Priority List
Here I will list the bare bones of the rotation: this is the absolute minimum you need to know to put out decent DPS. Make sure you read the other sections of this post for important details.
In addition, there are more advanced tactics that are not reflected in this post as they will be covered later in the guide in
King of the Jungle (Advanced Tactics).
- Tiger's Fury when on low energy.
- Berserk on cooldown, stack with Tiger's Fury when possible.
- Maintain Savage Roar.
- Ferocious Bite with 5 combo points and 50 energy to refresh Rip if the target is at or below 25% health.
- Maintain Rip with 5 combo points.
- Ferocious Bite with 5 combo points and 50 energy if Rip and Savage Roar are managed.
- Maintain Rake.
- Shred for combo points.
In general, you should aim to waste as little energy or combo points to overcapping as possible.
On multiple targets: Add in maintaining
Thrash, maintain
Rake on as many targets as possible, and use
Swipe in place of Shred. Swipe is extremely weak, and as such you should only use it when you have
all of your bleeds, including Rake, rolling on
all of the targets, or if there is a very large amount of targets that will die before you can DoT them.
Uptimes
First off, in Warlords of Draenor all damage over time effects now have a mechanic called
Pandemic. Pandemic allows you to carry over up to 30% of the base duration of the new effect from the old one's duration. For example, if you apply a Rake to a target that has a Rake with 4 seconds remaining already on it, the duration of the new Rake will be 15 (base duration) + 4 (remaining duration, <= 30% of 15) = 19 seconds. It is important to take advantage of this mechanic for optimal DPS, the main takeaway being that
all DoTs can be refreshed as soon as they have <= 30% of the base duration remaining. The sooner you reapply a DoT, the less chance you stand of letting it fall off, which means higher uptime and more damage. This mechanic allows for significantly easier maintenance of our bleeds and Savage Roar compared to 5.4.
Feral has 4 (de)buffs it should maintain for optimal DPS:
Savage Roar: This should be your #1 concern. When Savage Roar is down or about to end, the only thing you should cast is Savage Roar (or if you don't have any combo points, get one then Savage Roar). If you do this, you shouldn’t have too much trouble getting 99% or higher uptime on it, which is what you should aim for.
Savage Roar's pandemic threshold is a bit weird because of the specifics of the mechanic, but just keep in mind that when you're applying a 5 combo point roar you can refresh as soon as 12.6 seconds. The threshold is lower if you're applying a fewer combo point roar, but generally you shouldn't be applying a roar of less than 5 combo points unless is your current roar is about to run out (~3 seconds or less, roughly).
Rake: You should have this up near 100% of the time just like Savage Roar. Its a CP generator that just costs energy, so when Rake is down or about to end just swap a single Shred out for Rake. Simple. Rake has a Pandemic threshold of 4.5 seconds, so refresh it as soon as its remaining duration reaches that threshold.
Rip: This costs energy and combo points so this is where maintenance starts to get a little bit complicated. You always want to cast it with 5 combo points and should aim to have its uptime as high as possible. 90%+ is good, but close to 95% is ideal (given you have full uptime on the target). Rip has a Pandemic threshold of 7.2 seconds, so refresh it as soon as its remaining duration reaches that threshold.
Thrash: If you’re attacking more than one target you generally want to keep this up all the time. The more targets, the more important it is, so when you're fighting a large number of targets this should be your top priority after Savage Roar. Thrash has a Pandemic threshold of 4.5 seconds, so refresh it as soon as its remaining duration reaches that threshold.
In Warlords of Draenor, using Thrash on a single target is no longer a significant gain. At level 90 it is a small gain due to the higher levels of mastery available with Siege of Orgrimmar, but at level 100 the gain becomes of no significance and is not worth bothering with. In both cases, if there are secondary or tertiary targets who are useful to damage but not a priority Thrash can be maintained with little to no damage loss to the primary target.
Cooldowns
As a feral druid you have two main cooldowns:
Tiger's Fury and
Berserk; with
Incarnation being a third if you choose to spec into it. Tiger’s Fury should be used as close to every 30 seconds as you possibly can; think of it as more of a part of your rotation than a cooldown. It is a very rare occasion where you would consider not using it on cooldown as long as you have something to attack, basically the only time you do this is if you know there’s a big pack of adds about to spawn and you know your TF won’t line up to burst on them unless you save it for it.
Berserk is your big cooldown. It should always be used with Tiger’s Fury, the only exception being if Tiger’s Fury won’t be off cooldown again before the encounter is over. If you specialize into Incarnation, you should generally always use it together with Berserk.
You can use a macro like this to trigger Berserk with your Tiger’s Fury (you can add racial cooldowns, too):
Code: Select all
#showtooltip Berserk
/cast Incarnation: King of the Jungle
/cast Berserk
/cast Tiger’s Fury
You may also wish to trigger Incarnation seperately prior to Berserk to prevent unnecessarily losing 1 second of the Berserk buff, but this is a small gain.
