I have a couple questions to put in front of the pros. This guy is in Kara as offtank/DPS, and a last-resort subin for SSC/TK. Feral Druid natch. Here's my armory for reference, should be DPS gear.

First, a DPS question. When I'm fighting a bleed-immune boss like Netherspite, is it better to Ferocious Bite at five points, or just forget the points and keep shredding/refreshing Mangle? And if I do bite, should I do it with a minimum or a maximum of energy? I made a WWS parse of Kara from Opera on (here it is--I am Haze from the anonymizer), and when I couldn't Rip, my DPS positively SUCKED ASS. Where I could Rip, I ended up quite high for my comparative gear level (top on Aran woop woop). I know without Rip my DPS will go down no matter what I do, I just didn't expect to practically bottom out on Netherspite.

Second, a general tanking question. Last night without fort (but with Kings), my HP was 14.4k. It used to be about 16k before fort, but I've been nickel-and-diming away my stamina in trade for more dodge, armor, and agility/etc for threat generation (right now I sit at uncrittable, 33% dodge or so (maybe more), and 28.5k armor). So far it's been working all right, but last night I got Skulker's Greaves, which I may want to replace my Heavy Clefthoof Leggings with since I have more than enough armor, and I've still got the crit gap covered. My problem is, I'm nickel-and-diming away yet more stamina. What is a reasonable threshold, for my gear level, of life pre-buffs to never want to go below?

Hello.

I have a question and I hope that you guys can help me.

I have a number of well-geared feral druids in my guild. They have pretty good gear but their DPS is sub-par. They make great tanks, but when it comes time for them to dps, they are really lacking - always dead last or close to it.

Our progression is 6/6 SSC and working on kael in the eye. Does anyone have any wws or anything of feral druids doing well (top 50%) on the damage meters?

Thanks.

(edit) ^^^ I don't know if it will help you, but in the WWS I posted above I (as Haze) did top damage on Aran and fairly well on Nightbane as a DPS Feral. Someone else can probably help you better though.
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Thanks for the advice. Hopefully tonight I can slap on my bear gear and do a side-by-side of my cat and bear gear, and find out exactly where I would stand rather than my memory guesstimates.

Actually before a few weeks ago I would have immediately agreed that sta and armor are king, and dodge can go fuck right off. I had like 16k life, 28k armor, and a pathetic 24% dodge or something like that. I've since learned the error of my ways--I just fear I overcompensated.

It must be a rough deal for Warriors, having to balance all that shit plus a higher Defense need and block/parry

My biggest problem is that our druids did fine during kara, and even into early SSC. But as our rogues and warrior's gear (especially weapons) improves, the druids just cant keep up in the DPS department.

tidewalker
"rawrman" is dpsing and "madadder" is tanking. We have a prot warrior "Guplah" dpsing on tidewalker as well.

leotheras the blind
"rawrman" and "hunglykabull" dpsing.

lurker below
"rawrman" dpsing - "madadder" in tank gear to pick up adds during submerge.

hydross
"rawrman" dpsing - "madadder" off-tanking

In all comparisons it should be noted that "Jesseka" and "mysticseer" had never stepped foot into SSC prior to that night and were unfamiliar with the fights so their dps was un-naturally low.

Rawrman, assuming the gear in his armory is his raiding dps gear, really needs to change his gemming method. He's using crit/stam gems, dodge, and other junk. He also has an empty socket on his pants and half his gear is not enchanted or has a relatively weak enchant on it.

Kazrogal is a terrible test - the stuns and cripples are much too random across different classes to be able to get a decent comparison unless you use a lot of them.

Teron is a much better comparison fight.
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Sure, it's not showing amazing DPS, but it's middle-of-the-pack, which is better than nothing. On most fights I'll admit that I'm generally bottom of the pack while DPSing, but as long as there isn't a significant gap between the bottom person and me, I'm not unhappy.

