Quick question;

I under the rotation for balance being as followed:

Keep Insect Swarm and Moonfire on the target. Cast Wrath until Eclipse procs, then switch to Starfire. Continue casting Starfire after Eclipse ends, until the opposite Eclipse procs, then switch back to Wrath. Repeat while keeping the DoT's up. Use Force of Nature and Starfall on cooldown.

My question is on the keeping the DoT's refreshed part. Is it better to refresh DoT's as soon as they drop for max up time even if it means interrupting a Eclipse proc or should you wait till the Eclipse proc ends to refresh dots?

There's a bit of an open question about this since our DoT's have gotten so weak lately. The difference will be very small in any case. In practice you often wind up refreshing DoT's as convenient (determined by movement or fight mechanics).

I keep seeing references in the moonkin raiding thread about haste and crit softcap. I know the haste soft cap, but what wondering what the crit soft cap is?

I would think of it to be the Critical Strike Chance you need to get a 100% Crit for your Starfire during its Eclipse.

According to your Talents you get a 15% Chance to score a Critical Hit with your Starfire (before Crit rating and Intellect)
15% + 30% (Eclipse) would make you need an additional 55% Chance to Crit to reach the Soft Cap.

This is what i would expect it to be. Also you can add another 8% Crit-Chance from Raidbuffs/-debuffs to this.
Ending at 47%

After that, your Crit-Rating loses some of its weight.. although it ain't that much

Would it be worth to take Cryptmaker over other feral weps, im having a big problem getting hitrating for my gear, i currently having grimtoll and a HR chest 245 boe.
Having about 280 HR but i will want to change some gear so i can reach the hardcap.
There is NO gear in ICC that got hit rating and ArP, so i though would it be worth taking Cryptmaker instead of any other ICC feral wep?
Seems to not be that bad deal changeing from Distant Land to cryptmaker ,

Distant land got haste crit while Cryptmaker got ArP HR
BUT Distant land has agility + AP while Cryptmaker got STR

Im not in big need of crit currently about 65-70% raidbuffed have no problem keeping my rotation going, i just want to know what do you think about changeing your staff for cryptmaker?

For me it seems like a valid choice.

Cryptmaker
Two-Hand Mace
(3356 feral attack power)
+169 Strength
+185 Stamina
Red Socket
Blue Socket
Socket Bonus: +6 Strength
Equip: Improves hit rating by 95 (2.9% @ L80).
Equip: Increases your armor penetration rating by 100 (7.15% @ L80).

Distant Land
Two-Hand Staff
(3356 feral attack power)
+146 Agility
+138 Stamina
Red Socket
Blue Socket
Socket Bonus: +6 Agility
Equip: Improves critical strike rating by 108 (2.35% @ L80).
Equip: Improves haste rating by 108 (3.29% @ L80).
Equip: Increases attack power by 216.

Lichking gear is not avalible for me.

Depends on what you value more, DPS (when you take distant land) or getting the hit/arpen caps (Cryptmaker).

No matter what way you look at it, Distant Land wins out on dps easily, unless you have so much crit that all the crit rating on it will go to waste (like 76%+)

also keep in mind that cryptmaker is bis for warriors.

I personally would base your decision on whether or not your guild will be clearing 10-man heroic. I worked out that if you can get BiS from 10-man heroic only then you would end up with around 980 haste rating (i.e. too much). Swapping in 4T10 drops you to around 860 which is still fine plus you get the set bonuses.

If you won't be clearing heroic then I think that the boost in stats due to the higher ilvl you get from items like [Vestments of Spruce and Fir], and being able to wear better itemised stuff like [Thaumaturge's Crackling Cowl] over [Lasherweave Helmet] is better than the 4T10 for 10-man raiding.

I had two questions about Boomkins...

