The cat alpha stuff looks pretty strange at the moment- we're loading up on crit even more and there's nothing to change our scaling problem/ dependency on just a few physical dps- oriented stats.
I see no reason for Master Shapeshifter to be crit- ideally an energy proc or significant amount of armour penetration could lead to either of those stats being a bit more desireable and solve some problems in terms of sharing gear with other physical dps classes.

I never even considered NI except in PvP. I don't expect my healers to remember, "Oh, Kir's in cat and he's got NI. Needs less healing!". More like "Flash Heal, next target."

You're right, of course... Looking it up I found the following list:

Miss
Dodge
Parry
Glancing blow
Block
Critical strike
Hit

So, the crit cap is 100%-miss%-dodge%-clancing blow% when attacking from behind.

Well, the only place I've ever found NI useful is on dodgy Nightbane and Illidan attempts where you are able to switch in healing weapons/idols and actually do some reasonable healing after another healer dies. Most people would probably rather just wipe and do it again clean though, I guess.

I use NI on Bloodboil when he targets a clothie, on Illidan for transitions and when the flame is out of range, and Kalec if I'm decursing and don't have time to DPS anymore. We haven't hammered out our Brutallus strat, but if we end up short on healing instead of DPS during stomps, I might start dropping heals on the other tank rather than DPSing.

You might find that there's more usefulness than you think, just so long as you realize that some reasonable healing can be more valuable than some reasonable DPS in tank gear in certain situations.

@NI: Well i dont have any proof or something but isnt getting 20% more heals a good thing regardless of healer's awareness? There's a lot of raid damage in bossfights and i think that 2/2 NI is valid raid talent. It is often better to go cat and have more healing than to go bear and have more HP. And 800 extra healing bonus is also very nice.

@Najentus - i dont shift to bear. I use Barkskin, use rejuv / lb and then back to cat so healers have it easier to heal me or i help healing others (i have NI).

@Intellect on feral gear - in most cases intellect could be replaced by hit/crit/expertise 1:1 since at least one of these stats is not present on our gear. On the other hand i have to rebirth, tranquility, or even heal from time to time, and i am not sure i want smaller mana pool that i have now. On the other hand i could gem / enchant for intellect and spirit ...

This is true for white attacks, which use a 1 roll system. Yellow attacks, if they use a 2 roll system (which I believe they do, correct me if I'm wrong), won't reach the crit cap until your crit chance is 100%.

I really really like the new feral tree + early resto. When considering the rake buff, also consider that warriors now get a +30% bleed dmg debuff like mangle, which will presumably stack.

Also note that two feral raids took a blow with the removal of part of the synergy between having a bear tankign as your mangle bot. The new bear mangle increases Maul damage instead of Shred so you can no longer have a second feral in cat using your bear mangle.

I like it to be honest, it seems in keeping with the theme of the expansion and a few other classic synergyism's are being broken up, like shadow priests VT being lowered. If I didn't know better I'd say they were almost aiming at not having more than 1 of any one spec in 25 man WotLK, but obviously unless fights are designed round a drastically smaller number of healers (5 heal specs? shammy, pally, disc priest, holy priest and druid) then this is gonna fall flat on it's bottom. I'd like most encounters to be based on 5 healers though, it would be great and enable more specs to be taken. Or maybe the occasional fight where its "Oh no, phase 3, ferals/moonkin/elemental/enhance/retri! GO GO RAID HEALING TEAM!"

I was under the impression that by improving something on the table knocks the higher thing off i.e. as +hit improves %miss is move off the table. As +expertise improves %dodge/parry is moved off the table.
Im gonna throw some arbitrary figures on this to help me understand and hopefully ye can point out where Im wrong in my thinking.

Attacking from behind the table would look like this:

%5Miss
%5Dodge
%5Glancing blow
%35Critical Strike
%50Hit

if you then improve your +hit & +expertise rating to remove the 5% miss & dodge from the table it would then look like this:

%5Glancing blow
%35Critical Strike
%60Hit

by improving my Critical Strike by 5% (thus removing glancing blow) it looks like this:

40% Crit
60% Hit.

Now up until this point every improvement has been knocking a higher value off the table. If crit is further improved, does this then start knocking %hit off the table, even though it is 'lower' than crit and hence shouldn't be effected?

Flask of Chromatic Wonder is the best for First Kills I guess(if you don't wanna spend a lot of money), but on "one shot" bosses, stick with Agility+Fortitude. If you're dpsing, the agility will help a lot, if you're tanking, with agility you get almost 3% dodge, so it's better than the 250hp you lose compared to Flask of Fortification.

