My first impression of the new loot coming out on the PTR right now is, holy-armorpen-batman! I’m genuinely surprised, as I was expecting with the nerf they gave armor penetration that there would be less focus on the stat in the future, and so far the opposite is proving to be true. Armor penetration will be on nearly everything – something I’m not entirely thrilled with as a tank trying to fill out the hit/expertise caps. It seems that the leather now more than ever is extremely well itemized for cats, less for bears. That said, there’s a few promising items with strong expertise and all it will take is a few to get ‘enough’. I ponder whether it will come down to bears capping armor penetration like cats do to push for additional threat, which is quickly becoming a hot issue for tanks of all kinds. In both forms I find myself suddenly paying a lot closer attention to the threat meters.

I am most excited over a trinket currently coming out of the new 5-man content, the Needle Encrusted Scorpion is amazing with a whopping 114 crit rating and a 678 armor penetration proc. We’ll finally see an armor penetration proc that is accessible to everyone. I find that in itself is going to be the most striking change for all DPS classes. We’ll no longer see posts that have to say “gear this way if you have a trinket. gear that way if you don’t have access to it.” Anyone who cares about armor penetration will now tell you to farm this bad boy and otherwise assume for gear lists that you already have it.

While I am excited by the trinket, I am also pleased with the Tier 10. The tier bonuses are exciting for DPS and particularly amazing for tanking. For bear form I am used to negligible set bonuses.

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Finally got this one, better late then never! And if you notice in the corner, yes I have a shadow priest addon showing in the screenshot, I just installed it and didn’t get around to disabling it on my druid.

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I updated the guide again today. It was lacking some links and gear advice, and while I haven’t had the time to write a guide for gearing myself, I was able to hunt down a few good recommendations elsewhere. This is a large habit of mine, call it laziness or pure simplicity. I don’t like to reinvent the wheel so I often confer with other sources. My blog and the guide are more an exercise in condensing existing material for convenience than actually offering new advice. Practically anything on here based on theorycrafting or numbers is borrowed, what I do offer is specific gameplay advice from my own experience with what works and what helps.

I’ve been contemplating more story-driven material to include here for entertainment’s sake. And because there’s only so much advice that needs to be said regarding feral DPS. Lately though I am more focused on hanging out with friends and job hunting, than I am on writing. Hopefully I’ll get a chance for a good story soon. Until then!

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I had a run in with a fellow feral druid recently, this one primarily a tank. Discussing specs, he mentioned he might take Omen of Clarity again once he upgraded from Tier 8. Let me repeat.. he mentioned his current spec was lacking Omen of Clarity.. What?! How can that be, I asked.. so from there he makes the claim that the Tier 8 bonus overwrites our OoC. Dear lordy! I went looking for information, or even the claimed source for this tidbit, and returned empty handed. Sure, there are comments far and wide praising the clearcasting proc from Tier 8, but no mention of any hard testing of the ability to stack with Omen of Clarity. I, like everyone else, had made this assumption.

So now, I find myself doing something totally different. Instead of borrowing from other sources greater than myself, I went head first into testing mode (in kitty form). Results without Omen of Clarity in my spec were dismal. Less than 1PPM on Tier 8, actually approximately .85 Yet that is what we should expect, with a 2% chance and maintaining as close as humanly possible to 100% uptime on bleeds, less than 1PPM is expected. One free attack every minute is fairly underwhelming, but it’s something, right? Perhaps. I went on to look at Omen of Clarity by itself. With reasonably good haste and a mongoose enchant, I was varying considerably between 4.5 and 3.5 PPM. So much better. My surprise came trying to combine the two. I was unable to discern any difference between having my Tier 8 set bonus and not. Neither chestpiece had haste as a stat, so it was an even trade. I continued to show 3.5 PPM for clearcasting and this caused me to try again both with and without my tier bonus. I’m not jumping to any immediate conclusions. Let me repeat that: I’m wholeheartedly NOT prepared to make any claims based on a mere hour or less of testing. The RNG can indeed be a pain. There’s no reason Tier 8 shouldn’t work with Omen of Clarity, truthfully. It isn’t logical. However, my results thus far are disturbing. Therefore do I ask – has anyone else tested the Tier bonus lately?

