Feral Cat Guide to Wrath Raiding

A complete beginner’s guide to raiding as a Feral Cat. Some advanced tips are included for the not-so-beginner reading this. There are no gear suggestions, but some links are available to help with gear choices.

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Talent Spec

Here’s a sample of a feral raiding spec with a kitty focus. Note that a few points have been spent on survival options. Feral Swiftness, Nurturing Instinct, and Improved Leader of the Pack are included to help heal you, help others heal you, or help you avoid damage altogether. While I recommend this build if you are taking a pure DPS raiding role, there are alternatives. If you would like to alter the spec to include more tanking viability, the points in Nurturing Instinct may be moved to Thick Hide, and you may wish to sacrifice on DPS some to pick up Survival Instincts, and Protector of the Pack. Feral Aggression improves in value considerably as gear improves. The higher your crit chance, the more often you will have points to spend on Ferocious Bite, and because greater amounts of Armor Penetration will increase the value of Ferocious Bite damage. Conversely, having more crit and therefore more use of Ferocious Bite also increases the value of Armor Penetration. That said, if you wish to sacrifice the semi-optional self-healing for a small DPS boost, the alternative spec HERE, which I recommend over other Feral Agression specs I have seen, only because I’ve managed to include Swipe, over Feral Charge, which is handy but, in my experience, replaceable with Dash.

Gear & Stats

It is not necessary, or always ideal, to stack hit rating or expertise before the cap. Hit rating is a great stat to have before the cap and useless after it, and can substantially increase the overall value of a gear drop, but hit rating food and gems are almost never optimal for feral DPS.

Agility – your primary dps stat.

Attack Power & Strength – always good to have more of. 1 Str = 2.37864 AP in Cat form. Strength is a good stat for feral druids, however because gear with strength usually does not include agility, in practice it’s not a good stat to look for. What this means is that, in some cases, there will be strength rings/weapons, etc that drop and are a small up for you. Just be aware that while they can sometimes be fair, they will always be a much better choice for strength based DPS.

Armor Pen – At low levels it provides just a small boost, but it scales ridiculously well. Some feral cats will benefit more from Arpen than agility. If in doubt, keep your agility, I’ll try to make a more thorough comparison but for now, other sources will be more useful on deciding when to make the switch. 1232 is the cap for ArPen. There is a soft cap if you have the Grim Toll, at 566 Arpen.

Crit Rating – Provides a moderate boost compared to other stat itemizations.

Hit Rating – Cap 8% or 262.32 HitRating this stat has become less useful than ever for Ferals. It’s not because hit rating is bad per se, but because other stats have overtaken it by so much. It’s slightly more useful than haste, similar to expertise rating, and slightly less useful than crit rating.
Expertise – Cap (dpsing from behind) 6.5% or 170.51 ExpertiseRating (132 with Primal Precision talent)

Haste – Provides a small boost compared to other stat itemizations.

For detailed theorycrafting maths go here

DPS Strategies

Multi-Target

If there are 3 or more targets in a fight, there are 2 potential stategies. Use a mangle to generate a combo point, or two, then Savage Roar. Swipe while Savage Roar is up and refresh as needed. If the targets won’t be alive long enough to do get SR up, use only swipes. Better to Swipe once or twice before everything is dead than to get Savage Roar and not be able to Swipe at all.

Single Target (eg. Bosses)

Theres no specific rotation for kitty, instead it’s a matter of keeping buffs/debuffs up at all times

You have one buff you need to have up: Savage Roar. Then you have 3 debuffs you need to keep up: Rake, Rip and Mangle (you dont have to think about mangle if there’s a bear tank in the group, or an Arms warrior with “Trauma”)

Priority on Cat Abilities:

- Savage Roar (2-3 CP is best, but never let it wear off)
- Mangle
- 5-point Rip
- Rake

Get Faerie Fire up whenever you don’t have enough energy to make a special attack. One trick is to use Faerie Fire while you are running/charging toward the boss, but before you are in range to use anything else. I rather like to hit Feral Charge/FFF once the fight has begun.

Don’t worry about using Ferocious Bite in the beginning, but as your crit chance increases, you may find yourself with extra combo points. If you have a good time left on Rip (as a guess: 15 seconds or more), and Savage Roar has at least 4 seconds left, go ahead and use Ferocious Bite. You can refresh Savage Roar more quickly than a Rip.

Tiger’s Fury talented will return 60 energy, so use it every time it is up to refill your energy bar when you are low. Berserk if you’re confident you will be able to stay in melee for the duration and at times where the DPS really needs to be pushed. Because Berserk decreases the energy cost of your abilities two things hold true: use it during high-energy situations (immediately after Tiger’s Fury for instance) and do not use Ferocious Bite during a Berserk, even if you have 5 CPs. If you do not need Rip or Roar, continue to Shred until Berserk wears off, before using Ferocious Bite.

