An interesting mechanic a feral on my server noticed and I have confirmed.

If a mob dies that still has combo points on it, you can refresh savage roar with those combo points, even after the mob's death. It doesn't appear you can use any other finishing moves though, just SR.

Cat is my offset/spec but we've been farming for awhile and I have all 277 pieces except for the t10 tokens & second trinket (vanquisher hates my guild).

I appear to be coming up on the crit cap.

Before reforging Mew told me that Haste was my least valuable stat by far. After reforging all haste it turned out crit was lower, so I took the 2 pieces that had more crit than haste and reset them & reforged crit to mastery. I happened upon the exact point where crit *just* fell below hit/exp and matched haste.

As I upgrade to the ilvl 277 tokens I think I'll be in a conundrum. Crit is basically worthless to me now, UNLESS I get more hit/exp, but AGI is still the best thing to gem for, and mastery is still the best thing to reforge for. So I have no source of hit (unless I pick up gear that has it natively).

I'll have to take a second look at the following. I miss Rawr & optimizer, mew is nice but playing with entering stats is annoying :/.

[Ikfirus's Sack of Wonder] (I would still reforge something into mastery)
[Gangrenous Leggings] (druid legs already have exp, pass)
[Geistlord's Punishment Sack] (losses too much agi over t10, pass
[Band of the Bone Colossus] (perhaps)
[Ashen Band of Endless Vengeance]
[Signet of Twilight] (wtb)


Also semi-interesting is what do gem/reforge the eve of the cata release. Increasing dots on bosses is fine and dandy, but 80-85 is mostly going to be mangle spam.

To be clear - crit shouldn't ever be worthless to you. Being at the hit/exp crit cap just means that every missed normal attack could potentially have been a crit, but melee damage is not nearly as important as it was before and higher crit rates do influence 80% of your overall damage (between bleeds and shred/FBs).

From the beta perspective, things take a lot longer to die than you would expect; having multiple bleeds on targets does help tremendously on killing things.

I just realized that asking our rogues to use ToT on our dear kitties could finaly help us not to pull agro. Since the threat bonus disapear after 30 seconds and cower will be more efficient with ToT on ourselves, we would have less threat at that moment. The only issue is to see if you would be pulling agro before 30 sec, but if hunters still missdirect on the tank, that should be ok.
Let Df, Dt be the TPS for the feral druid and the tank; T the bonus threat from ToT; Bf, Bt the bonus damage on the feral druid and the tank and Af,At the threat coefficient of the feral druid and the tank.
30 sec after the pull, the kitty has :
(9Df+Tf+Af*Bf)*0.9³ + 10Df*0.9² + 10Df*0.9 + Df - Tf threat, if using ToT on feral
9Df*0.9³ + 10Df*0.9² + 10Df*0.9 + Df threat, if using ToT on tank
30 sec after the pull, the tank has :
30 Tt if using ToT on feral
30 Tt + At*Bt if using ToT on tank

ie, ToT on feral is better if, and only if :
0.271 Tf - 0.729 Af*Bf > At*Bt
Well this is false is someone else than the feral could possibly have threat issues. I am raiding in 10 man with tons of rogues and hunters in my guild, so this is my case. It is probably stupid in 25 man.

And of course using ToT on a feral druid is probably the best thing to do for DPS purpose at the moment.
Does anyone know an addon or some recount/skada settings to test how much threat/damage is affected by ToT? My fellow rogues used to have some addon whispering me these values but it seems it is, by some way, "4.0 broken". :p

The point is that now, it is even an advantage to keep the threat part of trick of the trade. It will reduce your threat on long term!

It seems very counter intuitive to purposely get high threat via tricks just so you can cower off more threat before it all fades. The reason being that in general, threat is the tightest within the first 30 seconds of the fight. If you haven't pull in that window, odds are you won't pull at all, given how vengeance works and how threat start to get obscene. Basically long term threat should be a non-issue, since at the point all the tricks threat fades, the tank should be pulling away easily anyways.

Well if you raid with 3-4 rogues or hunt, threat between the pull and 30 sec is not a problem, but you could have some problems beteween 30 sec and 60 sec, approximatively. No idea if this is normal, but I am always pulling agro after 30 sec if I keep bursting, when MD ant ToT fades.

While a nice thought, it frequently doesn't work that way. Many times there will hardly be any vengeance by that point, or none at all in some cases. Examples include LDW, Saur, Rot, Putri, sometimes LK.

It is probable this has something to do with the attack originating from the front legs of cat form.

Have there been any discussions about glyphing for Tiger's Fury and not putting Rip up unless TF is up? I think it would be a big benefit, seeing as it increases the damage of a 22s rip by 15% it seems like it would be worth the few seconds of rip downtime you would experience.

EDIT - It appears to be much better to wait for TF to be up to Rip and be glyphed for it, I'm sure tons of people know this but I personally didn't see it anywhere on the forums (although I am known for being terrible at finding things on forums).

If you model it in Mew it is always a dps loss to wait on Rake/Rip for TF - even if it comes off of cooldown .1 seconds later. I think this due to the possibility that TF will not always be immediately cast due to OOC or just having too much energy. You never want to wait on keeping your DoTs up...If your energy is low enough and no OOC, then you will TF first anyways. I have checked this over and over with different rotations, and it is consistent at level 80 and 85.

As a side note, at level 80, the best third glyph is SR. At level 85, TF becomes the best third glyph for a T11 geared toon (premade).