Glyphs: Rip, Savage Roar, Bloodletting. (Tendon’s not up for enough time for Berserk glyph, TF glyph doesn’t help and desyncs trinkets.)

Trinkets: Slot 1) A good on-use trinket. Kiroptyric Sigil is best option, but a PvP clicky or even Ancient Petrified Seed can work. Slot 2) Wrath of Unchaining, preferably, if not, whatever else you have. Don’t use two on-use trinkets, as the second one will not be usable until the buff from the first drops.  (and yes, this means engineering is somewhat penalized since they won’t get any benefit from Synapse Springs.)

Reforging: Cap hit, then either haste or crit, which appear to be roughly equal. Mastery is significantly worse. (edit: do NOT reforge for expertise, thanks Reesi)

Pre-Tendon: Get a Savage Roar and Stampede up off a corruption or blood.

Rotation: (Mangle), (FF), Trinket/Rake, Ravage!, Shred, TF/Trinket/Berserk/Rip.  (You can waste some TF energy here if necessary.) Continue with Shred/FB, make sure you get a Ravage! in. Using Rake a 2nd time is probably not worth it, but pretty close DPS-wise if you get it in during TF.  Final GCD should be an FB, but only if you have 5 CP’s, otherwise just Shred. Potion, obviously, though this is probably coordinated by your RL. If you have a 20s proc trinket, pop it at the beginning instead of with TF.

Is FF worth it in 10m if I’m the only melee DPS? Yes, but the difference is fairly small.

Rip? Really? Yes, assuming you get it up in time. 1 FB = ~3.5 Rip ticks on average. So, even if you’re slow starting, still use Rip unless there’s less than 9s remaining when you get to 5 cps.

Think that about covers everything; feel free to ask a question or share your experiences in the comments.

Strats:

Kael’thas

Prepwork: Make two macros and drag them to your bars.

/equip Staff of Disintegration
/use Staff of Disintegration

/equip Cosmic Infuser
/cast Rejuvenation (or Lifebloom if you prefer).

Clear trash in entry hallway and Al’ar’s (man that looks odd) room. Kill Al’ar (easy). If you want to kill Solarian or Void Reaver, do so now; they’re both easy, though you’ll have to clear all the trash in their rooms first. Clear the trash in one of the tunnels leading to KT (both is slightly safer but not necessary.) Kill the trash in his room if you wish. Pull KT, who will start monologuing. Run to one of the little antechambers leading to KT’s room; you’ve got about 45 seconds before the energy walls go back up and block entrance to the room.

Phase 1: Kill Thaladred and Sanguinar in the antechamber. Run to the doorway of the antechamber, enough so that Capernian runs out, then charge in and kill her. She’s quite annoying, with a long stun and a knockback, but she’ll die quickly if you can get close. Get to her sides, so the knockback doesn’t send you down the hallway. For Telonicus, work him down to 20-30% HP, run around dodging bombs until your Remote Toy debuff is at less than 15 seconds, than kill him, preferably on top of all the other advisors.

Phase 2: All the weapons spawn. You’ll have a few seconds to heal up before they get to you; tuck into the corner of the antechamber so they all come in, pop Barkskin, and start kitty swiping. Target the Cosmic Infuser and interrupt his heals. After 4-5 swipes, go bear, hit Enrage, and continue to AOE. With a little practice, you should be able to kill all the weapons with 30s left until Phase 3. Loot the Cosmic Infuser and Staff of Disintegration. Hit your macros to equip the Cosmic Infuser, cast a heal (to get the buff), then equip and use the Staff. Go bear.

Phase 3: All the advisors rez simultaneously. This is the first tricky bit. Wait until you get out of Sanguinar’s first fear, then pop Berserk and nuke down Thaladred, chaining Mangles to Sanguinar and Telonicus (hopefully). You’ll want to save Barkskin and SI for when he’s close to dead, as the stacking DoT from Rend is the biggest source of incoming damage. This will take 30s, as the DPS from the Staff of Disintegration is pretty low, but you need it equipped for the buff. Once Thaladred and Sanguinar are dead, go cat to take out Telonicus and finally Capernian. At any point, if you get low on health, start running down towards Al’ar’s room, hotting yourself up as you go. Once Telonicus is dead, you can outheal Capernian’s damage, so I usually heal to full and wait to kill her until Phase 4 is starting.

