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forums.worldofwarcraft.c ··· &sid=1#7This is an excerpt from my post on a different thread on another account. I am similarly interested in anyone else's testing.
Feral Druids are a bit underpowered at the moment using the build currently on the Public Test Realm. I was; however, able to reach about 80-85% of the damage I can reach using a different setup than live. I am currently stacking Agility, Haste (ArP on gear automatically converted to Haste) and Mastery (which I Reforged from all the Haste), in that order. My gems are all Agility (red), Agility/Crit (yellow) and Agility/Hit (blue). This is just one setup although seemingly optimal with the gear available. All my enchantments are Agility and I am currently testing Mongoose on my weapon. I have the following statistics unbuffed:
2209 Agility
712 Haste (21.71%) with Needle Encrusted Scorpion proc = 42.38% Haste (barely manageable with Tiger's Fury and/or Omen of Clarity)
343 Mastery (15.47%)
My build is pretty obvious except with emphasis on PvP/Utility. Infected Wounds, Stampede, Brutal Impact and Nurturing Instinct and excluding Fury Swipes. All other choices seem relatively obvious for a pure dps build.
Here are some things I have noticed:
Haste seems to work extremely well to quickly regenerate energy; I found that 30% Haste seems to work well since this provides a significant buff to energy regeneration but is manageable. I found that Haste over 50% was unmanageable when using Tiger's Fury or with Omen of Clarity procs. Haste is not currently effecting Damage over Time (Rake, Rip) "ticks;" although my testing in the last PTR build demonstrated that Haste was effecting DoTs in that build. If Blizzard reenables this your damage should rise significantly.
Mastery seems to effect Rake, Rip and Shred which comprise a considerable percentage of our damage.
DoTs can be critical strikes even though Feral Druids no longer have a specific talent to cause DoTs to allow critical strikes.
Stampede is an outstanding talent. I have been able to consistently Ravage three times with the talent and in some cases I was able to Ravage four or even five times. I have not lost a duel yet unless I was specifically testing a particular aspect of the game and lost intentionally. As a note i would not consider myself very good at PvP as a Feral Druid.
Fury Swipes provided only an additional ~1% of damage for three talent points. I would consider this for min/maxing but I used the points in other areas for improving PvP and raid utility.
Primal Madness helps with energy management during Berserk and Tiger's Fury. This talent is a must have with high levels of Haste in my opinion.
Endless Carnage helps considerably with Rake uptime although I wouldn't get this talent for the buff to Savage Roar alone. The one-two punch of this talent makes it very worthwhile.
Rend and Tear, Feral Aggression and Blood in the Water harmonize quite well. This trio of talents is an amazing improvement that shouldn't be overlooked even if you can't test Blood in the Water on a target dummy.
My Feral Druid lost about 3,000 Attack Power (I assume as a result of the removal of Feral Attack Power from weapons although the numbers don't exactly match). Some of the difference is relieved with the increased conversion rate of 2 Attack Power per 1 Agility.
I lost about 4% critical strike since a Feral Druid can't reach Master Shapeshifter at level 80.
The optimal rotation is the same as WotLK as we seem to have maintained essentially the same priority system and I couldnt see any differences in the priorities except that Savage Roar is slightly less important and Rip is replaced with Ferocious Bite at 25% of target's health.
Rip (replace with Ferocious Bite at 25% of target's health) (I averaged 1,348 dpe)
Savage Roar (I roar at 4 or 5 CP) (Need more time to calculate dpe)
Mangle Debuff (35 energy) ( I averaged 94.74 dpe)
Rake Debuff (I averaged 457. 42 dpe)
Shred (40 energy) (I averaged 106 dpe)
Faerie Fire (currently bugged - doesnt cause damage that I can see although tooltip indicates it should)
Ferocious Bite (I averaged ~214 dpe)
I tried dropping Ferocious Bite altogether and the difference was 5% loss in dps while dropping Savage Roar was about a 10% loss in overall dps. I wouldn't even consider dropping Rip since you should reroll if you can't keep Rip up >80% of the time; as a result I didn't bother testing the dps loss of not using Rip.
Lorebris
Drenden
I found this post very informative. It seems that Blizz is making most of our hard hitting abilities scale with Matery, and allowing us to hit for less, but more often with the changes to haste. We are still doing less damage than on live, but this is another very informative opinion.