I'd say you want to have mana leftover when the boss dies. Things won't always go as planned and if you mana is that tight, you'll be oom when even 1 thing deviates from the plans, and thats when you will most need it (to get back on track).

Personally, unless the socket bonus is not one of Spellpower, Spirit, Int, Haste, I gem to activate the socket.

Red/Uncoloured - Runed Cardinal Ruby
Blue - Purified Dreadstone
Yellow - Luminous Ametrine

With the complete variability of healing in fights, I don't like to focus on one aspect too much. The same fight may see you OOM if something went wrong, or riding easy the whole way through depending on what happens.

As for your peer, the concept that we're "Spirit" based is completely inaccurate these days. Innervate is no longer spirit controlled, and regen consists of Spirit and Int together. We get more benefit from gemming Spirit than we would from say MP5 or Crit, but we get similar returns from Int. Spirit is slightly better in that we get the spirit multiplier talent, and it gives us bonus spellpower, but in order to keep regen up you need significant Int as well, and SP/Haste gems may also be desirable especially coming into 3.3. I know I'll be considering replacing Luminous with Reckless if my mana can survive it.

Does the talent Improved Faerie Fire give 3% crit to all casters or just the Boomkin? I've been unclear on the issues with others considering how Blizzard is with tooltips.

It increases the hit chance of all casters; however, it only increases the Boomkin's critical hit chance. (the critical strike chance of YOUR damage spells)

I pulled together profession information that is current with respect to 3.2.x in a post on my blog. The summary for moonkin (and this also applies to resto) is that the gathering professions provide no worthwhile raiding benefit.

Leatherworking/Mining/Enchanting all provide similar benefits (for a moonkin or tree these equate to 46 spell power).
Alchemy gives 47 spell power via flasks, and Jc gives 48 spell power. All of these 6 also have good benefits for other specs however in general are now pretty much equal, so pick whichever is best

You can check out the full post on here : Strayegg.com • Moonkin profession choices

My comments apply to Moonkin endgame raiding in 3.2.x, and do not apply to levelling or moneymaking

I apologize, after reading that quote, it sounds like I am advocating burning your mana as fast as possible in all situations, which I don't. Let me clarify.

If you have zero mana at the end of the fight, you have optimized your potential throughput, for that particular fight, relative to the mana regen you currently have. That's it. Nothing more. I'm not saying you should gem for each specific fight, to make sure you go oom as the boss dies. I was simply referring to a perfect theoretical situation.

Independent of the differences in fight lengths and mechanics, a situation like this will almost never happen, because as you mentioned, things won't always go as planned. You might lose a healer who tunnel-visioned in fire, you might lose dps who were too busy killing scarabs to see Anub'arak steamroll right through them. Only the top end guilds will have raids that go off with absolutely zero mistakes, and even they have off nights.

Think of mana management like wealth management. You want to have enough money when you retire to last just until you keel over from sleeping with the 3 hookers you bought and thought you could handle. Anything left after you die is wasted. However, you do want to have a little bit of a cushion in case only 1 or 2 of them show up.

Similarly, you want to have enough mana to last until the boss dies, but you want to retain a cushion in case something goes horribly wrong.

Hopefully that makes a little more sense.

I would do the savage roar before waiting for energy. 33% less dmg with your autohits is a lot.
Otherwise this looks quite good.

About to purchase 4pc feral set for my offset gear in the coming weeks, will be gearing it for tanking as that's how I do all my feral gear.

Just wanted some suggestions mainly on how to gem this gear, I see a lot of different gemming going on in feral gear, and don't tank enough to really come to any sound conclusions.

Current stats unbuffed in bear before purchasing 4pc t9 245 (all but legs):
1036 agi
3420 stam
38.35 dodge
5581 AP
310 hit (i know over cap)
27 expertise
37.77% crit
41437 health

At the moment I'm mostly geared full stamina, and looking to see if it would be more beneficial to throw some different gems in.

Thanks for any opinions.

You should avoid using Savage Roar while Berserk is active. SR does not get the 50% energy discount.

EDIT: the above is wrong, SR gets 50% discount.

I do: mangle -> SR -> rake -> (shred if too much energy) -> TF -> berserk

My SR tooltip indicates 12 Energy with berserk active. Is the tooltip incorrect?

No. Obviously i was wrong, the ability says "all cat form abilities" but for some reason i was sure it was only attacks. Sorry about the confusion.

In the recently released Guide: How To Feral DPS this is discussed around 11:30 into the movie but I'd love to hear commentary on how it can be improved.
Viddler.com - Guide: How To Feral DPS - Uploaded by parl2001
YouTube - Guide How To Feral DPS part ONE of two
Guide: How To Feral DPS By Cold - World of Warcraft Movies

15 - MAXIMAL DPS STANDARD INITIAL ENGAGEMENT PROCEDURE

0. Pop a Potion of Speed as close as possible to, but still before entering Combat.
[Assuming you can rely on not having aggro issues early. The tank will probably be popping a potion as well assuming he's good at his job.]

1. FFF unless a boomkin will apply IFF in the first seconds and keep it up
[if necessary use FC to close the gap - you can apply FFF while flying through the air.]

