The Fluid DruidShapeshifting With Style.

Received a few email questions about how to maximize DPS on Burning Tendons (20 second DPS burn), so here’s a quick FAQ. (Also see the thread on the forums about it, which has several great contributions. Most of this blog post is ripping off Stenhaldi’s thoughts on the subject.)

Glyphs: Rip, Savage Roar, Bloodletting. (Tendon’s not up for enough time for Berserk glyph, TF glyph doesn’t help and desyncs trinkets.)

Trinkets: Slot 1) A good on-use trinket. Kiroptyric Sigil is best option, but a PvP clicky or even Ancient Petrified Seed can work. Slot 2) Wrath of Unchaining, preferably, if not, whatever else you have. Don’t use two on-use trinkets, as the second one will not be usable until the buff from the first drops.  (and yes, this means engineering is somewhat penalized since they won’t get any benefit from Synapse Springs.)

Reforging: Cap hit, then either haste or crit, which appear to be roughly equal. Mastery is significantly worse. (edit: do NOT reforge for expertise, thanks Reesi)

Pre-Tendon: Get a Savage Roar and Stampede up off a corruption or blood.

Rotation: (Mangle), (FF), Trinket/Rake, Ravage!, Shred, TF/Trinket/Berserk/Rip.  (You can waste some TF energy here if necessary.) Continue with Shred/FB, make sure you get a Ravage! in. Using Rake a 2nd time is probably not worth it, but pretty close DPS-wise if you get it in during TF.  Final GCD should be an FB, but only if you have 5 CP’s, otherwise just Shred. Potion, obviously, though this is probably coordinated by your RL. If you have a 20s proc trinket, pop it at the beginning instead of with TF.

Is FF worth it in 10m if I’m the only melee DPS? Yes, but the difference is fairly small.

Rip? Really? Yes, assuming you get it up in time. 1 FB = ~3.5 Rip ticks on average. So, even if you’re slow starting, still use Rip unless there’s less than 9s remaining when you get to 5 cps.

Think that about covers everything; feel free to ask a question or share your experiences in the comments.

On Friday night, I finally achieved two solo kills that I’ve been trying to get since Cataclysm released. Admittedly, it’s not quite the achievement it would have been had it been done in 359 gear, but both were still challenging and fun, and I highly recommend it to those looking for something different to do in-game. (Also check out Braindwen’s awesome feral soloing guide. He rates both of these kills as “medium;” well, KT took me several hours, so either I suck or he’s godly.)

Strats:

Kael’thas

Prepwork: Make two macros and drag them to your bars.

/equip Staff of Disintegration
/use Staff of Disintegration

/equip Cosmic Infuser
/cast Rejuvenation (or Lifebloom if you prefer).

Clear trash in entry hallway and Al’ar’s (man that looks odd) room. Kill Al’ar (easy). If you want to kill Solarian or Void Reaver, do so now; they’re both easy, though you’ll have to clear all the trash in their rooms first. Clear the trash in one of the tunnels leading to KT (both is slightly safer but not necessary.) Kill the trash in his room if you wish. Pull KT, who will start monologuing. Run to one of the little antechambers leading to KT’s room; you’ve got about 45 seconds before the energy walls go back up and block entrance to the room.

Phase 1: Kill Thaladred and Sanguinar in the antechamber. Run to the doorway of the antechamber, enough so that Capernian runs out, then charge in and kill her. She’s quite annoying, with a long stun and a knockback, but she’ll die quickly if you can get close. Get to her sides, so the knockback doesn’t send you down the hallway. For Telonicus, work him down to 20-30% HP, run around dodging bombs until your Remote Toy debuff is at less than 15 seconds, than kill him, preferably on top of all the other advisors.

Phase 2: All the weapons spawn. You’ll have a few seconds to heal up before they get to you; tuck into the corner of the antechamber so they all come in, pop Barkskin, and start kitty swiping. Target the Cosmic Infuser and interrupt his heals. After 4-5 swipes, go bear, hit Enrage, and continue to AOE. With a little practice, you should be able to kill all the weapons with 30s left until Phase 3. Loot the Cosmic Infuser and Staff of Disintegration. Hit your macros to equip the Cosmic Infuser, cast a heal (to get the buff), then equip and use the Staff. Go bear.

