Duilliath I have found my DPS varies a reasonable amount from attempt to attempt too, they are irritating mobs to DPS due to their stupidly small hit box and tendency to move around a lot. Tanking location and which way the tank moves fo avoid the fire walls will effect your time on target, do you have this sorted first so you aren't just playing chase the mob?
Also instead of looking at the overall DPS figure look at how much damage you are doing to each Drake.
If you are competitive here it would indicate you are losing damage, compared to others, on target changes. If you aren't competitive on the drakes at least you have something to work on improving.
Where the adds are tanked will effect the DPS of other classes, warriors will be using whirlwind anyway so bonus mobs being in range will buff their overall damage done, similarly deathknights and paladins will also gain overall damage while not effecting their primary targets damage.
Given that getting the drakes down quickly is important you don't want to be wasting energy on swipe until it is time to clean up the AoE mobs. I wouldn't expect rogues to be using Fan of Knives or casters using AoE while drakes are up, if this is happening I would say people are padding the meters.
I am currently working on two macros which attempt to maximize dps upon trash mobs and boss pulls, utilizing the knowledge gained from this thread, and in-game experience. I've spent several hours in front of a target dummy, and have came up with a trash mob macro (essentially a 30 second max dps fight) and a boss fight macro (geared for >90 second fights). I am looking for any improvements which can be gained by adjusting the sequence around, and attempting to provide others sort of a "I'm so drunk I can only hit 2 keys, but still want to get above 2500 dps" macro set. Try em out and let me know what you think I could change, or what works well.
I think that really misses sort of the point of the cat rotation, thornwalker. Unless you are hit and expertise capped and are facing a mob with no movement - and you have 100% crit - this will be suboptimal.
For instance, let's go with the boss mob macro. If you shred-rake-shred and don't hit with one of those, you're guaranteed to be under 5 CP when you rip. If you do hit with all but you don't crit twice, you'll be under 5 CP when you rip. If you miss the following mangle, you won't be able to SR and your mangle will be off. If your rake-shred-mangle doesn't hit or doesn't do 5CP, you're doing another <5 rip.
The best DPS you're going to be able to do is going to be a reactive dps cycle that you're going to need to pay attention to. If you want something you don't want to pay attention to, do mangle shredx4, sr, mangle shredx4, rip. And even then it's still bad.
The macro has no way of knowing if an attack missed or not. All it does is look at the sequence and hit the next attack in the sequence with each key press.
A cast sequence macro will still not be a good idea, even if you are hit & expertise caps as it also doesn't tak into account crits giving two combo points. You will lose a lot of DPS if you are using it.
IIRC, castsequence macros retry missed attacks until they land, so the missing doesn't matter.
No, castsequence macros retry things until they actually attempt the move. So if you're in a GCD and hit it, attempt to use an ability out of range, or flat out cannot do that ability for some reason, it doesn't progress to the next move. If it attempts it (even if the cast is canceled, interrupted, misses etc), the macro moves on.
It doesn't matter, cast sequencing a feral "rotation" is the worst idea ever.
Assuming the guy who posted that in the first place was actually serious, and not winding everybody up, I suggest you instead just bind your abilities to individual keys, use a dot timer or similar to track your bleeds, SR etc, and use a priority sequence which, if you actually read this thread, you might have a good idea about.
Hmm... I actually was serious. Fully raid buffed, I typically get 3.1-3.5k dps out of this macro... My gear isn't *that* great. I'm not saying that keeping an eye on cooldowns, and hitting the right key at the right moment wouldn't provide better dps. It certainly would provide a higher dps than the given macro's.
The macro set does not account for misses at all, or to see if 5cp finishers are even on the mob. What it does do is provide some basic timings. It would be interesting to see some macro similar to these which provides a basis for SR, mangle, rake, and rip rotation, and leave it open to manually fill in the shreds to 5cp.
I was looking for some constructive criticism on the rotation.
Auto-attacks alone do around 1800 dps. I think you'd be better off doing a mangle-mangle-mangle-mangle-mangle-mangle-sr rotation than use the macro.
Besides you win a lot of dps by shredding on clearcast so you don't want to use a castsequence macro.
the only cast sequence macro (and it works fine for me) its a combination of RIP and FB.
/castsequence reset = 15 RIP, Ferocious Bite
This will RIP, then use FB if you have more than 4-5 seconds left on RIP or avoid reapplying rip before it expires. In an average fight it screw up with respect to the right rotation no more than once.
