Yes, above about 60% you see drastic diminishing returns on crit as you virtually always generate 5cps in 3 CP builders, above that point your CP wastage increases and thus other stats are stronger.

In reality stacking armor pen even earlier tends to make sense, rawr with an armor pen gem set or the feralbynight addon can give you more detailed answers for your specific gear.

The only real crit cap is at 75% or so, and that's due to FB and R&T. After that in theory there's one at 85% for glancing blows as well, but that's about it. In practice crit always benefits, since those numbers are practically unobtainable.

Crits also do damage, and point of fact druids do more 'extra' damage with crits than almost any other class.

I'm not saying crit becomes useless, rather that there is a "soft cap" after which other stats are stronger and thus should be gemmed for or favored in gear selection. In this case there is such a "soft cap" at ~60% crit due to the specials to reach 5CPs I mentioned.

That is to say, if you have an open gem socket at 60% crit you are almost certainly better socketing armor pen than agility.

But there's a very hard cap on armor pen. You're better socketing armor pen over agility until that point anyway, and then afterwards you're always better off socketing agility over armor pen.

Also, agility doesn't just contribute crit. And 60% isn't what you'd need to reach 5 CP in 3 attacks totally reliably; you still have a 6% chance to not have any three attacks in a row crit, for instance, and about a 20% chance to not have at least 2 of the three crit.

The main point I should have said is that even if CPs are diminishing over time with each point of crit, CPs are not the best way of determining damage output and any soft cap of crit relative to CP should note that the actual DPS value of a CP is fairly low compared to the raw damage output. In general, you're spending the vast majority of your energy on normal attacks, and at best we're talking about 100 energy in a 30-second span devoted to CP use.

Well as kalbear pointed out you can't talk about a stats without taking into account other stats. Basically arpen stack with itself so untill you reach the cap it's better to stack it. After that you want to stack agility simply because it's our best stat also if it give us crit and ap.

As for crit "soft cap". Actually:

you can reach 100% crit with yellow attacks (but it doesn't mean that every yellow attack will crit).

you can reach: 100% - glancing (24%) - miss (0-8%) - dodge (0 - 6.5%) with white attacks. So the white crit cap is from 76% to 61.5% depending on your hit/expertise.

What you can easly see (look at FeralbyNight (Cat & Bear simulation tool) )
is that the increase in cp/waste is about linear from 30% to 60% crit while after 60% crit there is a power increase of wasted cps. So yes, crit/agility value is nearly stable untill you reach 60% crit and after that it goes down, but as already told kalbear cps generation is only a small part of agility value. For istance if at lower tiers 1 agi is around 2.6 AP, in very high gear and with for istance 70% crit (not possible atm) 1 agi can be around 2.3-2.4 AP (still pretty high).

The only thing we should take care (for future tier levels) will be the value of hit/expertise. The value of hit/exp increase pretty quikly (from 1 hit = 1.8 AP in blues to 1 hit = 2.4 AP in full t8.25) because it's direclty proportional to damage done. So we can easly assume that in t9 or t10 we can have a situation where after reaching arpen cap we will reach hit/exp cap and THEN we will go for agi, but at the moment that's not the situation.

should I drop IS glyph for 3% miss or should a hunter drop serpent sting for scorpid sting or should we forget the 3% miss chance entirely.

It's a considerably smaller loss for you to keep the 3% miss buff up (~100 DPS) than it is for the hunter to do the same (~500 DPS). We can't really tell you if it's worth it or not. There are certainly both fights like Thorim where tank avoidance is more important and fights like Yogg where it's less important; the obvious solution is carrying around stacks of IS and SF/SFall glyphs and swapping them as required.

Hello,

Tonight my guild ran through Naxx 10 man to gear up one of our new tanks.

At Patchwerk my dps was around 5100. But later when we arrived at Loatheb my dps was just 200 points higher. Can the lack of Sunders on the target explain this low increase of DPS? Please note that I had the spore debuff at all times during the Loatheb encounter, which put my crit percentage above 100%.

//Bxi@Nagrand-EU

Did you the same buff profile for Patch? In particular: sunder state, BoM+BoK and horn/totem.

I usually have a *much* higher delta between my Patch and Loatheb numbers. My Patch numbers are about where yours are, but I see around 7k on Loatheb. Loatheb and Thaddius are the two fights where my kitty dps really shines relative to other classes. In both cases, I believe this is due primarily to the % of my damage that comes from bleeds (which keep ticking even while shifting to kill a spore or rotating around Thadd). So if raid buffs aren't the cause, are you letting your rip/rake fall off too often?

