Expertise, Hit, and YOU! Part Two: Bear Druids
Hmm. Odd that Cat Form druids get to be kitties, but there is no charming diminutive for Bear druids. I suppose I could be all Alamo about it (Bare Durids!). Anyway, for the kitties, check out part one.
Someone stumbled across this site with the following search term: “druid tank minimum hit expertise.” I’m certain I didn’t have what they were looking for and I hope they found it. As I was pondering that implied questions, it seemed to me that should be a very simple thing to answer, but as I think further about it, I find it is not a straightforward answer at all. For both tanking and dps druids they provide benefits, but how much benefit?
Before I get into a discussion about those specifically, if you aren’t familiar with the attack table and how one-roll and two-roll systems work, WoW-Wiki has a good page on that. For a more in-depth look, check out the ElitistJerks Theorycrafting Think Tank page on Melee Combat Mechanics.
To properly determine the benefits, let’s first define them. Items that provide Hit Rating increase your chance to hit your target by reducing the miss chance on the attack table. At level 70 it requires 15.77 Hit Rating to reduce miss chance by 1%. Against a level 73 target (which raid bosses are) a normal attack, unmodified, by someone wielding only one weapon has a 9% chance to miss. 9 * 15.77 = 141.93 or 142 Hit Rating to eliminate the chance of your attacks to miss. (WoW-Wiki: Hit)
Expertise reduces the chance of your target to dodge or parry your attacks. It takes 3.9 Expertise Rating to increase your Expertise by 1 point, and each point reduces dodge/parry by .25% (or 4 Expertise per one percent). According to the EJ post, boss mobs have been parsed to have a 6% chance to dodge and a 12% chance to parry. To remove dodge from the attack table would require 24 Expertise (94 Expertise Rating) and removing Parries would require 48 Expertise (188 Expertise Rating). (WoW-Wiki: Expertise)
That’s what Hit and Expertise do, and how much benefit they provide is different for DPS and for tanking.
Bear Form
For tanking druids, the application of Hit and Expertise generally fall into the category of Threat stats. Warriors and Druids generate threat by attacking. Druid threat is largely generated by scaling threat modifiers on damage done, and warrior threat is largely a static amount based on abilities. Different strokes and all that. Paladins have a weird thing going on with a lot of their threat being generated by reactive abilities.
For druids, attacks need to land for threat to be generated. Hit, obviously, is useful for that because it can counter some of the 9% miss chance. Expertise counters the 6% Dodge and 12% parry chance. The block chance cannot be reduced.
It’s a lot harder to quantify threat scaling due to these effects than it is for DPS. As a general statement average optimal TPS (threat per second) will increase by 1% per increase of 1% of Hit chance. It can only be said that that is reflective of optimal performance only. In situations where there are adds or rage issues or any of that, hit may be more or less important.
In terms of threat generation, Expertise is twice as beneficial as Hit because it increases your chance to hit by 2% by reducing both dodges and parries. If you want to stack one to improve threat, Expertise is the way to go until you reach the 6% mark. From the 6% point onward, you have pushed dodges off the attack table and are only reducing parries, so it is equal to Hit as a means of increasing TPS.
The real benefit of expertise is that it is also a mitigation stat. Due to parry mechanics, when a boss parries a blow, its next attack may be sped up:
Parry & Attack Speed Reduction
When you parry an attack, it reduces the time of your next main hand attack. This applies to both players and NPCs, so when an NPC parries an attack its next attack may occur more quickly than normal. Depending on how much time is left until your next attack, one of three things will happen to your main hand swing timer:
- If the next attack would normally occur within 20% of your weapon speed after the parry, there is no effect.
- If the next attack would normally occur between 20% and 60% of your weapon speed later, it happens 20% of your weapon speed later instead.
- If the next attack would normally occur more than 60% of your weapon speed later, the time until your next attack is reduced by 40% of your weapon speed.
For example, with a 2.0 speed weapon, if your next attack would normally occur .3 seconds after the parry, it will still happen at that time. If it would normally occur anywhere between .4 and 1.2 seconds after the parry, it instead happens .4 seconds later. And if it were to normally happen 1.5 seconds after the parry, this would be reduced by .8 seconds causing it to happen .7 seconds later.
