Since the cat module of RAWR isn't updated for 3.0 yet, my question is, which stats shall I prefer now? Is it still the old Agility > all (with 142 hit and a little bit of expertise)? What about critrating, haste or simple strength?
Yesterday I was thinking about the best rotation till level 75 (SR)
What we should do is basically the same.
Keep mangle up
Keep rake up
Shred to 5 cp
Use RIP if RIP is not up and you have the glyph (otherwise FB if you have less than 35 energy)
Use FB if you have more than 2 seconds left on RIP and less than 40 energy.
So yesterday I got to DPS on something that actually lived long enough for me to try things out (Felmyst).
I found that pretty often I had rip, mangle, and rake all going, had 5 combo points, and 60-80 energy, mostly due to having to run out if someone got encapsulated, having an OOC proc or getting 2t4 procs.
Has anybody done the math on what's worth doing if you have more than 40 energy and more than 2s left on rip? My guess is that it would be best to shred even if you're already at 5 CPs but that probably depends on how long is left on rip. Dumping all your energy and combo points for a FB (big as they can crit now) isn't worth it.
Also, is the best strategy for Tiger's Fury to hit it whenever it's not on CD and you have less than say 15 energy, or to save it for after a FB so that you can get combo points quickly to put rip back up ASAP?
So yesterday I got to DPS on something that actually lived long enough for me to try things out (Felmyst).
I found that pretty often I had rip, mangle, and rake all going, had 5 combo points, and 60-80 energy, mostly due to having to run out if someone got encapsulated, having an OOC proc or getting 2t4 procs.
Has anybody done the math on what's worth doing if you have more than 40 energy and more than 2s left on rip? My guess is that it would be best to shred even if you're already at 5 CPs but that probably depends on how long is left on rip. Dumping all your energy and combo points for a FB (big as they can crit now) isn't worth it.
Also, is the best strategy for Tiger's Fury to hit it whenever it's not on CD and you have less than say 15 energy, or to save it for after a FB so that you can get combo points quickly to put rip back up ASAP?
At 40 seconds I would wait to rip, chances are you will be under 100 energy by the time rip expires.
I have pulled my rotation from reading about the rotation at level 80. With the exception of savage roar the rotation is the same, with mangle as a filler, omen, 2T4 there is energy for a bite between nearly all rips. From what I understand we do NOT want to dump energy into ferocious bite, I agree; we want to use as little energy as possible to bite. To prevent excess energy I only use Tiger's Fury after a FB up until I have one combo point up and rip active and energy <=40, otherwise I will wait until after FB is used then pop TF.
The numbers quoted below are a guide line for shred as a filler, I assume mangle would have slightly lower energy requirements as it costs roughly 75% the energy, slightly higher if you do not have improved bite as you don't want to lose any rip time. Because bite scales well with gear, and there's many talent points it would be rough to calculate a definitive answer of when its best to use bite. The kitty dps calculator could help give a guide of when to use it by writing a rotation.
For rough numbers on variance, omen procs - 6% 10 second internal cd?, 2T4 - 4% on hit no internal cd?, natural regen 10 energy per second, 50ish percent chance your attacks will give two combo points, windfury and mongoose procs, Tiger's fury availability... and of course FB damage compared to rip. The only sure test is getting a buffed group together and using the target dummies in major towns.
My apologies if the posting of specs is poor practice, the three below either have full FB talents or none. I use the three specs below to test dps. I highly advise the first spec as it has all the talents needed to tank and all the kitty talents except for FB so you can work on your rotation for WotLK.
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft - Hybrid, nurturing instinct (heals in cat) can switch to feral instinct (swipe damage). Has all kitty talents except improved FB. Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft - Kitty: (mangle rotation) a loss of 6% dodge, 12% more damage taken, and 10% armor in bear, last stand for imp. LotP, 1/2 nurturing instincts, 30% bite crit chance, and 15% bite damage done. Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft - Kitty: (shred rotation) If you don't have 2T6 this will be better. I think mangle is better with 2T6.
Ferocious Bite scales better than RIP with ap, crit and ArP. That's why with my simulation using FB have sense. Also if you use FB you don't need to wait for RIP to expire. As I read if you have (it happens) 8 seconds left on RIP, 5cps and 90 energy you'll do shred, rake, mangle, waisting cps? FB is used in my cycle only to make up for extra rip ticks.
