I would think that the glyph of barkskin would be a waste, since the duration of the unbalancing strikes is 15 seconds, you would still be potentially 2 or 5 seconds crittable. Wouldn't it be much easier to just rotate tanks, since you're most likely running 3 for the event anyhow?

Use Rawr to get an approximate value (check the Buffs section). For me it's valued at 143 DPS.

In addition, unbalancing strike has a ~20 second cooldown.

You're also ignoring the fact that we most likely have defense on our neck, cloak, and Jewelry. I understand that you're trying to make a point with zero defense rating on gear, but that usually isn't the case. As long as your defense -crit+res -crit+ SoTF= 13.6% you'll be fine.

You're right for the most part, just want to add a bit of detail.

Hi, Arms warrior here with a question: how much of a difference in your DPS does having to mangle make? I'm trying to decide whether or not to spec Trauma. I went to raid without it and got yelled at by the cats who claimed that it is a 1k DPS difference for the cat who has to mangle. If that's true, I will certainly spec Trauma; but I thought I'd come here for a second opinion first.

Thanks!

Someone here probably has a better grasp of the numbers, but while 1K is certainly an exaggeration I would say that 500DPS is quite believable, and you should certainly spec for it . Doesn't it provide a very nice buff to your deep wounds though? I've never heard of an Arms warrior who doesn't spec for trauma, personally.

Fairly certain that crushing blows are determined off base defense - debuffs meaning while unbalancing strike is on you, you are vulnerable to crushing blows. We had it happen to our druid MT.

If the mechanisms of crushing blows haven't been altered from how they used to be during TBC then Thorim should be able to crush the tank having the debuff, regardless of if the Tank is uncrittable even after the debuff. If I recall correctly, the chance to be crushed was depending on the difference between the weapon skill of the attacker versus the defence skill of the attacked.

I would have a question on my own I actually feel silly for asking:
I am unsure if using Cower is a DPS loss even when threat-capped or not?

I usualy hover around 100-105% of Tank-Threat after popping Berserk during Heroism which brings me in the range of grabbing the Boss off the Tank with just 1 (un-)lucky FB-Crit. The threat-reduction of cower seems to be so insigificant (~2,5 averaged out autohits per aplication after stance-modifier) when used sparingly that I came to the conclusion that it either has to be spammed on cooldown or not be used at all to have any merrit.

1) Spam Cower from the start of the fight regardless of aggro-problems to maximise my chances of being able to reap the benefits of "lucky crit streaks".

2) Drop FB out of my rotation entirely exept for the end of Berserk to avoid overtaking the tank and go for a close as humanly possible 100% uptime on all debuffs/buffs.

Strategies 1 wastes 120 Energy each Minute to reduce my threat for the amount of around 15 autohits, while then being very dependant on crit-luck and OOC-proccs to reap any benefits, so Strategy 2 seems to be more favourable.

[Edit: Rephrasing for clarity]

Just spam vent for a HoS!

On a serious note I don't even bother having cower on my task bar, it's useless..

I am quite often just under the tanks, having to watch my agro

For the first time ever I put Cower on my bars a couple weeks ago while slumming around in Naxx pugs. It's far from ideal, but if you're going to let your energy cap anyway due to threat there's no reason not to use it. Stopping attacks altogether is suboptimal since you're losing energy anway, so you may as well reduce a little threat with it.

3) Ask for Vigilance if prot warrior in raid. Only other class I've seen MT is a DK and they didn't seem to have threat issues.

Our guild actually has set up Salvation rotations for high-threat DPSers. We call for them or they are called for when needed -- often preventatively on a known offender before they're even in the danger zone. Some of the paladins have had to drag it out onto their bars. I would certainly rather put those cooldowns to use than have them rotting in people's spellbooks.

Vigilance is often an excellent idea, as well. I get it put on me a lot of the time since I'm going to be popping Berserk almost right away in a fight and that's a huge burst of threat.

I feel like Cower is really a crappy ability. I wish they would change it to have a higher cooldown and reduce threat by a percentage instead of some ridiculously low number. According to the spell details on Wowhead (source), Rank 6 reduces threat by 3474. If Druids have an innate ~70% threat modifier in Cat Form, all it takes ~4963 damage to completely negate the use of Cower. Ostensibly it's a bit more, as was mentioned above, due to not using a damaging ability in the GCD where Cower was used -- but that's a bit harder to quantify.

The Cower -threat is negatively affected by our threat modifier, so it's even worse.

