That's why I specifically compared it to avoidance. Avoidance is always spiky and RNG based and does not always come when you need it, and often turns necessary proactive heals into overheal.

You say that as if increasing your HP by 4% every 6 seconds wouldn't be an incredibly huge overbudget benefit for just 2 talent points.

If even 1/3 of ILotP's healing turns out to be effective healing vs. bosses, it's well worth taking the points as a tank. In practice, I think it's better than 1/2, putting it on par with natural reaction as a mitigation talent.

Boy oh boy this has been a pet peeve of mine for the longest time. Does anyone know if this has ever been brought up to blizzard and what their rationale is for having ferocious bites consume energy even with OOC up?

Omen of Clarity is consumed on offensive abilities. SR being a self buff, it wouldn't make sense for it be consumed by the wording of OoC. I wouldn't consider it an offensive ability even though it does increase damage. I would consider it a defensive ability because it is buffing you and not doing something to anyone else.

The ferocious bites consuming your energy is annoying, but has anyone checked if the amount of extra damage is from your current energy bar instead of your energy bar minus 35 (cost to cast FB)?

I've wondered the same thing actually. I'll try to do some target dummy testing to see. It's a bit difficult to determine, just due to the wide range of damage that FB can hit for and the time it would take to build a reliable sample size. I should be able to at least get a good idea one way or another, but I doubt it could be determined as a certainty without a very large amount of testing.

Edit: Just for a quick idea, the extra 35 energy would only be worth about 800 extra damage at 6500 AP, about 1600 extra damage at 15000 AP. This is not taking into account talents or set bonuses.

Unless I'm missing something, you don't need a large set to test this, you just need one example where the damage done is outside the range of the damage possible if it was 35 energy less. According to wowhead, 35 energy on a 5CP ferocious bite adds 35*(9.4 + AP/410) additional damage before mitigation, so if you have 5000 AP, it'll shift the midpoint of the range by 755.83. Still according to wowhead, the damage range of ferocious bite at any given energy level is only 140, so that should put it well outside the max range. So do a 5 CP ferocious bite on a target dummy at 100 energy with no clearcasting, then do it again at 100 energy with a clearcasting proc. If they crit, calculate what the non-crit equivalent would have been (will depend on talents taken). If the damage difference is within 140 (actually, a little less than that depending on the armor mitigation of the dummy, but we could figure this out if ends up being close) then we're not getting the 35 energy free. If it's much larger (~610-900 reduced some by the armor mitigation) then we are getting the 35 energy for free.

Edit: Yes, you'd need to take any set bonuses or multipliers to FB into account before doing this

This is my dps for a boss fight. (Too embarrassed to link my patchwerk since my hateful tank died and i died a second later)

WOW Meter Online - The Best World of Warcraft Combat Log Analyse System!Fully support Wrath of the Lich King!

I don't think my mangle spam would > my shred rotation.

I thought I would post a snippet of comparision between myself and a shredder.

WWS Loading...

Osevin - 4900 DPS

Wow Web Stats

Laas - 3800 DPS

What's similar

Him
Rake (Physical) 2135 average 48% crit
Rip (Physical) 1776 average
Swing (Physical) 691 average 47 % crit 0% miss

Me
Swing (Physical) 637 average 51 % crit 3.4 % miss
Rip (Physical)1709 average 1.0 % miss
Rake (Physical) 2010 average 41 % crit

his physical attacks are doing ~10% more damage and hitting ~3.5% more often. Through gear/buffs/raid he is doing ~ 15% more damage than myself if he used the same rotation. My dps was 3800, his was 4900. He is doing 29% more damage than me.

Wow Web Stats

Laas - 4500 DPS

Round 2:

Him - 4900 dps - 3'36''

- Toskk's forums

Me - 4500 dps - 2'55''
- Using rip and 2T7 bonus for 19 second rips, 55/16 spec for hybrid tanking.
- Similar attacks are doing almost the same damage, slightly higher in my favor.
- My rip is higher due to the idol.
- He is doing ~5% more damage most likely due to rotation.
- I have slightly higher DOT uptime attributed to more energy available due to a lower cost mangle vs shred.

I'd thought about that as well. Unfortunately, I'm not positive on the effects that the different bonuses and talents have on each other (multiplicative/additive), and it also just sounds too complicated. I was thinking more along the lines of trying out a 1CP FB with and without clearcast while naked and unspec'd. That should give the smallest overall deviation in results and allow one to pick out the extra damage from the 35 energy a lot easier.

Round 3:

Cumulus - 4800 dps - 2'44''

Wow Web Stats

--

Laas - 4500 dps - 2'55''

Wow Web Stats

Average swing suggests slightly better gearing than myself, DOTS are slightly lower. Shred shows greater DPS and I don't think I can tighten my 2T6 mangle rotation up enough to the levels of shred. Can anyone find a competitive mangle report on patchwerk equivalent to an equally geared shredder?

Hopefully next week I'll be able to DPS on our 25 man Patchwerk. The only results I can produce are 10 man, but I haven't found a 10 man mangler to compare with.

Using Mangle to generate CPs for a more consistent SR/Rip cycle is only for very low gear level (and few group buffs). With full raid buffs and even a few epics, you should be critting enough to sustain the cycle. This is especially true with 2t7 and Rip glyph. With my moderate dps gear I find myself with far too many CPs mangle spamming.

After that, the point of using Mangle is to be able to fit FBs into the rotation, which i don't see you doing from your WWS. So, I have to imagine you are just wasting the extra CPs you are getting from Mangle spam. We can still fit FBs into rotation with Shred, but will end up with lower Rip uptime. It's hard to break the habit of keeping Rip up 100%, but models show usings FBs will increase dps.

