4.0 Feral Gemming

[Shifthappens]

Not needing to deal with missed yellows is worth it. which can lower your DPS even more and not to mention screw up your priorities.

[Elunedra]

Hit/expertise has intrinsic value that cannot be modeled... hence when you see many people opt for hit/exp capping regardless if simulations show it will yield slightly lower DPS than stacking other stats. That value might just be knowing you can consistently make contact and perform exactly as you should (instead of relying on RNG to favor you). That value might be the knowledge that if a yellow attack misses, the impact on your DPS (or the fight itself) might be much larger than what can be modeled. Regardless, it's a personal choice in the end.

this is why i prefer hit / exp tobe capped as when i got 4 cp's id like to know that after my next shred i can do a finisher i dont want it to miss and screw my next move.

this is probely a personal issue as i play feral whitout any addons helping me on it.

[Purrfunctory]

The chance of missing "all" yellow attacks with even 2.89% Hit and 3.0% Expertise is astronomically low. At any rate with the energy refund on finishing attacks the cost is minimal. I do not weigh stats in a vacuum. I weigh stats relative to other stats.

If someone who focuses on Hit and Expertise caps misses they do the same thing I do "... do it next GCD ..." In the example above, Cat A has a total 8.61% chance to miss or be dodged while Cat B has a total 1.69% chance to miss or be dodged. In other words, Cat A will hit his target 91.39% of the time while Cat B will hit his target 98.31% of the time. It isn't as if Cat A has a 70% chance to hit versus Cat B at 98.31% chance to hit.

Focusing on high damage output means that I will always have high damage output. If the circumstances dictate I can use potions or food to increase my chance to hit.

There isn't any additional value to Hit or Expertise that can't be modeled. Although Hit and Expertise offer an effect in that it does "smooth" out the "rotation" somewhat since hits are slightly more predictable; however, this can be modeled. That is a common misconception. Haste will now have a somewhat similar effect in that recovery from misses will be much more rapid. One effect wastes less energy the other effect recuperates energy faster.

I don't raid with Ferals that maximize their Hit and Expertise before they actually reach any amount of reasonable damage. Admittedly, in the two examples above Cat A or Cat B are doing decent damage. If I saw someone with 5,000 Attack Power, 0 Mastery, 20% Haste, 40% Critical Strike and 8% Hit with 6.5% Expertise I can't imagine I would invite them to a raid. This is an extreme example but this is exactly what I see people saying.

This is in many ways similar to the EH versus TTL argument. Blindly stacking Stamina as high as you possibly can isn't very intelligent either. You will likely have Threat issues, the value of Savage Defense is lower and you simply become a mana sponge for healers. is Stamina important? Yes! Is Stamina the only stat to consider? No!

[Elunedra]

If I saw someone with 5,000 Attack Power, 0 Mastery, 20% Haste, 40% Critical Strike and 8% Hit with 6.5% Expertise I can't imagine I would invite them to a raid. This is an extreme example but this is exactly what I see people saying.

This might be tru for an hardcore enviroment but most ferals are in guilds a bit more socail and they do get into raids.

If its a pug they wont goto the armory to look 24 ppl up they just go by gearscore instead witch doesnt look at hit / exp.

Also there are still a shitlaod of officers / gm that know hit one of the most importent stats ingame (espcaily when you gm is a mage), its realy hard to get it into them thats its oke when a feral misses a lot.

[utopianh]

Not really, considering you can link them to Toskks or EJ, or simply point out that ferals don't suffer the same problems with Crit Soft capping as dual wielders, and only lose 20% resources on misses.

PS: In response, combo generators for all energy users have a built in 80% energy recovery on missed attack, and they made the 80% recovery baseline across the board when they removed primal precision for ferals. Rogues are in the same boat, but they crit soft cap at a very low crit rate, and a large portion of their damage is white, making hit relatively strong for them compared to us.

[Azz]

Thanks for the responses. The fact that the 80% return on misses was baseline was what I was missing. Glad it's still here Was little worried..

[Purrfunctory]

Hitting 91.39% of the time is not missing a lot.

