I don't think I said anything about wanting more armor, instead, I stated the majority of our armor should come from our core pieces and/or a better Bear form armor modifier (feral talent, unavailable to resto). Armor is one of our primary tanking stats, yet it scales pathetically across the spectrum from T4 to T6.

As a tank/dps hybrid, our armor should come purely from traditional slots (core armor pieces, leg, bracer, belt, boots), and not from slots which have 0 armor by default (weapon, ring, trinket). (I guess weapon armor is debatable because its changeable in combat.)

There should be no reason to have these items with extra armor. Gear of this type does nothing except make our class less hybrid and less able to fill the role of tank/dps, instead, we're usually stuck choosing one.

Higher armor on the core PvE pieces would finally separate the S3 feral gear from T6 and allow both to scale better without the PvP items infringing on PvE armor values. Less dependance on armor from rings and trinkets (lets face it, they might as well say Classes: Druid) would give us more gear configurations, and incentive to wear tanking rings with agility (which would also help for DPS).

Currently, two rings, a trinket, and a weapon give us nearly 9000 bear form armor. If instead, we gained significantly more armor as we upgraded our core pieces, we could swap out our low tier armor rings (best being Karazhan and Magtheridon), and transition to something with more stamina and agility.

I have a problem with Toskks and Feral Druid DPS 2.3.2 spreadsheet and how they handle Hit rate. While Toskks give me better items Don Alejandro's Money Belt and Shadowmaster's Boots the speadsheet says that Belt of Deep Shadow and Nyn'Jah's Tabi Boots win. Any help here?

Most likely you didn't check the "ignore hit/expertise cap" option and you already have a high enough hit rating, so the spreadsheet (correctly) informs you, by devaluing those items, that you'd be wasting a chunk of their budget by going over the cap.

Nope the hit rate was 93 and the ignore hit/expetrise Cap unchecked

Toskks uses the appropriate gem colors. Belt of Deep Shadow with 2 blue sockets would be better with 2 red gems instead. I don't know how the spreadsheet handles that.

When i hit the upgrade button it runs the query and says that Belt of Deep Shadow is 5 more dps but its not saying anything about gems

I've been thinking about the DPS rotation.

It is clear that the most widely accepted rotation is this:

Mangle + Shred until 4 combo points (or 5 if final Shred crits)

Wait till enough energy then

Rip

And then Mangle right after Rip

My question is this:

Knowing that you rip with 4 combo points, you averagely Mangle much more often than if you waited for 5 combo points. However the last combo point would have been acquired by a Shred, which deals much more damage than a Mangle. Therefore, doesn't the fact that you use more Mangles instead of Shred hinder your DPS somewhat?
I imagine this can only be demonstrated through heavy maths though :s

A rogue is likely missing out on one tick of rupture for each of your damage cycles.

A warrior is possibly missing one tick of deep wounds for each of your damage cycles. I say possibly as I'm not sure if they fixed the bug where if you crit with deep wounds active, it resets the tick timer meaning that a highly geared fury-haste warrior doesn't get many ticks due to it resetting a lot.

Find out what your rogues average damage rupture tick is, and the same for deep wounds for a warrior. Then find out the difference between a mangle hit and a shred hit. The easiest way to do this is to use WWS. Then do:

[(rupture tick * 0.3 * no. rogues) + (deep wounds tick * 0.3 * no. warriors)] - (average shred - average mangle)

If the answer is positive, you should break the cycle, if negative you shouldn't break the cycle.


The combo points thing tends to be personal preference and down to personal gear. At a high level (T6) you'll likely have such a high crit rate (50%+) that shredding to 4 points then refreshing Rip is a complete waste as a lot of the time you'll still have a rip going when you get to 80+ energy. The cycle is more of a dynamic thing rather than a static checklist - you should always be evaluating how many points you have, how much time you have left on the rip/mangle debuffs, and how much energy you have (and whether it's possible to powershift).

You should also be able to check this with some of the spreadsheets/Toskk's calculator, as I think they have functions for it (Toskk's lets you specify number of shreds after a mangle, IIRC).

