Largely at 80, yes. You'll have a lot more crit than you do now due to the itemization changes, you'll have a lot more energy thanks to haste, and your bleeds will be easier to keep up with being able to refresh them without losing ticks. With the glyph of FB you can be a lot sloppier on your hits and still maintain good energy use.

That being said, without 100% arpen FB hits fairly weakly, shreds don't hit for very much and melee damage is strong but not so amazing. Bleeds do a lot more damage, and as a result any fight that doesn't have a stationary target or has a lot of target switching is going to be hurt with having to get a mangle/rake/rip up asap. Swipe is also pretty weak; it already got reduced, and the arpen loss hurts that too.

One thing to note is that currently, Tiger's Fury gives 15% more damage while it's active. This does not update a current bleed. This means that if you TF and then rip/rake (or refresh same) they'll do 15% more damage until you update them again, well after the TF runs out.

I would also not bother with Primal Madness. It is not a strong talent given that you lose the 20 energy, and at 80 energy is the least of your concerns. Take feral aggression instead; 10% more FB damage will be significantly more when you're dealing with as many FBs as you're likely to. Also consider NI over NSS at 80, as NSS does nothing for you and NI can give you some fairly hefty tranquilities, which given the 4.0.1 smart heal change becomes almost as useful as an innervate in certain circumstances. It will function like a hymn of hope does for spriests.

I actually meant to take Feral Aggression instead of Brutal Impact. There aren't many fights in ICC requiring interrupts and at this point it's just fun to see how much damage i can squeeze out as raid utility isn't very important at the moment.

I would use Feral Agression instead of Brutal Impact for pve purposes. And yeah Ferocious Bite will see it's way through our rotation a bit more than it has before.

Brutal Impact is there so that we can function as an interrupter, as 2/2 gives us a 10 second cooldown interrupt, making us as useful as the other melee dps classes in that department. I'd consider it a nearly mandatory talent.

Predatory Strikes gives you energy when you want it - when you're doing extra damage from TF or when you're operating at half energy costs from Berserk. I agree it's a minor damage buff, but it's certainly not the only talent in that category. Predatory Strikes is barely useful in a pve environment, often coming up once per combat unless you have regular adds (and even there, you may well prefer to start with mangle/rake, and then it's below 80%). 2/2 Stampede also strikes me as weak over 1/2, as it's a minor energy reduction you aren't likely to get much on most fights.

As kalbear points out above, there's almost no reason to take Natural Shape Shifter prior to the expansion, as you can't get Master Shapeshifter until 81 at the earliest.

I can't think of a single fight that's required more than 2 interrupters in 25 man raiding, and in wrath the 10m version has always allowed a single interrupter. I find it hard to believe that a druid would be required to spec into something others get for free in order to fulfill that role.

Think of it as redundancy. Sometimes our rogues get stupid on LDW and die to the ghosts. Sometimes they are on vacation or watching a football game (or watching a football game while we are doing LDW...). The new Brutal Impact + Skull Bash is huge for a feral - providing a utility we did not have before both as a cat and as a bear.

I am very dubious about the overall value of Stampede and Predatory Strikes on a lot of the fights in PVE. It is 4 talent points for a single attack damage increase once every 30 seconds. Also, until they adjust our damage coefficients we don't really know how much better it will be than our other attacks. We may find that opening with mangle is more important in a raid environment even when we use feral charge to get in position.

An interesting question for our openings is whether we should get to 5 combo points, TF, RiP, refresh Rake and then use one or more combo points to get SR up or get SR up first. Lining up the timers - TF 30s, Rip 16s or 22s with Glyph of Shred, Rake 15s, SR 22-42s. It looks like we may not want to use Glyph of Shred, and instead line up every other Rake and Rip to occur after TF. There is also a question of using the Glyph of TF - but taking 3 seconds off of TF will make it harder to sync it with Rip and Rake. With mastery and the Glyph of Rip, lining up TF with Rip and Rake may take precedence over everything else in the rotation. The rules for when to FB will probably be more restrictive now and we may find the only time we use FB is during the execute phase. Current FB use is predicated on the idea that some downtime on Rip is acceptable.