Hit is not one of the best stats in the game. Hit seems more important for other classes because some have 17% hit caps or even 26% hit caps. When you consider that Ferals have to deal with 8% Hit and 6.5% Expertise our total chance to miss is 14.5% which isn't far from 17%. Before you say we have (well had) Primal Precision which increases our Expertise, most other classes have increases to Hit through talents as well (or did).

There are addons that evaluate raid members talent choices as well as gemming and enchanting decisions. I run a weekly GDKP raid so when I am evaluating raid members I need to know our likely success rate so I look at their progress in the given raid, their talents and their gear decisions.

I agree, the value of Hit and Expertise would be higher relative to other stats if we didn't have energy return when finishers miss. This isn't the most obvious change.

To be absolutely clear, I am not deriding Hit Rating and Expertise Rating. I am simply stating that other stats are better. In other words, you shouldn't gem or enchant for Hit or Expertise until such time as you cause sufficient damage to make the value of a miss higher than the cost of recovering from a miss. I value the Hit and Expertise on my gear very highly but choose to not focus on Hit and Expertise caps.

[exochaft]

I agree, the value of Hit and Expertise would be higher relative to other stats if we didn't have energy return when finishers miss. This isn't the most obvious change.

I think we're still missing what I meant about intrinsic value, because even with an energy refund, that mindset is based off "well, if something misses, no matter, I have all the time in the world to fix what I did wrong." What if you couldn't?

This generally pops up more in target switching, but it will deal with times where you have to stop DPSing the boss for some reason (whether it be the boss runs away for a second, you get CC'd, etc). Hit and expertise have more intrinsic value in non-Patchwerk style fights because if you need to switch targets yesterday, missing a yellow attack or a 5-point combo move is wasting time since you should be on another target. With bosses (say Putricide) that run away during a phase transition and you have to DPS something else... I'd get rather annoyed if I have 5-combo points on the target and my Rip gets dodged or misses, and *poof* the boss is at the table, I guess I'll settle for a 5-point SR (hope it wasn't at high duration already). Another would be in the brain room for the Yogg-Saron fight... good luck explaining to your raid that you were MC'd because you attack missed, but that's okay, I got energy refund so I spent extra time in there to make sure to land that attack (yes, back when it was cutting-edge content, as a feral kitty, I had the highest damage done to the brain because of all those yellow attack bleeds). Hit/exp is a tool to reduce RNG, since there's already enough of it in the game.

[utopianh]

I think we're still missing what I meant about intrinsic value, because even with an energy refund, that mindset is based off "well, if something misses, no matter, I have all the time in the world to fix what I did wrong." What if you couldn't?

This generally pops up more in target switching, but it will deal with times where you have to stop DPSing the boss for some reason (whether it be the boss runs away for a second, you get CC'd, etc). Hit and expertise have more intrinsic value in non-Patchwerk style fights because if you need to switch targets yesterday, missing a yellow attack or a 5-point combo move is wasting time since you should be on another target. With bosses (say Putricide) that run away during a phase transition and you have to DPS something else... I'd get rather annoyed if I have 5-combo points on the target and my Rip gets dodged or misses, and *poof* the boss is at the table, I guess I'll settle for a 5-point SR (hope it wasn't at high duration already). Another would be in the brain room for the Yogg-Saron fight... good luck explaining to your raid that you were MC'd because you attack missed, but that's okay, I got energy refund so I spent extra time in there to make sure to land that attack (yes, back when it was cutting-edge content, as a feral kitty, I had the highest damage done to the brain because of all those yellow attack bleeds). Hit/exp is a tool to reduce RNG, since there's already enough of it in the game.

That is one way of looking at it, but you're also ignoring so many OTHER factors that are involved. If we have a fight that involves interrupting, it places a higher value on hit, and haste (to offset the energy we'll need to use on our interrupt). Having a set built for this type of encounter would definetely be something a good player would do, but would not build their entire gameplay around.

