Back in the old WotLK Feral Thread there was a discussion about a Tank spec, that could do good damage with Mangle spam. I could never find the talents used for it. Does somebody have a specc for this Tank/Mangle Spam DPS?

Edit: Is there someone who could create the Feral Megathread replacement in the Theorycraft Think Tank? This would be the most obvious replacement for the Megathread starting post.

Theorycrafting Think Tank

The fire revenant type mobs from Halls of Lightning cast a buff called Afterburn which increases their crit chance by 50% for 10 sec. They visibly grow in size when they gain the buff, and are surrounded by a vortex of fire while casting so its fairly easy to spot. It can be dispelled like any normal buff, which is why you might find it being noticed more by bears as Warriors tend to remove it quite quickly with Shield Slam without even really noticing.

Possibly this Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

I replaced some gear since that post, which were bad pieces but loaded with crit, and I'm now down ~1.4% crit and up a lot of ap, but here is my armory.

The World of Warcraft Armory (not in cat form atm, and my staff skill isn't leveled so the crit is wrong)

I overlooked the fact that MS adds 4% to cat crit. However, even with the said buffs (11% from feral tree, 4% from resto), that adds up to roughly 45% crit.

That looks a lot more reasonable, thanks for the posting the armory.

Yeah, but like i said my staff skill isn't leveled. I currently have 47.88% crit in cat, but yesterday i had agi gem and enchant on my gloves, and boots with similar agi and ~30 crit rating, so i was sitting at around 48.9% crit with motw if i remember correctly.

This is the build that I use. In fact, I just made a whole post defending/explaining it in the Tanking talent build thread.

No, not better then Ravenous beast if you're shredding. The guy who said Terror was better uses a Mangle spam rotation, so RB would be useless for him.

His rotation however is inferior to a shred rotation, so RB is what you're going to want to be using.

I'm hoping that some of you might be able to answer some questions that I have as I'm still trying to wrap my head around how to use certain stats. I see Haste and Armor Pen. all over the place now, from my experience in BC these stats were never all that great for feral. Has this changed with the change to OoC and the addition of Savage Roar?

Also before I started leveling I was sitting at around I think 44% crit unbuffed and hit capped. I do know that the Agi -> Crit ratio has been nerfed so getting crit is going to be harder, but how much crit percent should we be aiming for now? And how important is it to reach the Hit/Expertise cap from a DPS stand point?

I apologize if this has been already been answered somewhere else, there's just so much information around here it is hard to sift through and I didn't find exactly what I was looking for anywhere just yet.

1. Has anyone heard anything about 4pT6 getting nerfed? It really seems like it should be... The % scaling on Rip damage is essentially a scaling amount of AP in a full Rip-uptime cycle. Toskk's still shows 4pT6 configurations to be crazy-good, but it's difficult to compare wholly different gear setups there, and Rawr doesn't list or include the bonus that I can see. (This could just be my user error; using Rawr on OSX is like trying to eat soup with chopsticks and a sheet of paper.)

If anyone has already worked out how long it will be before 4pT6 should be replaced and which four pieces are best upgraded with BoE/5/10 man gear until then, I'd love to see your conclusions.

Edit: It appears that the Optimizer in Rawr must be taking the 4pT6 set bonuses into account, because it does end up equipping 4 pieces of T6 even when I make full HT7 or even VT7 available.

2. How do folks feel about the 2pT7 set bonus for DPS? It's clearly good, but I am loathe to divorce my Rip and Mangle timers again. The nice thing about the Rip and Mangle glyphs is that you can usually count on mangling right when Rip expires, without worrying about watching your energy, just as in the powershifting days of BC.

Has anyone else noticed the occurrence of rare, random crits from certain abilities? I'm not talking about the Afterburn-related crits; tanking Malygos last night I was noticing at least twice over a few attempts the arcane explosion type effect following breaths was critting. Obviously not a huge concern as that is one of the least significant sources of damage in tanking but it seems odd that it would be able to crit in the first place.

I wonder if that's an artifact of his breath being coded as Frost and I believe the followup explosion is Arcane. Also, when they removed the ~1% barrier on hit, did they also remove the fractional chance to be crit even while crit-immune? I haven't noticed this behavior elsewhere specifically, but it's definitely disconcerting to see crit the sticky pop up on my incoming side of MSBT.

As far as Haste Rating goes, how do bear benefit from it in terms of TPS? I understand that our GCD does not get reduced, so does haste increase our TPS by faster auto-attack/maul?

Are you sure Malygos isn't getting touched by power sparks?

GCDs do NOT get reduced in bear/cat form. However, you will get faster autoattacks/mauls, which increases your TPS.

Does anyone know if the idol of worship's effect is applied when the rip is applied, or is applied when the damage ticks? If it is applied when the rip is applied, does anyone have a good macro for swapping it on, then ripping, then going back to ravenous beast? I made up a simple one, but I couldn't get the GCD timing correct.

In my experience it hasn't been worth the waste of a GCD to do something like idol swapping as feral.

Based on the spell (Power Spark - Spell - World of Warcraft) he should still be unable to crit. I'm not talking about the surge of damage when he is power sparked - he hits harder, breathes harder and the arcane blasts hit harder, but with regards to crit immunity nothing changes.

Next time we run him I'll log it and post the results - it's not a super-common occurrence and like I said not an issue, but it's discomforting to be crit in bear without a buff/debuff interaction when we are supposedly immune via talents.

Druid GCDs are only precious when berzerk is up. There is plenty of time where you can waste a GCD and not lose any dps at all, so it is worth it to swap if its possible.

Isn't the problem with idol swapping that it resets your weapon swing?

I just wanted to throw out there that Brutal Impact is a great talent to have in your arsenal for heroics, especially when starting out at 80. I found that being able to basically spam stun (once per pull, right at the start, twice if there were a lot of mobs) can really help you out with a healer that might not have gotten that precast off on you at the pull. I'm going to spec out of it now that my gear has significantly improved, but if your gear is lacking, I'd sneak points into there to start out in heroics.

I had a question concerning rake. Is rake actually more damage per energy than shredding? Or should I only be putting up rake when rip isn't up? We haven't had a DPS warrior in the raids (they all went DK or are leveling really slowly :| ), so I've had to keep up mangle myself. I'm pulling down 2500ish DPS, placing myself around 10th in every fight with all tank talents. I haven't been using rake, but I'm going to start working that into my rotation.

It's possible that the above shows my ignorance on cat DPS, but my primary role in endgame has always been tanking, followed by sitting (kitty DPS FTL in TBC :| ). Thanks to all the posts in this topic, as well. I've found a few nuggets that should help me for raids to come.

ok i've been doing my research but from what i have read i am getting mixed results. What i need to know is haste good for feral dps.

Why not just do your own calculation in game? Check what dmg a rake does, and what dmg a shred does (including crit rate). Anyway, the answer is: Yes, rake has higher DPE than shred.

No you haven't really. Just load your gear in Rawr, and see what relative stat values it gives you. Anyway, haste isn't bad, but it's still one of our weaker stats. If it happens to be there on a really nice dps item, fine, but don't go look for it.