SexyMap is a fantastic addon that improves the look of your UI by leveraging existing, in-game textures and spell effects to create beautiful map skins. Learn how to create your own, Druid-themed map in this tutorial by Korryna!Guest Post: So You Want to Rip Some Face?
Published on January 9, 2009 by Karthis
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This week, I am honored to bring you a guest post from Karthis Winterleaf, author of the well-respected Feral blog, Of Teeth and Claws. I asked Karthis to educate a noobish Tree like myself on what I’d want to look for when building a kitty cat set for dailies, soloing, and the occasional catnap under a tree.
Druids, no matter what their final spec, all start life walking down the same path: we spend nine levels exclusively in caster form dabbling with a mix of Restoration and Balance spells before earning the durable Bear Form at level ten, and then the fierce Cat Form at level twenty.
I distinctly remember the great power that seemed to be granted to me upon reaching that magical level twenty milestone all those years ago – no longer was I stuck as a frail caster or a curiously weak bear, instead suddenly I could shift into the form of a graceful killer and deal some real damage. The joy that I felt when I first sunk my claws into a foe and then proceeded to tear its face off remains unsurpassed by anything since. Bliss.
Surely, gentle trees, you too sometimes wish to leave your stiff limbs behind and slink into the shadows? Surely you too wish to taste something more fulfilling – far richer – than just simple water and sunshine? Surely you too wish to feel bones snap between your jaws, watch flesh part beneath your razor claws, and hear howls of helpless pain fill your ears as you destroy those who dare to stand in your way?
If so – and I know that in your heart of hearts you all do – then read on.
Evaluating Feral Gear
Druids are nearly alone in being able to utterly change their play style from healing to DPS (two flavors) to tanking with a single respec. It is because of this innate versatility that many Druids collect multiple sets of gear for when they want to step outside of their traditional role, and do something different for a while. It can be a great change of pace to heal a battleground after off-tanking a heroic raid, and I’m sure that the reverse is also true.
If you are to truly unleash your inner kitty, it pays to understand what makes a cat tick, and to ensure that your off-spec gear collection is as potent as it can be without passing up usable main spec items. Gear-wise, Cat Form benefits from the following stats: Strength, Agility, Hit Rating, Crit Rating, Expertise Rating, Haste Rating, Armor Penetration, and (Feral) Attack Power. If that seems like a lot of trade-offs to juggle, then you’re not far off the mark.
Attack Power
Attack Power (and for now, Feral Attack Power) increases the damage that all of your attacks deal. Both white and yellow attacks scale directly with attack power, and thus the more of it you have the harder you will hit. Although the bonus attack power that you see on gear often looks enormous, it pays to calculate the equivalent Strength or Agility this converts to (or vice versa) so that you can compare apples to apples when making a loot choice.
Strength
Strength is a strong stat on Druid gear in WotLK, which is a change from the later stages of TBC. Each point of Strength is worth roughly 2.2 Attack Power, which as discussed is the underlying stat that all kitty dps abilities scale with. Picking up leather gear with lots of strength is never a bad idea, and often times strength gems and enchantments are your best choices.
Agility
Agility used to be the key stat for all feral Druids, however it has fallen behind strength in terms of DPS utility. Offensively, agility increases both your Attack Power (1 Agility = 1.67 AP) and your chance to score a critical hit on a foe (1 agility = 0.013% chance to crit). Despite losing some prominence in WotLK, Agility is still an excellent stat to stack, and the ideal piece of cat gear will have a healthy dollop of Agility AND Strength on it.
Hit Rating
Hit rating decreases the chance that you will miss with your attacks, and thus indirectly boosts your overall damage. While it is not as flashy a stat as Attack Power, Strength, or Agility, it is probably the most important stat to pay attention to when building a Feral DPS gear set, since missed attacks deal zero damage no matter how much attack power that you have stacked. Against raid bosses the best current theorycrafting suggests that you need enough hit rating to overcome an 8.0% miss chance – this translates to +263 hit rating. If you are sticking to level 80 mobs you will only need to overcome a 5% miss chance, which requires +164 hit rating. Please keep in mind that stack hit rating beyond the cap is wasting stats, so some critical thought is required to maintain a good balance.
