Feral Dps question

[Cornstarched]

As a feral druid kitty dps i understand that hit/expertise reduce my overall damage, or so sall all the guides i read, and when i did attempt to gem hit/expertise u could instanly see the 2-5k dps drop. My question is, Is there a good balance or a good number/rating to get so that i dont have this in my rotation

Charge
Attempt to mangle, Dodge
attempt to mangle again, miss
I GOT MY Mangle
Cannot use ravage as the time wore out due to dodges/miss's
attempt to rake, dode/miss 3 times in a row
then i get it
shred to 5points yay i got it
rip Dodge
rip dodge
rip parry
rip miss
rip connected

OK SO ovuously this is annoying and mabye not exsact but pretty close. Iv had more than 4+ miss's/dodges on almost every ability in a row, bEHIND the target.

IS THERE a balance between having a % hit and %expertise so that i can actully dps when i need to and not have to waste multiple globals. Seriously bad design where half my gear has hit/expertise=tanking gear.

Oh and if you bash the post for spelling you fail in life.

[Deleted]

I don't play feral myself, but my guess is you shouldn't gem exp or hit, but you should probably reforge as much haste and maybe crit into it that you are able to reach caps. Because for most classes hit/exp are only beaten in numbers by Agi not by secondary stats.

[Vayro]

The dodges and misses are pretty annoying but it would still be a damage loss to gem/chant/gear for hit/exp. I also wouldn't use F-Charge to start. I start in stealth ravage then do the 'rotation'. The extra 36k crit at the begining is pretty nice and since it costs 60 energy if your mangle is dodged a few times you won't end up energy capped most of the time. But pretty much the misses are very annoying but it still isn't worth going for the hit/exp. Most of the time you will hit and it will be fine and dandy. :P

[tg4life666]

honestly when i recently got to 85 on my druid i heard that the hit cap was a no no to aim for but playing wow for 5+ years my instincts told me to still get to hit cap and then focus on mastery/crit well i was averaging around 11k dps on a good night with zero misses it wasnt untill recently that the top druid on my realm pointed a few things out to me and i spent some gold reforging and regemming/chanting and my hit dropped to .97 percent but my dps is now on average of 16-19k and i still dont have as many misses as u say u are having dont get me wrong i miss but not that much long story short i think ur just having really bad RNG all the time! also why dont u try Charging, FFF while in the air, and then ravage soon as u land then do ur normal priority atleast thats how mine goes and as far as gemming goes do straight agi unless ur socket bonus is +20 or better in mastery or agi only
ps sorry about my complete or incomplete grammar
also the when u charge u get a completely free ravage only thing it costs is a GCD

[Jaerin]

Your brain is only seeing a pattern of negatives and disregarding the positive hits.

The simulators have taken all this into account and statistically speaking hit/exp is a dps loss. So the balance for highest dps would be 0/0.

I know it seems like you are getting dodged/missed all the time, but trust me that you are not. This is a trick of your brain. Use recount, skada, WoL, whatever and you'll see the % match up with the simulator and not with your experience.

You are going to get what feels like horrible streaks...they happen and they are much more memorable and noticeable than 30 hits in a row that is probably equally as unlikely.

[Tradu]

For cats, the stat priority looks roughly like this agi >> mastery > crit > haste > hit = expertise, with haste and crit swapping places at higher gear levels. As a cat, you should get used to getting dodged and missing, you can get unlucky streaks, but it rarely happens, you shouldn't get parried, though, except for short phases of fights where you can't be behind the boss.

Reasoning for stat prio:
Agility increases the damage of everything, simple
Mastery increases damage of bleeds, our primary source of damage
Crit increases the damage of everything, but not as much as agility
Haste increases number of white hits and energy regen, and through that affects pretty much everything we do
Hit and expertise aren't worth as much, because we get 80% of the energy cost of a failed(missed, dodged, parried, and I believe immune'd as well) refunded, and we have enough free global cooldowns to redo failed attacks.

I run with about 3,5% hit(wish I could get rid of at least some of that...) and 12 expertise(getting rid of most of that won't be hard, yay for Akirus being my best weapon available because Malevolence won't drop), its possible to go for hitcap for a smoother rotation, but it lowers your DPS a bit. Running with 0% hit and 0 expertise is mathematically a DPS increase over having those stats, but it increases the chance to get unlucky streaks with dodges/misses.
You generally get enough hit/expertise from your gear, and just reforge away from it, it should still be at 2-4% hit and up to maybe 10 expertise, which is easily enough to have a pretty smooth rotation while not sacrificing as many better stats.

Hope this helped

Tradu

[Cerajin]

The only way to "actually dps when you need to and not have to waste multiple globals" is by (soft)capping hit and expertise - Aslong as you're not (soft)capped in both of them, there will always be a chance for your attacks to be missed/dodged/parried while attacking your target from behind (depending on the stat not capped).