For target switches, there is a huge variable and no real precise way to model it. Hit isn't necessarily going to immediately outweigh, because crit becomes more valuable as we need to increase the speed at which we get combo points to put rip up on the new target, and half the time you'll end up burning your CPs when target switching on a finisher that can't miss (Savage Roar) anyway.

There are so many factors it's almost impossible to accurately model a perfect gear set, but knowing the math and mechanics enough to make good judgements, and building your average gear set for most general encounters where maximizing dps matters is always, always advised. Telling new ferals to hit/expertise cap as a priority will not be a positive thing for the feral community, as it will lower their general dps output significantly if they are sacrificing other, better dps stats in order to reach those caps. Plus with each tier increasing the hit required, we'll already see a relative inflation on hit value throughout the tiers as the crit soft cap gets lower.

Reduced RNG when our class already requires a lot of RNG to maximize the dps but does not have a huge dropoff from small losses is really kind of a silly requirement. If the player is that obsessed with making the last hit in the brain room of yogg that they got mind controlled, that's not a gearing issue but a player issue, and something that wouldn't have been fixed by hit cap. After all, "oh sorry, I lagged" never, ever is a viable excuse but something every solid player plans around. Ferals increased movement speed isn't an excuse to let yourself sit inside longer just to lag spike and wipe the raid, even though it would maximize your uptime further.

The fact remains, that hit does not increase your dps more than any of our other secondary stats, and increases it less than our primary stat, but not by such a dramatic degree that every other stat should be ignored for the primary. Ferals have never been far off from this model with the exclusion of ArP's silly exponential scaling, and we've had our primary stacking stats change more without any huge mechanics overhaul more than most simply because of how closely balanced our stats are. After all, I've gone from having Mongoose, Berserking, Executioner, and Black Magic as my best enchants all based on small differences in my gearing; most of the time they've rarely differed by more than 20-25 dps, which means that honestly it's in the range of unnoticeable differences and far below the variable of your dps from the standpoint of human error and flat our RNG.

[Cheezee]

Why do you assume Exo is telling beginning cats to gem for hit/expertise? The OP is not in beginning level raid gear. Granted he's not in 277 ilvl but he's geared enough for some hit/expertise to be valuable especially once Arp is gone. I can tell you this much; on the PTR after reforging the highest stats on each piece of gear to mastery (589 rating) I am still at 70% crit, expertise & hit capped (after regemming) and I have almost 1100 haste. My dps is crap but Blizz will have to adjust that.

[Purrfunctory]

The discussion thus far has revolved around attribute priority based on relative weights although that isn't necessarily the exact question of the original poster. Some of us have argued that you shouldn't just gem Hit Rating and Expertise Rating while other have said that is the preferred method (at least their preferred method). I don't believe it is really an assumption since an end game Feral (at least in WotLK) should have sufficient Armor Penetration, Attack Power and Critical Strike to at least consider Hit and Expertise. Those of us on the relative weighting system wouldn't argue that, thus the argument centers around the stat priorities for WoW 4.0 which appears to essentially be the focus of the original poster's question.

A few of us argue that the stat priority is relative depending on the amount of other stats you have. For a typical fight, the relative stat weights would favor the following priorities:

1. Agility
2. Mastery
3. Haste
4. Hit
5. Expertise
6. Critical Strike

A beginning Feral might have the following:

Critical Strike ~60% to Crit (which is not near Crit Cap % for White)
Expertise 95% chance for the target to not dodge when attacking from behind
Hit 95% chance to hit the target
Haste ~20% Haste which will help with energy regeneration but probably won't help a mediocre Feral actually gain additional special attacks
Mastery 0 Bleed effects since reforging will be required initially
Agility 2,000 Agility will improve Attack Power and Critical Strike % which affects all attacks as well as Combo Point generation

One way of looking at this is

1. 2000 Agility - Not capped; (Agility itself doesn't cap per se) therefore, more Agility will result continue to result in large gains in dps
2. 0 Mastery - Not capped (Mastery doesn't cap as I understand the system) and most have reported outstanding results with Mastery and theorycraft supports this
3. 20% Haste - Not capped but large amounts of Haste has reduced the value of Haste relative to other stats
4. 3% Hit - Low Rating results in Hit now approaching Haste in relative value
5. 1.5% Expertise - Low Rating results in Expertise now surpassing Haste in relative value
6. 60% Critical Strike - A very poor stat now since Agility appears to give more Critical Strike % per point than Critical Strike Rating

Given the above stats the two stats which are nearest their respective caps are... Believe it or not... Hit and Expertise

So, this level 80 Feral who just entered WoW 4.0 needs to now try to optimize their stats for WoW 4.0 and has a strict budget of stats as demonstrated above. How can this Feral improve their damage? Remember, when you choose a stat you are choosing that stat over other stats.