With my stats point 5 became:
5. If Combo Points = 5 and Rip is up:
Use Ferocious Bite if Rip timer > 10 seconds
Use Ferocious Bite if you have less than: 68 energy and Rip debuff counter: 8
Use Ferocious Bite if you have less than: 40 energy and Rip debuff counter: 6
If RIP left time is <4 seconds: wait for RIP to expire (do RIP if you are going for 100 energy)
Since the cat module of RAWR isn't updated for 3.0 yet, my question is, which stats shall I prefer now? Is it still the old Agility > all (with 142 hit and a little bit of expertise)? What about critrating, haste or simple strength?
Expertise > Hit > Agi=Str > Haste, as a general rule of thumb, iirc.
Since the cat module of RAWR isn't updated for 3.0 yet, my question is, which stats shall I prefer now? Is it still the old Agility > all (with 142 hit and a little bit of expertise)? What about critrating, haste or simple strength?
Depends on what you're asking. Are you asking at 70 or 80? At 80, strength is better than agility and hit/expertise is better than either. At 70, I've been finding that str>agi for damage now that mangle, rip and rake all scale so well with AP and not as well with crit. But this is simply anecdotal and I have no specific math to back this up.
today i was tanking sethekk heroic (damn mount) for the first time after the patch. Two days ago i did sethekk with our warrior tank while i was dpsing. Even though both runs went pretty smoothly (everthing else would be very sad),
I encountered a couple of issues while I was tanking(of course we didnt cc at all).
Prophets and Talon Lords were a huge problem because of the known issue with Swipe. First the talon lords stun you before you use at least 3xswipe. After that the prophets fear which can not be countered every time given the current speed you rush through those heroics at the moment. Mobs are scattered now and gaining aggro was a huge pain. Basically we had about 3 deaths (single persons no wipes of course) because of that.
I know this is a situational problem but this is basically the problem people have been talking about 1 or 2 pages back in theory. A warrior can get fast aggro with TC + shockwave (enough to get through the stun) and then break every fear keeping all mobs on him.
Although it wasnt a huge problem which could have caused a "really" slow run, I was still somewhat disappointed in me, seeing our warrior tanking and then comparing it to me :/.
Seeing how this affected our group on the somewhat "easy" sethekk run, this could become a major issue on more difficult mob groups in wotlk.
Oh and another thing. Did they change fear mechanis somehow? Because the main issue on that sethekk run was that after a fear the mobs would scatter and go for other targets (probably second on threat). I don't think that was the case pre3.0? Sorry if I am completly wrong on this but other people on our run noticed it as well.
I have an Idea for a mod. I would just like to put this out there for you guys to think about
I’m pretty sure this will work
I’m just going to call it green light.
Using just this post by nightcrowler
Use Ferocious Bite if Rip timer > 10 seconds
Use Ferocious Bite if you have less than: 68 energy and Rip debuff counter: 8
Use Ferocious Bite if you have less than: 40 energy and Rip debuff counter: 6
If RIP left time is <4 seconds: wait for RIP to expire (do RIP if you are going for 100 energy)
How the mod would work would just like a class debuff timer but as your attack bars all in 1
I will trying to make it clear on what I’m talking about by use nightcrowlers post from above
So here we go
Use Ferocious Bite if Rip timer > 10 seconds
As this rule states above. The mod would do this
The mod attack bar would Show all attack red but Ferocious Bite as green (pretty much giving you the best option of attack)
by what nightcrowlers had posted
Use Ferocious Bite if you have less than: 68 energy and Rip debuff counter: 8
As this rule states above. The mod would do this
The mod attack bar would Show all attack red but Ferocious Bite as green (pretty much giving you the best option of attack)
by what nightcrowlers had posted
Use Ferocious Bite if you have less than: 40 energy and Rip debuff counter: 6
As this rule states above. The mod would do this
The mod attack bar would Show all attack red but Ferocious Bite as green (pretty much giving you the best option of attack)
by what nightcrowlers had posted
If RIP left time is <4 seconds: wait for RIP to expire (do RIP if you are going for 100 energy)
As this rule states above. The mod would do this
The mod attack bar would Show all attack red as well but rip as orange then turn green when energy at 100
(pretty much giving you the best option of attack) by what nightcrowlers had posted
So what this would do is more or less it takes the need to watch a class timer all the time or debuff mod to get you rotation up because they are more or less calculated on the fly now so if the attack is green use it red dont and orange best option for next attack then there enough energy
Free you up a bit and it would not be a golden rule of attack but give you more freedom
And give more time to see other things that are going on in a boss fight like keeping yourself alive
today i was tanking sethekk heroic (damn mount) for the first time after the patch. Two days ago i did sethekk with our warrior tank while i was dpsing. Even though both runs went pretty smoothly (everthing else would be very sad),
I encountered a couple of issues while I was tanking(of course we didnt cc at all).
