Shifting Perspectives: Troubleshooting cat DPS

Every Tuesday, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting feral/restoration druids and those who group with them. This week, we attempt to locate your cat DPS problems with a small flashlight and a cricothyroidotomy.

I get versions of this letter pretty frequently, and whenever I do, I ask for an armory link and (when available) a World of Logs entry. Afterwards, we start going through the following possibilities in an effort to pinpoint what might be causing problems for a player who's trying get more damage out of his or her cat.

Before we get started, I should note that untangling what's going wrong with someone's DPS over the course of a fight is close to impossible without access to records from sites like World of Logs. Someone in your guild should be recording raid data and uploading it to WoL after each evening's raid. If not, just go ahead and do it yourself. Your guild will thank you, it's completely free and it's an absolutely invaluable tool.

First things first ...

• ThinkTank

• The Fluid Druid blog and forums

• Elitist Jerks' comprehensive cat DPS guide

• Coldbear's Wowwiki entry on feral DPS

• Jacemora

• Feral Aggression

• Shifting Perspectives: Cat 101 and Shifting Perspectives: Gearing a new cat druid at 80

Clipping bleeds

Rake and Rip don't tick every second, and they also don't tick immediately. When you reapply them to a target that already has them, you're not only spending valuable energy to apply a debuff that's already there, but you're also costing yourself damage that would have ticked earlier on the old bleed. Instead of spending 30 energy to get eight ticks of Rip over 16 seconds, you're spending 30 energy to get six or seven and pushing off the next tick for another two to three seconds.

It won't have a huge impact on your DPS if you only do it once or twice over a fight, but if you do it constantly, you'll lose a ton of potential damage in addition to finding yourself needlessly energy-starved. Feel free to clip Mangle and Savage Roar when they need to be reapplied, but don't clip Rake or Rip.

Interestingly, the bleed-clipping issue is being addressed in Cataclysm in addition to a few other changes designed to make cat DPS a bit easier.

User interface issues

I will preface this section by saying that it got long even for my tastes, and I finally realized the subject really merits its own article. Look for a Shifting Perspectives column on how to build a feral-oriented UI soon, with a much more detailed description of commonly used cat addons.

UI issues are often the underlying cause of most cat DPS problems. While the "rotation" is something that everyone can learn with a little practice, the default user interface isn't a good fit for the spec. You need a mod or mods that will do the following things, and just as importantly, put them in a convenient place on your screen:

• track bleed durations and buff/debuff status

• allow you to see how many combo points you have on your target

• make it easy to tell when a trinket or weapon enchant's procced

• show cooldown and proc status

• play nice with raiding addons like Deadly Boss Mods, BigWigs or Deus Vox Encounters

There is no "best" mod or mods for this purpose, and players have customized a number of them to work with the spec. These are some of the more common picks:

• PowerAuras A pain in the ass to set up, but addictive once you actually get it running. It's particularly good if you're on a laptop with very limited screen real estate.

• Ovale A relatively new entry on the scene, and one I admit I wasn't initially keen on because it was riddled with bugs, but it's really come into its own. The most updated version of the cat DPS script can be found here on the Fluid Druid forums, and you'll find an explanation on how to use it here.

• BadKitty An oldie (well, at least by WoW standards) but still a goodie. I gained about 500 DPS after installing it more than a year ago.

• FeralbyNight or FaceMauler The grandaddies of the "suggester" mods, and I still recommend trying them (or Ovale) out for a bit so you can see what an idealized cat rotation looks like. Of the two, FaceMauler is the only one that has been updated recently (FbN's creator has sadly retired).

• RoguePowerBars Another oldie but a goodie. I haven't used it myself, but many players have and liked it.

More elaborate description will have to wait for the UI-specific column, but we recently profiled PowerAuras here on the site if you're interested in reading an in-depth examination of how the mod works and the effort needed to set it up.

Failure to use Omen of Clarity procs on Shred

Shred is a high-damage skill with an equally astronomical energy cost, and missing Omen of Clarity procs that you could have used on it is agonizing. It's all the more reason to tinker with your UI and get one of the aforementioned mods. You will need a very obvious notification on your UI that Omen has triggered, because unless Savage Roar's about to fall off, you should always use Omen procs for a free Shred. Over the course of a boss fight, it will save you a ton of energy better spent on maintaining bleed and debuff uptime.

Bad Savage Roar and/or Mangle uptime

Savage Roar is the most important part of the cat cycle because it affects all of the damage you do. Mangle affects the damage done by your bleeds and Shred. If you don't have these up, you can kiss your DPS good-bye. Post-3.3.3, it's become significantly easier to keep Mangle on your target, as the debuff lasts for one minute rather than 12 seconds.

Examine your WoL entries. What are your Savage Roar and Mangle uptimes like? In an ideal world, they're as close to 100% as possible, although a more realistic figure on any given boss fight is usually between 90-98% (higher for low-movement boss fights, lower for a lot of target-switching and movement). There's always some variability if you get unlucky with boss abilities (e.g. getting targeted by the orange goo on Professor Putricide a lot, or getting Bone Spike on Marrowgar multiple times), but if your Savage Roar/Mangle uptimes are consistently lower than 90% regardless of fight conditions, that'll be a big culprit behind your DPS issues.

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