP equaling the proper dps of a standard weapon.

Let's start, 5% crit is not a 5% damage increase.

Also its pretty funny, I thought the point was to get away from making stupid 5 rogue or 5 mage DPS groups. If we are not at least nearly comparable, we will not get spots over a 3rd rogue. Or do you not remember the "glory" days of 8 - 10 warriors in a Naxx raid. We are currently just a tank group slot or a hunter group aura bot when short on a hunter/shaman.

Ideally after converting the extra damage to the party into the druids damage, the Druid should outdamage what a rogue would have done in that spot, as a Fury and in some circumstances a MS Warrior, and an Enhancement shaman currently does.

Windfury, pots and having no offhand attack are really hurting our scaling into tier 6.

Pretty much, can we try to stay away from the "lol but you buff group option." Should we award 10% of SP dmg to warlocks due to COS? Conversely should we award 10% warlock dmg to SP due to shadow weaving? Should the MT get dps credit for putting up 5SA? Its not possible to actually calculate dmg like that if you do that to everything.

As it is right now, with 3 rogues in the raid (this is actually highly favored for everything other than maybe Illidari council or Illidan), Druid wont get a spot in melee dps group, period, due to the fact that both Battleshout and totems, neither of which need to be improved version, are superior to LoTP buff. Even IF Druids do get into the melee group due to lack of a rogue, not scalaing from Windfury is hurting greatly. This is beside the point though, right now on a high level content, we don't have specialized weapon that doesn't waste item budget. This is important because we can swap weapon in combat, which means it is NOT necessary to play hybrids with the weapon

I wouldnt necesarilly agree with that. I'd say if it were at around 90% maybe even 85% of a rogue's damage it would be reasonable, due to the fact that a feral does bring other things to the raid as well (Bres, innervate, spot heal, OT etc)

90% is where our damage should be on a WWS parse, after all is said and done with party buffs and whatnot. We are WAY too low to be considered dps right now.

Then why do you persist in considering yourselves DPS at the tier 6 level instead of off-tanks with better DPS than 50+ prot warriors?

It seems fairly clear, given the itemization, that in kara feral druids are supposed to be a viable OT choice that actually offeres decent DPS to compensate for the fact that it's a 10 man group with 6-7 DPS. With only 6-7 people the DPS really was necessary to make progression possible because sacrificing a large portion of DPS on one slot is huge when you only have 6-7 people DPSing. Fastforward to 25 man content and suddenly the denominator of this equation is much bigger so the DPS difference from a 'pure' DPS class is much less significant.

Is it possible to swap in a pure DPS for DPS check fights you can barely beat and an OT isn't necessary? Yeah sure it's possible, it's also fairly insignificant. Even if you assume that a druid is 10% of a rogue's damage and the fight is just barely possible with the rogue, which is overstating the diminished capacity of druid DPS by quite a bit, the raid DPS need only improve by 4.5-5.3% in order to make up for the loss. How long is it going to take for the raid to accumulate enough drops to make up the difference?

Cheep shotting someone just because their guild isn't linked in their profile on this forums is about the kind of bullshit I'd expect on the wow forums, not here.

Because offtanking is
A) Easy
B) Rarely needed
C) Easily hotswappable

Furthermore, offtank has a minimum requirement. Hold the mob and stay alive. Once those needs are met, more performance there isn't needed. Especially as compared to more dps. Holding the mob more and staying alive better aren't high on the list of desirable quantities in a raid slot, so once a fury warrior has demonstrated that they can hold the offtank mob they start looking MUCH better as a raid slot.

As an aside, not a single rogue would be willing to trade 826 AP for a loss of 58.9 dps on both of their weapons, and not a single rogue would ever want a 1.0 attack speed considering the huge advantage 2.5+ speed weapons have for PPM effects.

I agree completely man. The problem is that I think the devs ARE thinking this way. They added the auras to provide raid utility and viability. Otherwise the LOTP would be raid wide or castable on others. Even if you DO consider this we are still way below for serious competition.

