[EN] Fluffy Tail Feral Druid 5.4 PvE Guide

[Frostfang]

Fluffy Tail Feral Druid PvE Guide

Table of Content:
-Introduction
-Races and their racials
-Abilities
-Talents
-Glyphs
-Stats
-Opener and rotation
-Geming and professions
-Enchants
-Useful Macros
-Addons
-Symbiosis
-Closing Word




Introduction

Welcome to the Feral PvE Guide for the patch 5.4. In many ways this will be similar to my guardian druid guide. Hopefully this guide will be even better.




Races and their racials

Worgens
-Viciousness For now worgens are the best dps class on the alliance side.
-Darkflight Druids already got Dash and Stampeding Roar with Darkflight, our mobility is just amazing.
-Aberration Reduces Shadow and Nature damage taken, which is not that important for us but some extra survivability cant hurt.

Night Elves
-Shadowmeld Shadowmeld can be used to reset potion cooldown during boss fight, so you can use it 3 times(with pre-pot) while other races can do it only twice
-Quickness We wont be tanking this time.
-Nature Resistance Reduces damage taken from nature spells, which is not that important for us but some extra survivability cant hurt.

Trolls
-Berserking will slightly increase our energy regeneration rate also give us some more attack speed.
-Da Voodoo Shuffle Can be useful on certain encounters.
-Regeneration (wowhead link) 10% isnt much, but some extra survivability cant hurt.

Taurens
-War Stomp is just another crowd control spell added to your arsenal
-Endurance Some extra HPs is always nice.
-Nature Resistance Reduces damage taken from nature spells.

Taurens are the last pick in my opinion for feral pve druid. Again, if you are not limited by a faction go for a worgen, if you are horde lover, troll is your better pick.


Abilities
Abilities will be split into 3 parts:

Combo points generators:

Mangle is you main combo generator. It deals moderate amount of damage and gives 1 combo point.

Rake gives 1 combo point and leaves ticking bleed debuff on a target.

Shred deal high amount of damage to the bleeding targets. But because of its higher energy cost, overall it will generate less combo points than mangle. I suggest you to use it only while Berserking or having Clearcasting proc.

Ravage can only be used while stealthed and behind the target, but it deals massive amount of damage.

Swipe deals 20% more damage if used on bleeding targets, so use Trash first to apply debuff. It also generates 1 combo point on your current target.

Finishing abilities:

Rip is the main source of your damage. Most of the thing you will be doing is to empower this ability. It leaves ticking bleed debuff on a target.

Savage Roar increases your damage by 40%, keep it up at all times.

Ferocious Bite straight out blast dmg. It also refreshes the duration on your Rip to full duration on targets bellow 25% HP.

Need to know

Omen of Clarity makes your next spell free of energy cost.

Primal Fury - each times one of your combo generating abilities crit, you will gain double combo points.

Predatory Swiftness - you need to keep track of this, best way to do it, is by using some buff/debuff addon.

Tiger's Fury If you have T16 4Set Bonus, using this ability before your finishing spell, not only increases the damage of your spell but gives you 3 combo points in return.

Talents
Level 15 - Movement

The choice here is between Feline Swiftness or Wild Charge.Feline Swiftness should be your default choice and swap to Wild Charge if needed.

Level 30 - Healing

The best option is Ysera's Gift

Level 45 - Kiting

Faerie Swarm allows you to permanently keep 2 targets slowed, making it incredibly useful for kiting. Typhoon is the talent that sees the most use in raid/dungeon content by a huge margin. Mass Entanglement has no target limit so you can use it when there's big pack of adds that needs to be kited

Level 60 - Effectiveness

This is where the fun begins.Soul of the Forest will make your "rotation" alot smoother. On the other hand Incarnation: Son of Ursoc provides greater short time burst. Force of Nature can take snapeshot of all of your procs and deal good amount of damage.

Level 75 - Crowd Control

Has little or no effect on most raid encounters, just pick which ever you like.

Level 90 - Hybridity

The best choice here is Dream of Cenarius. It will require more buff tracking but it provides better dps outcome. Unfortunately it doesnt work correctly at the moment so you better roll with one of the other 2 talents. As always Nature's Vigil is a simple on demand dps increase, simple to use and aligns perfectly with Berserk. Heart of the Wild is a really good burst dps/healing talent, since using it to its full potential requires switching to Intelect weapons.


Glyphs

So the Prime Glyphs got removed from the game with Mist of Pandaria. Now we have only slots for 3 Major and 3 Minor Glyphs.
There are no "must use" glyphs, you i suggest you use these.

