Shifting Perspectives: The state of feral raid DPS in patch 4.2
by Chase Hasbrouck 
Sep 4th 2011 at 8:00PM
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat , bear , restoration and balance druids. Welcome to our feral cat edition, brought to you by Chase Hasbrouck, aka Alaron of The Fluid Druid blog. Let the face clawing begin!
Now that we've got several weeks of 4.2 data under our belt, I'd like to take a look at DPS across the classes to see how feral shakes out comparatively. Obviously, this is a topic that is always heavily controversial, so I'm doing my best to document my opinions using hard data rather than anecdotal observations.
My primary tool for this is going to be the charts from Seri's wonderful site, raidbots.com, which aggregates public data from World of Logs reports. I know several guilds don't report to WoL, but it's still a wonderful data source for information.
Methodology note I'll be looking at the Top 100 data set for 25-man normal, with occasional references to heroic. 10s have a wide variety of buffs, which makes normalization much more difficult, and heroics are comparatively sparse in terms of data allocation and have several other confounding mechanics that make them less than ideal for comparing classes.
Also, when ranking classes, I typically take the top-performing spec from each, excepting shaman and druids, for 12 total. My assumption is that top players will more than happily switch specs to whatever is optimal for the current fight, if the cost of switching is relatively trivial (respec, reforge, regem, etc.). However, they will generally not respec if it requires farming a whole new set of gear. If you want to debate this assumption, feel free to bring it up in the comments.
Overall spec ranking 11/12
Melee spec ranking 5/6
Feral DPS 90.9% of top
Top 4 classes Mage (100%)/warrior (98.4%)/hunter (97.9%)/rogue (95.9%)
So, my high hopes from early 4.2 did not materialize, and feral ended up remaining one of the lower specs for single-target DPS. That said, things are not that bad here; 11 of 12 specs are within 10% of the leader (ret is at 88.5%), which is probably as close to balanced as WoW is ever going to get. So, we're balanced for single-target DPS but just a bit on the low side of balanced.
Now, I'm certain someone is going to take my numbers and use them to justify that we need buffs, which is expressly what I'm not saying. Single-target is fine. I'm much more concerned about the numbers on some of the other fights.
Overall spec ranking 11/12
Melee spec ranking 5/6
Feral DPS 79.7% of top
Top 4 classes Priest (100%)/balance druid (97.1%)/warlock (96.8%)/rogue (84.6%)
As one might expect, we're not very good at maximizing DPS on fights with multiple targets that are spread out. Notice the relative dropoff between priests/moonkin/warlocks and the next highest; that's how much of a difference multi-DOTing can do. This difference is enough that you can start to see the effects in recruitment/slotting for 10-man guilds pushing progression on heroic Shannox.
How so? Well, flipping over to the 10-man heroic All Parses data for a second, there were 1,252 balance parses over the last 14 days, compared to 437 feral parses, or a 2.86:1 ratio. In comparison, 10-man normal All Parses shows 3,628 balance to 2,091 feral, or a 1.73:1 ratio. In other words: Ouch. If you play feral and have been sat out for heroic Shannox, I sympathize. I guess it's to be expected that feral would do poorly on a fight that features widely spaced targets, but what about all of them bunched together?
Two/Three-Target DPS, Bunched: Staghelm
Overall spec ranking 12/12
Melee spec ranking 6/6
Feral DPS 83.1% of top
Top 4 classes Rogue (100%)/priest (91.3%)/elemental shaman (90.7%)/warrior (90.4%)
Well, that's a bit better, I suppose. It looks worse then it is, really. Combat rogues are so overpowered on this fight that they push the baseline up for everyone else, so we're within 10% of the majority of the classes. We're bringing up the rear, but the rear isn't really that far back.
Overall spec ranking 10/12
Melee spec ranking 4/6
Feral DPS 64.8% of top
Top 4 classes Priest (100%)/mage (95.7%)/balance druid (93.1%)/warlock (90.8%)
Now, this is bad. This fight isn't a very good comparison of AOE DPS, admittedly, due to the Immolation mechanic, but melee absolutely suffer here, in general. As an aside, there are lots of mechanics that punish you for bringing extra melee ... are there any that punish you for bringing extra ranged? Any at all?
One interesting anecdotal data point: The parse containing the #1 feral for this fight (24.2k DPS) also contains an arcane mage who just barely topped her on DPS but didn't even crack the WoL top 200 for his class.