Two questions here, recently our protection pally gquit and for the first time we had to tank the waves with two prot warriors and myself. Before it was so easy as the pally just tanked everything except the heavy hitters. We'd group everthing up about 10secs after the wave started and aoe evething down.

Now there is considerably more chaos regarding the waves with the highest number of mobs. The 2 tanks and I would try to group up together like we did before (~10secs after the wave started), and many times we lose aggro on few mobs, a mage or lock dies, and it just wastes so much time.

Speaking to the two warriors it seemed evident that we'd either lose track of our fourth or fifth mobs that we were tanking or more commonly, waste time tab targeting through other peoples mobs because its just so congested in the aoe group.

Is it better now without a prot pally just to grab 4-5 mobs and then have 3 seperate groups (2 warriors and me) for dps to burn down?

Another really important question concering this is tab-targeting throught 4-5 mobs and having to look for your first mob whose lacerate you have to refresh in a crowd of 20 mobs and npcs running everywhere. I've used a warrior macro that sets the range on "targetNearestDistance" to 5 yds so I don't waste time targeting mobs way across the screen.

This macro is alright, however, I thought that it would be so much easier if there was a simple macro or addon that would simply target the next closest mob say, 3 or 4 times (depending how many mobs you want to tank) and then go back to your first target. Kind of the way "targetlasttarget" keybind works for two mobs except it targets next target until it gets to your set number of mobs then it "targetlasttarget" to your first target.

Then, now matter how many of your tanked mobs, other people's mobs, and npc's are running around in a huge group about to be aoe'd to heck, you will always be certain that you will always be tab-targetting throught the same 4-5 mobs you started with.

(Is my grammar ok for this post? Got banned before any feedback welcome)

I'm partially going to reply to my own question:

Say we're in a world in which you can never miss, but you can never crit either.

Building 4 combo points requires:
Mangle x1 + Shred x3

Building 5 combo points requires:
Mangle x1 + Shred x4

Energy cost of a 4 point cycle =
40 (Mangle) + 126(Shred) + 30 (Rip)

[top] 196

Energy cost of a 5 point cycle

40 (Mangle) + 168(Shred) + 30 (Rip)

[top] 238

196 and 238 can both be divided by 14, for a result of respectively 14 and 17.

With the same amount of energy it takes to deal 17 times the 4 point combo cycle, we can deal 14 times the 5 point combo cycle.

I used an excel sheet to work out the damage dealt by each cycle according to the Druid's AP.

Here are the rounded numbers for 3000ap

Normal 214
Mangle 728
Shred 1153
Rip c4 1942
Rip c5 2161

Cycle C4

6130
Cycle C5 = 7502
C4 Damage over 3332 energy = 104k
C5 Damage over 3332 energy = 105k

I did the same calculations with other values of AP:

4000ap
C4 damage = 123k
C5 damage = 123k

5000ap
C4 damage = 141k
C5 damage = 141k

6000ap
C4 damage = 159k
C5 damage = 159k


Now obviously this would need to be done again by inputting the factors of Critrate and Hitrate, but I think it quite interesting to notice that there is such a small difference between ripping at 4 combo points or ripping at 5 combo points.

We always used 4 tanks (2 feral, 2 warriors) and had three group tanks and one MT/group tank. The MT picked up a single mob which was focused DPS'ed, then picked up a second mob as that got to ~20% which was then focused (generally abomination's were targetted first). It meant there was always a threat lead for that tank, and meant the rest of us could focus ourselves on the groups for AoE once 2-3 mobs were dead from focused DPS.

4 tanks with a DPS warrior or even a holy paladin acting as the 4th made it so much quicker than trying to do it with just 3 "proper" tanks for us. Even one death loses you a lot more DPS than you lose by using a 4th tank, and it makes AoE'ing and other stuff so much quicker.

One thing we found helped immensely on the trash in hyjal is thorns + retribution aura. If you have both it's ~50 damage per hit back on the mobs hitting you, and if they're improved (up to ~100 per hit) it helps even more.

Another thing that helps is to turn nameplates on and stand still so they aren't shifting around constantly.

If you have more than one mob, swipe > lacerate, always. If you have crowd control near you, pull the mobs away or shout at the mage to resheep it once it's out of your way.

