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!
It’s not fair!
I have killed Curator many, many times on my Druid and have never seen the T4 druid token drop.
I have killed Curator once on my shadow priest, and the token drops. I was the only one in that raid that could use them.
WTB Malorne gloves tonight, kthxbai.
Somehow I ended up in charge
I have been promoted to Druid Class Lead for my guild, and at least half-time raid leader. It’s strange to be responsible for so many decisions: who goes to the raid, what bosses do we skip because we have a group that cannot do it, who gets what if we have drops.
Aside from those little concerns of the raid, what should I be doing now that I have power and authority? While it would be satisfying to gkick a few people, I don’t think I have the ability to do that, and our ethos as a guild doesn’t support that sort of behavior. We’re casual.
I am definitely going to be trying to forge our diverse troops into a raiding force. Unfortunately, we don’t have people consistently showing up for our Karazhan raids. Too many of our dpsers respecced to tanks (which we didn’t need) or don’t do enough dps. Some of that problem is with gear: if they showed up for Kara that would be ameliorated. Some of it is with Skill, and that’s a harder issue.
The role of the Class Lead, as I understand it, is to be the expert and guide in preparing guild members for raiding. This is critical moving into 25 man content, or ZA. I don’t care how good your gear is, if you are an enhancement shaman stacking stamina gear and casting lightning bolts while using 1.8 speed weapons, you’re dps will be too low to be useful. If you’re a retadin and spend the whole night on vent waxing rhapsodic about how great ret dps is, please be above the tank. As things stand, ret dps still needs to dps, or go home.
Skill can trump gear, to a certain extent. A player who knows how to use their class to the fullest can overcome deficiencies in their gear. I’ve seen blue-geared shaman out-dpsing epic mages. I’ve seen green/blue paladins out-heal epic paladins. We don’t need to train theses people, just help them get the tools, the gear, they need to excel.
The ones who, no matter how many epics we hand over, cannot keep up, they need to learn, quickly, or we need to look at our priorities in raiding. We cannot progress without people performing their best. The people who can do that need to be at the core (hopefully they are the entirety). How to handle the rest is where the raid ethos and the casual guild ethos aren’t meshing right now. If we get into Gruul’s, and our DPS needs to do an average of 500+ dps, someone only doing 300 is a hindrance if there is someone else for that slot.
But how to get this agenda supported by the remainder of the leadership? What’s the hook? We have five or so people gearing up all their alts as the core of our two Karazhan raids. Most weeks we can’t get ten people from our guild into a raid, let alone run two entirely separate raids so we have, not just the character base, but the player base to move forward.
Matticus had this tweet:
95% of guild problems can be solved with a gkick. The remaining 5% can be solved with recruiting.
I think this problem is more the other ratio, but we do need to clean up our raiding ranks and make a more clear direction for people to earn spots in a raid. And we need enough people online to fill the spots with people who can do the job.
Armored Bears!
I’m watching The Golden Compass right now, and I have two comments:
1. My bear should get armor, it’s just that cool.
2. We should get bear mounts on Northrend. It would be sooooo neat to ride a polar bear across a glaciar.
Links with commentary
Real content to come (sometime, perhaps later today) for now, links.
Guild Updates and Wrath News - Faithful Affliction
Of course the expansion will bring a reset for everyone and possible main character changes (possibly myself included). That plus the fact that we will be well into 25 man content by then may lead to us sticking to the 25 man versions. Of course with the announcement that the 10 mans will be on separate timers we will probably do both.
Preceding that we find out Thuenderman expects fairly quick progression into 25 man content. This is not hubris, he has the info to back it up, good luck. After that quoted section, he outlines some thoughts on raid progression in Wrath with its 10/25 split. They’re good ideas and something many guilds will need to think about.
Balancing the Spectrum - Chick GM
Every guild has an identity and goals. It’s what draws people to your guild over another. But, even within a guild there’s a spectrum. No matter how "hardcore" your guild is there is someone who is the most hardcore and someone who is the least hardcore. No matter how talented your guild is, someone out there is the most talented and someone is the least talented.
My job is to bridge the gap. How do I keep my hardest core and least skilled player working together? How do I drive policy and raid nights to cater to the majority while still keeping both my most skilled and least skilled players involved?