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You’ve probably heard about the armor penetration nerf by now. Me and my fellow druids often stack this stat and as such we’ve felt it, as have some others. Certain specs of warrior, hunter, and rogue, to name a few, are affected by this nerf. But I’m all about feral – and understand that armor penetration continues to be a powerful stat. Agility will also continue being important to us. What it does in essence is increases the breaking point at which agility becomes less valuable point per point, while at the same time it makes achieving the hard cap for armor penetration unlikely. Fear not, if you are stacking armor penetration now and achieving 55% crit and ~25% armor penetration I won’t recommend you switch. If you’re not at the breaking point yet, it is better to work on getting there than switch gems back and forth for minimal gains. If you were stacking agility, look more closely at tools, Rawr is the easier to use, but be careful.. your best test with the program is if you swap between ALL agility/ALL armor pen gems and compare the DPS estimates of each. SimulationCraft and FeralbyNight will be a bit more accurate, as simulations tend to do more precise calculations, but will take more effort to get accurate tests. Bottom line, with an armor penetration trinket you will benefit from armor pen stacking sooner, but in top gear you can still rip faces well without them. If you’re stacking agility now, pay attention to where your breaking point is. You don’t want to switch too early! Armor penetration scales ridiculously well, with other stats and with itself, while Agility only scales to a certain point – it starts to lose effectiveness when crits do. But because armor penetration relies on having stacked enough other stats and stacking itself, taking it too early will cost you.

So personal experience here. I know a few feral druids, some of which stack armor penetration, and some that stack agility. I experienced a drop of about 300 DPS, with a Grim Toll and ~400 Arpen. My best non-gimicky raid DPS has gotten to 5.5k. I’m under the impression from forums that we can get even better numbers with optimal gear, however my gear is hardly optimal – I can’t throw away +hit fast enough, and I’ll be in much better shape with one of the weapons that supplies armor pen. A druid with more luck than myself also stacking armor penetration, is reaching over 6k. I believe I’m still on the right track.

Now with a subject I enjoy more.. utility. Afterall, if feral druids were just rogues without kicks and stuns, who would play one? The new patch has an interesting feature for us that plays to our strengths.. instant casts for ferals. It’s not a huge life changing feature, but it’s not bad. Instant Battle Rezzes, roots, and cyclones. Instant healing touch. While this may get more use in PvP, I would encourage a proc monitor to make use of this during PvE as well. Self-healing is much more practical with one big instant heal, and can easily make a huge difference. Cyclones and roots may not see much action but there are 2 bosses where these play a big role. Mimiron, and Faction Champions. On mimiron have a macro ready to target and root bomb bots if a death knight isn’t available to grip. On faction champions (or pvp) I recommend this macro:

#showtooltip
/cast [modifier:shift, target=mouseover] Entangling Roots; [nomodifier:shift, target=mouseover] Cyclone

You mouse-over any target and click to cast cyclone. Shift-click will cast roots. Be ready to quickly return to your form again. If you are assigned to CC a specific target, replace target=mouseover with target=focus and use the /focus command to set your focus target.

While on the topic, I’m very happy with the changes to faction champions. Some of the classes were unreasonably difficult, get the right combination of them and they were easily the hardest fight in the instance. This fight still feels challenging, but is on par with the level of other normal modes in both 10 and 25 man. Getting the warlock no longer means instant death for melee classes, and you don’t have to rely as much on building a 10 man with a perfect class balance.

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I’ve had a variety of reactions when people hear me speak on Ventrilo. Most people will quickly start to refer to me as “she” instead of “he”. Not all the guys I meet care one way or another, in fact there are quite a few happy couples playing WoW. But it’s always funny to see how a new group will react. I was the only girl on Vent during one raid, and all the guys there were under the impression I was self-conscious. Ok, I am a little bit, however they clearly treated me differently. And it isn’t as though I was trying for that either. It was all a misunderstanding.  And it isn’t as though they shouldn’t have been nice to me. It’s that they were calling other people out, making fun, and generally being mean-spirited to everyone. Then making every effort to NOT treat me that way. If I made a mistake, it was mentioned in a roundabout manner without naming me. In short, they were treating me with the respect they SHOULD have given everyone else. The raid leaders in particular. The leadership often sets the tone, and so it was there. I won’t involve myself with that group again.

I also join many raids where the topic of discussion is wide open and varies into subjects of varying depths of bizarre. The raid leaders tolerate or outright encourage the topics. One night before entering the instance the raid was discussing boobs, for them a pretty mild topic. Someone called for a ready check and said “hit yes if you like boobs”. That truly happened and has become a running joke, along with many other absurd “ready checks”. There’s the “hit no if you’re in vent” ready check. There’s the “I don’t know why I did a ready check” ready check. And the ever popular “Hit yes to kick the raid leader out of raid” ready check. Our raid leaders really are, after all, quite incorrigible.

