Why, yes! I AM talented!
I didn’t accomplish anything I set out to do last night except for running Lycentia’s alt through all the Scarlet Monastery questlines. Instead of going to Sunwell last night to keep getting destroyed by the Twins, we decided to head to Black Temple and farm up a few pieces folks still need, kit out the new people, etc. Of course, I ducked out just before Supremus last night to let in some folks who, you know, actually needed gear. No sooner did I teleport back outside did I put my head down on my desk and promptly pass out on my keyboard. The next thing I know, Lycentia is telling me to go back to sleep, and at some point I remember fuzzily transferring from computer to bed. Oops, my b. Did I mention we raid from 10 PM to 1:30 AM EST?
We have so many tanks right now that I’m actually being pulled in more and more just to DPS. Generally that doesn’t happen, because whether or not I have 4k AP raid buffed, a rogue or DPS warrior with 2k will almost always beat me on meters. Usually, this works out—when I’m tanking, I can be happily shuffled into the melee group, give them my crit buff and continue doing my job. I’m an optimizer, obviously, but I don’t often do it while DPSing. Regardless, it’s a new avenue for improvement, and I’ve been working to tighten up my rotation, resocket my gear again (since I took a HIT loss on my new necklace and ring) and possibly pick up Nurturing Instincts for the extra 26% heals to me while I’m in cat form.
So let’s take a look at my current spec. I’m giving the general disclaimer here that I’m trying to optimize for raiding and only raiding, and that my spec is currently tailored to allow for specializations in other people’s specs. WTF does that mean? I’ll explain in a sec. As mentioned in an earlier post, I went resto the other evening for Sunwell. The next night, I had to spec back for tanking, and with 50 gold from the guild bank clinking in my metaphorical pockets, I decided to stop being lazy and realign a few Talent Points. The changes are staggeringly minor. 0/47/14 is the cookie cutter feral spec for dr00ds everywhere, but some people stack points in different places.
Thus far, I’ve had Feral Aggression maxed out, increasing the AP reduction of my Demoralizing Roar by 40%. It also gave me a bonus to Ferocious Bite, but as the Eviscerate of the cat-world, we all know that’s useless when you’re raiding anyway. With the Improved Demo Roar, I was making sure I was keeping debuffs up on mobs, overwriting the un-talented version of our warriors’ Demoralizing Shout. A quick look:
Untalented
Rank 6 Demoralizing Roar = -240 AP
Rank 7 Demoralizing Shout = -300 AP
240 * .40 = 96; 240 + 96 = total of -336 AP
Taking 5/5 Improved Demoralizing Shout, however, also offers a 40% boost to AP reduction, giving us:
300 * .40 = 120; 300 + 120 = total of -420 AP
My point, here, is that there’s absolutely no reason to have 5/5 in Feral Aggression if you have a warrior who’s always in to keep up Improved Demoralizing Shout. Since our DPS warrior specced 5/5 for Brutallus, talenting my roar (-336 AP) is pointless in comparison (-420 AP).
The other talent I didn’t have maxed out previously was Primal Tenacity for the sole reason that maxing it out would prevent me from picking up points in Natural Shapeshifter (due to having maxed out Feral Aggression). While Natural Shapeshifter definitely spares the mana pool on fights where I’m powershifting excessively, it’s otherwise a vanity talent—I’m not PvPing, and I’m usually not worried about running out of mana, ever. Taking 3/3 in Primal Tenacity, however, offers me a 15% resistance to Stuns and Fears. With that talented and the addition of my Powerful Earthstorm Diamond, I have a passive 20% stun resistance (when I’m tanking). Any time I can resist a stun or a fear means that some pissed off mob isn’t running after a squishie and that I’m generating more TPS rather than letting the DPS come perilously close to aggro pulling range as the mob beats the shit out of me while I’m doing nothing. Additionally, it even helps my DPS during fights where a boss or mob AOE stuns and I’m able to resist and keep on trucking (Kaz’rogal, for example).
So now, I’ve gone from 5/5 Feral Aggression to 0/0 Feral Aggression, and from 1/3 Primal Tenacity to 3/3 Primal Tenacity. I was still able to pick up 3/3 Natural Shapeshifter, although I’m already considering moving two of those points over to Nurturing Instincts instead to make it easier for healers to keep me up when the raid’s taking AOE damage. Most of the rest of the talents are self-explanatory—there’s no reason to pick up Brutal Impact unless you’re PvPing, and the obligatory talents in the Restoration tree allow for Rage/Energy clearcasting, STR bonuses and optimized powershifting capabilities.
Questions and comments are, of course, welcome.
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I always kinda felt like the feral talents were fairly linear in progression as to where you put them if you’re going to be raiding, the big variation (as you’ve pointed out) being whether or not to buff your roar. I would say though that relatively speaking, I find Natural Shapeshifter to be relatively pointless. Maybe it’s just me as a tree but I don’t feel like a do a lot of shifting unless it’s an “Oh shit” kind of moment where I have to NS+HT. I currently am specced in to it but I really didn’t see a huge improvement. Thus, as a healer and someone who feels a bit like Natural Shapeshifter goes to waste, I’d say it’s definitely worth considering putting points in Nurturing Instincts. If I was your healer I’d love you for it (though if I was your healer, well, realistically you’d never need the 26% increase because I’m just that awesome =P).