Expertise Rating
Expertise is a stat that feral Druids love to hate; it reduces the chance that enemies will dodge or parry our attacks (which is great) but seems to either appear in huge doses or else not at all (which makes stacking it a pain). Similarly to hit rating, capping your expertise is advisable if you intend on aiming to maximize your DPS. Against raid bosses you need to counteract their 6.5% chance to dodge which requires +214 expertise rating (parry is of lesser importance since you will be attacking from behind most of the time). Level 80 mobs only have a 5% chance to dodge, which +163 expertise rating will take care of. (Note: The Primal Precision talent – a core of any serious feral build – grants 10 expertise, or 82 expertise rating, so subtract this from the above numbers if you have specced into it).
Crit Rating
Crit rating increases the chances that you inflict double damage on your foe with either a white or a yellow attack. It is difficult to exactly quantify the DPS increase that crit rating grants you since a properly talented Feral Druid will have their Primal Fury talent maxed out, and thus receive an extra combo point in addition to double damage when they score a critical hit. More combo points leads to easier management of the complex Feral DPS cycle, which indirectly leads to higher sustained damage. Still, the consensus seems to be that crit rating is less important than raw attack power. Number junkies will want to know that every 46 crit rating that you acquire will bestow a 1% increase to your chance of scoring a critical hit.
Armor Penetration Rating
Armor Penetration Rating decreases the effective amount of armor that an enemy has to protect itself with against your attacks. While an increase in armor penetration leads to higher DPS, this is not a stat that feral Druids should go out of their way to acquire – if the gear has great other stats and some armor penetration thrown in then it’s not a bad thing, but armor penetration should rarely make or break a gear decision. Every 15.4 armor penetration reduces enemy armor by 1% (and keep in mind that enemy armor values are far lower than most players).
Haste Rating
Haste speeds up the time between white damage melee attacks. Since Druids in cat form have an attack speed of 1, this stat is of minimal impact to our bottom line DPS. Like armor penetration, having gear with haste on it cannot hurt, however it is not nearly as beneficial as the other stats that could be found in its place. Every 32.8 haste rating will increase attack speed by 1%.
Quick Comparisons
If your head is spinning a little bit right now, I don’t blame you – Feral Druids have a lot to consider when selecting their gear. As a rule of thumb, however, here is a guideline to follow:
hit > expertise > strength > agility > attack power > crit > armor penetration > haste
If you reach the cap for hit rating or expertise, then they drop to the back of the flow chart.
For an in-game numerical comparison of gear, I highly recommend that you use an addon like Pawn. Pawn allows you to assign weights to stats and that calculates a composite "score" for an item and displays it within the item tooltip. For reference, here is the Pawn scale that I use for evaluating cat gear:
Ap = 1, FeralAp = 1, Strength = 2.2, Agility = 1.565, CritRating = 1.025, ExpertiseRating = 1.033, HasteRating = 0.786, ArmorPenetration = 0.922, HitRating = 1.133, RedSocket = 25.04, BlueSocket = 16, YellowSocket = 24.264, ColorlessSocket = 25.04, MetaSocket = 32.865
Toskk and Rawr are also good sources for alternate gear scales for those who are interested in different points of view.
Always remember to keep the Hit Rating and Expertise caps in mind when making gear decisions, as their value cannot be modelled with a simple number in a scale like this. A composite stat-based gear score is no substitute for a little bit of critical thought.
If you want to plan your cat gear in advance, I have prepared a Loot Rank template that can be used to get a listing of kitty gear ranked by slot: Karthis’ Kitty Loot Rank. If you do not expect to be raiding then you can uncheck some of the boxes on the Loot Rank form, and click the "View Loot Ranking" button to regenerate the list to get a bigger list of gear that is relevant to your situation.
Final Thoughts
It can be a wonderful change of pace to play a different style than you are used to for a while, and the Druid class offers the ability to do this without having to roll an alt and level it up. It only furthers your enjoyment if you have a functional set of gear that makes your transition even smoother. In the end the Feral path may not be for everyone, but all Druids owe it to themselves to surrender to their inner beast for at least a little while, and get up close and personal with their foes.
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I am excited that BRK is back, though!
/cry I love you, ty for everything.
While haste isn’t a particularly great stat, you’re undervaluing it somewhat. OOC procs now scale with haste (and hit and expertise) instead of being based on a ppm mechanic, so increased haste will give you more OOC procs, which are a huge boost to damage. It’s basically our answer to rogues’ Combat Potency since we can’t powershift anymore.
