Druid Feral - Cat Class Discussion. Builds/Gear/Rotation.

[Jiujitsu]

Hello guys and girls.

I'm new to the server, I just rerolled here as a druid over on K2. I'm also pretty new to the druid class in general and I'm really enjoying their playstyle... I was wondering if anyone can link some PVP/Hybrid/DPS specs? Also a general discussion about gear and rotations/tactics in PVP and PVE would be cool. I'm sure there's some hardened druids around here that can help me out? Cheers :biggrin:

 

[Velesprus]

Yeah sure sorry for the late answer, this is the DPS rotation for druid in vanilla:
- Esc
- Logout
- Delete Character
- Create a new character
- Select Rogue

But seriously tho, the dps rotation ( cat ) is just keeping bleeds up and shredding from behind. If you're in a raid skip the bleeds and go for shred + 5 combo point fero bite.
You can try the ' cat->human->cat ' spec that gives 40 energy but idk.. I think staying in cat is better lol

 

[gotmilk0112]

In PvE, you're going to be healing. Period. Nobody is going to bring a feral druid to a raid, simply because they don't bring any buffs other than mark of the wild, and their DPS is crap compared to rogues/warriors.

In PvP you can do fine as feral however. Druid is one of the most versatile PvP specs, and one of the most complicated to play in PvP, due to all the forms and the vast library of spells you have at your disposal.

 

[OnslaughtFei]

http://kronos-logs.com/boss_info/boss/Onyxia

tf is feral

 

[gotmilk0112]

He's doing nearly 3x the dps of the next highest record.

that doesn't seem suspicious at all. :shifty:

Also a very short fight length (57 seconds? jesus fuck), so DPS values are going to be inflated for everyone.

 

[Whitewolf28]

I think the biggest factor that should be looked at is that Tf had 10% less ilevel versus the rest of the big hitters.

Yeah sure sorry for the late answer, this is the DPS rotation for druid in vanilla:
- Esc
- Logout
- Delete Character
- Create a new character
- Select Rogue

But seriously tho, the dps rotation ( cat ) is just keeping bleeds up and shredding from behind. If you're in a raid skip the bleeds and go for shred + 5 combo point fero bite.
You can try the ' cat->human->cat ' spec that gives 40 energy but idk.. I think staying in cat is better lol

What else are you going to spend the talents on? FB drains your energy to 0. Using a shapeshift macro will let you use a global to instantly regen 40 energy and in .5 seconds you will be getting another. If energy ticks are constant then when you time it right you will have 60 energy. I don't remember how energy regen should work when shapeshifting.

In PvE, you're going to be healing. Period. Nobody is going to bring a feral druid to a raid, simply because they don't bring any buffs other than mark of the wild, and their DPS is crap compared to rogues/warriors.

In PvP you can do fine as feral however. Druid is one of the most versatile PvP specs, and one of the most complicated to play in PvP, due to all the forms and the vast library of spells you have at your disposal.

They bring 3% crit to party members. Looking at the dps numbers of the others from the same guild I wouldn't be surprised if that equated to a +100 dps for the group. Unique buffs you provide can be added to personal dps as they are unique and not everyone has it.

 

[Velesprus]

People like repeating bullshit crap from 2006. Rofl.
Don't listen to anyone, if you like cat dps then raid with it. It's gonna be tough because bullshit gets spread out easily but it is worth, nothing is better than playing the class you like.

 

[gotmilk0112]

People like repeating bullshit crap from 2006. Rofl.

So you think you know more than the 12 years of shared knowledge about the game? :lol:

Feral does less DPS than rogue or warrior. That's a fact. Sure, you CAN bring ferals to your raid, but that'd be purposefully gimping yourself. You can get away with it in MC/ZG perhaps because those are super easy raids, but anything above that and people will just /lol at you for saying you're feral dps.

 

[Velesprus]

So you think you know more than the 12 years of shared knowledge about the game? :lol:

Feral does less DPS than rogue or warrior. That's a fact. Sure, you CAN bring ferals to your raid, but that'd be purposefully gimping yourself. You can get away with it in MC/ZG perhaps because those are super easy raids, but anything above that and people will just /lol at you for saying you're feral dps.

They also bring group buffs (LoP), innervate, offheals, abolish poison, in-combat res, mark of the wild/thorns and offtanks.
Again, stop repeating 2006 bullshit. Just because a class doesn't do 3 trillion damage that doesn't make it bad, every class has its unique flavour. Play what you think fits your playstyle and you enjoy no matter what *****s say.

