When I'm recruiting Druids these days, I don't think a lot of them completely understand my point of the last post. I mean, its great and all that you have, say, 30k armor, 40% dodge in bear, and that you've tanked lots and lots of things, but for the most part, that's not what makes you truly valuable to a raid. Yes, being able to tank things is great, but practically speaking, a Druid makes for a lousy main tank in most situations. Bosses either end up fearing in which case Druids have poor fear mitigation, or bosses go through some burst phases where Druids have very little to cope with that (say, a fear and you take a big burst, and you know your healing will be out of commission a while) compared to a Warrior who can Last Stand, Shield Wall, etc.
Overall speaking, a druid's main form of damage mitigation is through his armor, and honestly speaking, armor caps out, whereas a warrior's mitigation will never cap out. They can always get more armor, more parry, more block, more dodge, etc. And from an itemization stand point, you have far more to gain when the itemstats are spread amongst multiple stats than if they're only in agi, or only in armor.
So what do I mean? I'm trying to emphasize the fact that a druid's best role is to tank when needed, then to DPS when needed. DPS is a very very important part of the druid arsenal, which I feel like many feral druids fail to emphasize or understand the importance of.
DPS is ultimately the best way for a raid to control a fight. This might not be completely apparent at first, and might even seem a little unintuitive, but bare with me here. DPS allows you to control the pacing of the fight. With almost 40% of all boss fights involving some sort of add control, high dps allows you to kill the adds faster instead of having to worry about tank-controlling them for prolonged periods of time. The very best examples of this are what most people consider the ultimate "PvE Walls" that exist today, Gruul, Magtheridon, Vashj and Kaelthas. In Gruul, high dps results in less out of control growths, which leads to an easier time and less really unfriendly wipes. High DPS on Magtheridon allows you to get past the channelers, which everyone will agree is the hardest part of the fight. Killing the channelers fast allows you to get to the boss fight much more cleanly with more people up (also reduces the time that infernals are around to kill your raid). On Vashj, Phase 2 DPS control is obviously the overriding factor on whether or not you kill Vashj, or wipe to her repeatedly. On Kaelthas, well, if you can kill all the adds on time, you can kill Kael no problem... but killing those adds on time is a very very difficult task :)
Ok... so why the lecture on DPS? Because as a Druid, your greatest strength is your ability to tank, then DPS. Bring you instead of bringing another prot warrior is basically giving your raid an extra-DPSer that you didn't have before!!! I don't think many druids emphasize this portion of their repetoire. They focus so much on tanking, when it comes time to DPS, they barely outperform the prot-warrior they were meant to replace. So I'm going to lecture a little on cat dps here.
GEAR
Does this mean you have to roll on rogue loot? In many cases yes... but here are some resources to help you along with that task...
Emmerald, a mildly famous Druid now in Druid circles, publishes a pretty comprehensive Druid gear ranking list for DPS purposes. While I don't necessarily agree completely with the formula used to create this list, as a general rule of thumb, it is pretty good at ranking all the items. Ok.. so you have a gearlist, so what? Well, you'll find that you won't necessarily be directly competing with rogues on every item. Compare Emmerald's list with a famous rogue DPS gear list, like ShadowPanther.
Emmerald's Cat Sustained DPS Gear List
ShadowPanther's Rogue Gear Rankings
You'll find that while there is some overlap, you can probably convince your rogues friends to pass on an item to you if there is another item in the same instance that is much better for them.
Tier 4
Another thing that some druids might not know is about how overpowered our Druid T4 feral set is. I'm talking about the 2pc bonus which allows a 4% chance to gain 20 energy. This is HUGE. Theorycraft speaking wise, I think it results in around a 10-20% dps bonus.... It's so huge that even if you had access to every item in the game, you would still fit the T4 helm and shoulders into your DPS set b/c the bonus outweighs everything.
Stat Balance
I think this is something that most druids always ask about. The simple answer is, AGILITY AGILITY AGILITY. This the #1 tanking stat in the game (thanks to a ridiculously overpowered agi divider for us druids that gives us 1% dodge per 14.7 agility!!). An example of why even for tanking, agility is overpowered:
8 dodge rating gem (Subtle Living Ruby) gives you a 0.423% dodge chance. An 8 agility gem in contrast (Delicate Living Ruby) gives you .544% dodge chance. And not only that, agility gives you additional crit, and attack power while in cat!! It's a no brainer!!!
But I'm not talking about tank itemization here, I'm focusing on DPS... why is this the best DPS stat? Well, the most frequently asked question is, how do you balance strength and agility? Well, you can't design your own items, so you'll just have to look at a stat-comparing page, like Emmerald's gear list as mentioned earlier depending on what drops, but the thing you can control is sockets. Strength or Agility? Well, the answer is actually a little complicated, and it depends on your current attack statistics, but here is a graph a very smart Druid (of whose name I can't find) made, but it was based on formulas by Lolaan:
Actually.. here's a more accurate one from Tangedyn:
But waaaaaaah... how the heck can I get 3000 ap? Well, honestly, its not as far away as you think!!! You'll find that if you can get blessing of kings and blessing of might, mark of the wild, ap food buff, flask, you're well on your way to 3000 ap, if you're not there already... And if you're at 3000 ap, you're pretty much in the agi>str zone guarenteed. So not only is this the better DPS stat, you'll find that it's still insanely useful if you have to switch between cat and bear without the opportunity for a gear change. Agility is most definitely your friend!
Anyways, this post is getting a little long-winded, but I hope its a least somewhat informative. I want you feral druids out there to understand the equal important of DPS. I'll get into the finer details of druid dps rotations, power shifting, addons to assist on dps, etc in a later post.
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