EDIT: I always look at debuff monitor. I know when I can use it and when I must use individual ability.
as my spam-button, give that my chance to miss at this point is ~0. As it is, I try to stay away from macros, but I just have too many buttons!
The problem with these macros is that at the end of the day you're just dumbing down your "rotation" instead of paying 100% attention to it like you need to be. I tried to build several macros similar to the one above, but I would end up missing clearcasts, getting castsequences stuck (sometimes you can't clip Rip), etc. MY DPS is the best when I just pay attention, and punch different hotkeys as I need them without trying to automate anything.
Although that said I CAN see the utility of a [mangle -> FR -> swipe -> swipe -> TF -> swipe -> swipe macro] macro for trash mobs.
The problem with these macros is that at the end of the day you're just dumbing down your "rotation" instead of paying 100% attention to it like you need to be. I tried to build several macros similar to the one above, but I would end up missing clearcasts, getting castsequences stuck (sometimes you can't clip Rip), etc. MY DPS is the best when I just pay attention, and punch different hotkeys as I need them without trying to automate anything.
Although that said I CAN see the utility of a [mangle -> FR -> swipe -> swipe -> TF -> swipe -> swipe macro] macro for trash mobs.
Having tried paying 100% attention to my DPS cycle, I can attest that this will, in fact, lead to standing in fire.
You need to watch timers for rip, SR, mangle, rake, faerie fire, and tiger's fury. You need to watch energy. You need to watch CP count. You may need to watch threat.
I think the point is-- the plan isn't very clear in a "do this if..." cycle, especially adding in FBs and the like. "Do this if you have time" absolutely kills me-- if I have 20 energy, 5CP, my rip and SR will collide in 10 seconds, and my rake is dropping NOW-- that's 5 steps of logic that need to be worked through instantly; if my intuition is FB, can I figure that out in time to hit they key at the precise time where it isn't a waste of energy? The situation is drastically different if I'm at 45 energy.
Personally that's the real fun and challenge of the cat cycle and what makes cat DPS so compelling; it is absolutely complex with a large set of decisions to make all the time. Being able to reduce this to a macro would be uninteresting, and the difficulty can really differentiate good players from mediocre ones.
This is, I believe, the sort of thing blizzard should be encouraging in general.
Have to concur that I love the complexity of feral dps. I find myself getting better and better at it with practice. Yes, I think we all occasionally find ourselves in an "OH CRAP!!!" situation with our timers but I find myself being better able to avoid that by looking further ahead. If our focus is 6-8 seconds out we have a much harder time than when our focus is 10-12 seconds out. I really enjoy the fact that there is room to grow in our execution.
Now if only they adequately address our current scaling issues I'll be completely happy.
Personally that's the real fun and challenge of the cat cycle and what makes cat DPS so compelling; it is absolutely complex with a large set of decisions to make all the time. Being able to reduce this to a macro would be uninteresting, and the difficulty can really differentiate good players from mediocre ones.
This is, I believe, the sort of thing blizzard should be encouraging in general.
I completely agree. Feral Druid is the only DPS class that can keep me interested in attacking a target dummy for hours on end. I love what they've done with the class.
Early on in 3.0.2 I was desperately trying to hang on to my castsequence macros as a Feral, and got shot down in these forums. With BadKitty keeping track of all debuffs/selfbuffs/OOC procs and cooldowns became a lot easier. To the point where I could avoid standing in the fire and increase my dps from mediocre-at-best to top 3 in a raiding guild that vastly outgeared me.
I have a feral on my raid team, he is one of our off tanks if required but we have a pretty good tank corps overall. So most of the time he's asked to DPS, which is fine with him, but I dunno it just seems he can't get into the groove of DPS as a cat.
He may or may not have seen this thread, either way he probably should.
I'm wondering if any druids in the community could give me and him an idea of where he's falling behind in terms of a DPS.
As a guild we've had Naxx on farm for a long while, had everything cleared December 7th. Until recently we haven't been cracking down on individual performance as much as we should have been now with the focus turning to achievements we're starting to put performance under the microscope a little more.
Here is a WWS the other day of our unsuccessful Malygos 6 mins tries: Wow Web Stats
We were extremely close to getting him up into the air before the second vortex, an extra thousand or two DPS would help from start to finish in terms of that. I realize Malygos isn't the best benchmark for melee DPS but in terms of overall damage he still seems very low.
You use in a cat fight:
mangle, shred, rake, savage roar, rip, FB, TF, Berserk (8 ability), and then you still room for cat charge, dash, suvival instinct, barkskin.
