Feral questions?
 

In lieu of the "Simple Sticky" being full of non feral discussions and not so simple answers; I'm posting here to hopefully simplify for others and myself everything we ferals are looking to learn. Onto my questions:

1)Before the Cat megathread was closed Rannasha mentioned STR had become our most powerful DPS attribute and RAWR seems to support this (at least in gemming) but i was curious how many others are adding strength gems vs +hit,+exp,+crit, or agility gems. I guess I'm mostly concerned with what crit level I should be aiming vs AP or is this an old school mentality and we are no longer caring as much about crit%?
Currently at level 76 I'm sitting at 4386ap but only 37.01 crit unbuffed. (Includes Master Shapshifter)

2) This may seem simplistic but I'm assuming for most of us, our tier gear will be split between DPS and tanking so agility gems would be the superior choice?

3)Is it still okay to RIP at 4cp or do i need to wait until 5cp in the new rotations? Also, I haven't seen it stated anywhere yet but I'm guessing that we want to do a 5cp Savage Roar first and then build up 5cp for a RIP or should it be reversed?

4)Since Blizzard has made Bear avoidance more linear, what amount of dodge our we looking to achieve? Do we attain enough HP to survive whatever burst damage and then put everything else into hit/expertise and agility?
The Megathread lead me to believe that tanking stat priority should be as follows we should max out armor, achieve safe HP limit, reach expertise cap to negate parry, add additional +hit, and then throw anything else into agility. (Add str/ap if you want to do some extra dmg while tanking)

5)Lastly, now that our talents let us have our cat form speed increase indoors doesnt that make all speed enchants obsolete?

EDIT:
6) What percent is needed to be crit immune from lvl 80 bosses and does SotF reach that limit on its own?
I was looking around but read conflicting reports about it leaving a slight margin on end-game bosses.

Not for bear. You're going to want a speed enchant on your tanking boots, for sure.

On SR: I may be wrong here, but given how huge of a buff SR is, you may want to activate it as soon as possible, i.e. as soon as you have a combo point.

On SotF: Nothing changed in regards to bosses critchance. Thus, they have a 5.6% chance to crit you (untalented, without gear). Since SotF reduces this by 6%, ferals are essentially crit-immune out of the box.

Couple of things that popped in to my head.

What are the new fancy weapon enchants for us, is raw AP viable for kitty?
How well does Haste rank for both kitty and bear now? Is it still pretty much useless?

for leveling, i'm sticking with agility, for the reason that burst damage is superior when dealing with individual non-elite mobs.

At 80, however, you can see in Toskk's calculation on the Druid wiki, that even with a low value of 30% crit, the point where STR and AGI are equal is at 11.3K AP *before* Savage Roar. If you're AP is lower, or your crit is higher, STR will give more DPS.

If you're going to switch roles often, then going for agility enchants/gems is a good idea of course, but it's not the optimal stat.

It's not that we don't care about crit, it's that we'll always be at the point where more crit is good, but more strength is better. So given the choice between comparable levels of crit and STR, go for STR. Now, hit and exp are a different matter. First off, their values change depending on how much of them you have (Rawr is your friend here). But the more difficult part is that missing blows can interrupt your damage cycle, which results in greater loss of dps then the missed strikes themselves. This part is very difficult to model, and different people respond differently to dynamic cycles. I don't believe a consensus on this has been reached yet, but I'm personally planning to prioritize hit and exp within reason.

Agility is the stat of choice for tanking assuming you have enough stamina, but as previously mentioned there are better choices for dps. If the enchant for that slot is also good for both bear and cat you can definitely use the same piece for both, but if you want to optimize you should get two pieces.

Exact cycles are strongly dependant on your crit (which affects cp generation), so there's no universal answer here. But becasue SR is so significant, it's usually best to get it up as soon as possible, even with 1-2 cp (and yes, before the Rip).

A quick search of Thottbot or Wowhead can show you all of the spiffy new enchants but i have yet to see an improved version thats better than the old +35 agi enchant we had in TBC for TANKING. DPS will probably want to get a hold of [Formula: Enchant 2H Weapon - Massacre] or if you need more hit [Formula: Enchant Weapon - Accuracy]. Attaining the hit cap now seems possible so there is more emphasis for us to reach it before improving our AP or crit from what i gather.

As for haste, the 1st page in the megathread goes into this more but the simple answer for kitties it gets better with the more you have. So if you find yourself in gear with a lot of it, then it might be better to stack more haste instead of trying to diversify into haste and armor penetration. Again, RAWR is your best friend here because it completely depends on your gear.
Haste is not good for bears unless you are at the expertise cap and even then I would consider it the lowest stat to improve. The reason being is since you are attacking "faster" there is more chances for the boss to parry your attack which results in more damage taken.

Okay so rotations will vary but shouldn't we have an universal opening rotation?
FFF running in (unless a boomkin has it up) and then Rake to get your first combo point, Savage Roar, mangle (unless Arms warrior is doing trauma) and then shred away until you can RIP? Follow it up with whichever attack is prioritized based upon buffs and/or cps

I thought I read that it takes about 3secs after applying Rake before the first tick goes off which should give you enough time to get your SR up and hit with a mangle unless I'm mistaken.

I've been running some heroics now with most blue 80 parts, and some (4-5) TBC parts.

DPS seems fine, but I have trouble figuring out a nice cycle for trash mobs.

As you describe, you open with Rake, but why not open with Mangle+Rake instead? The initial Rake damage is bleeding, and increased as well by Mangle.

One big question is for Rip. Does the Rip damage change when my AP change, or does it just check when applying? Should I use my AP trinket + SR before applying Rip to maximize Rip damage?

Also note that Rawr currently does not take Expertise and Hit in account for calculating gear/gems, why some items appears to be weaker than they actually are.

Rip is calculated at the time of applying it. If you using an AP trinket haflway though it, it's not going to modify your rip ticks. Mob debuffs however, will affect it - for example if mangle gets applied after a couple of ticks, then the remaining ones will enjoy it's buff.

In regards to your second question, it was generally accepted in TBC that it was optimal to trinket just before Rip. I would say it'd be safe to assume that has not changed much. Unsure what you mean on the SR part though, as SR should be always up.

For TPS, Haste is very good for bears, in a normal fight about 65% of your threat will be Maul, for survival however it's actually quite bad. In tank and spanks you won't find yourself with alot of aggro trouble except some very special situations, so don't actively go looking for haste.

Yes, that's how I do it now. I have both trinket and SR active when I apply Rip.

But SR is a must always? Let's say I'm hacking 3 trash mobs. Start with Mangle+Rake, SR, Shred, FB?

While the initial damage of Rake is applied via a bleed mechanic (bypasses armor), it does not benefit from the Mangle debuff. I tested this post 3.0.2 but pre-WotLK.

My understanding is that Mongoose still has a slight advantage over +35 - is this still true or is it just a matter of preference?

Another more generic question: running Violet Hold heroic last night I was really getting pounded pretty hard including a wipe to the second boss spawn (Ichoron) who seemed to nearly 3-hit me from 30k to 0 while frenzied. Is this what I should expect until doing a lot of upgrading or was there just a lack of understanding to the mechanics at play here?

Things like Frenzy is what you have cooldowns (Survival Instincts, Frenzied regen, barkskin and possibly trinkets) for, all heroics at the moment are fairly easy to do with just quest blues/T6.