mesh7

Can someone reexplain this double mangle bonus again? I have a friend that swears he can somewhat consistently get the mangle bonus to double up on his rips during long boss encounters.

I tried reading the above post but im not quite following his explanation, unfortunately.

 

angral

The trick is to apply rip in the last second of the old mangle, then reapply mangle before the frist rip tick. This is very possible as rip ticks every 2 seconds, and cat form has a 1 second gcd.

The entire rip is then affected by both the old mangle and the new mangle.

N.B. You can reapply mangle later and all subsequent rip/lacerate ticks will be affected, but since the main use of this trick is to boost your dps, the best option is to use it as soon as possible.

 

Sandyr

I know I'm fairly new here, but I've been looking for ways to increase my raid DPS. I've made the switch from STR food to AGI food, from the "free token" flasks from the GBank to greater AGI pots, and so on. I'm not sure if its a problem with my DPS rotation or if it's a gear issue, but I've pretty much found that my top DPS is just @ 1400.

Najentus WWS

Above is a link of the most recent WWS report from a Najentus kill I was in. I was just under the 1400 mark, but overall still number two in the raid. (Granted, our rogue's mysteriously disappeared that night. More often than not they are above me as well as our marks hunter.)

Our guild has had Illidan on farm for just over two weeks, just to throw the average gear level of our raids out there. I was ultimately hoping to find some of you more experienced feral druids out there if you had any WWS reports of... say 1500+ dps. I'm ultimately wondering what seems to be the magic number where our DPS tops off. Any information, especially WWS reports, would be especially helpful.

 

Chosimu

I troll wws quite a bit and some of the higher consistent performers I've seen include:
Lamissa from deus vox: WWS
Arkadu from juggernaut: WWS
Antarin from abanax: WWS
And I have a couple of high parses

Enhancement shamans increase feral dps by more than probably anyone else due to our weapons consisting of entirely attack power. Also having a survival hunter, ms warrior, curse of recklessness and to a lesser degree a ret paladin are all major buffs. Another common factor is mastering powershifting and your rotations along with gearing yourself up correctly. I think 2000dps on a short fight such as gorefiend is certainly possible once you finish your gear set and get all these buffs. It should be possible now with a mangle bot and a short enough fight.

 

Boevis

Without 2 t6 I doubt it's possible to break 1500 under normal circumstances, it enhances power shifting so much.

One major thing that will improve your DPS is more Drums of Battle. It's at the point where everyone in my guild that isn't one of our primary Alchs or JCs is switching to Enchanting/Leatherworking.

I'm honestly amazed by Lamissa's DPS. 15% miss on Shreds, only 4 power shifts, 2 Drums ...

 

Sandyr

I've been recently thinking the same thing, questioning the 2pc T6 vs 2pc T4. I find that I end up clipping about half of my T4 procs off to nothingness due to powershifting. I've gotten the general feeling from this thread along with my personal experience that 2pc T4 is very very strong, but the rate at which I clip off the 20 energy really aggravates me. It seems the only set bonuses people argue are 2pc T4 vs 4pc T6, but how does the 2pc T4 stack up against 2pc T6, especially when you factor in the loss of the usefulness of T4 when powershifting?

 

Boevis

For me personally, I would chose 2T4 over 2T6 every time. Honestly though, wearing tanking gemmed/enchanted t4/6 to get both 2 pc bonus's is well worth it.

 

spartakos

His average rip tick is 806 so he is using 4t6.
Also all these had a warrior an ench shaman and a Mangle-bot, 3 things together that most feral will never have.

 

Boevis

I do, regularly. Admittedly I'm a raid leader, so I spoil myself on those "I get to do DPS?!? YAY!" fights. Of course, we lost our Enh Shaman to School, so the past month has been very morose for us melee.

This is my last recorded Teron, iirc I was in MT Group, so WF/SoE, Shout, BoK, BoM were my buffs.
Boevis - WWS

Recently I've switched to 4T6 and powershifted more, but Teron was unkind and I got debuffed first (I suppose I should call that kind, since I'm apparently one of the best at Ghost). Overall I doubt I'll be going back to 2t4 unless I manage to get DST and Madness, haste and armor pen with less AP clearly favors everything but Rip in our DPS, especially procs. I will say, as far as 4T6 goes, seeing "double Mangled" rip tics for over 1000 really made my week, if I could reliably reproduce this every cycle, I'd contemplate ripping with 3 cps sometimes. It's freakish when fully buffed seeing no numbers below 1k for a 6 second string of white crit, specials, and bugged rip.

 

monstor

Dukes, I saw looking at your armory, nice gear. Can I make a suggestion? I think you should swap your neck with [Choker of Endless Nightmares] and also use [Don Alejandro's Money Belt] instead of belt of deep shadow. Your neck should keep you hit capped and I think that it will slightly boost your ap/crit. Also, [Madness of the Betrayer] in my opinion is one of the best trinkets in the game because of high amount of hit/ap and armor pen, which is really sweet.


