User:Tejing/The State of Cat Druid DPS

The issues with feral DPS can be broken down into two groups: Itemization and Mechanics

Itemization
Here's a list of the specific issues I can identify with feral druid itemization as it is currently.

Mechanics
There are 4 basic factors which affect the melee dps of any class, and these are Hit Chance, Attack Power, Crit Chance, and Melee Haste.

Hit Chance
''Note that by this I am referring to reducing all forms of failed attacks, not just miss chance. (Dodge chance is of course the other main factor in a raid DPS situation)'' Druids scale as well with this as any class does, however since the vast majority of their DPS comes from special attacks, not auto-attacks, and specials which fail to hit have their energy cost drastically reduced, increasing hit chance is not terribly valuable to a feral druid, though lessening those occasional finisher misses definitely annoys the player less.

Attack Power
There are 3 separate pieces of Attack Power (henceforth referred to as AP) scaling that must be considered separately. These are Auto-attacks, Weapon-based attacks, and AP-based Attacks. Though excellent scaling of some may make up for poor scaling of others, as things currently stand, all scale poorly or are a very small effect. You can't lose every battle and win the war.

Auto-attacks
One might think that auto-attacks must scale just as well for all melee classes, as AP is defined to increase auto-attack DPS by 1 per 14 points, but this is not the case, due to the dual wield mechanic. A character that is dual wielding receives that entire AP bonus applied to both weapons, (Though the off-hand weapon then has its total damage reduced by 50% unless talents increase that percentage.) thus 14 points of AP actually increases an untalented dual-wielder's auto-attack DPS by 1.5, not 1, as it is for a single weapon user. All other melee DPS besides druids who use single weapons regain this loss in their weapon-based attacks, which use a 3.3 weapon speed (as they are using 2-handed weapons) to determine AP's contribution. Druids, however get the worst of both worlds. (More on this in the Weapon-based Attacks section.)

The solution to this scaling problem for druids is obvious enough: give druids in cat form an off-paw. By normal mechanics, this would incur a 19% miss penalty, causing druids to suddenly need huge amounts of +hit, and wrecking the existing itemization for druids, such as it is. There is no reason, however, that the 19% miss penalty cannot be ignored, or recovered by talents, so that the existing itemization can remain useful.

On a note not directly related to scaling (with stats anyway), the cat paw's base DPS has not changed since level 60, this is probably based on the assumption that Feral Attack Power (henceforth referred to as FAP) would take over that particular scaling. This could have worked, but FAP has been implemented in a broken manner such that if you project an item at an arbitrarily high item level, it gives less than 50% the bonus that a similar item level normal weapon would. A very thorough examination of this can be found on the Elitist Jerks Forums. As this problem appears to be slated to be fixed with the 2.3 patch. FAP is now a reasonable counterpoint to the unchanging weapon dps with level, and that can be left alone.

Weapon-based Attacks
Weapon-based attacks once took your auto-attack damage plus some modifier, multiplied by another modifier, and did that amount of damage to the enemy. Now, however, things are slightly more complicated. Due to the disproportionate value of slow weapons at high AP, Blizzard decided to normalize the AP contribution to the auto-attack damage used in weapon-based attacks (this did not affect auto-attacks themselves, only weapon-based attacks) to the same speed for all weapons of the same type. The normalization values were (and still are):

Druid's claws were left entirely unchanged by this, but it highlighted the importance of this aspect of weapon speed, and showed the strongest reason why cat druid weapon-based attacks were lacking: that 1.0 number. A lot of progress has been made in this department simply by jacking up each attack's multiplier by large amounts, with mangle increasing shred by 30%, and 10% increase to all physical damage, plus larger base multipliers than other classes to begin with.

AP-based Attacks
There is no overarching formula for these attacks beyond that they scale linearly with AP, meaning their damage is equal to some base value plus AP times some modifier. The only two that are of consequence for comparing to other melee classes (Rip and Ferocious Bite) scale at the same rate as rogues (which have the most directly comparable abilities), however these attacks comprise a very small portion of the druid's overall DPS, and thus are not a strong effect. It can be noted, however, that the presence of FAP makes these abilities actually scale slightly better for us than for rogues, since their counterpart, weapon damage, does not effect these attacks. Again, though, this is a very small gain made even smaller by the small role these attacks play in our DPS.

Crit Chance
Crit chance is the one thing cats really scale well with. we only require 25 points of agility to gain 1% critical strike chance, and we gain 1 attack power from each point of agility as well. with the burning crusade talents, our crit bonus is improved, if not by a lot. This is the one place I don't think we need any changes, except maybe an increase to our crit bonus.

Melee Haste
Melee haste is a rather odd beast, as unlike spell haste, it is not simply an overall direct dps multiplier. (That point can be argued, as it does not effect the global cooldown, but that's a small contention) Melee haste effects only autoattack speed and those things which come from it. This means that its overall value varies widely from class to class. Shamans, for example, get a very high value from it, as autoattack is a very high portion of their dps, and much of the rest is windfury, which gains a partial benefit from haste as well. Rogues get quite strong gains as well, since melee dps is well more than half of their overall, and the combat potency talent causes haste to spill over its effect into special attacks as well. Feral druids, however... get very little. Feral auto-attack damage is less than a third of overall damage, and there is essentially no spillover into other damage sources. The only spillover really is extra clearcasts and Malorne 2p procs, which hardly tip the scales at all for haste.

If druids were given an off-paw, (without the 19% miss penalty) and the broken FAP implementation were fixed (which appeares to ba about to happen), haste would be a much more viable stat for ferals, as well as helping us scale better with AP.