Feral (Cat) DPS Help (WoL provided)

[LocNess]

http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-k0glzu6i282edrs6/

One of our members is a 490 geared Feral Cat druid, and we are unsure if his DPS is where it should be at or not. These are just todays logs, however if you need to look at others feel free. Just have several members questioning it and now am going to let you guys help us out here as I, while being the raid leader, have no experience as a feral cat at all. Thank you for your help ^_^

EDIT: Sorry for inconsistent logs as well for past weeks, been having tech issues.

EDIT: Armory here http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...sclaw/advanced

[Deleted]

Armory looks very very good. One thing to change is to enchant the gloves with 170 strenght in stead of mastery. (1Str=0,5agi)
As for the WoL. Looking at some of them i see some quite bad bleed uptimes. I dont see savage roar up when he puts up his innital bleed but that might be me not being super good at WoL.
And he did not use trash....at all. Make him use it whenever things are not close to falling off.
Tell him that if he is not supergood at using the dream of cenarius talent he should change it for nature's vigil or heart of the wild.

[ScrubKitty]

I don't see any major concerns with your Feral, in fact his world rank 3 on heroic Stone Guard 10 man is quite impressive... I'd be more concerned with that Rogue's damage.

[aggixx]

1 strength is actually significantly less than 0.5 agility, it is still better than 1 mastery though.

It's going to be very seldom where hardcasting a Thrash is not going to be a DPS loss on a single target, it is best to only keep up thrash using Omen of Clarity (if Omen of Clarity procs -> use Thrash if thrash is <3 seconds or not up, otherwise do whatever else you would normally do).

Like Karlzone said, you definitely don't want to be using Dream of Cenarius if you're not comfortable with it. Practicing it is good but during raid (at least progression) is not the time to do that. I would highly recommend using Dream of Cenarius only if you enjoy doing so, otherwise use one of the other two talents. Nature's Vigil and Heart of the Wild are both competitive, barring burst being a major advantage in an encounter I would lean towards Heart of the Wild as the go to choice: you can use the use effect for a mega tranq if things get sketchy.

Looking specifically at the Tayak logs, both his bleed uptime and Savage Roar could use some improvement. On a standstill fight Rake and SR should more or less never fall off, although I understand Tayak isn't exactly a standstill fight. You should still be able to get 99%+ uptime on SR on that fight, and somewhere up to the neighborhood of 90% rake uptime if you're refreshing it right before he dissapears in P1 and right before he flies away in P2.

Two most important things for an easy DPS gain is make sure you're using a level 90 talent that you're comfortable with, and make sure your Savage Roar NEVER falls off more than a second or two. If you don't have an easy way of tracking your savage roar duration it is vital that you setup your UI to do so (I would recommend DroodFocus).

In the gear that your druid has, I would say it's more than achievable to pull anywhere between 75-80k DPS on Tayak.

I don't see any major concerns with your Feral, in fact his world rank 3 on heroic Stone Guard 10 man is quite impressive... I'd be more concerned with that Rogue's damage.

Assuming you're looking solely at their Blade Lord kill, the rogue was dead for a quarter of the fight.

[LocNess]

I don't see any major concerns with your Feral, in fact his world rank 3 on heroic Stone Guard 10 man is quite impressive... I'd be more concerned with that Rogue's damage.

The rogue was a PuG we brought in. We have had consistency issues with the group, and recently our resto druid had to drop due to increasing school work so we had the shaman switch to heals and now are trying to recruit a DPS.

Our death knight and myself just consistently beat him on most fights even though we are lower geared (I was beating him at 478 ilevel as well, not just the 484 I am at now) so I figured he needed to bump his DPS or something. Never played feral so don't know it much at all.

[Deleted]

I dont really see much wrong in the logs, he should be using ooc procs for thrash but thats about it, feral dps will never be able to compete with mages and cleaving DKS.

[LocNess]

I dont really see much wrong in the logs, he should be using ooc procs for thrash but thats about it, feral dps will never be able to compete with mages and cleaving DKS.

Are feral druids just in that bad of a place then? A comment earlier said he could get 75k-80k which is a substantial boost from his 63k. And I will have MV vaults logs Monday and be able to post those if necessary.

[nijuu]

Feral druids are not in a bad place and are actually pretty good and can pull off amazing single target dps with the right gear and proper playstyle with DoC

[anthemm]

Are feral druids just in that bad of a place then? A comment earlier said he could get 75k-80k which is a substantial boost from his 63k. And I will have MV vaults logs Monday and be able to post those if necessary.

The statement that your Feral should be doing 75-80k depends on how fast the boss dies.

