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!
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Great post! I’ve been wanting to find something succinct on the kitty side of druiding and this hit the spot.I hadn’t realised that agility > strength for AP for cats.
Jezrael’s last blog post..GRAWR!