Phase 4: KT comes after you. If you are in Al’ar’s room and you’ve only cleared one corridor, make SURE you position yourself so KT runs down the cleared corridor, else he’ll aggro every mob on the way. Try to hit your Macro 2 twice and Macro 1 twice every 30 seconds; this keeps the magic damage protection buff up, which really helps for the fireballs, as well as the staff buff, which you need to not get disoriented. KT has three main threats:

• Casts Fireball every 8-10 seconds. Interrupt as many of these as you can, as they hit for a good 15-20% of your HP. If you get low on HP and need to heal, either run away and HoT (easier) or LOS casts using a doorway (harder). Don’t run away if his Shock Barrier CD is close.
• Casts Shock Barrier, then three Pyroblasts. These can NOT be LOS’ed/outranged, so you’ll need to be close by. If you have Rip/Rake up, you can typically break the shield and interrupt before he gets one Pyro off; if unlucky, you may have to eat one. Pop a CD.
• Casts Flame Strike, which is a void zone on the ground, Just stay out of them, as they can hit for a lot.
• Phoenixes will come in, then turn into eggs at 0% HP, then turn back into Phoenixes after 15s Can mostly be ignored; if you want to kill, note that they can only be killed as an egg.

Pop Berserk and work him down. Play defensively; I used every Predatory Swiftness proc for instant HT’s, and ran away to HoT immediately after Shock Barrier phases if I felt threatened. Once you work him to 50%, he will take off and run back towards his room. He is still attackable, but slightly faster than you; if you use Dash and SR to keep up with him, you can knock a significant chunk of HP off him, but it’s not necessary.

Phase 5: go back to Al’ar’s room. Wait (kill any Phoenixes that are up). You’ll get hit with some stuff; don’t worry, just heal through it and wait. Eventually, he’ll teleport you to him. At this point, you can just kill him, but I like to run back to the main room to get some space; this time, he’ll follow you, and you can work him down like you did in P4. Still casts Fireball and Flame Strike, but no more Pyroblasts, so he should be easy to finish off once you get him here.

Reward: 300g, the T5 chest (if you want it for transmog) and a 1-2% chance at the Ashes of Al’ar.

High King Maulgar

Much simpler, mostly a gearcheck. Start in cat, pop a potion, Berserk/SI/Barkskin, and nuke down Blindeye, interrupting heals. Once Blindeye is dead, kill Olm so he stops fearing you. When you get low on HP, go bear and use FR to heal, then finish off Krosh, Kiggler, and finally Maulgar. The tough part is interrupting Blindeye’s heals, since they’re usually synced with a fear; you’ll win or lose the fight in the first 30 seconds.

Reward: 50g (I think) and T4 shoulders, plus you get to kill Gruul, who is very easy.

With that, I’m done with BC. Sunwell’s too difficult, and I’ve cleared everything else save Vashj in SSC (which requires ranged) or everything past Reliquary (no pet to take aggro and let you LoS) in BT. Time to start working on WOTLK content; here’s a little screenshot of a solo I did a while ago while I was playing in Iraq and was inordinately proud of:

Sounds good, right? Well, there’s a few problems with that.

Haste is useless if you’re not attacking something. Again, common sense, but it bears repeating. If you have to move off-target, your mastery/crit continues to affect your bleed ticks, while your haste just sits there.

Haste is terrible for bears. May not be an issue, but if you plan on bearcatting, then you want something that can affect Savage Defense, which means mastery. (Crit used to be nice, but is now devalued in bear due to the 2pT13 set bonus.)

Extra energy regeneration increases rotational difficulty. Ah, here’s the most important one. The cat rotation is very dynamic; you’ll have times where NOTHING is up, and you have to quickly execute your priorities to get everything going. You’ll have times where you need to dump energy ASAP to use Tiger’s Fury optimally. On the flipside, you’ll have times where you’re sitting around waiting for energy to regen.

The issue? Well, as haste increases, you have more #1 and #2 situations, and less #3. In these situations, fractional time matters. (What do I mean by this? Well, if you’re just waiting for energy to regen, you can use that Shred at 60 or 80 energy, it’s not really a big deal. If you’re trying to start or restart bleeds, each bit of delay starts to take away from uptime and thus damage.)  This is where in-game reality starts to diverge from simulations; Mew doesn’t have to deal with raid mechanics, crazy raid leaders, or out–of-game interruptions; all of which will end up causing you to spend more time at energy cap, which also makes haste less than useful. Ultraxion is a good example of this; relying on Mangle instead of Shred requires a few more keypresses, since Mangle uses less energy.