So what keeps me from just throwing up my hands, posting long walls of text on the Blizzard forums that get ignored, and declaring that feral is terrible for this tier? Well, two things. First, we do decently on Alysrazor, if we get to fly. We're not nearly the best, but comfortably middle-of-the-pack. I don't want to break down the numbers in great detail because it's essentially a gimmick fight, but for once I'm just happy that we're not the worst choice to go do something. Secondly, and more importantly, we actually do decently on Ragnaros. Let's take a look.
Overall spec ranking 8/12
Melee spec ranking 4/6
Feral DPS 90.7% of top
Top 4 classes Rogue (100%)/warrior (98.4%)/priest (98.1%)/mage (95.3%)
Well, I did say decently, not great. Our comparative advantage comes from add spawns that show up quickly and die quickly. Swipe does somewhat better, since things are dead before you empty your energy bar and lose steam.
This fight also features one of the few things that melee is decidedly better at than ranged: add control during the transition phases. This might not show up on DPS numbers, but it's definitely a contributing factor.
So how does Blizzard address this?
I agree that the numbers don't paint the prettiest of pictures. "Oh yay, if I push myself to put in 10% more effort than my mage/lock/moonkin/priest friend, I might be able to match him! Woo!"
I'd like to suggest some happy solution that makes things all even again, but I just don't see one. Casters, and hunters to a lesser extent, have a huge comparative advantage that melee do not; they get to switch targets and begin DPS almost instantly, regardless of where the target is placed. Melee, of course, get to run to the new target and get behind it, taking valuable time.
Just once, I'd love to see a fight where the boss had a chance to parry spells cast from the front. The forum threads would be epic.
Now, some melee classes have advantages of their own. Combat has insanely good cleave. Frost has great snap AOE. Fury ... well, fury just kicks ass at the moment. Unfortunately, ret, enhancement, and feral (sadly) need something. I'm not certain what that is, though I have a few ideas. I can safely say, though, that it's no fun when the best you can do is merely average.
Looking for the latest and greatest in feral cat druid guides? Shifting Perspectives has the answers! Check out our cat 101 for Cataclysm. Also don't miss gearing your cat for Firelands raiding, addons for cat druids and raiding strats for feral cats, as well as our feral cat Firelands boss strats.Filed under: Druid, (Druid) Shifting Perspectives
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Jabadabadana Sep 4th 2011 8:15PM
Kitties get to aoe on Ryolith? holy crap. I don't think my kitty knows what something other than his ankles looks like in that fight. I end up thinking of Beth as the aoe fight in FL.
(never mind the insanity that is eyeball aoe on occuthar... which is irrelevant, but aoe)
seems like fixes would be things like increased dam/rate on fury swipes, small tweaks to mastery value like .2% per, and other bits and pieces, else something big like giving us 10 expertise again, or something.
Jorges Sep 5th 2011 10:15AM
I've been designated driver in Rhyolith and temporal tank (switch to bear) for adds in this fight. When I just swiped the crap out of them, things went much smoother.
Just ask your healers to watch out for you when adds spawn, then get them in bear and swipe them in cat. You'll be amazed.
Jorges Sep 5th 2011 10:18AM
Besides, our hard hitting-non dispellable bleeds are not exactly a helpful when you need to turn him the other way.
nymrohd Sep 4th 2011 8:17PM
I am sorry but multidotting has nothing to do with HC shannox. If I found someone doing it just to pad the meters on a fight were you should only dps Shannox in my guild, I'd make sure to call him on his crap; at least on the first 2-3 kills at least.
As for Rhyolith, the standard practice is to have melee full time on the legs. So the majority of parses cannot possibly be representative of effective damage done.
In general Firelands is extremely gimmicky for dps and what is most important is that everyone does their job. You cannot look at parses and make such broad generalizations. There is only a single fight in Firelands that doesn't significantly affect dps performance according to what they are assigned and that is Baleroc. And ferals do just fine.
swelt Sep 5th 2011 4:35AM
The Obsidian Armor buff that Rhyolith has will prevent you from making any meaningful comparison of cross-role DPS. Just because a cat does less overall damage in the encounter because he's attacking a target that starts out taking 80% less damage, doesn't mean his raid contribution isn't just as important as someone who is doing AOE on adds without that buff. The best you can hope for would be to look only at the melee DPS classes and compare within those. Trying to make any type of argument that includes Rhyolith undermines the remainder of your case.
swelt Sep 5th 2011 4:36AM
oops, that wasn't meant to be a reply to this post which I agree with.