Throughout Hyjal our melee group consisted of me, two rogues, an enhancement shaman and a protection warrior with dps gear on those fights where no OT was necessary. (We started to do Anetheron all out dps, without tanking the infernal for example). In this group I'd put out 1300-1400dps on most fights. I got to tank, I got to be top 7-8 on many boss fights, it was great--everthing was peachy keen.

Mid-way through black temple we got an uber combat rogue transfer and now the "whose gonna be the one booted out of the melee group" controversy began. The three rogues do ~1700 dps, and of course you have to have the enhance shaman in the melee group. So it became a toss up between me and the prot warrior on who gets the fifth spot.

Now the prot warrior is an excellent player, has great dps gear and in the melee group puts out about 1.1k dps on many boss fights as pure prot spec. (So obviously he doesn't have Blood Frenzy (+4% melee damage) or improved battle shout.) And he has been taking that coveted fifth spot for the past few raids.

Here's where recently I've kind of wanted to quit the game unfortunately. I now get put in that fifth group where you stick that extra bad healer, extra bad caster, etc, where I receive not one single dps group buff.

My dps has gone from 1400+ to barely going over 1k dps sustained, and I feel like I'm literally contributing nothing to dps.

Well, besides talking about my "feelings" (lol), my question is about the math behind non-improved battle shout, vs LotP. Initially the melee group of the 3 combat rogues and enhancement shaman told my GM that 305 attack power >> 5% crit for this group, but the gm asked me to find out for sure.

Hyjal waves are very doable with 2 prot warriors and a single feral - we did them just the other day with 2 ferals, a prot warrior, and 1 dps warrior in hybrid gear. (WWS - WWS Loading...) There are a few spots where you need to be constructive - and we often kept an abomination or 2 shackled for part of each wave until 1 or 2 of them had been burned down.

Remember that really, in the big scheme of things, the Ghouls and Crypt Fiends hit for very little - you should be able to tank 3-4 Ghouls and 2-3 Crypt Fiends without getting into that many problems. It's only once you start adding (multiple) Abominations that the damage input gets taxing.

[e] Just to back that point up here's an excerpt from that raid - bear in mind I'm not wearing what I would call full max armour max defense bear gear, more like 5 man tanking gear.

What you can see is the Abominations do nearly as much damage as the Ghouls and Crypt Fiends together, even though I take less than half the hits from them.

Also, remember, it's not the end of the world if the NPCs tank a little bit, just as long as you taunt off them in time to stop them dying - they will recharge hp to full so long as you get an out of combat break between waves.

I'm new to both the game, and the class. This thread was helpful in so many ways. Just want to throw a quick Thank You to anyone who's helped with this. Regardless of level, the facts and suggestions in the thread, and the links provided, gave me an awesome heads-up to what's in store for me.

So, thank you.

EDIT: Grammar.

@Rae: Best bet is to use the Rogue and Warrior DPS spreadsheets and set them up with the gear of your guildmates. Find out what the DPS differences are in theory, and compare that with the DPS loss of yourself by not being in that group. I'm pretty sure you'll find that Battle Shout wins between them, although I'm not certain about that. The biggest thing is that the warrior is gaining Windfury in that group, without which his DPS would be a lot less and you'll have to factor that in too.

@Rae: Dukes beat me but 2 more things. 1)A warrior without WF totem cant survive.2) There is always the hunter group for you.
P.S. I still dont get why hit rate value is so different for toskks and Feral Druid DPS 2.3.2 it seems the xls hit rate value is equal to agility (just change the food buff from+hit to +agi to check it) which cant be right.

I will definately do so Dukes ty, ultimately that will be the only way for me to justify myself in the melee group, but just for theorycrafting's sake, does anyone know off hand how much (ballpark percentage) would +305 attack power raise 3 combat rogues and one enhancement shaman versus 5% crit? (The 3 rogues and shaman have at least 3/6 T6 gear)

I think for druids 14-15 attack power raises your dps by 1 approximately, but im sure this proportion varies with your typical BT combat rogue and enhancement shaman.

My math shows that with LotP the melee group should have its total damage out increased by btw 2.5-3%. Probably closer to 3% because unleashed rage(shammy buff) scales with the increase in the group's crit.