First off, The 4 piece t10 bonus. I noticed that it just refreshes after every crit (which is very consistantly). I was curious how they go about making the 4 piece bonus work. Does every consectutive crit stack untill RNG gets ya and that's when the dot ticks off, or is it refreshing per individual crit? I'm sure they were smart about it and made it stack, but I haven't done anything since getting it other than a five-man where everything just dies too fast to really get conclusive results.

Secondly, I was curious about Owlkin Frenzy. Is it worth talenting at all? I did some semi half-baked "tests" on it a while back trying to get it to proc, and could never get it to proc on anything but melee damage. When it says "Attacks done to you...", that means any and all damage I assume, but I'm not sure really.

Also, I've been trying to find an addon that pretty much will scream at me anytime Owlkin Frenzy procs. I need it so that I can get into an actual ICC raid environment and get how many times it procs without having to look at my buffs. Something much like annoying buff reminder would be nice, but I haven't been able to find one. If anyone knows of one, I'd love to know about it. SquawkAndAwe doesn't either, that I saw anyways.

To monitor how often Owlkin Frenzy procs, why not simply combatlog the raid and upload it to World of Logs. That provides you with a far better tool to monitor uptime on the talent.

Resto gearing questions:

I just finished reading through the Resto Itemization thread, looking for advice in regards to 4T9 and 2T10. Only found a few tidbits, but was still unsure of what to use.

I have 4T9 (all ilvl245, no chestpiece, usually have 25% crit raid-buffed with it equipped) in my bags, but I'm currently running with a pure haste set (equipped).

I'm wondering if my current setup 'trumps' the 4T9 bonus. Also, I'm probably running with too much haste (over 1k might be overkill); should I swap to pure SP? Although, it is nice to have that buffer haste in case I lose any buffs during the course of a fight.


Edit: hmm, after spending a while playing with the TreeCalcs spreadsheet, I seem to have answered my own questions. Better healing output with 4T9, 11/0/60, and 860 haste, although my regen seems to drop quite a bit.

I'm trying to replace FBN - ovale is better at the rotation, and SBF is better at almost all the buff management, save one thing: displaying how many times you've shreded to extend your rip. Is there a way to make SBF display this, or failing that a mod you'd recommend for highly configurable buff/debuff display including number of shreds?

Yes, 860 haste is enough. You need 856 to hit the cap with 5/5 GotEM. Any more than that won't do anything for your instants, is pretty marginal for Nourish, but will still help Regrowth and unglyphed HT. 4T9 and 4T10 are both pretty fantastic set bonuses, but both require that you wear 2 crit pieces.

You'll probably find when you play with treecalcs that the values of haste and sp are extremely close, so having more haste 'in case I lose buffs' is probably not wise - the sp will always be effective.

I've been retired for about 3 months. I last killed Heroic Anub'arak, and then quit for a while.

What has changed in those 3 months for Feral DPS? In terms of gearing, rotation, etc. What do I want to look out for in terms of playing as a feral DPS?

Not much really...
4T10 is totally insane and you should aim for it regardless of what gear you got atm.
There's not much hit/expertise rating on ICC items so keep that in mind when choosing what to replace.

The biggest difference between T9 gearing for cats and T10 gearing is that you need to occasionally keep in mind how close you're getting to the white crit cap (76%) and what kind of gearing choices that may enforce. In general most druids are either going for the arpen hard cap if they have the right trinkets or going for the soft cap if they do not, and then emphasizing 4pT10 + one offset piece.

Agility and arpen remain the top stats, but strength, hit and expertise can all be quite high depending on your combination; hit and expertise tend to win when you are arpen-soft capped and are close to or above the white crit cap.

Closing this thread as we don't expect folks to go through a bunch of random questions anyhow. A reasonably well-done FAQ is now included in the SQSA thread that is stickied. Thanks and enjoy!

Edit: Please don't be alarmed if you had posted in the other thread and your post got deleted and/or banished to the Suck thread. I just wanted to start it off clean since the discussion was quite old.