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.

~ by lily on September 29, 2009.

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