Ensidia

Feral Druid guide

This guide will be about Feral Druids. It's going to cover both DPS and Tanking, so this will be a long one. The first thing I'll cover is going to be DPS, as I expect that to be the most anticipated part of this guide. Let’s face it, who wants to do 2.5k DPS tanking if you can do OVER NINE THOUSAND as a kitty?

Anyway before we get started, as I expect this will turn into quite the monster-guide I will utilize some abbreviations, so to avoid confusion I'll make an index for you right here:

ArP = Armor Penetration rating
CP = Combo Point
FB = Ferocious Bite
AoE = Area of Effect
StR = Strength
Agi = Agility
ExP = Expertise
Sta = Stamina
CD = Cooldown
BiS = Best in Slot
ToT = Tricks of the Trade

So.. What to expect from this guide? First off, I expect both experienced and new ferals will benefit from this guide. It will give a hands-on, experienced point of view combined with some theorycrafting and some numbercrunching.That being said, I don’t like blindly trusting theorycrafting because it’s still not a totally accurate simulation of a raiding environment. More on that later.



Guide to being the meanest cat on the block

Alright, there are some simple things we have to get straight first. The limits of hit, expertise etc etc blabla, all the boring facts.

263 hit rating
132 expertise rating

Those are the limits you want as a Feral DPS. You might already start thinking I'm an idiot because "wtf, you need 214 expertise rating for cap lol???", this is however explained by the talent called Feral Precision, which you should always have in your DPS spec. It gives you 10 extra expertise, which is the equivalent of 82 expertise rating, so you only need 132 expertise rating, aka 16 expertise. First off, I've not been hit capped since 1996 and I've had the expertise cap for a while now. It's important to get both caps but it won’t DESTROY YOUR WORLD and cause EVERYONE TO PANIC if you miss a little, I'll get back to why later though. I just wanted people on the edge of their seats. Stay tuned though, later on in the guide I'm going to claim Haste is the best DPS stat.



I already hate writing this guide. I was going to link a few specs now, because there are 2 different specs you can use as a DPS. Actually there are 3 but the 3rd one sucks ass. However, in order to link the specs I'd have to defend one of them over the other and I can only do that with information I give further on in the guide. Anyway bear with me here, I'm going to link the 2 specs I find the most useful and briefly explain why I choose the one I do and not the other one.

Spec 1
Spec 2

Spec 1 is the spec I've been using for a long time now. It’s got AoE power, Survival Instincts and Improved Mangle. It’s a really good all-round spec, and my personal favorite. I don’t use FB much (if at all) so the 3/5 Feral Aggression is not a DPS loss at all for me. The 2nd spec is the best possible single target DPS spec. You get full Feral Aggression and you dump Improved Mangle to get 2/2 imp lotp. This spec requires an Arms warrior or another Feral, which is why I don’t like it.

Ok, so it's GLYPHING TIME. Basically, I read somewhere that the best glyphs to use are:

Rip
Shred
Savage Roar

So stop fiddling around with Berserk and God knows what other crap is out there. Even if you don't have a Mangle/Trauma debuffer in the raid these are still the 3 best Major Glyphs. Minor ones you should be using are Unburdened Rebirth, Dash and something random. Thorns or something crappy I guess.



Ok, now you have your Hit/Expertise caps, you have your spec and you have your glyphs. It's time to look at the rest of your gear. You want to get above 50% unbuffed crit chance. I SAY AGAIN; get 50% UNBUFFED crit chance. I'm tired of repeating that. Read it. Understand it. Embrace it. You need about 55% crit to keep a proper CP generation up, so you need just above 50% unbuffed for it to work. I've compiled a list of BiS gear. It's still a work in progress, because you have to account for random drops you might not get, which is hard. Anyways, here is the list of items I hope I can get before hardmodes open:

Sanctified Lasherweave Headguard
Sindragosa's Cruel Claw
Sanctified Lasherweave Shoulderpads
Sylvanas' Cunning
Sanctified Lasherweave Raiment
Toskk's Maximized Wristguards
Aldriana's Gloves of Secrecy
Vengeful Noose
Sanctified Lasherweave Legguards
Icewalker Treads
Ashen Band of Endless Vengeance
Frostbrood Sapphire Ring
Herkuml War Token
Deathbringer's Will
Twin's Pact
Idol of Mutilation

I've made a wowhead profile with the enchants/gems as well: Link

These items give you 1360 unbuffed ArP. The hard cap for ArP is 1400 so you’re at 100% passive ArP if you use Hearty Rhino. I've always preferred hardcapping because it suits my playstyle a lot better than softcapping. Softcapping is the fancy stuff where you value haste and blabla, screw that. Keep it simple. ArP and Crit, that’s the shit you want. Besides, the rotation goes from being annoying as hell to being fairly easy. You are going to drop a lot of crit hampering your CP generation so you can’t do FBs anymore. And be honest, which would you rather do? Work the hard way to achieve a minimal upgrade or go the lazy way and do even more dps? That’s right, pretty easy point!