The benefit of this is high. If you reached the soft cap on Expertise and reduced parries by 6%, that would reduce the number of incoming attacks and the amount of incoming damage. How much is an amount that is hard to quantify because it is highly situational.
Should you stack Expertise?
Personal preference: I wouldn’t be stacking it on my normal tanking set. I fall onto the Effective Health side of the fence rather than Avoidance right now. When I start building a more avoidance-centric set, I probably will stack Expertise in it. Why? Because the greater avoidance would mean I’d be taking less steady damage, meaning rage generation would be less stable. Being able to hit more reliably will offset some of that, the attacks would hit and the damage from them would help generate rage. Also, a heavy avoidance kit would be sacrificing survival stats and reducing damage by reducing parry gibs would be a good thing.
General Context: If you find survivability is not an issue and can either add Expertise or replace some items to add it, you can increase your threat generation. The more threat you as the tank can generate, the wider you are opening the window for raid DPS to shoot through.
Further Information:
Wanderlei - On Avoidance
Effective Health Theory
Finding the Expertise Hard Cap
Expertise, Hit, and YOU! Part One: Kitty Druids
Someone stumbled across this site with the following search term: “druid tank minimum hit expertise.” I’m certain I didn’t have what they were looking for and I hope they found it. As I was pondering that implied questions, it seemed to me that should be a very simple thing to answer, but as I think further about it, I find it is not a straightforward answer at all. For both tanking and dps druids they provide benefits, but how much benefit?
Before I get into a discussion about those specifically, if you aren’t familiar with the attack table and how one-roll and two-roll systems work, WoW-Wiki has a good page on that. For a more in-depth look, check out the ElitistJerks Theorycrafting Think Tank page on Melee Combat Mechanics.
To properly determine the benefits, let’s first define them. Items that provide Hit Rating increase your chance to hit your target by reducing the miss chance on the attack table. At level 70 it requires 15.77 Hit Rating to reduce miss chance by 1%. Against a level 73 target (which raid bosses are) a normal attack, unmodified, by someone wielding only one weapon has a 9% chance to miss. 9 * 15.77 = 141.93 or 142 Hit Rating to eliminate the chance of your attacks to miss. (WoW-Wiki: Hit)
Expertise reduces the chance of your target to dodge or parry your attacks. It takes 3.9 Expertise Rating to increase your Expertise by 1 point, and each point reduces dodge/parry by .25% (or 4 Expertise per one percent). According to the EJ post, boss mobs have been parsed to have a 6% chance to dodge and a 12% chance to parry. To remove dodge from the attack table would require 24 Expertise (94 Expertise Rating) and removing Parries would require 48 Expertise (188 Expertise Rating). (WoW-Wiki: Expertise)
That’s what Hit and Expertise do, and how much benefit they provide is different for DPS and for tanking.
Cat Form
For Cat form DPS I’ll assume you’d be Shredding and Ripping in a standard DPS rotation. Shred has to be done from behind the target and when attacked from behind a boss cannot parry or block (though nothing can reduce blocks anyway) so we only have to concern ourselves with Misses and Dodges. With no Hit and no Expertise you would miss 9% of the attacks, 6% would be dodged, 25% would be glancing blows (which also we cannot reduce), the remainder would be regular hits and crits.
Here is where the math starts to get fuzzy: Hit, Expertise, and Crit are all scaling effects. Depending on your stats they will all have different inherent values. As a general rule, removing one percent of misses (via Hit Rating) increases the Hit portion of the attack table by 1%, as does removing 1% of dodges (via Expertise Rating). Increasing your crit chance by 1% replaces 1% of your Hit.
Basically, Hit takes 1% that does no damage and lets it do normal damage. Expertise replaces 1% of no damage and makes it do normal damage. Crit replaces 1% of normal damage and makes it do double damage (before talents and meta gems, some of which increase the effect of critical hits and thus the value of Crit Rating). Without taking anything else into consideration, normal attacks on a normal attack table increase damage by 1% no matter which you choose.
Some special attacks, however, are resolved on different combat tables. For instance Rip cannot crit because it is a damage over time effect. Crit does not improve that ability at all, though Hit and Expertise do.
