Go for max uptime. Don't worry about the shreds, once you get the uptime fixed (savage roar > mangle > rip > rake), with your crit rate you will discover times when you have enough energy and are not at risk of losing anything. Use those to shred. And use any clearcasting proc to shred. And that's it, you win. If you don't get 2000 more dps or so on beasts out of that, then you might have some sort of severe lag issue; check your ping. There are some good threads here on EJ dealing with how to reduce your ping and optimize your setup if that turns out to be the case.

This could be what I've been looking for, or I guess sort of suspected. I think I've put the 3 shreds you need per rip at a much higher priority than I should be. Is it fairly normal for ferals to lack the time for all 3, here and there during their cycles? I believe I may be pushing that 3rd shred rather than making sure I have the energy to reapply everything.

Hey, my druid's name is Joog and I'm on Mannoroth. I was wondering if somebody knowledgeable about feral DPS could throw me a rough estimate as to the DPS I should be doing with my stats. Currently on the boss dummy I'm doing 3.5k DPS, but it feels extremely low to me.
The World of Warcraft Armory

damage 629-654
speed .92
power 7401
hit 267
crit 49.67
exp 15

With the post I'm just trying to gauge if with my stats my DPS is in the right ballpark, I'll troubleshoot rotation issues later.

Ok, forgive me for being obtuse, but let me get this straight. Since the armor penetration nerf, is it true that unless you can get to 1,000 (without trinkets) you should be gemming for agility? I don't have a trinket and my armor penetration is in the ~750 range. I guess I've just been reading some conflicting messages and I want to ensure I'm on the right page.

Thanks!

~750 ArP is the soft cap for ArP if you have either trinkets since they will bring you to hard cap when procced.

However they very 1st post in the this thread has an excellent ArP sub-section. I'd suggest you read it.

@hammartime
I'm not used to WoL, since we track our combatlog with WMO. So I can't really check your log, sorry for that.

Nobody expects you to do 3 shreds for every rip. I don't count my shreds every time.
If you have to make mangle yourself, of course this means you can't shred as often. As a general tip, try to pool your energy more often. I nearly never use shred whenever I have 42 energy and Mangle/rake/rip are up (unless rip is about to fall off and I could increase rip duration).
Pooling energy will give you more time to plan ahead and to analyze. Don't be afraid to waste combopoints from time to time.

@joog
Just check yourself in RAWR and disable all debuffs/buffs. If you are within 85% of the suggested DPS, then you're doing quite well.

@Raignn
You've obtained a lot ArP already. I'm really sure, that ArP will be the best stat for you already.
There is no perfect point, at which you should switch from Agi to ArP. With one of the ArP trinkets I would guess the breakpoint, where ArP becomes better than Agi, is at about 350-400. Without the trinket it should be at about 500-550. However, remember that the DPS difference between Agi and ArP is not huge, if you're near the breakpoint.

Hammartime, I don't know I can't find anything wrong with how you play judging from the logs. It's easy to say that your rip and rake uptime was bad, but I can't see how you could have done much better when you have to help killing snobolds and portals. If someone has a log where they do in fact help on adds and still get high uptime I sure would like to see it.

Points in FA is indeed nice in ToC10/25... there are quite many opportunities to bite on each boss; worms before they burrow, Icehowl when he crashes into walls, portals on jaraxxus (at least in 25man), empowered buff during twins and Anub before he burrows.

Since all the fights in ToC10/25 are like this, with low bleed uptime, target switching and opportunities to FB, I believe one can make a pretty strong case for gemming ArP even if you are without a proc trinket. So if you have the gold to burn I'd suggest you experiment with ArP gemming and the trinket from toc5.

