A complete beginner’s guide to raiding as a Feral Cat. Some advanced tips are included for the not-so-beginner reading this. There are no gear suggestions, but some links are available to help with gear choices. This guide is a combination of aggregated information available online and personal experience.

updated for patch 3.3.0

Talent Spec

Here’s a sample of a feral raiding spec with a kitty focus. Note that a few points have been spent on survival options. Feral Swiftness, Survival Instincts, and Improved Leader of the Pack are included to help heal you, help others heal you, or help you avoid damage altogether. While I recommend this build if you are taking a pure DPS raiding role, there are alternatives. Feral Aggression improves in value considerably as gear improves. The higher your crit chance, the more often you will have points to spend on Ferocious Bite, and because greater amounts of Armor Penetration will increase the value of Ferocious Bite damage. Conversely, having more crit and therefore more use of Ferocious Bite also increases the value of Armor Penetration. That said, if you wish to sacrifice the semi-optional self-healing for a small DPS boost, Maximum single-target spec HERE.

Gear & Stats

I’m looking out for some gear lists that are up to date, in the meantime, check the amazing program Rawr for a quick peek on whether an item may be an up. Don’t throw out your old gear unless the stats are all a direct upgrade, because the relative value of your stats will change over the course of your kitty career. Sometimes Agility will be better, sometimes armor penetration. Sometime crit will be better, other times haste. Check the post on reaching the Crit Cap for discussion relevant to druids in ICC gear as well. Generally speaking, Tier 9 set bonuses are worth using prior to obtaining tier 10. Tier 10 set bonuses are godly. Idol of Mutilation is very good and cheap, as such it should be your first Idol if you are just starting your druid. Idol of the Crying Moon is slightly better when Rake is not falling off. If Rake will fall off during the fight, use Idol of Mutilation instead to avoid downtime on your buff.

It is not necessary, or always ideal, to stack hit rating or expertise before the cap. Because you do not spend Energy on missed Yellow hits, this stat is low priority for beginning druids. These stats do impact more geared druids due to the affect miss and dodge have on the crit cap.

Agility - For starting druids this will be the most useful stat to acquire. In some cases with reasonable gear, Armor Penetration could be more valuable. At certain points now, Agility falls out in favor of other stats due to the Crit Cap on melee swings.

Attack Power & Strength - always good to have more of. 1 Str =~ 2.6 AP in Cat form. Strength is a good stat for feral druids, however because gear with strength usually does not include agility, in practice it’s not a good stat to look for. What this means is that, in some cases, there will be strength rings/weapons, etc that drop and are a small up for you. Just be aware that while they can sometimes be fair, they will always be more valuable to the STR based DPS.

Armor Penetration – Undergeared druids will not feel the full effect of this stat right away, however it is for most druids a very desirable stat. There are times, depending on gear and possibly raid comp, where stacking armor pen is best. 1400 is the hard cap for ArPen, anything after that will see 0 net gains. There are also potential soft caps, if you acquire one of the two current trinkets with an armor penetration proc, the soft cap will mean that during that proc you lose effective DPS stacking additional ArPen. With a Grim Toll the soft cap is now 788. With the Mjolnir Runestone, the soft cap is 735. If you’re using Needle Encrusted Scorpion the soft cap is 722.

Crit Rating – Provides a decent boost compared to other stats, crit chance itself is really important, therefore crit rating is usually better than haste or hit rating. However, most of your critical chance should be from your agility. When concerned with the crit cap,  avoiding crit rating in favor of more Agility gains may also be worthwhile, however this pretty much only applies to druids with ICC gear.

Hit Rating – Cap 8% or 262.32 HitRating This stat doesn’t do much for poorly geared druids, but scales with your stats. If you’re approaching the crit cap it will be important to reach the cap, but otherwise may not be necessary.
Expertise – Cap (dodge only) 5.5% or 131.16 ExpertiseRating  (with Primal Precision talent) Similar to hit rating.

Haste – Increases white damage and Omen of Clarity procs. It is not that good for undergeared players but provides significant boosts as other stats increase. At this time, when all 4 druid caps are accounted for, Haste becomes the most valuable stat to gain.

For more specific numbers look here.

DPS Strategies

Multi-Target

If there are 3 or more targets in a fight, there are 2 potential stategies. Use a mangle to generate a combo point, then Savage Roar. Swipe while Savage Roar is up and refresh as needed. If the targets won’t be alive long enough to get SR up, use only swipes. Better to Swipe once or twice before everything is dead than to get Savage Roar and not be able to Swipe at all. With Tiger’s Fury and Berserk, Cats can be a little too good at sudden AoE damage. Berserk at your own risk!

Single Target (eg. Bosses)

Theres no specific rotation for kitty, instead it’s a matter of keeping buffs/debuffs up at all times

You have one buff you need to have up: Savage Roar. Then you have 3 debuffs you need to keep up: Rake, Rip and Mangle (you dont have to think about mangle if there’s a bear tank in the group, or an Arms warrior with “Trauma”)

Priority on Cat Abilities:

- Savage Roar (2-3 CP is best, but never let it wear off)
- Mangle
- 5-point Rip
- Rake

Get Faerie Fire up whenever you don’t have enough energy to make a special attack. One trick is to use Faerie Fire while you are running/charging toward the boss, but before you are in range to use anything else. I rather like to hit Feral Charge/FFF once the fight has begun.

