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.

Related Posts

• Guest Post: Balance vs. Restoration Gear
• BA Shared Topic: Preparing for Wrath of the Lich King
• Phaelia’s Guide to Roguery

According to the most recent patch notes, a couple of improvements to the oft-derided spell Nourish will go live with the next patch:

• Moonglow: This talent now also benefits Nourish.
• Nourish: Wild Growth applied to a target now increases the healing done by this spell by 20% like other heal over time effects.

This means that instead of spamming Regrowth as a raid heal, you’ll cast Wild Growth on the five raid members at lowest health (hopefully) and then apply Nourish to supplement the healing (WG will now grant a 20% throughput bonus). This not only gives Nourish a special niche (high HPM raid heal) but lessens the sting of the 6-second cooldown simultaneously being applied to Wild Growth. Also, it’s worth noting that, while Nourish remains the lowest option in terms of HPS, you’ll be using it on targets who are already getting healed over time by Wild Growth. A Regrowth bomb would likely just waste that HoT. I’m especially pleased about this new synergy and the idea that a Druid will “nourish” a “wild growth.”

Here are the revised HPM/HPS graphs for the new variations of Nourish. I’ll update the Direct Healing in Wrath article with these graphs (and updated observations) when these changes go live:

And, in case you missed them, here are all the other announced Druid-related changes in the upcoming patch:

• Aquatic Form is now available from druid trainers at level 16.
• Feral Attack Power: All weapons now have the potential to grant feral attack power based on their dps (as compared to the best superior-quality weapons available at level 60). Players will see their existing feral weapons grant roughly the same attack power as they did before (+/- 2 or so), but many new weapons will be options for the feral druid. Some feral weapons have had strength converted to attack power to be more appealing to other classes able to equip them. All druids will see the amount of feral attack power granted by an item in the item tooltip, if it grants any, but other players will not see that information.
• Remove Curse and Abolish Poison can now be used in Moonkin form.
• Genesis: Now works with Tranquility and Hurricane.
• Growl: Range increased to 30 yards.
• King of the Jungle – The Bear effect is now physical, and thus cannot be dispelled.
• Moonglow: This talent now also benefits Nourish.
• Nature’s Grace – Now also effects Revive.
• Nourish: Wild Growth applied to a target now increases the healing done by this spell by 20% like other heal over time effects.
• Polearms: Now trainable by Druids.
• Primal Tenacity: Now reduces the cost of Bear Form, Cat Form, and Dire Bear Form by 17/33/50% in addition to its previous effects.
• Protector of the Pack: No longer changes value based on party size.
• Savage Roar: The buff now persists outside of Cat Form but only provides its benefits while in Cat Form.
• Starfall: Instead of canceling shapeshifting, now cancels on shapeshifting into an animal form.
• Survival of the Fittest: This talent now grants 22/44/66% bonus armor in Bear Form and Dire Bear Form in addition to all of its previous effects.
• Swipe: Swipe (Cat) has now been added at level 71, dealing 260% weapon damage, costs 50 energy with no cooldown. All talents affecting the Bear Form version affect the Cat Form one as well.
• Wild Growth now has a 6 second cooldown.
• Bear Form: This ability will now grant the correct attack power per level for levels 71-80.
• Entangling Roots: When determining if a new Entangling Roots should overwrite an old one, and will now calculate the correct damage modifiers for the creature type of the target.
• Maim: Tooltip adjusted to match the duration the ability has always had.
• Opening: Opening doors and objects should no longer cause shapeshifted forms to be cancelled.
• Rake: The initial damage from this ability is now properly considered bleed damage, and will be increased by Mangle and Trauma.
• Savage Fury – Mangle (Bear) damage was being increased by a higher percentage than intended. This has been fixed, and in result Mangle (Bear) should see roughly a 16% damage reduction. Also fixed a bug with Savage Fury where the Rake bleed effect was not being increased.
• Starfall will no longer cause nearby creatures to become hostile for no apparent reason while the Druid is affected by fear effects. In addition, it will no longer pick ambient creatures as targets.
• Survival Instincts: The extra health from this ability now persists in all forms, but the ability can only be activated in Cat Form, Bear Form, or Dire Bear Form. This prevents the health gain from occurring multiple times if constantly shapeshifting.
• Swiftmend: Riptide will no longer cause this ability to light up, and this ability will no longer sometimes consume Earthliving off the target.
• Idol of the Emerald Queen: This idol was providing greater healing than implied by its tooltip. It has been reduced to correct value.
• Glyph of Rejuvenation: The heal from this glyph is now properly considered a periodic heal.
• Soul Preserver: This item will now interact correctly with Desperate Prayer, Lay on Hands, Riptide, and Wild Growth.

Boo at no longer being able to Swiftmend Bobo the Shaman’s Riptide!