Attacks like Mangle and Shred seem to be on the two-roll system, so an attack has to hit before it can crit (normal attacks do not follow that rule). That increases the value of Hit and Expertise with the marginal increase in crit due to the special attack hitting in the first place.
Based on that, Hit and Expertise provide more benefit than Crit: they affect all attacks and on specials are increased by the marginal increase in crit chance the hit provides.
The talent Primal Fury, however, increases the benefit of Crit. Each time (if you have both points) a combo-point-generating-attack crits, you get not one combo point, but two. Given the time Energy takes to regen, it is not possible to have your four combo-point rip on a twelve-second cycle without having some of your special attacks crit. Even if you were to only Mangle, the 40 energy that costs would take four seconds to regen: the twelve seconds in between rips would only generate three combo points (assuming no misses, dodges, parries, blocks). A four CP Rip would be on a 16 second cycle using only Mangles. Using the higher DPS Shred you end up on an 18 second cycle! That is a 33% reduction in Rip damage (instead of total damage over 12 seconds it is over 18 seconds).
If we had a 33% crit rate, instead of four attacks to generate four combo points, we only need three attacks to do the same. Only using Mangle, generating four combo points would require 12 seconds, just in time to refresh Rip. Shred is improved to a 14 second cycle. At crit rates approaching 50%, mangle would generate those 4 CP in 8 seconds, far faster than Rip could be reapplied.
1% Crit, therefore, increases normal damage by 1%, special damage other than Rip by 1%, and rip damage (through faster CP generation) by up to 33%. 1% Hit or 1% expertise increases normal damage by 1%, special damage by 1% and a bit. In an effort to make this even more complicated, missed specials refund 80% of their cost and missed finishing moves do not. That weighs against the value of Hit/Expertise for specials because the energy cost of a miss is not 100% and Energy is a more scarce resource than global cooldowns (1 second in cat form).
None of that even takes relative values of AP into consideration!
Some people really like Hit and Expertise for keeping dps constant and not missing finishing moves, which is a valid argument. To the best of my knowledge, the dps benefits of any of them weighs out to very similar amounts in real world scenarios (hehe). Which you choose is going to have to be balanced against with the real items you would be equipping and the stat allocation. All of them are good to have.
My advice, is to not worry about Hit and Expertise. With the changes in 2.3 (I think it was 2.3) to Heart of the Wild made pure rogue leather much more attractive since it now operates off the derived stat of AP rather than strength. Most of the rogue gear is going to have some Hit or some Expertise on it, which is nice to have (rogues benefit so hugely from Hit that almost all of their gear should have it). I would never gem or enchant for it, however. And I would never chase pure crit. What comes on gear is nice, but I would focus on Agility. Point for point, the benefits of Agi providing both AP and Crit make it superior to every other stat for Cat DPS.
Additional resources:
ElitistJerks Feral Druid Megathread Check the first few posts for information.
Why is +hit good for DPS? A somewhat dated discussion, but the underlying math has not significantly changed.
Hunterology: Shot Rotation and Quartz
Hunter Shot Rotations, Quartz, and the Honorary PhD in Mathematics we should all get
Blizzard has some happy news for the hunter community: provided the changes go on as they have said, Steady Shot will no longer clip Auto Shot! Why is this a big deal? Right now, Hunter DPS, while generally very large, has an overwhelmingly complicated interrelation of speeds, cooldowns, and hidden mechanics only surpassed by Enhancement Shaman and Windfury! The upcoming change eliminates most of the complication, hunters rejoice! But until Wrath of the Lich King, or any preceding patch that contains these mechanics changes, Hunter DPS remains a complicated endeavor.
Quartz
Quartz is a casting bar addon that has a ton of features useful for many classes, but it is an almost mandatory addon for a hunter looking to maximize their MQoSRDPS. Here’s a basic rundown on how it works for you:
The first element that is important is the swing, or shot, timer. It just tracks from left to right across it’s length. When it hits the right end, your shot goes off. As a note, I have found there is about a half-second delay for the animation to process, but the time the shot is sent to the server seems consistently applied when the swing timer gets filled.
