Malazaar

I don't know about you, might be my tanking set is more dps oriented than usual but i'm getting noncrit swipes in the range of 210-230. Add 30-40% crit on top of that and you are easily at 272 - and i'm not even wearing 4pc T6 most of the time.

It all comes down to situation eventually. Is your mob sundered / otherwise debuffed ? Do you have multiple targets ? Are you in a melee group, getting all kinds of dps buffs ? Is your tanking set a bit dps oriented ?

I usually find most of the above points favouring swipe - but that may not be the case for everyone.

 

Dalamar

About the only thing I still lacerate on are the Flames of Azzinoth, and that is because I have nothing for crit and AP with 295FR.

Much like Malazaar I see mid range 200s noncrit swipes, this really lends credit to - Swipe > Lacerate in nearly all circumstances.

 

Morthis

From the looks of it, assuming the mob isn't bleed immune, it's always worth keeping up lacerate for a little bit of extra tps.

 

seminarca

Gah what the hell, I had assumed the German posts about "Bär" would result in the CM posting "of course, Bear Form gets it too, what a glaring oversight because it would make absolutely no sense to restrict the form that needs it the most".

=/

Though I suppose giving it to Cat form is like making it our post-2.3 Shamanistic Rage / CloS.

I don't think a flat 4% damage reduction if used on every cooldown is that overpowered for tanking tbh. How far ahead does Warrior mitigation pull ahead in T6 content? How much further will they get in Sunwell? Timing it well to high damage specials will only add to Druid tanking complexity, which lord knows is simple enough at the moment.

 

Morthis

Not sure how barkskin stacks with other mitigation. If it's multiplicative it would end up being 20% damage taken instead of 25% (assuming 75% mitigation and physical damage), which isn't all that overpowered, but would be pretty strong for absorbing nasty timed attacks or spell damage.

If it's additive though (which is very doubtful), it would put us at 95% mitigation against physical, which would obviously be far too powerful for a 1 minute cooldown.

Either way, it would be nice to get some sort of oh shit button as druid.

Btw what's wrong with druid scaling atm? We're not very far in T6 yet, but so far I'm not seeing myself as a weaker tank than our warriors (except for said oh shit buttons). Granted we suffer from armor capping so quickly, but our health scales very well with stamina, and our dodge scales incredibly well with agility, so the only two things we really miss is the fact we can get crushed (a gap that does become bigger as warriors can get more and more armor while we can't) and the emergency buttons (which, next patch at least we got pot/hs as an option).

 

Tuhalu

Warriors get a passive 16% (talented/defensive stance) reduction of all incoming damage (magic or physical). Barkskin would be our closest equivalent to that if it becomes castable in Bear Form. Of course, the current limitation of Barkskin on test is that you can't cast it and drop into form instantly due to the GCD.

 

dukes

Morthis/Cerunas - You basically just mentioned two of the problems - lack of emergency buttons, crushings (not fun to take a lot on a boss like Teron). The other "issues" are decent itemisation - plate boots, legs, belt, gloves, bracers, shoulders (although crap), helm, along with 2 tanking weapons and 2 shields, and t6 in comparison to leather boots + t6 for tanking. Wow, amazing variety for druids. As you carry on through BT, warriors get a lot more upgrades than druids which pushes them further ahead on a pure-tank curve (and all the druid things are trash boots, which you may have loads of or may have none of, along with tier pieces which are all late in the zones).

Theres also the issue of spell reflect (RoS/Council), shield block (Illidan) and zerk rage (Archimonde) which make warrior tanks effectively required for those bosses.


I don't believe they'd implement Barkskin in bear form. As it is, it looks like it's being put in for PvP more than anything else. It would be nice not to have to shift out on Naj'entus though.

 

Juicepack

Dukes: you mention that we get nothing but "tier 6 and treads of the den mother (which by the way still haven't dropped)", but i'm not entirely sure that's how it's intended. When druids hit the armorcap in tier 6 gear it should be more then viable to try out items such as don alejandros money belt, insidious bands, ring of deceitful intent etc. (more of the rogue oriented items), They should greatly increase our dodge and TPS abilities, and without reducing any stamina. I agree this isn't exactly what we are looking for, but it's definitely viable.

 

Juicepack

By the way, as i'm gearing for the flames of azzinoth, i thought of an alternate solution to reaching the crit cap without gimping yourself too much in +defense socketed fire resistance gear, by using 2 parts of merciless dragonhide gear (in my case head and shoulders) i reach crit immunity by that alone(+35 resilience 2-set bonus), and even gained a substantial amount of stamina due to the item budget of merciless set.

edit: Sorry for the double post

 

Voldin

I'm in the middle of moving at the moment, so I don't have a ton of time to put into this, but I've updated my spreadsheet to include most of the new changes in 2.3.