Phase 3: All the advisors rez simultaneously. This is the first tricky bit. Wait until you get out of Sanguinar’s first fear, then pop Berserk and nuke down Thaladred, chaining Mangles to Sanguinar and Telonicus (hopefully). You’ll want to save Barkskin and SI for when he’s close to dead, as the stacking DoT from Rend is the biggest source of incoming damage. This will take 30s, as the DPS from the Staff of Disintegration is pretty low, but you need it equipped for the buff. Once Thaladred and Sanguinar are dead, go cat to take out Telonicus and finally Capernian. At any point, if you get low on health, start running down towards Al’ar’s room, hotting yourself up as you go. Once Telonicus is dead, you can outheal Capernian’s damage, so I usually heal to full and wait to kill her until Phase 4 is starting.

Phase 4: KT comes after you. If you are in Al’ar’s room and you’ve only cleared one corridor, make SURE you position yourself so KT runs down the cleared corridor, else he’ll aggro every mob on the way. Try to hit your Macro 2 twice and Macro 1 twice every 30 seconds; this keeps the magic damage protection buff up, which really helps for the fireballs, as well as the staff buff, which you need to not get disoriented. KT has three main threats:

• Casts Fireball every 8-10 seconds. Interrupt as many of these as you can, as they hit for a good 15-20% of your HP. If you get low on HP and need to heal, either run away and HoT (easier) or LOS casts using a doorway (harder). Don’t run away if his Shock Barrier CD is close.
• Casts Shock Barrier, then three Pyroblasts. These can NOT be LOS’ed/outranged, so you’ll need to be close by. If you have Rip/Rake up, you can typically break the shield and interrupt before he gets one Pyro off; if unlucky, you may have to eat one. Pop a CD.
• Casts Flame Strike, which is a void zone on the ground, Just stay out of them, as they can hit for a lot.
• Phoenixes will come in, then turn into eggs at 0% HP, then turn back into Phoenixes after 15s Can mostly be ignored; if you want to kill, note that they can only be killed as an egg.

Pop Berserk and work him down. Play defensively; I used every Predatory Swiftness proc for instant HT’s, and ran away to HoT immediately after Shock Barrier phases if I felt threatened. Once you work him to 50%, he will take off and run back towards his room. He is still attackable, but slightly faster than you; if you use Dash and SR to keep up with him, you can knock a significant chunk of HP off him, but it’s not necessary.

Phase 5: go back to Al’ar’s room. Wait (kill any Phoenixes that are up). You’ll get hit with some stuff; don’t worry, just heal through it and wait. Eventually, he’ll teleport you to him. At this point, you can just kill him, but I like to run back to the main room to get some space; this time, he’ll follow you, and you can work him down like you did in P4. Still casts Fireball and Flame Strike, but no more Pyroblasts, so he should be easy to finish off once you get him here.

Reward: 300g, the T5 chest (if you want it for transmog) and a 1-2% chance at the Ashes of Al’ar.

High King Maulgar

Much simpler, mostly a gearcheck. Start in cat, pop a potion, Berserk/SI/Barkskin, and nuke down Blindeye, interrupting heals. Once Blindeye is dead, kill Olm so he stops fearing you. When you get low on HP, go bear and use FR to heal, then finish off Krosh, Kiggler, and finally Maulgar. The tough part is interrupting Blindeye’s heals, since they’re usually synced with a fear; you’ll win or lose the fight in the first 30 seconds.

Reward: 50g (I think) and T4 shoulders, plus you get to kill Gruul, who is very easy.

With that, I’m done with BC. Sunwell’s too difficult, and I’ve cleared everything else save Vashj in SSC (which requires ranged) or everything past Reliquary (no pet to take aggro and let you LoS) in BT. Time to start working on WOTLK content; here’s a little screenshot of a solo I did a while ago while I was playing in Iraq and was inordinately proud of:

First, a quick reminder. Haste’s value comes from two things: it boosts the amount of damage you do from your white attacks (because you get MORE…duh) and it increases the amount of energy you have, both passively (via small increases to energy regen rate) and actively via additional Omen procs.

Sounds good, right? Well, there’s a few problems with that.

