It seems fairly clear to me that Survival Instincts makes Frenzied Regeneration 30% better if both are active at once, and has made the SI + FR combo my standard ohshit button. Similarly, I try and time my Lifeblood in the same way due to the Glyph of FR. What is less obvious is the way that some of my other ohshit buttons interact: Barkskin and Defender's Code. In order to derive the full benefit in total damage reduction from either of them, it would seem that they cannot be used together. A swing dodged from DC will not be reduced by Barkskin. Does this make them better when used separately? In an emergency (say, Maexxna's enraged Web Wrap), is there still value from using them together?

Finally, I am not talented into KotJ, and thus do not have improved Enrage, but I'm considering that change and am curious if Barkskin would totally mitigate the damage coming from the decreased armor. Is enrage 8.58-.16=8.42 or 8.58*.84=7.21?

Personally, doing SI + FR seems like a waste. It's like hitting SI + barkskin. Yes, you can do it, and yes, it makes barkskin better - but you've just wasted two emergency buttons.

At this point the only thing I can see usable for Frenzied Regen is using healing right away as you use it, thus getting an immediate large boost that you can rely on.

Barkskin will reduce your damage by 20% regardless. It stays basically the same value regardless.

The only Emergency buttons that seem worth it to stack are ones that increase your avoidance, simply because of how each 1% dodge is better then the percent before it.

My healers and I are in a position in this content where I don't need to use many emergency buttons at all. Most boss fights are down before I've seen the need to pop one, and all of them are down before I'd ever get two uses out of SI or FR (we're not yet on Sarth+3). Either I use nothing but Barkskin, or my main healer is hit by an unfortunate Arcane Breath and takes 20k damage and I need to use a lot of them while the remaining healers find some new equilibrium. The rest of my buttons wait for emergencies that hardly ever seem to happen. The question I'd get at is this one: which emergency buttons should I treat as not being for emergencies at all? Is it at all useful to pop FR and Lifeblood every cooldown and drink in an extra 2000+ TPS for the duration? Which button(s) are best saved for a Decimate, an enraged web wrap on Maex, or a really unfortunate lagfest on Thaddius?

The longer I ruminate on this, the more I wonder why FR and Lifeblood aren't in a max TPS rotation.

For decimate, survival instincts is almost always the right choice. Doing FR + Lifeblood + Pot + healthstone is also a decent choice for an instant 10-15k heal.

I don't think FR + lifeblood is going to be worth the threat in any case. The main reason they're not in a max TPS rotation is that their threat is fairly small and is very likely to be overhealing in most situations. FR's glyphed bonus is the best part of it, but it gives the threat to the healers most of the time, not to you.

An enraged web wrap - SI, barkskin, and dodge trinkets. Basically anything you can. Same with a lagfest. SI might be enough, but having more damage reduction besides the raw HP is also good.

Just to clarify, you cannot dodge during stun. The health on use trinkets are much nicer on Maexxna.

Dodge Trinkets aren't going to help when you're web wrapped, since you can't dodge while stunned. I suppose it does help immediately after however.

Decimate counts as damage, so Barkskin before, and SI, FR, Healthstone afterward. Never SI before the Decimate; if you have 40k health you gain 12k from SI, if you SI before you end up with 2.6k health, if you SI afterward you end up with 14k health.

New question - I apologized if I missed it in another section of the thread/forum. How highly would you rate the 2 and 4 piece Dreamwalker bonus to cat DPS. The extension of rip combined with the shorter cool down on TF seems pretty darn useful, but balancing it against the slightly better stats some other gear pieces give you I'm not sure which comes out on top.

2pc is good. The 4pc not so much because it is only useful in some fights. If a fight lasts < 27 seconds there is no benefit. If a fight lasts 27-30 seconds there is a benefit. If the fight lasts from 30-54 seconds there is no benefit. If the fight lasts 54-60 seconds there is a benefit. Etc.

However, there isn't much gear that is better for dps than valorous so its not a bad thing to have the 4pc bonus. Ideally one would go with the 2pc (head and shoulders) and then maly hands and chest and the Sarth legs.

My favorite idea for this is to make hit rating increase our chance to be missed. A fairly simple mechanic that would fit in nicely with the feral gear being rogue gear concept and could provide a bit more avoidance of a type we already have small amounts of.

That would be brilliant. I just want a decent yellow-gem stat to socket for tanking.

Honestly I think the biggest cat from benefit from the 4pc bonus might be if it fits your particular group's trash pacing--TF means an extra swipe, which makes things go that much faster--so if it means you can TF on trash pulls more consistently, it's pretty helpful. As to its benefit on boss fights, I tend to view it more as reducing the chance your energy, priorities, and cooldowns conspire to make you either waste energy or significantly delay TF. You're that much less likely to have TF come off cooldown while you're web wrapped or vortexed, for instance--those being the fights where you get consistently interrupted on a frequency that can overlap your TF cycle.

