[Feral] The art of a Kitten: PvE guide

[iHelp]

Sorry for all the questions lol. Just finally got my Rune and I'm trying to get used to it/maximize my dps.

The Rune proc seems weird. It says it procs 1.26 times per minute, but then it says it has a 10 second cd. It will sometimes proc multiple times in a row and then never proc in like a minute and a half duration.

[Aseyhe]

Yes, re-origination (and any proc that says "approximately __ procs per minute") uses the RPPM system. Blizzard's descriptions of this system can be found here (original system) and here (bad luck streak prevention change). What this means is that the interval between procs is random, with a probability distribution essentially following the red line in this plot. (Here's an actual measurement of that distribution with a 549 Rune.)

Simpler description: the proc interval is very random, but produces an average proc frequency similar to what the tooltip says (actually about 13% higher).

[aggixx]

And the reason it chain procs is because the chance to proc essentially pools for up to 10 seconds of not hitting a target. You're considered unable to hit targets for the purpose of proccing RPPM effects while they are on ICD, so your first hit against a mob after the proc ends has the cumulative chance to proc of like 15 hits.

[Deleted]

@Stenhaldi. I have to ask mate. Why do you always use HOTW over Doc? and do you find it competitive to DOC when played to its max? i personally dont like DOC i hate having to weave in HT's into my rotation, i find it awkward yet i get better results with it that HOTW thus making me forced to play it. And do you use it just for the passive effect or do you find a use for the "on use" effect of it for every encounter? if so what are they? I hope you dont mind me asking you this, it would defo make my life easier. thanks

[Aseyhe]

For progression, I value the huge utility advantage of HotW over any minor damage advantage from DoC. For farm I don't care.

The typical use for the active effect is either a planned tranquility (or general healing) usage or unplanned emergency tank or heal usage. There are ways to use its active effect for damage, but I generally wouldn't do that because then you give up the advantage of taking the talent in the first place.

Edit: I would say that DoC's damage advantage is larger if you don't have strong snapshotting trinkets (like re-origination). HotW has advantages of being free to refresh bleeds at any time and to use rake for direct damage, both of which matter more when you have stronger proc trinkets.

[siccora]

i cannot get my head around the rune and what blizz statement was when they changed the monk mastery. why didnt they then changed feral mastery. it is really not cool to run old hc content to farm that one trinket.

[Skadovsk]

Well feral is perfectly playable with SoO trinkets, WW would be completely and utterly useless without rune if they kept the mastery unchanged.
and there is no reason to change the feral mastery, at least now in MoP, only thing they could've done was nerf rune.

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WTB NO ONE TOUCHING THE ADDS ON IMMERSUS #foreverhauntedbySparkuggz/Blatty/Pottm+Rest of Methods DPSERS, Max I hate you yet love you. kissskisss

its okay BBY, once nazgrim comes around we will be tied again.

Maximommmy + Fraggdaddy = prodigal son. He shall be named Mojah.

I was probably unclear. On progression yes, I was HotW unless I was tanking. Farm is full DoC though, unless we're wiping for whatever reason.

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Also, No one ACTUALLY uses proraiders to judge someones skill as a raider(I would hope) just because it has fights including immerseus and nazgrim, and because RPPM is a thing. I've known some people that were top 5 for their class but were pretty dog at staying alive and being a competant raider. If only there was something to judge both, or the more important one, being someones ability to actually play the game well.

How the fuck do you guys even get valid Immersus kills?
I've had like multiple top 5 ranked dps for weeks now and its always invalid.

[exochaft]

Well feral is perfectly playable with SoO trinkets, WW would be completely and utterly useless without rune if they kept the mastery unchanged.
and there is no reason to change the feral mastery, at least now in MoP, only thing they could've done was nerf rune

That's also why bleed snapshotting was looked at and currently slated to dynamically update with procs instead of being fixed upon application. Specifically for Ferals, adjusting the mastery would have requires adjusting much more than just bleeds and would not be received well in the middle of an expansion at the very least. Rune + snapshotting just exacerbated how one-sided the damage contribution of bleeds have becomes towards the end of the expansion.

Overall, I think the stats balance will end up being adjusted for Feral since... well, try DPSing as kitty with crit-oriented gear for Guardian and see how miserable your damage is compared to one that favors mastery. While the simple solution would be to focus more on mastery now, when we lose the ability to reforge in WoD (as well as sockets being much rarer), Ferals will need to be able to survive on currently non-optimal secondary stats. Simply stated, the disparity between mastery and other secondary stats is likely too great right now to be unchanged going into WoD. Right now, we just have to suck it up and adjust with the tools we have.