Blue Tidbits

Responding to concerns from Priests that they’re not strong enough in PvE or PvP, Ghostcrawler made the following (much abbreviated) statement:

If your raid is stacked with Paladin healers your group healing will suffer. If your raid is stacked with Druid healers, your tank healing will suffer. If your raid is stacked with Priests, you won’t have any problems.

Um … what? Am I the only one who finds it alarming that developer opinion is that Druids aren’t good tank healers? Especially given that three (arguably four) out of five of our healing spells are designed for use on tanks? Lifebloom is too inefficient to use single-stacked, Rejuvenation generally heals too slowly to use as a raid heal and better serves as a buffer, Nourish works best on a target with one or more HoTs (and don’t even get me started on the 4-piece T7 set bonus), and Regrowth gets a 20% throughput bonus when used on a target who already has Regrowth (assuming the [Glyph of Regrowth], of course). With a 6-second cooldown on Wild Growth and 4-minute cooldown on Tranquility, we are definitely not specialized as raid healers. The changes to Nourish above will certainly help counteract the Wild Growth nerf, but I find it worrisome that a developer would make a statement that seemingly flies in the face of the spells and tools we’ve been given.

On a separate topic entitled It’s time for the silence mechanic to change, Ghostcrawler shared this bit of PvP-specific but encouraging news:

We are considering DR for silence effects.

Praise Elune! Am I the only one who’s tried trinketing out of a silence? Silence is nothing but a form of caster-specific crowd control and should have been subject to diminishing returns from the beginning.

Related Posts

• PTR Changes: 6-Second Cooldown on Wild Growth
• Blue: Nourish may be Affected by Wild Growth
• Speculation: Revitalize and Wild Growth

Wrath of the Lich King included many changes to the Druid class, including some very positive changes to the Restoration and Balance trees. Talents such as Nature’s Focus and Improved Mark of the Wild were reduced from a cost of 5-points to 3 and 2 points respectively, and fun abilities such as Omen of Clarity, Nature’s Grace, and Nature’s Grasp were made a lot more accessible. In particular, I consider the 14 points in Balance for Genesis, Moonglow, Nature’s Majesty, Nature’s Grace, and Nature’s Splendor to be staples of the healing Druid’s specialization.

In addition to the obvious care and attention that was given to “pruning” our early talent trees, we were given 4 new abilities at the bottom of the Restoration tree to give us something to spend points on leading up to our 51-point talent, Wild Growth. Today, I’d like to take a look at three of these abilities: Living Seed, Revitalize, and Gift of the Earthmother.

Continue reading ‘Living Seed, Replenish, and Gift of the Earthmother’…

Related Posts

• Speculation: Revitalize and Wild Growth
• Gift of the Nerfmother
• Direct Healing in Wrath

Or “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Run and Hide”
by Vreenash of Dragonblight (US)

Shadowmeld has changed. Previous uses of this ability involved hiding from mobs while outside of combat or getting out of combat in Arena, sitting to drink, and using Shadowmeld to hide from your opponents. Now however, thanks to the powers that be, this Night Elf racial can remove you from combat and even temporarily from the hate list – permanently if you happen to be alone. We can all see the obvious advantages of Shadowmeld in a PvE dungeon setting, but you might be underestimating its full potential. Let’s consider a few additional uses:

While in a PvE dungeon setting (5-man only), use SM to take you out of combat mid-fight to:

• Drink or Eat: Even in a heroic dungeon where downtime is low, you can find yourself an 8-second quick drink (think of it as another mana pot).
• Revive: Yes, you can use our 10 second resurrection mid-battle (good luck finding those 10 seconds, though).
• Gear Change: If you have Itemrack or another gear-swapping mod installed, a Boomkin could switch over to healer if the healer goes down.

In PvP:

• If Shadowmeld is paired up with Nature’s Grasp via macro (neither is tied to the global cooldown and will therefore activate at the same time), the pursuer will drop you from their target list and will need to reacquire you. In such a situation, you will most likely be running and will break Shadowmeld immediately. The first attack after the pursuer reacquires you will most likely be an auto-attack and not a stun, thus entangling your opponent and giving you some breathing room.
• Outdoor PvP holds a cheeky benefit. If you’re being ganked, use Shadowmeld to take you out-of-combat, hit Swift Flight Form, and high tail it to the nearest bed and breakfast.
• There is currently a bug in Wintergrasp that will keep you in combat for long periods of time, even though there is no battle to be seen. Using Shadowmeld will break you out of combat so you can mount up.
• You can still use Shadowmeld to drink in Arenas, though it’s more challenging since your stealth will break once you’ve started drinking. Alternatively, you could use it in the same manner as before, running to get out combat long enough to sit and drink then activate Shadowmeld. However, given the now longer cooldown on the ability (3 minutes), you only get one shot at this in most matches.