It’s very easy on teh intarwebs to forget there are real people at the other end of a blog site or ont he other side of an avatar. When you’re responsible for organizing them into an effective team, there are distinct issues due to the medium of communication at our disposal. Auzara shares some tips on herding cats
The Process - Two and a Half Orcs
Twitter scares me.
I don’t have twitter.
Twitter shouldn’t scare me.
Dammerung: Twitter is your friend, it is nothing to be scared of. Just make sure you can see it’s hands at all times. >.> <.< It’s only paranoia if you’re wrong.
/gasp /breathe - 4 Haelz
After the run, I thanked them all for the raid invite, and left the raid. Not more than fifteen seconds later, a box popped up over my head. I had been invited into Sunder.
Grats Bell, I hope it works out for you!
We Are Iron Man - BigRedKitty
In other news.
The next BRK Event is in pre-planning! You want a hint?
Well, you can’t have one.
BRK is such a tease. Just be sure you (and maybe four of your friends) are ready for this mysterious event July 5th, 7 pm.
Times they are a-changin’ - Tank Hard!
The first thing you should do when trying to gear a tank is get enough stamina AND avoidance. If you don’t have a baseline level of each, you are going to run into trouble….
So all the Sunwell tanks are realizing that 22k fully buffed is enough and are now gemming for avoidance. There are still a few die hards out there that are clinging to all stam all the time, but most have made the shift.
Personally, I couldn’t be happier. I finally get to use my socket bonuses and I get to think before numbly sticking 15 stamina in every socket. So, shortly after I hopped on the Effective Health Bandwagon, I get to hop right off again. Now my biggest challenge is to loosen the guild bank’s vice-like grip on the crimson spinel supply.
What’s key is the "enough stamina AND avoidance" before jumping onto the effective health bandwagon. Not getting hit is a very goof thing, but if you do get hit, you’d better be able to survive it. Now give my bear a shield, rawr!
What Do You Need From A Guild? - Lady Jess
I often see posts in various communities about guild moves, server changes, and the like to suit that particular players needs. To be honest the thought of starting over terrifies me, but I suppose if my needs weren’t being met I’d have no choice. This got me to thinking “Jess, what do YOU need from a guild”. I tried to ignore myself, however the voice of Lady Jess can be very convincing. Again she says “You KNOW it would make a good topic for my blog!”. Ok, Ok, I get it.
It is a two-way street. The Guild gets players working together for common goals, the individuals get… loots, funs, etcs. Aswaith Auzara’s post above, sometimes The Guild’s goals won’t match yours or the loots and the funs aren’t. Lady Jess shares some of the things she feels are important in a guild. They sure sound good to me, but probably not hardcore enough for some.
Fel Forge Romance - Unbearbly HoT
I still get a little googly eyed around Fel Forges. Maybe it’s just all the smoke.
Aww…
Wow, well, not WoW, just wow
This is what happens when you get linked to by BigRedKitty:
Thanks, BRK!
And, for the person who searched for "define mqosrdps"- go here, it’s at the end of the post.
For the Herd!
This evening was BigRedKitty’s “Running of Da Bulls,” recast as a tribute to his friend and guildmate, Sharvan. This is what I saw during my 5-10 FPS…
Thank you, BRK, thank you.
The Huntress Raleena
I’m sure everyone remembers their first, magical steps into Azeroth. Fresh with the glow of rolling your first character and now-well, now what? I suppose that yellow exclamation mark might mean something… So, a few minutes later, you’re killing boars or something and you’re forever hooked, right? Right!?
Not everyone. The first MMORPG I played was Guild Wars. I love the look (and that there is no subscription fee) but the lack of depth to the game ended up killing it for me. Enter World of Warcraft. I had been playing the Warcraft games since the first one. I was familiar with the world and the high quality of Blizzard games, but I wasn’t too keen on a subscription based game. Because S. wanted to, I picked up a trial disc and installed it.
From the very beginning I was drawn to the night elves, even in Warcraft III, so, naturally, I rolled a Night Elf and chose druid. Entered the world of Shadowglen and WTF!?! Since when did Disney buy out Blizzard? I was… less than thrilled. After about ten minutes, I stop, turn to S. and say, “Go ahead and play if you want. This isn’t my kind of game at all.”