Fureflower: Rawrman is using rake (big no), he's using Ravage (really shouldn't), he's using Fero Bite when it's lower average damage than Shred (which is a big no unless he's making sure it's only costing 35 energy, and even then it's not worth it). He uses cat mangle randomly (like 5 times on each thing, which is random in my eyes) and doesn't seem to have a proper DPS cycle. Hunglykabull (nice name btw) also uses rake, uses mangle a lot more than he should (50/50 with shred, which is too much generally), but other than that seems to be doing OK.
Gearing for both of them should be covered by the first post, so I won't bother going in to that.

Rip is much nicer than Ferocious Bite, but it wasn't one of the main factors in your relatively poor performance on Netherspite according to your WWS reports.

First, you were not in the rotation for the dps beam on Netherspite for your winning attempt. The two warlocks were. I'm assuming that the 2 warlocks were each tanking a full stage of the dps beam and relying on life drain to bail them out for heals. That's not going to work as well next patch since life drain will actually be affected by the healing debuff they accumulate. Post patch, it would seem to be a better strategy to have a melee dps take the first half of the dps beam in a stage and have the warlocks take the second half (since they can continue to dps from range during the netherbreath stage). The best part is that this strategy will work whether you have 2 warlocks in your raid or not. In any case, if you'd had taken some dps beam time away from the warlocks, you would have had more dps.

Secondly, if you look at melee hits landed, every other melee landed far more hits than you. You only landed 2 minutes worth of melee hits and 2 minutes worth of skill attacks in a 6 minute fight. Usually, you should spend twice as much time in melee as out of it due to the stages of the fight. 3.5 minutes worth of melee hits and 3.5 minutes worth of skill attacks would definitely have boosted your dps way up. The rogue was much closer to that ideal time spent attacking with enough attacks for 4 minutes worth of energy (I can only assume he is combat spec and therefore has extra incoming energy). Can we assume that you aren't very confident with the Netherspite encounter or that it was your first time fighting him? In any case, I think we can confidently state that more time dpsing means more dps.

I imagine simply changing the constant at the beginning from 2.6 to 2.4, 2.2, or 2.0 would take care of that.

Will major agility elixirs still be better than fel strength elixirs after the patch?

You are correct about the DPS beam being assigned to the warlocks, though the fact that they never drained life according to the WWS and my memory makes me think that perhaps our strategy as far as the blue beam goes is flawed. Not that it matters since, as you say, it won't work in 2.3 anymore--I just thought I'd make the point that they were SB spamming and being healed through the damage instead of draining.

My low DPS time can be partly explained by the fact that I got instagibbed about two minutes before he went down. I only just learned this morning that he does, in fact, reset aggro and use a normal table between the time he unbanishes and the time the red beam is taken. This is what gibbed me, I kept up melee during the unbanish and got blown away. In the future I will remember to back off until the portals are in place.

I imagine, however, that you already took my early death into account. This is my third Karazhan run but the first one where I bothered to look at combat logs, so I was unfamiliar with WWS. I looked at my own DPS report and--jesus christ, only 15 or so Shreds the whole encounter? I would swear I did more than that, but the WWS doesn't exactly lie. I cannot explain why I did so few; I possibly simply wasn't paying attention and fell victim to cat melee bugs (I can never figure out whether you can be in skill range but not melee range, or melee range but not skill range--maybe it's both at different times).

At any rate, I guess the lessons for me here are three-fold:

- Pay attention to range, since melee range != skill range
- Discuss allocation of the beams--maybe Green should be passed around to manaless classes more for reduced costs, and Blue passed around more to prevent massive damage from the aoe?
- Pay more attention to when aggro gets dumped; until just this morning I thought there were no aggro dumps for Netherspite at all

Anything else I should be taking home from this?

Since they are extending the Weightstone/Sharpening stone buff to 1 hour, do you guys think it is more worth it (as far as costs are concerned) to bring them to raids as standard consumables now?