I've made a BiS gear list with full hardmode gear as well but it’s totally pointless linking it seeing as none of us are ever going to get all of it. For the hell of it though, here it is: Link
When it comes to gearing in ICC it’s very important you have your head on your shoulders and not under your arm. Before this section gets totally out of hand, I'll just say that I want to hardcap ArP no matter what. I'm not going to even think about softcapping because I've always hated doing it. Use your head when thinking about upgrades. And for the seriously please wait with using Emblems of Frost until you can buy t10 set pieces. The 4 part bonus is the biggest damage boost we can get, so you want to get that before anything else.



Alright, you have your gear, spec, glyphs etc. fixed. Now what's left before you're an awesome cat from hell? Obviously, which buttons to press and when to press said buttons. Usually if I get asked about my rotation I say "Bind Mangle, Rip, Shred, Savage Roar, Ferocious Bite and Berserk to random keys from 1-6, then roll your face from left to right. If your DPS drops, start hammering your face instead of rolling it." I'm sure you've all seen the spreadsheets and the JOHN FUCKING MADDEN jokes. However, there is actually a little thought involved in DPSing as Feral.
Essentially, there's no real rotation as such. There's a prioritized list of skills and timers. If a timer is too low, it's sometimes better to save some Energy to refresh it as soon as possible rather than just shredding on like a roidraging bodybuilder.

Here goes: You start off your rotation by doing Mangle, followed by a Rake. You then have enough energy spare to use Savage Roar, then you press Tiger's Fury and you Shred once, then use Berserk. I realize Berserk overwrites Tiger's Fury but it’s more important getting your rotation started properly and get Berserk on CD. At 5 CP you apply Rip to your target, then refresh Rake. That’s how I start fights. If you don't crit for shit, you might have to reapply Rake before doing Rip (if you're at 3 or 4 CP and Rake runs out without Rip being up). Basically it's all about keeping stuff up. The most important thing to keep up is Savage Roar. After that it's Rip. Savage Roar basically increases your dps by 33%. Never let it be down for even a second! After that, you just apply Rake and spam shred whenever the other stuff is up. If you have 5 CP and Rip and Savage Roar runs out at the same time (in less than 5 seconds) just wait. Apply Rip, quickly do Rake or Shred and do a 1-2 CP Savage Roar. It's a balance to keep everything up, and it's based on how many CP you produce and how much energy you have. Tiger's Fury is very important. You should try and time it so you can just spam Shred when you use Tiger's Fury. Remember, the effect from Tiger's Fury is canceled if you do Berserk while it's up.

As I said earlier, you can include Ferocious Bite in your rotation. If you have 10+ seconds on Rip and 10+ seconds on Savage Roar and YOU’RE ALREADY AT 5 CP you can do a Ferocious Bite. It involves some lucky crits and probably a Clearcast proc as well. Personally, I only use Ferocious Bite if I have Berserk active (so I can get enough CP and Energy to get the other stuff up and running again). Nowadays I don’t even FB with Berserk active though (because it’s energy ineffective), and you should only do this if you can get Rip refreshed within 6 seconds of it running out. It’s freak occurences that you can use FB and it’s a minimal gain. That’s why I prefer hardcapping, you don’t crit enough to spend CP on FBs :P
With that rotation, or priority of skills if you will, you can go give bosses the good news. But before going so DPS horny that you'd bang the crack of dawn, you must remember that getting buffed with Hysteria and Tricks of the Trade is awesome. If you can get away with it, make sure you get as much of it as you can. Pay the DK's and Rogues if you have to. WE WANT MORE DPS! WE WANTS IT! Stupid selfish DK's have specced Unholy now though, and they don’t tank anymore. Rogues only ToT each other. Leaving Ferals with fuck all. Fantastic.

If you need more ArP you use Hearty Rhino, otherwise you use one of the 40 agi foods. At least I think there's more than one? Whatever, there's a 40 agi food made from some fish.

