druid feral dps spec world of warcraft

Something Wicked This Way Comes

Since podcast episode 12 we’ve been trying to get to this topic.  It took a little more research than we thought but better late than never.  So we’re going to give you a couple of absolutely awesome tools to use that will really boost your cat form DPS – even if you’ve never spent a single second in a feral form.

I actually decided to give cat deeps a whirl after healing for 6 months straight.  I heard of a fellow who used to be in the guild doing something weird like 5.5k DPS in somewhat regular-ish gear just by using a certain mod.  Well, since we had done so many runs in Naxx I had a fairly complete set of cat gear just sitting around collecting dust and the thought of doing a little melee sounded like fun.

So off I went to download Facemaul.  It puts a nifty little box on your screen that shows you the next two moves in advance and a larger icon for the button you should hit right now.  Now, if you’ve ever read theory-crafting for feral druids, such as the mega-thread from EJ you know that it can be thoroughly mind-boggling to try to come up with a way of balancing all the priorities in the potential rotation.  And that’s saying nothing of differences of opinion about what the rotation SHOULD be.

But Facemaul does it by the numbers.  It calculates you potential DPS on the fly based on some complex algorithm.  It will have you doing things in orders you never would have thought of, like saving Faerie Fire for after two or three moves sometimes.  You simply cannot get a better rotation manually.  Facemaul is a  must have.

The next thing I found has to be hands-down one of the best WoW tools I’ve ever seen.  Toskk’s DPS Gear Methodology page is a blend of number-crunching geek heaven, uber nerd theory-crafting and on the page spread-sheeting on steroids.

All you do is plug in a little information about your druid and it does hundreds of complex calculations instantly.  What it does is tell you exactly what kind of DPS you can expect, it suggests your build and even builds a pawn formula for your druid based on your current gear set.  It does this because based on your crit rate and blah blah blah you might actually be better off using a bit of gear with more strength OR a bit with more agility – without these calculations it’s almost impossible to know.

Which brings us to Pawn – one of my all-time favorites.  Pawn will give you a score for every single piece of gear you ever see based on a formula as complex as you want it to be.  The formula from the Tossk DPS page is as precise as it gets.  It gives you a formula to rank gear based on your current gear and even raid buffs you normally have in your groupings.  It doesn’t get any more specific than that.

So, armed with Facemaul and the knowledge from Toskk you can plug your formula into Pawn and you’re ready to go chew some mobs.  And Even though you can get the build directly from the Toskk page, here it is so you can go ahead and plug it in while you get over the information overload you’re going to run into.  Actually Toskk only lists the absolute bare essential 54 points, so we filled them in with raiding in mind.  You might want to move a few of them around if you ever double as a tank or for solo leveling use.

Feral Druid Cat Spec DPS Build For World of Warcraft Patch 3.1

Glyph Suggestions:

  • Rip
  • Savage Roar
  • Shred

So go throw on that extra gear set, grab a couple of mods and go try out a litte hot claw action.  You’ll be glad you did if you’ve been in tree or chicken form for way too long.  With dual specs it makes for a refreshing change.  Plus it’s just another good reasons that druids completely Dominate.