Certain things knock certain other things off the table, thats pretty much it. + hit removes misses. +expertise removes dodge/parry. Crit removes hit. Nothing removes glancing blows. I don't think anything removes block from the table either (but that really shouldn't be a concern for dpsing).

That's funny becuase I see it the other way around. I flask at the start of the raid and push through the farm content with Chromatic Wonder up because the content isn't particularly demanding, but occasionally shit happens, and I don't want to waste elixirs dying on a farm boss because a healer had a brain fart. When we pull the progression boss, click the flask off and buff up the ass because that's when it counts, so you spend your money there.

Well except that as soon as you have 4 piece tier 6, you'll be using that for tanking, but the 4 piece bonus also provides a huge boost to dps. If I actually bothered to switch out my tanking staff for the Forest Lord dps stave, I would think I could put out around 1.2k when powershifting in tank gear, which is certainly reasonable. But I think overall we agree - I still help out heal on Illidan after tanking flames on p2, just because the first few kills I was so paranoid we'd screw it up and I'd have to tank p2 again! In my opinion that is what sets the players who actually USE their hybrid skills vs those who just want to dps all the time & let the raid wipe if it gets hairy, but that's just my opinion.

I'd actually like to see yet more talents & set bonuses that played to those strengths. We shall see I guess.

[e] added quote I was responding to and clarified my point.

cool i guess that pretty much answers it for me. thanks for the help.

Farm, trash: Agility + Ironskin elixirs (i tank trash in mixed tank / dps gear and even with ironskin i am at 0.2% crit from 73).

1st kills: Fortification or Agility + Ironskin (here i usually swap def neck for threat neck which lacks defense) since i am not crit immune in tank gear without these.

Chromatic wonder: if i die too much on trash and for certain fights (Kalecgos, Illidan P2).

edit: typo

Honestly, they need to just make intellect not cost anything on gear with physical dps stats similar to how you got items like [The End of Dreams] where the itemization formula knows that you're not realistically using the spell damage and the AP. This is the same problem hunters, enh shaman, ret paladins have. Like for a hunter, a class who is often limited in damage just by mana, physical dps stats still scale his damage so much more than the intellect would that you find hunters in all rogue gear other than 4 t6. They really need to either make some sort of mana regen based on ap or something and just not put int on feral, hunter, ret, enh gear at all, or make it so intellect is much cheaper for item budgets. I always get NI when i go feral and with a weapon swap I'm at something like 1400 +healing in full feral gear when i drop out to heal. The problem is that you're giving up way more damage to have gear with intellect than you're gaining healing output. Its not that Int is useless, its that no matter how well you use your hybrid skills, the 'raid usefulness' of 20 int just doesn't come close to the usefulness of 20 int worth of damage stats for most fights.

Shifting to bear on the najentus bubble reduces damage taken by about 40%. You can do a barkskin + rejuv + shift to cat form as well, but I think that actually would cost more mana. If you're using NI then it's probably a bit better, but if you don't have it the bear shift is likely a bit better in terms of damage.

The important thing to note is that even with a bare minimum of int (because of rogue itemized gear) and aggressive powershifting, mana is not particularly an issue. I want int on pvp gear because shifting happens all the time there and I don't have the mana regen. But in PvE? The only situation where I'd want it is in heroic MrT on the priestess and occasionally Kael.

Yes. Barkskin + Bear Form -> Bubble Burst -> Cat Form is a lot of straight-up damage reduction.
The advantage of Barkskin + HoTs -> Cat Form -> Bubble Burst is that you get a head start on your energy regeneration.

I can see it going either way.

I don't get the logic behind that. Unless you're using the bonus % hp from bear form as sorta backwards damage shield, since shifting to cat leaves you at the same % HP as you were at in bear? At least, I think it does that.

Regardless, why should you bother? Popping barkskin (and using just LB) will leave you alive with plenty of HP to spare for a healer (probably a shaman chain healing the melee), to get your HP up enough to survive the next needle spine that hits you. And that's the only thing that really matters.

When you shift to bear form, you gain 40% more HP.

You then take 8500 damage. Instead of being at 25% health (or whatever) that you'd be in cat form, you're at 50-60% health. Shift to cat, and you're still at 50-60% health. You will have less health than in bear but more health than if you had stayed in cat. Shifting between forms retains the same percentage of health you had in the prior form.


It takes fewer GCDs, for one, and it's less prone to user error. But I can see barkskin + HoTs being close to the same, though it might cost a bit more mana. Depends on the talents, honestly. I usually get off a quick mangle/maul after being blown up and then switch to cat, but getting more energy may be better, though I doubt it heals for as much unless you've got NI.