I personally had issues with the playstyle of being uncapped on both of these stats aswell, since it has a huge impact on your rotation, though I grew used to it to the point where it's not issue anymore. (Still at times it can be quite frustrating still when you have to switch targets often or in certain burnphases such as Magmaw's head being exposed). Anyhow, back when I had these issues aswell, I did some discussing on EJ and one of the replies to my question was this:

Quoting Righthorn at EJ's [Feral-Cat] Cataclysm Release thread
It's a tradeoff between convenience/ease and raw dps. There's three factors that make hit & expertise not required for optimum dps:

1. White hits & associated fury swipes only make up ~1/4 of our damage
2. Energy abilities that miss or are dodges do not use up their entire cost
3. We are not GCD capped; that is we have downtime between abilities while we wait for energy to build up

The third factor is what really makes hit & expertise not required. Even if you miss, because you have not expended the entire energy, and because you have free GCDs anyways, you can simply re-use the ability until you hit.

The big caveat is that, as you were made painfully aware, you really need to be able to keep on top of your buff/debuffs and be able to make quick decisions on what ability to use next. If you are able to react quickly and correctly to your misses, then you lose little dps even with 0 hit and 0 expertise, and because those stats have been converted to other dps stats (hopefully mastery) overall you gain DPS. However, if you find yourself unable to keep tabs on what's missed and what's hit and your bleed uptimes suffers, then you will find hit & exp more useful.

The most important thing to keep in mind is that your theoretical max dps will suffer if you have hit and expertise, but if you can't pull off the mechanics in reality then theory doesn't help that much.

He gave a great explanation for me, so I figured I'd quote him here on your question.

[Arctagon]

random rant about dodgemissparryfest

I don't believe you.

I don't play feral myself, but my guess is you shouldn't gem exp or hit, but you should probably reforge as much haste and maybe crit into it that you are able to reach caps. Because for most classes hit/exp are only beaten in numbers by Agi not by secondary stats.

Sharing your guesses isn't contributing, so don't do it. You will usually end up being wrong.

I also wouldn't use F-Charge to start.

Why wouldn't you want to do that?

I start in stealth ravage then do the 'rotation'. The extra 36k crit at the begining is pretty nice and since it costs 60 energy

The extra 36k crit at the beginning for free is what is nice.

if your mangle is dodged a few times you won't end up energy capped most of the time.

You are insinuating that Mangle has a higher chance of being dodged than Ravage. How does that make sense to you?

honestly when i recently got to 85 on my druid i heard that the hit cap was a no no to aim for but playing wow for 5+ years my instincts told me to still get to hit cap and then focus on mastery/crit

What? You read about optimisation backed up by maths, practice, parses and whatnot and turned it straight down?

i think ur just having really bad RNG all the time!

There is nothing such as 'bad RNG all the time'. Read Jaerin's post.

and then ravage soon as u land

Talk about a waste of energy.

as far as gemming goes do straight agi unless ur socket bonus is +20 or better in mastery or agi only

40 agility > 20 agility, mastery and any other stat, so going for mastery socket bonuses is a DPS loss.

also the when u charge u get a completely free ravage only thing it costs is a GCD

Which is virtually nothing since GCDs aren't important to us at all.

Agility increases the damage of everything, simple

Except for Mangle, Shred, Fury Swipes, Ravage and Swipe.

Crit increases the damage of everything, but not as much as agility

Either you are completely wrong or you just phrased yourself clumsily. I'm going to assume the latter. Crit increases the probability of inflicting a critical strike at your target, so over the course of time you will end up doing more damage with a higher chance to crit, but it's like you are asserting that crit passively increases damage of all attacks. However, the increased chance to crit per crit rating is greater than the increased chance to crit per point of agility.

but it increases the chance to get unlucky streaks with dodges/misses.

Even with 0 hit rating and expertise rating the probability of coming across such streaks is incredibly low.

[littlepiggy]

Your brain is only seeing a pattern of negatives and disregarding the positive hits.

The simulators have taken all this into account and statistically speaking hit/exp is a dps loss. So the balance for highest dps would be 0/0.

I know it seems like you are getting dodged/missed all the time, but trust me that you are not. This is a trick of your brain. Use recount, skada, WoL, whatever and you'll see the % match up with the simulator and not with your experience.

You are going to get what feels like horrible streaks...they happen and they are much more memorable and noticeable than 30 hits in a row that is probably equally as unlikely.

I like this post. However I'm so used to no hit/exp cap and missing that I never really notice missing except for the random 2-3 times a month that I miss 3 rips in a row.

[Tradu]

Except for Mangle, Shred, Fury Swipes, Ravage and Swipe.