The next most important element is the cast bar. It show the spell or ability you are currently casting. It shows the total time the spell should take to cast and fills from left to right as the time goes by. If the cast time increases due to pushback, it pushes the cast bar to the left and makes a note within the text of how much longer the cast will take. The right end of the bar has a red section. This section represents the lag in communication time between the server and you. What is important about this section of the cast bar is that if you send the command to begin a spell, it won’t reach the server until after the current spell is finished.
What does that mean, you ask? Every time you click a button (okay, not every time, some commands are processed on the local client, but most) your computer sends a message to Blizzard’s servers saying “I want to do something now!” Blizzard’s servers decide whether you can or not, and then send a message back to your computer and you either do what you want to, or you get a voice telling you you can’t do that yet and see an error message pop up on your screen. If you send a command during the red “lag” time, the servers won’t think you’re busy when they get the message and will let you do it without you having to wait until you really are done.
Shot Rotations
The hunter specs have different needs as far as DPS styles go. Beastmaster hunters have a fairly easy time of dps, Survival and Marksman hunters have a lot more work to so. Not that any one is better than another, they all bring different tools to the table.
Beastmaster hunters are going to provide the most dps. Don’t yell at me, yell at Blizzard. Personal DPS is high, pet DPS is high, Ferocious Inspiration is a great buff to party members. The nice thing about FI is that it helps casters out too, not just physical dps.
Marksman hunters are going to have solid personal dps, but it’s going to come at a cost of pet DPS (minimal) and mana efficiency (terrible). Trueshot Aura is a nice party buff if you are in a physical damage party but it’s lack of scaling weakens its effects as your raid dps improves.
Survival Hunters bring arguably the best buff: Expose Weakness. It buffs physical damage for the entire raid, not just the party. Downside to this is issues with mana (though not as bad as marksman hunters), good, but generally not excellent, personal DPS, low pet DPS, and a general lack of excellent gear to provide the insane agility values they require.
These differences result in a considerably different playstyle for each spec, but they all come out of a single theory on shot rotation: Steady Shot should always take less time than an Auto Shot, and it does not reset the shot timer. Before I get any further, it is important to mention that Auto Shot has a hidden “cast time.” As your shot timer ticks across, the last .5 second is a “cast time” for auto shot. If you move or take an action during that half second, auto shot is either delayed or reset, depending on the action. The trick, then, is to get your Steady Shots to fill up the dead time before that half-second cast time on Auto Shot.
The 1:1 rotation
The 1:1 rotation is the mainstay of the Beastmaster shot rotation and the basis for the rest. What it means is one special shot to one auto shot. Every Auto Shot has it’s dead time filled with one steady shot. The reason this is so useful for Beastmaster hunters is the haste effects of the Serpent’s Swiftness talent and the proc effect of Improved Aspect of the Hawk. It pushes shot times short enough you can’t really fit any more in-between.
The 3:2 rotation
The 3:2 rotation is used by Beastmaster hunters when they aren’t under haste effects (if it fits within their shot times as enhanced by Serpent’s Swiftness) and is the basis for Marksman or Survival hunters. The idea is that you fit three special shots for every two auto shots. For this style, you use the red “lag” time of your first Steady Shot to cast in instant shot, like Arcane Shot, before the Auto Shot cast time. Arcane shot is the best one to weave, but the cooldown on it might push it out of the 3:2 rotation. In a raid setting, Scorpid Sting is good to alternate it with. If there are no crowd-controlled targets, Multi-shot can be used as well. Serpent Sting is better than nothing, but the DPS and DPM it provides make it a sub-optimal choice.
Why this involves math
Any time you are not dealing damage is wasted time, hence the steady shot-auto shot rotation: you fill the wasted auto shot time with more damage. Rotations involving more shots are filling dead time with more shots and thus more damage. The hard part is figuring out just how much dead time is available to fill. Hunters are always dealing with haste effects so this is never as straightforward as it seems. Happily, Steady Shot and Auto Shot both scale with haste, so as long as Auto Shot is a half-second longer than Steady (it would take a lot of haste to get to that point) you can follow the 1:1 rotation. Steady Shot also does not reset the Auto Shot timer even in the half-second cast time it only delays it. If haste effects are pushing them that close, the Auto Shot only gets delayed. DPS is not as high as theoretically it could be, but it is better than losing the shot entirely. So the 1:1 rotation-no problem.