Haste is useless if you’re not attacking something. Again, common sense, but it bears repeating. If you have to move off-target, your mastery/crit continues to affect your bleed ticks, while your haste just sits there.

Haste is terrible for bears. May not be an issue, but if you plan on bearcatting, then you want something that can affect Savage Defense, which means mastery. (Crit used to be nice, but is now devalued in bear due to the 2pT13 set bonus.)

Extra energy regeneration increases rotational difficulty. Ah, here’s the most important one. The cat rotation is very dynamic; you’ll have times where NOTHING is up, and you have to quickly execute your priorities to get everything going. You’ll have times where you need to dump energy ASAP to use Tiger’s Fury optimally. On the flipside, you’ll have times where you’re sitting around waiting for energy to regen.

The issue? Well, as haste increases, you have more #1 and #2 situations, and less #3. In these situations, fractional time matters. (What do I mean by this? Well, if you’re just waiting for energy to regen, you can use that Shred at 60 or 80 energy, it’s not really a big deal. If you’re trying to start or restart bleeds, each bit of delay starts to take away from uptime and thus damage.)  This is where in-game reality starts to diverge from simulations; Mew doesn’t have to deal with raid mechanics, crazy raid leaders, or out–of-game interruptions; all of which will end up causing you to spend more time at energy cap, which also makes haste less than useful. Ultraxion is a good example of this; relying on Mangle instead of Shred requires a few more keypresses, since Mangle uses less energy.

So, what am I saying? Yes, in sim theory, all the stats are roughly equal. In actuality, though, the priorities that make it easier to play perfectly, such as capping hit and expertise, and minimizing haste, will increase your DPS the most. What do you think?

I know, I know, LFR, big fish, little pond, etc. etc., but topping meters on Ultraxion (the fight biased against ferals) makes me smile. (No flask or pot either.) Man, I miss raiding.

Of course, this group also managed to wipe on Spine when we somehow triggered a barrel roll killing the third amalgamation, so…perhaps not the best representative sampling.

Okay, I give, I give. I don’t like posting things before they’re done, but I’ve gotten several requests for a gear list, so here you go:

The Draft 4.3 Gear List

The full version (with better explanations and text) will be going up on WoW Insider sometime next week (when I finish it), but this is a good starting point. Feel free to leave any comments here; I’ll try to respond quickly, but no guarantees as things are crazy around here with packing.

(Wowhead’s list is good as well. If I had known they were doing one, I probably would have skipped doing one myself. Also, here’s my Firelands/ZA gear list, if you’re just getting started.)

It’s official: I’m leaving the Middle East in a week, and heading home.

I apologize for the lack of blogs lately; as more and more people have stacked up here in preparation to depart, the civilian wireless network has gone from bad to horrendous. (You’re only reading this now because I’ve prewritten it and gotten up early in the morning to log in and publish it.) It’s been all I could do to keep my columns going for WoW Insider, and I’ve only been able to keep those up because their blogging software doesn’t get filtered by the work firewall. *cough* Of course, my laptop recently died as well, which didn’t help matters any.

Anyway, enough complaining. I’ll be going dark for the rest of December, as I have a lot of catching up to do with my wife and son. Come January, however, I have a lot of changes in store; thinking a blog style refresh and update is long overdue. Couple people have asked me for Fluid Druid shirts, too, so hell, I’ll see what I can do. Anything else you want to see, feel free to ask in the comments!

Hey cats n’ kittens I know it has been all too long since you’ve last heard from me; however, thinking back on all the times Deathwing has cooked me while afk in Twilight Highlands I knew I was going to have to come back for my chance to finally kill that dragon.

As always Fluiddruid is all about making sure you have all the information needed to succeed in the new-raid zone. With that being said the Raid and Strategy section of our forums will be updated to include the new encounters over the turkey weekend. For those of you who have not been sniffing around the official forums Tangedyn wrote up a very clean summery of everything you will need to know to stay competitive in Dragon Soul, for those who have not read it I highly suggest taking a quick peak here. Included in the post are trinket ratings for Dragon Soul that have already been evaluated by Yawning and Mihir (the druid responsible for maintaining the feral dps guide on MMO-Champion.)