 

[gotmilk0112]

group buffs (LoP)

This is pretty much the only thing Feral brings that is actually useful to most raiding situations.

innervate, offheals, abolish poison, in-combat res, mark of the wild/thorns

These are all things that a healing druid can bring, without having to waste time/mana shapeshifting in and out of cat form.

and offtanks.

Strictly for adds and nothing else, yeah, since if they tried to tank a raid boss they'd get 2shot by crits / crushing blows.

There aren't many fights that need "off tanks" like that though, so you're not particularly much help there.

Just because a class doesn't do 3 trillion damage that doesn't make it bad

I never said feral was bad, just that it's not as good as other DPS, and you'd be helping the raid a lot more by healing.

They're in the same boat as Shadow priest, Balance druid, Nightfall ret paladin, etc...you're not there to DPS, you're there to buff the real DPS.

Furthermore, all of the gear is going to go to rogues first, since you're just there for buffs and not dps, so your DPS is only going to suffer even more (in comparison to theirs) unless you're being carried by a guild that's farming everything and already has fully geared rogues that pass all the agi leather to you. And speaking of gear, all of the Druid tier/set gear has int/healing/mp5/spell damage on it, so it's useless for feral.

So unless you enjoy sitting in the raid just to buff other DPS while occasionally throwing out an innervate to the healers, and never getting any gear because it's all going to other people who actually use it, Feral in raids should be avoided.

 

[krutopatkin]

So you think you know more than the 12 years of shared knowledge about the game? [emoji38]

Feral does less DPS than rogue or warrior. That's a fact. Sure, you CAN bring ferals to your raid, but that'd be purposefully gimping yourself. You can get away with it in MC/ZG perhaps because those are super easy raids, but anything above that and people will just /lol at you for saying you're feral dps.

We have a feral(and 1-2 eles) and raid bwl. Why tryhard in a 12 year old game, especially if the people playing offspeccs actually put in effort?

 

[Whitewolf28]

We have a feral(and 1-2 eles) and raid bwl. Why tryhard in a 12 year old game, especially if the people playing offspeccs actually put in effort?

Because it's about sacrificing fun to make sure a few people get to have more fun. If any one wanted to they could have a raid of where all the dps were paladins and still be able to down most if not all the content.

 

[SeeQ]

Also you can pull 600+dps with some naxx gear, sure rogue war lock mage can put 1k but youll be competing with stuff like hunters while being more usefull and ahead of pal/sham/priest dps.

And since people have so many years of experience with vanilla, I dont believe a guild cant afford like 5 random specs outside of the "norm" and still clear everything

 

[turbofresh]

I can consistently pull 600+ dps in current gear (while still missing many pieces from bwl) using strats that, as far as i know, weren't used 12 years ago. I don't ever see myself beating other melee, but i can match caster dps on nearly all fights (Chromag being the biggest exception) while offering 3 crit to 2 or 3 other melee. I never even played feral before so it's gonna be cool to see how far i can take it with AQ gear. That armor pen. trinket will be nuts if i ever manage to get one.

 

[Vanillacoke]

more usefull and ahead of pal/sham/priest dps.

Feral druid will never be more usefull than an spriest. 15% shadow damage for all the warlocks is MUCH more dps than 3% crit for 2-3 melee's.

You can't argue druid buffs are important, because you will always have a resto druid in group.
Innervate, sure, but the druid could just be resto instead.
CR, same as above, it would be better to just have a resto druid instead.

And anyways, most of the time you'll only bring 2 or 3 druids to an endgame raid, an additional rogue instead of a feral druid will most likely bring more dps than Leader of the pack does. You'll lose the CR and Innervate but with proper consumables mana is not very often an issue and the CR, well.. you shouldn't be dying anyways...

Bring a feral to raids for sure, not everyone wants to min-max the game, but it will always be sub par. In the ultimate setup you will never find a feral druid.

This is coming from someone who used to play druid, I'm not trying to sound salty, it's just the truth

 

[Whitewolf28]

We all know that there is really no reason to bring more than one mage either. The best group setup will have just one spriest and the rest warriors, rogues, and warlocks. We know this. Hybrids are like insurance.

 

[suhail1200]

Well as a druid I outdpsed few warriors and rogues on Nost in Mc,Onyx and bwl and then Nost closed down.So yea feral is viable in raids,fack what eveybody else says just play what u want to.If u have gear for feral then u should be able to go to a raid as feral.I was in 8-10 different guilds and always played feral in raids,so that cancels out not beong choosen in raids.

Same thing goes for ret pala,melee shaman etc...

