Embracing My Quaternary Spec

Many of you, you like myself, have probably been farming ICC for longer than you care to admit. The dungeon has a tendency to get painfully boring but one of the few pleasant side effects for us as druids is the ability to populate our off-specs (or in some cases off-off-specs). Primarily I raid as restoration with a balance off-spec that I do get asked to pull out from time to time when we raid. Additional typhoons and starfalls are advantageous on some bosses and my damage output is fairly respectable for those nights when we have surplus healing. Over the course of our time in ICC I have been picking up every piece of feral gear I can get my hands on that is going to rot anyway and have managed to purchase a third set of Sanctified Lasherweave feral version. My goal all this time was to develop a tanking set as it would allow me to, in a pinch, serve all three roles in a raid as needed. With the impending removal of Zul’Gurub on the horizon I have actually been maintaining Feral as my offspec so I can solo Molten Core, ZG, and AQ20 in my free time over the course of the raid week. What this has meant for me is that, should I be needed for DPS, I have to fall back on my fourth set of gear (which isn’t totally terrible but far from ideal) and my least familiar mode of play: Feral DPS.

I needed help. I do read some feral blogs out there but they don’t really do a whole lot to decipher the cryptic puzzle that is the feral cat rotation. We are all very familiar with the rather humorous (and not very new) flow chart that elaborates more on what this rotation entails:

Needless to say it is a tad over my head. I love playing damage dealing builds but this is just one I don’t quite grasp the nuances of just yet. I know some people have a rather fierce opposition to them, but I turned to one of the “move suggestion” add-ons to help me get my feet wet and figure out just what the priorities are and get a firm grasp of how to adapt to the suggestions given unique circumstances. A lot of people suggested Feral By Night and Drood Focus however there was one that caught my attention called Ovale. This mod is currently designed for multiple classes (though I have no intention of using it for them) however on the elitist jerks website a druid by the name of Furion, who has since quit the game, posted a DPS script for Ovale that he recommended. So, I installed the mod and copy and pasted his script into the Druid section and gave it a go. I must say I enjoy the minimalist approach the mod takes screen real estate wise, and it certainly does help keep you on top of things. I am using it alongside the standard debuff tracking mods so I am not entirely relying on it for knowing my Savage Roar, Rip, and Rake timers but having a visual queue showing when you might need to refresh these abilities certainly helps. Needless to say my feral DPS shot up from laughable to roughly on par with my gear level.

You can go here for the Ovale addon:  http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/ovale.aspx

The Feral Script (which may or may not be an improvement on the updated Ovale one):  http://elitistjerks.com/f73/t84378-visualising_optimal_cat_rotation_ingame/

If you have really positive experience with other mods for feral dps please let me know as I am always open to trying out new things.