2. Mangle
[Do NOT bother with Pounce or Ravage, they are net dps losses]

3. SR and from now on - if Clearcast then Shred

4. Rake

5. immediately Tiger's Fury, but you must press the button after the Rake

6. Berserk - This immediately drops the TF buff but it's more important to get Berserk on cooldown asap, and you don't want to Berserk at low energy (50-85 energy with 85 being ideal??).

7. Continue with the regular DPS priority algorithm as described earlier.

Note: A consistent problem I find myself facing is toward the tail end of a Berserk phase when getting tunnel vision and not paying enough attention to synchronized SR and Rip timers running out concurrently. Solution: don't get tunnel vision. For Heroic Anub'Arak I even brought out my old sticky-on-the-computer-monitor solution from the Thaddius days to remind myself about Shattering Throw Scheduling and keeping 9 seconds on SR and Rip before FB'ing.

Hysteria may put you over the top occasionally, and I've had instances of malicious Blood DKs trying to get me to pull aggro on purpose that way. Plan ahead if this becomes an issue - Vigilance and Hand of Salv macros can help.

TF should never be used right before an FB - you want to FB with as little energy as possible as it's horrible DPE otherwise.

There are similarities between the above Maximal DPS Standard Initial Engagement Procedure and during-fight extra dps availablities/required burst dps sequences like XT heart phase - Icehowl stun - heroic Lord Jaraxxus portal/volcano, but to me they're different enough to warrant a new look.

Situation: short, i.e. ten-seconds-or-less timeframe needing extra dps.
Problem: A very limited number of GCDs to accomplish what you want.
Solution: talk about it ahead of time, maximize raid burst synergy and have your gear and consumables set up for ease of operation

Consider:
1. getting on the boomkin's case about how quickly IFF comes up
2. Hysteria - talk it over, remember many raiders have fragile egos, and winning an argument with numbers may be outweighed by sour grapes.
3. Shattering Throw
4. Sunder Armours - [any other not-strictly-automatic buffs/debuffs I'm missing here?]
5. Potion of Speed and "Here's your friendly reminder to pop your potions on the first portal guys!" in vent.
6. ENERGY is huge. If you're sitting on an empty energy bar right before the dps availability/requirement, then you just screwed yourself and possibly the raid. If you did great dps on Heroic Lord Jaraxxus before the first portal but couldn't close it before two mistresses appeared, your raid just failed miserably and you may have contributed to the failure. Remind people about it - Energy for ferals and rogues, max rage and runic power for warriors/DKs etc.
7. Pre-burn Berserk about one second before the portal spawns. Set up your Berserk/Hysteria macro like this and notify the DK so he has enough time to react without screwing his own rotation up and getting you Hysteria before the portal spawns:

#showtooltip Berserk
/use [nomod:shift] Berserk
/use [nomod:shift] Sulfuron Slammer
/stopmacro [nomod:shift]
/w Kastille BERSERK A GO GO!
/ w Asreif BERSERK A GO GO!

* Safe to use regularly in pvp/bg's/whatever, then when raiding with a Blood DK who's going to provide you with Hysteria, hit Shift + Macro hotkey - get Hysteria - then hit button normally and go to town. If you run with several different Blood DK's on a regular basis, just make a line for each of them but disable the line by putting a space between the "/" and the "w".

Why the Sulfuron Slammer? - Makes things look pretty, puts a different-looking notification into everyone's chat frame (which has gotten me Hysteria in the past when I've forgotten to notify the Blood DK), but could possibly self-stun you if the fight goes on for too long or you mash the button.

8. Last, if you end up burning 5CP on a SR (normally a good thing) during a dps availability/requirement - while missing synchronized Rip/SR timers or other priority, you'll feel mighty stupid. Solution is to make sure you have a fairly long-duration SR up before the burst dps period comes along.

@Murna
Well, if you SR before popping berserk, you have to pool energy for an extra 2s, putting off the berserk. If you find yourself waiting anyway, it's certainly worth it, of course. As 2s isn't a big deal, I guess the major question is how much time tends to be left on the first SR before you get up the second one, as that's not a time when you want it to drop off. You're gcd limited at that point, so at worst it's 11s (10x cp generation + rip), although ~8s is probably more reasonable. If you pool to 85 before berserk, that's 3.4+2-1.5=2.9s, plus 1s for the gcd from berserk, giving a total of 11.9s typical (14.9 worst). Looks like that would work fine. Putting off both berserk and TF for 2s might cost you in the long run, though probably not.

@coldbear
I dunno about using TF before berserk. I understand that you want to get the energy benefit from it as soon as possible, but you're both wasting the non-energy part of the ability, and I've had problems getting enough cb after the fb at the end of the sequence to refresh rip in a timely fashion. (Well, by refresh I mean put up a new one right after the old one goes down, of course.) So, let's say your method gets 15s worth of TF more than mine (as a rough approximation). That's 30 energy, or about 3/4 of a shred. Then the question is is that enough to account for ~3 tics of lost rip (again, a rough approximation)? I don't think it is.

