At a certain point, every attack crits. Since you have a talent that increases FB's chance to crit, it caps first-- so you get less value from increasing your crit. 4T9 also creates this issue, marginally, with Rip. White hits reach this cap fairly quickly because of glancing blows.

The white hits assume capped hit/expertise; if you don't have them capped, the numbers get adjusted even further down. (This makes hit/expertise caps fairly important, actually.)

Due to crit depression on bosses, the first 4.8% crit doesn't count; so for FB, the soft cap is at most 74.8% (69.8% with 4T9). Rip is still high at 99.8% with 4T9, so I don't see that being reached. But white crit cap is 104.8% - 24% (glances) = 80.8%, which is very reachable.

The actual numbers may be 4.8% lower than THAT, though-- the 4.8% we lose from crit reduction might turn into hits that we can never get back. This may push the FB cap down to 65%, the Rip cap to 95%, and the white hit cap to 76%.

Do you have a parse we could look at? I'm not seeing obvious issues with your gear, and while you could drop 2 points in furor for improved mark of the wild, that is also not a big enough issue to explain such a deficiency.

I will differently post one next week for you guys. Thanks

Hi guys, I have (another) question about Agi vs. ArP gemming. I've always trusted RAWR on how to upgrade my gear and in which direction to head with for stats, however, at the moment it seems to be largely undervalueing ArP. It continues to tell me that Agility is still my best stat, worth about 50% more than ArP per point. I assumed that as I geared up, ArP would slowly catch up and overtake, but now I sit on 390 ArP (without a trinket) it's still telling me to gem for Agility. What would you guys recommend I gem for from now on? (FYI: if I swapped all gems to +20 ArP, I'd gain 201 ArP)

Another complication is that I often tank to justify my place in a raid/group and a few of my pieces cross over between the two gear sets. Therefore I have the option of gemming ArP everywhere and risking some confusing looks at my tank gear, or mix ArP and Agi where I need to, or start using sub-optimal pieces in my tank set (this is the same reason my staff has Mongoose on it).

Any other advice about my gear/spec would be welcome. I haven't played a feral since mid-TBC and I've only dinged 80 on this one about 4 weeks ago, so pugging like mad to get my gear up to a level I can raid with my guild with! Cheers all.

EDIT: Low hit and exp are from a couple of recent upgrades which I haven't recovered from yet. Again RAWR is fine with me being below the cap, but I'm not tbh. The hit will come back from the Triumph badge hat when I get it, not sure about the exp tho!

390 ar pen isn't enough to be gemming ar pen, especially without a trinket (Mjolnir/grim toll). there was a previous posts on here saying that since the nerf, you probably don't want to gem ar pen until you can reach 400 ar pen if you have a trinket, or 1000 if you don't have a trinket.

*Edit*
I also wanted to mention that you should have a look at your spec. 5/5 Furor is unnecessary in pve since you'll very rarely find yourself shifting out of cat/bear (you have 5/5 in both specs). 3/5 Furor and 2/2 Imp MOTW would do you better.
You're also missing 5/5 feral aggression in your cat spec. Feral instinct is pretty unnecessary in pve. Sure, you'll top trash pulls, but the 3 points are better spent in feral aggression for single target dps (i.e. boss fights). I've discussed with another feral druid about having it for cleave in the TotC fights, which makes sense, but he has a consistent mangle bot (feral tank/arms war) and removed the 3 points from improved mangle in order to have feral instinct.
The point in survival instincts is debatable, and could potentially be removed to max FA. If you shift the points around from furor and feral instinct, however, you'll have only 4 in feral aggression (since 1 point went to max imp motw). The point could come from survival instincts, but I've found it to be extraordinarily useful in tight spots (i.e. tank death with boss at 5%, negligent healers in raid damage intensive fight). I took one point out of imp leader of the pack for it. It's all really a matter of your opinion and your play style in the end.

I don't agree on skilling Feral aggression instead of Feral instinct.

While I have to admit, that the bosses in TotC don't need a lot of cleave (only anub'arak), this was not true for Ulduar. And we don't know about Icecrown bosses. But more swipe damage was useful in a couple of Ulduar bosses.

XT (before guild getting better and making Hardmode)
Razorscale
Kologarn Adds
Auriaya
Hodir, if Flash Freeze'd NPC's are close together
Freya Explosive Adds
Thorim Arena
Mimiron Adds in P3
Yogg-Saron in the cultist Brain room (cleaving the 3-packs)


While you might argue, that more cleave damage isn't necessary for all of these occasions, I will ask you, if 9% (3 points) more damage for FB is worth it. Typically FB makes up for around 5% of our dmg. Spending 3 points in FA instead of FI means ~0.5% DPS increase.

Even if you would do 10% of your dmg via FB, which would be extraordinary high, than the whole 5/5 FA Talent only accounts for 1.5% DPS increase, which is still incredibly low for 5 talent points.

I completely agree. Especcially since dropping T8, I find myself barely getting any FB's in at all. Maybe 1-2 if I'm lucky. While the first 4 fights in ToGC (Except FC) are tank and spank for melee, the 5th one requires as much AoE as possible. You will be AoEing that fight more than single targetting.

I've never really found 5/5 FA particularly appealing, even when I had T8. I was able to drop 3/3 Imp mangle for it one time, because we had a full time arms warrior, but I never considered dropping Feral Instinct.

Yeah, I still had raid buffs turned off because I was comparing target dummy dps. My bad.

However, I disagree with you on the latter bits. Yes, ideally I *should* be min/maxing my professions and dropping my gathering profs for JC/BS. Additionally, I *should* have SoH rep to exalted for the improved shoulder chant. However, this would net me 82 Agi and 10AP at a loss of 35 Crit rating and a hell of a lot of my time. In all honesty, I don't think that has a massive bearing on whether I should be looking at ArP now or not, compared to the stat improvements I've made by pugging heroics and raids for the last four weeks. Yes, a realise I'm not "geared up" if you mean full 245 as "geared up", but it's not too early to be thinking about when I might need to spend out on replacing 15 epic gems.

Thanks for clearing it up Babjengi, I misread the previous post to indicate gemming for ArP once you reach 400 *without* trinket. I'll continue stacking Agi and I'll swap my talents as soon as I'm raiding with the guild more and solo questing less =)

82 Agility actually makes a huge difference, and the 35 crit from skinning is fairly useless.

That being said, I don't believe BS to be worth it as a feral (bear+cat) druid, the fact that the BiS list as a BS/JC differs so much from other professions, and is worse for Tanking than LW by the same degree that it's better for DPS. In terms of Hybridity (yes, I invented that word) it's actually quite a bit worse, it's far more difficult and costly (not that I particularly believe time or money have anything to do with character optimization, but to many it is an issue) to switch BiS items between Tank and DPS, especially if you're going for Hard ArP instead of Soft+Trinket.

The big point is, the difference between ArP and Agi will make much, much less difference than the things you're skipping, Laupen. If you don't think it's "worth it" to put the time into improving your character, why should we bother putting the time into helping you improve?

If I misguided you on your gem selection, and you switched them all, then switched back when you found out I misguided you-- that's as much gold as just rerolling a profession. And a larger DPS difference.

And I'm not endorsing BS/JC, I'm just saying that that is the profession combination which best stacks ArP. And unless you can stack it high, it's only marginally worth stacking in the first place-- you get more value out of the last points than the first points.

I've been doing some testing since I hit 80.. and I've noticed.. Berserker enchant isn't procing.. in a 13 minute dummy fight, I had 0 procs'... Yet when I swap to my tanking set(Has mongoose).. Could keep mongoose almost permantly proc'd... Anybody else noticing this?