For Major Glyphs:

Glyph of Savagery Savage Roar can now be used with 0 combo points, resulting in a 12 sec duration.
Glyph of Shred While Berserk or Tiger's Fury is active, Shred has no positional requirement.
Glyph of Cat Form Increases healing done to you by 20% while in Cat Form

For Minor Glyphs:

Glyph of Survival Instincts Reduces the cooldown of Survival Instincts by 60 sec, but reduces its duration by 50%
Glyph of Stampeding Roar Increases the radius of Stampeding Roar by 30 yards.
Glyph of Rebirth Players resurrected by Rebirth are returned to life with 100% health

Stats
There are 2 viable specs which i will go trough in a moment, but first lets go again trough stat meaning.

Weapon Damage is actually pretty important. All base weapon damage has been doubled, which is good for abilities that scale with it such as Mangle.

Agility is our primary stat. It gives us attack power. Since you cannot obtain more agility by reforging, you should get more agility every chance you get. It also increases our critical strike chance.

Critical Strike gives you double combo points via Primal Fury

Haste increases attack speed and Energy regeneration.

Hit cap is 7.5%. By having hit cap, you ensure your melee attacks always land.

Mastery increases our bleed damage, rake and rip. They are our biggest source of damage.

So the first build goes something like this:
Agility>Mastery>Hit Cap (7.5% = 2.550)>Expertise Cap (7.5% = 2.550)>Critical Strike>Haste

I think i dont need to explain again why stats go in this order.


The second build is slightly different and its based on Rune of Re-Origination. Even tho its from the previous tier, it still stands for the BiS trinket for Ferals.

Agility > Hit > Expertise > Mastery = Critical Strike = Haste
with Mastery slightly above crit and haste

How this trinket works. Lets say you got 100 Mastery points, 50 Critical Strike and 50 Haste. When trinket procs it will sum 2 of your lower stats (Critical Strike and Haste) double it and add it to your highest Stat (Mastery). (50+50)*2+100= 300 Mastery points. Proc lasts for 10 seconds and for its duration crit and haste are reduced to 0. This is why you should keep your mastery slightly above other 2 but just by a bit.



Opener and rotation
Let's assume that you're playing with Rune of Re-Origination, Dream of Cenarius and T16 4 set bonus. Your opener should be something like this:

You cast Healing Touch to proc Dream of Cenarius > Pre-Pot > Prowl > Savege Roar > Ravage > Mangle till 5 Combo Points > Tiger's Fury > Savage Roar
At this point everything should have proced, including Rune of Re-Origination, you will have 3 combo points and Healing Touch instant proc.

You pop Berserk+Engineering Gloves etc> Rake > Healing Touch instant proc > Rake > Rip > Healing Touch > Thresh
This should give you your strongest bleeds and you DO NOT refresh them until they expire.

If you dont have T16 4 part bonus and you're not playing with Dream of Cenarius, your opener is much more simple.

You pre-pot > Prowl > Savage Roar > Ravage as fast as you can > Rake till 5 combo points > Tigers's Fury+Engineering Gloves etc > Rip > Rake

After you've done all that best you could, you follow some sort of priority system which includes various buffs and debuffs.

Faerie Fire if someone else didnt apply it
Savage Roar
Healing Touch with Predatory Swiftness on 4 combo points.
Tiger's Fury + Berserk
Rip
Rake
Thrash if less than 6 seconds
Ferocious Bite but only if you are sure you can make 5 combo points before rip or savage roar falls off.
Shred only with Omen of Clarity or during berserk
Rake with Rune of Re-Origination proc
Mangle

I know this seems like alot of things to do, but once you get used to it, its fairly simple.


Geming and professions

Meta: Capacitive Primal Diamond is the best choice. If you cant get it Agile Primal Diamond will work just fine.
Red:Delicate Primordial Ruby
Blue: Glinting Imperial Amethyst or if you dont need more expertise Accurate Imperial Amethyst
Yellow: Adept Vermilion Onyx

My suggestion is, if socket bonus is not agility, put a nice little Delicate Primordial Ruby

As for the professions, i dont think i have to explain them fully, so ill just put them in order:

Engeneering
Tailoring
Blacksmithing
Leatherworking
Jewelcrafting
Inscription
Enchanting

Enchants

Enchants are pretty much self-explanatory but lets go over them fast.

