Being asked to OS DPS - Kitty or Chicken?

[Tricksterjim]

Hi all,

Background I could use some well thought out opinions. I am currently Resto/Bear Spec. In our 10 man group we had me, a priest and a pally healer. The healing capabilities of our group are in that same order with me doing about 10-15% more healing than the pally. She is still in some 450 pvp gear and one 420 item because she doesnt do dailies, farm etc. She at least is enchanted and gemmed properly etc. We are semi casual raiding, but my requests that she put some effort into her gear has not been received very well. We all work full time etc and she just doesn't have time (I am told). I rarely see her on except for raid nights.

Anyways. Our priest was going shadow for 2 healed fights and I was able to carry a lot of the slack... up until this week when he randomly faction changed. We had a 2nd pally step in for our group this week. He is actually quite good. So we did 2 pallies and a druid. Neither pally has a dps set. The not so good pally claims she has 2 healing specs. So I have been asked to go dps.

Issue We are currently working on elegon. If I was to go kitty, I would be the ONLY melee. We tried this last night and the healers seemed to have trouble remembering I was not stacked with ranged and I would just sit at 50%...40%...20%....10%... (oh Sh*t they forgot to heal me again!!).. try to heal self... realize they haven't dispelled me either... dead. While I might be able to pop more heals on myself, I was dpsing for the first time and it was taking all my attention to keep my rotation right and remember to run out to remove my buff as I helped kill the protector.

So the pluses and minuses are that if I stay kitty, I can reforge/re-gem/re-enchant my tank gear, which is not great but still better than the pallies MS healing set. I can still probably use it to tank on off nights. However being mellee on a lot of these fights makes it harder on the healer.
If I go chicken, I have less options because I will still need to heal some fights. Thus I cannot sacrifice spirit or prioritize DPS stats. However I can stack with ranged on numerous fights.

Either way, i have not DPS'd for a raid on my druid since Karazan. I have a Spriest and DK for my dps desires, but both are not 90 and on a different faction. I had faction changed my druid because I was recruited by them to heal. So I will need to read up and practice for either spec. I also hear some of the new raid bosses are melee friendly.

Opinions?

[Mel]

Hi all,

Background I could use some well thought out opinions. I am currently Resto/Bear Spec. In our 10 man group we had me, a priest and a pally healer. The healing capabilities of our group are in that same order with me doing about 10-15% more healing than the pally. She is still in some 450 pvp gear and one 420 item because she doesnt do dailies, farm etc. She at least is enchanted and gemmed properly etc. We are semi casual raiding, but my requests that she put some effort into her gear has not been received very well. We all work full time etc and she just doesn't have time (I am told). I rarely see her on except for raid nights.

Anyways. Our priest was going shadow for 2 healed fights and I was able to carry a lot of the slack... up until this week when he randomly faction changed. We had a 2nd pally step in for our group this week. He is actually quite good. So we did 2 pallies and a druid. Neither pally has a dps set. The not so good pally claims she has 2 healing specs. So I have been asked to go dps.

Issue We are currently working on elegon. If I was to go kitty, I would be the ONLY melee. We tried this last night and the healers seemed to have trouble remembering I was not stacked with ranged and I would just sit at 50%...40%...20%....10%... (oh Sh*t they forgot to heal me again!!).. try to heal self... realize they haven't dispelled me either... dead. While I might be able to pop more heals on myself, I was dpsing for the first time and it was taking all my attention to keep my rotation right and remember to run out to remove my buff as I helped kill the protector.

So the pluses and minuses are that if I stay kitty, I can reforge/re-gem/re-enchant my tank gear, which is not great but still better than the pallies MS healing set. I can still probably use it to tank on off nights. However being mellee on a lot of these fights makes it harder on the healer.
If I go chicken, I have less options because I will still need to heal some fights. Thus I cannot sacrifice spirit or prioritize DPS stats. However I can stack with ranged on numerous fights.

Either way, i have not DPS'd for a raid on my druid since Karazan. I have a Spriest and DK for my dps desires, but both are not 90 and on a different faction. I had faction changed my druid because I was recruited by them to heal. So I will need to read up and practice for either spec. I also hear some of the new raid bosses are melee friendly.

Opinions?

I was Kitty for the end of Cata and did great damage but when MOP dropped I was being out dpsed by practically everyone in my guild and I was in full heroics gear and still couldn't pull past 35k. I have a friend that is Boomkin and he's playing no joke but around 80k on bosses. I wouldn't have believed it if I didn't see it. Also I feel this xpac is more ranged friendly anyway. Our raid comp only takes two melee and that's plenty.

