I'm hating 2pc T9 (Cat)Follow

I've made the jump from 4pc T8 to 2pc T9 & 2pc T8 and I'm not liking it (Head/Hands T9 i245: Head I bought, Hands I won 25VoA; not my ideal choice of 2pc T9 for reference, namely because I wouldn't really want to use the hands in a 2pc T9 build).

For AOE pulls, I've found myself wanting as far as the timer on Savage Roar goes. It's just not lasting long enough if you're getting one combo point off that first mangle or rake to Savage Roar with. For most 5man content it seems ok. Sometimes even there a little annoyingly short. And in AOE pulls, Savage Roar is a pretty large benefit if the aoe group's health lasts long to go with the increased duration of SR. But the increased Rake timer is practically worthless for AoE.

For Single Target pulls (Raid Boss), I've found it less fun not being able to throw in Ferocious Bites as often because so many points keep getting dumped into SR. Rake was one of those abilities that was worth easy cheap combo points while being comparable to Shred in damage and now because of the increased duration I'm not getting those cheap combo points as often. That in conjunction with having to reapply SR more often, it just feels really weird compared to 4 pc T8.

On the training dummy, moving from two 226 T8 pieces to two 245 T9 pieces, I've lost ~300 to 400 DPS over the course of several 5min tests (I don't training dummy test with berserk since it's an extra variable that can play out really randomly). And almost all of my tests at the end of those 5mins for each gear set are within 60 dps of eachother. So 300 to 400 DPS off between the two sets seems really weird, and backwards. And to be honest, I should probably further clarify. This 300 to 400 DPS difference is comparing the two pieces of T8 without a working meta to two pieces of T9. I moved my 10stats to the new helm and regemmed the rest of the gear a bit so I don't even have a working meta in the old T8. If you look at it from that angle, I'm actually down closer to 500 dps with this change of gear on the dummy. I was almost always hitting 4600 DPS (5mins with no berserk) on the dummy with the 4pc T8 before I wrecked the meta for it. Now I'm doing ~4100 with the T9 and 4300/4400 without a meta in the T8. I can explain away a bit of the DPS loss being that some of the hit on the gloves is just plain wasted. So some itemization issues for my gear.

In a raid setting/single target boss, it doesn't really feel like I've lost anything, but then, those are harder to compare one time to the next with so many different variances in the group make up, etc.

All said, It feels slow, sluggish as far as the rotation itself goes. I don't like it. I'm not too worried about the DPS loss on the dummy because RNG and wasted hit and not a raid setting, all that jazz, etc.

Any others with an opinion to share?

Edited, Sep 18th 2009 10:21am by Torzak

T8 was just really sexy as far as bonuses go.

The WWS would be nice as would a RAWR profile for each. If they 4T8 gear set has less wasted hit and expertise that could also be swaying things as well.