[Kraineth]

i cannot get my head around the rune and what blizz statement was when they changed the monk mastery. why didnt they then changed feral mastery. it is really not cool to run old hc content to farm that one trinket.

Because feral damage is balanced around bleeds/bleed snapshotting and by extension our mastery, changing our mastery would completely change how feral is designed, monk mastery on the other hand was just a straight %dmg buff to everything when they popped tiger's eye brew, and wasn't involved in the rotation at all.

[aggixx]

While the simple solution would be to focus more on mastery now, when we lose the ability to reforge in WoD (as well as sockets being much rarer), Ferals will need to be able to survive on currently non-optimal secondary stats. Simply stated, the disparity between mastery and other secondary stats is likely too great right now to be unchanged going into WoD.

I'm sure most people don't understand that the feral community, primarily via work of the theorycrafters pushing the rotation further and further in SimulationCraft, Catus, Ovale, and the introduction of addons like AffDots and WeakAuras for the same purpose completely pushed the boundaries of what they could've possibly expected from us. Even if mastery was perfectly balanced with the other two stats at the beginning of the expansion, it would still crush the other two stats with by leaps and bounds with the improvements we've made since then. Keep in mind that coefficients are set at the beginning of the expansion, often before theorycrafters get their hands on things and put out their decisions on what's good and what's bad, and those coefficients very rarely are ever changed until one expansion later when the level cap is raised. This more than anything has caused such a gap between mastery and other stats, and honestly there are other classes that have it far worse, our disparity isn't really that horrible.

I more than probably anyone know to what extent we're talking about here. If you can recall what the theorycrafting was like on stat balance at the start of the expansion in full heroic dungeon gear or so, mastery was the best stat, there was no doubt about that, but it wasn't a crushing difference. Nowadays, if you take the exact same gear using the priority lists we have now with the extreme amount of snapshotting "abuse", mastery completely destroys the other stats, it's not even remotely close. It's to the point where you can almost get away with gemming mastery instead of agility which would've been completely unthinkable at the time.

And honestly, they could've easily just dropped the coefficient on mastery a tad to bring it in line with crit and haste, but there was no reason for them to, especially with the existence of reforging.

It's not like feral has any inherent scaling issues with any of it's stats, when Warlords rolls around and they pick their coefficients for stats, things can and will change. Not to mention they're doing a complete systems change with the stat squish and the introduction of three new secondary stats that will introduce a multitude of new synergies.

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Because feral damage is balanced around bleeds/bleed snapshotting and by extension our mastery

And a quick addition, I'm not entirely convinced that's the case. You know how we're really OP in the hands of a skilled player right now? Gee, I wonder why that is. Oh wait, no I don't, it's because Blizzard doesn't balance us (or anyone else) around perfect play. For a skilled player we were perfectly fine at the beginning of this tier, even above the middle of the pack (in damage, case could be made for lacking utility but let's not open that can of worms). And then from nowhere out of the left field they slapped us with a huge buff to Rip! And why else but because the average player who probably isn't too great at uptimes, and likely has no idea about bleed clipping at all, was firmly below middle of the pack.

[exochaft]

I more than probably anyone know to what extent we're talking about here. If you can recall what the theorycrafting was like on stat balance at the start of the expansion in full heroic dungeon gear or so, mastery was the best stat, there was no doubt about that, but it wasn't a crushing difference. Nowadays, if you take the exact same gear using the priority lists we have now with the extreme amount of snapshotting "abuse", mastery completely destroys the other stats, it's not even remotely close. It's to the point where you can almost get away with gemming mastery instead of agility which would've been completely unthinkable at the time.

It's not like feral has any inherent scaling issues with any of it's stats, when Warlords rolls around and they pick their coefficients for stats, things can and will change. Not to mention they're doing a complete systems change with the stat squish and the introduction of three new secondary stats that will introduce a multitude of new synergies.

That was pretty much my point, but to be fair there were a number of adjustments to Ferals that occurred throughout the expansion and the priorities didn't change that much in terms of rotations until gear started reaching a point to support such changes (other classes have similar issues where the rotation/priority changes once a certain level of gear is reached)... Rune sort of brought everything to the extreme, though, along with the Rip buff. Snap-shotting certainly doesn't help things, which can be said for many classes with such capability. For what it's worth, I think Ferals are perfectly fine as is in a world with as much customization allowed currently.