They have to get over the fact that we can switch from a "rogue" to a "warrior" to a "caster". It costs mana and the current iteration involves the same stat stacking for maximum use as any other class. It is the same ole same ole, "but you can heal, but you can DPS, but you can tank," argument holding us back. A Feral Druid should be able to do EXACTLY what an arms or fury warrior can do, with proper gear of course, OT and DPS effectively and competitively, NOT push rogues out of their position, but make it viable.

There are so many solutions from decent Idols to better weapon scaling to stat synergy to specialized weapons. It isn't just weapon scaling or item budget, it is basic design flaw. They STILL do not get it.

It really reminds me of the change from AQ where Ferals were starting to hold their own and be contenders and viable, and then Naxx hit and it is was a wasteland for feral itemization and viability.

I don't think it will change. The MO seems to be Ferals are tanks for everyone to level while the warriors are fury and then we OT for a bit in raids and are pushed out in the last instance of the end game while everyone else gets their uber shiny epics and legendarys.

Um..lets see here:

A dagger rogue would want daggers of roughly 1.6-1.8ish MH and if possible 1.3ish for OH.

So lets go with 1.8 and 1.3 for weapon speeds.

In this case you will get:

In 6 seconds, not counting SnD, haste, or any weapon speed inc., you will get 7 swings from your MH(3 @ 5.4 sec) and OH(4 @ 5.2 sec). Now a Druid with their "godly" 1 sec Atk speed will get 6. So you tell me man would you rather have 6 or 7 swings.

A Druid is not allowed to heal well, because they can tank.
A Druid is not allowed to tank well, because they can DPS.
A Druid is not allowed to DPS well, because they can heal.

You missed the point completely.

Not only that, going by the numbers Dejablue posted, it appears that he neither subtracted 41.4 dps (the iLvl 63 blue 1H that seems to be aligned with the FAP "zero" for scaling purposes) from the rogue weapons nor added 55 dps to the druid FAP (base paw) before doing percentage calculations in upgrades. (Not that one should do both, but either would seem appropriate if trying to do a percentage-wise-upgrade comparison for weapon damage, the choice of which depending on what the comparison would be used for, but adding base paw making most sense in most circumstances)

Your point stands, of course, but that percentage trickery Dejablue seems to have inadvertently used makes for truly weird results. Doing it for e.g. two of the lowest iLvl Feral weapons, [Angerstaff] (81) and [Primal Lore-Staff] (87) (and let's assume they have an awful suffix that doesn't add to their combat stats) that's a HUGE increase of 28 AP (2 white dps) for a whopping 28/46 ~ 60.9% upgrade while a poor rogue's mainhand (again without combat stats) going from green iLvl 81 to 87 only increases from 44.6 dps to 46.7 dps, a mere 2.0-2.1 dps upgrade (depending on rounding), i.e, at BEST, 2.1/44.6 ~ 4.7% upgrade.... One could, based on that, reach the false conclusion that druid weapons scaled much better than rogue weapons percentage-wise - a good example of how one should be careful with percentages.

The two bolded percentage values are absolutley not related to each other. You compare a "AP-increase":AP ratio to a "dps-increase":AP ratio, but there is the factor 14 between AP and dps.

So the 28AP increase is equal to 2dps, which gives you 2/46 ~4.3% upgrade which is pretty similar to the 4.7% you stated for rogues.
Correct me if I'm wrong but the base paw dps can be left out since it stay regardless of the upgrade.

I hear the sky is falling.

In all seriousness, my guild is just about to start work on Mother Shahraz in Black Temple and has completed Hyjal. That's 5/5 in Hyjal and 6/9 down in BT. We typically have two feral druids in our raids. When they aren't off-tanking, they're DPSing. In my experience, ferals are particularly awesome for Bloodboil and RoS as offtanks. Either my guild is some exception to the rule or the future is not as bleak as you make it seem.

Not a lot of classes see more than 2 or 3 spots in a raid group .... that's about exactly what any class should be bringing ( 25 / 9 = 2.7777 ) ....

It's funny - if you read rogue forums, you see them bitching about doing only damage and having no utility, then the druid forums, you see them bitching about having utility so they can't do damage.

The grass is always greener.


