Crap, it’s Friday already?

Very busy week for me, so little time to sit down and research/write anything good. Here’s some postlets:

• Guild progression: Collateral Damage successfully downed H Dreamwalker this week and got a second kill on H Festergut (my first), which leaves us at 5/12 for 25M heroic. Ferals are pretty OP for Fester; since such a low percentage of our DPS is autoattacks, malleable goos don’t affect us nearly as much. Me and the other feral in our raid were 1-2 on the DPS chart; unfortunately for me, we were 2-1 for EPGP purposes, so now he’s got Heroic Distant Land. :( (Grats Feans!)
• Heroic progression isn’t nearly as interesting as normal progression, I find. Every time we firstkilled an ICC boss on normal mode, there was a killshot and much rejoicing; on heroic, it’s just kinda eh. We’re basically gearing up for the H LK fight, which doesn’t look fun, at all. Oh well, at least there’s Ruby Sanctum to look forward to.
• Site upgrades: I successfully upgraded the site to WP 3.0 without anything important breaking (yay). I decided to convert my bear guide to BBcode to post on the forums as a test, and it 1) took forever to do and 2) still looks a bit crappy. I think I’m going to give Zel’s suggestion a try with static pages on the blog itself, and put a sticky on the forums with links to the guides.

I’ve previously posted this list, but a few pieces have been added to the loot table, so here it is again with expanded commentary.

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The big prize from RS-25 for feral DPS is the Sharpened Scale trinket. The massive chunk of ArPen makes it superior to any other trinket in the game, save Heroic DBW, and the ability to have two ArPen trinkets (should you be so lucky) will make reaching the ArPen hardcap much easier. Of course, you’ll be rolling against all melee dps classes (except for enh shammies) and hunters, so good luck. Hopefully it will drop more often than DBW has for us.

The Signet ring is pretty nice as well, but the hit/crit itemization drops it in value some. If you don’t have a 264 ring for your second slot and this drops, take it, but otherwise it’s pretty much a sidegrade from Frostbrood Sapphire/H Saurfang’s Cold-Forged.

The Umbrage Armbands are similar; a sidegrade from Toskk’s, a downgrade from H Toskk’s, but better than anything else.

Finally, neck-wise, the  Penumbra Pendant is a strength item, so let your plate DPS have first dibs on it. If you’ve had bad luck on neck drops for some reason, it’s about equal to an ICC-10 neck. (Or you could just buy a Wodin’s, if you have the gold to spare.) For 10-man, Baltharus’s is pretty equivalent to its ilevel; better than a 251, worse than a 264.

For bears, the Petrified Scale tank trinket is very nice as well, but it depends on your personal preference–it’s basically an upgraded Glyph of Indominability, with the same issues. Great mitigation trinket, but no extra HP to swallow burst.  I’d still prefer 2 of Organ/Fang/Key for progression, I think. Come Cataclysm, though, when healer HPS will be more limited, the ability of armor trinkets to reduce DTPS will be much more important. I could see this trinket lasting you until 85, easily. From 10-man, the Gloaming Sark is pretty terrible for feral DPS, but it’s an excellent tanking piece if you don’t have the badges for Shadowseeker’s or the cash for Ikfirus. There’s a strength ring, also, but it’s pretty bad.

With the advent of ICC, Scourgebane became popular as a minmax choice. Unfortunately, it’s useless anywhere else and for certain fights in ICC. Black Magic, though, is very interesting. While its intended as a caster enchant, it still procs off Mangles and Shreds, for some reason. I don’t think this is intended behavior, but it makes it very usable for ferals.

The List

I decided to run the numbers twice; once with my gear, once with BIS gear, to see how the numbers change. (Rawr, as usual.)

Alarron:

1. Scourgebane +132 DPS
2. Berserking +110 DPS
3. Executioner +104 DPS
4. Massacre +104 DPS
5. Mongoose +103 DPS
6. Black Magic +97 DPS

BIS:

1. Scourgebane +144 DPS
2. Black Magic +123 DPS
3. Berserking +116 DPS
4. Massacre +112 DPS
5. Mongoose +99 DPS
6. Executioner: +0 DPS (ArPen capped)

Conclusion

Scourgebane is obviously your best bet, if you purely run ICC. If not, then Berserking is probably your best choice. Mongoose remains a decent option for hybrids, but its not a contender like it once was. (sigh, time to switch enchants.) If you really hate proc effects, for some reason, then Massacre is a good choice as well. The behavior of Black Magic is interesting, but ultimately irrelevant since it does not provide an upgrade over Scourgebane.

Well, I said I wouldn’t rehash my previous thoughts on the new talents…and I was wrong. :) I’ve seen some good writeups from other feral bloggers, and I’ve changed my mind on a few. I’ve linked the new talents to Wowhead, but they’re not in the database yet- check here for the text.

