Well, feral dps ist totally playable even without any kind of external help. I tested the very first version of the addon and, while having great respect for nightcrowlers work, strictly decided not to use it. While I also couldn't achieve any better dps while using it, the main reason was, that, for me, the main aspect of playing a computer game successfully is improvement and I do not want to base this upon an addon or the guy developing it or anything other than myself. Bring the player, not the class (or gear or addon) is still important for me in order to retain a level of interest. Doesn't it otherwise make this game boring?

But that again is the point. It isn't exactly you who makes these decisions. It is the addon doing it for you. You only react to the addon's suggestions. That is a big difference.

In the end, I am totally ok with other people using this great piece of theory/simulation craft, but I just cannot give them the credit for their accomplishment.

I am glad that this has been brought up and I am really interested in other peoples opinions but I actually wanted to ask something else.

@nightcrowler: Some time ago, we discussed the way of implementing movement to your simulation in order to find the impact of ArP/Agi. Back then, you said you would work on it. While the discussion of ArP vs. Agi has come to an end, I would like to know if you actually had some time to work on movement and its influence on the priority list and things like that? Any results?

@Monfalaris:
Yes I did, but not to a great extend indeed. With a fixed time frame (let's say 10 seconds without attacking every 40 seconds) Arpen, hit, and other static damage increase stats increase their value with respect to agility/crit rating, you can set te option in the later simulator with dps stop duration and frequency, if you want.

As a side note, I'm really interested in how you manage to do high-end feral dps without any external help. Actually the base WoW interface is not able to keep track of rip/rake, do you take them in your mind? If this is the case I think you are one of the few people (also there) able to do that.

Time your berserk to keep yourself from getting feared. You'll get several extra seconds of DPS on the boss.

Did you find a hot spot for Agility being more valuable because of its benefits to bleeds and the fact that bleeds even out negative dps peaks (negative in terms of going to zero not below zero)? Maybe something like 16 to 21 seconds? Did you change the priority list to ensure the application of rake/Rip before leaving melee range or even planning ahead? We mentioned a lot of things around page 20 I think.

For the rest -> PM, as I don't think my personal interface setting is helping anyone or contributing to the discussion.

Playing without addons/interfaces to assist you is not too difficult. Rip, rake and mangle all show up on the boss in the same way that all the other boss debuffs/dots do, you can see the icon and get a good idea of their duration. SR shows in your buffs with a duration, and all your cooldowns are watchable, so really I see no problem other than that they do not all appear in the same location. Clearcasting procs display a message, you get a new buff and a sound is played. I'm not going to pretend there aren't easier ways to track all these, and FBN is a great way of doing this and also getting other help as a feral.. but saying that the wow interface doesn't work or that people cannot manage with it is incorrect.

However, I did have problems on one raid using the basic wow interface. During one raid we had three cats (never raided with more than 2 previously). Two or three times during this raid my dots seemed to become lost amongst all the boss dots/debuffs. This only happened once or twice during a naxx clear, and it has only ever happened during that particular raid, so I assume it was due to the number of cats in the raid all applying the same dots (but would love to know if there is another reason for it). When it happened it made it impossible to track rip/rake until I re-applied them, so obviously my dps suffered.

I, too, do not personally use "suggestion" addons like FBN or FaceMauler but I can admire the work put into them, and I recommend them for new ferals. That being said, while my interface is FAR from standard, I could still reliably put out the same amount of dps using only these two addons: HearKitty and NeedToKnow. HearKitty plays an orchestral sound every time you put a combo point up, or two if you crit, and also has a finishing move sound - this allows me to keep my eyes on the playing field as much as possible, and using sound instead of a larger CP tracker means my screen is clearer to boot. The second addon, NeedToKnow, is a highly configurable buff/debuff tracker that I will consistently swear by. It takes up the tiny rectangle of space between my chat log and my player frame and action bars, and tracks SR on myself, Faerie Fire and MangleBear/Cat/Trauma on my target in green no matter who put them up, and MY Rip and Rake durations (hues of red) in a small set of bars. I also have it track my Runestone procs in dark blue and Clearcasting in light blue, in the middle of the barset so you can see even out of the corner of your eye when they pop up.

Here is a link to a screenshot of this part of my UI: http://img140.imageshack.us/img140/8126/nalui.png

I did edit the .lua file after this screenshot was taken to make it show durations in tenths of seconds, I can PM you this revised code if you have any interest in this addon. In addition, the new version allows you to either scale the entire barset from one buff's duration (ie, one second of time will be x many pixels), or scale each bar from start to finish (ie one percent of time is x pixels).

I do find it is slower to react to suggestions (even with a prediction frame) than it is to just look at the timers and say, hey, I have x many energy and mangle is falling off and rip is falling off and TF is x many seconds away...and if you have the speed to do all that in your head go for it, and if not, well Nightcrowler is here to help

Every so often and I'm not 100% when it happens (I think after I apply a Savage Rawr or a 5 point Rip) but the Rake suggestion doesn't show up when the rake debuff is about to wear off. My mangle/trauma is up and my Savage Rawr/Rip are showing as applied to the boss but sometimes (not always) the rake just doesn't want to appear.

Sidenote: Thanks for putting FBN onto Curse it's a lot easier to update now with Curse's program then to constantly manually downloading and installing it.