The 3:2 rotation, on the other hand, makes things much more complicated. For Beastmaster hunters, this rotation should only be used when not under haste procs. Under haste, just go 1:1. I’d suggest the same for Marksman and Survival: when you hit rapid fire or are under Heroism/Bloodlust, just go for a 1:1 rotation. When using a 3:2 rotation, the time of two Auto Shots needs to equal the time of two steady shots, plus a 1.5 second global cooldown, plus half a second for the Auto Shot cast time, plus any time for you to accommodate lag. Accommodating lag is why Quartz is so important for hunters.
The cast times are influenced by any passive haste on gear as well as your ammo pouch. Depending on how much haste you have, what your weapon speed is, and what ammo pouch you use, those numbers will change. It is important to balance all of those issues out. For the most part, Beastmaster hunters are going to look for the fastest weapon they can find. Since Auto and Steady shot will both scale, they will want the hits coming fast and steady. Marksman and Survival are going to want weapons that scale with haste to the exact interval they require to accommodate their shot rotation. Err on the side of slower weapons. A slower weapon will have more dead time (allowing easier shot weaving) and individual hits do more damage. A slower weapon for a Survival or Marksman hunter will probably result in higher DPS, even if they are the same DPS values.
Visiting the Dr.
Before trying to get all of this going in a raid you will probably want to get some practice on timing your shots, maybe play around with different weapon speeds and ammo pouches. Best way to do that is grab a few stacks of cheap ammo and go visit Dr. Boom in Netherstorm. Stand on the barrels and he won’t be able to damage you while you can fire away at him until you run out of arrows (or bullets, for the gun-lovers). Just dismiss your pet before you do that-no one wants to get blown up by bomblings.
But no clipping!
The absolutely most important thing to consider when using a shot-rotation is to not “clip” Auto Shots. If you begin casting Steady Shot before Auto Shot completes, the Auto Shot is delayed for the length of the Steady Shot and Auto Shot’s half-second cast time. That means the Auto Shot is losing up to two seconds per cast which is a huge sink for your dps.
Development Plans
Keredria of Tree of Life has mixed the corporate world of the warcraft world to come up with her "development plan." While I am forced to agree that these usually are a waste of time, they can serve as useful tools and help in clarifying goals and providing focus in achieving them. Keredria tells us:
So here in a nutshell is what it looks like. It starts by asking:
* What are your short term goals/plans?
* Your long term goals/plans?
* What are your 3-4 areas of skills/knowledge that are your strengths?Then in the next part you have to come up with a couple of "development needs" (bleh… corporate mumbo jumbo). And for every need, you list out:
* Why is this a priority?
* What is your action plan to achieve this need?
* Do you need anything to achieve this need?
* What are possible obstacles and constraints?
* What are the projected results and how will you measure success?
What are my short term goals /plans? This is an interesting question all by itself. Mage from 69.3 -> 70 is one. Raid at least once per week is another. I need to spend more time figuring this one out is a third.
What are my long term goals/plans? Somewhat easier of a question to answer. I have 4 level 70 characters, with a fifth quite possibly this weekend. I would like to have nine. I have a Paladin and a Warlock at about 50, so they won’t take long, but the rogue from 35 and the Warrior from 16 will take more work. I would like to tank Brutallus. This is a crazy dream, but I would love to go toe-to-toe with him on Lushere (druid tank).
What are 3-4 areas of skill or knowledge that are my strengths? A chance for hubris! I am a fairly good player. I know the classes I play well, I know the theorycrafting behind them, I have no problem doing the research outside of game to support that.
Development Need #1: Lushere needs Tier 4
Why is this a priority? Even if I never tank Brutallus, I want to "be on the path" (1)(2). Overall, I have gear that I can go into Tier 5 content with, but it would not be enough to excel. The Tier 4 set bonuses for feral druids are really good, particularly the two piece bonus in context of cat-form dps. I know that as a druid tank I will be spending a disproportionately large amount of time not tanking and that means I need to be able to both tank and dps at those end-game levels.
