Kitty vs BoomFollow

The few Kitties I've seen in Heroics and raids had horrible dps compared to me as Boomkin, so much so I often felt ashamed for Druiddom on their behalf. I might have been unlucky but I am convinced right now that feral dps is not viable at all in that content.
Only real stats I can remember were with quite new 80s a while back in Occulus Heroic. I did 1300 dps or so, and the Kitty did almost 800, gear was comparable.

I would think as burst or in Bg's they may take boom as well

Kitty dps in drawn-out fights is pretty good too nowadays. Rip/SR/Rake generally take a long time to build up but do amazing damage over time. I think both dps specs have that limitation.

I don't play boomkin but my guess is they still would beat kitties on a target dummy. But not by much. As another poster said, I think it depends on how much running/knockback/etc there is in the fight. If the boomkin can stand still and pew-pew, he will probably win.

Taking out AoE where Boomkins excell, in 5 mans, a boomkin will be better as rule. In 25 mans, the increase in Buffs available probably benefits the feral more as many buffs increase the ferals AP and this is multiplied further by Savage Roar. There are few buffs avaiable to increase SpellPower.

In 25mans, I have seen ferals near the top of meters regularly. It depends a bit on movement etc., although a Boom having to stop a cast halfway through has lost an extra second or two of DPS as well as the time spent moving.

Overall, in smaller groups, Boom probably wins and things are pretty even in 25mans.

I haven't really enchanted my gear yet (all my mats are going towards leveling my enchanting), still only have green quality gems, have no T7 and haven't spent many of my emblems yet and I can manage about 2-2.5k DPS in 10mans in good fights. I don't get much practice with my roatations/priorities though as I seem to be tanking or healing 99% of the time. I have a sneaking suspicion that my Aussie latency (2-300ms+) hurts my DPS a fair bit as even with the old spamming powershifting macros (which removed quite a bit of skill from our rotation pre-WotLK), I couldn't match the figures some other fairly similar geared druids could put out (I hope like hell it's the latency and not me!! - pretty sure though )

I haven't had a chance to DPS in 25mans yet (not enough tanks or heals on the server) but I did a Sartharion fight where a feral topped the meters at about 3.5k on several attempts. I can't vouch for the skill of the other DPS there on the night as anyone can get into a 25man raid these days, even bad players, who have just hit 80 and are in quest greens.

Kitties are focused target dps like all melees - with good gear and a competent player they're quite lethal - I've only got ok/good gear at 80 and I'm close to 50% crit and can kill most mobs before I can get off a five point bite.

In business there's a term "opening the kimono" that means you're exposing your weaknesses in the interest of adding value to the conversation and relationship. My kittymono is now open.




ME: "Wow, that's a lot more than me, but I checked their gear and they have better gear than I do, I'm not too worried."



ME: "Holy crap, 50% crit with "ok/good gear? I assume he means buffed to the bejesus, and that he's exaggerating a smidge."



ME: "OK, I've been biting my tongue (i.e. hiding my apparent incompetence) so far, but this next one takes the cake as it provides the most direct comparison to what I know about my DPS, and makes me feel that despite my better judgement I must TOTALLY suck."


So a level 76 is doing 1500 DPS while soloing without buffs and not even maxing his DPS with an optimal rotation. Meanwhile, I'm level 80, with what I think is pretty decent gear and talent spec.(just yesterday I recently swapped King of the Jungle for Infected Wounds because my guild needs me to tank, but other than that my spec didn't change much)) My stuff's even enchanted and gemmed pretty well. All told I have like 4700 pre-SR AP and 33%ish crit, can't check because of the weekly maintenance. I'm using what I THINK is a decent set of attacks (SR, pounce, mangle, etc.), and yet I (according to Recount) only crank like 1100 DPS when I'm sologrinding like that.

Hell, even in instances Recount reports that I'm doing like 1300 DPS. That's with SR up all the time, Pouncing for the bleed DoT, Mangling for the debuff, getting/keeping Rip up as my finisher, Raking for the added Dot, Shredding when I can, TFing my energy back up when necessary, Berserking for occasional burst, and popping my +432 AP trinket on a regular basis. Unloading the kitchen friggin' sink and I'm still 200 dps LESS than Torzak the 76 manglespamming stuff to death solo?

I am open to the notion that I'm not great, but I am (was anyway) confident I'm at least GOOD given 80 levels of experience, and given the increases in stats, talents and spells between 76 and 80 it just doesn't seem possible that I can suck that much. I'm hoping there's some other explanation as to how the HELL my DPS can apparently be so dismal. Anybody got any ideas/excuses for me? Or shall I bow my head in shame and move on?

The 1300 was BEFORE I respeced to more tanky spec, which really just cost me PI and KotJ. Since the respec I'm doing like 1,000.


Yeah, that's my raw DPS kit I use for grinding against equal level mobs, I have a "hit kit" that sacrifices AP and crit for hit. In full hit kit I've got like 250 hit, and my DPS stays the same . I chalked that up to increased hit % balancing out the loss of raw AP and number of crits.

As far as upgrades, I know they're out there, but my point is that I know for a FACT Torzak is wearing not a single piece higher than level 76. My very worst pieces are higher than that, and I've got a handful of what I'm confident are solid pre-raid pieces like Ice Striker's Cloak, Trollwoven shoulder and belt, etc. And it's all enchanted/gemmed -- hell I even gemmed the belt thanks to a buckle!

Cat-form DPS: It's hard to compare numbers sometimes. In a good raid with a stationary boss, I'll pull 2200-2800 DPS. In Vaults when the tank won't pull Archavon out of the damn cloud, I've been as low as 950. Heroic target dummy is a better baseline, IMO, but you don't get to count raid buffs.

5400 AP, 41% crit, and 150-180 hit. My not-bad-not-good PVE skills get me around 2000 dps vs the dummy over 5 minutes.

I focus on keeping SR and Rake up first, Mangle second, and then Shred when I've got energy and Rip when I've got the CP. This is pretty standard stuff, but there's a few potential gotchas.

The mangle debuff applies to bleeds as soon as it's put up. SR only counts for bleeds _when they're applied_. Make sure SR is up first, hence its higher priority in the list.

I have Mirror of Truth, and I'm still working on timing things to work within its +1000 AP window. I'll usually re-Rake as soon as it procs, for instance. Should I be saving TF for when it procs? Berserk? Improvements to think about.

One thing that really helped for me early on was not to dwell too much on Rip. If you have 4 CP, but are going to need to refresh Rake and SR soon, Rip early. Rip's just there to utilize the CPs. Think of it as a bonus more than a priority.

+Hit makes a big difference. 1% hit is (1+crit)% additional damage plus (1+crit)% more CPs.

What else can people think of?

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But for the OP: Boomkin for shorter fights where mana is not an issue, or there's AOE or positioning difficulty for the kitties. Feral/cat for longer fights or magic resist.

I am using 30stam and 30haste food I think it is, and self buffed includes weightstones (12dmg/12crit)/MotW/Thorns. No elixirs or agility/strength scrolls. Those weightstones seem to make less and less of a difference the higher level I get, but I've got I think another 2 and a half stacks to blow from before the expansion so it's almost too far in the back of my head to care, but I probably should have mentioned them the first go round in any case.

As far as optimal rotations go, I think it's debatable (At least in the context of exp per hour or kills per hour and not the dps number on the chart). I tried once before (to debate), prior to WotLK, but I think for the most part folks of that debate agreed that largely it depended on your targets proximity to each other whether or not prowling/pounce/mangle/shred is worth it. I shared a video actually in filefront as my demonstration as to why I prefer not to prowl for regular exp solo grinding.

With the way the talent tree expanded after the expansion and knowing I had no intentions to tank anything until 80 anyway (with a single instance as an exception because a friend wanted me to get the Lvl76 staff and it just happened to drop the first try), my spec went toward a very solo oriented path. And it made my style of soloing that much easier because mangles only cost me 35 energy as opposed to 40 prior to the expansion due to spec.


I do keep Savage Roar up usually with either 1 or 2 combo points used to reapply as needed. The time extension per combo point beyond 1 or 2 is not worth it IMO. To intentionally try for a 5 point Savage Roar while solo grinding targets in fairly close proximity seems silly to me /shrug. It is nice though if you see the opposite faction coming from a distance on a ground mount and you hit a 5 point SR on an NPC and then prowl up on them :p



As a quick note, I think most Lv78 blues are still side grades to me. Other than that, it's probably largely spec related /shrug. Do you have 35 energy Mangles? That 5 energy adds up while mangle spamming and still taking advantage of 2pc T4 (+20 energy procs in conjunction to clear casting). At the very least, if you don't, this could answer part of the concern.

Everything of mine is enchanted, largely because I'm a leather worker/enchanter and I don't mind at all to enchant the same chant on top of a piece already enchanted just to get the skill up in the craft if I manage to pick up the mats from DE'ing misc. greens.

Wrist I went 90 Stam even on my dps piece. Makes the whole leader of the pack while soloing etc a good bit more potent than I was previously used to, so I'm enjoying that. Other that though, everything was re-enchanted/re-gemmed. I've stuck, and plan to stick, with my 70 purples because of the lack of hit on just about everything I've seen even up to Lv78.

I did go ahead and put one of those belt buckle things on my Lv70 belt just because I could /shrug. Replaced the attack/crit leg patch on my Lv70 dps leg option with the newer one for a minor AP/Crit increase there, and even though I had read Strength was better than Agility starting around Lv75 I still regemmed all my +10Agility gems to +16Agility gems expecting that Agility would still net better results for the first several levels after Lv70 (at least up until Savage Roar is what I was hoping), I've been a combo of lazy and just not playing much to redo the agility to strength gems now that I'm 76. There were a few yellow sockets that I replaced from 5agi/5hits with 8expertise/8hits. I am expertise capped for Lv76, I do know that (in part from talent tree). Replaced my +2 damage ring enchants to +32AP Enchants, etc. And most of this I did all while I was still LV70, but a few retools on enchants did come as I learned them a bit later.

Like I said in my first post though, I'm no expert on LV80 and the performance I would expect. All I am doing is making an educated guess that 1500 would be the minimum I would expect in a LV80 Heroic considering higher tiers of abilities than I have access to and 78 to 80 blues that are largely side grades or small upgrades to me (with an exception being the weapons; they seemed to have done quite nicely with weapon progression).

Considering your semi tank specced, do you have Tiger's Fury on spam? I have mine attached to Mangle. I don't have talents specced to gain energy upon using it, so I have no fear of accidentally using Tiger's Fury and wasting energy. So in my case, I'm care free and just spam it along with mangle. Have my trinket on the same button too /shrug. And if it gives anyone any ideas, Savage Roar is on a shift modifier on the same button.

Edited, Jan 6th 2009 11:33pm by Torzak