Feral questions? - Page 32

Deadmoon · 10/15/09, 11:59 AM

Originally Posted by Allev

Druids are worse at 2-3 target AOE than most other classes-- we don't see benefits to our DPS until we see 4 targets or more. We're clearly inferior to the small-AoE classes, including Blood DKs (all DKs?), warriors, ret pallies, and rogues; and classes that can apply good single-target spells (i.e. warlocks, SPs) also see benefits from managing multiple targets instead of one.

ToC's fights are biased against druid single-target DPS. You don't have time to get bleeds up on Gormok's adds, if you switch to them; if you AOE, you don't get a substantial increase in damage. You lose bleeds when Jormungars submerge. DPSing adds on Jaraxxus sucks for us, because they die too quickly. We don't good overall DPS unless we get into long-term DPS situations, which is exactly what Inaiwae is doing-- switching away from short-term AoE and establishing a long-term DPS cycle.

Finally, both 4th and 6th is "middle of the pack" rank-wise, and those tend to have only a few hundred DPS difference. While the rank looks different, I'm sure the DPS between one spot and the next is only 100-200 DPS in any case, which could be made up in single-target if WMO guilds would bring more multi-feral raids (looking at a selection of the top 10 guilds on any fight, you'll rarely see 2 ferals.)

Agreed.

ToC's fights aren't so terribly bad for feral single-target DPS, if the druid is allowed to actually perform single-target DPS.

World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis - Northrend beasts - 10/6/2009
World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis - Northrend beasts - 10/14/2009

In our last two heroic Northrend beasts encounters, I have come in second and first in total damage.
On Gormok, I completely ignore snobolds, berserk as early as possible with almost full energy and item procs running (Berserking weapon/Idol of Mutilation/Darkmoon card: Greatness/maybe a Grim Toll). I'm generally top damage after Gormok, one of 1-5 players with 1 million damage done to that point.

On the jormungars, melees dps the moving Dreadscale at first, and ranged dps the stationary Acidmaw. After the first submerge, I berserk for the second time, and we bloodlust and focus down Acidmaw, which dies before submerging again. An enraged Dreadscale dies after 2nd submerge. Submerges, even though they allow dots to fall off, gives me a chance to regain energy. It's a net loss, but not a devastating one.

Icehowl gets my third berserk during his second wall crash.
If I do a good job of staying at max melee range, and don't get unlucky and get frozen too many times, I am generally one of the top damage dealers for this fight.

However, we're not at the point where I can do single-target dps on the other fights and still have a good chance at defeating the encounter.
Jaraxxus: I have to dps portals and adds.
Faction Champions: I CC the warrior.
Val'kyr Twins: Our strat involves nearly the whole raid burning through an opposite-color shield, and is thus far unstable and a bit RNG-dependent. Because our (ferals') burst damage spikes are largely blocked by a shield, it doesn't show up on parses, even though it is important to our success.
Anub'arak: We haven't gotten enough solid tries on this for me to comment, but I expect to be on adds like I am for Jaraxxus until this boss is on farm.

Edit: I'm the best geared cat on Tichondrius (I think) but my guild is not the most progressed, so there may be some bias there.
Edit: We have an arms warrior for Trauma, but I don't get Hysteria.

coldbear · 10/30/09, 4:09 PM

Can someone confirm that the only major cooldown synergies with respect to Berserk use is Hysteria and Shattering Throw?

Bloodlust/Heroism + Berserk obviously could lead to wasted energy or Clearcast procs, but are there no raid-wide short-duration-long-cooldown buff/debuff's other than Shattering Throw that a Feral DPS'er should watch or plan for?

Ja7us · 10/30/09, 6:52 PM

Hysteria/Shattering Throw are the only raid buffs/debuffs with major synergies with Berserk, but there are a ton of buffs that synergize with Hysteria/Shattering throw (read: bloodlust). For maximum DPS they should all be stacked together.

Aurochus · 10/31/09, 8:53 PM

Hey guys, I'm typically a resto druid with a boomkin offspec, but I would like to change it to feral. I'm going with a hybrid cat/bear spec with the goal of being primarily cat, for 25 and 10 mans, but with the ability to tank 5 mans and the occasional 10 man. This is the build I'm tentatively going to use: The World of Warcraft Armory

I'm just curious on where you would put the remaining 8 points in order to have the least dps reduction as cat and the most benefit as bear. If I were going pure cat, I would do Feral Aggression and Improved Mangle. Pure bear would probably be Infected Wounds and either Feral Aggression or Thick Hide and Improved LoTP.

