Flyv's Warcraft Blog

Kitty: the most complicated DPS rotation in the game

Feral druid cat DPS is the most complicated DPS rotation in the game. In boss fights our DPS is limited by the player's own skill and the demands and quirks of any specific fight. By contrast, most classes have a much easier time maxing their DPS in any specific fight. The added difficulty of cat DPS is a good thing, good game design. Blizzard should emulate it for other DPS classes.

Feral decision tree

The cat DPS rotation is incredibly complex. Here's my decision tree, roughly in priority order:

1. Is Savage Roar up? If not, consume 2-5 combo points and 25 energy to refresh it for 19-34 seconds.
2. Is Rip up? If not, consume 5 combo points and 30 energy to refresh it for 12, 16, or 20 seconds depending on your current gear.
3. Is Mangle up? If not, consume 45 energy to apply it for 12 seconds and get 1-2 combo points.
4. Is Rake up? If not, consume 40 energy to apply it for 9 seconds and get a combo point.
5. Is Faerie Fire up? If not, consume a GCD to apply it for 40 seconds. If it misses try again in 6 seconds.
6. Is Tiger's Fury available? Are you below 40 energy? If so, use it. Unless you want to save it for a few seconds for the 60 energy boost.
7. Is Berserk available? Are you in a good position and low enough threat to unload extra DPS for 15 seconds? Do you have 50 energy or Tiger's Fury coming available? If so, use Berserk. While Berserked your abilities cost less energy, so your timing is faster and you will have more combo points than you can use.
8. Do you have 5 combo points, 40+ energy, and both Rip and Savage Roar have 15+ seconds left on them? Then consider Ferocious Bite to consume all combo points and energy. But be sure you don't set yourself up for a problem 20 seconds down the road.
9. No special abilities in the pipeline. If you are behind the mob Shred, consuming 42 energy and generating 1-2 combo points. If you're not behind the mob, then Mangle for 45 energy and 1-2 combo points.

That's the DPS rotation on a training dummy. Things get more complex in a real fight. Variable damage buffs like Loatheb and Thaddeus require timing your abilities or prioritizing them differently. Fights with enforced DPS delays like Maexxna and Sapphiron require front-loading the bleeds and optimizing your extra energy. And of course a good druid is always keeping an eye out in case the raid needs an innervate, battle rez, heal, etc.

Why it's complicated

The simplest DPS classes can be reduced to a simple casting rotation (press 1 three times, then 2. repeat). Cat DPS can't be reduced to a rotation, it's a priority system of refreshing five different buffs. That's not unique: other classes also use a priority system, although few have so many buffs to juggle.

What makes cat DPS particularly demanding is that buffs require both energy and combo points to apply. And those resources fluctuate quickly. Furthermore, they don't come at an even rate. Energy comes at 20 per second, but Clearcasting gives you more energy and Berserk makes you use less. Combo points cost energy to generate, and you get 1 or 2 randomly depending on whether you crit. Ensuring you have enough combo points and energy to reapply a buff ten seconds in the future is a big part of the challenge.

Furthermore, the buffs all are on different timer lengths. You can't just space them out so that each one expires an orderly 3 seconds before the next. Worse, some of the buffs expire in a variable amount of time. Choosing to Savage Roar for 2 combo points and 19 seconds can make a big difference down the road over Savage Roar for 5 points and 34 seconds. Cat DPS constantly demands planning ahead 30 seconds. You have to make sure that when Rip expires in 10 seconds you've got 5 combo points and 30 energy to reapply it, and you better be sure Savage Roar is active when you use it or else you're going to have to find another 2 combo points and 25 energy somewhere first.

You can do pretty good cat DPS with a simpler rotation. Just Mangle, Rake, Savage Roar, Shred, and Rip. Ignore Ferocious Bite entirely, use Tiger's Fury and Berserk as soon as they're available. Skip Faerie Fire entirely, screw the raid DPS. The simpler cat DPS rotation makes kitty DPS about as complex as the other DPS classes I understand. But it's about 20% less DPS than a perfect kitty. Playing well means better results.

