david0925

To save your time; strength is better now for 2 reasons
1.Savage Roar: this makes strength scale faster than it used to. Agility is better at ridiculous gear level that it is not worth discussing right now

2.Gear Choices: since our leather gear has a lot of agility now, you will not lack agility, having additional agility means ap/strength will relatively become better.

Maniq is my hero

 

Grimcat

I think you're right. The extra avoidance/mitigation, while certainly nice, is not quite as useful as other trinkets. In my case, I'll only get an opportunity to tank in specialized circumstances. I think it's the Eye where you need a tank with 40k+ health to survive the 20k attack and 15k AOE. I'm better off with the Essence of Gossamer and the Alchemist trinket for tanking.

Next Monday I'll turn my deck in for the Strength trinket. I was really skeptical when I read on EJ that strength was better than agility. I wanted to hit 50% crit so badly. Instead I replaced my agility gems with strength, and my agility enchants with AP. My dps skyrocketed. Last Friday I had 3400dps on Patchwerk (WWS showed I did just over a million damage in that fight). Strength is the way to go.

 

a civilian

No less reliable than avoidance in the first place. Due to the random nature of avoidance and the relatively short duration and cooldown of the effect, I can almost guarantee there will not be a noticeable difference between the 300 agility proc and a flat 90 (or so) agility.

 

kalbear

It's about as reliable and useful for overall damage reduction as mongoose is. Well, moreso since it's about double the value, but it's basically the same dependability.

I no longer use essence of gossamer or defender's code except in very specific situations. At higher gear levels the health is not necessary and the armor doesn't do enough compared to DM:G. I would definitely recommend using DM:G + essence over Defender's Code + essence unless you're going against Patch.

 

Inaiwae

I use essence of gossamer only on S3D. Everywhere else, including patchwek, i use DG +90 agi (i have like 44k HP buffed).

If you are typical druid, who spends 50% time tanking and 50% dpsing, i'd definitely recommend agility version of the darkmoon card.

 

Vaccine

I really liked DM:G for tanking, I went with the 90 agility version as at the time I was 90% tanking, 10% dps though this has swung to about the opposite proportion now that we've recruited a few more tanks. Other slot I use the JC trinket which is pretty awesome, the 1 min CD is fantastic.

 

david0925

I'm going to retract the statement on DM:G Agility for tanking, but not because of the proc, but because of stat allocation. 90 agility translate to 135 stamina in terms of item budget, which means that if you want a balance of stat, then you'll get more by getting the agility deck+ stamina gem, versus if you use gossimer and use +agility gem.

The proc itself has a decent uptime so it may make a difference, but we are talking about 300 agility at lvl 80, the contribution to dodge is not very high.

Maniq is my hero

 

kalbear

300 agility at level 80 is around 4-5% dodge depending on how much you've stacked dodge. That's pretty awesome. It's also 600 armor by itself.

 

Allev

I just wanted to correct these misconceptions.

1: SR has very little to do with it. If you kept everything else equal in TBC, SR would have relatively little effect on relative values of stats. The value of hit, expertise, etc. scale with the amount of AP you have and get more valuable. Having more AP is great, but because the other stats are percentage stats rather than absolute, they actually scale pretty closely with AP. You can see this with the relative value of hit rating to AP: this didn't really change from TBC t4 to WotLK t7. The same is true of most other stats in relative value. Agility might have even been worth more compared to Strength, since the percent of our damage in bleeds would have gone down.

2: Agility is actually a "balanced" addition: half of its value (roughly) is AP, half of it is in crit. A balanced investment of agility actually sticks a lot closer to the balance line than hit/expertise/raw crit/ArPen/haste.

The first real reason agility is no longer our best DPS stat is because it was nerfed. The ratio of crit from agility to crit rating changed so that crit rating is a better source of raw crit; they used to be about equal, except you also got a point of AP from agility. Now we are more in line with rogues and other melee classes in value of stats on our gear.

The second real reason agility is no longer our best DPS stat is because we use Rake in our rotation now. More bleed damage (as a percentage of our total damage) means crit is worth less as a percentage of our total damage, which means agility is worth less.

