[Feral] The art of a Kitten: PvE guide

[aggixx]

Uff I can already imagine the annoyance of not even having SotF energy during rune procs.

How so? If you cast a finisher that isn't Rip during the Rune proc you're probably not going to be getting another 5 CP in time regardless (unless you're in berserk, which again you would make it regardless).

On the topic of Treants, I would love them to do a little bit of cleave. On fights like horridon, our tier 4 talent is just not very useful

The rest of the options aren't exactly oriented towards multi-target either. Our CP expenditure doesn't exactly go up when you're attacking multiple targets.

[Deleted]

How so? If you cast a finisher that isn't Rip during the Rune proc you're probably not going to be getting another 5 CP in time regardless (unless you're in berserk, which again you would make it regardless).

Correct, but I mostly use the energy gained from SotF (during rune) to get another rake out. This is very helpful with a rentaki proc or on fights with adds. As said it is just a minor annoyance if I can't do that.

The rest of the options aren't exactly oriented towards multi-target either. Our CP expenditure doesn't exactly go up when you're attacking multiple targets.

The only reason that we take SotF for a fight where we use less finishers, is that the other talents do effectively nothing for multitarget.
Also I enjoy min/maxing AoE attacks (like cleaving an additional target with thrash). Perhaps a little AoE attack around them when they spawn would be enough. Did they not do a little stomp when summoned, in the start of mists?

[Deleted]

Correct, but I mostly use the energy gained from SotF (during rune) to get another rake out. This is very helpful with a rentaki proc or on fights with adds. As said it is just a minor annoyance if I can't do that.

Instead of having a slightly longer Rune'd rake you will have the treants' rakes which will probably outweigh the damage of your clipped rake (especially with melee hits). Essentially, it means that whenever you did Trinket Proc -> Rake -> [...] -> Rip -> (energy from sotf Rake you will no cast treants before it drops off instead.

SotF might still be the best choice for AoC+berserk aoe but I wouldn't disregard treants as a viable single-target option. We'll have to wait and see there's still a lot of bugs that might make or break the talent and there's probably quite a bit to fix on sims to see whether they actually pull off well.

[Deleted]

stuff

I was merely thinking about playstyle
I'll get used to it

[Wojtek]

Hoping to get some analysis here. I've got a lot of gear over this guy but he destroyed me on normal Ji-kun last night.

Me:
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte.../Wojtek/simple
http://worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-29...=10005&e=10344

Him:
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...chizzle/simple
http://worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-29...=10005&e=10344

I am a main spec tank for a 10m that went 12/13H this tier. I don't get to dps much in that group. We couldn't go this week in our normal group so I filled in for a 25m in another group as a DPS.

As I said I have gear over him (~13 ilvls, heroic RoR, heroic RSC, heroic weapon) and he destroyed me. For reference I use ovale with leafkiller.

Here are what I think my problems are:
1) A lot of this gear is crossover from my tank set and is gemmed crit.
2) I may be raking too much (whenever RoR is up I'm spamming it).
3) I am maintaining thrash as much as possible, and I see 0 thrashes from him.
4) He's using more shred than mangles. Me: 64/11 mangle/shred, him 7/72.

The thing I can't explain is that his melee hits and crits average much bigger than mine, even though I have 4000 more base agility and a better weapon. I don't know how to explain that one other than I was wearing Juju instead of Rentaki because I forgot to swap it, but that shouldn't make that large of a difference. I'm not gemmed as much agility as I can because I share so much of this gear with bear, but I've still got higher stats.

Thanks in advance.

[Nishida]

One HUGH thing that sticks out is... You got 0 Primal Nutriment buffs. That's the whole point of the fight....

[Wojtek]

That's something I didn't think about at all. Welp.

[Cruit]

Any news on any BiS list for 5.4?

[teddabear]

SotF will probably degrade dramatically in 5.4 with Ilvl. Combo points just don't translate into damage well past a certain point due to FB. Hopefully the Treants will be tuned to be as good at high Ilvls as SotF was at low Ilvls.

[Redpanda]

not sure if its been asked kind of a noob question. From what I understand treants will put a rake up, its got 3 charges so in single target can you just dump all you treats and they will each make their own rake so on the boss frame it will be your own bleeds followed by 3 more rake icons? would be pretty cool to use to just target something across the room throw a tree at him. something else pops you throw a tree and on your main target you have your own bleeds plus a tree.

[aggixx]

One HUGH thing that sticks out is... You got 0 Primal Nutriment buffs. That's the whole point of the fight....

And he had 4. Without looking at specifics (just gear and buffs) you guys played probably at about the same level (aside from you forgetting to get the buffs at all). If he wasn't massively behind you in gear he would've crushed you with a 4 buff advantage.

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not sure if its been asked kind of a noob question. From what I understand treants will put a rake up, its got 3 charges so in single target can you just dump all you treats and they will each make their own rake so on the boss frame it will be your own bleeds followed by 3 more rake icons? would be pretty cool to use to just target something across the room throw a tree at him. something else pops you throw a tree and on your main target you have your own bleeds plus a tree.

That's correct. You can have your own rake and 3 treant rakes active on the same target at the same time.

- - - Updated - - -

Any news on any BiS list for 5.4?

Trinkets, item level, and set bonuses are the only thing that matter if you have Rune. If you don't have a Rune (or one worth using) it's the same as before: mastery on every piece you possibly can and red sockets if possible.