Glyphs

The best glyphs right now are Glyph of Savage Roar, Glyph of Rip, and Glyph of Shred. This seems to be the consensus, as a way to optimize your combo points. Glyph of Mangle is also good, though generally considered slightly less beneficial than the rest. Glyph of Berserk is one which sounds nice on first glance but is actually a lot less DPS than the alternatives.

Gear

To begin with I am going to direct you to some good resources that compare the stats of your gear. Jacemora frequently discusses new gear so if you’re looking for some discussion of raid gear, I’d recommend checking his blog. Rawr compares gear based on your current stats. Comparing gear based on what stats you have is more accurate, because stats value scales based on what you currently have, but has the downside of potentially misleading you, asin Shoulderpad A is better than Shoulderpad B, but when you get Head C, their relative value will reverse. They are still useful tools and should help making gear choices, but some understanding of the gear and stats is important. The greatest caution should be taken with trinkets, which are hardest to model. Another drawback of Rawr, currently it does not suggest armor penetration when FeralbyNight does. Generally speaking, stack armor penetration instead of agility if you have the grim toll, and 50% or greater crit chance. If you have neither, you definitely should not stack armor penetration. If you have 50% crit chance and you are close to 200 armor penetration already, you might want to consider switching even without the trinket.

There are 2 Idols currently worthy of a look, that can be purchased with emblems. Idol of Shred and Idol of Worship. To begin with, as you are gearing, the Idol of Worship will outperform the Idol of Shred, by a lot. It does require Emblems of Valor, so you will probably be getting the Idol of Shred first. At 230 Arpen, the Idol of Shred will start to out-dps the Idol of Worship. In effect, what this means is that most druids will go from shred, to worship, and then back to shred. Idol of Worship is also useful during fights where you cannot DPS from behind, like Kologarn.

The next patch will introduce yet another idol, with the new Emblems of Triumph. It will be a great multi-purpose idol for tanking and DPSing. This has a dodge and agility proc, and if you are wondering the agility does NOT proc from Mangle(Bear), it only works for cat form. The Idol of Mutilation.

Enchants

Head: Arcanum of Torment – 50 AP, 20 Critrating.
Shoulder: Greater Inscription of the Axe – 40 AP, 15 Critrating.
Back: Major Agility – 22 Agility.
Chest: Powerful Stats – 10 to all stats.
Wrist: Greater Assault – 50 AP.
Hands: Major Agility – 20 Agility.
Leggings: Icescale Leg Armor – 75 AP, 22 Critrating.
Feet: Superior Agility – 16 Agility.
Weapon: Massacre.

My personal feelings on berserk, is that it is a bad idea. While it provides a minor increase in damage truly, the side effect is unpleasant for any of the following:  cats who, given a sudden bursty increase in DPS, are likely to pull aggro. cats who sometimes might attempt to pick up tanking a mob with bear form, if their tank suddenly falls, or a druid who has not yet acquired a decent tanking weapon and tanks with a DPS weapon.

Gems

In most cases, you will be wanting Delicate Scarlet Ruby, if you are ready to stack Arpen, you’ll want Fractured Scarlet Ruby instead. In the rare case that it is worthwhile to keep your bonus, there is also Glinting Monarch Topaz, or Shifting Twilight Opal. That is, Agility + Hit, and Agility + Stam. For your meta-gem, Relentless Earthsiege Diamond is by far superior. If you couple this with an enchanted tear, you will be able to satisfy the yellow and blue requirements, allowing the rest of your sockets to be pure red gems. In almost every case, the socket bonus is not very worthwhile.

Add-ons

All the add-ons listed here are available at Curse.

General & Raid Use

Omen – tracks threat, TPS, and displays threat tables on mobs.
Deadly Boss Mods – provides key information during boss fights, a critical addon for raiding.

RatingsBuster – provides information of what a stat will increase on your gear. Good for all classes.
XPerl – Replaces the default raid display with something a bit more attractive and a lot more configurable. Highly recommended.
ORA2 – provides extra raiding functions and considered a required addon for raiding.

Class Specific
may be useful to other classes than druids, but are much more specific in their audience.

FeralByNight – Suggests which ability to use to optimize your DPS. I just got this one and I was skeptical at first, but after some testing I’m convinced. (In my experience the DPS increase is 200-400) Similar in concept to Face Smasher for death knights.
ToneDeaf - plays sounds, depending on how many combo points you have. Useful theory.
EventAlert - informs you with visual and audio cues when your procs occur. I use this to track my OoC. It supports other classes with proc talents.
Decursive – Every druid (and priest, paladin, shaman or mage) should have this addon. Gives an immediate visual cue when party/raid members are poisoned or cursed, and allows for fast cleansing.
ItemRack – Highly recommended for druids, also useful for any class that plans on keeping more than one gear set. You can also use the new built in gear manager, the primary difference however will be that the add-on provides a built in menu that you can quickly access to swap gear, while the gear manager will require you to find space on your bar for each set. This is really up to personal preference.