Originally Posted by
aggixx
You can't just look at a log's average Rake tick damage and compare it to it's average Shred damage. If the feral is playing effectively they should be "gaming" their procs and cooldowns to keep the strongest rake going whenever they can. If you were to just spam Rake instead of Shred you would greatly gimp your periodic damage, and therefore your average Rake damage, because you lose the ability do the aforementioned cooldown gaming.
This is especially true if you're playing DoC, you might have your Rake empowered with DoC 90% of the time (pulling this number out of my ass here) but if you spammed it, the percentage of those rakes that were affected by DoC would be drastically less.