Why complication is good

If you follow usual WoW player logic, the cat DPS rotation is unfair and nerfs us vs. other classes. Frankly, it's really damn hard to put out great DPS on a moving fight like Heigan or Sapphiron and it's a real challenge optimizing DPS on a damage-variable fight like Thaddeus. I'm envious of my Hunter friends who just sit there spamming Steady Shot and pressing Explosive Shot every 6 seconds.

Well, I was envious. Until I raided with my hunter, and talked to my hunter friends. The problem is the hunter DPS rotation is boring. Once you learn the right shot rotation you just press the same 2 or 3 buttons with the right timing and you're done. My impression is most DPS classes are the same, one or two primary damage abilities and one or two fixed buffs to re-apply every thirty seconds or so. It's not terribly challenging.

The cat DPS rotation is a complicated, elegant puzzle. And it's really fun to work it in a difficult fight. I love that my personal skill in timing and planning has a significant impact on my actual DPS. I'd love to see Blizzard design this kind of complication into other DPS classes. It's OK if most players never master it, only put out 80-90% of their potential DPS. Because it gives them another 20% to achieve if they just master the skill.

A caveat

I haven't played every DPS class in WoW. Feel free to tell me in comments how I'm wrong and other classes are just as complicated as cats. Particularly interested in other classes' version of my decision tree. My impression is affliction lock is the next-most complicated DPS class, and then only if you're optimizing DPS on multiple mobs.

Loot council

A friend of mine was asking me how my guild's loot council system works, so I thought I'd write it up for the blog.

We use master looter. When a piece of loot drops, anyone in the raid interested in it for their main spec expresses interest with a link to what they'd be upgrading. Ie, if Origin of Nightmares drops then the feral druid will say "int Staff of the Plaguehound". The loot council (in our case, the officers currently online) then look at who all is interested in the loot and assigns the loot based on what we think is fair. People are allowed to ask for something for off-spec or PvP, too, but they almost always get lower priority than main spec.

Loot Council decisions are final and autocratic. In my guild it'd be unprecedented to publically question a decision, although some private griping happens on occasion. Obviously this system only works if the loot council is fair and believed to be fair. It also helps a lot if your guild members aren't too stressed about loot.

So how do we make decisions fairly? These days, most of the time there's only one person who's interested and so there's no real decision to be made. When multiple people are interested there's a variety of criteria we use. Most of the time it's "last loot"; we try to prioritize loot for people who haven't gotten any in awhile. Occasionally it's "biggest upgrade", particularly for someone who's playing well and making a serious effort to improve. In rare occasions we may decide something's not suited for someone who's inted; yes, the weapon may be an upgrade for the Hunter but because it has expertise it really should go to the rogue. In practice, the results are roughly the same as if we were using an attendance-based system like DKP or Suicide Kings.

I think we do an OK job of being fair. For the months I was just a regular person I really appreciated the freedom from responsibility of having a loot council. I was free to int on anything and everything I wanted and trust the officers would give me only my fair share. Loot seems to come to everyone at a reasonable pace; I'm much more likely to hear someone complain that there are no upgrades for them than that they aren't getting the upgrade they want.

The main problem with our system is the discussion can be slow, particularly when a trinket or ring drops that every single physical DPS class wants. It can take 5+ minutes to make a decision, holding up at least one person to assign loot. It's also a bit awkward when loot council members are competing with other raiders, although we do make extra effort to be fair in those circumstances. And the personal nature of the decision process can occasionally result in hurt feelings, although fortunately our guild is full of people with remarkably mature understanding of loot decisions. Mostly it works OK, it's just a headache for the officers.

In my mind loot is more of a problem than a reward. Getting an extra +10 agility doesn't really make the game more fun for me; pulling the next mob does. If it were up to me I'd run loot entirely on rolls. There's a need/greed loot box for a reason, just use it. It's the fastest, simplest, most transparent way. The biggest problem with random rolls is some people may roll inappropriately and there's a big grey area where folks are socially pressured to pass on one roll because "someone else needs it more". Loot council removes that problem and saves some drama.

Raid leading

Last night our usual raid leader couldn't make our Tuesday 25 man run. So I took over leading. I know the fights pretty well, I'm willing to talk, I'm pretty good at leading 10 mans. One problem: I hate leading large groups.

