[Feral] The art of a Kitten: PvE guide

[mmokri]

Please explaine me 'predictive clipping'. Thanks.

[aggixx]

Predictive clipping is when you replace a stronger bleed with a weaker one with an expectation that it will end up being more damage in the long run.

Example: You get your mega Rip up on the pull with 20 stack TED, Rune, Pot & all that good stuff. Your Rune and TED reprocs about 12 seconds in so you decide to take advantage of it and apply a new Rip. This one is a bit weaker than your opener Rip but you're gaining 12 seconds of the new rips damage after the first Rip would have expired, making it a net gain as long as your trinkets don't end up procing again.

Another simpler form would be reapplying bleeds as your procs are about to end (this is especially true for Rake and 10 second procs as it increases the effect of the proc on your Rake from 15 to 25 seconds).

[Aseyhe]

Recasting a bleed that might be weaker than the one already up because the one you could cast in the future would be weaker still.

[Deleted]

Question of the day: When NOT using Rune are we still Gemming mostly (reds)Delicate's, Adepts and Glinting? or (secondaries)Adepts, Fractures and Sensie's?

thanks lads.

[aggixx]

Red in Red, Orange in yellow if bonus is good.

[mmokri]

320 mastery and 80 ag/160 mastery combo is very viable too.

[aggixx]

I have no idea why you would do that. I have yet to see a gear set where yellows are superior to reds.

[Deleted]

I have no idea why you would do that. I have yet to see a gear set where yellows are superior to reds.

Hmm, Catus seems to sim Mastery build a few % higher than Agi build, but that could be because of my Ilvl (~570). Do you find that pure Agi / Agi-Mastery is superior most of the time?

[Deleted]

Ferocious Bite now does less base damage and scales more with AP.

Shred now does 365% damage, up from 260%.

Savagery - Savage Roar now also increases all Physical damage dealt by 45%.

Rip now does ~2.5x more damage.

Oh my.....

[aggixx]

A few %? That's sounds like quite the large gap. And you're not using Rune of Re-Origination, right?

Keep mind stat weights alone cannot tell you which is superior, you actually have to sim two sets of gears with the different gemming.

- - - Updated - - -

Oh my.....

While numbers changes are fairly useless without context, the Savagery change definitely does not just seem like a number change. It's very odd that they would buff if when in the current state all 3 talents were near negligible levels of single-target DPS, now Savagery will just be the clear winner.

I suspect the Shred and Ferocious Bite changes are just some retuning after they AP and Weapon Damage system changes (which could potentially have affected us differently than other specs given our funny weapon damage mechanics), but the Rip change seems like it might be a bit more than that.

Good changes I would say though, overall auto-attack damage was way too high of a portion of our damage without these changes.

[Glurp]

Oh my.....

It's as if you actually didn't see the image above the changes.

[mmokri]

Blizz decided to remove base damage. Changelogs r related , except savagery.

[exochaft]

While numbers changes are fairly useless without context, the Savagery change definitely does not just seem like a number change. It's very odd that they would buff if when in the current state all 3 talents were near negligible levels of single-target DPS, now Savagery will just be the clear winner

And I think quite a few of us saw that kind of change likely to make it into the development process... or at least I thought it would to make it a plausible talent by giving some kind of damage bonus to Feral Savagery. The model of having one talent on par in one situation and completely underwhelming in every other situation leads to a talent not being used. Ignoring the damage increase amount, it's a very viable method of making the talent usable in every situation, as long as it does not beat out all the other talents in every situation.

[Rioo]

Since they are removing snapshotting I expect them to buff our attacks by quite a lot, so nothing surprising there. But I really don't want Savagery to be a valid choice in raids for experienced ferals. Hopefully it will cause problems in PvP and for once Blizzard will nerf the right thing.

[Glurp]

http://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/fzVPn3cqdWyBbYRk
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...pbeep/advanced

If possible could someone look through my Feral logs for H Garrosh. I decided to try out Feral there since Boomkin is terrible for that fight and I'm not sure what to think about my performance or if there is anything majorly bad I am doing wrong. I got parried quite a bit which is due to not playing melee and simply just not noticing sometimes when the boss in turned, not a huge issue for Feral though.

The things that immediately stick out are that I used Mangle a lot more than the other Ferals, I am only using Shred during Berserk, is there some other time I am meant to be using it that I don't know about? I also had a higher Thrash uptime than the other Ferals, is that unusual? Perhaps I just have more energy due to AoC and no RoR or am I prioritizing it wrong or something?

On a somewhat related note Simcraft tells me that using a 530 Rune is going to be about ~1k dps higher than the 580 AoC. Does that seem reasonable? I haven't swapped over yet because I'm somewhat suspicious of those results.

[Themessiah]

Just briefly looked over your logs: Trash up time seems fine to me. It will vary. One thing you have to be careful with when looking at up times is that some groups (such as mine) do not engage Garrosh is some of rooms - in particular the Sha room. I'm guessing this dramatically effects up times, such that if you engage him in all rooms, your up times are significantly higher.

As for mangle versus shred, shred only during berserk or bloodlust is usually fine. There will be high energy situations outside of those cd's where you could reasonably use shred instead of mangle, but overall this is negligible.

I suspect simcraft is correct about the use of 530 rune - especially on Garrosh. Garrosh spends a lot of time at or around >25% health. Meaning you can extend many rune-buffed rips for a relatively long time. Using rune should also increase the difference between rip and rake on your damage done, which strikes me as the immediate difference between your damage ratio's on Garrosh, and mine.

[Cruit]

It's as if you actually didn't see the image above the changes.

That image of the Tweets didn't come up as of later. I saw these changes before I went to bed and when I woke up I noticed that they've added the tweets.

[aggixx]

Per Stenhaldi, the Shred and FB changes return the abilities' damage to where they are on live, while the Rip change is a ~38% buff, which is definitely good because Rip will need a little bit of a boost to remain as damaging as it on live without rampant snapshotting.

There's still a couple of abilities in our toolkit that have not been retuned like this, so expect more status quo-netural buffs in future builds.

Since they are removing snapshotting I expect them to buff our attacks by quite a lot, so nothing surprising there. But I really don't want Savagery to be a valid choice in raids for experienced ferals. Hopefully it will cause problems in PvP and for once Blizzard will nerf the right thing.

I think it should be viable and Blizzard will almost definitely try to make it so. I think the ideal case is that it would be just the tiniest bit lower than the other options on Patchwerk which would cause people to shy away from it a bit without it being measurably inferior in practice.

To put it another way, the highest DPS player between two ferals should be the one who is most skilled, not the one who doesn't pick Savagery. In a perfect world, if I'm anything more than marginally better than someone I should be able to beat them with any talent combination (barring RNG).

[Deleted]

It's worth noting that the savagery change indicates that they won't reduce savage roar to 30% again. Weird considering their attempt to make feral much more beginner friendly.

[Deleted]

(at) agigxx

Thanks for your answer. I just simmed my equip sets in Catus using pure agi as well as pure mastery setups. The mastery build was always 1-3k ahead in simmed dps (Item-Lvl ~370, no RoR). So I'd guess that for some builds, yellow gemming can be ok as well, although this will depend on the type of fight as well i assume.