The best DPS pot/flask is Endless Rage, which is the AP flask. Regardless of how stupid that sounds, adding another 180 AP to your 10000 AP is still the best for your overall DPS.



As for all the Feral DPS do's and don’ts thats about all you need to know. The rest is overall gameplay and not sucking as much as Buzzkill on moving around. The final thing I want to add about Feral DPS is a rather weird subject. I will try and sum up some theory about Ferals.

First of all, let's talk about the dreaded crit soft cap. This is a rather complex subject so I really want to out some words on how it actually works, and I hope it makes sense once I'm done. The first thing we can talk about is Specials: Shred, Rake and Mangle. They cannot be glancing hits and therefore can have up to 100% crit. Your white melee hits can be Glancing Blows, and they have the same percentage as every other melee class ingame, 24%. All boss level mobs have Critical Strike Suppression as well, which is 4.8%, but given you're in a raiding environment you'll get +3% crit from Heart of the Crusader so in total you have 100% - 24% (glancing blows) - 4.8% (crit suppression) + 3% = 74.2%. That is your white hits crit soft cap. What Crit Suppression does is convert 4.8% of your crits into hits. Special attacks are unaffected by crit suppression. There are more factors that can play a role with your crits (though this is mostly hypothetical since it won’t ever be a reality), like say if you are hit capped but you're missing 1% expertise. Assuming you hit a mob 100 times, you will crit 50 attacks, hit with 49 and miss with 1. That's not so bad, but if you're at the soft cap for crits then the more attacks you get avoided the more crits you lose. Imagine if you have 80% crit, then the last 5.8% crit are totally wasted because you cannot crit anymore. Hit and Expertise also become more and more valuable the more crit you get. If you have for instance 75% crit but you're missing 2% hit and 1% expertise then you will only crit 72%. Keep in mind, this is talking about so insanely high amounts of crit that you will need at least full toc25 hardmode gear to be that high. Hit and Expertise also affects Specials because all Special Attacks are on a 2-roll system, and you can’t crit what you can’t hit.

So anyway I lost my trail of thought up there. Let’s use these numbers in a way we can all understand:
Firstly, lets assume a hit and expertise capped Kitty.
with 100% crit, you would get: 24% glancing, 1.8% hits and 74.2% crits.
with 76% crit, you would get: 24% glancing, 1.8% hits and 74.2% crits.
with 75% crit, you would get: 24% glancing, 2.8% hits and 73.2% crits.
with 70% crit, you would get: 24% glancing, 7.8% hits and 68.2% crits.
with 60% crit, you would get: 24% glancing, 17.8% hits and 58.2% crits.

Bear in mind, that is only for white attacks and it assumes that you have Heart of the Crusader on your target. Yellow attacks use a 2-roll system, which means you first check if you hit or miss the mob and then you check if you crit or hit with the attack if you hit in the first place. What that essentially means is that you need as much crit as you can get when it comes to special attacks. It also means that hit and expertise are very valuable for specials because if you're capped you'll always go straight to rolling on the crit/hit table because you never miss an attack.

Alright, so my next point about hit/expertise was that it gets more and more valuable the closer to the crit cap you get. This should be fairly obvious by now, since the closer you get to crit cap the more often you'll crit. If you miss an attack and you have 74.2% crit on your char sheet then you effectively just lost a crit. The closer you get to the crit cap the more you want to get hit/expertise capped, because it ensures more crits. Simple as that. Hit and Expertise aren't insanely good stats unless you have a lot of crit though, but I'm not sure where the breakpoint is.

Man, I got a headache from just typing that pile of garbage. I apologize for even writing it. To top it off it's probably going to be wrong as well, but at least it made sense when I wrote it. Anyway, if it’s wrong I'm sure some kind soul on EJ will make fun of me soon enough.

To top this wonderful section off I'm just going to put these words of advice out there: Do not use FeralByNight, BadKitty or whatever the hell all those random add-ons that play the game for you are called. Do. Not. Use. Them. This game is not hard to play and you'll never get better if you just give up before even trying to get better. Don't ever use FeralByNight or Rawr to simulate your DPS and then ask someone why your dps doesn’t match it. If you want to use a simulator, use http://code.google.com/p/simulationcraft/ and you can still use Rawr, but only to determine whether or not an item is an actual upgrade. Personally, I don’t use Rawr at all. Nopher loves it though, but Nopher sucks.