However, I'm viewing this more towards WoD, where we're going to have much less customization of gear while being at the mercy of being stuck with what we acquire in terms of stats. I don't want anyone thinking that Feral scaling can stay the same in WoD, because the current balance model definitely wouldn't mesh well with WoD conceptual model. The question is how much of an extreme will Blizz allow for stat values variance for damage output and how much the community is willing to accept.

[Kraineth]

Blizzard already said somewhere that they wanted secondaries to be within 5% of eacth other which I think is fine, it's not like you'll be stuck with every single piece that isn't the best for you just because, the only issue I see arising is when that 5% difference is the same for every class, so for instance every leather piece that is mastery/crit is BiS for every leather wearer, but I trust blizzard has this all in their heads as they move forward with the expansion.

We already know feral in particular is getting some attention this expansion so I think we'll be just fine.

[exochaft]

Blizzard already said somewhere that they wanted secondaries to be within 5% of eacth other which I think is fine, it's not like you'll be stuck with every single piece that isn't the best for you just because, the only issue I see arising is when that 5% difference is the same for every class, so for instance every leather piece that is mastery/crit is BiS for every leather wearer, but I trust blizzard has this all in their heads as they move forward with the expansion.

We already know feral in particular is getting some attention this expansion so I think we'll be just fine.

5% stat value variance would be a miracle if they can pull that off. With my current gear sets of similar ilvl (actually the Feral set is lower ilvl at 574) without trinkets/metas interferring, the difference between my crit-heavy vs Rune-balanced (aka, Guardian vs Feral sets) sims about 21% better damage with a bit more mastery over crit (haste is roughly the same). Rune makes it something silly like 38% better. Just reaffirms that MoP scaling for Ferals will have to change since current scaling only works with heavy gear optimization, especially if gear drops don't go your way.

Regardless, I think Blizz will have a harder time with the social aspect of the balancing since people complain about even a 1% difference than reaching an average 5% difference. I can already hear the complaints "I got sat because my gear is itemized poorly compared to <insert someone else>!"... inevitable even if Blizz got the difference to 1%.

[Deleted]

5% stat value variance would be a miracle if they can pull that off.

They did pretty well during cataclysm, did they not (DS at least)?

[hullaballoonatic]

Feral is a rather special spec. Due to its bizarre unintended traits, it has fostered perhaps the most dedicated community of support to really optimize it. It is likely due to the sheer depth of feral optimization that has caused this.

[exochaft]

They did pretty well during cataclysm, did they not (DS at least)?

I spent most of my time tanking, although that did entail some bearcatting... but the real truth is that I can't remember specifically since trying to sort out specific details from expansions past takes too much effort.

Ironically, I think the new talent system actually makes it harder to balance the stats, since the throughput-oriented ones can affect how a specific stat scales (which may be why Cataclysm may have pulled off such scaling with cookie-cutter builds... if that was even true, making conjectures at this point). Don't get me wrong, I don't think the sky is falling, I just think 5% stat variance is a lofty goal across the board. Kudos to Blizz if they can pull it off!

[Rioo]

It's been a while since DS, especially since I quit early on, but I'm pretty sure the secondaries were all really close. I think I changed from a mastery build to haste once I got some DS gear and later changed to crit for Spine hc. They difference in DPS wasn't really that big on the other fights.

[Deleted]

It's been a while since DS, especially since I quit early on, but I'm pretty sure the secondaries were all really close. I think I changed from a mastery build to haste once I got some DS gear and later changed to crit for Spine hc. They difference in DPS wasn't really that big on the other fights.

Crit build was quite a lot lower on all fights outside of tendon burst AFAIK. There was either Haste>Crit or Mastery>Crit outside of those. I remember no one knowing what to do on Ultraxion.

But I do agree with you exo. Stats (and just the game in general) were a lot more simple during Cata. I doubt they can balance the stats that close without continuously adjusting them as item level increases.

[Rioo]

What were you thinking in terms of numbers when you wrote "quite a bit lower"?

[Deleted]

What were you thinking in terms of numbers when you wrote "quite a bit lower"?

I don't .. know or remember. I just recall that I chose to reforge back for farm fights, just because my output was so much worse with crit.