I also use the [Shadowmoon Insignia] to stay crit immune. In addition one could use [Cloak of Blade Turning] if absolutely needed. It's not the best in slot, but it has it's situational uses.

The [Thunderheart Wristguards] are good, but they're not stellar. I'd much rather have the guardian's bracers + a trinket of my choosing (badge/commendation under many circumstances, badge/moroes/shadowmoon under others) than I would the thunderheart + be forced to elixir/shadowmoon. It's just not flexible enough. And it costs quite a bit.

I'm wondering if you guys can help me perfect my DPS rotation on Brutallus. I've been unhappy with my own rip uptime and I think it's because I'm trying for super-rips. Here's a WWS of our latest brut kill: Hibernicus - WWS. I'm not really familiar with gleaning specific information from WWS reports yet, so that's another skill I hope you guys could give me some advice on.

I got 161 rip ticks over a six and a half minute fight (yeah he was enraged for a while, lol. We haven't totally perfected the technique yet, and we run with 8 healers). Since rip ticks every 2 seconds, and I'm pretty sure I had one up within 10 seconds of the fight starting, 100% rip uptime should have given me closer to 190 rip ticks. However, you can see that my max rip ticks were over 950... I got several super-rips, but I don't know my ratio of super-rip to not-super rip (I'm not sure how to use the WWS report to look into that).

So my question is: is it worth losing rip uptime for super-rips? To do super-rips, I wait until Mangle is about to fall off, then rip and mangle again. This usually means that my Mangle debuff only takes 1 second more to fall off than Rip does, but that's still a minimum 13-sec cycle, losing me a significant amount of potential rip uptime. If my old Rip's Mangle got dodged the first time, that's even more time wasted trying for a chance at a super-rip.

The group I run in for Brut is almost always Feral, BM, BM, Surv, Resto Sham. The hunters chain Drums of Battle when it won't mess up their other haste effects, and I spam Drums of War on CD. I've begun power-shifting a lot more aggressively than I used to (at least once per rotation), but this led me to nearly run OOM and I had to stop shifting for a while. So, I figure that starting to bring mana pots to raids will help my dps. I have my Bloodlust Brooch (still waiting for something better to drop) macro'd into my rips so that I won't forget to use it, and it always gets applied to at least 2 rips each time.

This particular Brut kill finally gave me the ability to run with 2t4 and 4t6 (yay for the belt!), but I was running with 2t4 and 2t6 on that WWS. Rawr says that with the gear I used on the kill, I should have been seeing 1750 DPS. I consistently top out at around the 1630s, though, so I've gotta be doing something wrong.

On a related note, is there any kind of online tool that's like the Armory, but that you can save specific gear-sets to, instead of relying on what you logged out in? I'm logged in my tanking gear on Armory, so I can't think of any way to include a link to my DPS set in this post.

You will lose about 7-8% in number of rip ticks by trying to get super rips. You gain 30% damage from rip by succeeding. So if you have a success rate of 30% or more, doing super rips will pay off.
This is assuming you would otherwise time rip perfectly to the millisecond of when it falls of, which you wouldn't. So in practice you probably only need to hit about 1 in 5 for it to pay off.

Looking at your wws, your highest rip is 954. I guess that was with trinket proc and trinket use, so lets say it was 850 instead. 850/1.3=650, and your average rip was 705. That looks like you're hitting one in four.

To answer your question, yes it's worth it. I think Be Imba! - the online Character Auditor for World of Warcraft can make profiles.

I believe they did exactly the right thing in TBC by starting us off OP and then nerfing afterwards. There was a tremendous amount of baggage that ferals carried - especially in raiding guilds - from pre-BC. By making us OP people who had been rabid naysayers about ferals had no choice but to sit up and listen because for a month or so we were actually the best tanks for most encounters. It also gave ferals who had been resto for the last 2 years a chance to relearn how to tank in a forgiving environment (who can remember Swipe spam being able to stick 3 mobs to you like glue before they nerfed it?) Once public opinion had swayed in the direction that ferals really were capable tanks, they brought us back to a reasonable level. Was it intentional on Blizzard's part? Maybe not but I expect the uphill climb to find a tanking role would have been a lot harder if they had started us off on an even playing field - the negativity in the WoW community was just that harsh.

I dont see what you mean by being forced to use elixir of ironskin. It is the best consumable option for given slot, so i see nothing wrong with being forced to use it.