Either you are completely wrong or you just phrased yourself clumsily. I'm going to assume the latter. Crit increases the probability of inflicting a critical strike at your target, so over the course of time you will end up doing more damage with a higher chance to crit, but it's like you are asserting that crit passively increases damage of all attacks. However, the increased chance to crit per crit rating is greater than the increased chance to crit per point of agility.


Even with 0 hit rating and expertise rating the probability of coming across such streaks is incredibly low.

Last time I checked, agility increased AP, which in turn increases weapon DPS, which then increases weapon damage, and all of those work with weapon damage, so how doesn't agility increase the damage of our main CP generator and the others?

And about the crit thing, yeah, I phrased it clumsily, I meant that it increases the chance of RNG being nice to you, and works with all our abilities.

And about the miss/dodge streaks, I know they don't happen much, and even if they do, the only time it gets annoying is when you HAVE to switch target but want to get that last Rip up on a target. Sadly I don't get to play kitten as much as I used to(damn lack of ranged in my guild), but when I do(mostly Argaloth, the fight with the most parries ever), I don't get more than max 1 streak of maybe 3 misses/dodges/parries.

[Deleted]

Cannot use ravage as the time wore out due to dodges/miss's

Red trollflag here, tbh. The Ravage! proc lasts 10 seconds.

[injectmg]

Except for Mangle, Shred, Fury Swipes, Ravage and Swipe.

Agility increases the damage of everything. Period.

Mangle, Shred, Fury Swipes, Ravage, Swipe, etc are effected by weapon damage. Our finalized 'weapon damage' is increased by our attack power which in result makes the original statement true. Agility increases the dmg of everything.

If you pull near 30k shred crits in full 359s, you definately wont pull a 30k shred crit naked with only a 359 weapon on.

[Arctagon]

@Drathos and injectdmg: Yes, you're right. Sorry. I think narrowly when I'm tired, which ends up in me saying things like that.

[Blackfoo]

gonna ask the folks here is 23-27k good for my gear http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...rkseven/simple it feels rather low to me the spec for was for v&t and 50 mastery to gloves to reach a whole point in mastery

[gollie]

Going for the 50 mastery is a huge DPSloss versus going for the strength enchant. Also, every fraction of our mastery counts.

[Arctagon]

Since every fraction counts as far as mastery goes, there is no point going for the mastery glove enchant. The strength enchant is worth a lot more. Also, you should never deviate from gemming pure agility, unless the socket bonus is +20 agility or better and only if maximum one socket is not red. I'm referring to your chest and boots here.

Edit: gollie beat me to it. I should refresh pages more often...

[Jon]

I don't play feral myself, but my guess is you shouldn't gem exp or hit, but you should probably reforge as much haste and maybe crit into it that you are able to reach caps. Because for most classes hit/exp are only beaten in numbers by Agi not by secondary stats.

If you don't play Feral/are clueless, stop giving bad advice.

Hit and exp are horrible stats for cats.

[Stevoman]

Short answer: Misses only cost us GCDs. Ferals are energy-limited, not GCD-limited. Therefore, misses are a miniscule DPS loss.

Long answer: An unlucky string of misses seems really annoying at the beginning, when you are trying to get up Mangle, Rake, FFF, and a 5cp Rip. Besides that, it's a non-issue. Our current rotation mostly consists of getting a quick 5cp Rip and SR, and spamming shred for the next 10-15 seconds to dump energy until these run out, refreshing Rake when needed. Our limiting resource is energy, and you will spend a large majority of that 10-15 seconds waiting to generate energy. All you have to do to entirely avoid the chain-miss scenario is plan ahead and pool energy for the last few of those seconds, and start attempting to refresh when you are in the clipping window. You will have 3 globals in which to refresh Rip/Rake every time if you plan ahead; basically they will never fall off even if you get a really unlucky string of misses. If you fail to plan ahead, and you spam too many Shreds, or refresh SR at the wrong time, or use FB when you shouldn't, then you most likely will be going into the Rip clipping window without 5 cp, in which case you'll have to use 1 or 2 of your 3 globals build cps or pool energy, at which point you'll only have 1 global to refresh Rip, greatly increasing the chance it will fall off.

[Danii]

ok, first of all, stand behind the target so that boss can't parry, secondly, you should never drop below 3% hit ..
I'm ilvl 358 overall and only miss 2 pieces of gear for full epic, i pull a fair 21k average on every boss fight and i don't have that much trouble with missing attacks

[spw]

Charge
Attempt to mangle, Dodge
attempt to mangle again, miss
I GOT MY Mangle
Cannot use ravage as the time wore out due to dodges/miss's
attempt to rake, dode/miss 3 times in a row
then i get it
shred to 5points yay i got it
rip Dodge
rip dodge
rip parry
rip miss
rip connected

Buy a lottery ticket, the string of misses that "happened" to you can be multiplied out to the 6th decimal place.

Oh and....

rip parry

....stop being bad