Also, if your reference to not using TF before FB was directed to me, that's not what I was saying. I was saying that it's useful to keep TF available, so you can use if after the FB, when you're out of energy and cb, and your rip is falling off in short order.

I did some calculation about the new tier 10 2 and 4 piece bonus..if there is an older post about that, im sorry, i couldnt find it..



2 pieces:
10 energy less for rip.

Now assuming rip will be refreshed every 22sec. (12+4ripglyph+6shredglyph) youh have a gain of 10 energy every 22sec.
or 1 energy every 2.2 sec.
On a 5 minute fight you´ll have a gain of ~136 Energy. In terms of shred youll have exactly 3 extra shreds.
Now fully raidbuffed an with ICC gear my assumption for a shredattack is 9k noncrit an 17k crit. with a critchance of say 70% the average dmg is 14,6k. So with 3 shreds you would get an additional 43,8k average dmg per 5min or 146 dps


4 pieces
Gives your rake the ability to cirtically hit

My Rake dot does aprox. 10% of my total dmg. So if i have 70% crit (on icc gear) the dmg of rake will increase by an additional 77% (10% increased critical strike dmg because of predatory instincts)
To make things easy lets say i do 100dmg to an enemy, 10 dmg would be the result of rake, right?
now withe the 4pc bonus rake would do 17,7dmg, an my TOTAL dmg is 107,7 dmg.
So my total damage would be increased by 7,7%, am i correct?
So this is a very valuable setbonus.

Keep in mind that these calculations were made without considering mouvement oder targetchanges.

Please correct me if im wrong, im intrested in your opinions!

I've been feral for nearly all of my druid's playtime, but I'm putting together a healing set to allow more flexibility with our 10-man heroic group and wanted to sanity-check the gear weightings I've been using. As a note, I'm more interested in their relative weights post-3.3 than with current usefulness and I do not plan to take Celestial Focus, which means my haste "cap" will be around 850.

The numbers I'm using (and can't for the life of me remember where I grabbed them from) are:
Spellpower = 1
Mana / 5 = 1.1
Spirit = 0.7
Intellect = 0.6
Haste = 1
Crit = 0.1

Do these look like reasonable numbers? Obviously it's not an exact science, but wanted a decent starting point until I get my experience with what feels "comfortable."

Your stat weights aren't bad, I guess. If you have Replenishment in your raid, I would completely ignore "weight" from MP5. It isn't bad, but you would want to look more into Spell Power and Haste. Also, why wouldn't you get CF? It allows you to get NG too, which is good for 10 mans, where Nourish/Regrowth will see more daylight.

As far as gemming goes, which is an easy base for "stat weights", I will most likely gem Reckless in all Red and Yellow slots, while putting Purified into Blue (assuming a SP socket bonus) until I reached haste cap. Spellpower and Haste will be your direct itemization choices. One overweight the other mathematically in pure HPS, but I feel haste to cap is going to be important, not just for GCD reduction, but for Rapid Rejuve and Regrowth/Nourish in 10 man content.

Hello
I have one simple question: what do you think about new glyph of rapid rejuvenation, does it work good and with which glyph that you previously used would you replace it? In my case i used glyph of swiftmend, wild growth and rejuvenation when raid healing and if i was more focused on tanks then it was glyph of nourish. So now i'm in a dilemma which glyph to remove for the new one.

Thank you in advance for your answers

Sanchopancho, Boulderfist

Just looking for confirmation that AGI is no longer the imba stat for feral druids in Cat form.

Looking at the stat weighting it seems that STR is now the preferable stat (for AP generation, and therefore DPS, principally)?

I am not looking for in-depth end game stuff, this is just to try and ensure I am making the best choices in gear that comes up via AH, Quest, Instances etc. as I progress towards 80 (level 57 atm so still a way to go).

DPS for cats is heavily based on combo-point generation, and thus on crits. Agi is the stat you want to be stacking, not Str.

As you progress towards 80 honestly it doesn't matter what weighings you use. Agi and Str are going to be fairly close. That being said, you definitely will be better off with more crit early on.

If your white crit rate is above 71.2% (76% character sheet crit vs. level 80) during all your combined procs, hit/expertise will be your most valuable stat.

If you have an ArP trinket, 245ish gear level, and 400-700ish ArP, then ArP will be your next best stat. Alternately, if you can obtain over 1000 ArP without an ArP trinket, ArP will be your next best stat.

If you're below 71.2% white crit after all procs, Agi will be your next best stat. If you're above 71.2% during procs, Agi will be close to Str. If you're above 71.2% white crit before procs, Str will be better than Agi.

If you're hard-capped ArP and white crit capped, you may have sufficient gear where Haste > all.

In other words: Gear up to close-to-endgame using Agi/ArP; then gear to reach the hit/expertise caps; then gear to ArP soft/hard cap; then gear to soft white crit cap (with Agility and not crit rating); then use Str/Haste depending on gear level.

I'd like to know the value of improved demo shout, demo roar or vindication in some quantitative way. Is it possible to express it as effective health?

I can see that in every forum it is considered a priority to have an improved attack power reduction on a boss, but every in depth discussion I've seen on the numbers is quite old.