Its far from perfect at this point, but it seems to be functional.

Known issues - ZA and Heroic Badge loot is all listed as Heroic loot for the moment.
- Hourglass of the Unraveller isn't calculating correctly if you have haste on your gear.


Feral Druid DPS 1.1.2

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to let me know, and I'll try to address them as soon as possible.



Edit: Added Taurens and fixed a math bug (double dipping on the HOTW)
Also fixed the Hourglass bug.

 

moonwings

I searched the forum but did not run across a discussion of this. So I'll ask.

For feral druids, why not get Improved Mark of the Wild?
Let's assume for argument sake that a lvl 70 feral druid does NOT typically have another druid with Imp MoTW in their group (which is typical in my case).

Leaving this talent out of the spec seems like it would be a significant loss of, not only DPS done by the druid, but also DPS done by others in the group/raid.

I currently have 5 points in this talent but, in return I had to give up 3 points of Furor and 2 of Shredding attacks.

Has anyone done the math to determine what the effect is on the druid when you do (and do not) have 5 points in this skill?

Since I've been told by more than one person that I really don't "need" this talent as compared to some others that are more important, I feel like I must be missing something.

Thank you in advance for enlightening me.

 

Allev

Voldin,

Something's wrong with your spreadsheet in the raid-buffed category. It gives me 600 Melee DPS, which I assume to be autoattack-- but even if I crit every white hit I make, I still wouldn't have that much DPS.

 

Valerian

Furor is like a million times better than IMotW even if you only include its powershifting use. It only adds in like 5 to all stats which is quite minor. Losing points in shredding attacks for points in IMotW is insane. The energy savings from shredding attacks alone scales FAR more than the extra 5 Str/Agi would.

Bottom line, IMotW is a flat 5 to all stats that doesn't scale. Your points in resto should be 5 furor, 5 naturalist, 1 OOC. You can add points to NS and Intensity if you need but more than that and you're losing significant important talents in the feral tree.

 

BurninSun

I'm making a spreadsheet to try out different combo of attacks/finishers/etc to see how much better/worse different play styles are. One problem I ran into was lack of info on Ferocious Bite damage so I did some tests to come up with the equation myself. While the spreadsheet is still being worked on, I thought I'd share the FB findings.

For the TLDR version, a 5 pt FB has its damage as follows:

Top end:
ApMult * AP + EnergyMult * Energy + HighDamage * 2 + Base
Low end:
ApMult * AP + EnergyMult * Energy + LowDamage * 2 + Base

where

ApMult = 0.25
AP = characters displayed AP
EnergyMult = 4.1 (as displayed on tooltip)
Energy = Energy at the time of FB minus FB's cost of 35
HighDamage/LowDamage = the high/low displayed on the tooltip for a rank 6 FB
Base = -966.43 +/- .02?

These numbers are then adjusted based on talents and mob mitigation as normal.


For details of how I came up with this:
I used the unkillable servants in blasted lands for all of my number crunching.

First I needed the mobs mitigation. My character sheet displays damage as 254-277 + 7 x 110% which is 287.1 to 312.4. I observed white hits doing 217 to 236 which gave me a mitigation of ~.2443.

Next I ran 3 tests and recorded 40-60 FB hits for each test.
Test #1 was with 2950 AP, rake to 5 CP, wait for a full energy bar, then FB.
Test #2 was with 2950 AP, rake to 5 CP, wait for a full energy bar and an OOC proc, then FB.
Test #3 was with 1997 AP, rake to 5 CP, wait for a full energy bar, then FB.

Test #1 had high/low of 1586 / 1640, w/o talents and mitigation: 1907 / 1973
Test #2 had high/low of 1706 / 1758, w/o talents and mitigation: 2051 / 2115
Test #3 had high/low of 1389 / 1441, w/o talents and mitigation: 1670 / 1734

The first problem is that the tooltip says that damage is based on the static values of AP and Energy, and a variable value of the listed damage range (935 - 968) which is a range of 33. But my attacks have a range of ~66. So using a 2x multiplier with the listed damage makes this issue go away. Removing this factor results in:
Test #1: 37.59 / 37.56
Test #2: 181.9 / 179.6
Test #3: -199.3 / -201.9
With only AP and energy left to solve for.

Next was to verify the 4.1 energy multiplier as listed on the tooltip. Test #1 results in 100-35=65 energy being used with the multiplier while test #2 uses all 100 energy for the multiplier since the 35 energy of the FB itself is free due to an OOC proc. Removing this results in:
Test #1: -288.9 / -288.9
Test #2: -288.0 / -230.4
Test #3: -465.9 / -468.4

Now for the AP scaling factor. Using excel's solver, I came up with ~.25 which results in:
Test #1: -966.41 / -966.44
Test #2: -965.58 / -967.94
Test #3: -965.11 / -967.67
This remaining value is the Base tacked on to the end of the equation.