I have seen cases were moonkins our dpsing mages which was crazy.

 

[Cpstabber]

Thread recap. We all accept the fact that on a normal non zerged boss fight, a Feral will do about 60-65% of a fury/rogue.

So let's move on to the utility:

1: Off tanking.

Somebody mentioned, only for trash, not for bosses, fury warrior could just do it.

ONLY for trash? Some bosses require additional tanks to simply taunt for a moment to avoid a buffet, or reset a debuff. A high EPH tank regardless of being able to push crushing blows/crits will be able to survive these few seconds. Trash makes up a big part of each raid night and 4 tanks can be used on quite often. If you bring 2 or 3 prot warriors, the occasional time you need a 4th tank would be better to use your 60% dpser as a tank and allow your Fury warrior to do max damage. During the fight, once the 4th tank isn't needed, they can then DPS. Their DPS loss % would be much less than the % lost by a Fury warrior having to be in tank gear the full fight enough though his add is killed first. TL;DR, using bear as 4th tank increases raid DPS.


2: Spot/Raid healing.


Some fights limit what a melee DPS can do, due to mechanics. Just as a fury warrior is expected to bring tank gear to raids, I'd expect a feral druid to bring a heal set / MP5 set to raid. If a fight requires mass decursing, I'd expect my feral druid to use their max MP5 healing set and only SPAM decursing/abolish poison. This allows a great DPS mage and or great healing druid to focus on dps/healing while dedicating your weak DPS to cover this raid saving task. TL;DR - Feral being assigned to decurse/clean increases raid damage and healing.

The 2 examples above show how a feral druid versitility can actually increase raid damage / healing even without taking into consideration the combat rez, innervate, or 3 crit buff for party.

 

[Whitewolf28]

Well I guess people don't see the need for versatility. On top of that, looking at the logs posted earlier Tf is only doing 81% of the top warrior who is leading by a large margin over other warriors and rogues. If you add the dps together and multiply by 3% over the 4 top dps in his guild excluding said top warrior you get around 109 dps. subtract what, about 17% for crits already being done and you get 91 dps. So 892 dps and 6 Ilevels below anyone above and 5 for anyone nearby below.

 

[Brochette]

Hi, we had a feral druid who could pull 550dps with low bad gear ( http://armory.twinstar.cz/character-sheet.xml?r=Kronos&cn=Awkeeh ) on ebonroc/flamegor which is a better way to compare than onyxia, unfortunatly he stayd one month.
He topped the feral charts at 1st try.

He was only using wolfhead helm in a good rotation. His theory was he could achieve 1k dps with decent bwl gear just by farming the Mace in gnomeragan while world buffed.

 

[Whitewolf28]

Looking at Tf's activity feed, it looks like he farms the mace too.

 

[capital]

Feral is pretty awful for raids. There's a video of a feral druid going full tryhard powershifting vs patchwork in Naxx and he's 22 out of 25 DPS. You're better off playing any other class in a raid.

For every other aspect of the game feral is pretty fun.

tbh some guilds might even let you raid or even get DPS raid gear! Your best bet is to find a guild with leadership that isn't really aware of how shitty feral DPS actually is, or a guild that is cool and doesn't really care about that stuff. That way you can actually get a raidspot and get gear.

 

[Brochette]

Yeah, i heard hunter dps was bad aswell in retail. Weird, because here on this server 4 hunters deal more damage than 95% of the warlock and mage.

I still think with enought knowledge you could perform well (around 900dps on single target) and bring 3% crit to 4 players.

 

[Topmong]

If you compare the damage a blue geared hunter with a blue xbow does on here to the damage a bis t3/r14 hunter does in his vanilla pvp movies you can probably draw some connections as to why some hunters do so much dps on Kronos.

 

[Whitewolf28]

Hunter dps was never bad. The only weakness was the reliance on pets for damage, which can be inhibitive on AoE fights and a little tough to control when there is fire on the floor so to speak. Warlocks don't have this problem thanks to a certain talent in the demonology tree.

Mages aren't top dps but are great when you have a few nightfalls floating around. Warlock's get ahead thanks to the talent alluded to above, shadow priest shadow weaving, and the improved shadow bolt talent. They all stack multiplicatively.

That Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0BGh3GuGhs

Is on Feenix. I don't know how that server is set up, but it's not Kronos. The druid Also doesn't even use Manual Crowd Pummeler which could easily boost his dps by a large margin and we don't even get to see the druid's gear with nearly 8.5k mana. Don't forget that 3 of the top melee were in the druid's group which leader of the pack affects which boosts contributed dps.