After struggling with attendance and membership in my raid group I ended up going dps last week to fill the raid positions more easily.
I discovered a few things on Sunday night while playing as dps:
- Raid leading while maintaining the cat rotation is somewhat tricky. Easier than when the rotation was more complex, but speaking on vent and keeping all bleeds up is more challenging than I expected. It did get a laugh or two from people though.
- Cat druids do very competitive dps. On Halfus with 2 target switches (no whelps) I was very happy with how my damage compared to other raid members.
- The combination of Slate Dragon and Nether Scion is a pain, especially when your healers are not already geared in raid drops.
- When you are the raid leader, it’s embarrassing to use the wrong helm enchant 😦 I hadn’t focused on Ramkahen reputation yet…
Following on from the raid, I tried some PvP in a full cat spec. I have a couple of ilevel 352 honor rewards and a good trinket so thought I might do ok.
The reason for my sudden PvP interest is that my guild has started winning a bunch of rated battlegrounds. I haven’t really been involved with many of those players, and as guild master I feel like I should do something other than chat in guild chat with them.
PvP was an interesting experience since the shapeshift change. Multiple times I caught myself powershifting to get out of a snare – and I’m pretty sure that the frost mage was laughing while he killed me…over and over again. So I ran away and made myself happy killing melee targets instead.
I foresee a long grind of battlegrounds to build a more robust PvP set before really having much fun in PvP. I’m hanging out for the changes to Dash and Stampeding Roar that were announced in 4.1 so that druids feel viable against a mage again. In all honesty I felt most useful in a support role – entangling and taking out vehicles and distracting healers. That might be a result of not having enough resilience yet as well.
While gearing up the PvP set I think I’ll stay well away from the guild battlegrounds teams. There’s nothing worse than a poorly performing guild master getting carried…and since the team leader gets final say on the roster, I get to save myself some rejection too 🙂
Eao's excursions 
What addons do you use? I don’t like to “automate” my rotation, but it is certainly necessary when you’re trying to raid lead at the same time. Try ovale with custom script?
I use NeedToKnow as my primary cat addon. I don’t use anything to highlight cooldowns (like Tiger’s fury), I just check for them and use them when they are available. I don’t use any rotation suggestion addons either, I find the icons that pop up to be distracting. I also have Heatsink to track cooldowns automatically.
I hated doing raid lead while playing any type of melee or tank. I was too close to the action while ranged or healer lets you see almost everything that is going on.
While your dps might be competitive right now you will quickly fall behind as the rest of the raid gets geared. Cats are OK in 345 to 359 level stuff. But higher then that and we just don’t scale that well. Not to mention that many of the fights are anti-melee.
As for PvP the proposed 4.1 changes are a step in the right direction but will end up doing very little. Stampeding Roar just uses up too much energy and the CD’s are too long. Besides mage one frosted yoru butt. As soon as you break it mage two will do the same and they will still end up laughing at you. Cats are basically dead as far as PvP goes.
I find raid leading as a tank to be the easiest. As melee it’s a pain, and as ranged I always end up standing in fire while I talk on vent…which is funny for everyone else the first time, but gets wearing after that.
I had another PvP experience last night, and for PvP I’m going back to my mage. Feral is totally disheartening in PvP at the moment and I didn’t enjoy it at all (apart from chewing up 2 shadow priests and a hunter who must not have been great at PvP).
LOL raid leading while tanking = dangerous LOL
Glad to hear you’ve joined the kitty forces, even if for just a moment. If you are looking for simple ways to just keep track of both bleed and savage roar timers might I suggest ditching feralbynight for DroodFocus. The addon itself will come stock with more stuff then you’ll ever need; however, with a good time spent clicking everything off I think you’ll end up liking it more. Basically I have mine set to just display a row of icons with timers for bleeds//roar, as well as a pulsing icon (you can set the size too) in order to be alerted as such important abilities come off cd (Tiger’s fury, feral charge, berserk.) The great thing about drood focus, is it also displays the same pulse icons for debuff you recieve. Example if your sitting there mashing keys on asendent council mad because that fight is horrible for melee as your suddenly hit with the lightning rod icon, it is very noticeable you need to get out of dodge.
Long rant sort Droodfocus is the bomb, pain to set up but I’d suggest looking into if you plan to kitty for awhile.
thanks for all the helpful stuff, can’t beleive how much you’ve helped my game.