xyruul

My rudimentary math puts it at 19% and 16% respectively for the two we brought to our highest Teron. Add another 3-4% for seal of blood procs from wf as well.

 

Cuandoman

My thinking was that Druids get more use out of UR than any other due to our high AP values. In a no huner no Warrior group, we miss out on Imp SoE, UR, BS.

 

seminarca

Sure, we have naturally high AP, and UR would add a higher absolute amount of AP for us as opposed to a Rogue. The real question is, can we translate that raw AP to actual DPS more effectively than a Rogue? I'm a huge fan of 2 x Enh Shaman tank/melee groups anyway.

 

Endosora

Since I've seen a a bit of discussion about groups and optimizing raid dps, I come to you with a dilema. My raid leader creates a tank group and a melee dps group. He also has a group dedicated to warlocks which includes a shaman for Tranquil Air (they are destro and enjoy pulling agro). The three groups are as follows:

TANK GROUP:
Main Tank
Off Tank
Holy Paladin (Survival/BM Hunter.. if he decides to be active, we cleared most of BT with ZERO hunters.)
Feral Druid
Feral Druid

DPS GROUP:
MS Warrior
Enhanc Shaman
Rogue
Rogue
Rogue

WARLOCK GROUP:
Resto Shaman
Warlock
Warlock
Warlock
Holy Paladin

I've been trying to have him swap the lowest dps rogue with one of the feral druids in the tank group and swap the paladin (or hunter) with the resto shaman in the warlock group. The warlocks are given Tranquil Air for threat problems, but I feel giving the tank Windfury would offset that and allow the rogue that is being moved into the tank group to gain Leader of the Pack and only give up Unleashed Rage.

I've looked at one of the rogue spreadsheets to check what Boevis said and after the switch, the feral druid would gain about 150 DPS from Strength of Earth and Unleashed Rage. The members of the melee group would all gain about 64 DPS from Leader of the Pack, that's roughly 250 DPS. The rogue being swapped would lose 105 from Unleashed Rage, but gain 64 from Leader of the Pack (-41 DPS). The feral druid left in the tank group would also gain about 50 DPS from Strength of Earth.

After the swap, I'm calculating roughly a 450 DPS increase, which isn't too bad considering all it costs is one rogue Unleashed Rage.

The biggest concern I have with my argument is, will Windfury be enough to compensate for the destro warlocks losing Tranquil Air? Is the 450 DPS really worth the move? That's about 135k damage over a 5 minute fight. It can be the difference between a 1% wipe and a kill sometimes.

 

david0925

You're also not considering the fact that the tank also sees increased rage generation through the windfury totem. With that as well as careful usage of Soul Shatter from the warlock, you should be fine in the threat department.

Our Warlocks do pretty good dps, but i don't think we ever used Tranquil air over WoA

 

Sandyr

From a DPS standpoint, would it be better to be popping haste pots or insane strength pots? 400 haste vs 120 str?

Drive By Boulder

 

seminarca

AEP wise, the Haste Potions come out ahead for most gearsets, your mileage may vary based on your current stats.

 

Chojee

dukes has [Insane Strength Potion] as being worth 35AP over 120s, which equates to 5-10dps.
[Haste Potion] basically gives 4 extra hits(which can also proc the 2pT4 bonus).

To match the insane strength potion over the 120s cooldown(optimistic estimate of 10dps*120s ~= 1200 damage), those 4 hits only need to average about 300 damage(with misses/dodges/glancing/crits factored in), which is easily achievable. Haste Potions get even better when used during Bloodlust or in conjunction with other haste effects.

I was looking through my herbalist's bags the other day and noticed that [Flame Cap] adds fire damage to melee attacks. Quick testing revealed that it does work in cat form and has a proc rate in the range of 10-20%(with my unscientific sample set of one use). It's on the same cooldown as a healthstone, but it should work out to be a small dps boost. I'll do more specific testing during my raids next week.