[Tradu]

Chicken, because a ranged, multiDoTing ret paladin is a good thing. Ranged is just stronger on almost every fight, and on the ones where it isn't, it's a tie. I haven't tried MoP kitty, but having played both kitty and chicken in Cata(and in ICC), they're both fun to play and it just comes down to which one you prefer playing.
If your healers let you die, they just need to wake up and do their jobs :P

[Deleted]

In theory cat dps should be far superior to moonkin. However, almost every fight in the first raid tier so far heavily favors ranged dps over melee and especially multidot classes are king right now on most fights. I myself play a feral druid and I'm top 3 of the dps most of the time (fire mage/affli lock *cough*). However, you should consider that physical dps classes (and feral especially) scale heavily with weapon dps so if you don't have a decent weapon you should rather go moonkin.

[Elunedra]

well first of all in our guild if they need to use an extra dps and one less healer, its a priviledge tobe asked to go as offspec becase the only other option is tobe sit out and someone else is taken in.

you healers not healing or dispelling you is just epic fail of them tbh, but as a cat you can use 1 HT each time you do a 5 cp move finisher, that should keep you alive quite a bit longer + ofcurse the seurvival cooldowns, in my raids i am usaly one of the last to die

but i think the biggest question is wheter or not you like to play cat, if not thne id say go for healing only, if you do like todo soemthing else every now and then, then id say take the oppertunity.

as for melee frendly bosses? well some are some are not, for example the mongy emperor (last boss in MV) is tottally not melee frendly at all!
however for a good balance raid setup having a melee is usefull

[Deleted]

You wont go far with 2 holy palas, show them the healing metter where all 3 of you heal. If your leader is thinking clearly at that time he will let you heal.

[Navoan]

If you had the chance to get your DK up it would do some very nice dmg, but as feral OR boomkin you should be fine. The excuse of 'oh you're in Melee so we forgot to heal you' is just bullshit tbh. It's totally unnaceptable even if a semi-social (meaning slightly less social and more raid orientated, or even 'less' raid orientated than a social guild?) for a heal to just leave out healing a melee class, I mean wtf is that? xD You have to think yourself, "Would I leave that melee on 40% health, or would I heal them?".

I can already guess your answer is ofc I would heal them, so why isn't that the same for pallies? Regardles of ranged (I mean they're obviously healing tanks) they should be able to handle that with no problem. Having two pallies healing together really isn't the best option though. Sounds to me like a hard decision to try and replace the slacking pally is needed. Something like replacing him with an Ele shamy who can off-heal some fights would be great, or a s.priest who's comfortable healing too (they almost share the same gear and stats so it works well).

As for feral / boomkin, boomkin are great with multi-target encounters and offer some nice utility (shrooms for slows on WotE, typhoon (can ofc get as feral too), spell haste if you need it, off-healing (inc strong tranq) and even greater OH with HotW)). But feral does some great damage too regardless of what some have said here. I'm MS guardian and have little practice DPSing in MoP yet I am regularly top DPS in LFR (Yes LFR is a really really bad place to test dmg) but if I as a tank can come top you'll hardly be pulling shit numbers if you have a brain.

Choose what you think is best. If you'll be a sub-par healer/dps if you go boomkin it's maybe best you just get your feral set up to scratch and tell the healers to wise the fuck up and heal you. If you don't have a tank/dps monk/rouge you'll easily build up a nice feral set (and yes, a full-dps feral set can be used very easily to tank HCs/LFR etc) the only differences are stat weights depending on how you like to play guardian. If you stick with Mastery > Crit > exp > hit > haste you'll do perfectly fine in both specs in the same gear.


Edit: Yeah honestly, you're really best not using 2 pallies like I said, resto druids are strong atm (ours is always top for HC raids) and to drop you for a sup-par holy pally who doesn't seem to care enough to even get some rep for VP gear (or anything tbh) reflects badly on your RL. If at all possible, just drop the healer and replace with a shamy/priest who can both DPS and Heal.

[NightZero88]

Typically this tier ranged is better than melee because it is much easier for ranged to avoid mechanics. That being said, there are a few instances where melee are better(Garalon legs, etc.). However, ferals do not have great cleave abilities so you will not be doing as well as a blade furry rogue or a warrior. Since you are also the only melee outside the tanks you don't need to worry about that. So I would pick whichever one you want as either will work but ranged is likely better as you will get the ranged buffs.

TLDR: Pick whichever you want to play more but boomkin will likely work better in your group due to buff distribution. Also, your resto gear will function well for boomkin gear so you'll be starting off better over feral.