View Full Forums : Cat Main Spec-dps


Goose
01-13-2009, 05:42 AM
my current level: pulled 3.4kdps on patchwork a week ago, got some major upgrades since then so i'm aiming for 4k this week.

What i've found:

geming-go for STRENGTH 100%. strenght provides 2.5 AP per 1 str with KINGS BUFF. This is better than AP gemming and alot better than agility (1ap per agil). Agile also offers crit BUT crit won't help ur bleeds or FB (should be 100% crit with RnT). also the crit return on our agility is kinda crappy. 16 agil isn't very much crit at all.

DPS rotation-i've seen it best organized as a priority list of what to do if its on cooldown.

1-SR
2-Rake (highest dps per energy reported by EJ)
3-mangle (to maintain debuff only)
4-RIP
5-FB (if more than 7-10 seconds on both SR and rip)
6-Shred

berserk- try and time this for with major debuffs of battle (such as sparks for malygos) make sure to berserk with atleast 80 energy.

TF- general rule is to use it every time its off cd and you have less energy than 1/3, however i would sugest trying to also time it before berzerking, or directly after FB.

Addon awesomeness- theres an addon on curse gaming site called 'bad kitty'. It organizes all your durations very nicely. It also claims to monitor other peoples mangle's/trauma so that youd don't redundently mangle, however i think this is glitchy.

FB discussion- EJ strongly recommends FB every time you have 5 combo points and more than 7 seconds on rip and SR. I would up this to more like 10 seconds personally, but as you can tell by my gemming, i have lower crit.. 45.5 unbuffed.

For sure DON"T ever FB during a berzerk. most of my FBs come in when i think boss is going to die in less than 30 seconds, i spam it 5 combopoints. obviously always make sure a bleed is up to guarentee crit.

whether to rotate in a FB in between rip SR? i do it occasionally however I think FB has been predicted to not scale as well as shred. this probably won't be as noticable till ulduar content. Currently my shreds average 9k, FB average 10.5k. this would be good if FB would use its minimal energy but atleast for me i've noticed that theres a 1 second lag after it activates before it takes the remaining energy. Not only does it use more energy but it also seems to leave my energy empty longer. I've noticed more dps if i continue shreding past 5 combo points rather than risk iffy timing on FB and possibly loose rip-SR for 10 seconds of boss fight.

Current stats:
45.5% crit 6.4k AP. 190ish hit i think.

Inc upgrades hopefully this week. Journey's end; grim toll trinket, my JC is lvled, got 3 27 strength gems incoming once i save up enough dailies this week.

Grimjonn
01-13-2009, 06:43 AM
What a depressing post. Boo! I don't want to regem!

Sadly, the folks at EJ and Rawr agree with you 100%. Strength is better than agility for overall sustained dps. And +85 attack power is better than +35 agility.

I haven't bit the bullet and regemmed, but I'm going to have to. I may have to tweak my enchants as well. Everything is agility or a plus to all stats. I suspect strength or AP enchants are the way to go for pure kitty dps.

skwidrific
01-13-2009, 12:34 PM
Thanks for the post man... way to make me feel subpar lol

seriously though, you've given me some numbers to shoot for on my PvE dps set... right now im mew-mewing with my PvP set, relying on crits to generate combo points...

45% chance to crit when you're gemming for strength is pretty impressive... would you mind linking your armory so i can get a look at your gear?

We were in hVH last night and i scored 1% less damage than a decently geared rouge... The discussion in vent following the DM report was pretty hilarious... Knowing the the concensus at EJ was to gem for strength and enjoy the massive boost from SR, my comment was basically like "Just wait until i'm geared and gemmed right... imma put your dps to shame"

lol

Goose
01-13-2009, 06:18 PM
yeah np, wowarmory was down last night or i would have posted it then:

http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Akama&n=Heartcrusher

yeah i was reporting my dps to try and add some credibility to my post. : ). if ur lower don't feel bad, I got some valoreous set. I had the chest last week, this week i got the val helm. Such a huge upgrade. Hopefully if i get picked tonight for raid i can report some numbers with the new gear. But i can go ahead and say from what i've seen, i think** a best-inslot itemized druid could pull 5k dps right now. I've seen a pretty good range of classes doing that, i think bliz might have done a good job balancing classes dps end game. Earlier on its not balanced though.

