General (about stats):

The gear selection I made in the open page (It's not yet updated with all Ulduar loots) and stats ranking, is done for a 5 minute static fight and average out dps over 100k fights.

What doesn't take into account is movement, simplicity, human error, stability. It's also based on a pre-Ulduar best in slot druids (not so strange really, Naxx25 it's so easy...).

What does it means?
Basically if you see the stats you will se that there are Arpen and Agility on top and then AP/Feral AP/Hit/Expertise/Str/Crit/Haste all very near each other. Basically every stats are around 10% from eachother, while the dps standard deviation is around 15%.

Actually your stats can influence dps in 2 different ways: stable dps /burst dps.

Into the stable dps slot go:
Arpen, AP, Str

Into burst dps slot go:
crit, (Agi, it's between them giving both AP and Crit)

Into Anti-burst dps slot go:
Hit, Expertise

Haste both stabilize dps with itself effect and add randomness increasing OOC procs.

After a lot of fights I think that having a stable cycle and a stable dps is the more important things. That's why, given a small dps difference between gear I tend to gem/choce gear for Arpen and try to cap hit/expertise also if they are not the "best stats".
Obviously you need to start with a good hit/crit/exp/haste total to be sure to generate enough cps for your cycle. After that probably the best choce is stability. For example many rogues (remember the old Vanilla-TBC days) prefered things that increased their white damage for a better cycle stability.

As said by Temelin you have in front of you a choce:
Go for dots (agi gemming, rip/rake max uptime cycle)? Or go for instant high damage (Arpen gemming, shred/FB (obviosly you still rake/rip) cycle)?
The dps difference is not that big, from my simulation it's about 5-10% more dps for the second choce. The difference is smaller than the average dps difference you will see from fight to fight, but what really make the second choce better in a real environment is stability and simplicity (using FBN addon), at least in my opinion.

@Deathwing: As a rule of thumb:
low level gear (blue): 4cp SR
medium level gear (naxx10-heroic): 3cp SR
high level gear (naxx25-Maly-Sarth): 2cp SR
Tier 8 gear (4 T8): 1cp SR

+/-1 cp to SR only change your dps output by 2-3% on average.

The best way to see what suite best for you is download my simulation program, put your gear into the simulator and try out different values for SR, the dps difference is to small to test it in the real game.

@Kalbear: As I said before I'll put font choce in the next release, badly I'm a little under pressure at work those days.

@tr33hugger: the FFF switch is only for cats. For bears there is no reason to avoid FFF suggestion. FFF is our best TPS (and obviosly TPR) move next to mangle. You must use it every CD, they have increased its damage (and threat) with 3.1 and now no longer generate errors with moonkins and SPriest.

@Tauran: actually the suggester shows move a little before the right time based on your latency. In the next release I'll add a "human latency" scroll to set it to an higher than real value to take into account human reflexes. Remember that if RIP->SR shifts on the fly but you RIP, it's not the end of the world.

@Skandar (RIP Issue): the addon will never ask you to clip rip. I've tested it and (done Razor) and I was unable to replicate your bug. Are you using my addon for both suggester and ability track? Because I know that (probably fixed by now) badkitty have some problem with rip time. Actually you can try it on target dummies and see that when you shred the rip timer goes up (it's not an internal timer but it takes it from boss debuff, so it's done automatically), I'll investigate this issue further.
EDIT: I've probably found your problem.
This is the decision line for rip:
As you can see it shows rip depending on your latency, if you have a big lag spike it can show rip some second ahead, actually it's not a "real" bug, I can try to put a maximum value on lag.

@Double trinket problem: I don't know yet if it's better to gem agi and go for double Arpen trinket or go for 1 arpen trinket and gem Arpen, If I should put my bet on something I'll put it on the second choce, but when I'll revamp gear choce for the simulation I'll obviosly test it.

Even though I have avoided agi vs. ArP discussions I want to add some notes to it since it further seems to cause confusion.

Nightcrowler already made the break down to stable/burst dps. Agility is not only between those two categories because of the stats it provides (crit/ap) but also because it affects our bleed damage as opposed to ArP. With that said, another aspect comes into consideration: movement. Movement is not simulated (it can't be), so the stat weights that the leading simulations (FBN/SimCraft) suggest only take static fighting situations into account, which they both state also. This is a highly unrealistic situation! In real world encounters melee classes have to move a lot, and bleeds are a way to keep up some dps even though we cannot hit. This moves agility even further to the stable dps category evening out inverse peaks and therefore agility is 'naturally' underrated by these simulations. It is hard to prove the following statement but my guess is that the movement factor would probably negate this ArP advantage.

The second advantage of agility is its great performance as a defensive stat. Pure DPS cats can stop reading here, but Cat/Bear druids will want to use agility gems, because most items won't be available multiple times for the next months, unless you are a selfish raid leader. Agi is a great hybrid stat and the best choice in a proceeding environment, which we have at the moment.