Well, personally I've found iLotP more valueable than Feral Agression. Since they nerfed Rend and Tear a while ago, FB are 100% crit anymore and with the loss of 4t8, the dps rotation is tighter, so I find myself FB so much less. On the flipside, iLotP has been very handy for helping smooth out some of the constant damage that many fights have like, XT tantrums, Council HM, Hodir, Mimiron p2, Vexax HM p2, Yogg brain room tentacles reflective damage, Bile/Toxin from worms in Beasts, Twins, Anub p3. I'm sure Icecrown will have no shortage of constant aoe raid damage either and I can't tell you how many times I've barely lived that I'm sure iLotP help make the difference, not only for myself but for basically all the melee. I'm sure you've heard the saying, no matter how high your DPS may be, dead DPS is no DPS.

Shimida, regarding many of those times you mentioned FBing in TotC (excluding portals/volcanos on Jaraxxus, bite is better there and Anub burrowing), just the same you can apply a Rip and tack on plenty of extra damage.

My Guild is currently working on hard mode Anub as well as Yogg Zero lights. These two bosses are require a lot of AOE output so I changed my spec around and completely got rid of feral aggression and speced into Feral Instinct and my last 2 points int o Nurturing Instinct to improve my survivability for hard modes. With this spec I hardly ever FB and instead focus on uptimes (even sitting at 5cp shredding at times) and I have to say my dps has increased fairly significantly.

As an anecdotal point, I've always been a pretty hardcore theorycrafter, spent 10k getting blacksmithing so I could have the two extra sockets, ran every simulator religiously, etc., etc. At the arpen nerf, I said screw it, let's see what happens if I regem all agi and drop my T8 bonus for some more 245s and a h258, which the simulators advised me not to do.

End result - dps went up about 200, my rotation feels way easier to maintain, uptimes are improved, and I spend a lot less time fretting about whether to use ferocious bite or not, because the number of times it's appropriate are significantly reduced.

For me it feels like the key religious principle that must not be abandoned is that Blizz Wants Us To Play DDR. The sacrament is that Savage Roar, Mangle, Rip, Rake must be maintained, and then Shred away (but thou shalt also Shred on every Clearcasting proc unless Mangle is down). If you accept that as the fundamental tenet of cat dps, then it naturally follows that all your gear choices, benefits, gemming, etc., revolve around optimizing that to the best of your ability. Agi vs. Arpen choice is more about your personal preference and what gear has dropped for you than it is a foundational decider of what is good or not. The difference pretty much appears to vanish in the fights in front of us.

I'm doing 1k less than what RAWR thinks I should be... I don't understand it though, I have 90% uptime on debuffs and am shredding for CP..

Actually, Rawr assumes you waste at max 4 CPs per 5 min fight with default settings. It calculates how many CPs are generated over the duration of the fight, subtract what is needed for rip and SR 100% uptime, then divides the rest by 5 and rounds down to determine average number of FBs per fight.

Yeah, I've seen some enormous discrepancies between what Rawr says I should be doing, and what I actually do. With my current gear and self-buffs rawr puts me at 4200 DPS vs a Heroic Target Dummy. I've tried to achieve this number, using both FeralbyNight as my guide and just dpsing based on personal experience. Using FbN I achieved an average of 3300 DPS and using, just a standard rotation I've gotten around 3500-3600. This is quite far off from the optimal DPS, it was mentioned earlier that within 85% of the optimal should be alright, so it seems that it is accepted that Rawr does overestimate, if this is true, by how much. I do not fall even within the 85% range. Clearly I'm not perfect and neither is my rotation, but I feel like I have a fairly clean rotation which brings me to my real question.

How close to Rawr's optimal dps should I be getting?

P.S. Does anyone have data points to add to this, e.g. real dps vs rawr optimal? Perhaps we could get a better idea of how much Rawr overestimates.

EDIT: I've tried simulation craft, but it gives me absurdly low numbers (3300), I think this is most likely due to the fact that I still use 4pt6, although when I tried it with my girlfriends character it gave me much more realistic number.