1. Increase Agility by reducing either Critical Strike %, Hit or Expertise
2. Increase Mastery by reducing either Critical Strike %, Hit or Expertise
3. Increase Haste (although the benefit is relatively minimal by comparison to Agility and Mastery)
4. Expertise is an excellent candidate for reduction since you are rarely able to attack from behind for the duration of the fight while leveling
5. Critical Strike is also an excellent candidate since Agility provides much better benefit overall

TLDR

Much like Armor Penetration was the "go to" stat in WotLK, Agility will be the "go to" stat in Cataclysm with Mastery a close second. While Agility itself doesn't cap per se the value of Agility is reduced once the Crit Cap % for White is reached. At such time the value of Hit and Expertise are elevated to first place (or at least become much more desirable).

[Elunedra]

First of all nice post !

6. 1000 Critical Strike Rating - A very poor stat now since Agility appears to give more Critical Strike % per point than Critical Strike Rating

I just did my regemming yesterday i had 66% crit and after gemming 10 +20 crit gems to 10 +20 agi gems and then i had 63% crit.

but thiking back at it might have missed out on Mark of the Wild \o/

[Purrfunctory]

Now that I think about it, my comment about Agility providing more Critical Strike % than Critical Strike Rating was based on a comment from Mihir which I believe applied to level 85 Ferals. The values probably are different for level 80 Ferals.

At any rate, I believe few would argue that the relative value of Agility is far greater than Critical Strike rating since Agility does provide Critical Strike % as well as large amounts of Attack Power. Agility is also increased by our Armor Specialization and Mark of the Wild (as you pointed out).

Thank you for the clarification.

[Elunedra]

Yes but when it comes to leveling i gues crit > mastery as often you dont you your bleeds effects (well rake maybe but not rip).

If you want todo instances then mastery should be better yes

[Cheezee]

The discussion thus far has revolved around attribute priority based on relative weights although that isn't necessarily the exact question of the original poster. Some of us have argued that you shouldn't just gem Hit Rating and Expertise Rating while other have said that is the preferred method (at least their preferred method). I don't believe it is really an assumption since an end game Feral (at least in WotLK) should have sufficient Armor Penetration, Attack Power and Critical Strike to at least consider Hit and Expertise. Those of us on the relative weighting system wouldn't argue that, thus the argument centers around the stat priorities for WoW 4.0 which appears to essentially be the focus of the original poster's question.

I think you are misinterpreting relative stat weights and a stat priority system. Relative weights change based on the stats a character currently has and is very subjective. A priority system generally means you take one stat to the exclusion of all others (hello Arp, defense & caster haste or sp) until you either cap or you just can't get anymore and then you go for the next best thing. This is one of the things Blizzard is trying to get away from in Cataclysm.

A few of us argue that the stat priority is relative depending on the amount of other stats you have. For a typical fight, the relative stat weights would favor the following priorities:

1. Agility
2. Mastery
3. Haste
4. Hit
5. Expertise
6. Critical Strike

Define a typical fight. For all we know right now Blizzard has planned a kologarn style fight in a raid that also involves parry hastened attacks. Suddenly Expertise is the greatest stat you could possibly get so you don't gib the tank. And if you don't think people would re-gem, re-enchant or re-forge to get past such a fight you're dead wrong.