Here is another interesting question, if we refresh a Rip with FB during the execute phase, if the Rip was cast during TF does it retain the 15% extra damage?

Yeah it will be most likely mandatory for 85 raiding. But seeing as we got away with it for the time being we can do without for the less than 2 months left raiding at 80.

I'm not understanding why we can't take all the above listed talents at 80 - we've been going so long without an interupt and without NI - why not take all the points that increase our dps and then take BI for the interupt? thats all 36 available points in a 0/33/3 build

I'm looking at this build with glyphs - WoW Talent Calculator - Sigrie

mostly for the utility (i know its a 30min cd but) of rebirth and skull bash - then yes I'm looking at glyph of TF cause I feel it will make it easier to reapply the bleeds during TF with the shortened cooldown it would take 5 TF's to make them come out of alignment if my numbers are correct. It just varies the timing at which the refresh happens during the TF.

While we could take 1 less point in Predatory strikes due to the high crit we will already have, why not take it - there really isn't anywhere else other than NI to put it and I'd rather guarantee myself two quick ravage crits and 4 CPS allowing for an opener of - Charge - Ravage - Roar - Ravage - continue to normal rotation

Jaymz, healers are going to struggle for a while, getting used to the new mechanics, etc. I'll take the +20% buff in healing done to me over something else, personally.

I gemmed everything with 20 agi except for one slot that already had my nightmare tear in it (I'm aware that I could probably optimise a little better with some hybrid gems for a few choice socket bonuses), and then reforged to reach the hit and expertise caps.

For mastery, I tried to reforge whatever stat of crit and haste that Mew was reporting as worth less on the RSV table*, which seems intuitive enough. However, I was a little unsure in that I could generally convert more crit into mastery than haste into mastery.

*Once I approached ~65% crit unbuffed, it started to show haste with a lower RSV than crit.

Is there an easy way to work out which of haste and crit is worth reforging to mastery once they both hit a breakeven point and then start to move in opposite directions, when the value being reforged is slightly different? I'm having a brain fart moment, and don't quite have the time to sit down and sum up RSVs for each piece of gear : \

For reference,

WebMewPivot - Yawninglol

RSVs as I'm currently geared:

Weapon DPS: 4.34
Agility: 2.92
Mastery Rating: 2.15
Strength: 1.95
Crit Rating: 1.41
Expertise Rating: 1.37
Haste Rating: 1.37
Hit Rating: 1.36
Attack Power: 0.93

Was also thinking about in which scenarios it would be worth reforging the rating with higher amount on an item despite its RSV-value being higher then the rating with lower amount on the item.

RFlow = reforge the low (and weaker) stat
RFhigh= reforge the high (and stronger) stat

We want to find when:
RFlow < RFhigh

high * RSVhigh + low * RSVlow * 0,6 + low *0,4 * RSVMastery < high * 0,6 * RSVhigh + high *0,4 * RSVMastery + low * RSVlow

This can be simplified to:

RSVMastery > (high * RSVhigh - low * RSVlow) / (high – low)

or (where diff = high - low)

RSVMastery > (low *(RSVhigh - RSVlow) + diff * RSVhigh) / diff


This equation don't make us much more enlightened though. Plugging in some reasonable numbers might give us a little info.
Using high = 110, low = 100, RSVhigh = 1,41 and RSVlow = 1,37 as in your example gives that if RSVMastery > 1,81 its still worth reforging crit for you. However doing the "wrong" reforge is about 1 dps difference if RSVMastery = 2,13.

Increasing only the RSVhigh to 1,47 and using same numbers for the rest, gives RSVMastery > 2,47 for it to be worth reforging the better stat. The difference between the 2 alternatives are still less then 2 dps though. Bumping the RSVhigh to 1,57 gives RSVMastery > 3,57 to brake even and penalty for doing it wrong to 5dps.

To conclude it is depending on a lot of factors, but unless they are pretty close in value reforging the weak stat is likely the best. But making the wrong decision isn't a catastrophe.