Feral DPS Guide 3.3.5

This Guide is no longer valid since Patch 4.0.1

Please do NOT use this guide, it's absolutely worthless.

Hi everyone!

This is my little guide to doing damage as a feral kitty. It's meant as a startup for people new to the class, or as a reference to people not sure about something. It is in NO way definitive! If you think you know something better, by all means, do it better. This is my view on things; Providing argumentation for something isn't the intention for this guide. I'll post something about that later on.

Before we start

This guide is meant for a level 80 Catform druid in a PvE situation. Leveling as a feral is something completely different. Feral DPS does NOT work like this before endgame. Feral DPS does NOT work like this in PvP.

Talents and Glyphs

Spec something like this: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#0ZvGMsfrz0eR0huVkbAczb
Or something along those lines. You can drop Feral Aggression for Other talents, like survivability (Nurturing Instinct), or Improved Mangle for all I care. Feral Aggression is a very small boost on an attack that's 5% of your damage on a good day, it's a tiny DPS boost, you can loose it if you want to.

For glyphs, take the major ones:

1. Rip
2. Shred
3. Savage Roar

Mangle isn't worth it, not pre-patch-3.3.3, not post-patch-3.3.3

For Minor, the only two that are worth anything are Dash and Rebirth. Take whichever one you want as the third one, Thorns is probably the only one that isn't completely useless.

Gear

Right, gear. Gearing is pretty simple to start with, and pretty hard to master. Few simple things first, the caps. Anything above these values is a waste that will generally do nothing for you whatsoever:

Hit cap: 263 Hit Rating.
Expertise: 132 Expertise Rating.
Critical Strike: 76% Crit Chance. (For normal autoattack, your abilities keep benefiting till 100%.)
Armour Penetration: 1400 Armour Penetration.

Right, so what do our stats do for us? The following is a list of stats that do something at least useful for us. The ones missing are stamina, which comes on gear naturally and should be ignored, and weapon damage/speed - these values get translated directly into Feral Attack Power, look at that instead.

• Attack Power - Simple, one more attack power, never bad. Feral Attack Power is exactly the same, but only active in your feral forms - Which you are in anyways, so treat it like normal Attack Power.
• Strength - 2 Attack Power, simple as that, nice and powerful.
• Agility - 1 Attack Power, and 1% crit per 83.33 Agility. Armour and Dodge as well, but we're not trying to tank.
• Haste - 1% haste per 25.22 rating. Your base attack speed is 1.00 seconds/attack.
  
• Hit - See the limit above.
• Expertise - See the limit above.
• Crit rating - 1% crit per 45.91 rating.
• Armour Penetration - We'll deal with this down at the bottom.

Note that these stats are the raw stats, before talents apply. With the proper talents, you actually get more out of them. Dodge is increased by 4%. Crit chance is increased by 4% and by 6%. Attack Power of your weapon is increased by 20%, ALL your attributes by 6% and by 2%, etc. etc. Doesn't matter too much, never look at raw stats, and here's why:

So, what stats do we want? There isn't such a thing as a "Stats equivalent list", what's actually best for you comes from simulations like Rawr or Toskk - Normally, try to aim for Agility, it's the most important stat there is for you. Hit and Expertise never hurt, but don't overcap them. Strength is almost always worse than Agility (It becomes better the more crit you have, don't look for strength unless you know what you're doing, and can back it up with sims.). Haste increases the amount of clearcasting procs, but don't go looking for it. Crit rating isn't bad either, but don't go looking for it. Attack Power is always nice.

Not that some stats become more important as your gear changes. If you have extremely high-level gear, a missed attack is a LOT of damage missed, so +hit and +expertise become more important; while at the start, a missed attack isn't really that much of a bother at all. Again; do NOT rely on stat weights, look at simulations.

Armour penetration has it's own section all the way down there, we'll get to that in a bit. Time for your actual DPS rotation!

What to actually do during combat?

Time to actually do something. Let's deal with the simple thing first. There's 3 kinds of things that need getting killed:

1. Loads of small things that you can AoE.
   
2. Medium sized things that you have to single-target.
   
3. Big things that take a long time to kill (Bosses)

First one is also the most simple one.
If you face a pack of mobs, just spam Swipe (Cat) - If the mobs are especially hardy, and will survive for longer than 10 seconds, use Mangle or Rake on a random mob first to get a Combo Point, then use Savage Roar, and then spam Swipe. Choose between Mangle and Rake depending on your idol. For example, if you have the Crying Moon idol, choose rake.

Medium sized things means one target to focus on. Medium sized things die too fast for you to use Rip, so don't. Just use the same thing as I'm going to tell you to do on bosses, but forget Rip - Just use Ferocious Bite instead.

Right, the big one! What to do on bosses! First things first, you do NOT have a rotation. Rotations are for silly classes, we are kitties and we do NOT have rotations. Rather, we have a list of things to do. Always try to do these things.