 

Boevis

My math was off on this, I was using WF * Average Hit instead of WF/Hits*Total Damage like I should have. Doing it properly, WF was just under 10% of this paladins DPS, though they had a high number of WF procs (9 with 7.6 being the average for his white attacks), average WF would be 8% of their DPS. But this isn't an argument about WF, if you run 3 shamans, 2 groups can get WF

It is very true that Druids get more AP from UR, I don't think that's ever in debate, as for the Value of AP, using the spreadsheets we can see that 1 DPS is about 8.64 AP for top end Rogues, compared to 4.75 AP for druids. I'll look into Paladins and Warriors in a bit, but I doubt they are lower than 6 AP per DPS. This is mostly because a large portion of their DPS is from base Weapon DPS, and Flat modifiers to their attacks (or spell damage)

 

Sarasper

I use an addon called Classtimer and it sometimes didn't show the mangle debuff even when i knew I had it active on the boss. That's because it was only set up to show Mangle(cat). I was able to add just Mangle to it and it now shows up whether the Mangle(cat) is active or just the Mangle is active. Might be a way to easily see which version of Mangle is active without having to mouseover the debuff on the boss all the time.

 

onkl

Did you just add it to ClassTimer or also removed the other two mangles?

 

Kaelic

Not sure if this is known, but while doing some Rage calculations during a debate about Crit vs % Damage and Rage generation for Arms Warriors I discovered a discrepancy in the formula commonly known. As it stands here is the current known formula:

Damage = Damage delt from white attack
WpnSpeed = BASE Weapon swing speed
Factor = 3.5 MH normal, 7.0 MH crit

((Damage/274.7)*7.5+(WpnSpeed*Factor))/2

What I discovered with multiple tests is that a Druid crit actually uses the NON-Crit Factor in the formula. I realise this isn't a huge deal but I haven't found it documented anywhere. Its easy to test, just go hit something and stick the number in the formula for a non-crit, you'll find its correct while the crit factor wasn't (if you had crit that is). Bug or intended nerf on our rage? Thoughts?

 

Sarasper

I have all 3 mangles in classtimer: Mangle(cat), Mangle(bear), and Mangle. They are all treated different such that no matter which mangle is active, by having all 3 in the addon you can see which is actually applied to the mob.

 

Boevis

So what are you doing as a finisher the first cycle, Nothing? Non-mangled Rip is better DPS than using the energy for another shred/mangle.

 

Drasil

You're right Boevis.

After doing some math and testing, my rotation turns out to be less DPS than a regular cycle with no double-mangles.

Astrylian's rotation was better, but won't work due to the fact that you can't override a rip in some siuations (i.e. it's trinketed). If you add another mangle (step 4b), it works out:

1) Apply Mangle (Cat).
2) Shred to 4+cp.
2b) On 2nd+ loops through the rotation, previous Rip wears off here
3) Mangle the instant Mangle (Cat) will wear off, to apply Mangle.
4) Rip
4b) Mangle
5) Shred to 5+cp.
6) Rip right before Mangle wears off.
7) Start over, applying Mangle (Cat).

Unfortunately, this still isn't a DPS gain.

The only time I'm going to use this technique, is if I won't be able to get 5 CP before mangle runs out. Then I'd start at step 3.

 

Valerian

Is this type of double mangle thing really practical? It seems to require pretty precise timing, changing of the standard cycle and its really just exploiting a bug in the code.

 

Allev

I think, in proper context now, it's more important to avoid getting in a bad mangle scenario than to maximize the good scenarios, i.e. waiting until a mangle expires before you rip so that you don't rip during Mangle(Cat) and overwrite it with a Mangle.

Other ideas include offsetting your mangles, or mangling every 8s instead of every 12s, but that's trading shreds for mangles, and I don't think it's worth the difficulty. And misses/dodges of rips/mangles also have to be minimized-- hit capped with no expertise, the chances of missing a mangle or missing the rip after the mangle is 0.056 + (.944 * 0.056) = 10.9% chance of failure of double-buffing.

What might be more interesting is seeing if two druids in the raid can come up with some sort of double-mangling scenario that benefits one or both ferals doubly. Can Mangle(bear) be overwritten by a second feral's Mangle(cat) to produce a Mangle in a similar method?

At the very least, I'm happy to discover why my custom Pitbull buffs don't always show my mangle debuffs!

