Perhaps, like most casual ferals you’ve been stacking Agility all along. You maybe considered strength and got told not only “NO!” but “HELL NO!”, or maybe you took a more proactive approach and spent some time debating whether you were ready to dive into stacking Armor Penetration. If you’re hard core, you probably have the gear to support it. First of all, I’d like to point out a good analysis on the multiple caps that feral DPS needs to be concerned with over at Think Tank.

I’ll try to fully explain how the crit cap affects feral DPS. First of all, feral druids have more than one crit cap. Yellow attacks can achieve 100% crit chance so we’ll be focusing on your white, or normal melee swings which are capped at 80.8%. (EJ testing confirms 24% Glancing and 4.8% crit suppression affects the crit cap as of writing) These caps will be affected by Agility procs, raid composition, and also affected by hit and expertise. This means hit and expertise will become drastically more important once your crit chance approaches a certain value. At that gear level, these stats are already increasing in value because your hits are doing more damage. However, at a certain point your missed attacks become attacks that would have been crits. The crit cap is 76% for white damage, and without hit rating your chance to miss an attack is 8%. So, without hit rating your crit cap drops to 68%. Expertise works similarly. There’s a 5.5% chance to be dodged (assuming you have Primal Precision), so without any expertise, you may crit that much less. Watch your buffs from other classes, and your Agility procs, as these will also increase your crit chance. If you know you will regularly raid with specific classes you can derive how much crit to stack. After reaching the cap, your next most important stats are hit/expertise if they aren’t already at the cap, Armor Penetration up to the cap, and finally haste.

Relevant Crit increases from Agility Procs (assuming kings):

Mongoose – 1.7126208%

DMC:Greatness – 4.281552%

Death’s Verdict/Choice – 6.422328%

Death’s Verdict/Choice (H) – 7.2786384%

Idol of Mutilation – 2.854368%

Idol of the Crying Moon – 3.1398048

Buffs: All percentages assume you have a paladin in your raid for Kings.

Ret Pally/Assassination Rogue/Ele Shaman: 3%

All DKs (HoW): 2.2121352%

Enhancement Shaman (does not stack with HoW from DK): 2.54038752

How to use these numbers:

Log in, cast gift of the wild on yourself, and find a nice pally willing to offer you Kings. In Cat form, check your current crit rating. This is your total.

Add together all the buffs you have or will have during the raid, if you are doing 25’s this will normally include the 2 raid buffs. Subtract this amount from 76%. This is your Crit Cap, after all relevant buffs.

Subtract your total from the crit cap. This is how much you are short by the cap, with full expertise and hit.

if your current total is greater than the crit cap, you are over. Evaluate your gear, if you are gemming for agility start gemming for Armor Penetration (hard and soft-caps are provided in the guide). If you are near, at, or above the cap, also start assuring you meet the hit and expertise caps. Beyond these stats, Haste will become more valuable than others. However, using tools may help determine whether to hard cap Armor Penetration or stack haste instead (and probably depends on what gear you can find).

~ by lily on January 5, 2010.

Posted in Uncategorized