In this section I’ll be assuming you understand the basics of cat DPS, and delve directly into less often mentioned strategies I’ve found useful, including but not limited to macros.

Part 1: Macros

First I’m going to discuss survivability. Staying alive is your primary goal, you can’t DPS when you’re dead. With this in mind, as I’ve mentioned, I’ve added some of my spare talent points into Survival Instincts, and 1 into Nurturing Instincts. With Nurturing Instincts, I have the following healing macro for those tough spots:

/castsequence [target=player] reset=20 Lifebloom, Rejuvenation, Lifebloom, Lifebloom, Nourish, Nourish

The intention here is for immediate heals, you can continue for as long as needed. This will help on fights like XT-Deconstructor where the entire raid sustains massive damage, and especially for Malygos where you are in the air, and only instant cast heals are possible. tip: turn on autocast self in your options.

You may also wish to have your potions/abilities macro’d such as the following:

/cast Barkskin

/use Healthstone

/use Crazy Alchemist’s Potion *alchemy only

/use Runic Health Potion

/cast Survival Instincts

/cast Lifebloom *herbalism only

Finally, a good macro to keep available, for snare and root abilities.

/cancelform

/cast Cat Form

This will have the effect of a. possibly reducing your energy if you have less than 5/5 Furor. b. removing any slow or rooting effects if they are able to be removed.

During a boss fight you will undoubtedly have encounters that are immediately recognizeable as a wipe. If most of the party is up, the boss is almost dead, and the tank dies, you might consider picking up the boss. Before you do, you’ll realize that this is in most cases a sacrificial act.

However, an effective pickup might look like this:

/cast Dire Bear Form

/cast Barkskin

/cast Growl

/raid TAUNTING >> %t >> HEAL ME!

/rw TAUNTING >> %t >> HEAL ME!

Don’t forget to follow up with Berserk for threat, and in most cases Survival Instincts.

Part 2:  The ‘Tricks’

Of course not every wipe is recoverable. If you think this is the case, the best solution is to run and put as much distance from yourself and the boss as you can, unequip your weapon, and use Shadowmeld. With the changes to shadowmeld, it has the chance to remove you from the threat list of mobs. With one important caveat, if you cancel your shadowmeld (and the boss hasn’t reset) all the threat you had is returned to you. This means, if you are about to pull threat off the tank, you can use Shadowmeld but you must wait some time for your threat to drop. A more useful way to dump threat is to cast Cower. Only if Cower is not doing enough should you try casting Shadowmeld and stopping DPS. Always run Omen so you can keep track of your threat, remember that you will take aggro off the tank at 110% threat, so never let yourself pass the threat. If you are having trouble with initial aggro, stand a distance from the pull while the tank is positioning and establishing aggro, watch Omen. When he has some threat built up, use charge to immediately close the gap.

Other uses for Charge.. when soloing mobs or PvPing, keep in mind that you can feral charge without breaking stealth. This will allow you to quickly approach and use pounce to stun. Forget about Ravage, though, in Wotlk it’s a waste of energy to even use it.

Some feral tanks may find themselves DPSing with a tanking spec at times. If your spec includes improved mangle, you’ll want to mangle spam in cat form for DPS, instead of using Shred. Without the DPS talents, the energy cost of Shred is too high to be worthwhile.

Part 3 (New!) Theorycrafting Tools

In World of Warcraft, stats are balanced and affected in many ways, which can make comparisons tricky. We deal with things like diminishing returns, which makes a stat reduce in value as you gain more of it, or the opposite of that, stats like arpen that scale with itself and increase in value the more you have of it. More common though are stats that scale with each other, like crit rating and attack power.

Point being, is that we can model all of these things with formulas or with simulators.

Rawr attempts to model via a formula, it comes pretty close, but has a few things that do not model well with static formulas. It’s easy to use, and will make suggestions gear-wise for you.

FeralbyNight and others also work in simulated fight encounters. These come closer to the natural variance on things like attack cycle, crits, and proc rates. To say something procs, is to say that it has an ability that randomly goes off on its own.

Both of these assume a quite stationary fight, where our DPS is maximized but also where Shreds will be more frequent. Simply put, there’s no completely accurate substitution for testing in game. Yet, it’s still much easier to do the testing before you spend time/gold/dkp etc. on acquiring and swapping different gear options.

If you’re curious about playing with numbers, you can look at the formulas and check things for yourself here. You can also take a look at Rawr’s program, or FeralbyNight’s sim. At this point I do not do any ‘napkin math’ for theorycraft, but I follow those on EJ and elsewhere that do, and make use of what tools I can find.