Ive tanked heroic sethek post-patch. From the sounds of it, not to be harsh, I think you were trying to overuse the new swipe. Remember our existing attacks havent gone, infact they hit harder. What I did was instruct the group to kill the prophets first, and queued up a glyphed maul and mangle to land on him at the same time, i then did the same with the talon which meant that every mob in the pack had a maul on it because of the glyph. Started swiping after that, and being feared / stunned was no issue at all because they were all definitely on me anyway.
--
Edit: Just saw a post on the beta forums that they're adding 10% armor to all the lvl 83 raid bosses in northrend. Their reasoning behind this is what they believe to be a balance issue. According to their internal testing, rogues were too far infront of caster dps classes, and have reduced the miss chance penalty on titans grip to soften the blow for fury warriors. No compensation has so far been provided for feral drudis, but my gut feeling (since a decent proportion of our dps is bleeds) is that we'll be fine. My real worry is how it will affect bear tps/dps, perhaps armor penetration on leather tanking slots just became more valuable?
Ive tanked heroic sethek post-patch. From the sounds of it, not to be harsh, I think you were trying to overuse the new swipe.
How can you assure that 2xMaul will hit four different mobs? In a worst case scenario it would only hit two.
I was trying to contribute to the discussion about the ae tanking capability of druids. Basically the conclusion of that discussion was that, even though we build a ton of threat over time and do nice ae dps, we can not compete against other tanks in terms of instant or fast ae threat.
Originally Posted by Abradix
You can say "Well just tell them to wait", which obviously druids will do, but that doesn't mean AoE tanking capabilities are equal. We can manage just fine, and if you give us some time then we will do very nice sustained AoE threat. But right now in Naxxramas, the most powerful AoE tanking is the frontloaded threat, even if its not sustainable forever like our AoE threat is.
This a quote which was part of that discussion. The example of sethekk just shows that this might not only be an issue of a few seconds and asking your dps to wait it could become a serious issue in certain situations which is contrary to blizzard's philosophy for wotlk. They don't want a raid to require a certain class to be viable.
Besides, threat does become a shaky and risky thing in those situations. This is another thing blizzard wanted to remove.
Again this completly depends on raid/dungeon design and I realize nothing is really balanced around level 70 content right now.
I've read through the majority of this thread, and run my prospective gear through Rawr, but with the threat aspect of Bears not quite working at the moment - I had a question about current badge gear options. Are the rogue chest/legs superior to the feral chest/legs, for tanking? It's basically a int + haste for hit trade, if I'm seeing it right. Rawr values the 'feral' items a little higher, but without taking threat into consideration. I suppose that holds true for most any of the current badge gear - trading the intellect 'feral' gear for the rogue 'hit' gear, with armor being normalized.
Am I missing a fundemental mechanic that makes the 'wall of stats' far superior to simple agil/stam/ap/hit items? I understand that with BoK, the Str might be more AP than the rogue equivalents, but the +hit should cancel that out until capped. I'm primarily a mage, who is spamming heroics on druid (as resto), to build up a feral set to amuse myself with. Thanks for any insight.
I've tanked MH, BT, SWP (solo tanking felmyst, him in p1 and skeletons in p2) and number of heroics. My impression so far is that Swipe is good, really good. My guildmates started to call me "paladin tank" after the patch.
Swipe has its advantages. Yes, you need to spam it, but i somehow dont have a problem with it (i thought i would) because it does good damage, and it makes you very flexible. All other AoE tanks are limited by their cooldowns. If mobs for any reason move away from consecration or they dont reach it at all, paladin has problems. Druid just follows the mobs and swipes (and mauls) away.
The fact that in some situations swipe may be inferior (e.g. the above example with mobs that stun) is not a problem for me. Swipe has other advantages, that for me more than outweights the limitations.
p.s. I use glyph of maul. It may have significant role in AoE threat, since you of course cycle targets and spam-maul them.
When tanking AoE pulls with medium number of targets (10), swipe and maul do roughly equal damage (swipe a bit more, but not by much).
Last edited by Inaiwae : 10/22/08 at 10:21 AM.
Reason: typo
I've read through the majority of this thread, and run my prospective gear through Rawr, but with the threat aspect of Bears not quite working at the moment - I had a question about current badge gear options. Are the rogue chest/legs superior to the feral chest/legs, for tanking? It's basically a int + haste for hit trade, if I'm seeing it right. Rawr values the 'feral' items a little higher, but without taking threat into consideration. I suppose that holds true for most any of the current badge gear - trading the intellect 'feral' gear for the rogue 'hit' gear, with armor being normalized.