Looking over your log, the reason why you wiped on Garalon is because of those PuGs you say you got. Two healing the fight makes the DPS requirement pretty easy. And no, a Feral should not be topping on Garalon. Ever. Feral energy regen is slow, and you simply cannot dump damage into Garalon's legs whenever you feel like it. As practically any other DPS spec, it's pretty easy to frontload tons of damage into those legs since most DPS specs don't use energy. Also, Feral has a high skill cap, so trying to maximize your DPS gets pretty challenging.

However, your Feral could be doing more damage. I'm less geared than he is, and I do 100k DPS on Garalon, and I am by no means that skilled. To make Garalon really easy, you can get a Combat Rogue to trivialize the fight, or a Warrior using Sweeping Strikes, unless Blizz has already implemented the nerf that no longer makes them do double damage to the boss when they hit Garalon's legs.

[LocNess]

The statement that your Feral should be doing 75-80k depends on how fast the boss dies.

Looking over your log, the reason why you wiped on Garalon is because of those PuGs you say you got. Two healing the fight makes the DPS requirement pretty easy. And no, a Feral should not be topping on Garalon. Ever. Feral energy regen is slow, and you simply cannot dump damage into Garalon's legs whenever you feel like it. As practically any other DPS spec, it's pretty easy to frontload tons of damage into those legs since most DPS specs don't use energy. Also, Feral has a high skill cap, so trying to maximize your DPS gets pretty challenging.

However, your Feral could be doing more damage. I'm less geared than he is, and I do 100k DPS on Garalon, and I am by no means that skilled. To make Garalon really easy, you can get a Combat Rogue to trivialize the fight, or a Warrior using Sweeping Strikes, unless Blizz has already implemented the nerf that no longer makes them do double damage to the boss when they hit Garalon's legs.

Well the purpose here is to figure out why he should be or should not be pulling more DPS. It is on almost every fight we do. Garalon we got to 3% but I made a mistake as raid leader and caused the wipe, and we didn't have time to get another good attempt in to finish it. But that is neither here nor there. I have some people saying he is fine, and others saying he should pull more.

[anthemm]

Well the purpose here is to figure out why he should be or should not be pulling more DPS. It is on almost every fight we do. Garalon we got to 3% but I made a mistake as raid leader and caused the wipe, and we didn't have time to get another good attempt in to finish it. But that is neither here nor there. I have some people saying he is fine, and others saying he should pull more.

Okay. Specifics.

1) He shouldn't be spamming Swipe
2) He should be pewpewing the legs as MUCH as possible. If you analyze the logs below, you'll see that your Feral is on the legs for significantly less time than the others

Here are some top Feral parses for 10 man:

1) http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/c...?s=3056&e=3453 (Uses HotW, quite possibly for stronger Tranquility)
2) http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/r...?s=3922&e=4344 (Dream of Cenarius)
3) http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/r.../4/?s=32&e=379 (Dream of Cenarius)

Your Feral and the Feral from parse #3 appear to be both hardcasting Thrash; and it appears to be viable.

Lastly, you can have your two Tanks on the front legs if they can manage it for some extra DPS.

[SyberGilneas]

DK's and other cleave classes dps will look better as their dots spread automatically to the boss and the legs. As a Feral we have to manually apply ours. And DoC rotation isn't terrible to master once you figure out it doesn't buff rip just rake. And Savage roar isn't buffing rip like it should. 118,704 base dmg for me with SR goes up to 119,128. Not really a 30% inc there. But, it does buff all of our other melee attacks so it should be up as much as possible. Also on Garalon feral's are at disadvantage as our dots are our primary dmg output. By the time we build up enough combo points the leg is dead. Ideally, throw up a quick SR buffed Rake, shred and get a couple combo points and throw up a Rip then get back on the boss.

Something else you can do is get him to Symbiosis your warrior for Shattering Blow I think it's called. That is a nice dmg increase across the entire raid. And having looked at the log of your best attempt on Garalon 7:04, we killed it in 7:02 25m his dps and up times are fine except for SR could be a bit better.

And until you've played a Feral in a raiding situation, never try to compare it to other classes, we have the John Madden of specs. It's more forgiving than Wrath and Cata but still a Hail Mary. My Fiance actually makes fun of how much I actually use the key board while raiding.