Having leveled up primarily as balance spec all the way to 70, I never knew the joys so DPS as a cat. I always chose quest rewards and had gear that was caster oriented, thus my cat DPS was terribad, and so I never really used it. Towards the end of BC, I could never find a tank (Had switched over to healing by then) so I started collecting tanking gear. I was fairly well geared in Kara and Badge epics by the time Wrath rolled around, so decided to level up to 80 as feral. The letters O.M.G. come to mind when I did this. I woed the prior 50 levels of the game because I didn’t do this in the first place.
With a simple respec, anybody can feel the power of cat, especially when doing dailies. I have collected a Naxx worthy set of tanking and DPS gear, and have switched back to resto now, but I long for the day when a simple click of a button will allow me to switch back and forth. Because grinding the sons of hodir dailies in caster form in my resto gear is a pain compared to when I did it as feral.
If you are worried about having to pass up, or have already passed up a bunch of gear choices for feral, there is no problem. If you are a leather worker, or know one, the mats for the entire 8 piece Eviscerator’s Set are not too hard to come by. It’s a great place to start, especially if want to try out pvp since it has resilience on it.
Also, there is a Chest piece in regular UP or UK from a quest inside the instace that you can SOLO with stealth. That is of course, unless you happen to need the caster reward from that quest, which I didn’t.
Ok I am confused, what is the hit cap? I am currently around 268 and was planning to use a food buff to hit the cap listed at http://wowthinktank.blogspot.com/2008/11/druid-cat-item-list-and-rep-list-for.html Now you say the cap is 263?
Call me confused
Was curious about this – where did you find the info on the 8.2% hit cap? I’ve seen information about it being 8% or 9%, but 8.2% seems a bit odd. I’m guessing this is just a typo, as the 263 rating value is correct to deal with 8%.
Kals last blog post..[General] Who I am…ON THE INTARWEBS
One of the things I really love about playing a druid is the flexibility of shape changing. Fly in and drop into a relatively safe place in flight form. Sneak around in cat form to find the quest object or single mob I need to kill. Root and nuke in caster form. Then I’m flying out and away to the questgiver.
Oh, this is a very nice guide… Kayeri had a bad time of it while playing feral in Maraudon while a young druid… it took her DAYS to get the taste of dino butt out of her mouth… she lost her desire for the feral side and is a very happy tree… (and Princess never did drop the danged dagger in 6 Mara runs!)
But lately, its stirring again…
So its very nice to know what to look for in a kitty set…
Thank you!
An interesting side note I just realized from reading another post on hit cap on the forums is if you have even one Draenei in your party you get 1% more chance to hit. Not sure what the math is on that (thats why i need you guys, i suck at math).
@Kal:
The 8.2% is from, I believe, Elitist Jerks (I’ll rummage thru my links at home and see if I can get an exact link). I did a whole bunch of digging on all sorts of feral druid numbers, and stumbled into the hit cap debate somewhere along the way. That said, even the EJ folks aren’t 100% sure that they have it nailed down yet last I looked.
Regarding the hit rating discrepancy – you’re totally correct that I accidentally typed in the 8% value, I need to tweak that. Once I confirm the hit cap (8% vs 8.2%) tonight I’ll update both bits of data.
@Loquat:
The hit rating at the site you list is assuming a 9% hit cap, I believe. It’s a fairly recent discovery that this is actually higher than necessary, and the hit cap is actually somewhere in the 8% range.
Karthiss last blog post..Kitty gear explained – Now on Resto4Life
I can agree on Hit somewhat, but as for raiding I’m not so sure if Expertise is “that” beneficial – as mobs cannot dodge or parry hits from behind, can they? (well i know they can’t parry… dodge is always a bit weird…)
Perhaps its thats why it’s either entirely expertise or none at all, a stat specific for soloing?
I’m just guessing…
@Partouf:
Expertise reduces a chance for an enemy to dodge your attacks, and even from behind they can do this. The expertise rating I listed was the amount that is sufficient to eliminate this chance to dodge – if you wanted to also remove their ability to parry (i.e. you wanted to mangle-spam from the front arc) then you would need a little more than double this amount (which is clearly not feasible).