These raids are about having fun, though we do get serious and focused from time to time. Often times the colorful content of the chat, and my responses, encourage the guys to flirt. Usually playful teasing, which is all fine and well for me. The boob check ended with me staving off several requests for pics, the one rare moment where I started to get a bit annoyed with it. Teasing is all fun and everything afterall – but I have no intention of encouraging any of the guys TOO much. It is interesting to be that rare.. single female gamer that speaks. I have heard some girls say they stopped speaking in Vent because of too much flirting. I don’t think I could do that. I am WAY too outspoken.

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Truly my pet peeve right now has become people who are signing up, or joining raids they are undergeared for. With the epic handouts lately, there’s absolutely no reason that someone with blue quality gear is trying to head to any 10 or 25 raid zones. Get Conquest Emblems, guys. Find normal ToC drops, and check crafted gear, Tournament gear, and faction rewards. It’s so easy to do. Even if you do not have a lot of time to spare. Grind some faction to friendly and get some help doing heroics. If you truly have to PuG and are having trouble with groups, continue farming faction, especially the tournament, and look into buying some epics.

What is upsetting me so much is this, I’m finding geared people looking to PuG, but when I invite guilds, including my own, being social guilds they always seem to have people who are looking for a free ride. Jeapoardizing a raid to include your really undergeared friends/guildies is a TERRIBLE idea. Especially a 25 man raid. They are better off splitting into 5 mans. While I realize this means that temporarily, 25 man raid content is harder to fill, it also means they will be easier to do once everyone is geared, even overgeared for them out of 5 man content.

So what is expected? Entering Naxx 10 you should have the Superior achievement, or almost there, and some of the Emblem gear will go a long way to making it an easy encounter, naturally. Healers should have 1800 Spellpower. Tanks should have around 30k buffed health and DPS should be close to 2k on fights like Patchwerk, how close dependent on whether there are overgeared DPS in the group too. Same goes for OS, which is even easier. VoA and EoE are going to need more solidly 2k+ DPSers and also moderately better healers and tanks.

The next clear advancement for people is going to be 25 man version of the same (or more Heroic gear). 2k – 2.5k DPS and 2k +spellpower for healing. 35k health buffed (without sacrificing other stats heavily). Emalon and EoE are going to be the hardest, and definitely prefer 2.5-3k DPS and otherwise solid stats.

Being ready for Ulduar 10 is going to be more challenging. Depending on the fight, expect to need somewhere between 35k-40k buffed health on most fights as a tank, 2k-2.5k +healing, or 2.5-3.5k DPS. Until the Keepers, the lower values will perform adequately. Several of the Keepers will be a significant challenge without more.

What I will say of ToC is this.. Don’t attempt a ToC 10 man raid with a group that cannot get most of the Ulduar bosses cleared. If you can kill every Keeper except Mimiron, you can probably get ToC. If you can kill Mimiron then by all means try ToC.

For Ulduar 25 man, same thing goes as for ToC 10 man for the first few bosses. 3k+ DPS and tanks with 40k+ health, healers with 2500+ healing will all perform well on the easy bosses, and may be able to get some Keepers as well. Even ToC 25 man can be done with this level of gear for at least the first couple of encounters.

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While no major class changes have been reported yet for the new expansion, some things are inevitable. There will be more levels and talent points, so I will be keeping an eye on any specific changes. There are some changes that will directly impact things, such as the changes to player stats. Armor penetration and attack power are being removed from gear. This has implication for how they will go forward with feral attack power for weapons, as they will have to either retain it or make some other change to allow druids to benefit from weapon damage. Also under question, as things are adjusted from current stats on items to new stats, how will class balance be affected. For agility based classes, agility will offer more attack power. 2 AP per point instead of 1. The real kicker is their offer of ‘more stamina on gear’ to counteract the changes to stats. I foresee this as being armor penetration = stamina, AP = agility conversions. Currently they are trying to balance damage with druids benefiting well compared to other classes from armor penetration. If they aren’t careful I could easily see this being a considerable blow to druid dps compared with other classes. However, this should also in theory benefit tanking in terms of bigger health pools and greater SD amounts if Agi is also going to give bears more AP. Bear with me here, all of this is just speculation, and there’s a lot of details still being left out. Also look out for haste becoming an important DPS stat. Haste: Will also increase the rate at which you gain energy, runes, and focus. Retribution paladins and Enhancement shaman will have a talent that allows them to take advantage of this benefit.