With 4.3 I do hope to bring back The FluidDruid YouTube Chan, however; I did come back in a much more casual raiding guild then before with 9 hours per week I promise to get content out as fast as we’re capable of creating strats for it. I did want to make special mention that if you have videos of yourself doing exceptional on a boss in Dragon Soul and wish to add it to this site’s channel feel free to PM me on the forums. I’d love to get other people then just myself up on the channel and I think with me progressing much slower in 4.3 this opens up a prime opportunity to get more video content out. Who knows maybe I could do a month by month contest where the feral who submits the best video for me to release gets a Blizzard Store pet of their choice, wink wink.

Lastly I do wish to make mention of the FluidDruid Forums where we have been and will continue to discuss all aspects of feral dps. With the release of the MOP Talent Calculator we are already locked in discussion on what the changes to the tooltips mean for both single target and aoe dps.

As always if you have any questions or suggestion feel free to PM me on the forums

Until next time and my hopes for a Happy Thanksgiving to all,

Qbear

So, since my last post and now, the desert sand has manged to render my laptop fan inoperable. Glorious. This means for any personal-type stuff, I get to walk across base to the Internet cafe…which is always packed. Yay. Almost the end of the year.

Okay, enough bitching. Wanted to highlight some nifty feral-type posts I’ve seen recently:

• My last Shifting Perspectives column on the hybridization debate sparked some excellent posts in the comments, with very little trolling and other tomfoolery. It’s really all speculation until they decide to reveal what the new “Symbiosis” ability will do, but it’s a good read.
• The wonderful folks with the Team Waffle podcast has released a feral cat roundtable. Three hours from some of the best of the business. (I’d like to listen…anyone want to mail me a CD? :P)
• Reygahnci has returned from his posting hiatus with some excellent thoughts on the new talents and possibilities for feral PvP.
• Kalon at ThinkTank also poked his head up for the first time in a while (grats on the new baby!) with, as always, some well-written thoughts on the new talents.
• Tangedyn at TIB threw out a quick cheat-sheet on changes you’ll need to make when the patch drops in his 4.3 survival guide. I will be featuring this in a future SP column.

As always, if anyone’s reading any great new feral blogs, I’d love to check them out; just drop a comment here (gets auto-forwarded to my email, may not be able to reply though).  I still have Gmail and GReader at work, so I can function. :) (Also, WTF is up with the new GReader design? Ugh.)

Feral, 4P — Frenzied Regeneration also affects all raid and party members. This effect cannot be triggered if you have been in Bear Form for less than 15 sec. In addition, using Tiger’s Fury will cause your next Ravage to cost no energy, not require stealth, and have no positioning requirement for 10 sec.

Well, so much for the free Rallying Cry. A bit of a kneejerk change; I think this is a reaction to the claims that people would “stack ferals,” yet you didn’t really see people stacking DPS warriors in 4.2, did you?
The tweak to Ravage, though, is MUCH more interesting. Apparently, they got some good feedback that FC->Ravage was one of the fun parts of the class, and want to build on that. I agree; this is an nifty and dynamic way to do it which also bumps the skill cap a bit. (Don’t want to use Ravage immediately after TF since you’ll presumably be close to energy cap, but you want to use it before the DPS increase from TF runs out…)

It definitely increases burst damage, though. I’ll let someone more skilled in feral PvP discuss the implications there, but I know there were already complaints about feral burst.

Site updates have been slow, literally. (See below for what a typical night, connection-wise, looks like.)

I’ll be updating my gear guide when we get more definitive loot tables. In the meantime, check out Antony’s list on Eao’s Excursions for a breakdown of feral loot from the 5-mans. I’ve also been semi-promoted from a guest columnist to a full columnist at WoW Insider, so you’ll see a bit more of my writing there. Fear not: I still plan to make this the one-stop feral shop for 4.3, when it gets here.

(Three months left in my deployment yaaay)

WoW Insider’s got the full list of set bonuses: I’ve replicated the feral ones below.

• Feral, 2P — While Berserk is active, Savage Defense absorbs are 100% larger, and your Blood in the Water talent now causes Ferocious Bite to refresh the duration of your Rip on targets with 60% or less health.
• Feral, 4P — Frenzied Regeneration also affects all raid and party members, and your Stampede talent now grants two charges after using Feral Charge (Cat).