Alaron Sep 5th 2011 10:24AM
@nymrohd: I didn't look at H Shannox, just N, for the reasons outlined at the top of the article. WRT Rhyolith: I agree. As mentioned in the article, Rhyolith isn't a great comparison, but it's really the only fight this tier with mass AoE. (Beth'tilac might have been a better example, but the AoE periods are so short that it's hard to find useful data; same for Rag.)
I agree that Firelands is gimmicky, and assignments affect your DPS. The thing that frustrates me is that ranged DPS get their choice of assignment, while melee DPS are locked into an exclusive role. Put another way: 10m FL is MASSIVELY harder with an all-melee DPS team then it is with an all-ranged team.
Noah Sep 4th 2011 8:53PM
Firelands seems to be out of my reach right now, and that's what's really bugging me. Since cats are the stragglers in this tier of raiding, it's difficult for me to stretch my paws up to the levels of rogues, mages or warriors, who seem to have little to no trouble out-DPSing me even though we're matched for gear (I have 363 ilvl, with my only piece that's below 359 being my 353 helm from ZA). I can pull 15k, which I would think, coupled with my item level, is enough to at least push me into at least the first boss of firelands, but since the standard is so high it makes it really suck.
I think I may need a hand here, am I right where I should be for DPS for my current gearset? Am I too low, or do I need better gear? My rotation generally looks like this.
*fight starts*
Feral Charge - Improved
Ravage (free)
Mangle
Rake
Rip (5 points usually)
Mangle
Rake
Tiger's Fury
Mangle
Ferocious Bite (5 points again)
This will continue for a while until I switch targets, at which point I burn my energy and unleash my best Rip or Savage Roar on my target. Whenever I manage to catch them, I use my clearcasting procs on Shreds, and after a target gets below 25%, I don't renew Rip unless it falls off, I just Ferocious Bite, thanks to Blood In The Water. Can someone give me a hand with this? What am I doing wrong, what am I doing right, how can I change my rotation, what priority to certain attacks have over others, all that good stuff.
Thanks!
Jabadabadana Sep 4th 2011 9:07PM
Shred!
Mangle is for keeping up the debuff, and for when you can't get behind a target.
Rip greatly out-powers savage roar, but after its up, you're going to want to keep roar up. It's called "bite-weaving" because the ability to sometimes weave in a 3-5 pt bite into the rotation, outside of berserk, while keeping rip and roar up is a trick.
Also, tiger's fury applies to bleeds, put it up before that first rip.
Silversol Sep 4th 2011 9:53PM
Make sure to have a 3 stack of Feral Faeire Fire up as well if you're in a raid where the debuff isn't being applied.
I don't know what your glyphs are, but the basic standard for feral are: Rip, Berserk, and Shred.
Matt Sep 4th 2011 10:22PM
Here's an opener trick:
Feral Charge - Improved
Mangle
Rake
Savage Roar
(energy is now almost @ zero)
Tiger's Fury
Ravage (STILL FREE due to how long the buff lasts -- but NOW GETS TF DAMAGE INCREASE!!)
Shredx2
Rip
(TF ends sometime later...)
It doesn't get rip up as fast, but it gets Savage roar up, buffs your initial ravage/shred dmg (I've had ravage crit for > 50k) with TF, and gets the 1st rip up with tiger's fury without wasting any energy.
If you feel confident that your tank can hold it (and with 500% threat... they should unless they are asleep...) and you aren't saving it for a special burn phase that comes before 3 mins into the fight, you can put Berserk right after that tiger's fury and watch your dps shoot sky high.
Also, as others have said, only use mangle to keep up the debuff (and if you have an arms? warrior or bear tank, you NEVER need to use it) or if there is some GOOD reason you can't get to the side or behind a boss...
One more thing. There is an addon I recommend to EVERYONE having trouble with their rotation: Ovale.
It doesn't know EVERYTHING, but it is very good at telling you what spell/ability you should use next (assuming a Patchwerk like fight -- there are times to do things other than what it says due to mechanics and such).
Luke Sep 5th 2011 5:50AM
@Noah
You need to make sure to apply John Madden after rake but before rake and just before TF is almost on cool down but not before you click your heals three times and look behind the curtain.
Hope that helps!