If you mean that you have to use it for farm bosses / trash as well, then i think its not a problem to downgrade your gear a bit and use e.g. shadowmoon insignia or pvp bracers to stay crit immune without the elixir.

I'm one of two Feral Druids in our raid, we both have a different gear approach, but both setups did work for Brutallus and in the end we had very similar overall stats although a lot of slots are different.

I use the PvP bracers to stay crit immune while he worked his way around the bracers in order to use [Thunderheart Wristguards]. So I agree that both approaches very well work.

Never the less, I alway considered the T6 bracers to be a sidegrade (less armor than [Band of the Swift Paw] while also not contributing to crit immunity). Therefore I included them in my Cat DPS-set and stayed with the PvP bracers for tanking.

I went through the theory of elixirs / flask recently, here are the results (forgive stating the obvious, it was originally intended for non-druids as an overview).

Assumption: it is possible with your best gear to be at crit immunity border when using elixir of ironskin (so the resilience is not wasted).

Elixir of Major Agility (35 agi, 20 crit rating) ~= 2.4% dodge, 0.9% crit
Elixir of Ironskin (30 resilience) = -0.75% to be critted. Comparing it to a Major fortitude elixir (250hp), which equals about 16 stamina, Ironskin is 3x better when it comes to itembudget. It enables to sub some suboptimal pieces of equipment that has defense on it for equipment without defense, same goes for enchants and gems.

Itempoints of elixirs: 85
Itempoints of their defensive part: 65
Alternative: Flask of Fortification (500hp, 10 defense). 500 hp = cca 32 stamina. Itempoints of flask: cca 32.

Meaning elixirs have approximately twice as many points in defense then flasks and above that boost threat as well.

An example of the difference according to a simulator. Total mitigation/effective health (physical dmg) raid buffed. This is set to work in a fight like Brutallus.
Elixirs + stam food: 84.2% / 86 300 (mitigation/effective health*)
Flask + stam food: 83.5% / 86 140 (regemmed 15 stam --> 10 def)
unbuffed: 83% / 83100 (regemmed 15 stam --> 10 def)

*effective health = how much damage unmitigated you survive without a heal = armor + hp, total mitigation is armor + dodge

Said differently, out of 100k dmg taken (unmitigated), you'll receive:
unbuffed - 17000
Flask - 16500 (cca 4% difference against unbuffed)
elixirs - 15800 (cca 7% difference against unbuffed)

Gear used in this simulation:
6/8 T6 (wrists) with 15 resilience on chest, 12 defense on wrists, glyph of the gladiator.
[Brooch of Deftness]
[Slikk's Cloak of Placation]
[Belt of Natural Power]
[Treads of the Den Mother]
[Ring of the Stalwart Protector]
[Violet Signet of the Great Protector]
[Commendation of Kael'thas]
[Badge of Tenacity]
[Wildfury Greatstaff]
[Idol of Terror]

Since this is my Brutallus tank gear, i had to replace the belt with cat belt in Rawr otherwise the changes in gear allowed by elixir of ironskin (e.g. armor on the badge ring) wouldnt be reflected properly in the overall mitigation.

About the costs: i think at this level the costs of the elixirs are not a problem. On progress content, you want the best you can get. On farm content, you dont die so the costs are minimal. I havent used a flask for a very long time now.

If you mean you're at/over the armor cap and you want to figure out what value additional armor has, you can check the Stomp debuff dealt by Brutallus. You can find it under the options pane in rawr.

I've not used Elixir of Major Fortitude for probably 5 months, I would guess. The flexibility you gain in the rest of your gear to gain more dodge by using an Ironskin instead is superior from what I've seen to the benefit of using an elixir of major fortitude and wearing another piece with defense/resilience on it.

Hi. I've been perusing this thread and I have been improving my powershifting, but I'm running into a big problem breaking 800dps. I was ~790 dps last night on Aran with a SoE totem and an Elixir of Greater Agility added to buffs. There was also a hunter in my group with ferocious inspiration. No sunders on Aran, but I kept FF up at all times. I was the only feral druid in the group.

I was a noob and logged out in my pvp gear, but a link to my profile (I'll log out in my dps gear when I get home.)
Relevart's Armory

My dps cycle is Mangle -> Shred ->Shred ->Powershift -> Shred ->Rip -> Powershift

I didn't log my combat log (stupid) or I would post some type of link to it.

