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And on trash, kitty totally rocked too. 7-8k swipe dps was pretty fun. Didn't get to do a lot of DPS/tanking other than that, and nothing that was a great benchmark.
In fact, later that week we did Malygos, and again the antitank leapt into the fray - the MT went down at one point (stupid pets), and I tanked it for a while. Too many people had died, but we made it to P3. Was able to dps in P1, tank and dps in p2 without a hitch.
But...what about dps? 3.2k dps is marginally acceptable and certainly better than what the other tanking classes can do when not tanking under most circumstances - but is it worthwhile dpsing?
Oh yeah. Oh yeah baby.
It's a pity I died - one of our tanks died early and I was this close to switching to bear right before I died. But DPS wise, it was pretty phenomenal and went right around what Rawr predicted given my gear. I need to be better with using berserk and the timing, but I'm pretty pleased with 5200 DPS.
On Gluth I DPSed for a while until we needed more add tanking. Then I tanked zombies. When decimate hits, going to cat and swiping the hell out of them with berserk was quite nice. Got up to 50 stacks of the debuff too, but the high armor came through just fine. Hooray for offtanking!
Thaddius kind of sucks though. It might suck in general for cats, but it especially sucks in this build. Only 6800 DPS. A lot of this is because about half of the time there are no shreds, and this build does not do as well with manglespam as it could. Part of it is the fight itself; it is crucial that you never apply bleeds until after you've gotten the charge buff. Which also means you should try and time it so that you put up your bleeds right before the polarity shift so that they're ticking during the shift. It's tough, and I messed it up more than a few times. This is true in general; the problem with the cat dps spec in general is that it is very position and dot dependent to maximize. Sometimes this can be an advantage (Sapph loves those dots ticking on him while he's flying) and sometimes not (hate Loatheb and his moving ass, same with Grobbulus).
I don't honestly know how much real MT tanking I'd want to do with this. The HP is awfully low. The avoidance is nice, and there's plenty of armor, but having a bit more would be good too. It does work in a pinch to save the raid though, which is pretty awesome.
But having the ability to do pretty decent DPS and tanking in the same spec? That's awesome. That's the fun I missed a lot from TBC days. And it comes at the cost of threat, basically, and a smidgen of utility for soloing.
So thanks, Blizzard. 3.0.8 wasn't the best for bears, but it's definitely a huge buff for ferals, and it's made me a heck of a lot more excited to raid.
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Uhh! Those are some impressive results.
Would be nice to see a post about kitty dps by you at some point! About "rotation", timing Berserk, etc.
Myself I did 5200 dps on Patchwerk which is 200 dps short of what Rawr tells me, but thats with usual cat spec/gems/etc, so there is some room to imrove.
I've been working on my kitty dps the past few weeks as the 25-man naxx I run has 2 warrior and 2 druid tanks. I'm usually the one left dps'ing. 2 weeks ago, all I could manage was a paltry 2100 dps overall. Last week I got some upgrades, fixed my rotation a bit and ended up with 2450 dps for the run. This week I took advantage of kitty swipe and swapped out my Glyph of Growl for a Glyph of Rip (love 20 second rips). I ended up with a pretty decent 2950 dps, which was good for #6 on the damage meter. Most boss fights I would be between #5-#8. Of course this is an "alt & friends" run so only a few have top notch gear.
Loatheb I dropped to #9. Maybe I need to work on a better "crit-enhanced" rotation. The 3 rogues I had been beating all flew past me in this fight. Maybe the buff just isn't as good for cats.
I think I was around 4100dps on Patch. Thaddius was ok but I had to switch polarities 95% of the time so that cut down on my dps time. I never noticed the buff was only up at certain times. I'll try to time my rips and rakes better next time.
Sapphiron was irritating. I still have problems avoiding the tail and blizzard. The tail seems to have a huge knockback radius. I ended up dying by doing a cat charge which put me too far under him and got cleaved.
KT was annoying as well due to about 10 melee dps crowded together. In 3 attempts I was 0 for 3 in surviving the ice block. I think a combination of no instant aoe healers (CoH priest or druids) and a lot of melee in KT makes it very difficult.
Otherwise I was really pleased with cat dps. My current best Swipe is 35k. That's pretty ridiculous. I might try to respec to Shred next time as I had plenty of combo points for Roar/Rip this week and was left waiting a lot with 5 CPs ready to go.
Congratulations on your damage! I'm not even halfway there, but I'm working on it.
Last weekend was pretty productive. I got:
- Staff of Trickery
- Shroud of Darkness (finally a helmet with meta slot)
- T7.10 leggings & T7.25 gloves
- Titanium Earthguard Ring
- Essence of Gossamer
- Idol of the White Stag (we tried to get the BT achievement but couldn't down Illidan; the idol might be interesting for a Mangle spammer like me)
The funny thing is that I probably won't be able to use all the stuff much, since the guild leader is trying to get me to respecc as Resto.
But even if I'm willing to, I doubt that my equip is up to it yet (still have badge shoulders, gloves and girdle), and as a healer I'm only able to fill one role slot, while as a Feral I could be tank or DPS.
We'll see how this turns out... I'm definately waiting for the dual spec though!
http://lazybearmusings.blogspot.com/2009/02/classification-of-encounters-based-on.html
Wrote up something in response to this series of antitank posts you've been making.
Holy moses. 6800dps? 5200dps? Do you have a link to your build/gear etc that i could take a look at!?
Posting to the most recent of your antitank articles, though this is kinda of aimed at your analysis of enchants and gemming.
As you and I discussed previously, your approach counts on having very good gear to allow the unified gearset. I've found the calculations you provided very useful at the other end, where a piece of equipment has to serve cat and bear duty because I haven't geared up enough to get strong separate cat and bear pieces.
As you said, gemming's easy, agi agi agi. Same with most enchants, either get agi (hands feet cloak) or all stats (chest).
This hits 3 slots, head, shoulders, and legs. As you've noticed (and this fits my experience) shoulders aren't a huge impact either way. Head your data is telling me I can survive with a shroud of darkness set up for dps and I can also spend badges on the Mirror of Truth rather than have to bolt to the Savage Gladiator helm so quickly.
Legs I'm getting a different result, probably because of lower gear. I only get an increase in Rawr of 18 points going from Frosthide to Icescale (18 points against 3608, so half a percent), giving up the stam, dodge, and armor for 46 AP and about .20% crit.
Bracers I thought was a fairly binary choice, stam or assault, but I saw very little spread between stam (3613), 6 all stats (3617), greater assault (3623), still at most a very minor difference.
This is in heroics and crafted epics with standard BoK, BoM, fort, and totems, nothing outrageous.
Your articles on the antitank have been a big help even though I'm on the far opposite end of progression from you. Think of it as me testing out the opposite edge condition from the far edge you looked at.
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