Am I missing a fundemental mechanic that makes the 'wall of stats' far superior to simple agil/stam/ap/hit items? I understand that with BoK, the Str might be more AP than the rogue equivalents, but the +hit should cancel that out until capped. I'm primarily a mage, who is spamming heroics on druid (as resto), to build up a feral set to amuse myself with. Thanks for any insight.
Fundamental mechanic is that as you stack more of the same stat on one item, it gets more expensive. For example, let's assume that there is an item with item budgeted with 100 strength and 100 agility. On item with the same item budget, you will not see 200 agility on it.
Intuitively speaking a lot of the rogue gears got better after armor nerf on leather items. Rawr is correct for the most part, so follow that in general. (avoidance versus hp should still be taken with a grain of salt, but that's offtopic)
Out of curiosity, have folks gone to the trouble of re-gemming and enchanting their tank gear post-patch? (more specifically people who were very avoidance heavy before). Honestly, given how much of a joke stuff is right now it really doesn't matter how you gear to some degree but it's interesting nonetheless. I probably switched over about half my stuff to stamina where appropriate and kept pure agility on most of the sunwell stuff -- particularly the T6 SWP pieces that can be used for DPS as well as tanking. With the significantly larger health pool, you're fairly flexible in terms of being able to swap in weapons/trinkets/jewelry for even more avoidance if you need it but it simply hasn't been necessary.
Despite RAWR, I've tried to maintain some balance between avoidance/survivability but as I mentioned, given the current state of content it probably really doesn't even matter at this point. Threat is a non-issue on most everything now so I'm not even compelled to use Glinting Pyrestones anymore either. I also swapped a couple of things around to prioritize defense due to it's value in light of DR (e.g. no point using Glyph of the Gladiator anymore given that resilience is near useless).
Personally, I've stuck with gemming heavy on Agi (not just out of laziness; finally got Felmyst pants and M'uru gloves last night, gemmed them with agi and agi/sta). Rawr tries to display a good balance of Mitigation and Survival as an Overall rating, but you can't forget that they are still two separate things which should be considered as such. As always, you want 'enough' survivability, and 'as much as possible' mitigation. With all the content nerfed so bad, the survivability requirements of most fights are through the floor. Sure, gemming for stam will give you more theoretical 'value' for your gem slot, overall, but it's giving you something you may not need any more of.
As I have posted a couple of times recently, we decided to raise the armor of level 83 raid bosses by 10% to correct for some dps difference between casters and melee + hunters. I wanted to address the issue head on with the rogues.
We have done a lot of testing recently, and concluded that even with this change, Assassination rogues are likely the top dps spec in the game against single bosses that don't move around a lot (like Patchwerk). This isn't a bad place for them to be. They pay a small price both for being melee (where more damage tends to occur) and for lacking the ability to respec into a non-damage build. We don't think they will be as far above hybrids as they have been before -- as I've posted before, it's very important that hybrid classes do higher dps now that their buffs do not stack.
Combat builds, especially swords, is competitive but probably behind Assassination. This is something we'd like to address, especially if it turns out to be a major difference between the specs. Additional armor does hurt Combat, but also remember it's just raid bosses and not other players (or trash or heroic bosses).
Subtelty, sadly, is just much harder to test since so much of their damage relies on other players. Our preliminary evidence is that they generate plenty of combo points from Honor Among Thieves, but this might mean their personal dps when not in a group suffers. This is something we're still testing.
I will add that some players have wondered if Honor Among Thieves is bugged since the cp can occur more often than 1 sec. In this case, the tooltip is just unclear. When Jimmy the Shaman crits, he cannnot "send you" a combo point more often than 1 per sec. But if you have lots of players critting all the time, you can build them up quickly. So Honor is (here it comes) working as intended.
Theyre raising all boss armor values by 10%. And On the druid forums:
It will hurt Feral dps, but we also needed to hurt Feral dps a little. Cats with a cat spec really hurt stuff now.
It will be a slight threat nerf to bears and warriors (and DKs and paladins slightly less) but tank threat is so enormous right now, that we don't think it will be a big deal.
I dont know how much this will really affect our dps considering a good portion of it is bleed damage. I do feel however, that we are being balanced around our most complex cycles, which are going to be hard to keep up in a movement intensive fight, or fights that really need you to pay attention to what is going on around you.
"Some people say I would kill them as soon as look at them... No, I would much rather kill you than look at you..." - Mr. Teatime The Hogfather
"One sees what one observes, and one observes only that which is already in the mind..." Anonymous
"I will show you fear in a handful of dust" The Gunslinger
IMHO Blizzard should balance Cat DPS around some simpler cycle so that average players can keep up, and expert players will have a nice opportunity to shine and really earn what they deserve.