Ainvarr
01-19-2009, 10:04 AM
Your HR is also 265 which is much higher than mine. My HR is quite low. I've been using rawr which keeps telling me that agility is what I want but i'm doubting it now. I think that I need to regem for HR until some upgrades come along.

Goose
01-20-2009, 07:12 AM
my gear got upgraded again ainvarr, when i wrote the post i think i was at 140 hit rating. And last week i got stuck in our guild's ALT 25, so my overall dps wasn't accurate because we didn't have proper class balancing in the raid (we had like 6 DKs, 7 priest). Hopefully i can report what i'm at this week. In a heroic yesturday i managed to pull 5.7k single target on a boss with heroism popped. This was a 45 second fight though and I had a a bear tank keeping all necessary debuffs up for me.

on a side note now that i finally have my dps set coming together, my guild now wants me to switch back to primary bear tank. i never got a chance to really play with my epiced kitty :(

skwidrific
01-20-2009, 01:34 PM
sounds like the dps'ers in your guild are having *rawr* envy lol... I'm sorry to hear that you're going back to tanking... I'd love to keep hearing updates about your kitty dps.

You have 2 Naxx25 runs going? wow... I set paw into Naxx25 for the first time this past Sunday night with my guild and quite a few people from outside the guild. Not necessarily PUGs, but people that guildies know and play with fairly frequently... We got pretty far into the Military Quarter, but wiped a few times on the Four Horsemen, probably because there more than a few people that were there for their first time as well.

Hopefully those Dual Specs will be implemented soon, and you'll be able to give us (me) more updates on face-clawing dps :)

tlbj6142
01-20-2009, 01:58 PM
I haven't looked at your spec yet, but I was talking to my guild's main Druid tank after a 25-man run of that raid in Wintergrasp. He and I were Cat DPS'ing in the fight.

He doesn't have KoJ or SA. But has 5/5 FA and 3/3 PI and 5/5 RnT. He did some amazing DPS during the fight, just using Mangle and FB (along with keeping SR up). I used the more conventional rotation (Rake, Rip, SR, TF, etc.), but given the nearly constant movement of the boss, I was very, very inefficient. Sometimes, I think KISS > theorycrafting. Thoughts?

Though I have to wonder where he got the bleed effect from in order to benefit from RnT. Rogue? Arms warrior? My rips/rakes?

FWIW, I installed BadKitty the other day, it is nice. I disabled the buff icons (they are called "warnings") as they were too huge. I couldn't figure out how to scale them down, besides they were very dark in my UI so it hard to identify the icon. I also wish the order of the DoTs moved as they were about to expire. I think that can be done with other generic DoT tracking addons.

skwidrific
01-20-2009, 02:15 PM
I ran 10-Man Vault of Archavon last week and was actually at the top of Damage Done. I was definitely using the conventional rotation, but anytime i got the "a more powerful spell is active" error when i tried to Rip, I would immediately FB or SR and start all over. I made sure to blow my CD's whenever they were up, except for TF, which i would wait until my FB or SR to pop that. Any time Archavon charged across the room, I would cat charge to get right behind again (it was usually off of CD) and continue clawing.

and yes, tlbj, the other druid would definitely benefit from the bleed effects that you (or the warrior, with Deep Wounds) put on the boss.

Oiysters
01-20-2009, 02:19 PM
I've had similar problems with movement fights. I've started timing Berserk to use with Shred spam; it does wonders. Shred is seriously useless on most trash though, or maybe I am just bad at positioning.

Ainvarr
01-20-2009, 02:38 PM
BadKitty keeps blowing a fuse for me although I didn't disable the icons. I'll try it again tonight with icons disabled and only minimal mods loaded and see what happens. I suddenly can't live without it so if I can't get it to work better I gotta find something.

I started using a simple macro that hits Tiger's Fury and Berserk (if available) together to see if that does anything. Planning on a shred spam at that point.

Anyone (not already tank or hybrid specced) adding FI to their spec since I believe that 3.0.8 is live tonight?

tlbj6142
01-20-2009, 02:54 PM
and yes, tlbj, the other druid would definitely benefit from the bleed effects that you (or the warrior, with Deep Wounds) put on the boss.Besides Rake, Rip and Pouce, what other attacks result in a bleed effect? Does a normal Prot tank have a bleed? Rogues?


Check out this cat dps video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWPEWQsO4vM) (click on the "Watch in HD" in the lower right corner otherwise you can't see the addon all that well) in which someone is using another addon to track dots, etc.

From this post on EJ (http://elitistjerks.com/1055879-post327.html).