If Savage Roar and Rip will expire within 2 seconds of eachother, try to use a low combo-point SR a little early to desynchronize them.

Don’t worry about using Ferocious Bite in the beginning, but as your crit chance increases, you may find yourself with extra combo points. If you have a good time left on Rip (about 7 seconds or more), and Savage Roar has at least 4 seconds left, go ahead and use Ferocious Bite. You can refresh Savage Roar more quickly than a Rip.

Tiger’s Fury talented will return 60 energy, so use it every time it is up to refill your energy bar when you are low. Berserk if you’re confident you will be able to stay in melee for the duration and at times where the DPS really needs to be pushed. Because Berserk decreases the energy cost of your abilities two things hold true: use it during high-energy situations (immediately after Tiger’s Fury for instance) and do not use Ferocious Bite during a Berserk, even if you have 5 CPs. If you do not need Rip or Roar, continue to Shred until Berserk wears off, before using Ferocious Bite.

Glyphs

The best glyphs right now are Glyph of Savage Roar, Glyph of Rip, and Glyph of Shred. This seems to be the consensus, as a way to optimize your combo points. Glyph of Mangle is also good, though generally considered slightly less beneficial than the rest. Glyph of Berserk is one which sounds nice on first glance but is actually a lot less DPS than the alternatives.

Enchants

Head: Arcanum of Torment – 50 AP, 20 Critrating.
Shoulder: Greater Inscription of the Axe – 40 AP, 15 Critrating.
Back: Major Agility – 22 Agility.
Chest: Powerful Stats – 10 to all stats.
Wrist: Greater Assault – 50 AP.
Hands: Major Agility – 20 Agility.
Leggings: Icescale Leg Armor – 75 AP, 22 Critrating.
Feet: Icewalker – 12 Hit, 12 Crit. or: Superior Agility – 16 Agility.
Weapon: Massacre – Cheap to pickup so it makes a good starting enchant.

Berserking – Better for some, but with a few drawbacks. The proc is less frequent than Moongoose and gear dictates that it is only minorly better than Mongoose, in some cases, and in other cases it is worse.

Mongoose – As gear improves so does this enchant and eventually it will do more for you than Berserking, it is also a good hybrid enchant for tanking.

Gems

You’ll want to acquire a good helmet with a meta socket ASAP. You can use Relentless Earthsiege Diamond, which means you need 1 of each color gem to fulfill the requirement. The bad news is that nothing comes close to your red gems for pure DPS output. The good news is that a single gem, the Nightmare Tear, will fulfill that requirement by itself. For a cheaper alternative grab an Enchanted Tear instead.

To determine your optimal gemming, try visiting Toskk’s calculator, on the side select ‘derive optimal gemming’ and input your base stats and buffs you expect to have in your raid. At some point it may be possible to attain the hard armor penetration and crit cap, if you’re very well geared. If so you may need to consider hit, expertise, haste, or strength. Gems with these stats are included below, but remember that in most cases Agility and Armor Penetration will be best for your red gems, and Agility+Crit or Agility+Haste will be your best yellow socket in cases where you want to keep a good socket bonus.

Red:

Fractured Cardinal Ruby

Delicate Cardinal Ruby

Bold Cardinal Ruby

Orange:

Deft Ametrine

Deadly Ametrine

Accurate Ametrine

Etched Ametrine

Fierce Ametrine

Yellow:

Quick King’s Amber

Rigid King’s Amber

Add-ons

General & Raid Use

Omen – tracks threat, TPS, and displays threat tables on mobs.
Deadly Boss Mods – provides key information during boss fights, a critical addon for raiding.

XPerl – Replaces the default raid display with something a bit more attractive and a lot more configurable. Highly recommended.
ORA2 – provides extra raiding functions, such as tank window, auto-invites and auto promotes. Also provides a voting system, MT frames and assisting/healing lists.

Class Specific
may be useful to other classes than druids, but are much more specific in their audience.

BadKitty – Provides information on Feral Cooldowns, functionality is similar to EventHorizon except that in this case it cannot be used for other classes.

EventHorizon – Displays uptime/cast time of spells and abilities, visualized in real time.
ToneDeaf - plays sounds, depending on how many combo points you have.
Event Horizon- informs you with visual and audio cues when your procs occur. I use this to track my OoC. It supports other classes with proc talents.
Decursive – Every druid (and priest, paladin, shaman or mage) should have this addon. Gives an immediate visual cue when party/raid members are poisoned or cursed, and allows for fast cleansing.
ItemRack – Highly recommended for druids, also useful for any class that plans on keeping more than one gear set. You can also use the new built in gear manager, the primary difference however will be that the add-on provides a built in menu that you can quickly access to swap gear, while the gear manager will require you to find space on your bar for each set. This is really up to personal preference.