Maim, am I missing something?Follow

Energy regeneration, allowing time for your DoTs to tick and/or giving you a good chance to run or heal is just about all Maim does.

That's why its so good. =) If only it didn't require combo points...

Hello.
When I leveled I was feral all the way and had the same problem when I got maim, I still not 100% sure I use it to it's fullest, but I'm pretty certain I got the hang of it.
One thing that confused me about maim, is that it works very similarly to rogues' gouge, it will incapacitate the mob for some time. Rogues use that time to regain energy and backstab/mutilate or to run/keep one mob busy/first aid/stop someone casting. Maim is inferior to gouge in one aspect, it "eats" our combo points while gouge creates them. When I just got the skill, I'd use it for a free shred, as the time to regain energy was enough for one(With shredding attacks). Later on I realized I lost too much damage in the switch from ferocious bite to maim for it to be truly effective, also waiting for ~5 seconds mid combat is highly boring each fight(and probably highly ineffective in the long run) espacially as cat should end a fight in 10-18 seconds(against a normal mob of equal level).
Also we should keep in mind that if you already have 4-5 combo points on a mob, it should be nearly dead, so running, or just keeping it busy is silly, because if you'd use ferocious bite you'll probably kill that one(or rip and move on to next mob).
One use I did find for maim was when I had to emergency heal myself. Maim would give me enough time to shift off+root my enemy and then heal at my own leisure. The other use was to stop an enemy caster while it's casting, as we have no other way to do that in cat form(after a maim I'll go on with a shred first). That's PvE against normal mobs speaking, against elites you'll probably want to use bear form, and I have no clue about PvP. Of course I also assume you are feral specced and geared, and therefore when you have 4-5 combo points a mob should almost be dead.(Not sure how other specs do in cat form).

As for your main tactic to fight, I never did that math for it, and I might be wrong but you say you start the fight by pounce-> feral faerie fire-> mangle-> rake-> mob comes out of stun. Why don't you try pounce-> mangle-> shred-> if omen of clarity proced so far use another shred here-> feral faerie fire-> rake (if you insist, I'm pretty sure it's inferior to mangle, but I might be wrong) -> mob is actually already of of stun on last move. It sounds more complicated, but it's really simple, the idea here is to shred as much as possible. Against most mobs, my mangles were for ~500 and my shreds for ~900(with the idol that gave bonus to mangle's damage, also shreding attacks, brutal impact and savage fury) so for 2 energy points I could "upgrade" a mangle for a shred once a fight at the very least(twice with omen of clarity proc at start of fight). This way worked well for me, I suggest you try it.

I hope I managed to give any information and make life a bit easier.

Well, your build is pretty much what I used for, except I went for omen of clarity(and naturalist) before thick hide, survival of the fittest and nature's grasp while soloing, the former 2 are mostly useful for tanking and the last one is mostly for PvP, I liked the 10% increase in damage on the amazing proc omen of clarity gives me before the other abilities, but that's a matter of preferance I guess.
Anyway, I'm not sure why are you getting a mob only to 40-50% health before you get 5 combo points, are you fighting higher level mobs? Maybe it's normal at this level yet, I really can't remember being at level 62, that was about 6 months ago. Sorry.
Anyway, try the technique I offered you, if you replace a single mangle with shred each fight, you'll be increasing your initial burst by quite alot. Also, rake MIGHT be a waste as you do roughly the same damage from mangle and rake, but mangle can crit for full damage and rake doesn't as the DoT doesn't crit(I may be 100% wrong here).

About your gear, you are now in outlands by the looks of it, and I guess you are doing Hellfire peninsula quests, so maybe you should go for the following:

• http://wow.allakhazam.com/db/item.ht...ource=live
• http://wow.allakhazam.com/db/item.ht...ource=live
• http://wow.allakhazam.com/db/item.ht...ource=live

The first 2 are from quests in there, the last one is from the ramparts.
I'm sorry if the links are broken, or incoherent, that's a first time for me linking gear. Also try to switch your other trinket as well. While smoking heart of the mountain is amazing for tanking, it's not really useful for your cat form. The ring from Blackrock Depth is not the most efficient one for soloing as well in my opinion. Most of your gear is good. Just try to replace the non outlandish ones as they are hindering you.

Again, hope I managed to help a bit, most of my so called knowledge comes from playing my druid at 70 for quite some time, and so I hardly remember my first footsteps into outlands(I didn't get any other character there yet I'm afraid).

If you do that, won't the critter regen?

Man, when I saw this question I figured it'd be one or two very brief accurate answers and done. To pull the good info out from the "rest" here's the most accurate and worthwhile nuggets of info my admittedly not so humble opinion:

Absolutely. Anathor comes through again. Emphasis on the "last possible moment" to get all the DoT damage out of your maim and let you regen most of your energy (assuming a 4-5 point maim, even a 3 point gets you lots of energy back) while you swing around behind them for Shreddage.

Very close. In lengthy threads it's been generally (unanimously?) agreed to that the best opening sequence for feral druids in cat form (because it requires brutal impact and shredding attacks talents) is this:
Pounce -> Faerie Fire -> Mangle -> Shred, with another Shred squeezed in at the last second if OOC procs. With 3 CP-generating attacks in the opening and a 30% crit rate that OOC a very common/reliable occurence in my experience.

This is a fantastic use of maim, especially when you're fighting two mobs. It allows you to start burning down the second mob without taking hits from the first one that you've put on the fast track to the afterlife. In my experience it works about about 15-20% of mob health depending on how much health they HAVE of course, but Maim does opening damage that can crit so sometimes it'll work even if they're at 25-30%.