Also, I am still trying to figure out this mangle/rip extra damage, I can't say I fully understand it but I did manage to get 816 rip ticks in Hyjal the other week, and I had 855 rip tick on Teron this week.

 

Rathyr

Monstor, you just listed 2 of the highest demand melee items in the game. My guild has been blessed (BLESSED) with Madness (like 6 in 8 kills or something stupid), and I was still 3rd in line. I'm still using the Kael neck because I cant justify taking such a minor upgrade over another melee.

 

Schnigges

The Kael neck is still best ingame if you have your hitcap.

 

spartakos

1) Fix your armory link profile
2) Dukes as he said himself is not playing any more

 

dukes

- I saw the choker twice, once going to a rogue and once to a shaman, and not planning on getting it myself anyway. The kael neck is a very very slight upgrade over both Haramads (which I effectively got for "free") and the choker anyway. Having only killed Kael 4-5 times (keying) and having priority on the neck for healers, there wasn't any point in me thinking about changing my neck.
- I saw the belt twice, once to a rogue and once to a hunter, and never wanted it as my setup is already very good for someone not priority on DPS loot (looking to upgrade a trinket, maybe upgrade the weapon, and that's about it).
- I never saw the madness drop in 4 months of farming illidan (with 100% raid attendance). I would've preferred the trinket from ZA ([Berserker's Call]) over the madness anyway, as the hit rating would be completely wasted. Not to mention we only ever had 1 dragonspine drop, and saw 3 tsunami's over the entire course of doing SSC which means every melee was looking to upgrade their melee trinkets, and being (primarily) a tanking character I had less priority anyway. We also never saw the Gurtogg tanking trinket drop, but we did see the Skull of Guldan about 8 times which I suppose makes up for it in some meager way.
- I probably would've swapped Everbloom for the Idol of Terror too (iirc I farmed the badges for both the idol and the brooch of deftness pre-2.3).

As stated previously, I stopped playing just prior to 2.3, so all of this is a moot point really.

Surely the last page of posts explains the mechanic behind the double rip perfectly enough? Wait until mangle is on but rip isn't (the last 1-2 seconds of the debuff), then rip, then wait for mangle to run out and then put on a new mangle. The rip gets the benefit of both the initial mangle and the new one. I'm not sure if this is a "perfect" bug where it always happens, or if it's dependant on client/server lag interaction and will only happen some of the time.

Edit: We used a loot council btw, so taking items that were useful for melee DPS just because I wanted to and had the DKP wasn't an option.

 

Aranan

I have more question with a potentially obvious answer. I've been plotting my gear upgrade path for both cat and bear and I've come to the conclusion that cat is a lot easier to do this for. Anytime I consider an upgrade for tanking, I have to reevaluate the rest of my gear and ensure that I have not dipped below crit immunity. I have been using RAWR for ranking various gear pieces against one another in hopes of finding ones that are definitely "better" than what I have now so I can have a few target items to go after. I'm learning that I can't just trust the rankings because if I swap one item for it's supposed superior and drop below crit immunity, that's a bad thing.

Then again, some items are a nobrainer. I went from [Ring of Protection] to [Ring of Unyielding Force], a crappy belt to [Belt of Natural Power] and a few other easy to spot upgrades. I think my main problem right now is managing to retain crit immunity when I start to swap out pieces of my Clefthoof gear. For instance, I made the [Boots of Natural Grace] last night, but if I replace my [Heavy Clefthoof Boots] with them, I drop below crit immunity.

What do/did other bears do as they were gearing up? How do/did you prioritize your upgrades?

 

Valerian

I made this post in a thread quite a while back about crit immunity I believe most of it still applies:

Lets do some math here:

We need 2.6% anti crit to be crit immune.

39.4 Resilience gives 1% crit reduction
2.4 Def Rating grants 1 Def Skill -> 1 Def Skill gives 0.04% crit reduction

Sources of crit reduction everyone should have:
Veteran's Bracers: These are ideal since there is nothing else that really fits this slot. Gives 17 Resilience.
Helm Enchant: 16 Def rating.
Shoulder enchant: Aldor = 10 Def rating, Scryer = 15 Def Rating
Total = 0.8648 % crit reduction low end for aldor

We therefore need 1.7352 % more
The enchants to chest/bracers seem like the next best place to add crit reduction. All combat ratings have a 1.000 Stat value as do all stats but Sta which has a 0.667 Stat value. Therefore, exchanging 6 Sta and 6 Agi for 15 resilience gives us better item budget value as does exchanging 12 Sta for 12 Defense. Therefore:
Enchant Chest: 15 Resilience
Enchant Bracers: 12 Defense Rating

[top] 0.5807 % crit reduction
Total: 1.4455%, 1.1545% remaining

Rings/Necklaces
The heroic badge necklace is pretty similar to most of the neck pieces available to us for tanking. Further they all have roughly the same Defense Rating on them so adding that we have:
22 Defense rating (Juggernaut as an example)
Take the Kara Exalted Ring and the Mag's Head ring and we get another 39 Defense rating. Note: upgrading to the Band of the Abyssal Lord or other non-armor rings, results in either no loss of Defense rating or a gain of it.
61 Defense Rating

1.01666% crit reduction
Total: 2.4622% crit reduction, only 0.1378 remaining.

