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 healing macros, for those times when you’re on the brink of death and need to react quickly I have the following healing macro for those tough spots:

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

You may also wish to have your potions/abilities macroed 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

You can use a proc monitor to detect Predator’s Swiftness procs and use the following macro to quickly heal yourself and return to cat form:
/castsequence [@player] reset=10 Healing Touch, Cat Form

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 recognizable 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 macro for emergency tanking would look like this:

/cast Dire Bear Form
/cast Barkskin
/cast Survival Instincts
/cast Growl
/raid TAUNTING >> %t >> HEAL ME!
/rw TAUNTING >> %t >> HEAL _your_name_!

You will also want to use Berserk if available, Frenzied Regeneration, and Enrage if you have the Tier10 4pc bonus. Don’t forget to keep the basics on your bear form bar, and add a !Maul macro to your primary abilities: Lacerate, Swipe, Mangle, and FFF.

example:
#showtooltip
/cast Mangle
/cast !Maul

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, but wait until the last second – you can still be targeted with special abilities while melded. 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. Always run Omen so you can keep track of your threat, remember that you will take aggro off the tank at 110% 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. Never bother with Ravage, which is a DPS loss and replaces a perfectly good stun.

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 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.

SimulationCraft 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.

If you’re curious about some of the math behind these programs, you can look at the formulas at Elitist Jerks.