What is your action plan to achieve this need? I have to continue running Karazhan until I can get the two pieces from there and attempt to organize or join runs to Gruul’s Lair and Magtheridon’s… Lair?
Do you need anything to achieve this need? Sadly, 9 to 24 other people in appropriate class balances that have goals of their own that can be worked on by pursuing those activities.
What are possible obstacles and constraints? There are two giant obstacles: The Stormseekers guild can barely and only sporadically field a Karazhan run, let alone move into 25-man content. Goals related to content progression may require changing guilds, which I am not happy about. The second obstacle is that even if The bosses are defeated, there is no guarantee that the items I desire will drop or that I will get them.
What are the projected results and how will you measure success? Honestly, the projected result is that I will fail. As of today, I lack the desire to guild hop which is probably the only way I can accomplish this. Success is measures in having the items or not: no equivocation possible.
Development Need #2: Four more 70s
Why is this a priority? I like variety in play, sometimes jumping from character to character every twenty minutes. I like the flexibility (when other goals are not in conflict) in being able to fill a wide variety of party roles/
What is your action plan to achieve this need? Continue leveling my additional characters.
Do you need anything to achieve this need? Time.
What are possible obstacles and constraints? Few things can interfere with this. The only issue is whether I devote sufficient time to this endeavor or not. The additional characters will not be well-geared or progressed, that is understood up front, but time is the only issue.
What are the projected results and how will you measure success? This one is constrained primarily by the release date for the Wrath of the Lich King expansion. I may not finish by that point (at which point the goal becomes ten level-80 characters) but it can continue past that. Success is measured by character levels. Again, objective.
**********
Hm. Not sure what else needs to be added. I’ll call this a work-in-progress, I think.
Kitties Pounce!
A brief introduction to Druid Cat Form DPS.
Note: this will probably be entirely invalidated by the release of Wrath of the Lich King. Deal.
TLDR version: Wear good rogue gear, get a Stranglestaff. Get behind things, mangle, shred three times, wait until you have 80 energy, rip, repeat.
While Cat Form druids have a lot of similarities with Rogues, there are some notable differences in play style. It is possible, using pounce, maim, and shifting to bear form to bash, for a small amount of stun-locking, but it is not going to last very long. Unlike rogues, who can have a variety of specs and playstyles that ultimately all stabstab, kitty dps is a pretty streamlined endeavor.
Solo DPS
When soloing, I find the best way to deal with single enemies is to pounce, shred twice, then mangle until it dies. Ferocious Bite can be handy if the mob is a runner or self-healer and you kill them with it. Maim is useful to stun the self-healers if you won’t kill them in one blow. If there are two or more enemies, I kill the first enemy the same way, then on the remaining enemies using mangle to four points then rip, cycling between them all.
Raid DPS
The biggest difference about dpsing in a raid environment is that you usually can be behind the target. Whatever the main target is, you have two main goals: keep rip up and keep mangle up. You keep Rip up because it is your best DPS finishing move. Aim for four combo points then hit it after the previous rip has just faded. You aim for four combo points because the additional benefit of the fifth combo point is not worth aiming for, and if you crit on your last combo point, you get that benefit for free. A five point rip is good, but not good enough to be your goal.
Mangle is important to keep up because it increases the damage from Rip and from Shred, and if any rogues are using bleed effects, they get a nice bonus too. A general rule is to start with mangle, then Shred for DPS until you have four combo points. At that point, let your energy regen until you can Rip then mangle right away. If you have a buffed crit of 30-35% it should only be three attacks before you have your four combo points, so a tight 12-second cycle should be possible.
On certain fights, such as Prince Malchezzar, where you expect to be running out of melee range, I often try to get my rip cycles to line up so that I rip right before I run out of melee range to keep the damage ticking nicely.
Gear and Stats
The core of kitty dps is based on the same stats as a Rogue: ap and crit. Agility is a very nice stat to stack because it generates both! A general goal is to get crit to 30-35% to keep the combo point cycles quick. AP always generates more damage. Hit rating is nice to have, but I wouldn’t recommend going out of your way to chase it. Getting hit capped is important, but a lot of rogue gear (which you’ll be wearing) has it, so most of your hit rating needs will be taken care of along the way. Expertise is of little value, as you should be attacking from behind. Haste will increase your white-damage dps at a rate of 1% haste to 1% white damage. Depending on your gear/rotation, your white damage is probably half your damage, so 1% haste is .5% dps. Correspondingly, crit is beneficial to everything but rip and pounce, which are probably no more than 20-25%, so 1% crit is .75% dps- a better value, and it will help build combo points faster.