Remember: knowing how your DPS actually works is the first step towards learning how to optimize DPS on your own!

 

Altarion

Hi,

I have some basic questions about [Darkmoon Card: Greatness] as a feral tanking trinket. How good is this trinket? How does it rate in respect to the alternatives? All else equal, would it be better in the hands of a physical dps'er, over a feral tank, or do both have a good claim? Thanks.

 

• Caniki

For gear questions, you should consult Rawr. It's most likely best in slot for the feral in question though.

I don't understand how obtaining it is an issue though. It's easily obtainable by anyone with enough time or money.

 

Balroth

RAWR gogo

I'll even post you a link: Rawr - Release: Rawr 2.1.9

The guy above you just made the same mistake please read through threads before you post. Or at least the last few.

 

Druidmanz

so I'm hit capped and I use the newest version of RAWR.

I am feral dps and I never OT. So rawr suggest the darkmoon cards as the 2 best ones with the str one first and agi second. But as a third best trinket I get Grim Toll - Item - World of Warcraft is this due to the armor penetration? Is armor penetration really that good for kitties?

And on fourth trinket RAWR tells me to use Mirror of Truth - Item - World of Warcraft

This confuses me a bit... Cause I see that the creator of this thread listed Fury of the Five Flights - Item - World of Warcraft as third best. Did rawr forget Fury of the Five Flights - Item - World of Warcraft , or is this trinket not so good for feral kitties?

Ty in advance

 

• jonny

Are you sure you're hit capped? I'd guess RAWR is valuing the grim troll so high for the hit rating since the armor pen has no effect on a large amount of your damage.

 

Pike

I just added that trinket manually and assigned it 320ap for the time being.

 

Allev

For most classes, armor penetration doesn't affect a significant portion of a class's damage. Rogues have poisons and bleeds, hunters have non-melee shots and pets which don't benefit, DKs and pallies have spells, warriors have a bleed. Ferals thus are probably one of the classes that benefit the most from additional armor penetration, and it shows up in stat weights.

As it is, Armor Penetration looks to be balanced with all these things in mind, instead of balancing it being effective on 100% of damage. It actually ends up being decent for us, relative to other classes (and other DPS stats). Especially if you work FBs into your cycle.

 

Kiryojo

I recently switched over all my gems to Armor Penetration, from a previous combination of Str/Hit. I have every good armor penetration piece (the leather PvP boots are pretty awful) except for the [Greatring of Collision]. This puts me at a passive 23% or so armor penetration ([Greatring of Collision] would bring it to about 26%), whereas my old setup had a passive 15% ArP.

The big reason for the switch was getting [Grim Toll], which boost my ArP to around 63% when its up. I wanted to see how it performed vs. Mark of Truth (my other trinket being an Agi Greatness Card), as well as just ArP in general.

Overall, my dps feels a bit lower. I've gotten autoattack crits at 2770 or so (not on Thaddius), while my best without heavy ArP stacking is around 2470. My Shreds of course hit much harder, and I consistently see them break 10k. One thing I do miss is the crit rating from Mark of Truth; I actually had a non crit FB on Patchwerk recently, since my gear is so heavily focused on ArP. This is all nice, but I lose quite a bit of damage on my DoT abilities, as well as a fair chunk of Crit & Atk from changing my gems around.

My best Patchwerk attempt without heavy focus on ArP was approx 5.9k, while my best with ArP was about 5.4k, though it is very, very important to note the 15% difference in crit rate on Shred between the two, which messes up the sample a lot. I don't have a lot of WWS data for this yet since this weeks Patchwerk wasn't recorded, and the week before that I was still using Mark of Truth + Str/Hit gems. The 5.4k number comes from Recount, which can have slightly different results than WWS.

Here's some WWS for various parts of 3 different Naxx Runs.

Mark of Truth/Str/Hit:
Wow Web Stats
Wow Web Stats

Grim Toll/ArP:
Wow Web Stats

My current plan is to switch back to Str/Hit when I get a Fury of the Five Flights, which would drop me down to about 15% ArP.

http://sig.gamerdna.com/quizzes/INFL...ks/Kiryojo.png

 

maiez

How about [Incisor Fragment]?