There are no "BiS lists" put out by anybody yet because the people that would tend to do that sort of thing understand they're fairly pointless this time around.

[Redpanda]

if thats the case then wow gg nice change on the mechanic. having a rake up on multiple targets helps alot on cleave fights and add fights like nazgrim when the ww adds come out. paragons, galakras etc.

[Wojtek]

And he had 4. Without looking at specifics (just gear and buffs) you guys played probably at about the same level (aside from you forgetting to get the buffs at all). If he wasn't massively behind you in gear he would've crushed you with a 4 buff advantage.

Would you mind combing the rest of my post and the logs posted and letting me know if I'm doing things correctly?

[aggixx]

Sure, since I'm in such a kind mood



Blue boxes were when you were travelling and weren't on the boss. Red boxes are where you had a bad downtime (there are also some long thrash downtimes in there that are pretty questionable but I didn't outline them).

It definitely looks like your bleed uptimes need some work.

Rake: You had 2 3 second downtimes and then a 13 second downtime. None of these should happen.
You could probably do a better job refreshing your Rake before leaving the boss, that's free damage right there. You should also (usually) be attempting to do that with Rip as well.

Rip: You had 2 very long downtimes, that can't happen either. Make sure you're not getting too overzealous with Ferocious Bite, if you'll be able to wait to refresh the Rip and do so before your energy fills you should do that instead of Ferocious Biting (in most cases). It also doesn't look like you know that you can refresh Rip at any time when it's below 2 seconds (same goes for Rake and Thrash @ 3 seconds), because you only did so once the entire fight. Having little 1-3 second downtimes between every single rip will really add up over the course of the fight and cost you a lot of damage.

You also only clipped a Rip once the entire fight, (overwriting a weaker Rip for a more powerful one) which is a very integral part of feral gameplay. You MUST do this if you want to do great damage. Get some addon that will tell you the power of your bleeds on the target and clip Rip any time it says you can put one up that's at least 15% stronger (this WeakAura or DroodFocus or Ovale can do this). Ferocious Bite is NOT our hard-hitting finisher ability, Rip is, and it's important you recognize that FB should take a backseat to it.

Your SR uptime as alright but it looks you put a Thrash and a couple swipes into a nest without realizing your SR was down. If your SR is running low when you know you're not going to be attacking anything for sometime you should spam SR (you could've done that while flying to the nest and wouldn't have had an issue).

Try to use Berserk with Tiger's Fury every time (although it admittedly it doesn't matter that much, there's usually no reason not to).

Finally, the easiest way to improve your bleed uptimes is make sure you have an addon that will display your bleed durations in a very obvious and easy to see way. If you don't have such a display, you should get one. If you do have one, put some serious thought into how you can make it easier to see, as well as how you can make it very obvious to yourself that a bleed is about to/has fallen off.

PS: As mentioned before, Primal Nutriments are super important to your DPS, as a feral druid more so than probably every other spec in the game. If you don't already know you should find a guide how to get that buff consistently.

Once you have the buff you generally want to get a Rip and Rake up ASAP, and then make sure you refresh the Rip and Rake shortly before the buff falls off so you can get (almost) double benefit from it. This is also crucial to maximizing execute phase (it's possible to get 800k-1m damage rip crits for the whole execute phase with really good gear and buff lineup).

[Wojtek]

Wow, thank you very much for that analysis.

[Deleted]

How do you put up a option like that in WoL? I've been trying to do such thing but I've never made it :P

[Deleted]

How do you put up a option like that in WoL? I've been trying to do such thing but I've never made it :P

Go into the log you want, click on the player you want to analyze, and click the buffs cast, and then click the "#" at the end to show it on the graph.

[Skadovsk]

Question, how does one rank in H animus?
Do you need to have your guild let you stay on boss 24/7? or some sort of burn strat that doesn't deal with small adds as much?
and by rank I mean top 20US/EU, only fight without good numbers.

[Paloro]

Question, how does one rank in H animus?
Do you need to have your guild let you stay on boss 24/7? or some sort of burn strat that doesn't deal with small adds as much?
and by rank I mean top 20US/EU, only fight without good numbers.

I'm not sure how to for 10m, but on 25m this was my log from last night :H: Dark Animus

I have to keep an add on me until the 2:20 mark, then kill it onto the massive golem. I use soul swap to put up initial strong bleeds on the anima golem, then x-fer them to DA so the little guy doesn't die right away and this gives me plenty of threat to hold him until he needs to die. If I have a time in the fight where I can refresh a stronger Rip/Rake, I tend to soul swap off to the massives since it will be a damage gain either way. The only other trick is to refresh thrash while the massives are in close proximity to the boss, hence my high thrash damage on the massives.

[Deleted]

Since i because of unexpected events will step down raiding (But i will still continue playing LFR and Flex and such) I'll need one or a few players to help me maintain the "Boss Guide" part of this guide.

I had plans of making the specific boss guide in another thread and for 5.4. Making it more in depth and way more focused then what it was in 5.3, especially since it looks like we will have a lot of options to pick between comparing to the past. And a lot of things depending from fight to fight. If you'r interested in maintaining this please contact me thought PM. Because i think I'll lack experience from the fights when it will matter.

And i do feel bad because i had Elypop making me these nice boss pics for the guide i planned, and it would be a shame not the use them...

Vale of Eternal Sorrows:



Gates of Retribution:



The Underhold:



Downfall: