Cat DPS cycleFollow

So you can rip (30 energy) then immediately mangle (40 energy) that way you get the full benefit of the increased mangle bleed for the duration of your rip.

I am a new druid, see my other thread about my journey if you must.

About cat DPS

I have read that pounce-mangle-shred-shred is used for openers.

However, I solo quest/grind and I find that I can, at most

Pounce-Shred-Mangle (usually by the time I get mangle off, the mob isn't dazed anymore)

Is there a better way to dps or just go

Pounce-shred-mangle-mangle-mangle-ferocious bite?


Haksu
Fenris Realm

Which is better?

mangle for your 4th combo point --> rip...
vs.
shred for your 4th combo point --> wait for energy --> rip, mangle...


To the poster above,

This is wrong:


Pounce, mangle, shred is the standard opening sequence and should be manageable in any circumstance assuming you start at full energy. If Omen of Clarity procs, you should be able to fit a second shred right before pounce stun wears off.

Good luck,
-B

AFAIK (I'm not raiding), Rake is useless for anything that doesn't involve keeping Rogues from stealthing and wearing down Protection Warriors and Paladins. The damage to energy ratio just doesn't cut it compared to a Mangle or Shred.

Spinningheel, pounce-mangle-shred-shred is possible when soloing only with the resto talent Omen of Clarity, which occasionally procs to give you a free attack. If it proces on the opening pounce (or it procced on killing blow of previous mob) and you time things perfectly, you will have just enough energy to cram in another shred in before the mob unstuns. At that point the mob will have at least 4 combo points on it and, assuming it's not elite, will be pretty close to dead.

If OOC doesnt proc you generally only get pounce-mangle-shred before the mob attacks.

Keeping the mangle debuff up IS the golden rule and has nothing to do with personal preference.



Personally I used to Pounce, Shred x2, then Rip & Mangle when out by myself, because usually mobs were like half dead by the time they got out of the Pounce stun since the extra Shred takes yet another huge chunk out of their health bar.

Oh well.. I'm a freaking tree now and can't hurt anything anymore...

If you Mangle for the 4th CP, the mangle debuff will expire before the last Rip tick. Rake is worthless in PvE. With good hit rating and decent (33%+) crit, you need 2 Shreds to hit 4/5 CP (Since you start with Mangle right after rip), so 84 energy. Youshould get at 5 ticks between Mangle and Rip wearing off. That's 100 energy, so every third cycle with no OOC procs/power shifts/2t4, you'll get an extra Shred in.

Your bark is worse than your bite?

Eh? *nudge* Eh?

I love that comic.

Torzak, I use Pounce almost always. I don't have Brutal Impact so the stun duration wears off pretty quick, but with a 33% crit chance self-buffed in my PvP gear (I'm always wearing PvP gear while doing quests due to lurking enemies) and 9.7k health, my Improved Leader of the Pack, coupled with an enemy that doesn't hit me, means I can keep going forever. I actually regenerate more health than I lose when fighting normal mobs of my own level.

I should probably have mentioned that without the Pounce opener, I'll lose more health than I regenerate, simply because I don't get those few moments of no incoming damage and 33% chance on hit to regen 500+ health.

Edit: At 100 energy and some button mashing, I can actually get in a Mangle and two Shreds before the stun ends. Despite not having the improved version.

Edited, May 7th 2008 11:30pm by Mazra

I disagree /shrug



I generally don't use ravage... because that "also" means prowl.

I use FFF, meet target half way, and mow it down from there with some exceptions depending if the opponent is a caster that won't meet half way.

And I rarely get hit 3 times before most opponent's LV68'ish are dead. In fact I got hit 5 times total between 3 seperate targets that I didn't pounce in the video I will link below.

In the video I start with two attempts at prowl >> pounce >> mangle >> shred. And 3 attempts, though one was accidental, of just kill it without bothering with prowling.

Something to note is that my pounce macro is a castsequence/reset macro including Tiger's Fury and Pounce (and even rake if I'm not prowling, but that's niether here nor there). So for the video I was stuck using Tiger's Fury and that added some varying amount of additional wait time (waiting on energy to tick some) before actually starting the prowl fights.

That said, you can note that I was waiting on a cooldown timer for prowl (I moved the mouse over prowl's icon in my action bar to show the omnicc timer counting down still. You can see the big "Prowl Ready Now" toward the top of the screen once it was ready; prowl is bound despite what may look otherwise from the video) before I could move to the 2nd opponent. And then when moving to the 3rd opponent, I again, was waiting for a cool down on prowl but inched too close to the 3rd opponent and ended up aggroing it. I thought, "meh" and just burned it down with no real regards for how, didn't even FFF it.

Moving to the 4th target I FFF'd, met half way ish, and burned it down, looted, and moved to the 5th target. Same more or less for the 5th target.

On the two targets I prowled/pounced I was hit zero times. While that may sound great, I feel that the pounce's bleed effect went nearly entirely wasted. As did Leader Of The Pack since I took zero damage and had nothing for it to recover for me. Maybe it's a bonus to not have a repair bill, you know... not getting hit and all, but unless you flat out die and take a 10% durability reduction, I don't think that's a big deal. Definitely not a deal to me to say the least.

I took a total of 5hits from the 3 targets that didn't get pounced. Leader of the Pack makes up for that by a long shot.

A Lv70 resto druid I've recently been able to convert to feral sometimes for solo purposes is loving the survivability and loves rarely having to come out of cat to heal since LotP does most of the work. I even asked her about speccing into Nuturing for an improved heal for LotP and I got an answer something like "it's not needed lol" and she's in some fairly nub'ish dps leathers (fel feet, stylin' purple hat, blue 70legs, a shadow prowler's I made her, the stam trinket from UB's last boss, a healing trinket (she has no dps trinkets and only uses the swift flight quest's idol), some dps shoulders out of kara, and a few other blues/kara purples) and this was in regards to the same targets in the video (Lv67s)

I don't see the point of pouncing unless you need the edge against the target. I just don't see it as being as effecient in terms of kills/hour.

Maybe in some situations, gear depending, level depending, mob type depending, and as I above said previously in my first post in this thread, "Not saying it's never worth using".

Anyway, I will leave it at that. Just my opinion on the whole solo dps deal. Different preferences will I'm sure be largely based on a lot of variables.

http://files.filefront.com/Moviewmv/;10152887;/fileinfo.html
**** Quality if you stream it as full screen. I downloaded it from filefront and watched the downloaded version and it turned out half decently watching it full screen in both windows media player and nero show time4 /shrug.

My 2 cents on the solo/prowl issue: if the mobs are hard, I prowl. If I'm just farming, I usually don't bother. Even without prowling there's no downtime in solo PVE. Just regrowth or rejuv every few fights as needed. I'd kill the stuff faster if I'd prowl, but it FEELS faster to just run around and not bother with positioning, and on easy mobs I can afford to be lazy, except if I overpull or some elite thingie walks up behind me, and then I'm all, "Well, that's what you get for being lazy," but of course it doesn't really matter because I'm a druid and I can't be killed.

My gear is, like, the worst gear ever, and I don't have downtime. I don't get how you consider healing yourself to be downtime, though. Rejuv is an instant cast, as is going back into cat. I'm not that picky about it. :)

I don't dispute that prowl is probably the fastest and most efficient way. But it's like RareBeast says - do what feels faster and feels like less of a hassle. It's farming, I don't need it to be uberplay, I just want to get through it painlessly.

Also, for me pulling with FFF is definitely the way to go when farming crowded areas like the EP.