There's really 4 levels I can see people switching cycles:

Starting at 80 with T6, Mangle spam to learn new style and generate more CPs with low crit.
After learning cycles and getting 2t7 plus some epics, switch to Shred cycle.
and/or
When comfortable with cycles and decent gear, Mangle spam again and try using SR/Rip/FB cycles.
With high gear level continue SR/Rip/FB cycles with Shred.

I think you're really over complicating this. Using my current spec, the only thing that affects a non-crit ferocious bite on non-bleeding targets is naturalist. So I switched into a gear set with low crit rate and 5329AP and tested on a level 70 dummy in IF. I used just mangle to generate combo points and used FB at 100 energy every time. I did a small set of 5 each way, but the results were fairly conclusive:

Non-crit FB with 100 energy and no clearcasting proc:
3823
3805
3740
3805
3767

Non-crit FB with 100 energy and a clearcasting proc:
4348
4363
4391
4405
4390

Admittedly, the sample sizes are small, but the deviations among each group are relatively small compared to the differences between the two sets. Additionally, the numbers line up with the rough guess I made earlier.

You're much better off slotting hit to cap before even thinking about slotting strength, you'll get a higher DPS increase out of capped hit than simply upping your strength.

I am still struggling to decide what to do with excess combo points, some times I find I have SR with 20 seconds left on it and a fresjly applied Rip up on the boss along with rake and mangle debuffs applied, I tend to get back up to 5 CP's and then have to either refresh SR early or sit there wasting the potential CP's before Rip drops off.

Other times I get a streak of non crits and dont seem to generate enough CP's. I think I will try to use FB on 2 or 3 CP's everytime I have just refreshed Rip and have several seconds of SR left. Any thoughts on this or something else I should be doing.

Is anyone aware of a mod that could help me with SR uptime, I would like something like a huge countdown bar? (similar to the old countdown bars from boss mods)

For uptimes I use classtimer. They are default a bit small. I am thinking of making em way bigger, but haven't found the time yet to do so. Don't know if it is possible.

I don't agree with your first paragraph. The only buffs that will change a druid's CP/s is crit and haste(ooc procs). Ferals already have the most powerful crit buff. So, through Heart of the Crusader, BoK, and SoE, you get ~6% crit, and improved windfury gives 20% haste. I don't see how that can push you from struggling to maintain 75% uptime on rip(see my gear, tested it for 3 hours on the boss dummy), to an overabundance of CP's(5 CP rip and whatever CP SR up all the time). Just seems like too big a jump in my mind.

I have raided with that gear using a shred rotation, and I definitely didn't maintain 100% rip uptime. Hopefully will get a chance with this mangle build this weekend.

I use Power Auras Classic and you can scale the icon to any size as well as the timer attatched to it, personally I have a big paw on my screen near my other relevant info so I always know how much time remains on SR.

I know that this is not an uncommon opinion, but Toskk's site suggests that +1str > +1hit for just about every combination of AP and Crit you'd normally find (for example his model suggests at 11000 ap with 30% crit, +1hit > +1str).

Does alternate theorycrafting refute this? I noticed that in one of the WWS reports above there was a really high DPS report with a substantial % miss (suggesting that Tossk's model is correct perhaps?).

I'm eager to see further math exploring this, if anyone is willing (I'm basically ignoring hit gems/enchants in favor of str/AP, and still seeing numbers I'm really pleased with).

The issue is that the theorycrafting and modeling use an averaged dps cycle. This results in strength being a better stat but what a lot of people have found is that capping hit/expertise let them maintain a much more consistent cycle which leads to them doing higher dps. Your variation from fight to fight will also be reduced if you cap hit and expertise. It comes down to personal preference on what you want to gear for.

NeedToKnow - Addons - Curse
NeedToKnow is what I use, thanks to RoboStac on page 2 of the Druid Simple Questions/Simple Answers sticky. It's dirt simple to use, and can track buffs or debuffs. So right below my targets I can see how long SR has left, along with Rip, Rake, and Mangle.

If in fact it does come down to personal preference, it's therefore faulty to suggest (as has been done earlier in the thread) that slotting hit is what you want/need to do before you even think about slotting strength.

Secondly, your point about variation in cycles is well-taken, but doesn't seem intuitive to me. Our cycles are all about managing our current combo points, and planning for future combo points, so of course less variation = better use/planning. That said, we're already talking about quite a bit of variablility, considering that CP generation is largely based on crits. OoC procs often, and crits (obviously) happen often, so at any given time our CP generation can vary quite a bit; why gem/enchant for hit to eliminate a small contribution (miss chance) to this variablility INSTEAD of maximizing DPS? Selecting hit to make maintaining a cycle easier, rather than maximizing DPS, seems to be living in the "I need to maintain my rotation" mindset, rather than the new "I need to maintain my priority list of buffs/debuffs" mindset.

That said, I'm assuming there's a population of people who would argue that hit > str, in a pre-cap point-to-point DPS comparison. If so, I would love to see the math (I apologize for not presenting any of my own, at this point I'm trusting Toskk's models, but if I shouldn't be, I certainly want to know why!).

Here's a very important update about Rawr: http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t21713-r...1/#post1008310

It left out the mangle bonus to shred! So all this talk (in part by me) of mangle spam being adequate even without 2T6 turns out to be misinformed. Sad face for the OT bears like me that thought they could get away with just mangle spam and no shredding attacks. Not unless we want to lose 100 DPS!