Also, assuming I have no warrior in the group, which talent will provide more damage mitigation with mostly iLvl226 gear: Infected Wounds or Thick Hide?

savantus · 11/01/09, 1:45 AM

Originally Posted by Aurochus

Hey guys, I'm typically a resto druid with a boomkin offspec, but I would like to change it to feral. I'm going with a hybrid cat/bear spec with the goal of being primarily cat, for 25 and 10 mans, but with the ability to tank 5 mans and the occasional 10 man. This is the build I'm tentatively going to use: The World of Warcraft Armory

I'm just curious on where you would put the remaining 8 points in order to have the least dps reduction as cat and the most benefit as bear. If I were going pure cat, I would do Feral Aggression and Improved Mangle. Pure bear would probably be Infected Wounds and either Feral Aggression or Thick Hide and Improved LoTP.

Also, assuming I have no warrior in the group, which talent will provide more damage mitigation with mostly iLvl226 gear: Infected Wounds or Thick Hide?

Being hybrid spec means you are sub-par on either one or the other spec ( not to mention your glyphs will favor one or the other).
5 mans the demand is always for healer or tank, since you already have a resto spec you are better off going fully either DPS or tank as other spec and then be able to an asset instead of a wasted raid spot.
You wouldn't expect some half-ass boomkin spec to compare on healing versus a tree, the same applies to tanking/dps.

If you insist on doing hybrid, put 2pts in imp lotp , put the other 6 pts in predatory instincts + imp mangle.
As those give more benefit to dps than whats left, and imp lotp is always good to have.
Unless the rest of the raid is under whatever gear-level you are using, you will be near the bottom of the dmg meter
, and you will take alot more dmg than pure tanks but your threat should be decent at least. Hopefully whomever you raid with can overlook that.

Morcrist · 11/01/09, 5:29 AM

Originally Posted by Aurochus

Hey guys, I'm typically a resto druid with a boomkin offspec, but I would like to change it to feral. I'm going with a hybrid cat/bear spec with the goal of being primarily cat, for 25 and 10 mans, but with the ability to tank 5 mans and the occasional 10 man. This is the build I'm tentatively going to use: The World of Warcraft Armory

I'm just curious on where you would put the remaining 8 points in order to have the least dps reduction as cat and the most benefit as bear. If I were going pure cat, I would do Feral Aggression and Improved Mangle. Pure bear would probably be Infected Wounds and either Feral Aggression or Thick Hide and Improved LoTP.

Also, assuming I have no warrior in the group, which talent will provide more damage mitigation with mostly iLvl226 gear: Infected Wounds or Thick Hide?

This is what I would use based on your criteria. It has the most dps you can get while still being able to do like you said and tank 5/10 mans.
Hybrid Cat DPS/Tank Build

One thing I might do to help the tanking side is dropping Improved Mangle and getting 2/2 Leader of the Pack and 1/3 Infected Wounds. If your role is primary dps you're not going to be using Mangle much at all on most fights (you'll be shredding) so you won't be losing much dps. If you've got a trauma bot you'll use it even less.

Feral Aggression is a waste considering it's 5 points to maximize a move you don't always get to use.

Lose Natural Reaction. It's only a couple points of dodge.

Predatory Instincts is big. Make sure you get it. You're going to be critting about 50% of the time at that iLvl (at least) so that's like an extra 5% dmg (50% of 10%) for 3 talent pts.

16 pts in Resto guarantees the maximum benefit to your dps.

3 pts in Protector of the Pack guarantees the most efficient benefit to your dmg reduction (3 pts for 12% dmg reduction compared to 3 pts for a 10% armor increase ~= a lot less than 12% dmg reduction).

You're going to need a good healer if you tank with this build but your cat dps will be almost totally maximized (except for ferocious bites). By limiting your tanking to 5 mans and an occasional 10 man you should have no problems assuming a competent group (i.e., don't expect to carry a group due to your awesome tanking abilities with this build - heh).

If you had to sacrifice some kitty dps (say by dropping Master Shapeshifter) for some more tanking ability definitely get Infected Wounds. Reducing a target's attack speed by 40% is huge compared to reducing it's damage by a couple %. If it hits for 10k every 2 seconds, or 5k per second you've just saved yourself about 1.5k per second in damage (10k every 2.8 seconds). To get the same savings (3k dmg) from armor alone would take a 30% damage reduction.

Hope this helps you make up your mind.

