I’ve discovered that priests really need 3 specs, being able to discipline or holy heal is a very good thing, but sometimes raids just have too many healers period. I’ve tried all the specs and enjoy them. Also I want to test out the proc off Trauma while Shadow. It may be a healing weapon, but it’s liable to proc for Spriest VE more often than anything, except potentially druid hots, if they are spamming enough. It also does not scale with anything, therefore being used by a non-healer won’t affect the amount of the heal. So, Spriest healing weapon! Pretty nifty, huh? As an added bonus, Trauma is BiS for holy priests and that is my main spec anyway. I don’t have to fight QQ over rolling on a healing weapon, I just need to find a chance to play my offspec if I win it.

Oh right.. shenanigans. I often try them while tanking, but to combat boredom I have been finding myself trying new things in heroics on my priest, too. I healed through VH in shadow, while topping DPS, and I may start trying to do that a bit more often. I’ve holynovaspam healed many many times. The other day while with a guild tank and particularly bored, I stood in the Fire Beam during Halls of Stone and healed myself through it (didn’t convince the tank to stand in it for me, but after that he offered to use DPS gear). If you are reading this and you are a tank, I must beg you: mind your healer’s mana pool more often and be courteous. If your healer is at 100% mana for your random, they’re bored to death! Multipulling is both fun and helpful. If healing you is even a little challenging, your healer is going to be grateful, and DPS love to AoE! Don’t be surprised if some wipes occur, figuring out how much your group will handle is a process, but should get easier with practice. Enabling Gearscore will help you in guessing the appropriate speed for your group. IF you are reading this and wondering, yes as a matter of fact a lot of random tanks do single pulls, which is slow and frustrating.

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).

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.

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!

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?

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.

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.

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.