(Huge note: Players cannot dodge when attacked from behind. Mobs certainly can, however. Perhaps that is the source of the confusion? )
Karthiss last blog post..Kitty gear explained – Now on Resto4Life
@Karthis: Ah, yes, probably… Damn cheating mobs…
hmm… reminds me of a post though someone (no clue where) did about fighting Prince that melee had to fight at the back of him to prevent the tank getting an after-parry-speedup-thingy-whatever-its-called… Oh well..
I must confess I jumped to the darkside (feral) here in the expansion between a healer glut, naxx25 not being super healer intensive, CoH overpowered, and tank shortage. I must admit it is intoxicating seeing large numbers float up.
For new kitties trying to earn a place DPSing, it’s very possible but it takes some practice. Cat DPS is all about maximizing the uptime of Savage Roar, Mangle, Rip and Rake. Get a good timer to visually display time left (I use ClassTimers, but there’s a lot of good ones out there) on your buffs, DoTs and debuffs. Monitor your combo point usage to keep Savage Roar up (I tend to SR at 3-4 CP) and then keep 5 point Rips up as much as possible.
On raids bosses I open with a rake/mangle/SR and then I start furiously shredding to a 5pt Rip. Then re-Shred (renewing Rake & Mangle as needed) up to a renewing Savage Roar. On trash I don’t worry about my finishers, try to keep SR up from mob to mob and occasionally Ferocious Bite for giggles.
There’s lots of good advice over at Elitist Jerks, but there’s no substitute for practicing with a combat dummy and fiddling with your addons to display the information you need.
I am salivating over the dual spec change in the future because I miss feral so, so much but can’t stand respeccing. I have four druids – two elves and two tauren – partly because I loved levelling them but mostly because I liked having a feral me and a resto me. Healing for groups and raids, feral for fun!
The dual spec change will mean I can come home and immediately walk out the door as feral and go farm and do quests, and then be resto at raid time without wasting half an hour travelling and respeccing. IT CAN’T COME SOON ENOUGH.
I’m very rusty though, I haven’t played feral for a long time – in fact my little feral tauren hasn’t even had her talents put in since the last time we got a talent wipe! A lot has changed since I was tanking in Kara, I’ll definitely have to do some reading to get back into the feral groove. This is a great start.
Thanks
Keevas last blog post..Healing Sartharion 25 with drakes
Excellent content here and a nice writing style too – keep up the great work!
Hay thanks for the info, when dual specs come out I am planning to go resto/feral cat, and this will be helpful to me then.
Here’s your link, Kal.
http://elitistjerks.com/f73/t36999-feral_druid_numbers/
Interestingly enough, I’ve missed on raid bosses with over 8% hit but not when I bumped my hit to 9%.
@Runy:
Ah yes – that was certainly one of the threads. If you flip on over to page 4 you will see an interesting exchange on the topic of hit. Some highlights:
– There is photographic evidence of the hit cap being 8% at least for level 83 training dummies, which are said to replicate boss mechanics
– There is a guy showing (now expired) WWS reports that he claim prove the hit cap is 9%, except it turns out that WWS was reporting parries as misses.
I think that the jury is still out on the exact hit needed for a level 83 raid boss – some sort of proof needs to be found that the bosses really do operate exactly like the training dummies…. unfortunately this will take a lot of sample data to nail down.
Karthiss last blog post..Kitty gear explained – Now on Resto4Life
Hi,
I love your Blog, but you wrote, that you only need 5% expertise to avoid dodge, I checked http://thebigbearbutt.com/2008/11/19/feral-druid-level-80-hit-expertise-and-dodge/ again and verified, that you need 6.5 % and with Primal Precision 4%.
Now im not anymore sure, what kind of number is correct.
Greetings Thural
Muh, after checking the case again, I found my mistake
Please don’t notice my comment above and delete it please.
If strength is the mail stat to get, why is there no epic leather with strength on it? EVERTHING is stacked with agility.
@Staris:
I’ll agree that +str leather is rare – especially near the top of the gear lists. I’m assuming the answer as to why this is the case is that Blizzard wants cats to share gear with rogues, and rogues love their agility. But don’t get me started on the push to eliminate all druid-specific gear – I’ll never stop
That said – enchant/gem strength as much as you can – it’s still the best stat unless you’re not hit/expertise capped.