So, I don’t know, I go read a book or play something on my Xbox and later look over to see what she’s doing. Northshire Abbey is not quite so Disney as Shadowglen. And she’s not killing boars, but bandits! Perhaps I was a bit too quick to judge after all. I didn’t want to play that druid again, oh that was terrible!, but something else. Hmmm… if the rest of the world isn’t soo terribly cartoony, I can probably get through the first few levels as a Night Elf… what’s this hunter class all about? Okay, pets… dual wielding… let’s give it a shot! (Unintentional and unfunny pun, ignore it)
Another opening cinematic and Raleena is standing in the middle of Shadowglen and sent to kill boars and cats. I was mildly annoyed to find out I didn’t get a pet until level 10 (not that that takes long). While I tried a few of the beast mastery talents out, I was always interested in the Survival tree. Leveling with a mage, neither of us knowing much about the game, or agro, or kiting, or trapping, or sheeping, etc., having the melee survivability was quite nice. And Wyvern Sting was just a heck of a lot of fun.
I did the raid thing for a while (“/yell Tranquilizing Shot HIT! Next shot…”), but got a little bored with it. Did some alt leveling, switched to a shadow priest, did some more alt leveling, BC hit, switched to a shaman, did some more… you get the idea. Raleena has dinged 70, and I’ve been slowly working on clearing quests. I’ve got a white theme going (white hair, swift frostsaber, snowy griffon) that means I’m leveling a level 60 frostsaber stalker now. She is called Yuki, which is Japanese for Snow according to Wikimedia. I think I might get one of the winterfall owls because they’re white, too.
Gear is a constant issue. I’m specced Survival even though I don’t have the gear to make it really, really awesome in groups (only 530 agility). My personal DPS is not at all shabby (about 450 +pet), but it isn’t ready for much more than easy heroics or Karazhan. I’m not sure 
how much I’m going to be able to improve that. I’d finish out leatherworking and make the BoP set, but it is not survival gear (and is not pretty). Given the difficulties in winning AV I’ve found post-2.4, I won’t be getting much PVP gear on any of my characters. I’m certainly open to suggestions-good gear that looks good, no clown suits!
More so than any of my other characters, I’ve made gear choices for Raleena with a strong aesthetic influence, even sacrificing DPS for it (though not in raids). My favorite gear, pre-bc, 
was the Black Dragonscale set which I couple with the Ancient bone bow-wicked looking, wicked. I haven’t found much since that is awesome. I quite like the look of Lohn’Goran, but it isn’t a great bow past level 70 instances. If I’m remembering correctly, the red Dragonstalker set is shaman mail (at the very least, the shoulders are) which is sad, because that would be pretty awesome as well. Dragonstalker’s in black would be OMG TEH AWESOME but doesn’t exist. /pout
Despite the annoyance of having to level pets, playing a hunter is a whole lot of fun. Chain trapping, wyvern stinging, feigning death, scattershot (oh! how I love scattershot). I don’t recall which blogger said it, but someone said Survival spec hunters were about removing the ability of your enemies to follow their plans in battle. It’s a good spec if you enjoy the feeling of Schadenfreude. I like it because it is intricate: there are many, many tools to use, and weighing them out in the immediacy of combat is enjoyable. I also find a long run of a shot-rotation to be almost meditative, it is so easy to get into the zone where the twang of the bow becomes an instinctive trigger to a click or a button press and without paying any attention, things are dead. If I ever get to the point Lushere is done in Karazhan, I think Raleena might be choice number two. I’m very reluctant to do much grouping with my shadowpriest, which I suppose I can talk about when I introduce Serasong later on. Karazhan is a good raid for someone who brings MQoSRDPS (hat tip to BRK on that), and I can’t imagine I’d have a problem doing that (at the Kara level, at any rate).
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.
Fill in the
While I was writing the previous post, Matticus posted a… question:
Now that my plug has finished, here’s a “finish the sentence” question I want to post to everyone.
Raiding is like…
To me, raiding is like dating. When it’s new and exciting you’re on cloud nine, and when it’s rough you have to decide (and it’s an anxiety filled decision) whether you need to break up and move on, or if there are problems that can be solved and the future will be even better.