The moment I would totally switch to ArP gems is when a ArP limit is exceeded and rake is completely thrown out of our rotation because it can't compete with shred's dpe anymore. At the same time, FB will probably be the finisher of choice, eliminating all bleed effects from our rotation. Right now I can't say if this will ever become reality, because of a ArP cap reducing enemy armor to 0, but it sounds like there is a chance.

In conclusion, according to the above mentioned reasons, I wouldn't recommend the use of ArP gems in the current state of Ulduar progress. Maybe later on (probably even after Ulduar), when we have seperate cat/bear gear and the ArP level gets closer to the cap, ArP becomes a real option (for me at least).

EDIT: Maybe we should think about discussing these things in the cat rotation thread or in a seperate, new thread? (not meant to backseat moderate )

Yeah i totally agree with that. But even if FFF is on CD, it shows FFF in the suggestion screen, not mangle or lacerate.

There is just one issue I noticed after the latest build: it stopped showing Clearcast proccs in either of the two little icons to the left of the main move suggestion frame. I tried turning on the Clearcast "star" graphical effect but it only started showing the star itself.

The options I have turned on (this is just in case it might have something to do with it) are: stats pane, move prediction, move suggestion. Everything else is off.

And again, thank you for the work

You explicitly do have to change the cycle.

- you need to try to keep your Rip up during the break, even if that means refreshing it early.
- you need to explicitly NOT FB before a break if your other timers will run out during the break. You prevent the start-of-fight dip in DPS that way. Specifically, 5.7% SR downtime (non-break) and 20% Rip downtime should be improved upon.
- you need to purposely drain all your energy before a break, so you get the full benefit of regen.

Sometimes if i have 10+ seconds on rip left and I know a break is about to come up I'll build up as much CP as I can to save them for when I can get back in and pop SR right away (if it has fallen). There are a lot of factors that you can't simulate.

Night, I believe you were right about lag affecting the issue i had with rip being asked to clip the other day. We were experiencing some strange server lag that night. Thanks for pointing it out. I didn't have any issues at all last night on Razor or XT.

To all, once again last night on XT i had an issue with not being able to reapply rip. This time i was attacking the heart, no other feral in raid, and it showed "more powerful spell" issue again. Positioning wasnt an issue as i could shred and bite with no problems. Has anyone else encountered this issue with Rip.

How would you possibly have enough time for 2 Rips on the heart? There is hardly enough time for 1 full duration.

Some feedback on the addon: I didn't really look at the optimization, more at the appearence. When I first saw the amount of hud space it required I asked myself if I had enough room on the screen As it turns out, some of the bars aren't really useful (at least for me) and it was easy to turn them off in the config window.

Cat mode: impressive. Actually, I'd say "scary". I did a dummy test and I gained some 300 DPS, bringing the value in line with the theoretical simulation from Toskks.While at times the "suggestion" icon changes frantically, leading to some mistakes, it doesn't seem to affect overall performance a lot. As I wrote, I didn't pay too much attention to the cycle itself, but I didn't see anything particularly weird. It's similar to what I already do, with the exception of better timing and using FB, something which I avoid to do as I always felt it messing up my timers (that's why I have 0 talent enhancement on it).

Bear mode: nice, but overall less impressive. The suggestion flickers a lot more, and it's a much harder to follow. After some testing, this is due to the fact that I'm always keeping maul on, and the addon seems unable to account for it in the rage bar. As a consequence, it shifts VERY often from some reasonable thing to FFF just because a maul occured, draining the rage bar before the next move could be applied. I'm not sure I can provide a suggestion on how to fix it, one idea would be to track the auto-attack timer and NOT provide a suggestion if the attack will occur shortly in the future. This would make the suggestion more stable, as it would wait to see what the rage value is after the attack, since maul could drain it (preventing the suggested move) or a white attack could increase it (allowing a more rage-expensive move). This may slow things down, but I find that compared to cat mode, the bear is a lot less time-critical.

And I know that this may sound weird, but I'll not be using the addon for the DPS.
The reason is that while doing the DPS rotation, I really felt like a bot.... actually I felt I could leave and go drink some tea and the addon would do the job better than me, if it just had fingers. I'll go back to my suboptimal DPS looking at timers on eventhorizon or needtoknow but making decisions myself instead of having the game do it for me. Please don't misunderstand me, it's just that I think that fun has priority on performance, and while developing the addon is certainly very interesting (I write my own simulators as well), using it makes the game a lot less fun. I'll keep following the developement because it's interesting, of course

Thanks for your work..... e un saluto da parte di un altro giocatore italiano

@ Mijae, sorry, not "reapply" but apply. Still showed "more powerful spell".

I just checked my fraps of our first kill: FFF does stay up, but it continues to expire (FFF was on 270 seconds when the heart went away, came up with 200 seconds left when heart appeared the next time), so Rip would have been long over before the heart is up again.

[edit]: I watched again and saw that both Rake and Rip kept on ticking on the heart when XT was back from sleeping, but since I didn't bother applying a Rip at the end of heart phase (though, being made aware of this, I should in the future), and since it was just a couple of ticks - so I can't say for sure - but it does seem that it would actually stay up through to the next heart phase, in case raid dps is such that you can get there in time.