Karthiss last blog post..Kitty gear explained – Now on Resto4Life
I have never understood melee and always gone caster because of this. I never knew what stats to look for on gear so have always carried around a sub par feral set of random pieces that had the most agility I could find. Now I have a far better idea of what I am looking for than before
Wise Foxs last blog post..Yimas becomes a dad!
@ Karthis:
Thank you, this is a great summary! However, I think you’ve misunderstood something about the way haste works with cat druids, and since we’re doing some theorycrafting anyway I want to set it straight. Your original post states:
“Since Druids in cat form have an attack speed of 1, this stat is of minimal impact to our bottom line DPS.”
You’re right about it not being very useful, but it’s not really related to our (white) attack speed. It’s rather because a big % of our DPS comes from special (yellow) attacks. The contribution of haste to special attacks consists of lowering GCD, but:
1) Cats are limited by available energy rather than length of the GCD, which makes a lower GCD irrelevant in the medium to long run.
2) Haste won’t bring GCD below 1 s, which cats already have, rendering it utterly useless for their special attacks even in the very short run (burst damage).
So in short, since cat druids do a lot of yellow damage and haste won’t improve their yellow damage, it’s not a very good stat for a cat.
(I haven’t actually done any number crunching, so don’t take my word for it. However, it seems much more logical to me than the notion that our attack speed would matter.)
The GCD for melee specials is not affected by the GCD anyways
Also, while 30-35% of our damage does come from bleeds and 15% from shred/mangle, an awful lot still comes from plain old “swing” white damage. (35% is about average for white damage I’m finding.)
Haste affects attack speed by a percentage. The slower you are, the more a single point of haste affects you.
Karthiss last blog post..A Feral UI
Sorry for that (and thanks for pointing it out), please replace line 12 and downwards in my previous post with “haste doesn’t affect special (yellow) attacks”. :/
I still don’t understand how the attack speed would matter though. Yes, the slower you are, the more a single point of haste affects you — but that’s per swing, not per second! Consider these two fictitious characters:
Cat: Avg dmg 100, 1.00 speed = max 100 white dps
Warrior: Avg dmg 300, 3.00 speed = max 100 white dps
Now give them both 10% haste:
Cat: Avg dmg 100, 0.90 speed = max 111 white dps
Warrior: Avg dmg 300, 2.70 speed = max 111 white dps
Ergo, dps increase from haste is independent of attack speed.
…or am I missing something again?
Doh. I do believe that you are correct. Lemme dig a bit more, and then potentially revise the post.
Thank you!
Karthiss last blog post..Swiping your way to the top
Thank you for this great posting. I am primarily a bear tank, but being the most flexible of the tanks I am usually the one asked to go Dps when 3 tanks aren’t needed in the boss encounter, so I stumbled across this post when browsing the internet for guides to maximise my kitty dps.
I have collected dps gear when the only rogue in guild passes, so its not ideal but I think its not bad for a kitty.
However, all the gear I have picked up has no strength at all, in fact when I’m in my dps gear I have only 10 more str than base (which comes from +10 all stats chest enchant). Quite a few threads I have read seem to imply that str is around as important as agi, so I’m wondering if anyone else has noticed the lack of str on leather items and if they think this is a problem?
Does it mean I should be using str gems instead of agi gems? Same question for enchants.
And should I also be after the same rings that pally’s and DKs are after? Or still using the more rogue-ish rings with agi.
@Wolfenkite:
Until 3.1 strength will remain slightly better than agility…..
Once the next patch lands, however, agility will be the clear-cut winner, and the lack of +str leather gear will cease being an issue.
Karthiss last blog post..Drake-tanking Sartharion-3D
Ok wicked, thanks for the quick response.
So you’re saying after 3.1 it doesnt matter how low your str is? Agi will always be worth more so expect to see alot of kitties with no str at all?
Well, strength will still provide AP…. it just won’t be as valuable on a point-per-point basis as agility. So if +str is thrown in, don’t reject it…. just don’t try to optimize for str in 3.1
Karthiss last blog post..Warhammer: Age of Reckoning Review
Armor Pen has been updated, and it is now over powered…Stacking this is now the best way to drasticly increase your dps, don’t go out of your way to get it, most uldar feral gear has a healthy amount of Arm. Pen. As well stacking some AP gems is very usefull.