Leading a 25 man is stressful. So many people to watch, so many details to worry about. Is the hit-challenged prot warrior in a group with a draenei? Do your healers have enough mana before every trash pull? What do you do about the disconnecting mage? Are you pulling trash too fast. Or worse, too slowly? Does this group have enough DPS to burn through the boss the easy way or do you need to do fancy kiting? Are people having fun? Etc etc.

Fortunately our guild has done the content together enough times that the raid mostly runs itself. And other officers dealt with loot distribution and invites, leaving me to mostly just worry about strategy and pacing. We even got a couple of achievements for the first time, including Patchwerk in 3 minutes. Yay!

The most frustrating thing is that being responsible for the group made me personally play poorly. There's no way I can attend to the cat DPS rotation while also watching the whole raid and calling out anything urgent. Bear is a lot easier, so I ended up off-tanking a lot and just sort of chilling out. I think I enjoy the game more when I get to selfishly focus on myself but pay enough attention to help the group as a whole get better next time.

By contrast, leading a 10 man is a joy for me. Last fall I worked with a group to learn Zul'aman well enough to get bear mounts. It took about 6-8 weeks of dedicated attempts before we beat the timer and it was an accomplishment I'm proud of. The nice thing about a 10 man run is they really require personal responsibility, every player has to play well for themselves. There's less assigned jobs, more room for creative play. Suits my leadership style better. I'd like to work on Sartharion + 3 Drakes in 10 man now, but boy is that fight hard.

PS: loot distribution in Naxxramas is by far the worst thing about WoW raiding right now. 45 epics to hand out in 3 hours = 1 loot every 3 minutes. We do loot council in our guild, people express interest and the officers assign loot. It can take awhile, particularly when discussion is required. So we keep pulling trash to the next boss while one poor officer stands by the corpse using the terrible master looter UI. And everyone's attention is divided between loot and game-playing, sucking some of the fun out of it.

Auction house addons revisited

Back when 3.0 hit I posted a request for auction addons. 3.0 forced the switch to AuctioneerAdvanced and it was so brutal I went looking for alternatives. Now after several months of fiddling with the AH and over 100,000 gold in items sold, I've settled on a few addons I like.

The first addon I use is Auctionator. It's a very simple enhancement to the auction UI, adding two tabs for "Buy" and "Sell". What's neat is it's all based on quickly doing searches of the current AH and automating the process of buying or selling at a good price. Drag an item to the "Sell" box and Auctionator immediately does a search, shows you all the existing auction, and auto-fills a form for you to post the item at a configurable undercut. Do a search in the "Buy" box and you get a quick list back of the items sorted by buyout price per item, none of this garbage about bid prices and stack size. Simple, clean, and very quick. (Thanks to my reader Tiniane for pointing it out!)

The second addon I use is good ol' Auctioneer Advanced. I've finally made my peace with it. Auctioneer is really two things. First, it's a horrible inhuman GUI for buying and selling stuff on the AH. The user interface is garbage, just ignore it and use Auctionator instead. Second, Auctioneer is a very smart tool for tracking the history of the auction house, remembering past prices for items and (via BeanCounter) your own history of purchases and sales. This history is very valuable when you're doing long term profit trading on the AH and it makes a nice supplement to Auctionator's instantaneous data. Unfortunately Auctioneer is pretty complicated with a dizzying array of pricing models. I favour the models that have a shorter time history, but what's best is to turn them all on in the tooltips for awhile and get a feel for how they change. It's a mess, but it's the best I can find. One great improvement in Auctionator 5.2 is the "fast scan" button, which for some bizarre reason looks like a fast-forward glyph. Ignore the scary warning and use it and you get a full scan in under a minute.

The final addon I use is Opportunity, something I wrote for myself. It hooks into Auctioneer's data APIs to provide a complete overview of the gem market in a single window. I use it to figure out which gems are worth cutting and selling at the moment. I'm not currently sharing the addon because, frankly, it gives me an edge in my trading. I may reconsider that at some point.