I played with using Maim while doing some of the Netherwing quests in the mines a few weeks ago. I used the Pounce, Mangle, Shred, (Shred), Maim.. then got behind the mob for another shred just before the maim expired.

It worked well and I took very little damage, but in the end I decided it was (seemed?) faster to just FB or Rip them and keep attacking. I took a bit more damage but not spending that 4-5 secs every mob waiting for Maim to tick down, meant I had plenty of spare time to pop out for a heal every 3-4 mobs.

I like Maim, but find it a frustrating skill to use. Whenever I want to use it, I have either no combo points, no energy or it is on cool down :/

To use it effectively, I seem to have to drop my DPS and try to make sure I always have the energy available. I wish it was more like gouge and wasn't a finishing move.

i usually pounce, mangle, rake, at 3 combo points i rip, re-rake, re-mangle, then usually they're dead before i can do anything else

-- i have also been playing my druid off and on and just hit 64 with him --

after asking a ton of advice from some friends of mine and the general "best" feral druids of our server, the only consistent advice they gave me is to keep rip and bite up all the time unless they have ~500 or less hp, where you do that ... erm... other thing [my memory is shot to hell right now :/] the direct damage one, like a rogues eviscerate? -- i think its ferocious bite but i'm not 100%

my downtime is none... yet again my gear (i am told) is pretty solid for solo cat dps [although i slightly disagree hehe], also rejuv ftw :D

armory -- http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Dunemaul&n=Jeffreh if you care to look



Edited, Aug 30th 2007 1:15am by russki

Not all the good eq comes from Outland, and the Smoking Heart is a good example of a trinket you might not replace before some time (it still gives very good armor). Similarly a few items like Idol of Brutality are still used at endgame...



Ok first of all please let me dispell the first source of confusion: the AP you see on your staff is more commonly known as Feral Attack Power (FAP). It behaves exactly in the same way as regular AP (as long as you are in a feral form) and was introduced by Blizzard to ensure (as much as possible) scalability of feral druids. I'm not going to go into the specifics of that right now but the bottom line is that FAP is good. So you were definitely on the right track there.

Now to clarify what I meant by my comment: stats (agi, str) are better for a feral druid than ratings (crit, dodge, AP).

In feral form 1 agi gives you 0.068% dodge and 0.04% crit (and 1 AP in cat form). In comparison (at lvl 70) 1 crit rating 0.045% crit (and that's all), and 1 dodge rating gives you 0.053% dodge.

So in bear form 1 agi is still better than 1 dodge. And in cat form the crit from agi is a bit lower, but you get 1 AP and some dodge too. So basically agi is better than crit rating or dodge rating.

Re: strength, 1 str is worth 2 AP in bear, 2.4 AP in cat (thanks to HotW).

Let's take for example this item: Ranger Pauldrons and let's focus in particular on the "of the Bandit" and "of the Beast" versions. They are very comparable, the only difference is that one gives you +35 AP and the other 17 str. In bear form 17 str is 34 AP (even a bit more with SotF) so the items are roughly interchangeable for a bear. However for a cat 17 str becomes 41 AP, quite an upgrade on the straight AP item. Now let's imagine a theoretical item with same stat distribution but one has 17 str and 35 AP, and the other has 17 str and 17 agi. As we have seen in cat form 17 agi is 17 AP. So the gap is only 18 AP between the two items. But 17 agi is also worth 0.68% crit, and some dodge. Even without taking the dodge aspect into account, 0.68% crit is much better than 18 AP (0.68% crit is going, more or less, to increase your dps by 0.68%, and 18 AP = 1.28 dps, so the crit is better if your dps is more than 188, which is most certainly the case at your level)

And if you're interested only in pure dps (no sta) then the +22 agi/+22 str version is by far the best for a cat.

EDIT: just to conlude quickly, if you see an item with crit rating and hit rating on it, it's an item designed for rogues, with str/agi/sta is designed for feral druids. It doesn't mean that we can't benefit from the rogue item, or that the rogue item won't be better than some specific feral druid item, it will just mean that with the same "item cost" we could have had an item much better suited to our needs.

Edited, Aug 30th 2007 9:54am by anathor

Edited, Aug 30th 2007 9:56am by anathor

All druids should absolutely know all of this, but as with most of the math you learn in school it's equally important to later in life buy a calculator. : )

The calculator in this case is a fantastic addon called "DruidStats" that distills all this googlymooglymath down so that when you bring up an item's info it automatically shows what those stats mean to you as a druid in terms of armor (which benefits from agility), HP, AP (which benefits from +ap, +str and even +agi in cat), crit% (affected by +crit and +agility), dodge, etc. It even takes into account your current form and relevant talents. It's invaluable for quickly seeing an apples-to-apples comparison of items with multiple conflicting or complimentary (which both equal "confusing") stats. Easily my second favorite and most important add-on after Outfitter.

http://wow.curse.com/downloads/details/7351/


Edited, Aug 30th 2007 10:13am by JeeBar

ok about opening attacks, where does tigers fury figure in? I've used the Pounce -> Faerie Fire -> Mangle -> Shred, but i tiger's fury right after the faerie fir, waste of time?

any specific reason to use pounce over ravage?
i always used ravage, as it can crit incredible hard >.>

guess i should look in pounce a bit more *blush*

Ravage is still good for bleed immune mobs (elementals, mostly). I'd rather smack em hard than stun for a few secs if I can't get the bleed.

I have a lvl 65 druid that is now my main and I am still using the trinket from Mara that when it procs it gives +25 to all stats and it does proc all the time, so that adds up to some nice ap and dam.