Can you think of any other uses for this revised ability?

Related Posts

• Night Elf is to Ninja as Tauren is to Giant, Stompy Cheeseburger
• Natural Perfection No Longer Triggers from Crits while Sitting
• Line of Sight in Arenas

Taking a cue from Leafshine, I’d like to take this opportunity to take a look back at 2008 for Resto4Life.

Top 10 Posts as Measured by Page Views

As I would have expected, among the most popular articles to reference were guides, including 2.4 mana regeneration and how to pick from the plethora of trinkets available in TBC. Andrige is also directly responsible for more than 120,000 of my page hits in 2008 with his sharing of a female hairstyles preview (which continues to receive lots of inbound links) and his customized shapeshifting skins.

1. Wrath of the Lich King Female Hairstyles
   This post alone has brought in more than 100,000 visitors. I imagine the companion piece over at BBB has had similar results.
2. Calculator: Mana Regeneration (from 2.4)
   This will eventually be updated for Wrath, but I’ve been reluctant to invest the time with all the blue talk about wanting to nerf mana regeneration (an action that could significantly change the formula used).
3. 2.4 Mana Regen: The Basics
   Without a doubt, one of my most complex series of 2008.
4. Andrige’s Shapeshift Skins
   Clearly, forms customization is high on the priority list for Druids! Hopefully 2009 will see some innovative and inspiring new forms for Druids of all shape.
5. Mailbag: WotLK Item List
   This was my original “I filter WoWHead so you don’t have to” list. I’m going back and writing more detailed posts by groups of slots now.
6. Grid: Thinking within the Box(es)
   Not surprisingly, many people had follow-up questions to my post on customizing this often overwhelmingly complex addon.
7. Talent Spec: Leveling Restoration/Balance
8. The Belkin Nostromo N52 TE
9. 2.4 Mana Regen: Regrowth as the New Raid Heal
   As far back as 2.4, I totally called the awesomeness of Regrowth.
10. Arrrghhh!!! Trinkets!!!
    This is another post I intend to rewrite for Wrath at some point, though if ever stop posting, it’s a good guess that I didn’t make it through writing it!

Top 10 Posts as Measured by Comments

These are the posts that got visitors talking. I worked hard in 2008 to ensure that I responded to as many comments as I could, but these posts were the ones that gave me a definite run for my money!

1. Direct Healing in Wrath (73 comments) 
   Interestingly, the original post on this subject written during the WotLK beta (since unpublished to avoid confusion) generated 27 comments of its own!
2. Ghostcrawler: Wild Growth May Receive 6-Second Cooldown (65 comments)
   This is a very recent post that generated a lot of discussion about whether such a cooldown was necessary and how much it would affect us if so.
3. Grid: Thinking within the Box(es) (63 comments)
4. The Belkin Nostromo N52 TE (63 comments)
   I was very happy with the amount of interest this post generated. Still waiting for my free Belkin Nostromo N52 TE to give away as part of a site contest, though! /peers Belkin
5. Andrige’s Shapeshift Skins (61 comments)
6. Blue: Mana Regen Complexity and Restoration Scaling (60 comments)
7. Bornakk: Druids Not to be “Big Green Blobs” (59 comments)
   I’m still waiting for the Druid- or multi-healer-oriented blog named “Big Green Blob.”
8. 9014 Nerfs and Ghostcrawler Responds to Resto Concerns (55 comments)
9. Build 8962 Changes (51 comments)
10. Ghostcrawler: Healers Not to be Interchangeable (51 comments)

Surprisingly, many of the top-commented post were related to blue posts or posts about upcoming changes to the class and spec. This would seem to indicate that a large number of visitors like to get their Druid-related (or at least Resto-related) news here and might even prefer discussing it here to discussing it on the forums.

Most Popular Shirt Designs

I love adding new designs to the shirt shop. Here were the top performers in 2008 (these results are obviously biased based on the time they were added):

1. HoTs Girlfriend and HoTs Boyfriend
2. Positive Carbon Footprint
3. Restoration Cloud
4. Resto4Life Logo
5. Restoration Wreath

Other Stats of Interest for 2008

• There were 234 total posts.
• Visitors made a total of 3706 comments.
• I made a total of 650 comments.
• Resto4Life.com received a total of 665,410 visits and 1,355,119 page views.
• Visitors spent an average of 3 minutes on the site per visit.
• There were 29 Community Spotlight posts or an average of 2.4 a month.
• I received (and hopefully responded to) more than 450 e-mails, not including those related to Arbor Day or Turkey Day.

Thank You!

Thanks to everyone who visited and contributed and helped make 2008 an awesome year for Resto4Life! I am looking forward with excitement to 2009 and hope you are, too!

Related Posts

• Resto4Life Closing Its Doors
• Work Complete!
• More Work?