A beginning Feral might have the following:

Critical Strike ~60% to Crit (which is not near Crit Cap % for White)
Expertise 95% chance for the target to not dodge when attacking from behind
Hit 95% chance to hit the target
Haste ~20% Haste which will help with energy regeneration but probably won't help a mediocre Feral actually gain additional special attacks
Mastery 0 Bleed effects since reforging will be required initially
Agility 2,000 Agility will improve Attack Power and Critical Strike % which affects all attacks as well as Combo Point generation

One way of looking at this is

1. 2000 Agility - Not capped; (Agility itself doesn't cap per se) therefore, more Agility will result continue to result in large gains in dps
2. 0 Mastery - Not capped (Mastery doesn't cap as I understand the system) and most have reported outstanding results with Mastery and theorycraft supports this
3. 20% Haste - Not capped but large amounts of Haste has reduced the value of Haste relative to other stats
4. 3% Hit - Low Rating results in Hit now approaching Haste in relative value
5. 1.5% Expertise - Low Rating results in Expertise now surpassing Haste in relative value
6. 60% Critical Strike - A very poor stat now since Agility appears to give more Critical Strike % per point than Critical Strike Rating

No beginning feral druid is going to have those stats; they would need TOC + ICC gear to get to 60% crit or 2k agility unless you're talking raid buffed.

Also your values for crit and agility are incorrect. 1 Crit rating provides about 70% more crit % than 1 agility does at level 80 and about 80% more crit at 85. Agility provides too many benefits for it to provide more crit per point than pure crit rating.

So, this level 80 Feral who just entered WoW 4.0 needs to now try to optimize their stats for WoW 4.0 and has a strict budget of stats as demonstrated above. How can this Feral improve their damage? Remember, when you choose a stat you are choosing that stat over other stats.

1. Increase Agility by reducing either Critical Strike %, Hit or Expertise
2. Increase Mastery by reducing either Critical Strike %, Hit or Expertise
3. Increase Haste (although the benefit is relatively minimal by comparison to Agility and Mastery)
4. Expertise is an excellent candidate for reduction since you are rarely able to attack from behind for the duration of the fight while leveling
5. Critical Strike is also an excellent candidate since Agility provides much better benefit overall

1. You cannot increase or reduce primary stats (agility, strength, stamina, int) with the re-forging system; only with gems or enchants or different gear pieces all together. Only secondary stats (crit, haste, hit, expertise, dodge, parry or spirit) can be increased or reduced via re-forging.

2. True but this is rather pointless for a beginning feral. An end game feral will likely reduce the highest secondary stat (crit or haste) on each piece of gear in order to get the greatest benefit from mastery. Also there are no mastery gems until Cataclysm goes live.

3. The benefit from haste is not minimal. Increased damage and resources in the from of omen of clarity procs as well as increased energy regeneration.

4. So since you rarely attack a mob from behind while leveling you chose to reduce the stat that prevents them from dodging & parrying your attacks from the front which further reduces your chance to hit said mob? Seems counter productive.

5. See point 1 as well as my previous statement.

TLDR

Much like Armor Penetration was the "go to" stat in WotLK, Agility will be the "go to" stat in Cataclysm with Mastery a close second. While Agility itself doesn't cap per se the value of Agility is reduced once the Crit Cap % for White is reached. At such time the value of Hit and Expertise are elevated to first place (or at least become much more desirable).

Saying something is or will be the penultimate attribute is not the best idea going into an expansion. I would further argue that mastery & haste will be our preferred stats to stack rather than agility based on the fact that one increases damage by a percentage rather than a flat rate and the other provides increased energy regeneration as well as increased omen procs (more energy regeneration). I'm not saying they are all or nothing stats (you probably won't reforge every piece of gear to have mastery or haste) but I believe they will be more valuable than agility (gem & enchant wise) once we have raid quality gear. Granted I could be completely wrong but only time will tell at this point.

