How To Feral DPS in Raids

I was going to write a guild management post next, but this has been on my mind, so I'm putting it down. It's probably one of the more important and frequently asked questions, yet its so simple that I can describe it pretty quickly.

As I previously stated in posts, the reason why Druids are so valuable to raids are their ability to mitigate huge amts of melee damage, AND being able to do mid-level dps with just a simple form change (b/c of how awesome our feral tree is). So great, you can tank... a lot of people get experience tanking from tanking heroics and the like. But most feral druids don't get nearly as much opportunity to dps hard, and end up being quite quite poor at it.


Here is the cliffnotes version if you have no desire to read further:
1) Wait until you have 80-100 energy, then mangle ONCE, then Shred until 4-5 combo points. If mangle falls off, and you only have 3 combo points, just shred again, don't worry about reapplying mangle.
2) Wait until you have ~80-90 energy, then Rip, go back to step 1 and mangle-shred-shred again. Do not do any other sorts of special attacks. Rake, Ferocious Bite, extra mangles are a big big no-no. If you wear a trinket such as Bloodlust Brooch, use it right before you rip.



Explanation in Detail
First, lets go into the cat dps mechanics so you can see how this all works together.

1) The Energy Tick Mechanic.
They might change this next patch in 2.2, but currently, your energy ticks every 2 seconds for 20 energy. This energy tick is completely independent of anything you do. This is why despite the fact that you *might* have 100 energy, if you do say a mangle right before the energy tick, you'll find yourself with 80 remaining energy instead of 60 remaining energy. Mods exist to track this energy tick such as Energy Watch v2. This functionality is also built into X-Perl-Unitframes, and I'm assuming also built into a bunch of other UI mods. But if you can't find it, or aren't sure, you can always just install Energy Watch.

(Sidenote: the term "powershifting" takes advantage of this point, coupled with furor. The reasoning behind this is, assuming you used your last tick of energy and are now at 0 energy, and your next tick won't be for 2 seconds, if you shift out, then into cat in that 2 second time frame, you will get the 40 energy, then the 2second will tick immediately and you'll now have 60 energy, instead of just 20... of course, low ping helps here, but either way, GCD is only 1-1.5s, so you have some leeway here, provided you reacted fast).

2) What attack gives you the most bang for buck for your energy?
Obviously, Shred @ only 42 energy is ridiculous. It scales tremendously with your attack power, and has this wonderful wonderful idol called Everbloom Idol which is easy to get, and which you'll use the rest of your druid career (yes, even better than anything that drops past Illidan) b/c its simple the best by far in the game at this point. Mangle doesn't give you nearly the same bang for your buck. The only other move which competes with Shred is Rip, but this is a finisher.

Because of this, you should never ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever use any ability other than Shred and Rip (with 1 mangle to increase the dmg of both).

3) The timing of Rip.
Rip lasts 12 seconds, but doesn't tick until after 2 seconds. So... even if your mangle falls off right after your 4-5th combo point, DON'T SWEAT IT!! As previously mentioned in my cliff-notes summary, after your 4-5th combo point, you should be waiting doing white dmg until your energy is up to 80-90, at which point, you Rip when you know the energy is about to tick over. Then after you rip, you have a 2 second window to apply the mangle before rip even ticks once!! Also, this may or may not be coincidence, but Mangle debuff lasts 12 seconds. Rip debuffs lasts 12 seconds. If you Mangle BEFORE your Rip, your last tick of Rip will not get the Mangle Bonus. If you Mangle AFTER you Rip, your Rip will guarenteed never tick without the Mangle Bonus.

4) Trinket Power.
The great thing about these on-use attack power trinkets such as Bloodlust Brooch, and Crystalforge Trinket is that you can time when you're going to do a big burst (every time you let a rip go), so you can coordinate when to activate the trinket to maximize your burst. Conveniently, Bloodlust Brooch lasts 20s, so if you activate it JUST before your 1st rip, odds are there will be 4-5 seconds left before you're ready to unleash your 2nd rip :>

5) Why Rip at 4-5 combo points? Why not rip when you have exactly 5?
Well, I think many people have already mathematically modelled this and shown that its better off Ripping @ 4 instead of going to 5, but here's a quick explanation (although in nowhere near as convincing as the mathematical explanation). If you have 4 combo points, the odds are that your mangle debuff will have fallen off by the time you do your next shred. Mathematically speaking, the difference in damage between a 4 point rip and a 5 point rip is not that huge. Also, if you crit when you have 4 combo points up, you will lose an extra combo point. In general, its more worth it just to save up energy and start your next mangle/shred/shred/shred/rip rotation. Once you get your gear/critrate up higher, you'll be seeing a lot more 5 point rips than 4 point rips, but your damage should be the same. Remember, if you follow this DPS method, whitedmg/shred will make up 80-85% of your damage. Rip only makes up a 15% component. It is much more ideal to plan for your next Mangle-Shred rotation than it is to obsess over only having 5 combo point rips. If your mangle debuff is still up there and you have time to put in that last shred to get 5 combo points, you can, although honestly, unless you got an extremely happy crit-streak, this will be rare. In general, maybe the better rule of thumb is to simply let your rip go if your mangle debuff is off.

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Anyways, can you see now why if you put steps 1-5 together, this maximizes your DPS? It's really pretty simple, although it might take a couple days of practicing it before it becomes second nature.

Some extra tips:

- Try not to ever cower. 20 energy? Please.... That's almost half a shred. If you feel like you're about to take aggro, simple cool it with your abilities. The only time you should EVER EVER cower is if you're somehow still above your MT on threat, and you have 100 energy banked already, so you're losing energy ticks b/c of your threat situation (honestly, this should be extremely rare.. this means that your white dmg is out threatting your MT...).

- For bleed immune mobs, its still probably not worth it to ferocious bite unless you find yourself with exactly 35->39 energy left, and your mangle is about to fall off. For bleed immune mobs, you basically want to maximize the amt of mangled shreds you can get in. Which means, if mangle falls off, save up 80-90 energy before Mangle then Shred dumping again. If you mangle with 40 energy, you now have to wait 6 seconds before you can do your 1st shred, effectively WASTING half your mangle debuff. This is why you always save your energy before you start with a mangle-shred-shred rotation. This is also why you save this before a rip-mangle-shred rotation :)