Any suggestions or pointers? I just feel like my gear is not THAT bad.

Slots that differ from my pvp stuff:
Shoulders - Malorne
Boots - Edgewalker Longboots
Ring 1 - Adal's Command
Trinket 1 - Bloodlust Brooch
Trinket 2 - Berserker's Call

Rawr puts you at about 930 in perfect conditions. With Aran, you have to run out a lot, can get stuck in a flame wreath away from him, and he is constantly spinning around so you can't just shred away, so I don't think you are doing too bad given your gear.

If you really want to do good dps, you need to start splitting your gear, and getting DPS specific pieces with dps enchants.

Also, you really don't want to powershift after a Rip. You want to wait to Rip until you have at least enough energy to Rip then mangle immediately (otherwise your first rip tick will be unmangled).

Your DPS cycle should be a set of rules rather than a fixed thing due to the fact you do not crit 100% of the time (or 0% of the time) and unless you are hit and expertise capped you will have some avoided attacks as well.

Besides the first set of attacks you should be shredding until 4 or 5 combo points. Then you should let your energy regen so that you can rip and then immediately mangle. Then repeat the shredding until 4-5 combo points.

You aim for 4 combo points and if you happen to crit at 3 to get 5 all the better. The only time you're going to actively go for the 5 combo points is if you still have a rip ticking and your energy is going to start getting lost due to it going over 100.

Powershifting results in a net energy gain if you powershift immediately after the GCD is up AND you have less than 30 energy. In practice powershifting at that high a level of energy will be extremely mana inefficient so its probably best to aim for it when you're below 10 or so mana. This threshold can increase if you have a lot of mana and/or the fight is short.

Finally, as was mentioned Aran isn't a great fight to test your DPS on. The fact that he's turning around all the time can make getting shreds off pretty annoying (or downright impossible for the most part if you're topping the threat list). For lower content DPS tests, Morogrim or VR are probably the easiest tank and spank fights from Melee's POV.

I was wondering what most druids are doing in Sunwell when tanking different encounters and upgrading gear.

Pre-sunwell I used the [Vindicator's Dragonhide Bracers], along with the [Shadowmoon Insignia], [Violet Signet of the Great Protector], [A'dal's Signet of Defense], [Slikk's Cloak of Placation], and [Pendant of Titans].

Those I felt were all pretty obvious choices. This kept me from ever needing to gem/enchant for resil or defense for crit immunity.

When tanking Kalecgos(and demon) I actually started using [Brooch of Deftness] and [Boots of Natural Grace] for less taunt resists and more overall threat. Since I lose some defense from swapping necks, I just tossed a 10 Defense gem into my chest (replacing a 5 agi/5hit) and I was good to go...

But, on to my actual dilema. My guild and I downed Kalecgos last week for the first time. I would be the first person on the Vanq token to get it when it drops. If I use the T6 bracers over the pvp bracers(now s4 bracers) I lose crit immunity. Do most people just enchant/gem for defense/resil and suck it up? Also, from what I've gathered, most players tend to go with [Badge of Tenacity] and [Commendation of Kael'thas] for tanking Brutallus. If I do that, it leaves me crittable by quite a lot(even more if I usethe T6 bracers when I get them). Requiring me to change even more gemming/chanting for just one specific fight. I actually just re-gemed my shoulders with another 10 defense and my chest with a 5def/7stam so now I am uncrittable without using the Shadowmoon Insignia. That solves the problem until I get T6 bracers.

A few posts up someone mentioned that they used their pvp bracers for "farm" bosses and only tossed on their T6 bracers for new bosses, along with popping [Elixir of Ironskin]. Is this what most druids do? Or do you just put another defense/resil gem/chant on your gear? I know it's not bad doing that, I just usually try to avoid it unless all else fails.

I also know about rawr and have played around with my gear in it for a while now and was just wanting other input on it to see what other ferals are doing with this problem that I'm guessing more than a few people have ran into.

Ok, that;s cool. I do actually base my cycle off 4 combo points. That was just a guideline referencing what I would do ideally. As far as powershifting goes, I never powershift with more than 14 energy. I try to get it below 10 (8 is my ideal number again, but as you said, I miss or get dodged, since I'm not hit/expertise capped). I totally agree with the needing seperate gear, and I've been working on that alot. The biggest problems I've been having are with the helm, legs and chest. I actually have a good chest to move into place, but I need to socket it and enchant it first. Once that is done, I should have no problem moving around some other gear too. I'll retest on a more static boss and see what my dps is there. Thanks so much for the tips!