I have just run few test with Wolfshead Helm on training dummies and figured that someone may find the results interesting:

My gear is far form perfect, unbuffed in cat form:
Without Wolfshead Helm (Guise of Midgard Serpent, socketed with +27agi & +21 agi +3% crit dmg meta):
7003 AP
200 Hit (6.10%)
262 haste rating (0.91 speed)
123 ArP (9.99%)
50.31% Crit
19 Expertise (81 rating + 10 from talents)

With Wolfshead Helm:
6607 AP
216 Hit (6.59%) - I used Arcanum of Ferocity instead of Arcanum of Torment which cannot be applied on Wolfshead Helm.
262 haste rating (0.91 speed)
123 ArP (9.99%)
46.77% Crit
13 Expertise (28 rating + 10 talents)
6K mana

The initial tests were 10 minutes long (4 berserks used), without any buffs and without anyone else interfering. The "rotation" was maintained with the help of FeralByNight addon.
I powershifted as soon as I had less than 50 energy, had mana for it and had a free global CD.

lvl 60 training dummy:
Wolfshead helm: 4.6K dps
Guise of Midgard Serpent: 4.2K dps

It looked promising so I tried it on heroic training dummy (boss lvl) with the same conditions. Unfortunately, the results were the exact opposite:
WH: 3.45K dps
GoMS: 3.6K dps

Then I tried shorter fight as I was OOM after few minutes of powershifting and while mana regeneration from ILotP is nice, I heard "Not enough mana" a lot more than I would have liked
Heroic training dummy with 5min test (2 berserks):
-------------------
WH: 3.67K dps
GoMS: 3.51K dps
-------------------
WH: 3.72K dps
GoMS: 3.6K dps
-------------------
WH: 3.66K dps
GoMS: 3.6K dps

I know that it is a fairly small sample of tests - yet WH's worst attempt is still better than GoMS's best.

Few observations:
* The shorter the fights should be more benefical to WH since you have enough mana for all powershifts during the fight.
* The better stats you have (better gear / raid buffs) the more benefical that +20 powershift energy should be (based on similar 2T4 bonus scaling).
* Raid buffs increase you mana pool & mana regen effectively increasing the number of powershift you can take.
* You can use mana potion to make even more powershifts!
* When out of mana, you cannot Battle Ress / Heal anyone, which could be an issue. You can save a mana pot for these situations.

I'm eager to try it next week in Ulduar on shorter fights (Ignis, XT-002, Kologarn, Auriaya) to see if it really is viable.

Can someone with better gear confirm these results?

Edit: added additional test data & reformulated conclusion.

Cower certainly does seem to be an out of date and clunky ability, obviously left over from when cat druids were modeled to be more like rogues with their feint. Now most dps classes seem to have large threat dumps; while cower is rendered basically useless, I can't remember if I even have it on a hot bar anymore.

It would be nice if the ability was redesigned to actually be useful, something like mirror images for mages which is a temporary threat dump would be nice. Give it a decent cooldown and possibly a temporary dps nerf to prevent it from being used offensively (such as popping all cooldowns at the start of a boss fight to yield massive dps with no risk of pulling agro).

A situation where I would have found such an ability useful was a Vezax attempt the other night - melee dps missed an interrupt, and since all our holy priests had specced disc for the fight, a pain suppression was put on the tank, suddenly I went from being just under the tank on threat to pulling agro. I was ressed later in the fight but we unfortunately wiped on 0.3%

Did you have 3/3 primal tenacity and 3/3 natural shapeshifter? With those talents I never dropped below full mana (essentially) even shifting every free global cooldown.

In any case, the wolfshead helm no longer works on US realms as of yesterday and I expect the fix will be applied to European realms today.

Simple question: Is it worthwhile to run 2t6 on Kologarn?

Yes.

I would say it's worth it with Bracers, Belt, or Boots, but not with any of the lower iLevel pieces from BT, especially if it causes you to break t7 or t8 bonuses.

I've just decided to give kitty DPS a proper try for the first time, so I've just got a couple of questions I couldn't see immediate solid answers for in other threads. (although I could just be blind)

Hit - is it worth aiming for the hit cap here? I've seen some contradictory statements (and rawr appears to rank it of least importance out of all our stats). This feels particularly relevant given point two, where I'm trying to work out exactly how I should be gemming.
ArP - this now appears to be to "go to" stat for kitties. Rawr ranks it higher that Agi I believe. Is it going to be worth pulling out my Agi gems and heading down that path? Is there a Agi/ArP cross-over point where one becomes better than the other?

I wished I remembered to log out in my DPS gear so I could play with numbers at work.

Thanks,

Labrynth, while I noticed a overall-dps improvement from upgrading a few items after 3.1 and loosing around 150 hit in the process I also was able to experience missing rip just to use 5 combo points a second later for savage roar a few times. This wont happen very often, but if it does its noticeable dps loss and also quite demoralizing.

While I am not sure about the cross-over point between Agi/ArP in rawr I would suggest reading this Thread (Fearalbynight (Cat & Bear Simulator)) as nightcowler uses a quite different approach/strategy to kitty-priority lists than rawr does and for his approach (using FB quite often) ArP becomes the stat to stack at around 200 Arp-rating.

My guild is starting to do serious pushes on Ulduar hard modes now, and there's a push to get the most we can out of consumables. We obviously flask, already, but now there are the potions to consider. It seems the options are:

[Potion of Wild Magic]
[Potion of Speed]

I think it's been pretty definitively proven that we get very little out of haste, but 15% haste might open up enough of a higher chance to proc Clearcasting to be better than 4.36% crit from Wild Magic? I'd like to see if anyone has some experience or thoughts on which of these comes out on top, all things considered. At first blush, I'd guess the Wild Magic, but that's why I'm asking.

Also, are there other non-flask, non-potion consumables that are worth using? I can't think of anything, but then again, I wasn't really even aware of [Nightmare Seed] when I found them. Embarrassing, I know.