Why doesn't Predatory strikes affect weapon enchants? I just did some testing with an AP enchant and showed myself this is the case, yet predatory strikes should affect all weapon AP. If it did, Berserking would need 33% uptime instead of 27.5% to beat Massacre as the best in slot DPS enchant.

I rarely find reason to delay TF by more than a GCD or two at most. Anyways, it on average allows you to use it 3 seconds sooner which only has an advantage in fights of specific duration. Only on fights that are specifically 27-30 seconds longer than your first application of TF or specifically 54-60 seconds longer than your second application, etc. Any fight durations that fall between the specific intervals (so if the fight lasted 45 seconds for example) do not benefit at all from the set bonus.

As for trash, well, its trash. An additional swipe might save the raid .5 seconds on a pack? Just somewhat irrelevant with the current massive aoe going on.

3.1 Changes for druids

# DRUID

# Savage Defense – this is a new passive ability. When a druid in Dire Bear form deals a melee critical strike, the druid gains a damage shield equal to 25% of their attack power. The next hit completely removes the shield regardless of how much damage was done.
# Survival of the Fittest has had its bonus armor reduced to compensate for the above increase in damage mitigation.
# Faerie Fire (and similar debuffs) now reduces armor by 5%. See Sunder Armor in the warrior update below for additional details.
# Thorns and Nature’s Grasp can be cast in Tree of Life form.
# Survival Instincts now works in Moonkin form.
# Replenish – to avoid confusion, this talent has been renamed “Revitalize.” It now also works with Wild Growth.
# We are also looking at increasing the sustained (not burst) damage of feral druids in cat form.

World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> Upcoming Class Change Highlights (Part 2)

Does that change make us more or less squishy? I'm not sure if I'd rather keep the AC, even if it does mean hitting the soft ac cap.

40% crit and 8k AP sound about right for a raid buffed bear?

Are you sure that would be ridiculous? How much do paladins block for? Yes, I know block only works on physical damage, just trying to get a comparison of numbers.

In best current tank gear, rawr says a bit under 7k AP raid buffed. I'm going to stick with 40% crit because my bear is 37% and not fully geared yet.

Not sure about Paladins, but Naxx-ish geared Warriors block for about 800, critically block for about 1600. They have about a 20% base block rate, so a 6% base critical block rate. For AoE situations, we couldn't crit enough to make the damage shield really shine... but for single target fights (Patchwerk, heh), there's no reason the damage shield shouldn't be up almost every time the boss swings or casts. As it's written, it'll proc off of every melee ability that can crit... and bears use one of those every GCD plus one (raid hasted) autoattack every ~2 seconds.

At 25% of 7k AP (1750 absorbed) and with 40% crit, it will absorb more and have a greater uptime than a warrior's block in single-target fights. This is without gearing for it, with the numbers you provided. If it also absorbs spell damage, that's a whole other thing to consider.

I guess the bottom line is if Druid tanks were close to being fine as they currently are, this change will provide an enormous, enormous buff, even with the armor component of SotF nerfed.

Assuming there's no cooldown on the ability, 2 target Maul and multitarget swipe should make it up almost every time you do an attack. That does put a limit on potential absorption from it with multiple targets to ~1/sec, which seems to be about the range of Holy Shield.

A potential side benefit to this is that it will make cat specced druids more capable to tank in a pinch(though with dual specs this is certainly less useful).

These are interesting changes, for sure, to provide a better way of scaling overall; it allows us to continue getting better gear without hitting any armor caps, and allows melee stats to come into play.

We haven't seen the specific implementation of the "damage shield", so it's probably premature to say that it will be overpowered. It could easily have something like a 6 second cooldown, as ILotP does. Considering that it's a passive ability that doesn't require any talents, that seems rather likely.

Here's the warrior update referred to above (for those too lazy to click):

#WARRIOR
#Sunder Armor (and similar debuffs) now reduces armor by 4% per application, and is now a single rank. Creature armor has been globally reduced so that debuffed targets should take about the same damage from physical attacks that they did before this change. The net effect should be that this debuff is slightly less mandatory in PvE and is not disproportionately more powerful against cloth targets in PvP.

Cat swipe is absolutely destructive on large trash packs, and nearly every guild spends more time on trash than on bosses, still. And, obviously, if the 45 second long fight benefits from you popping TF at 28 seconds rather than 32 (due to buff stacking, interruption, what have you), it still benefits--and if the next fight starts 9 seconds later, you're in that 54 second window now. I don't know how your raids do it, but in my experience trash pulls tend to be a minute or more of chain pulling, not 15 second fights with breaks. This picket-fence model of how the 4pc bonus helps or doesn't help is built around (in my current experience) an outdated model of raid pacing which views each trash clear as an isolated entity.