Goose
01-21-2009, 04:14 PM
tlbj6142--
other bleed effects: rogues use rupture (garrote isn't really used in raids that i know of) warriors have deep wounds (prot tanks are getting deep wounds now too for extra threat) and rend. and don't forget of course our own lacerate.

Ainvarr: sorry i don't have an exact spec to send you but yes i was planning on putting some points into FI. It won't help on the majority of boss fights which is what really matters in raids, however i think we cats have earned it. normally i havea couple extra points after all my dps necessary talents are taken which i normally put into IW just in case the tank isn't keeping up their own slow effect. probably gonna switch these and maybe one or two points out of Feral aggression (FB damage talent)

Ainvarr
01-28-2009, 09:00 AM
Got loathleb's shadow last night. Not sure what trinkets to use out of: mirror, Loathleb's, mighty alchemist's stone. I like "on use" stuff so that I can time it with other CD's. I did a quick macro last night just to put stuff together for boss fights:

/cast tiger's fury
/cast Berserk
/use Loathleb's shadow

Didn't really see much difference though.

s3Rgio
01-28-2009, 09:42 AM
Mirror of truth for sure.

And if im not mistaken, the alchemists stone is better when you look on DPS.
Cause it was a close one between Mirror and Alchemists-Stone and mirror is far superior to loathebs.

smartidiot
01-30-2009, 11:55 AM
As for DPS addons I suggest looking at this blog post.
http://www.unbearably.net/2009/01/22/just-tellmewhen-baby-i-needtoknow/

TellMeWhen and NeedToKnow are awesome for cat DPS.

Ainvarr
02-03-2009, 12:08 PM
NeedToKnow rules. It can be configured to monitor other's bleed effects.

tlbj6142
02-03-2009, 12:18 PM
Recently (over the past 2 days), BadKitty has been updated and now it is really, really, nice. No crazy advanced configuration required. It tracks both cat (rake, rip, mangle, sr, tf, energy, combo points, fff, etc.) and bear (dr, beserk, lacerate stacks, mangle, fff, etc.) timers as well as other bleed effects.

The only thing I'm not too crazy about BadKitty is the "warnings". Basically, they are an icon block that contains all of the attacks, cooldowns, etc. that you are not using (the goal being to keep the block off). It seems like a great idea. But they a bit too large and dark. And frankly, the hot timer bars show the same information. The warnings can be turned off and I suggest you do so.

Love it!

Wait, I just realized something, I wonder if the warning "icons" are meant to be clickable? Hmmm. If that is the case I can see how useful they would be. Think Wack-a-mole (tm) DPS. I never use my mouse to select attacks. But I know quite a few of you folks do...

Goose
02-05-2009, 11:36 AM
i'm pretty sure theres an option to turn of "warning" but the bad thing is i'm not sure if this removes the OOC icon which i actually do use/like.

tlbj6142
02-05-2009, 11:42 AM
i'm pretty sure theres an option to turn of "warning" but the bad thing is i'm not sure if this removes the OOC icon which i actually do use/like.You can turn off the warnings (BTW, they are not buttons) and you still get the OOC "background".

Oiysters
02-05-2009, 01:05 PM
Love it!
/agree. BadKitty > all.

Ainvarr
02-10-2009, 09:00 AM
And so I FINALLY got to play with a bear tank. I let him mangle while I just kept up rake, rip, SR, and shredded. I did 500dps less than I usually do. ???

tlbj6142
02-10-2009, 09:13 AM
And so I FINALLY got to play with a bear tank. I let him mangle while I just kept up rake, rip, SR, and shredded. I did 500dps less than I usually do. ???Weird. Maybe you use mangle for DPS than you thought?

Goose
02-11-2009, 04:58 PM
theoretically and personally a bear tank should only help you. you still have to watch the debuffs thou and make sure he's reapplying them, otherwise it will hurt your dps. Another possible reason you lost dps could have been if it was a different boss or raid/party buffs. Even tank and spank bosses have different armor etc.

tlbj6142
02-11-2009, 05:03 PM
Does the bear mangle debuff last as long as the cat version? I know when I'm raid boss tanking and have to worry about "other stuff", I often miss mangle once in a while. As Maul and Swipe have become my "OMG mash a button already" move.

Now if it is a simple tank-n-spank, the type where you can one-hand the fight (I sort of like those once in a while). I keep FFF, DR and Mangle up all the time.