 

• Astrylian

Indeed. The big thing to see is that (at least with only one feral), it's not possible to get more double-mangle rips than 0-mangle rips, using the normal cycle, and that using an abnormal cycle requires too precise timing and has a high failure rate, for a very meager dmg increase, if any at all.

More interesting may be the play between a bear and a cat... Gunna be on before raid at all tonight, Allev?

 

• Astrylian

Wait a sec. Here's an idea.

Using a typical rotation, we can't avoid the fact that you'll have the same number of 0mangle rips as 2mangle rips, right?... So what? That's still a damage boost. We typically get 130% rip damage all the time. Isn't 100% half the time and 169% half the time for an average of 134.5% better? That's a 3.46% dps increase, just for getting the timing right. Additionally, we can just always use our trinkets on the doublemangle rip, and not on the 0mangle rips.

 

Brachamul

The answer is yes.

A rogue gets about 300ap from UR, we get around 500 (at my level, beginning Hyjal/BT).

On white hits, we get (without counting crits or armor) 7% of our ap into damage per second.
Rogues get a little more because they are dual wielding, 11%.

So for white hits, we get an additionnal 36 dps, and they get an additionnal 32 dps. The intersting part comes here:

Their main attack, say as combat, is Sinister Strike. This attack deals 100% of one swing's worth of damage, plus a little bonus. If the rogue uses a 2.6 weapon, 300 ap will add 56 damage to each hit, and in turn 56 more damage to each Sinister Strike. Sinister Strike costs 40 energy, and I will compare it to our Shred, which costs 42 energy.

Our shred inflicts 225% of our base damage, + a fixed value, and then multiplied by 30% thanks to mangle. Since we hit at 1 per second, with 500 ap we get an extra 36 damage per hit. On a Shred, this equals a bonus of 105 damage.

This is a very crude estimation, but I think it partially goes to the point :p

 

dukes

Not really. Doing "very crude" estimations doesn't get you very far in WoW mechanics terms, you need to think things through and look at everything that's being affected.

You haven't accounted for white hits for a sword rogue account for 70%+ of their damage, while our white hits being in the range of 30-40% of our total damage. Rogues also gain 30% base haste (slice and dice) and will go for some haste items due to them being best in slot, giving them maybe 40% more gain from the AP on their white hits than we do.

 

Sylvannae

A few days ago, I picked up some epic moonkin legs from ZA (elunite leggings or something). Being resto, it was an offspec item so only worth a few dkp points. I started doing research to see if moonkin was a spec I would enjoy and could use to help out my guild, and I was dissapointed.

I have decent feral gear - Squid stick, the 2p tier 4, all that kind of necessary stuff. Rawr puts me at around 1300 DPS fully buffed at optimum rotation and in a good group. That's not much, but it's solid (we are a mid tier5 guild at the moment). If I upgrade to season 3 mace and get one or two other easy gear ups, Rawr puts me at over 1400. Since we already have a good and active feral in our guild, that number would most likely rise (for one of us, anyway) since only one mangle would need to be applied.

The moonkin DPS spreadsheet assumes a huge amount of spell damage, like 1300 or so, to match that kind of dps. Items which far outstrip my current modest feral set are required to match the feral dps. Now, that's all just theorycraft, but I must admit that the highest parse of moonkin DPS I've ever seen was approximately 1950 or so. I've also seen a 1800 feral druid. The feral druid can tank very well, innervate others instead of himself, and never runs out of "juice" during a fight.

What's the point of a moonkin, then? Am I not giving our feathery brothers enough credit, or is the spec really not that much better than a tank/dps spec for pure dps purposes?

 

Tidia

Spreadsheets often [read always] overestimate DPS.

Without going into maths Balance does have its benefits, +5% crit, + to raid hit, as well as the usual Druid buffs and abilities. As well some fights are not melee friendly, and in these fights the ranged DPS of Balance is very nice. Damage aside, Hurricane is a very nice debuff on AOE pulls [reduces incoming damage].

From my personal experience Balance in equal gear can do considerably more damage than Feral. A well played Balance Druid should be able to manage their mana effectively anyway, and with the buffs since 2.0 do not have the mana concerns pre-BC [hence Boomkin not Oomkin]

Putting the um in Forum.

 

Valynon