[Elunedra]

Define a typical fight. For all we know right now Blizzard has planned a kologarn style fight in a raid that also involves parry hastened attacks. Suddenly Expertise is the greatest stat you could possibly get so you don't gib the tank. And if you don't think people would re-gem, re-enchant or re-forge to get past such a fight you're dead wrong.

socail core guild and defently pugs cant do this. If the tank dies blalme the tank or healer noone would blame the dps as they are dpsing as they are meant to. the only thing they will do its take a lot of casters in the group. but i defently dont see poeple regem/forge for this, unless you are in hardcore envirement and want to kill every boss in 1 nite

blizzard cant just force thier idea's onto poeple as it would take like atleast half a year before dps'ers realise they might actauly have to drop dps loose thier spot on the meter just to get the fight done? "ah oh well i cba someone else can do that ill just keep on nuking"

[Cheezee]

socail core guild and defently pugs can do this. the tank dies balme the tank or healer noone would blame the dps as they are dpsing as they are meant to. the only thing they will do its take a lot of casters in the group. but i defently dont see poeple regem for this, unless you are in hardcore envirement and want to kill every boss in 1 nite

blizzard cant just force thier idea's onto poeple as it would take like atleast half a year before dps'ers realise they might actauly have to drop dps loose thier spot on the meter just to get the fight done? "ah oh well i cba someone else can do that ill just keep on nuking"

I agree they may not do it on a normal mode encounter (probably not at all really); but what about a heroic mode that is meant to challenge people? How many 25 man pugs have killed heroic deathwhisper, sindragosa or putricide much less LK or Halion? You know those fights where the dps have to do something other than just dps? I like the philosophy that everyone gets to see the content but that doesn't mean every encounter should be designed around pugs being able to do them.

[Elunedra]

I agree they may not do it on a normal mode encounter (probably not at all really); but what about a heroic mode that is meant to challenge people? How many 25 man pugs have killed heroic deathwhisper, sindragosa or putricide much less LK or Halion? You know those fights where the dps have to do something other than just dps? I like the philosophy that everyone gets to see the content but that doesn't mean every encounter should be designed around pugs being able to do them.

that is tru but i gues wo wont get to see those hardmodes like they where in ULD that was fun (not at the moment but looking back at it afterwards it)

[utopianh]

Saying something is or will be the penultimate attribute is not the best idea going into an expansion. I would further argue that mastery & haste will be our preferred stats to stack rather than agility based on the fact that one increases damage by a percentage rather than a flat rate and the other provides increased energy regeneration as well as increased omen procs (more energy regeneration). I'm not saying they are all or nothing stats (you probably won't reforge every piece of gear to have mastery or haste) but I believe they will be more valuable than agility (gem & enchant wise) once we have raid quality gear. Granted I could be completely wrong but only time will tell at this point.

Mew right now you can throw in your stats in T11, T12, T13, etc, using blizzard's typical ilevel power increases and come up with a stat guideline; Mew of course isn't as robust or complete model as toskks, but it can help give you an idea of how close the stats will be as we gear up. I can tell you right now that it takes an absurd amount of gear before haste or mastery overtake agility from the math I've been seeing, but the stats as a whole aren't hugely off from one another (agility is about 20% more valuable than any other stat), and certainly not enough to blindly stack or ignore socket bonuses over.

I do agree though that telling people to blindly stack agi isn't any better than telling people to hit cap. Value all your stats, and honestly unless you're gemming for crit rating and reforging for it, you're going to be within a reasonable margin of the better ferals who actually know the math. There's no ArP silliness this expansion.

Also, two things are wrong with your statement; Agility is both a flat AP increase, AND a % increase with crit; and think of it this way, each point of AP is increased in total conversion to dps by all other % modifiers. You can be % modifier heavy with a spec, which I have a strong feeling going into this expansion that we'll be AP starved without the Feral AP mechanic enough that all our baseline % modifiers will make AP far more valuable than any percent modifier throughout the first few tiers.

[Oweena]

With agility having a 2 AP + crit value in 4.0, Agility is our best stat, alongside that haste would be next.

Ofc assuming respectable expertise and hit values, So I'll assume the best bet is to reforge your crit into expertise+hit then haste and then regem your gear to agility and agility+haste. And if it's possible to hit crit cap still then swap agility gems for more haste gems

Ofc once cataclsym hits mastery comes into play but, for just the WotLK 4.0 patch that's the best way to go prolly