Soooo, the big question is not what your feral talents look like, but what your resto talents look like =).
@Kylnor
Yeah, as I mentioned, I’m finding more and more that Natural Shapeshifter isn’t worth taking 3/3 in–unless you’re PvPing. Before the last changes, Nurturing Instincts was pretty retarded as well, but now that it boosts healing done TO you, I have a hard time justifying not taking it.
But truthfully, you have to be sort of dumb to screw up a basic feral combat spec. Healing is something different altogether, and I’m considering putting up my usual Restoration build for discussion. I used to avoid all the HT talents entirely and ended up dipping into the Balance tree for Brambles and Insect Swarm.
Btw, the fact that your pally has almost as much +healing as my druid did before the new badge gear was finally available makes me one sad panda… Why must your alt be so uber?!
@Kylnor
My paladin has more +heal than my druid does, too. I think it’s considerably easier to get it as a paladin than it is as a druid–at lower levels, at least. I’ve also picked up all the badge gear I can for that toon, and I’m wearing some S3 as well. If you look though, my mana regen is godawful, and my spell crit should probably be much higher. Until I get a new helm, shield, shoulders, I won’t be able to keep up on longer fights without having serious mana issues.
“because whether or not I have 4k AP raid buffed, a rogue or DPS warrior with 2k will almost always beat me on meters.”
Just wanted to point out that, for rogues at least, this is because +hit gives us more dps until capped (at 363) than AP or crit (and is harder to come by!). For instance (ballpark figures since EU armory is down) our guild crittycat is around the same dps as me - he has almost double my AP and crit but only about 1/3 of my hit as he needs no more to be capped.
As for talents - the one thing I can pick out is primal tenacity - the rogue equivalent has always been a talent I love as I see everyone around me stunned / feared and I stand there happily continuing to dps
Good choice imo!
Anyways, very nice blog! First time here and I likes what I see.
/hug
/vanish
@Aurik
Hey, thanks for dropping by.
Hit is super important for any DPS class. Getting hit capped as a kitten (appx. 146, I believe) isn’t too hard, especially since you can pick up some pretty sweet AGI/HIT gems. I don’t bother DPSing unless I’m at the cap, and that means I’m either switching a piece of gear in or out or scarfing a slab of Spicy Talbuk Steak (which I only recommend eating if it’s not going to put you OVER the cap).
Despite having two paws, we don’t dual wield, and that’s the advantage that Fury Warriors, Rogues and Enhance Shammies have over us: white damage. My white damage is miserable. Sure, it could be worse, but if you whip out a WWS report, you’ll generally find that my high damage output is generated primarily by yellow damage with minimal white damage. Rogues are a little more even.
Let’s look at a split from Illybeans the other night (which is sort of a poor example for melee DPS, especially if we’re running around with parasites, but whatever). Our rogue on that fight did about 465,592 white damage, which ended up being 65% of his total DPS output. My white damage, on the other hand, was about 171,994, which ended up being 36% of my total DPS output. While that’s a little lower than normal for me, I think you can see the difference. The lion’s share of my damage is made up by “specials”, and while our rogue’s specials sure hurt, they didn’t occupy the majority of his DPS output.
So if you, as a rogue, don’t get close to the hit cap, you are totally boning yourself on damage output. There’s a rogue camp that favors socketing strict AGI over HIT, but even if your specials never miss, they’d better be so leet that they’re making up for approximately 65% of your damage that you might otherwise be missing.
BUT, even as a kitty, hit counts!! If you’re scratching away and you’re missing your specials, then you’re doing even LESS damage than you would be normally. Additionally, kitten DPS relies heavily on a fairly solid rotation of keeping various debuffs on your target mob. Missing a Mangle or a Shred can screw up your rotation, especially your powershifting cycle, and in my opinion, makes it harder to learn said rotation and generates unreliable damage.
Druid gear, however, is generally woefully low on +HIT. Of T6 gear, I believe only the Belt, Bracers (both out of Sunwell) and Pants (off of the Illidari Council) have a minute amount of +HIT on it. Fortunately, we generally wear rogue gear for DPS anyway and rock tier pieces just for set bonuses. Tell your kitty to get some Glinting Pyrestones!
EDIT: I also realize I may have read what you wrote incorrectly. And yeah, it is a pain in the ass to socket for 300+ HIT.
I wouldn’t totally discount Natural Shapeshifter.
For PvE it has limited uses. Outside the obvious, it allows you to powershift in catform more often…more energy, more DPS.
For PvP shifting out of snares/roots is the name of the game, as a resto druid it is even possible to use a hybrid pvp/pve spec without losing to much…
http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=0zjZVMhoZVMIxcq0Gst
@Sheshonk
Wow, I’m sorry. I think because you added a URL, Akismet snagged your comment and marked it for deletion. I’m really glad I check on stuff sometimes.
I’m not totally discounting it; I agree that it has a lot more uses for PvP purposes rather than PvE, and it’s a talent I always pick up when I’m respeccing for arenas (which I haven’t done in…forever). But in terms of PvE viability, you really shouldn’t be powershifting enough that you’re running out of mana; it’s probably an indicator that you’re not timing your energy ticks correctly. I am making that assumption because I used a lot more mana when I was learning to do it correctly than I actually do now. But, even if you do pick up Nurturing Instincts, you can still throw one point in Natural Shapeshifter. It’s too good to let go completely.
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