So that's my advice. For casual traders just use Auctionator, it'll help you get a decent price for an item without much hassle. If you're more serious about working the auction house then Auctioneer is helpful to build up some historical context.

How to dual spec today

Lots of folks are (rightly) excited about dual-speccing in an upcoming Warcraft patch. Lots of open questions about how it will work, but hopefully it'll make it easy for PvPers to switch back to raid specs and healers to have a viable solo PvE spec. If they make it free and easy to switch during a raid I'll probably use it to swap between tank and cat dps specs. If it's on a cooldown or expensive I'll use it to swap between healing and feral specs.

But you don't need to wait for Blizzard to implement dual specs, because thanks to the magic of addons you can have dual specs today.

The main addon you need for dual specs is Talented, a complete replacement for the talent spec UI. It allows you to store multiple specs and implement a new one with a single button. I keep two specs around at all times: feral and resto. It also lets you import specs from Wowhead, WowArmory, and characters you inspect making it easy to evaluate new specs.. It's an old and reliable addon, although it has on occasion had an out-of-date tooltip on a talent.

Unfortunately when you respec your action bars get messed up. Either you need a full new bar if switching roles or you simply lose talent spells like Mangle. That's where Action Bar Saver comes in. It remembers an action bar layout and reapplies it. There's no UI, you simply do "/abs save feral" and "/abs restore feral" to use it. (Coding opportunity: integrate ABS with Talented).

With these two addons swapping specs is as simple as teleporting to Moonglade, paying the trainer 50g, and then applying the new spec in Talented and the new action bar in ABS. The only thing you don't get is glyph swapping. For that you want to have a stack of glyphs in your bags and head to a capital city to apply them.

Effulgent!

Kalon's blog post about resistance has me on a kick to build a Sartharion-specific armor set. The problem with Sartharion + 3 drakes is your health is debuffed down to 35,000 or so and a few times he hits you with a 50,000 flame breath. You need some magic to survive that. I can get to 285 fire resistance, which should be good for 30% damage mitigation.

But it just occurred to me I should give the Effulgent Skyflare Diamond a try. It's another 2% mitigation to spells. Bears normally take the Austere Earthsiege Diamond which gives an extra 2% armor. It's a nice buff, but how big is it in practice? I tried it on my Naxx/25 level tank set. Stats are unbuffed.

With bonus: 33260 armor (68.59%)
Without bonus: 32685 armor (68.21%)
Difference: 575 armor (0.38%)

That's a pretty minor armor difference: on a huge 10,000 point melee hit we're saving 38 points of damage. By comparison on an incoming 10,000 spell attack we're saving 200 points of damage. Is my math wrong? I think what's going on is the 2% resist bonus from the Effulgent diamond is effectively not subject to diminishing returns like armor is.

Lrn 2 hunter

Not many druid posts on my blog lately. Why? Because my guild is pretty close to done with the current raid content. Not many gear upgrades for me, I already had my flirtation with respeccing resto, and I still don't feel I understand cat DPS well enough to make a definitive statement on how to do it best. The one real PvE challenge left for me now is Sartharion with 3 drakes, I'm looking forward to Kalon's thoughts. I really like the way that fight's designed with incremental difficulty.

So in my spare time I finally got my hunter up to level 80. I've forgotten how much fun she is. A beastmaster hunter is the class most different from a druid I could find; the pet mechanic is quite interesting. Sadly at level 80 BM hunterism is boring, the shot rotation is "press your steady shot button as fast as you can". But since the enormous Hunter nerf I'm about to go Survival and try that out for awhile.

Which got me thinking about how to learn to play a class in Warcraft, and how this Elitist Jerks forum post is a beautifully precise description of how to be a Survival hunter. It has everything you need in a simple format: talents, DPS rotation, item stats, and recommendations for glyphs, gems, enchants, etc. There's just enough explanation that you understand the choices without getting bogged down in details. And lots of links. All that's missing is a Pawn scale (try here) and a gearing guide (try here). And if you want to get really down and dirty, the Hunter community has an elaborate spreadsheet for a DPS model.

Does anyone have a similar single page how-to-feral description? My own attempt is a little too brief, I tend to write this blog for other progression-oriented druids. Where do new folks go to learn?