Personally, I would suggest looking for gear with the following order for stats: Agility, Crit, AP, Hit, Haste, Expertise. Any bonuses to stamina or intellect or mp5 is basically worthless for DPS. You need a certain amount of stamina, but that is an arbitrary amount based on any damage you expect to take. Intellect and Mp5 are marginally useful is if you intend to powershift.
For a weapon, get a good Feral AP weapon. The large amounts of AP those proved even on green items outweigh almost any non-FAP weapon.
Powershifting
Kitty DPS uses energy, just like a rogue. Energy regens at 20 points every two seconds. If you have a large enough mana pool, it is possible to "speed up" the energy regen by using the Furor talent. If you have that talent at max ranks, you generate forty energy when you shift into Cat form. If you shift out of cat form and then immediately shift back in, you get forty energy. This can be done pretty simply using a macro:
/cancelform
/cast Cat Form(Shapeshift)
I wrote this from memory, so you may want to shift-click the cat form into the macro from your spellbook. There are other options for the powershifting macro, including some that check energy and/or mana levels, but this does what I need. Also, this lets me click from flight form into cat form while in the air and not getting a silly error message.
You will probably lose an auto attack by doing this, but if you do it at zero energy , or as close to zero as possible, you get a net benefit of 20 energy. This can be handy if you are in a situation where you are using Ferocious Bite, as it reduces you to zero energy.
As druid class lead, I think I should have some quickly available references for people new to the druid class or to each role. If any of you have thoughts on this or see something glaringly, horribly, wrong, or have questions, comments, etc, let me know!
The Triangle
There is always discussion, perhaps even controversy, about class abilities in World of Warcraft, especially in regards to the "hybrid" classes. The common argument goes something along the lines of "Class X can only do A, so class Y, who can do A, B, or C should be nowhere near as good at A as X." Substitute any relevant "pure" class for X and any hybrid for Y. Argument ad Mad Lib (I shall have to ask a friend of mine who is a PhD candidate in philosophy to write a paper on that).
At first glance, the argument is kind of true, isn’t it? If, say, a druid can tank or heal or dps, shouldn’t a warrior be a better tank? I wish I could argue against that, but, I can’t. If a druid could tank or heal or dps, they probably should not be as good at tanking as a warrior. However, that isn’t the case.
The concept of a hybrid class is a class that can fill multiple roles, though is not as effective in those roles as the base class. World of Warcraft does not have hybrids, it has "role-switchers." Though I don’t recall the source for that term, it is much more appropriate than hybrid. With the rather limited exception of Feral druids doing melee dps and tanking with enormously similar specs, the remainder of the "hybrid" classes have to spec almost completely into one tree to be effective in that role. A cookie-cutter enhancement shaman, well-geared, is going to put out mammoth melee dps and buff the raid nicely with Unleashed Rage. However, they can’t just start healing in the middle of combat and do well. At best, they can serve as a stopgap or pick up a tad bit of slack. The definition the spec gives, coupled with the definition and divide of gear limits the ability to cross the role line.
Some roles will have easier times: moonkin druids are going to be wearing spell damage and healing gear and have decent mana pools if they need to heal, as would elemental shaman. Shadow priests probably won’t because they would sell greater heal for a 10% better scaling Mind Flay (or maybe that’s just me) and focus on Shadow Damage to get better return on I-Level (but shadow priests are crazy anyway), again showing how deeply the gear divide separates roles. Could a shadow priest or a boomkin put on healing gear and bust out the hps? You bet (and I dare you to ask a shadow priest to do that). But they could not do it while in combat. They may not need a full respec to pass in that role, but they would need a complete gear switch.
Given this, this focus on one role at a time, shouldn’t a role-switcher be able to fill the role as well as a dedicated class? After all, for the length of that encounter, they are dedicated to that role with very limited ability to step outside of it. Well, yes and no. Clearly, classes that can fill multiple roles need some check to give room for the focused classes to exist. No need for rogues if feral druids can kitty dps just as well, after all.