[dennisdkramer]

57k on blade lord is a little low for his gear but not awful (DPS(e) is all that matters btw, not DPS). Based on active time it looks like you guys are taking a while to cross through the tornado phase, but that depends on strategy; we also take it slow so the healers dont have to move as much, it sucks for dps but wiping there is a waste of time so meh..

specific to garlon, your strategy for handling the legs is going to make a HUGE difference in dps. On attempts where people were blowing up the legs quickly, I would see myself at 80-90k because it almost wasn't worth switching to them. You can see in damage by actor on your longest attempt (as someone else pointed out) that your feral had 75% of his damage done to the body. You can see in one of our enrage-hitting attempts that I have 38% to the body and 62% to the legs, which is consistent with most of the top damage parses on WoL. If your dps is blowing up the legs as soon as they spawn, I strongly advise that you revise your strategy. Cleaving and dotting/bleeding the legs down is the optimal method for overall raid dps.

One thing that is strange to me is how rip can be his top damage ability in your first blade lord wipe even though he only has a 61.6% uptime. bleed uptimes should be ~99% for rake and ~90% for rip, although the tornado phase will skew it a bit low

[Deleted]

Are feral druids just in that bad of a place then? A comment earlier said he could get 75k-80k which is a substantial boost from his 63k. And I will have MV vaults logs Monday and be able to post those if necessary.

We are great single target DPS'ers but when it comes to switching targets and cleaving we will be behind majorly.

Currently single target with no swapping and minimal movement i can pull about 100k dps with a 499 iLevel, as soon as we start switching targets (garalons legs) our DoC rotation will be less valuable

[dennisdkramer]

We are great single target DPS'ers but when it comes to switching targets and cleaving we will be behind majorly.

Currently single target with no swapping and minimal movement i can pull about 100k dps with a 499 iLevel, as soon as we start switching targets (garalons legs) our DoC rotation will be less valuable

If you could pull 100k dps single target you'd be #1 WoL on every fight, that's just plain not true.

We're not very good at passive cleaving, thrash is our only tool for 2-3 targets without actually target switching, and even bleed cleaving we're behind a few classes, specifically fire mages and rogues who basically don't even have to do anything and get significant dps increases if there are other targets nearby.

That said, on a fight like Garalon its not *what* we have to dps its *how its done. We're not arms warriors or anything, but feral dps can be very potent if the legs are alive long enough to get good DPE out of bleed cleaving them.

[Deleted]

If you could pull 100k dps single target you'd be #1 WoL on every fight, that's just plain not true.

We're not very good at passive cleaving, thrash is our only tool for 2-3 targets without actually target switching, and even bleed cleaving we're behind a few classes, specifically fire mages and rogues who basically don't even have to do anything and get significant dps increases if there are other targets nearby.

That said, on a fight like Garalon its not *what* we have to dps its *how its done. We're not arms warriors or anything, but feral dps can be very potent if the legs are alive long enough to get good DPE out of bleed cleaving them.

eh? do you even check WoL? My rankings are not on there because all our logs are private. http://www.worldoflogs.com/rankings/...ral-Cat_Druid/ theres over 20 ferals pulling 100k.

Ill happily post my Gara'jal skada report on next weeks kill. Please bare in mind that this is the only fight so far thats a good marker for single target nuking, everything else requires switching.

[nijuu]

If you could pull 100k dps single target you'd be #1 WoL on every fight, that's just plain not true.

We're not very good at passive cleaving, thrash is our only tool for 2-3 targets without actually target switching, and even bleed cleaving we're behind a few classes, specifically fire mages and rogues who basically don't even have to do anything and get significant dps increases if there are other targets nearby.

That said, on a fight like Garalon its not *what* we have to dps its *how its done. We're not arms warriors or anything, but feral dps can be very potent if the legs are alive long enough to get good DPE out of bleed cleaving them.

100k are easily achieveable, you can probably aim for something between 115-120k with best in slot gear on a single target fight like garajal

[dennisdkramer]

Gara'jal is not an unbuffed fight. The top log at 114k had 49% uptime on spiritual innervation, which if its a 22% damage increase then yes you're technically right -that would put him at like 102k without it, but that's the top recorded log ever and an extremely quick kill.. I dont think 100k is a number that should be thrown around casually, its more of an "if the stars align you might do 100k in great gear".

[aggixx]

100k are easily achieveable, you can probably aim for something between 115-120k with best in slot gear on a single target fight like garajal

Only with the right amount of gear, and BiS will be more like 130k for good parses.

[Deleted]

Gara'jal is not an unbuffed fight. The top log at 114k had 49% uptime on spiritual innervation, which if its a 22% damage increase then yes you're technically right -that would put him at like 102k without it, but that's the top recorded log ever and an extremely quick kill.. I dont think 100k is a number that should be thrown around casually, its more of an "if the stars align you might do 100k in great gear".

100k is the number i thew about myself, if you check my gear you'll see i have a 500 ilevel putting me as one of the best geared ferals in the world (top 5) im also in a world top 50 raiding guild so i know what im doing.