Shifting Perspectives: Gearing your feral cat for raiding, part 2

By Dan O'Halloran

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat , bear , restoration and balance druids. Welcome to our weekly feral cat edition, brought to you by Chase Hasbrouck, aka Alaron of The Fluid Druid blog. Let the face clawing begin!

In this continuation of my previous article, I'll look specifically at the items that drop from the various tier 11 raids. Your first priority is getting two pieces of tier 11 gear, as the two-piece set bonus is a nice DPS increase. The four-piece set bonus isn't quite as good and complicates your rotation a bit, but it's still better than just stacking off-set pieces. For normal mode gear, your best off-set slot is the head, specifically, Tsanga's; for heroic modes, the best off-set slot is shoulders.

I won't be including any epic PvP items here, with a couple of exceptions. With the patch nerf to the four-piece PvP bonus, wearing PvP gear is generally suboptimal. An epic PvP item is usually roughly equal to a rare PvE item. I'm also not listing the few 379 items; chances are good that if you can beat Sinestra, you probably don't need to use a gear list for help.

Finally, the items from Throne of the Four Winds are randomly enchanted, with four possible combinations: Stormblast (crit/hit), Windflurry (crit/haste), Windstorm (crit/mastery), and Zephyr (haste/mastery). This makes them tough to rate. Your best choices are the pieces with mastery, but any epic will be better than a rare.

Read Gearing your feral cat for raiding, part 1.

Weapon

Happily, a perfectly itemized BiS weapon drops from the first boss in Bastion of Twilight, and a solid alternative drops from the first boss in Blackwing Descent. Magmaw is very puggable, and Halfus is close to it. Note that Akirus is a strength weapon, so while it's an upgrade from a 346 blue, it's a much better upgrade for strength-based classes. Don't be greedy.

Head

Tsanga's Helm is a very nice BoE that drops in Bastion of Twilight. Grab it if you can. If not, the tier helm is decent, but it'll probably be a while before you can snag it. I don't really recommend the C'Thun helm, though if nobody else wants it, grab it up and slap a tanking metagem in there.

Legs

Do you feel lucky, punk? And by "punk," I mean all you new troll druids. Get a haircut. The tier piece is BiS here and is probably the best value per point for your VP; however, you also have a (small) chance to get it from Argaloth. The Wind Stalker's Leggings can be pretty good if you get the right random enchants, but I'd still prefer tier.

Chest

The tier piece is pretty poor, but most people will end up picking it up anyway to complete their tier set. Morrie's and/or Sark are much better pieces, though they'd be perfect if they had a +agi socket bonus which is why we want the off-set head, which is perfectly itemized. The crafted piece is terrible. Even if the patch adds a socket to it, it'll still be short one.

Trinkets

Trinket ratings tend to jump around, depending on your gear. That said, the new version of Unheeded Warning is very nice and barely beats out the two heroic agility trinkets for BiS. Crit and haste are pretty equal for ferals after the patch, so I'm preferring the trinket that's much easier to acquire. Fluid Death is very good, but you'll probably want to spend your VP in other places to start. I bought it anyway, because it's as close I'll ever get to having an in-game item named after me. My blog's close enough. And, yes, Tia's Grace is that good. Perfectly itemized for ferals.

Hands

This is one of the few slots that has an available pre-raid epic, so get that while you build up VP for the tier piece.


Shoulders

Unlike the hands, you may want to go ahead and spend DKP on the offset shoulders; Cho'gall's not easy, and the token drops will be highly prized. Unfortunately, you're stuck with having to kill either Nef or Cho to get the fourth piece for your set, so this one's probably a bit easier to get.

Waist

The LW belt will come up a bit in value if it gets a gem socket; if not, it's still pretty close to the other two. The Wind Stalker belt is your best and most easily obtainable option, assuming you can get one with mastery.


Feet

We now begin the "boring itemization" section. Kill Halfus, get boots, win. Yes, Halfus is apparently the one stop shop for feral/rogue gearing. VP boots are poor; many better options to spend VP on.

Neck

Don Rodrigo's is still slightly under budget for some reason, but it's very close to the raid drop in terms of stats. Get it if you have money to burn, I suppose.


Rings

Well, at least the ring itemization makes up for the neck and feet slots. Or maybe not, but it feels easier to fill two slots with
six items than one slot with three. As with all the Throne items, get the Mistral ring with mastery if you can.


Back

Just like the feet, you have a decent raid item and a poor VP item (which now has an identical world drop). Moving on ...

Wrists

Hey, remember how tough it was to fill a wrist slot from heroics? Guess what? It's even harder now!

Relic

... Okay, Blizz, now you're just being lazy.

So, that wraps up the gear list (it's hard to call it a "guide" when some of the slots have only one raid-level item in them). Consolidating 10-man and 25-man raids has had a lot of benefits, but I do miss the varied gear that resulted.

What race should you choose for your druid? What happened to Tree of Life? How can you get started as a bear or cat in Cataclysm? Shifting Perspectives has the answers!

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