Shoulder: Greater Tiger Claw Inscription
Back: Enchant Cloak - Superior Critical Strike
Chest: Enchant Chest - Glorious Stats
Wrist: Enchant Bracer - Greater Agility
Hands: Enchant Gloves - Superior Mastery
Waist: Living Steel Belt Buckle, crafted by blacksmiths; it allows you to put another gem on your belt
Legs: Shadowleather Leg Armor, crafted by leatherworkers
Boots: Enchant Boots - Blurred Speed
Weapons: Enchant Weapon - Dancing Steel
Rings (if you are an enchanter): Formula: Enchant Ring - Greater Agility on both

Addons

Chatter
Bartender4
TellMeWhen
Tidy Plates it was eyeopener for me, use it!
Bagnon
Deadly Boss Mods
AtlasLoot
Recount
Miks Scrolling Battle Text
OmniCC

Macros

Code:

#showtooltip Might of Ursoc /cast Might of Ursoc /cast Healthstone

Code:

#showtooltip /cast [@focus] Skull Bash

Code:

/cast [@mouseover] Rebirth

Code:

#showtooltip /cast [swimming] Aquatic Form; [indoors] Cat Form; [combat] Travel Form; [flyable] Swift Flight Form; [nocombat, harm] Travel Form

Code:

#showtooltip /cast Mangle /startattack

Symbiosis

So with Mists of Pandaria we got this cool new spell which grants us other classes' abilities. Spell we get only depend on our spec. We get spell that increase our dps and spells that reduce our damage taken. As a feral choices we get are pretty amazing i must say. They are all good and it all depends on what you need.

Death Knight - Death Coil

Hunter - Play Dead Coolest spell EVER!

Mage - Frost Nova

Monk - Clash

Paladin - Divine Shield

Priest - Dispersion

Rogue - Redirect

Shaman - Feral Spirit

Warlock - Soul Swap

Warrior - Shattering Blow

Closing Word

Not many feral druids are seen out there in pve. Mostly because so far balance was doing better and it was range which was preferably along the way. Feral is one of the classes which scales most with the gear. Hopefully feral will really start to shine somewhere in mid SoO.
Thats it folks. If you got any questions, or suggestions for this guide please post them in comments.
Have fun!

Guardian Druid Tanking Guide

[madau]

Good job!
But i have some things to point out and i'm not gonna add them all right now because i'm at work.
You put symbiosis instead of macros.
It seems like the talent choiches are not made for freakz but for blizz. On t4 you cannot play with sotf since it is best only under 490 ilvl where haste is not enough. Incarnation is the best choice for extra bursting and does a lot of damage, being responsible of around 15% of your damage in a 7 minutes fight. Also the treants are awesome in terms of dps since you can snapshot their bleeds on your best procs.

On t6 doc is not working properly at the moment so you cannot advise ppl to play with it. HotW is best for progression riding for its healing and can be an awesome dps burst by casting only wrath in fights that tw/bl is not required at the begining and it also gives you 6% flat agi which is huge. Nature vigil is always awesome for bursting since you can align his cd with berserk and incarnation and can always be used as a raid wide healing cd.



Vengeance is in my heart, death in my hand,
Blood and revenge are hammering in my head.

[Frostfang]

madau wrote:

It seems like the talent choiches are not made for freakz but for blizz. On t4 you cannot play with sotf since it is best only under 490 ilvl where haste is not enough. Incarnation is the best choice for extra bursting and does a lot of damage, being responsible of around 15% of your damage in a 7 minutes fight. Also the treants are awesome in terms of dps since you can snapshot their bleeds on your best procs.

Yes you are right, Incarnation is the best choice for extra bursting but i already said, also i dont like incarnation in mobile fightrs where you have to move alot, feels like you are wasting its duration, so i'd rather go with SoTF or Treants ( which i forgot to write about)

madau wrote:

On t6 doc is not working properly at the moment so you cannot advise ppl to play with it. HotW is best for progression riding for its healing and can be an awesome dps burst by casting only wrath in fights that tw/bl is not required at the begining and it also gives you 6% flat agi which is huge. Nature vigil is always awesome for bursting since you can align his cd with berserk and incarnation and can always be used as a raid wide healing cd.

Edited, thank you!

Guardian Druid Tanking Guide

[madau]

The best quality of a feral druid is that he is the most mobile and swift melee dps of them all. You can move and close the gaps with skullbash, wild charge, dash, roar so it is a very low time spent out of the range of the target. This is why i would recommend playing with incarnation over all the other talents, even though the trees are a higher dps output overall in a fight.

Thanks for making the guide!



Vengeance is in my heart, death in my hand,
Blood and revenge are hammering in my head.

[Daeron]

Good job!

[Wedinn]

Good job, Frostfang!

Wedinn
Former Game Master & Discord Community Manager
(January 2017 - February 2018)

[joao44289]

Is it normal to have mad dps at the begining? I'm one shooting everything and I really don't like it. When does it stop being op?

[Frostfang]

You mean low level? It gets scaled around level 30-40 idk. Leveling is kinda fast, so not many people really pays attention since everything works fine at higher levels.

Guardian Druid Tanking Guide

[Gogumen]

Good