• Improved Feral Charge: Increases your melee haste by 15/30% after you use Feral Charge (Bear) for 8 seconds, and Ravage will temporarly not require stealth for 3/6 seconds after you use Feral Charge (Cat). Moderately useful for bears, mostly a PvP talent for cats.  The extra damage after a charge for bears is very nice to avoid threat pulls; however, GC has previously commented that threat past the few seconds should not be a major issue, so I see this more as a 5-man talent. For cats, this is highly unlikely to be used in a PvE scenario, due to threat. Yes, you could theoretically go Prowl->Feral Charge->Stealthed Ravage->Savage Roar->TF->Unstealthed Ravage for some nice burst, but the mob will then eat your face. Some have speculated on EJ that you could Bear FC and then shift to Cat, keeping the damage buff; I think not only would that be a DPS loss, it’s a misreading of the tooltip.
• Fury Swipes: When you auto-attack while in Cat Form or Bear Form, you have a 4/8/12% chance to gain an extra auto-attack on the same target. This effect cannot occur more than once every 6 seconds. Poor for bears; meh for cats. At the moment, this talent is pretty underpowered, especially for bears. Cats have 60 auto-attacks per minute (before haste); this bumps that up to 64-65ish, which boosts our white damage by 6-8% or so, which increases our overall damage by 3-4%ish (much depends on how much more damage (proportionally) will come from our white damage in Cata; now, it’s only about 35%). Bears only get 24 auto-attacks a minute, though, so so you’re only looking at 2-3 extra attacks a minute for the 3 points, and white attacks have never hit that hard anyway. I’d like to see the 6s CD dropped some; I don’t expect it to be removed entirely due to PvP burst complaints (OMG ferals have windfury QQ), but 3s would be a little better.
• Predatory Strikes (redesigned): Increases the critical strike chance of your Ravage by 25/50% at or above 90% health, and your finishing moves have a 10/20% chance per combo point to make your next Nature spell with a base casting time less than 10 seconds become an instant cast spell. PvP talent. See the Imp. FC discussion above.
• Endless Carnage: Increases the duration of your Rake by 3/6 seconds and your Savage Roar and Pulverize by 3/6 seconds. Exceptionally powerful talent for bears and cats. A 66% increase in Rake’s duration is VERY strong. Rake was already one of our strongest abilities by DPE but was hard to consistently keep up with the 9s duration, since it was prioritized behind Rip/Savage Roar/Glyph of Shred shreds. The duration increase to SR is nothing to sneeze at, either, and will make low-cp SR’s less painful. For bears, longer Pulverize duration means that you should be able to keep Pulverize up nearly 100% (depending on rage) which means more threat and (more importantly) more Savage Defense.
• Primal Madness: Tiger’s Fury and Berserk also increases your maximum energy by 6/12 during its duration, and your Enrage and Berserk abilities instantly generates 0/12 Rage. Situational for bears; poor for cats. Unless something changes dramatically, a good feral DPS never energy caps, so bumping our cap up temporarily doesn’t do anything for us and actually encourages bad habits. Bear-wise, more rage is nice, but it’s stuck behind KOTJ, which isn’t really a great bear talent either. I speculate that they plan to permanently drop the armor debuff from Enrage, or at least make it less painful: why would they keep buffing it otherwise?
• Nom Nom Nom: When you Ferocious Bite a target at or below 25% health, you have a 50/100% chance to instantly refresh the duration of your Rip on the target. Very powerful for cats. First, is there anyone that doesn’t like the name? KEEP NNN BLIZZ! Second, this brings a welcome change to the kitty DPS rotation and brings us more in line with other melee DPS classes who have a stronger(“execute”) attack sub-25%. Anything else will have to wait for actual numbers, but it’s good to see FB being rehabilitated. This may finally make Feral Aggression worth taking for cats (but don’t count on it.)
• Pulverize: Requires Dire Bear Form. Deals 100% weapon damage plus additional 786 damage for each of your Lacerate applications on the target, and increases your melee critical strike chance by 2% for each Lacerate application consumed for 10 seconds. Very powerful for bears. This will drastically shake up the bear single-target rotation, which is good. Since FFF’s cooldown will be greatly reduced, I’d imagine its power will be drastically weakened, taking it out of the general bear rotation. I like the Pulverize-Savage Defense synergy.

Overall, I’m very excited with the direction in which Feral is going right now. Bring on Cata already! :)

I’m sure most of you read wow.com already, but if you don’t, please check out Allison’s latest Shifting Perspectives column on troubleshooting cat DPS. Some excellent advice there (of course, the linkback doesn’t hurt).

My addition:

Failure to energy pool. If all of your buffs/DoTs are up, it’s tempting to spam Shred as soon as you have the energy required. Don’t. Let that energy accumulate up to about 80 or so before firing off that Shred; this gives you a small reserve for when you DON’T want to wait (Rip down and need CP’s, etc.)