Jorges Sep 5th 2011 10:56AM
Macro FC, FFF and Ravage! in the same button:
#showtooltip Feral Charge(Cat Form)
/castsequence reset=10 Faerie Fire (Feral), Ravage(Cat Form)
/castsequence reset=10 Feral Charge(Cat Form)
With this, I can apply FFF while Charging and then I just press the button again to Ravage! If Ravage! is on cooldown it'll just apply FFF, but I prefer to use another button for that.
So what I do is:
FC/FFF
Mangle
Rake
Shred
TF
Ravage! (will be a crit if target is over 80%)
5P Rip
Then build up 5 CP with SHRED to get up Savage Roar
After that you have to adapt to the situation, always keeping up Rip, Rake and SR. Run out and FC again to Ravage! if you have time and all debuffs are up, and use 5CP FB only and only if everything is up and you have energy to spare. At 25% forget about SR, just make sure you have Manlge, Rake and Rip on the target, build CP with SHRED and FB to refresh Rip. Even a 1CP Bite is good, the point is to keep Rip up.
And remeber to ALWAYS build extra CP with SHRED. Only use Mangle if you can't get behind the target or the Mangle debuff if about to wear off.
Notes: Tiger's Fury (TF) Increases Bleed damage and Ravage! damage.
Savage Roar increases everything, but the time to build up the initial SR and then put up everything else is not worth it. You can try it, but most of the times you have to move or do some other thing before you get the chance to put up a 5CP Rip in the opening cycle, so leave SR for the second CP cycle. First thing is to put Rip ASAP.
Sleutel Sep 4th 2011 9:40PM
The problem with balancing ranged vs. melee is that ranged can stand anywhere, including stacked on the boss (except Hunters on fights with minimum range); melee don't have that same flexibility. I'd really love to see more fights that balance out the typical melee penalty, a la Sindragosa (although it's probably tough to find a mechanic that also works for a non-mana ranged class like Hunters).
Billlop Sep 4th 2011 9:46PM
Theres also some "Ranged" class/specs that lose a fair chunk of their dps when actually ranged. For a demon lock, as an example, if you arnt hugging the boss while in Meta form, you will lose as much as 5-10k dps from Immolation Aura and Shadowflame.
Andrew Sep 4th 2011 10:25PM
For the record, we do have a similar boss encounter to the one fantasized about at the end of the article, except he doesn't parry spells. Throngus in Grim Batol has his shield that diminishes all damage in front of him by a certain percentage, forcing all dpsers, including ranged, to have to stay behind him as he switches directions around. Ranged often find this maddening, as they're used to standing so much farther away from the boss that they end up having farther to run than melee do to get behind him again. Most of us can correct this by getting in closer, of course, but poor hunters who still need to keep some distance...
I personally enjoy that added bit of positioning on that fight (though to be honest, for a mage it's trivial movement), and wouldn't mind seeing more scenarios like that.
Snuzzle Sep 4th 2011 10:55PM
Not just Throngus, but Dragha fight in GB benefits ranged to stack up, too. If you fight too far from the dragon, you risk being in a bad spot for her flame breath and have to run through it for a few seconds (unless you're a Mage or something). So these fights are out there.
shuaigejay Sep 5th 2011 12:19AM
Nice article, but one thing you didn't mention was the HUGE benefit to kitties of the new tank threat. Cats (and Fury warriors) were the class with the biggest problems with threat throttling prior to the change. Now that we don't have to worry about pulling, our dps can be significantly improved just by doing what we do faster and harder.
Sure the other classes get the benefit too, but cats in my opinion get the biggest benefit due to our long ramp-up time. Negating the threat throttle means we can get our dots n buffs up faster, ravage with TF without having to worry in the first 5 seconds, and proceed to shred the crap outta stuff while popping berserk early so we can get in 2 berserks per fight.
All melee are at a disadvantage in this tier, but the threat problems (especially with pally and warrior tanks) were really holding us back more than others. Now that they've fixed it, we're back where we should be: middle of the pack for melee dps. I'm happy enough with that.
Alaron Sep 5th 2011 10:27AM
This is true, though I'd expect this to benefit all melee relatively equally.
(Also, I looked at normal-mode data, which seems to have less troubles with tank threat.)
Jorges Sep 5th 2011 11:06AM
So true! I hated how every paladin, warrior, dk and everyone else opened with cd's and did a ton of damage while I had to hold down and even use cower in the first cycles of my dps.
Not anymore my friends, not anymore.