It's the +305 attack power's effect that I have trouble figuring out.

I've tried to look into why the spreadsheet values hit so much, and couldn't find anything that stands out other than the way he determines his values.

Toskk's has one slight defect that will cause it to undervalue hit (but not to the degree of the spreadsheet): it doesn't change your cycle time based on missed rips. For every avoided Rip, you have to wait at least another GCD (1 second), and probably an average of 1.5 energy ticks (2.25 seconds) to optimally re-start your cycle. So if you have 10% of your rips avoided, the minimum possible average cycle time is around 12.22.

Also, Toskk's determines his "average" cycle as averaging combo points, then finding the average of how many attacks you'd need. This is fundamental in his approach to programming it and can't be "fixed". The spreadsheet, on the other hand, looks at the individual probabilities of sequences of attacks landing. I'm not sure this is creating the difference you see in the tools, however.

The thing I noticed when using both tools is that the spreadsheet has significantly lower DPS when using unbuffed values; i.e., if you take a fully buffed druid's stats from the spreadsheet and put it into Toskk's calculator, you get similar end-DPS values; however, plug the unbuffed stats from the spreadsheet into Toskk's, and the DPS it predicts is around 200 DPS different.

Since they report markedly different values, a good starting point for picking one as the more accurate one would be to compare their predicted values of DPS at your current gear level-- i.e., if you are in catform on Shahraz and severely gimp your stats for shadow resist gear, try to find an attempt where you don't get teleported. Take an attempt or two of a boss you have on farm, and test out how you do without a weapon equipped.

I'll try to do this next time I get an opportunity.

For druids, it's 14 AP per character sheet DPS, BEFORE you account for special attacks. In practice, you get 1 DPS from between 4 and 6 AP, depending on gear level.

The rogue spreadsheet I have, which has a gear level of an early T6 rogue, shows a point of crit rating is worth about 1.75 AP. Which puts 5% crit worth around 200 AP overall to them.

The shaman will not see much increased uptime on unleashed rage-- it's up nearly all the time the shaman is in combat.

I forget which thread it was in, but I saw a chart that cross referenced AP and Energy to determine if it was better to Shred or Bite a non-bleed boss. Could anyone direct me to that chart or provide it again?

I don't have the chart handy but I do recall looking at the math the other day. Without taking into account FB costing the full 35 energy on a miss/dodge it looked something like

At 35 energy you need ~15k AP for Shred to be more DPE than FB
at 40 energy you need ~6.7k AP for Shred to be more DPE than FB

Taking the miss thing into account will lower those numbers somewhat, but they were also calculated with FB scaling at 0.15 dmg per AP whereas it may be 0.1666 (1/6) per AP (can anyone confirm the scaling of FB?). Either way at 35 energy its highly unlikely you'll ever get enough AP for Shred to be more worthwhile, whereas at 40-42 energy, if you're in top end gear fully buffed it MAY be better off to use Shred but either way it will be very close.

We generally use 4 tanks for trash - 1 prot war, 1 dps war, 2 ferals. Many times either the dps war or one of the ferals is just assigned to picking up runners. In general, there's really no rush to start the AoE. Threat is more important. We each grab our assigned mobs and split up, get a good amount of threat on each, then group them together. We've also recently switched to hunters kiting abominations to get the NPCs (instead of ghouls or fiends). This reduces the number needing to be tanked.

Spartakos hit this one dead on. The problem is that the WF dps gain for warriors is huge. We run with up to 3 dps warriors at times and even our top end rogues are getting pushed out into the tank or hunter groups. I've only been in the melee group once since starting T6 and that was on Archimonde to get tremor totem. I have to decurse on him now though. A 2-3 hunter/resto shaman group is quite nice for damage (though still not optimal).

According to my spreadsheet, [Shadowmaster's Boots] is worth roughly 2.5 dps more than [Nyn'jah's Tabi Boots] and [Don Alejandro's Money Belt] is only about 0.5 dps more than [Belt of Deep Shadow]. Of course, numbers vary depending on other gear. Yes, hit rating is not as good as agility. However, those items also have much less stamina, meaning more item points available for dps stats.