I have a problem. I used to manage 6.3k or so on the good benchmarks, Vexas hard mode, XT, Ignis. I took a week break, but just before that I switched to 4t8 from 2t7/2t8. This week my Vexas dps fell 400-500 dps with the same gear, same addons, same rotation. 4-5 point rips, 4-5 point roars, not worrying too much about CP wastage, and biting when I had 3+ CP and high timers left on the other finishers.

Is there a different ideal CP for Roar when you have 4t8?

1-2 cp's for roar unless its going to fall off, then whatever cp's you have at the time.

For ferals with very good gear shred DPE isn't far behind rake DPE. With some active proccs and on special occasions, it is indeed wiser to shred instead to rake.
I know for a fact, that FBN checks every buff you have and it could be that shred > rake, if for example Mjolnir Runestone + DC: Greatness procs.

I understand that, but when it happens, there is no icon either in the "upcoming" section, or the "press now" section saying to do anything (shred, rip, rake, mangle, etc) even though I have the energy to do the action. This is not one of those times where it switches from rake to shred in an instant, I'm talking about 2-3 seconds where nothing is shown and I know I need to rake.

What's the purpose of using SR at one combo point with 4T8? I thought it was best to just make sure it's up regardless of the combo points, but favoring higher amounts if possible.

Also, the addon continues to suggest maim when on certain bosses even after I unchecked the "Toggle interrupt" option.

The purpose is to have SR equal or longer than the rip counter. 3/4 CP is required 2T7, 1 is required 4T8 while 5 can be cycled with 2 rips.

You want to get the most out of 4t8 and not waste CPs. You will get 8 additional seconds regardless of how many CPs you used. So the SR uptime per CP is significantly higher when you use SR with only 1 CP:

1CP: 14 sec. + 9 sec. -> 23 sec. per CP
3CP: 24 sec. + 9 sec. -> 33 sec. / 11 sec. per CP
5CP: 34 sec. + 9 sec. -> 43 sec. / 8.6 sec. per CP

So the bottom-up approach is, for a 6 min. boss fight you willl need 360 sec. SR uptime. This requires 15.65 CPs with 4t8 when you refresh SR with 1 CP all the time and 41.86 CPs when you refresh it with 5CPs. This is a waste of roughly 25 CPs.
While this is somewhat incorrect due to refreshing SR during Berserk to not waste the massiv amount of generated CPs it answers your question.

Another way to use 4t8 is to make sure you never waste CPs when critting at 4CPs. This might be sufficient to overcome bad timing issues between Rip and SR.

That makes sense. But even with the slider set to 1 combo point for SR, FBN still wants me to use SR at higher amounts of combo points. Should I just FB to dump my combo points when SR is at around five seconds or so remaining?

Is anyone else having issues with FBN not recommending a next move for long periods of time. I think I read somewhere it was getting stuck on rake and it does seem that might be the case. If I go 3+ secs with energy and don't see anything from FBN I usually rake or shred to get it to start working again.

Just a little annoying, great tool otherwise to see bleeds, buffs, and debuffs in one spot on the screen.

The only problem with regular UI is that the mangle sometimes gets "lost" when you have more than one feral druid. Other than that, it's perfectly fine. A lot of people seem to underestimate the UI a lot, but it's got much of what you need.

Actually I'm finding the berserk is not being recommended soon enough for me. If I have even 50-60 energy when I begin, I do not run out. Maybe it is because of my haste and OoC procs. Would it be possible to add an option to lower the recommendation for Berserk?

It should be extremely rare for you to get so many OOC procs that you can't empty your energy bar during Berserk. It only takes 9 shreds in 15 seconds to run yourself dry. If you are, it means you aren't using Berserk to its full potential. Make sure you use it at a period where you'll have enough time on the boss to take full advantage of the energy. In my experience, the only time that this isn't always possible is during phase 2 on Mimiron due to facing issues. Every other boss you should only run into problems on very rare occasions with 3+ OOC procs during Berserk, which is not common.

I hold the Berserk till Laser Barrage. At that point you can stay behind him for a good while.

I think I know why it takes a while for rake to be suggested occasionally, even without a proc from greatness or mjonlir. It pools energy sometimes, I've noticed, before using rake, but not all the time.

One issue that still irks me occasionally is that sometimes abilities will appear in the suggestion window out of nowhere even with the prediction frame turned on.

@ramenchef:
yes it does. Actually it used to pool energy only at low CPs (less than 3) and it results in a little performance increase. Also it usually pool energy when (remember that we can't know OOC procs in advance) (energy[mangle]+energy[rake,shred])/10 < timer[mangle] to avoid mangle downtime.
I'm still reviewing the code to see if there is any hole in it.
As for ability appearing into suggestion window without the appearing into prediction frame it can happen in 2 situation (I've not yet find a way to make it smoother without increasing a lot the CPU weight passing a dozen of other variables):
- rake/shred choce: basically suppose that you have grim toll or similar trinkets up or anything else that make shred more apealing than rake, now suppose that you have for istance 35 energy. The suggestion frame thinks that you need to shred, but in that moment your trinket (or the like) wents down, it istantly shift to rake without going throw prediction frame.
- FB/RIP choce: the situation can be the same as before or simply you have a "lesser than 1 second window" to efficiently FB, in that situation you can easly see FB into the prediction frame then it disappear from it and then it appears again into the suggestion frame.