Has anyone experimented with alternating between Wrath and Starfire during the Pre-Eclipse stage? It seems like I always waste a little portion of Eclipse to the opposite of whichever procs... ex: If I spam Wrath, then I cast 1 extra Wrath after Eclipse procs, wasting at least 1 second... vice versa for Starfire spam. However, if you alternate between Wrath and Starfire, you'll always be on the right spell when Eclipse procs and then it's just a matter of continuing the one that Eclipse benefits.

Besides being a little confusing (in my [limited] experience it's not really that bad), is there something I'm missing that makes alternating between the two a poor decision?

If your dps is that low relative to patchwerk, chances are you did not get enough spore buffs. Spore buffs are incredibly good for DPS given how much extra damage our crits do.

my apologies if this was covered, but I'm having a hard time figuring out the improved faerie fire talent :

Improved Faerie Fire - Spell - World of Warcraft

According to the tooltip, you get 3% crit on a target affected by ANY faerie fire. Can anyone confirm if this is the case if the target is debuffed with feral faerie fire? Ofc. you wont gain the additional 3% hit though.

Or just have two balance specs, one with IS glyph and one without :p



Confirmed.

In the FBN thread it states ArPen has more value than Agi point for point. However, Rawr suggests I gem all my slots with +16 agi.

Why is that, and which way should I go?

Also, I'm only at ~130 hit rating, and yet Rawr suggests no hit gemming, also somewhat puzzled about that...

Once you get a certain amount of armor pen (over 300 plus raid buffs) armor pen scales above agility. So basically you need to use a significant amount of armor pen, or none at all.

When your finishing moves fail to land you get an energy return. Therefore hit is not as high for a feral druid as it is for other classes.

also (just speculating, not 100% sure) missed white attacks might come off of the glancing blow portion of the hit table.

That's not the case - for white attacks, they come off the "normal hit" portion first.

Hit has low value for feral druid because a miss on any special attack (not just finishing moves) refunds 80% of the energy cost and all of the combo point cost.

It's 80%, but yes it's independent of Primal Precision.

From what I've gathered I had the same buffs going except for Sunders according to the warrior in the group. We only had BoK going and no dk's nor shamans to be seen.
I recall not having the spore buff for roughly 20 seconds but had it for the rest of the fight. (not including waiting for the first spore to spawn obviously)

Also, Rawr disagrees with FBN on where the threshold is for arpen vs. agility on damage. It also has weird local minima sometimes, where armor pen will be far worse than agility because of some specific threshold you need for agility.

I've read through the majority of this thread and FeralByNight so my brain is mush at the moment, sorry if any of these were touched upon in previous pages but I can't seem to find them again.

What would be a safe Armor Penetration Rating strictly through gear where ArPen gems would be a better choice than Agility gems? Are there any buffs that give armor penetration or something similar? For instance, would you take a sunder armor into consideration when aiming to reach armor penetration cap?

I've seen the Runestone trinket soft cap, at 566. What is the soft cap for the Grim Toll?

Is the Flask of Endless Rage always better than Elixirs of Armor Piercing?

Does the DPS "priority" change when stacking ArPen?

I regemmed to ArP when I had ~250 ArP form gear socketed with Agi gems. I did not have Mjolnir Runestone/Grim Toll at that time and did slightly more dps with ArP gems. Faerie Fire/Sunders do not count toward the ArP cap.

Grim Toll cap is 1231 (hard cap for 100% ArP) - 612 (trinket proc) = 619 ArP.

If you are under (soft) cap, use Heary Rhino food (+40 ArP +40 sta). Flask of Endless Rage is better than Elixir of Armor Piercing.

Try to understand, that ArmorPenetrationRating just means, that you ignore a percentage of your target's armor.
Of course this does not chance with Sunder Armor or Faerie Fire.

With 1231.6 Armorpenetrationrating, you will ignore 100% of your targets armor. Sunder armor or Faerie Fire wouldn't bring any DPS, they would be useless.
When you are below the cap, both will always bring more DPS.
Imagine you ignore 90% armor (which is realistic when grim toll or runestone proccs), then your target's armor for you is

1 * 0.95 * 0.8 * 0.1 = 0.076

The boss would have only 7.6% of his armor, so you would ignore 92.4% of the boss armor.


Your DPS priority won't change. The only thing is, that maintaining rip and rake 100% uptime becomes less important.