Very nice trinket from King Dred in Heroic Drak'Tharon Keep.

ps: first post... hi

 

thalys

On [Extract of Necromantic Power]:

Yes, it procs on our bleeds. I used it on KT after winning it last night. We also had a afflic warlock who had it, which provided some good fodder for comparison. Observations (noting that obviously one fight is about as anecdotal as you can get with first hand evidence...):

-He got one more proc, 10 to my 9. The internal cooldown appears, at first glance, to dominate the discussion here provided you can keep your dots rolling (and you'd better...). Obviously, as I said, this is only one fight.

-I got a miss, because I'm not spell hit capped. He did not.

-We each got one partial resist, but mine did substantially less damage. I'm no warlock expert, but I would be unsurprised to learn that they have some resistance reduction on shadow damage. Then again, with only the two events, this could fall under pure RNG, too.

-My crit rate was higher than his (not a surprise). My crit *damage* was higher than his, which was a surprise, but this is only 3 crits from each of us, so it's hardly what I'd call a good sample.

Ultimately the difference between the damage we did with it was his extra proc, and he had more time on target due to a little accident with an add tank and a frost blast that had me momentarily distracted, so my bleeds may have fallen off briefly. We *each* had 30+ second gaps (where the other person got 3 procs inbetween two of ours). Comparatively (he typically outdamages me, for reasons that can only be attributed to my suckitude as near as I can tell) the proc was roughly the same % of our DPS. So it'slooks comparably (though probably not quite equally) good for us and an afflic lock, at first glance--and the afflic lock should be the poster child for who benefits from this trinket. It's clearly pretty strong for us. I'm definitely not regretting bidding on it.

 

mydhrin

I would be very interested to see this trinket inserted in Rawr so that we could compare its relative value to other trinkets like DM:G and Grim Toll.

 

Mijae

Assuming capped melee hit and Misery (4% spell miss) and 18% spell crit:

Base Dmg = (788+1312)/2 = 1050
Crit = 1050 * 1.5 * 1.03 = 1622
Avg Dmg = Crit*0.18 + Base*0.82 = 1153 * 0.96 = 1107

With 100% Rip and Rake uptime: 1/3 + 1/2 = 0.833 tick/sec

Proc has 10% chance per tick with 15s cooldown. For simplicity, let's say the average wait is 5 ticks.

1107 / (15 + 5*0.833) ~= 57.8 DPS


The biggest problem about modeling this trinket (and similar proc effects) is that they use spell mechanics, which are generally not modeled. They also require testing to which mechanics are actually applied. I try to give very rough approximations, but I'm sure there are factors missing. Based on my initial modeling, in max dps spec/gear this trinket rates quite low.

However, Thalys reported that his crit procs were higher than a warlock's, which might indicate the proc takes on the damage type of the period damage. This could be similar to how the proc from [Shattered Sun Pendant of Might] had mixed melee/spell mechanics. If it counts as magic, with a 13% spell damage raid buff the damage goes up to 65.3 DPS. This puts it roughly equal to [Mirror of Truth] (depending on other gear). If it counts as physical, it would need PI and Naturalist applied (as well as melee hit/crit).

Also note that was assuming 100% bleed uptimes. The value goes down as bleed uptime goes down. If using a 5SR/5Rip/5FB rotation you would expect Rip uptime to drop as low as 60%.

Feral DruidStats spreadsheet
v3.2.0.0.xls - updated 8/4/2009

 

endymonium

Just want to mention that with the changes to armor pen and crit rating coming with the next patch, this list get's shuffled a bit.

E.g. the Incisor Fragment is not bad choice now.

 

Duilliath

I could see this move up a bit on the list as well, with dots critting the trinket just became a wee bit more interesting.

An thenn tehy wuz al ded. Srsly. (Exodus 1)

 

kalbear

Why is that? Optimal DPS uptime had 100% uptime on DoTs anyway, and a crit dot won't trigger this any more than a normal DoT will.

 

Broseph

Because the 95 critical strike rating will now increase DoT damage, Kalbear. Its increased value has nothing to do with the proc.