People are probably going to groan, but I had a question about Ferocious Bite. It's been worked out on every individual possibility to be worse than Rip, and I accept that. However, I haven't seen anyone address the entire possible gamut, and if they have and I missed it I apologize. We've ruled out simply speccing for it as clearly inferior to Rip. It's been shown that overall Rip remains superior when powershifting. What I'm looking at, is the entire combination of things available to a feral druid that could increase Ferocious Bite. Namely talented for it, excess CP's from 2T4/Omen/Powershifting, and armor penetration. A lot of the high end dps gear has armor pen, and it seems a shame that 25-35% of our damage doesn't really take advantage of it. Obviously using powershifting to the degree necessary to be stacking up extra CP's presents an OOM problem, but the potential for that problem is the same either way I think. I can follow most of the math when people post it, but I've never been a bright enough fellow to figure it out on my own. I've thought about just doing testing using the invulnerable mobs out by the dark portal, but I know that I'm pretty far off from running an optimum cycle and I'm pretty sure that would just get worse as I got bored trying to run hundreds of iterations. So if anyone knows the math and can suggest or show how to figure it out, that'd be great. Even if it wasn't possible to maintain over the duration of a boss fight, if the potential is higher maybe it'd be worth speccing for to use on the last 20% when bosses typically enrage/change attack style/go bugnuts?

And I'm not just asking to justify the 60 badges I spent on Dory's even though the 25 badge cloak rates higher in Rawr. <.<

The big problem with trying to make FB worth using is that you have to spend a whopping 5 talent points to even make it worth considering. Where are those 5 talent points going to come from? You'd have to really heavily gimp your bear bonuses in order to get all the cat bonuses and get the FB dmg talent.

Though oddly enough, that looks like exactly what we'll be doing in WotLK, based on the current talent trees, what with FB always critting against bleeding mobs.

One option is the 15 resilience chest enchant. You do lose some dodge but it is far more effective in reaching crit immunity than the defense is.

Inaiwae, I'm not arguing that the elixir of ironskin is more item points than the other values. I'm arguing that there are fights where it is not that helpful, and that 30 resilience doesn't matter in certain circumstances. Quite a few. Now, if you can maximize your setup such that using an elixir of ironskin and an elixir of agility is the best for that fight, that's great. I'm saying that 30 resilience isn't always the best choice. For example, instead of using the Thunderheart bracers, why not use Band of the Swift paw? You lose threat but gain more effective health.

I also don't understand why you would regem from 15 stam to 10 def. There's no need for that; you can get around it via enchants for the most part. Gems are way worse on the item economy than enchants are. But I don't know what your setup was, so perhaps that's the only way you can do it.

As to the item value - this only matters if you can be perfectly itemized. It doesn't matter that you can get either 30 resilience or 250 HP unless what you're replacing is perfectly itemized. The Thunderhearts, for instance, aren't. They waste budget on int and armor pen. So while agility + ironskin is more item points, that doesn't mean they're useful item points. This is why pvp gear works so well - because it's actually well-itemized for tanking, whereas so much other gear is not.

Mostly, I debate this:
That's a very, very big assumption.

I gemed my [Vindicator's Dragonhide Bracers] with a [Glistening Fire Opal] and enchanted them with 12 defense rating.
This just happens to mean they are almost exactly the same amount of anti-crit as an [Elixir of Ironskin] so I can swap between them and my T6 bracers depending on content.

I have a couple of different gear setups in Itemrack but find myself using what I classed my trash/heroic tanking setup more often than the straight tanking one now. I have even used this setup on Teron a couple of times!
For reference I will attach my Rawr files to the post instead of making a huge list, there are two .xml files in the zip.

I used a 10 agility gem and +4 stats enchant for my T6 bracers as they are not a clear upgrade over the PvP ones for what I do most often in raids, this makes them great for cat and also gives a lot of avoidance when needed for tanking.
The last two Brutallus kills I swapped them in and used the elixir to remain crit immune, it isn't a perfect scenario but that sums up feral druids quite well.
Everything is a trade off somewhere, you choose what you are happy with and go from there.