If they could achieve this, they made a nice job. I'm looking forward to it.
IMHO Blizzard should balance Cat DPS around some simpler cycle so that average players can keep up, and expert players will have a nice opportunity to shine and really earn what they deserve.
If they could achieve this, they made a nice job. I'm looking forward to it.
You have to balance around the high end or you will make a class overpowered in the hands of someone who knows what they are doing and has zero lag. The problem with the current druid rotation that it has several trip points that cause a hard failure.
-FB energy conversion still sucks and hurts your DPS every time you use it with more than 35 energy.
-SR failing off is a huge DPS loss and has to be immediately reapplied if it falls off
-Tiger's Fury has to be used when you have less than 40 energy, plus what ever delay there is between hitting that button and your next attack
-Berserk needs to be used when you have almost full energy but not full.
3 and 4 are trade-off you can make for skilled verse average. 1 and 2 on the other hand need to be adjusted so they aren't such hard failures. Best fixes for those is removing the energy dump from FB (looking at you glyph slots) and nerfing savage roar while buffing HotW the same amount.
You have to balance around the high end or you will make a class overpowered in the hands of someone who knows what they are doing and has zero lag. The problem with the current druid rotation that it has several trip points that cause a hard failure.
-FB energy conversion still sucks and hurts your DPS every time you use it with more than 35 energy.
-SR failing off is a huge DPS loss and has to be immediately reapplied if it falls off
-Tiger's Fury has to be used when you have less than 40 energy, plus what ever delay there is between hitting that button and your next attack
-Berserk needs to be used when you have almost full energy but not full.
3 and 4 are trade-off you can make for skilled verse average. 1 and 2 on the other hand need to be adjusted so they aren't such hard failures. Best fixes for those is removing the energy dump from FB (looking at you glyph slots) and nerfing savage roar while buffing HotW the same amount.
I agree with 1, that the FB conversion really needs to go. 2 does not need to be changed. Rogues should never let slice and dice drop and this is OUR slice and dice. It makes sense it should always be up.
I agree with 1, that the FB conversion really needs to go. 2 does not need to be changed. Rogues should never let slice and dice drop and this is OUR slice and dice. It makes sense it should always be up.
The problem is that SR is trying to emulate both slice and dice and dual weld at the same time. The DPS loss for screwing up SR should be roughly the same as a rogue screwing up SnD, bad and noticeable but not to the point of gimping you for those few seconds when you don't have it. Its a bigger problem in fights where you do have to run out a lot and in PVP. Tank and spank fight, yeah its not so much of a problem there (lag aside).
i've been searching this and the main (apparently soon-to-end) feral druid thread and i havnt seen any discussion on the dimishing returns to avoidance. I am wondering a couple things about this new mechanic.
1) Does your chance to dodge reduce with every dodge you have or does it have a number of dodges that you can have in a row without it changing your dodge chance?
2) Does this in fact mean that there is some sort of ideal amount of dodge stacking to have? Or is more always still better?
Mainly i'm just wondering what has been discovered as far as this new dimishing returns mechanic and if it is something i should keep in mind for gear/gemming/enchanting choices or if i should mostly ignore it as a minor mechanic added in just to make rogue tanks impossible?
So Im using a Mangle+Lacerate macro and now i'd like a separate button to activate berserk and to spam mangle. Im a complete noob when it comes to macroing and I tried
TheNameLessOne: That's exactly my point. I _want_ it to be more powerful with complex and hard to maintain cycles, I don't see any problems with that.
DestroLock-Pre3.0 only had to spam Shadowbolts and use Trinkets + DestroPots every now and then. Simple thing, huge DPS.
AfflictionLocks had to keep track of several DoT-timers and had a complex Trinket+Pot timing, but even while doing all this with perfection, they couldn't keep up with Shadowbolt spamming DestroLocks in the end.
All classes and speccs I heard of do have some talents with procc-effects like resetting cooldowns for a powerful attack, enabling execute while the target has over 20% hp, instant Pyroblasts etc.
So IMHO there's enough room to widen the gap between an average and an expert player.
I'm not saying "Balance everything so that Mangle Spam + FB is on par with every other class, specc and their rotations and let the complex cat cycle do more DPS than every other class/specc/rotation."
Just some more diversity of skill would be much appreciated.
So Im using a Mangle+Lacerate macro and now i'd like a separate button to activate berserk and to spam mangle. Im a complete noob when it comes to macroing and I tried
10/21/08, 11:05 AM
