Are Kitties Competitive For Raids Hard Modes?

[Deleted]

Quick and simple answer to OP question - Yes.

[ciggy]

Not sure if it's changed since ICC, but a well played kitty used to be pretty damn imba with good gear

[Elunedra]

Not sure if it's changed since ICC, but a well played kitty used to be pretty damn imba with good gear

it has chanced, the difference between good and bad kittyy is a lot lower now days and according to state of dps. com kitty druids are about 6K behind the top dpsers in current end game content

[Tareum]

It depends on what you consider competitive. Can they keep up with the average dps of the raid on the normal non gimmicky fight which suck for all melee, yes, easily. If you want to be above the average dps, they aren't for you. But they are definitely competitive.

Sounds contradictory to me.

I guess what transpires from everyone feed back is that cats may mount a decent challenge but are unlikely to win many. As confirmed by my own personal experience where I find myself about 2 to 3k off the top dps ( I know damage is more significant) on most fights including intensive movement, target switching and AOE.
Anything pretty static I have no problems topping meters.

Thanks all for your feedback. I guess cats "can" be competitive but unlike other classes, unlikely to win any competition.

On another note, this is just what I find amazing about feral, along the years there always is a different challenge to beat. That's why I still love my kitty and keep trying harder.

Cya out there and hf

[Gerti]

people are mentioning swipe buff, but they forget almost all classes are getting some aoe love

[Jon]

No.

Since two word reply isn't enough, I'll say it again: No, kitties suck at the moment. Bad.

[Elunedra]

On another note, this is just what I find amazing about feral, along the years there always is a different challenge to beat. That's why I still love my kitty and keep trying harder.

i loved how kitty could have such huge crit and AP pools and not be overpowered. how i could just swap form and tank. how i could chain interupt a caster in ToGC whit just maim , charge (bear), cyclone, bash in a rotation whit different diminished returns

thats all gone nowdays. now i am just a melee dps class that has to spec for tanking if i want to tank and that has normal AP values (still slightly higher)

[Lackluster]

Cats scale fairly poorly at the moment. If you wish to top meters on your druid, you'd be better off respeccing to moonkin, unfortunately.

I'm not saying that ferals can't keep up, but they're mediocre at best.

[Arcdragon]

I have a feeling by next xpac, feral dps will go the way of blood dps. The current state of kitty is to prepare us all for it, cat form might become a pvp thing only.

[Deleted]

I myself raid only 10 man, and I got the highest dps. One exepction is Atramedes tho.
I got the worst gear of all the DPS in the raid, and they all know what they are doing. I didn't use to be the nr.1 on Recount and it really doesn't matter to me, but improving my dps matters. I reforged to hit and expertise so that I am hit and expertise capped - That gave me a nice 2k dps boost on Cho'gall, where I get to stand and nuke the entire fight (Except for phase 2). Pushing out around 18-19k dps in 70% epic/30% blue gear, while the rest of the raid is fully epic geared. So to answer your question from my point of view - Yes, we are indeed able to compete DPS wise.

But dps shouldn't matter at all - Getting a kill should matter the most.

[Rioo]

I think if you are a good player, you will be decent enough to continue playing feral. I mean granted, target switching on heroic omni is a pain and definitely lowers the dps, the painful aoe is bad but being fixed, and as far as single target fights go, you should be raping. I do not have a lot of experience in heroics (Mag Halfus and Chim) but for the most part I am still competing with rogues who outgear me (:

I always do well on Omnitron heroic. Refreshing my bleeds just before I switch target (unless it's Magmatron ofc), feral charging and with the free ravage quickly building up bleeds on the new target is awesome for my DPS.

We do OK on most bosses, but it really requires you to learn all the perks of each encounter, utilizing your bleeds in the correct way to stay competitive. Against equally skilled rogues we don't really stand a chance on most encounters. Once I would have gotten world rank 2 on Valiona if our logs were public, and at the same time I was rank 5 on our recount. Says a lot.