I use 1 add-on for DPS: ForteWarlock. Other than that I use Ora2 so the others in the raid can keep track of my CR timer as well. I've made a simplistic UI but those 2 add-ons are the only ones I use that affect gameplay



Anyway though, keeping the above in mind (where I blatantly admit I don't have all the answers for all questions about Feral DPS) you're well on your way to being a mean kitty from hell.



Becoming the fiercest and fattest bear

In order to become a successful bear tank you need to master the power of the roar. The power of the roar is very much like the power of the WAAAGH! if you know your Warhammer 40000 orkz. The power of the roar is basically your IRL roaring. You want to perfect it so it's a deep, thundering roar to strike horror in the hearts of your enemy. The method I found best for this is just practice. If you get a proper, deep, thundering, empowering roar going you can even use it in real life situations, like people cutting you off in traffic or people cutting in line; give them a sound roar and you'll see things change to your favor.

Getting straight into it, there are a myriad of specs you can use as a tank. I've only ever used 2 specs but I know there's a bunch of other viable specs available. The specs I've found to not totally suck are these:

Threat spec
Progress spec

I've never been hyped on getting Feral Aggression in my tanking specs because there'll always be another way of getting that improved demo shout on bosses
As with Feral DPS there are some stat limits that apply for tanking as well. The most important one is the hit cap, which is still 263 rating. The other one is expertise where you need 50 expertise to get capped. Those 263 rating are for your attacks, people seem to insist that Growl is a spell and so the hit cap for that is 17%. Well, 14% with Misery/Imp FF. So.. Yeah. Druid tanks are actually pretty good now! Last time I wrote this guide Feral tanks weren't so good and our DPS was totally overpowered. The calm has settled and now the mighty bear has emerged as a true champion of nature. Nobody can hold down the bear, for the bear is strong. When the going gets tough, the Bear gets mauling. That being said, I should be tanking instead of Kungen because he's weak and dies all the time. Plus Kungen tends to panic on vent, screaming all kinds of nonsense. We ferals have long studied the art of self-control and restraint, so we do not give in to panic and fear



This is a much debated topic. The general consensus is that you should socket 20 agility in red sockets, 30 stamina in blue sockets and 10 defense/15 stamina in yellow sockets. I don't do that. I'm a Feral badboy and a radical thinker. I gem 20 agility in red sockets, 10 agi/15 stamina in blue sockets and at the moment I use my Jewelcrafter gems in yellow sockets for the 34 agi gems. I'll probably keep doing that even when I lose the bonuses. Depending on how amazing the bonus is, I might use that stupid defense/stamina gem, but honestly I think that gem is a pile of steaming shit. Let's look at Fate's Clutch. Yellow socket and the bonus is 6 stamina, so you could get 18 sta and an amazing 8 defense or you could use a JC gem and just get 41 stamina. What would you rather have, 8 defense rating or 23 stamina? Yeah, unless you're a spastic you'd take the 23 stamina. Even the Solid Stormjewel is better. Then it's 30 sta vs. 18 sta and 8 defense rating. The most simple solution would be if Blizzard just realized that yellow sockets are like a bag of flaming poop, nothing good can come out of them.
Man I wish that was still so. It made a lot of sense, didn’t it? Socketing different things, thinking about what you're doing etc.. Not anymore though, just stick 30 stamina in all of your sockets now. With 20% less dodge in ICC trying to stack dodge is pointless anyway. GOOOOO STAMINA

I was going to make a separate topic for enchants but I don't really see the point, it's all pretty self-explanatory. Don't take random bullshit like AP on gloves, stick with Agility for gloves. Stamina on Bracers. The only thing that sucks is that the best Weapon Enchant for tanking is still Mongoose. I've been trying Blood Draining and it's bad. Like tenth Baywatch re-run bad.



I've made my own BiS gear list for tanking. You'll find some items on this list that you won’t see on other lists. Thats because I really dislike using gimped items, like Loop of the Agile. The people who came up with stuff like that ring over Fate's Clutch are people who want to SHOCK AND AWE you all with their immense knowledge of the game. My take on this is very simple: you ain't shit if you ain't pimped out. Take what makes the most sense, instead of grasping at straws that might give you a little more relative avoidance to compensate for lack of mitigation from armor. I can guarantee you that taking 1% less damage will not make or break an encounter. You might argue that “why shouldn't you optimize?” and you'd be right. Thing is, they calculate a lot of avoidance and mitigation and not really a lot of stamina and threat. The difference in damage taken between the “best” tanking set and my tanking set will be so minuscule that you and your healers won’t notice it at all. I even think you compensate for it with extra stamina. So my BiS gear list is NOT the best theorized list of gear, it's what I will be using when I get the gear, based on what I think will be the best overall. You choose who to believe, the eggheads or the awesome Druid writing this guide.