• Cluey · 11/01/09, 8:02 AM

Originally Posted by Morcrist

If you had to sacrifice some kitty dps (say by dropping Master Shapeshifter) for some more tanking ability definitely get Infected Wounds. Reducing a target's attack speed by 40% is huge compared to reducing it's damage by a couple %. If it hits for 10k every 2 seconds, or 5k per second you've just saved yourself about 1.5k per second in damage (10k every 2.8 seconds). To get the same savings (3k dmg) from armor alone would take a 30% damage reduction.

Hope this helps you make up your mind.

Just noting that the infected wounds debuff is a 20% slow not a 40% one, the same as all the tank classes get.
I disagree with a few of your choices but for heroics it won't matter, I have tanked them with my cat spec and gear. The main thing I miss tanking heroics, or any trash, is the Glyph of Maul.

The spec I use for most of my tanking is this one. I'm not one of our main tanks so I use a hybrid build. Having said that I have used this build to tank every boss in 25 man Naxx, Ulduar and TotCr, this includes things like Steelbreaker 25 man before we out geared it, one of the tanks couldn't stay connected and I forgot I didn't have a full tank spec! For the initial Steelbreaker learning I had a full tank spec.

A friend who mainly does ten mans used this spec as his feral one, paired with a resto spec, to tank or cat through Ulduar ten. He used it for their General Vezax Hard mode kills tanking the Animus and and on Steelbreaker if he wasn't healing, this was all done while the group was pushing for server first ten man hard modes and Glory of Ulduar raider with no 25 man gear.

As for what is best for you Aurochus, that is something you will have to work out.
I have tanked all of TotGC ten man with this build, I used a full tank build while we learnt Anub but since then this build has been fine. I change glyphs a lot though, if the fight has periods where I can contribute to DPS and doesn't have multiple targets for tanking I will use the Rip glyph instead of the Maul one.
Depending on what your ten man group consists of could also affect how you glyph and spec, having an arms warrior is very nice and makes skipping Improved Mangle very easy to do. If you always have a DK slowing the mobs attack speed you can drop infected wounds too.

The Predatory Instincts, King of the Jungle and Primal Gore talents are the ones which do the most for cat DPS. Using a full tank spec as a cat is an exercise in frustration, no energy gain with Tigers Fury makes cycles painful and even solo play is noticeably slower without PI and KotJ.

Pelf · 11/01/09, 11:42 PM

Originally Posted by Deadmoon

Agreed.

ToC's fights aren't so terribly bad for feral single-target DPS, if the druid is allowed to actually perform single-target DPS.

[...]

However, we're not at the point where I can do single-target dps on the other fights and still have a good chance at defeating the encounter.
Jaraxxus: I have to dps portals and adds.
Faction Champions: I CC the warrior.
Val'kyr Twins: Our strat involves nearly the whole raid burning through an opposite-color shield, and is thus far unstable and a bit RNG-dependent. Because our (ferals') burst damage spikes are largely blocked by a shield, it doesn't show up on parses, even though it is important to our success.
Anub'arak: We haven't gotten enough solid tries on this for me to comment, but I expect to be on adds like I am for Jaraxxus until this boss is on farm.

Getting the raid leaders to understand what feral strengths and weaknesses are is pretty important, I've found. The ferals (we have two, one of which [the not-me one] tanks/dps probably 60/40, give or take) have different jobs than everyone else in some of these fights like Deadmoon was mentioning.

Beasts: Ignore snobolds for Gormok. On jormungars, everyone is on the stationary to start, then after the first submerge we split off into physical/magical. Physical ends up on the stationary. I'm getting better at timing my CP usage to make sure I have no points on them before they submerge. Icehowl is icehowl -- the pro melee attack from max melee range and don't get tossed.

Jaraxxus: Ferals switch for Portal/Volcano, but switch back afterward without following up on the adds. Usually just long enough to resume the rotation after Rip falls off.

Twins: We're using the cheese-the-door strategy. Everyone's on the same person the whole time, though my DPS does suffer due to being unable to use Berserk for as long as 3 special abilities into the fight.

coldbear · 11/17/09, 7:20 PM

Considering using [Idol of Perspicacious Attacks] over Idol of Mutilation for Heroic Anub'Arak, but as of right now I'm thinking the extra damage per swipe is outweighed by the extra crit chance and AP from all the Agi on Idol of Mutilation. Can someone confirm or deny?

Not really considering idol-swapping as last I saw it was more of a dps loss than gain.

EDIT: Never bloody mind. Seems as of 9 months ago it did not affect Cat (Swipe). If this is wrong I'd love to hear.