I'm not sure 4t6 is properly modeled in SC, since feral support didn't exist until WotLK. In addition, you can improve on the "standard" SimulationCraft cycle, the version that's up doesn't have much of a concept of energy pooling. At this point, though, you should quickly be discarding T6 as quickly as possible (except keeping 2 pieces around for the odd "I can't shred on this fight" scenarios).

Rawr is not a metric for how well you should be playing-- simulators are better for that. Rawr should be used as a metric for gear. In that context, the better question is, how much are its gear recommendations off by. You'll find that since it both overestimates bleeds AND overestimates FBs, the relative stat values are close to accurate; so most gear estimates won't be off by more than a few DPS.

DPS on Heroic Dummies is useless for judging how you'll do in a raid fight unless you are fully raid buffed for the dummy (not likely). Full raid buffs do so much for your crit chance (in particular) that your rotation really changes and that has a dramatic effect on your DPS.

In any case, like Allev says just use Rawr for figuring out what is an upgrade not for figuring out what exactly your DPS should be.

For just practicing unbuffed cycles, I believe the level 70 dummies should give you an extra 15% crit or so (no vs. bosses crit depression, 10% extra crit due to level difference?).

I'm going inactive from WoW and thus won't update the guide anymore.
Whoever wants to continue my work and wants to update it every time something changes - feel free to use my original guide. Maybe you could leave a small note indicating the original one comes from me

Judging on the countless private messages I received since writing this guide, I'm convinced that keeping something like this all-in-one summary is good and important for our great druid community.

I don't know what I'm doing wrong.. I used to get 4080 with/without FbN, and I got some upgrades (245 ilvl helm, crafted wrist/boots) and it went to like 3.8k.

http://www.wowarmory.com/character-s...lstrom&n=Mylus

Maybe its my rotation.. Usually I start off with FFF, then start attacking with rake then savage roar, then i mangle till i have no energy then use TF and berserk and shred till 5cp then rip, then I keep shredding to 4/5 and use SR, then I shred to 5cp then ferocious bite and then i get off one mangle/rip before berserk wears off then I am able to get rip back up and SR without those getting any downtime. I have 4.3k then, and then it just goes down.. When I have full energy after savage roar and have a OOC proc I use 5cp ferocious bite and then I should be able to get rip staying on.

You should start your fight using Mangle, SR, Rake, and then Shred to 5 combo points then rip. You want mangle and bleeds up before shred because they buff the shred. You want to keep SR up at all tmes and try and keep mangle, rake and rip up as much as you possible can. I would only use FB in limited cases. When clearcasting procs always shred.

I was wondering if there are tests whether the move prediction of FbN or Facemauler will result in higher DPS.
And second, I'm not quite sure about the best setting of the "desired Rip uptime" slider.
In this post, nightcrowler stated that with a setting of 4-5, you should be able to always keep up Rip, but I don't know if this is the way to go.

Murna, I have struggled to come up with an answer to why the upper threshold should be 85 Energy for Berserk? Anyone care to elaborate?

The best I can come up with is that 15 is 5 more Energy than the following GCD will net you, giving us a very slim margin for making sure that we don't go max out at 100 Energy, thus wasting it.

@cana immediately above - as far as I know FaceMauler is no longer supported, and Nightcrowler actually worked on one of the earlier FaceMauler algorithms. FbN also has several different settings for skill weightings if you really want to get technical, so there's essentially a nearly infinite number of possibilities to compare here, especially depending on crit rates, gear, player skill and whatnot. For practical purposes, FaceMauler is dead and FbN is the newer, bigger model with more features.

Wild guess: berserk will eat a GCD, so if you berserk at 85, next ability will activate when you're at 95. In case your first attack is missed/dodged you'll only spend 1/5 of the energy cost, assuming 40 (which becomes 20 with berserk) that's 4 energy consumed bringing you to 91, which will regen to 101 (=100, 1 energy lost) over then next GCD. So it looks like it's a good way to optimize energy usage, making sure that you'll never waste energy, but at the same time making sure that you start berserk with as much energy as possible, since energy available during berserk is twice as valuable.