1. Keep up Mangle - Unless you have somebody else doing this for you, another cat, a bear tank or an arms warrior.
2. Keep up Savage Roar - Use as little combo points as possible. SR doesn't get stronger with more combo points, and each combo point is only a small duration increase over the first one. A single-combo-point SR is the best, but it's far easier to keep up with more combo points.
3. Keep up Rake - Do NOT Rake unless both Mangle and SR are up. SR because it's only calculated at application, all Rake ticks take the SR bonus you had when you applied Rake. Mangle is calculated for each tick seperately, but the initial damage is affected by it. Do NOT refresh Rake before it's last tick is done (This is known as clipping)
4. Shred for Combo Points - Do not Shred unless Mangle, Savage Roar and one of your bleeds are all up.
5. Keep up Rip - 5 Combo points only, anything less is bad, do not use Rip without Savage Roar up, do not clip it, just like rake.
6. Tiger's Fury - As soon as it comes off cooldown, unless you're absolutely sure why you're saving it. Have under 40 energy before you sue it, so you don't get 100 energy and start loosing regen.
7. Berserk - As soon as it's off cooldown. Avoid berserking with too little energy, but don't use it if you're almost at 100 energy either. During berserk, shred as much as possible. Don't bother waiting for Heroism/Bloodlust - It doesn't influence it in any positive way.
8. Ferocious Bite - BUT only if you are absolutely sure of the following: You have 5 Combo points, SR is up with enough time left, Rip is up with enough time left (Enough being: You can build enough combo points again to refresh them on time) - And 35 energy. Any energy above 35 will be wasted by the extremely low added damage component on FB. You will almost never FB, treat it like a delicious piece of candy.
9. Faerie Fire - If you have nothing else to do whatsoever.

Use Clearcasting procs for Shred unless Mangle is down. Stand behind the boss at all times, unless of course that means standing in the fire, use Feral Charge to get behind a boss quickly.

This list will result in the following start for attacking a boss:
Faerie Fire as you approach->Feral Charge if needed->Mangle->Savage Roar->Rake->(Shred if too high on energy)->Tiger's Fury->Berserk->Shred to 5->Rip->...
And keep things up from there.

The bit more advanced things.

Like Gemming, Enchants, Food and Armour Penetration. Always: If you have a profession that provides better, then use that instead.

Enchants first:
Head: Arcanum of Torment
Shoulder: Greater Inscription of the Axe
Cloak: Major Agility
Chest: Powerful Stats
Wrists: Greater Assault
Gloves: Major Agility (Consider Precision if you're not capped on hit yet!)
Legs: Icescale
Feet: Major Agility (Consider Icewalker if you're not capped on hit yet!)
Weapon: Mongoose

For your weapon, Massacre is acceptable at lower gear levels, Berserking is also acceptable, and is either a bit better or a bit worse depending on gear. Executioner can be an improvement, but that all depends on Armour Penetration, which we shall come to shortly. Mongoose is the safest choice though. Black Magic procs on some feral abilities, and is the best enchantment in BiS gear, BUT until you're capped for ArP and Agility (Crit) - the other options are significantly better.

Gemming:

Your Meta gem is Relentless Earthsiege Diamond.
Put a Nightmare Tear somewhere - It will automatically fill all requirements, and it's also the best gem there is - unique sadly. Put it either in your headpiece so you never have to worry about your meta, or put it somewhere with the best socket bonus.
Put +20 Agility in everything else, unless Armour Penetration is better, which we shall come to in the next part. If you are very sure that a socket bonus is worth gemming for, by all means do, but that's very rare.

Armour Penetration:

Finally, we get there... Armour penetration is either the worst stat you can have, or the best - That all depends on how much armour penetration you already have: Since the stat doesn't scale linearly. That means that the first point of armour penetration you have will only remove a tiny bit of damage mitigation from the enemy (And thus improves your DPS by a very small amount), while the last point of armour penetration will remove a far greater amount of mitigation, and this be a massive DPS improvement.

It's because of this that armour penetration (ArP) should only be stacked if you already have enough. The most important here is gemming, you can replace all your +20 agility gems with +20 ArP gems, but only when you already have enough ArP already! That's all nice, but let's put it in a little list:

If you have:

Less than ±400 ArP: Stack and Gem Agility.

More than ±400, but less than the softcap: Stack and Gem ArP.

More than the softcap, but less than ±950: Stack and Gem Agility.

More than ±950, but less than 1400: Stack and Gem ArP.

More than 1400: Stack and Gem Agility, avoid ArP, ArP is 100% useless over 1400.

The softcap depend on what trinket you're wearing:
Grim Toll - 788 Armour Penetration.
Mjolnir Runestone - 735 Armour Penetration.
Needle Encrusted Scorpion - 722 Armour Penetration.
The numbers 400 and 950 are approximate values for 25-man raiding, they should be taken higher if you're only doing 10-mans, even higher if you're only doing heroics. The general rule is more: If you can keep the rest of your stats high enough, you can stack ArP.
Always consider your own situation before you go and stack ArP. Stacking ArP means loosing agility - thereby losing crits, and making your DPS harder. If you are struggling to get enough combo points, then do NOT drop Agility for ArP.

Food:

Almost done!

Hearty Rhino if you need the ArP.
Blackened Dragonfin if not.
Fish Feast is a decent alternative (If you're lazy).
Use Endless Rage as a flask.

And that's basically it, I believe.
Good luck as a Kitty!

~Vaeil

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Thanks to Runningwater, Honourless and Thorer for some tips and edits.

Thanks to everyone on the forums for linking this guide!