Edit.
@ coredumperror you to look further at what you did on Brutallus brows the log file and filter out for what you want, this link is only your Dots which means only Rip.
Looking at it you are getting some unmangled Rips including the first two tics.
Personally I haven't tried to get the super Rips, I find there is enough going on already without distracting myself trying to achieve them.
I also noticed that you have 146 hit rating on armory in what looks like your cat gear and you have a Moonkin with Improved Faerie Fire in the raid, as long as he keeps it up you only need 95 hit rating so if he is consistent and keeps it up you might be able to swap gear around to gain some more DPS.

@ Madrail. I don't see any point trying to make Ferocious Bite work. Also looking at my last Teron parse and coredumperror's Brutallus link above shows us both with 18% of our damage coming from Rip leaving a lot of our damage affected by Armor Penetration, no idea where you are getting your 25-25% numbers from.

I am looking for some feedback to our raidsetup.

Our guild leaders try to keep the same setup throughout the most parts of an instance. We basically kept the same setup for all T5 and T6 instances. The only thing we really changed was going from 7 healers (SSC and TK) to 8 healers (MH and BT). This comes mostly from our roster. Regarding my situation in this setup:

We basically have 4 spots for tanks. They are split in 2 spots for Def-Warriors (we sadly don't have any protection paladins, though we are trying to get one for Felmyst and Mu'ru) and 2 spots for ferals. We ferals do have good equip for tank and dps purposes, basically we just need 1 or 2 items each from MH/BT. We just downed Kalecgos, so a lot of brutallus wipes are to come soon.

There are 4 other melee dps in the setup (usually 1 enhancer, 1 warrior or retribution paladin and 2 rogues). Our number of hunters varies from 0 - 2 (2 are the desired number in our setup).

My question is, how viable is this setup regarding the 2 ferals? Obivously, Kalecgos worked quite well whith 1 tanking and 1 dpsing. but how about the other bosses? I have some concerns about brutallus, I doubt that feral dps is sufficient for a first kill, and the 2 tanks are already there, so basically no need for us. Felmyst and Twins also do not require more than 2 Tanks, is feral dps enough for a first kill here? Mu'ru and KJ I have no idea how well we might perform there.

I am pretty sure we have to minmax the number of healers on some encounters, in how far are we force to also leave some of the ferals at home? I apppreciate any comments on the raid setup and the role of a feral in sunwell, considering our specific setup.

Tim you will probably find your raid will work better with one feral and one warrior tanking Brutallus, I expect you are right about a feral being in as DPS for your first kill too.
I have only been in as a tank and while I think I could pull my weight as DPS, especially with a bear providing Mangle for me, I understand why the officers haven't chosen that option.

With a warrior/bear tank combo the raid gains both Mangle and Faerie Fire to buff rDPS, sure you could ask a resto druid to keep Faerie Fire up but I expect you will find they are a little busy for that and wouldn't like the mana hit not being in tree form. If you have a Moonkin this becomes irrelevant but the raid still gains Mangle from having a feral in there.
You will also find, especially pushing for your first kill, that the additional DPS a feral tank provides over a second warrior helps you get there. Our warrior is normally around 350dps for the fight and I have been around 700dps, while he is tanking I am in cat doing the best I can.

Of course most of this is theoretical and it will depend on who you have available on the night and how deep your bench is.

We have basically the same situation, two Warriors, two Ferals. Our melee and hunter composition is actually identical to yours as well.

One of the Ferals (me) tends to default to tanking, and the other to dps. The most common competition for him, as hybrid dps, was for a spot in the melee dps group, and was with our Retadin, who recently stopped playing. While we used the Retadin on our first Brutallus kill, the other feral has been there for all subsequent kills and was present for our first Felmyst kill. We got a good bit more dps out of our melee group with the feral, but about comparable dps increasefor the ranged from JoW with the Retadin. So for Brutallus at least, it was pretty much a wash and just depended on who was available. For Felmyst, the extra tank for skeleton wrangling more than made up for any dps loss relative to other melee. Imp LotP becomes increasingly useful after Brutallus, from what I've seen, as the amount of raidwide damage just seems to keep increasing. I should note that I switched to Resto for our Felymst kill, but this was due to shortages in our healing roster, not any dps issues.

So the answer to your question is, yes, two ferals are completely viable, particularly if one of the warriors is able and willing to swing to dps as necessary. If both your warriors are set on tanking, that's an entirely different issue, and as was just pointed out, will hurt your dps (and possibly lead to threat issues) on Brutallus.