Head: Sanctified Lasherweave Headguard
Neck: Bile-Encrusted Medallion
Shoulders: Sanctified Lasherweave Shoulderpads
Back: Sentinel's Winter Cloak
Chest: Ikfirus's Sack of Wonder
Bracers: Toskk's Maximized Wristguards
Gloves: Sanctified Lasherweave Handgrips
Belt: Astrylian's Sutured Cinch
Legs: Sanctified Lasherweave Legguards
Feet: Footpads of Impending Death
Ring1: Devium's Eternally Cold Ring
Ring2: Abomination's Bloody Ring
Trinket1: Sindragosa's Flawless Fang
>Trinket2: Corroded Skeleton Key
Weapon: Bloodfall
Idol: Idol of the Crying Moon

I want the 4 part t10 for tanking because of the bonus. Enrage making you take 12% less damage is SWEET.



There are some different glyphs you can use. If you don't have the hit cap of 263 hit rating, you should use:

Growl
Maul
Survival Instincts

If you do have the hit cap, you should use these:

Frenzied Regeneration
Maul
Survival Instincts

Again, all the minor ones really suck ass except the Challenging Roar one. Use that one and Unburdened Rebirth. The last one you can take Dash or something stupid I guess.



Flask: Flask of Stoneblood
Food: If you really don't want to Glyph for Growl and you need less than 40 hit rating, you can just use Snapper Extreme to get the last Hit rating. I used to do that. Otherwise I'd say you should be using Blackened Dragonfin as food.
Keep a healthy supply of Runic Healing Potions as well. Indestructible Potions are very nice to have on hand as well, you should stock up on those



There are only 3 macros I use for tanking.

#showtooltip
/cast Mangle (Bear)(Rank 5)
/cast !Maul

#showtooltip
/cast Swipe (Bear)(Rank 8)
/cast !Maul

#showtooltip
/cast Lacerate()
/cast !Maul

These make life so much easier, instead of having to spam your maul button all the time.



This isn't really special to just tanking, this is more just a little part of this guide where I will write something I want to say. When you DPS as a cat, it's important to tunnelvision as little as possible. Avoid raiding with ventrilo muted. This might seem like some pretty obvious things, but they're things I still struggle with. It's just so easy to raid with music/series and just find something to beat up and never change target.

For tanking there are a few stories I'd like to share with you. The first one starts on PTR where I just left the raid and sat on the bench when we tried Mimiron hardmode. I couldn't tank anything and at that time I didn't have any DPS gear. It was great fun doing demo shout in phase 1 and nothing else. Druids still don't tank Mimiron phase 1. In my 10 man the DK I raid with even solotanks the entire phase. It's probably possible to let druids soak the stupid beam but it's just too much damage when we only have a crappy 20% damage reduction timer.

A thing I've come to rather enjoy is Thorim hardmode. Lots of druids use sta socketed PvP gear, or Polar gear or something else. I just tank it in normal tanking gear. Most guilds do something fancy like tank switches when Unbalancing Strike hits a tank. We don't. I pick him up and I tank until I die, then Kungen takes him and if he dies as well Zkygge is there to save our sorry asses. The thing is, once you get the timings right on the Strikes you can actually tank him all the way until he gives up. You can juggle around with some Guardian Spirits as well, and you'll be all good. I think it was this reset or the last one I tanked him until 5% and Kungen still managed to die before the boss reached 2%.

In ToC there haven't really been any interesting tanking failures since everything is so trivial. Well, obviously I should mention that it’s awful Druids don’t have Block. If only I could've tanked adds on Anub'Arak hardmode instead of relying on our Warriors.. We had to use an alt because our other warriors couldn't be bothered getting tank gear. That’s what you get when you leave a Druids job to Warriors.

Just be nice to your healers. There is nothing poetic about death.

The last thing I want to say is just believe in yourself. Beauty comes from the inside.

Looking good Tun.

This is an updated version of the Feral Guide. We are slowly converting the older guides over to the new format here and we are going to be adding some new/updated Guides at the same time.

Yeah its fixed now