So, what am I saying? Yes, in sim theory, all the stats are roughly equal. In actuality, though, the priorities that make it easier to play perfectly, such as capping hit and expertise, and minimizing haste, will increase your DPS the most. What do you think?

Of course, this group also managed to wipe on Spine when we somehow triggered a barrel roll killing the third amalgamation, so…perhaps not the best representative sampling.

Short-Term (pre-MoP):

• Get back to regular updates. With my schedule, that wasn’t possible before, but I plan to start writing a weekend recap post, even if nothing else is going on.
• Add some merch. As I mentioned before the holidays, I’ve had several requests for shirts/etc., and I’d love to put something together.  I’ve done some looking around on Cafepress, etc., and at the moment I still feel a bit overwhelmed.  I’m a writer, not an artist, and I don’t want to sell something crap. If anyone has experience with Cafepress or similar sites of that ilk, please shoot me an email.
• Update the guide. Yeah, the feral guide that’s still labeled 4.0.3, that’s about a year out of date. That one. :P
• Participate more in the forums. Not much to say here, but I like to be accessible.
• Remember that I have a Twitter account. Uh, yeah.
• Refresh the site theme. The theme is getting a bit stale. I like the overall presentation of information, but there’s lots of little niggling things that I want to fix.
• Add some solo-specific content. This is our last and greatest opportunity to experiment with soloing content, to see what we can push. The item level “squish” and the removal of hybrid speccing is going to make old raids more difficult.

Long-Term (for MoP)

• Video Guides. Yes, I’m entering 2007. Go me. I will still do a fully-written guide for Mists of Pandaria, but I will supplement it with a video guide as well. There will be a small charge for the videos (still determining what a fair price would be), but everything else (text guide, blog, forums, etc.) will remain free. I plan to cover both Guardian and Feral. I will probably do some smaller videos pre-MoP to make sure I have a good product; those smaller videos will be free or almost free. I don’t do scammy; refunds will be available, sample clips will be available, etc.

Feel free to jump in and tell me what else I should cover (or tell me I’m crazy for trying to do videos, either works). This is still just an idea at the moment, so there’s lots of flexibility.

Website Stats

People were excited to finally dig into Cataclysm content, and it showed. The site had a huge spike in popularity, going from ~50k monthly views in Nov/Dec to ~150k in January, then slowly fell back to the 50-60k level. (Of course, we also had a lot less to talk about in the later half of the year.)  Subscribers to the RSS feed (as measured by FeedBurner) jumped from 500ish to about 800 in January, and are now hovering around 1k. I don’t have good stats for the forums, but we’re up over 6k total posts, so obviously something’s going right there. :)

Popular Posts:

• January: The gearlists, obviously. We discussed Unheeded Warning quite a bit, as well as the 4.0.6 patch notes; most notably, the loss of our free root/snare break, which had everyone predicting the death of ferals in arena.
• February: My 4.0.6 trinket list was big news (short version: UW sucked, then was great, but see below). My post discussing my negative outlook for the feral class also made the rounds and got LOTS of comments. :)
• March: My posting started to fall off here. No super-popular posts this month, but I really liked Syl’s UI post; lots of great information.
• April-June: Swipe damage was doubled for 4.1, taking us from near-worst in AoE situations to near-first. We had our first glance at the FIREKITTY. 4.2 re-nerfed Swipe a bit, but buffed a few more abilities. My 4.2 gear list was popular, but I forgot to link it on the front page until after 4.3, making it somewhat useless. :)
• July-September: Not too much happened.  UW finally got nerfed, as we had all predicted.
• October-December: Some cool stuff came out at Blizzcon. 4.3 buffed us a bit; things look pretty decent in normal gear, though the final verdict is still fairly mediocre at the heroic gear level. (That said, sub rogues/UH DKs’/Enh at the top, arcane and mut rogues at the bottom…Neo says whoa.)