[Edit to add:] The two classes I've heard raid leaders just go on and on and on and on about willing to bring 3+ of? Shaman and Shadow priest. Not because they do amazing damage on their own (though SPriest is close up there), but because of utility.

No, the second factor was dps-increase:dps, not dps-increase:AP, and multiplying both sides by 14 to make them AP-increase:APwould not have changed the result. They are thus related to eachother inasmuch as it makes sense to make the comparison.

You are doing dps-increase:AP here.

No, you can only leave it out when it cancels out. The point of the post, which was perhaps made too roundabout, was that the comparison (FAP2-FAP1)/FAP1 with (WDPS2-WDPS1)/WDPS1 excluding Base_paw leads to meaningless results that can only be misinterpreted - I am sorry if I didn't make it clear.

Base_paw makes a significant difference because ((FAP2+Base_paw)-(FAP1+Base_paw))/(FAP1+Base_paw) = (FAP2-FAP1)/(FAP1+Base_paw) != (FAP2-FAP1)/FAP1 except when Base_paw = 0 AP. You can only leave out Base_paw (55 dps or 770 AP) in comparisons when it cancels out (such as FAP2-FAP1), not in general.

The facts are very simple:

1. dps-wise, 2H druid weapons FAP scale approximately like 1H melee weapons
2. The item budget on a 2H weapon scales better than the sum of the item budgets of a mainhand and an offhand taken together - but this is mostly counteracted (at least in the mathematics if not in actual itemization) by it being cheaper to spread stats over two items than having the sum of the stats on one item.
3. Despite 2), druids will scale faster in total AP equivalence (assuming decent itemization) due to favourable AGI-to-crit and STR-to-agi formulas and this is more pronounced the higher the item level.
4. 1), 2), and 3) are pretty meaningless details to waste time on comparing for purposes of "rogue vs druid dps" since what is important in an actual raiding situation is the dps actually applied to a boss after talents, abilities, attack cycles, and buffs are all taken into account, and there's no easy way to extrapolate what that'll be by a quick look at AP equivalent stat upgrades. How much extra damage will rogueX actually do if a gear upgrade grants him 30 extra AP compared to druidY who gets a 40 AP gear upgrade? Answering such a question in full requires something like the rogue spreadsheet with everything taken into account, not a simple "40 vs 30" comparison, but we all know that no matter the exact result, the result will include the rogue increasing his dps more than the druid, despite the druid gaining a third more AP. Dualwielding has a lot to answer for.

I've made a more general post on the druid forums on the WoW web site petitioning Blizzard to re-evaluate the loot tables of existing instances with an eye for feral druids, particularly DPS-oriented itemization. Talk has worked its way around to the very topic of this thread, and even if it hadn't, I thought you guys might be interested.

WoW Forums -> Petition for Cat DPS Itemization Reevaluation

Must... resist... urge... to... sign... posts... I do it habitually, but I'll have to learn not to do it here. Sigh.

Got it now, you are right.
The results of your first post can easily be misinterpreted. 60% vs. 5% upgrade just couldn't be right for me. I didn't get the point that you wanted to show that this is wrong.
So the right calculation for your example including base paw dmg would then be:

(FAP2-FAP1)/(FAP1+Base_paw) = 28/46+770 ~= 3.4%

Like Kazastankas already said its even worse than my first assumption. Granted my math was wrong, but it was closer to the real value. :p
Nevertheless i think we are talking about the same thing and stop at this point discussing the scaling of lvl57 greens.

You left out point 5) As soon as the druid is going to innervate a healer or spothealing to prevent someone from dying or rezzing one that has already died, he will loose the dps comparison against the rogue.
But does that make the druid less desireable for the raid because he just did less dmg? I say no for the majority of the raids, because the ones where nobody ever screws up or anything goes wrong are rare i assume.
The problem with math is that it assumes an ideal world that does not exist. A druid brings things to the raid that you just can't include in your calculations.

I don't know why you would post there, for one you are much more likely to get into an argument about a random corner of your statement then get any real support or conversation about what you said. Also you are probably more likely to get a dev to read something here then there.

The fact that some idiot was slandering your +damage enchants on your rings makes me want to chokeabitch.