[vaccine]

I think Feral Cats have a lot more issues than most DPS at the moment and really struggle in hard modes. Part of it is weak AoE, part is the facing requirement on Shred and arguably the greatest is the poor scaling from heroics to 359 to 372.
The bit that annoys me most though is the bugs that have persisted for months with no sign of a fix that manifest as quality of life issues. Things like Rip duration not matching the UI and SotP dropping off in caster making CR/Innervate/Tranq even more costly to use.

We've actually had some really good discussion on it for the last month or so in this thread over on WoW-Europe where I've tried to lay out the issues I felt most affect Heroic feral cats, it's at about 7 or 8 pages now and is mostly constructive. I'd link here but can't as I've not posted enough or something, but you can find it in the Druid forum on wow-europe.

[Elunedra]

SotP dropping off in caster making CR/Innervate/Tranq, do you mean LotP ? as the entire raid loosing 5% psysical crit for 3 secs i dont realy see a big issue whit that tbh :P (besides we often got a dps warrior who covers it anyway)

shred position requirement does indeed hurt

scales well at the start of the instance we pwn later on when we all got better gear we suc again but i have had that since was back in ULD. it does surprise me tho was shred does like 702% weapon damage that means each 1 weapno damage you gain is multiplied by 7 so how can that not scale ?

but OT: there are ferals in end game hardcore guilds like mihir, but it doesnt mean we are verry good at it :P

[vaccine]

Strength of the Panther is our Tier 11 4 piece bonus. Each time we Mangle we gain a stack up to 3, and it lasts for 30 seconds. Shifting out of cat instantly drops this requiring 3 more mangles to get it up and rolling again if you need to perform any CR/Innervate/Tranq.

As for scaling, just because we've always had bad scaling doesn't mean we should accept it. It was masked a bit this tier at least earlier on by the ease of obtaining our 372 compared to other classes as well.

[kATTEKONGEN]

I'm competitive in my guild, we've cleared 7/13hc.
Get the wep, get prober trinkets and a bunch of agi=win.

[Elunedra]

Strength of the Panther is our Tier 11 4 piece bonus. Each time we Mangle we gain a stack up to 3, and it lasts for 30 seconds. Shifting out of cat instantly drops this requiring 3 more mangles to get it up and rolling again if you need to perform any CR/Innervate/Tranq.

ah oke i forgot about that one, i am still at 3/4 myzelf :P but yeh that sucks if it instantly drops off.

[Deleted]

13/13 hc here and well...I can be near top of dps in my guild on some fights but that's only coz I am using almost 100% potential of my class when some my guild mates are crap ~~

[teddabear]

it has chanced, the difference between good and bad kittyy is a lot lower now days and according to state of dps. com kitty druids are about 6K behind the top dpsers in current end game content

The main complaint some Ferals have is that there is almost no dps difference between a good and bad kitty in Cataclysm.

[Avenn]

The main complaint some Ferals have is that there is almost no dps difference between a good and bad kitty in Cataclysm.

This guy. Ticks me off when I see another feral in BH or whatever, their gemming is garbage and yet they still do a decent amount of damage.

[Myrrar]

Sounds contradictory to me.

I guess what transpires from everyone feed back is that cats may mount a decent challenge but are unlikely to win many. As confirmed by my own personal experience where I find myself about 2 to 3k off the top dps ( I know damage is more significant) on most fights including intensive movement, target switching and AOE.
Anything pretty static I have no problems topping meters.

Thanks all for your feedback. I guess cats "can" be competitive but unlike other classes, unlikely to win any competition.

On another note, this is just what I find amazing about feral, along the years there always is a different challenge to beat. That's why I still love my kitty and keep trying harder.

Cya out there and hf

No, it just means they aren't going to blow other classes out of the water on specific fights like some classes can.

My guild is 13/13 25HMs and our kitty does great. On all fights there are always one or two classes that pull ahead because of mechanics and then everyone else is pretty close, and our kitty is always in the middle or top of that.