Personal

WoW Insider offered me a columnist slot back in January, which I accepted (first column for WOWI). Admittedly, the timing wasn’t the greatest:  I completed my training in Georgia in February (CISSP passed! Yay!) and moved to Texas in March to deploy to Iraq in April. Whew. Sylvaneart, Qbear, Tinderhoof, and Leafkiller did an excellent job filling in with guest posts while I was occupied, and they of course continue to contribute in forum discussion, which I am slowly dipping my toe back into. Due to a highly unlikely set of coincidences, I was actually able to keep raiding in Iraq, even though I had to wake up at 0330 to make the 8PM CST start time. Due to a lack of healers and low FPS, I ended up raiding as Resto.

September saw me leaving Iraq for Kuwait; no more incoming fire (good) but, ironically, worse Internet and housing arrangements meant no more raiding. Yay. I wrote a story for the Blizzard writing contest, which didn’t win anything. I’ll post it, in case anyone is interested in reading my first attempt to write fiction since high school. (TLDR: Not very good.)

Now that I’m home, I’m playing through all the great games I missed (got Portal 2 on my 360, with Arkham City waiting as soon as I finish Arkham Asylum on the PC). Raid Finder is cool, but ultimately boring in the lack of difficulty. I feel like I’m cheating somehow; I’ve still got a lot of 359 gear, but I’m hitting top 5 on the DPS meters for every fight. (UPDATE: Wow, Happy Winterveil: I’ve done RF twice now, both parts, and come away with 3 pieces of T13, Kiril’s, and the Wrath trinket. I actually topped the DPS meters on Ultraxion.)  I may come back to normal raiding, but I’m not ready to commit time to a schedule yet. We’ll see on that one.

Anyway, enough navel-gazing. (At least till my next post, where I discuss where I want to take TFD for 2012.) What’s your favorite moment of 2011?

The Draft 4.3 Gear List

The full version (with better explanations and text) will be going up on WoW Insider sometime next week (when I finish it), but this is a good starting point. Feel free to leave any comments here; I’ll try to respond quickly, but no guarantees as things are crazy around here with packing.

(Wowhead’s list is good as well. If I had known they were doing one, I probably would have skipped doing one myself. Also, here’s my Firelands/ZA gear list, if you’re just getting started.)

I apologize for the lack of blogs lately; as more and more people have stacked up here in preparation to depart, the civilian wireless network has gone from bad to horrendous. (You’re only reading this now because I’ve prewritten it and gotten up early in the morning to log in and publish it.) It’s been all I could do to keep my columns going for WoW Insider, and I’ve only been able to keep those up because their blogging software doesn’t get filtered by the work firewall. *cough* Of course, my laptop recently died as well, which didn’t help matters any.

Anyway, enough complaining. I’ll be going dark for the rest of December, as I have a lot of catching up to do with my wife and son. Come January, however, I have a lot of changes in store; thinking a blog style refresh and update is long overdue. Couple people have asked me for Fluid Druid shirts, too, so hell, I’ll see what I can do. Anything else you want to see, feel free to ask in the comments!

As always Fluiddruid is all about making sure you have all the information needed to succeed in the new-raid zone. With that being said the Raid and Strategy section of our forums will be updated to include the new encounters over the turkey weekend. For those of you who have not been sniffing around the official forums Tangedyn wrote up a very clean summery of everything you will need to know to stay competitive in Dragon Soul, for those who have not read it I highly suggest taking a quick peak here. Included in the post are trinket ratings for Dragon Soul that have already been evaluated by Yawning and Mihir (the druid responsible for maintaining the feral dps guide on MMO-Champion.)

With 4.3 I do hope to bring back The FluidDruid YouTube Chan, however; I did come back in a much more casual raiding guild then before with 9 hours per week I promise to get content out as fast as we’re capable of creating strats for it. I did want to make special mention that if you have videos of yourself doing exceptional on a boss in Dragon Soul and wish to add it to this site’s channel feel free to PM me on the forums. I’d love to get other people then just myself up on the channel and I think with me progressing much slower in 4.3 this opens up a prime opportunity to get more video content out. Who knows maybe I could do a month by month contest where the feral who submits the best video for me to release gets a Blizzard Store pet of their choice, wink wink.

Lastly I do wish to make mention of the FluidDruid Forums where we have been and will continue to discuss all aspects of feral dps. With the release of the MOP Talent Calculator we are already locked in discussion on what the changes to the tooltips mean for both single target and aoe dps.

As always if you have any questions or suggestion feel free to PM me on the forums

Until next time and my hopes for a Happy Thanksgiving to all,

Qbear