So I saw the unhittable rogue video... and thought, 'hey... druids get more dodge per point of agility than anyone... shouldn't we be able to do something similar?' The obvious problem, of course, being the lack of parry... but I tried it anyways. At first, I tried to avoid including Sunwell drops, but then found that impossible (closest I got was ~96% avoidance). I'm lazy, and so didn't include bonuses from defense in these calculations. Two possible problems. I counted consumables and enchants as being influenced by SotF and Kings, and I calculated the effect of both of those by simply multiplying the post consumable/enchant agility total by 1.13. It's possible (probable?) that it's actually calculated multiplicatively. All gem slots are assumed to be filled by 10 agi gems, with the exception of the meta gem slot (12 agi). Note that this does require you to be an engineer.

14.7059 agi per 1% dodge
18.923 dodge rating per 1% dodge

[Harness of Carnal Instinct] - 67 agi
- 44 base agi
- [Delicate Crimson Spinel] - 10 agi
- [Glistening Fire Opal] - 4 agi, 5 defense
- [Shifting Shadowsong Amethyst] - 5 agi
- 4 agi socket bonus
[Shadowmaster's Boots] - 50 agi
- 30 base agi
- [Delicate Crimson Spinel] - 10 agi
- [Delicate Crimson Spinel] - 10 agi
[Shadowed Gauntlets of Paroxysm] - 61 agi
- 41 base agi
- [Delicate Crimson Spinel] - 10 agi
- [Delicate Crimson Spinel] - 10 agi
[Schematic: Quad Deathblow X44 Goggles] - 82 agi
- 61 base agi
- [Shifting Shadowsong Amethyst] - 5 agi
- [Relentless Earthstorm Diamond] - 12 agi
- 4 agi socket bonus
[Leggings of the Immortal Beast] - 76 agi
- 46 base agi
- [Delicate Crimson Spinel] - 10 agi
- [Delicate Crimson Spinel] - 10 agi
- [Delicate Crimson Spinel] - 10 agi
[Demontooth Shoulderpads] - 58 agi
- 38 base agi
- [Delicate Crimson Spinel] - 10 agi
- [Delicate Crimson Spinel] - 10 agi
[Belt of Deep Shadow] - 52 agi
- 32 base agi
- [Delicate Crimson Spinel] - 10 agi
- [Delicate Crimson Spinel] - 10 agi
[Insidious Bands] - 34 agi
- 28 base agi
- [Glistening Fire Opal] - 4 agi, 5 defense
- 2 agi socket bonus
[Necklace of the Deep] - 41 agi
- [Delicate Crimson Spinel] - 10 agi
- [Delicate Crimson Spinel] - 10 agi
[Thalassian Wildercloak] - 28 agi
[Moroes' Lucky Pocket Watch] - 38 dodge rating
[Shadowmoon Insignia] - 32 dodge rating
[Delicate Eternium Ring] - 25 agi, 16 dodge rating
[Angelista's Revenge] - 29 agi
[Stanchion of Primal Instinct] - 75 agi

+678 agi from items

+35 agi to weapon
+4 all stats wrist
+6 all stats chest
+12 agi cloak
+15 agi hands
+12 agi feet
+12 agi legs
+16 def/17 dodge to head
+10 def/15 dodge to shoulder
65 base agi

+839 agi from enchants/items/base agi

+20 agi from [Grilled Mudfish]
+20 agi from [Scroll of Agility V]
+35 agi from [Elixir of Major Agility]
+18 agi from Imp MOTW
+88 agi from Imp GoA

+1020 agi from enchants/items/base agi/consumables
+1152 agi from enchants/items/base agi/consumables/SotF/BoK
78.33% dodge

+4% dodge from talents
82.33% dodge

+6.23% dodge from 118 dodge rating

88.56% to dodge

-5% to hit from Scorpid Sting
-2% to hit from Insect Swarm
5% base miss for a boss.
12% to miss

100.56% avoidance

+1.84% dodge from 35 dodge rating (moonglade 2-piece on a resto druid, 100% rejuvenation uptime)

102.4% avoidance

--

EDIT:
Changed Signet of Primal Wrath to Delicate Eternium Ring
Changed Thunderheart Wristguards to Insidious Bands
Redid gems to take into account the meta gem requirement

Your meta won't be active if you have all 10 agi gems. Maybe I'm missing it, but where do you count chance to be missed and chance to dodge from defense?

Also: http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t16211-t...100_avoidence/