The most interesting parts are going to be the new race options for druids and the plans for crafters. Worgen druids will be possible, and quite powerful with the currently announced racials.

Worgens have a racial ability called Darkflight, which allows the worgen to temporarily increase their movement speed by 70%, and can be used every three minutes. This activated ability, like entering combat, will also force the worgen into its true form. Other worgen racials include a passive 1% increase to all damage, reduced duration from the effects of curses and disease, and a bonus to skinning, as well as the ability to skin faster. Worgen will have access to all classes except paladin and shaman.

Worgen druids will flat out have DPS and tanking advantages over Night Elves. I fully expect Blizzard to offer same-faction race transfers inevitably, as people will complain A LOT about needing to pay .. twice.. for something already over charged, especially as the mass exodus to Worgen mains ensues. These racials have some pretty tempting abilities for both PvE and PvP players.. a little something for everyone. Ultimately it will surprise me if NEs and some of the other races aren’t given something extra to keep things balanced.

Also on the table are some crafting changes for Leatherworkers, Tailors, and Blacksmiths. Mmmm.

Reforging affords tailors, blacksmiths, leatherworkers, engineers, and jewelcrafters the opportunity to customize any player’s gear, including their own. Specifically, they can reduce a single statistic on applicable items and convert the lost points into another stat not already on the item.

I think adding more customization to items is interesting, and yet this one confuses me. Does this mean I’ll see more rogues rolling on leather with high stam and/or expertise because, of all things.. after reforging it turns out that it’s BiS for everything? However, I believe in a way this will prevent the stat changes from over-simplifying too. It adds a new angle to item upgrades that will separate the noob and the advanced players. While I want everyone to perform well, I also like to see how smart people are with their gear before I find out during a raid that they like to stand in bad stuff and otherwise cannot follow simple directions.
Lastly I will leave you thinking on the new zones currently under works. More details on MMO-Champion.

* Uldum will feature two new dungeons, the Lost City of Tol’vir and the Halls of Origination (a titan city)
* Skywall (Air Elemental Plane) will have a level-up dungeon and a raid instance.
* The Deadmines and Shadowfang Keep will be back in a brand new level 85 heroic version.
* Blackrock Caverns will be a new level-up dungeon located in Blackrock Spire.
* Sunken City of Vashj’ir will be an underwater zone and was the home city of Lady Vashj before the original sundering.
* Deepholm will be the new hub of the expansion, you will have portals here to let you teleport to Hyjal, Uldum, etc.
*Plane of Fire.  Ragnaros used the cataclysm to come back from the Plane of Fire where we sent him and is now sieging the World Tree in Mount Hyjal to burn it down. (Hyjal) will make extensive use of phasing.
* The Twilight Highlands will feature Grim Batol, Deathwing literally broke open Grim Batol as he emerged from the ground.

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This may be a surprise, but you know what? I could be wrong once in awhile. Very wrong.. Here’s the thing. I was in Ulduar again, working on hard modes and we decided to take a break for cooldowns and finish off Kologarn. Up until Kolo I was using my shred Idol, with the impression from other sites that this was better. I had a mangle bot, so it seemed like a good idea. On Kologarn though, even without the ability to shred, my DPS went up. Not an amazing up, and yet you might imagine my surprise. There’s a first! I continued the rest of the night with the Corruptor idol, I used my FeralbyNight addon to track the buff and keep it refreshed, and it worked out well. Possibly because I haven’t been able to get enough arpen in my gear, it’s terribly lacking aside from the Grim Toll and gems. I’m not saying anyone is wrong that the Shred Idol can be better, just that it’s quite clearly not better for me in my current gear. I’m really not sure when it might be. Iron Council hard mode is actually easier and less movement intensive for DPSers than normal mode, so it’s definitely not for lack of Shred time.

What is everyone’s experience with the Idols right now anyway? Do you love Corruptor or hate it? Are you getting the Mutilation Idol right away, or waiting for something else?

update: fyi, looking over the stat differences, my preference right now is for the ring. It’s slightly more emblems, but it’s a much better upgrade than for my gloves or my Idol. Because the Idol can proc on Shred as well as Mangle, that’s likely my next buy.

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