I think this focus solely on numbers loses sight of the real method of comparing. People generally compare on the triangle: tank - dps - heal. The total area of each classes triangle should be roughly equal. A Rogue should be much further extended toward DPS than, say, a paladin: rogues only DPS, paladins do all of them. But how should that rogue compare to a dps-spec paladin who has little stamina gear, virtually no +healing, and has a two-hander of doom? Why should the rogue get to be that far ahead of the paladin in that case.? Said paladin has traded abilities of breadth for depth.
I suggest we add a fourth axis to the triangle: we must consider the amount of options the class/spec has as the height of a solid figure and compare the total volume to come to a better method of weighing classes. DPS Paladins have very few options in doing DPS, rogues have lots of options with haste effects, bleed effects, etc. What the Paladin has options in is in survivability with greater armor and Divine Shield, the rogue has better dodge and Vanish. Overall (and this is hasty and unquantified) the volume of the ability polyhedral is roughly similar between the two. Warriors are the tanks with the most options, though not the best in every given area. Skillsets may differ favoring some classes for some encounters, but the "pure" class is going to have more options to fill their role than any role-switcher would.
Those options may or may not be useful all the time. Vanish is still a nice trick to have up the rogue-sleeve. Last Stand is one of those really nice abilities of the warrior that gives them more options than Paladin or Druid tanks. Ice Block > the destruction of the universe (old and inside joke). Priests have more options for healing: group heal, HoT, large single-target heal, binding heal, prayer of frisbee… a resto shaman has fast small heal, slow big heal, chain heal. When you need chain heal, the Shaman may well serve you better than the priest, but the priest will have more flexibility as a healer over all.
Edit: It seemed a bit of clarification might be in order.
Looking at the "triangle"of roles, you basically have this-
If you consider the warrior class, which has lots of tanking ability and some dps ability, you have a triangle filled in something like this-
And rogue and priest would be more or less these (respectively):
The people who feel hybrid classes are overpowered, would suggest druids, for example, look a bit like this:
But, more realistically, before gear and spec are taken into account, it’s more this:
My argument is to suggest that, yes, druids can have that full triangle, but only when considering the total abilities of the class without regard to the limitations of spec and gear. If you could be 61/61/61 and wear gear that had all stats and +defense and +crit and +heal and +spell damage, sure, that would make the druid a hybrid. But for any given encounter, the druid’s triangle is limited to something similar to that of the pure class whose role they are filling. A lot of people seem to feel that allowing a role-switching class (because they can only fill one role at a time) to be nearly as good as a pure class unfairly limits the pure class because they can’t do anything else.
And I can’t inherently argue against that. That’s why I think the triangle is too limited a way to consider class balance. Kitty or Boomkin druids may well be able to dps at the same level as a rogue, but they have far fewer options to do it with. Cat druids get two viable finishing moves, and Ferocious Bite is not that good if Rip has the time to tick and the target is bleedable. Moonkin cast arcane of nature damage spells, severely limiting their ability to do damage if those schools are off the table. Rogues can vary their abilities to the situation, focusing on haste effects (slice and dice) or bleed damage (which skill escapes me) and has options for getting out of combat that a druid lacks (vanish).
My point is not whether classes are balanced, but to give a better method for doing those comparisons. When all of the factors are weighed, rogues look much more like this:
Their options for dpsing give them more abilities in that area than a dps druid would have. Their options in each area are fewer, but it balances out due to their options in other arenas: tanking and healing. Their abilities come up in their ability to switch roles, however sub-optimally. Correspondingly, a dps druid’s would look more like this:
I’m not suggesting these graphs are accurate, merely conceptual. I’m not trying, here, to determine the relative abilities of classes or specs, but lay a groundwork for how that can be done. It came out of hearing too many people saying "Oh, my spec sucks because I can’t do" something that some other class can, without being cognizant of their abilities that serve as balancing factors. No, not every class/spec/role will be filled equally, and individual encounters and gear levels will affect things greatly. I just though, that instead of living in my head, this concept should be shared and discussed.