Based on this, test #2 should have been able to register a hit for 1759 and test #3 with a 1388 and 1442 but I ran out of people to talk to while beating on mobs and didn't record any extra data points.

Afterwards, I recorded about 50 FB's of random AP and energy and everything fell within the limits of this equation.

So after all that, plugging these values into my damage spreadsheet, I get that FB damage is approximately equal to shred damage when at 0 energy and gets considerably worse from there. So heres the proof that FB does in fact suck without the Feral Aggression talent, but might be useful to non ferals that don't have the shred energy savings of Shredding Attacks.

As a side note, I did some quick testing with 1 and 2 CP's and it appears the equation is the same but the Base value changes. At 1 CP, it is somewhere around -870 and 2 CP is around -890.

One last thought: if its possible to hit 0 AP and do a 1 CP FB with exactly 35 energy, this would result in negative damage being done by these equations. Anyone have any insight as to where I might have gone wrong?

 

Voldin

That doesn't sound unreasonable to me. Depending on your raid buffs that wouldn't be too difficult to make at all. With 4000 AP and 0% crit chance, you'd be doing...

55+4000/14 = 341 DPS (assuming you're hit capped)

Throw in Naturalist, and that number shoots up to 341*110% = 375 DPS.

Toss in a meager 33% crit chance, and that climbs to roughly 500 DPS.

If you include a RED and Predatory Instincts, you're sitting at 533 DPS.



With 4300 and 40% crit chance, you'd be sitting right at 600 DPS for your auto-attacks.

Neither of those numbers seem unreasonably high for a fully raid buffed situation. If your gear and buffs add up to something considerably lower than that, or my math is totally wrong, please let me know.

 

Allev

So those numbers don't account for armor of the mob at all?

My reference point, Toskk's calculator, puts white DPS with those stats at 1102 * 37% = 407.74 white damage.

Edit: Found the difference. The gear I put in ended up having a much higher raid-buffed AP than I thought it reasonably could (5.5k). I'm actually getting very similar numbers for white DPS when putting that number into Toskk's...

And the error in the spreadsheet looks like, you're taking unbuffed AP, which includes unbuffed strength; then adding buffed strength. Thus double-counting unbuffed strength?

 

Voldin

Fixed another small math error.

Feral Druid DPS 1.1.3

 

Bloodwood

The most common reason is that in a raid setting, most, if not all resto druids have imp MOTW because it makes up the first five points of their tree.

Even in your case, it's not worth investing points in imp motw when you're only doing 10 man raids (just judging from your gear on armory).

 

Bloodwood

Sorry if this has been asked before, but what are T5 level druids subbing out for 2pc malorne once 2.3 hits?

Thinking about subbing out the helmet and gloves, but god, s3 head and the gloves from A'lar are so god damn good...

 

Allev

As much as we all like to play the "what gear should I wear?" game, you really should just use one of the MANY gear resources out there and use those rather than be told-- it all depends on what you have access to. Generally anyone raiding T5 right now should be moving through content fast enough that all gearing except endgame is a moving target, and you take the upgrades you can get, keeping in mind what you'll need at endgame.

 

Mistaya

I had a question about these actually, since I picked them up last night. Is the expertise on the gloves going to be worth dropping the Gloves of Dex. Manipulation? They'll have 14 or so less agi on them than my old ones, but I'm not sure how I should value expertise in comparison to flat agi.

 

dukes

Expertise is approximately equal to hit rating when in a purely DPS role, but doesn't cap.

4 expertise rating = 1 expertise = 0.25% less dodge
~16 hit rating = 1% hit, 4 hit rating = 0.25% less miss.

[Gloves of the Searing Grip]
[Gloves of Dexterous Manipulation]

Assuming 2x8 agi gems, it's a difference of:

51-33 = 18 agility
42-66 = 24 AP
18 expertise.

So you gain ~0.8% crit compared to 18 expertise (essentially 1.125% hit, although it rounds down so it's actually 1% iirc). I'd probably take the Searing Grip, but it's a close call.

 

onkl

Well the cap would be the 5% dodge/parry the bosses have (or whatever number it is).

 

onkl

Your armory shows PvP gear i guess but maybe it's better for you to get S3 head and chest an then wear T4 shoulders and gloves for the setbonus.

 

Wings

Thanks for updating and such, really appreciate it and loving your spreadsheet.
Curious, why isn't [Unstoppable Aggressor's Ring] in your list?

Also, these stats are 2.3 or 2.2?