And Faery Fire? And, heavens forbid, Cower? (If Blizzard is actually going to make good on their promise to make threat matter and boost cats some.)
What about Cat Swipe?
I'll just ignore the fact that some people don't like reorganising their hotbar everytime they PvP or PvE either.
Ignorance can be solved with a book. Stupidity requires a shotgun and a shovel.
First problem: he´s not using the perfect cat-spec, he makes tradeoffs to tanking (see talents: Feral Swiftness, Feral Instincts, King of the Jungle). At a fight like Malygos, these three talents are worth pure gold, as you need to move a lot, have P2 to swipe things down, and KotJ is just necessary for catting.
Next is is gear - maybe it´s just his heroic-tanking gear, but he´s using non-optimal gear for cat. But i won't go into this too much, as he really seems to wear tanking (KotJ 2/3, but at your WWS he gets 60 energy for a Tiger's Fury).
Looking at his Naxx-performace, he seems to wear tankgear for most fights... Compare my swings to his ones . It doesn't get better at other fights, even worse.
Another obvious thing is his lack of Tiger's Fury-usage - at some fights he doesn't even use it once (Sapphiron). This would explain his really high percentage of swing-dmg he always has.
I think he should take an hour or two on a heroic-dummy. Sounds boring (it is), but it helps a lot to sharp "rotation". Proper usage of addons like TellMeWhen and BadKitty (links anywhere on the last pages) will help, too.
Regarding cat-swipe... Does anyone else feel it might be too strong? Since 3.0.8, i became trash-king in my raid simply because of that ability, right next to my top-boss-dps (though I'm sury it isn't too much, comparing to other raids) some of my melee-companions feel like cheated, as they simply cannot reach me (well, beside evil-frost-dk).
I'd say the main problem is his awful rotation. Looking through a few of the fights there seems to be no consistency with his abilities. Sometimes there's too much mangle and no shred, another fight lots of shred and ferocious bites. But generally speaking, it seems he's spamming mangle too much and then using FB as his main finisher which is just a no-no. It's also hard to tell the Savage Roar uptime through wws.
I'd suggest you tell him to download Badkitty (love this addon), read this thread and spend some quality time with the boss dummy as has been suggested.
Centarion, while I do agree, cat-swipe is very strong. But only really in bursts, which makes it exceptionally useful for short lived trash. I have been astonishing people on raids with my sudden amazing aoe, but once we used our initial swipe->swipe->TF->swipe->swipe combo, we just run out of steam as we wait for energy or OoC procs.
Having tried paying 100% attention to my DPS cycle, I can attest that this will, in fact, lead to standing in fire.
You need to watch timers for rip, SR, mangle, rake, faerie fire, and tiger's fury. You need to watch energy. You need to watch CP count. You may need to watch threat.
I think the point is-- the plan isn't very clear in a "do this if..." cycle, especially adding in FBs and the like. "Do this if you have time" absolutely kills me-- if I have 20 energy, 5CP, my rip and SR will collide in 10 seconds, and my rake is dropping NOW-- that's 5 steps of logic that need to be worked through instantly; if my intuition is FB, can I figure that out in time to hit they key at the precise time where it isn't a waste of energy? The situation is drastically different if I'm at 45 energy.
I found that having visible debuff bars in many nice colors help me immensely in letting me concentrate on the environment while still being to dps full force.
I use RoguePowerBars, which can be easily setup, I made them quite big and in middle on my screen. I use a specific distinct bright color for each self buff (SR, clearcasting) and debuff (mangle, rip, rake, FFF) I need to track. It had been said before in this and other cat threads, the excellent thing about RPB is that it tracks other's mangles too. After some hours of playing, I began to react instinctively to decision making about what to do next by just having the colored bars run out/refresh. My energy and combo points are also just below them, so one quick glance is all i need to know where i am in my "cycle". This works for me as the visuality and visibility of the bars make it very easy to not absoultely have to focus all my attention to them, thus freeing up looking at the whole of my screen.
From a Druid that just last night walked, for the first time, in feral shoes this thread has been a huge help and a wealth of information.
Thank you to all that have contributed, and I'm very excited to try out the addons listed above to help out. With nothing else to do tonight, me and the test dummy are going to get quite fond.
My DPS right now is 1600-1800 on a test dummy. Horrible, compared to others in my raid, and hope to improve that with a better understanding, and practice with rotation.
02/05/09, 11:22 AM
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