Hi folks,
I've been struggling for a few weeks now and I'm really at a loss for what to do next. Here's hoping someone here can help me out. I've been playing a kitty for many years now, and used to do extremely good DPS back in WotLK, often topping meters. I skipped Cataclysm altogether, and came back to MoP to find myself consistently at the bottom no matter what I do. What frustrates me is at at an iLevel of 490 I know I should be doing much better and I've only myself to blame, I just can't figure out what and have tried a number of things.
For example, during last night's raid session, I was struggling to even hit 75k on Garalon. Other guildies with very similar iLevels are 95-100k. Then we went to clear some older content and my performance was even worse. Some of the fights are challenging, like Will of the Emperor where adds die before I can even get combo points up, but I'd like to focus on Garalon for a minute.
I've been working with our RL to try different things. At first I thought that the target switching to the legs all the time was costing me in bleed damage so I asked if I could stay on the boss. That ended up being a marginal DPS loss, so we haven't really visited that strategy in a while. I try to stand in the leg circles and am assuming that the boost it gives my shred & FB should make up for the lack of a rip.
I've found that the information for kitties is out there is either over simplified or sometimes in conflict depending on what site you go to, so I'd really rather hear it from the horse's mouth.
I try my best to:
* Keep SR up
* Where available, pop TF before a 5 CP rip but not if the rip will be down for long. I find now my TF and rip seem to roll at roughly the same time
* Keep rake up
* Shred for CPs
As much as I can I TF before berserk, though I forget sometimes.
For Garalon I can't do that so really I try to do that on boss, and if a leg is up I keep SR up, build up 5 CPs with shred (while standing inside a circle), and finish with an FB.
I'm attaching a log. I'll be completely up-front, it's not my best performance, but I was trying very hard. On low mobility patchwerk-style fights I can actually keep SR, rake, 5 CP rips up with some pretty consistent up-time, but doing that I find requires a fair amount of concentration and even working very hard at it I end up doing 75% the DPS of everyone else with a similar gear iLevel.
As for reforging, I've tried both what Rawr suggests for my gear as well as Mr. Robot. One vs the other causes a change in dps slightly here or there, but it's hard to test on a combat dummy without raid buffs and unfortunately no matter what the differences are, I'm still way, way off what other guildies are doing. I just can't seem to hold my weight, so I'm appealing for some help. I'd very much like constructive criticism as much as possible. If you need to look at a log, pls look at the Garalon kill linked here:
The report on world of logs is zutzi8ft87wh9uws
Like I said, not a perfect run for me I know, but I could really use the critique. My armory is Charinna / US-Shadowsong
Thanks very much for any advice you can use. Once I get unstuck I'll be thrilled to pay it forward somehow.
---------- Post added 2013-02-09 at 09:56 PM ----------
At the risk of turning this post into my personal blog (but with the whole paying it forward in mind), I figured I'd say where I'm going next...
From my current reading, I'm going to try dropping Heart of the Wild in favor of Nature's Vigil. Maybe later I'll try DoC, but it sounds like NV is the way to go until I have things under control, making sure to pop it at the same time as I do my Berserk.