0.1378 Requires either 9 Def Rating or 6 Resilience rating to get (less if you're a scryer since you have an extra 5 Defense rating). With such a small amount left almost any good tanking cloak will have the required Defense ratings. In fact a cloak with over 21 Defense rating will allow you to enchant your bracers with Sta again. This also leaves all your tier slots, your trinkets and your belt/boots free to use whatever you want in them without needing to worry about crit immunity. Another option at this point is to get a single 8 resilience gem (or one of the 5 defense/6 sta ones if you're scryer) and that leaves a slot open between neck/cloak/rings that also doesnt need defense on it (Necklace of the Deep instead of a defense neck for example).

 

Zeln

[Elixir of Ironskin]

I tank a lot of trash in MH, but we have a prot pally, so its basically Shadowy Necros, so most damage is spellcasts. In BT we rarely need me to provide that much (Even the prot pally is over 20k health). So I tend to aim for not being crit against trash mobs and just in case let the above elixir make up the difference.

 

dukes

[Veteran's Dragonhide Belt]
[Veteran's Dragonhide Bracers]
[Slikk's Cloak of Placation]
[Timelapse Shard]
[Necklace of the Juggernaut]

All of those are upgrades for you IMO (although the belt arguably so - it makes up a huge chunk of crit immunity, but loses a small number of stats and ~600 armour compared to Natural Power). All are relatively easy to get, although both Timelapse and the Veteran's bits require a bit of grinding. You should be able to pick up the cloak and neck pretty easily if you're doing kara though. You could also get [Brooch of the Immortal King]/[Adamantine Figurine]/[Figurine - Dawnstone Crab], or even [Scarab of Displacement] if you're in SSC.

 

Ghoselle

You probably want instead:
[Vindicator's Dragonhide Belt]
[Vindicator's Dragonhide Bracers]

If you are having to use a trinket for defense rating, you want the belt. If not, you want the natural power belt you already have.

Ghoselle.
Feral Druid.

 

dukes

Thanks for the update - been out of the loop for slightly too long I think :<

 

Duilliath

Get gaming again

--

Should start using that Elixir of Ironskin more. Made a Hybrid set, which basically consists of some stamina trinkets and enough DPS gear w/ resilience to not get critted, but that'd make a fair bit of a difference. It's not like the Elixir of Major Fortitude has a major impact.

 

dukes

I've been gaming, just not playing WoW. Farming Illidan for 4 months meant WoW started to drag rather a lot (especially as I didn't PvP other than to get upgrades for PvE gear, which I disliked the idea of in the first place), and a lot of my friends decided the same so a lot of us quit as Team Fortress 2 and quite a few other things came out. I've been playing TF2 and Eve mostly, and had quite a lot of fun, just kept up with most of WoW just because of this thread. There really doesn't seem to be much happening atm, and I'm kind of glad that I didn't keep playing because I think I'd just be very depressed at how long Sunwell is taking to come out.



Yeah, the Elixir of Ironskin is a very good option for getting crit immunity. I just don't (didn't) like using consumables for things like that (I'd rather it be an advantage than something that is standard for a particular set of gear). If you're only slightly short you could use a Flask of Fort instead, although that may be going over the top when you could use a resillience gem instead of something and have Major Fort + Major Agi.

 

Aranan

Well, then. I feel pretty silly for buying [Band of the Swift Paw] last week and wish I could have spared a friend a fair bit of trouble in getting the [Belt of Natural Power].

Thanks for the feedback, everyone. I guess it really is a piece-by-piece decision on what to go for.

 

bluenote

Those bracers are not bad at all if you can stay crit immune by using pvp belt, boots, or a s3 helm/chest/gloves.


Hey Dukes, I think I might have gotten that mangle glitch rip - Bluenote - WWS

854 rip tick is my highest I've seen.

 

Oaken

So I look at the gear for some of those and, interestingly, they are not (a) socketed with +10 agility everywhere nor are they (b) wearing 2-piece T4. Can't tell Antarin right now because he's in pvp gear. I'd be curious though to see people who really do go with 2pc T4/2pc T6 and see if it makes a noticeable difference. I understand the theorycraft behind it, just interesting to see some of the top tier guild players don't seem to think it makes a big enough difference to care about.