Hunter loot!

Threads on the forums arguing over whether a ferals should get melee weapon priorities over hunter are fairly common. One popped up recently that got more involved and ran longer than most.

I'll state up front my answer to this question, but that's not really what's at issue here. I'm going to be mostly discussing weapon scaling. My answer, and indeed the ONLY answer to this question, is a simple one:
If hunters receive priority over rogues and warriors for ranged weapons: YES.
If nobody receives priority:  No

That's all there is to that issue in my book.

But people got to talking about situations in which they'd pass, and discussing for whom the weapon would be a bigger upgrade.  Time for MATH.

Fap fap fap
It's well known that feral scales well with weapons (and practically nothing else).  Predatory Strikes for any other class would read "increases the damage of your melee weapon by 5/10/15%", and in fact it scales better and better the further our weapons get from their base 54.8 DPS.  Go back to our old standby Terestian's Stranglestaff (a weapon I love dearly and still have banked), it's a 10% weapon damage increase.  A Heroic Oathbinder, the difference is close to 17%.  And then raid buffs actually affect our weapon DPS as well.  Take a Distant Land, the most common weapon used by raiding ferals right now.  It's 294.6 DPS base, but apply Predatory Strikes, Heart of the Wild, and whichever flavour of the 10% AP raid buff you have, and you've turned it into a 403 DPS monster.  That's 37% more DPS than base - and this is scaling that's mostly unavailable to other classes.  A warrior's 294 DPS weapon doesn't change in base damage because you have an enhancement shaman in the raid.

Then ALL of our damage also scales with this weapon damage, because everything's based on AP.  Rip?  30% of your weapon damage.  Rake?  18% of it.  FB?  35% (the rogue analog, Eviscerate, also gets 35% AP as best I can tell from their spreadsheets, but none of the actual weapon damage).  Of course, all of this ends up coming at the cost of not scaling well with any other gear.  That's the price we pay for FAP - and that's a whole other post that I promise to write one day.  But what are the actual numbers?

I got splinters in these paws!
Well, for this as usual I turn to Rawr and Toskk's.  I ran a couple profiles in Rawr - the best-in-slot pre-raid set, and my own raid gear.  Between an Orca-Hunter's Harpoon and a Distant Land, in full raid buffs, for the pre-raid set, the difference was around 900 DPS, depending on whether I reoptimized the sets around the two weapons (from available pre-raid gear) or not.  For my own profile, the difference was 1080 DPS.

Holy crap.


Of course, hunters on the forums wouldn't believe it, so I verified with Toskk's calc, and ran some dummy tests to confirm the results.  Each test was 5 minutes (apply FFF, stop when it drops), two berserk cycles, alone, self-buffed.  I sadly don't have a 232 weapon anymore, having vendored my very boring-looking Lotrafen some months ago, but I kept my cooler-looking Journey's End (226) and Twin's Pact (245), so I used those.  Imagine that an Orca-Hunter's will fall in between the two.  Here are my numbers:

Journey's End, Toskk's predicts DPS = 6382.2101, Rawr predicts 6523
Actual DPS: 5772 (90% of Toskk's prediction)

Twin's Pact, prediction: DPS = 6752.1063 (+370), Rawr: 6915 (+392)
Actual DPS: 6224 (92% of Toskk's) (+452)

Distant Land, prediction: DPS = 7188.2147 (+806, +436), Rawr: 7365 (+842, +450)
Actual DPS: 6880 (95% of Toskk's)  (+1108, +656)

A little RNG variation, and I re-did a couple runs because of mistakes, bad streaks, or very good ones.  But it shows that the INCREASES the calculators predicted were, if anything, lowballs, unless I just had a particularly bad RNG spread between the runs - each subsequent run favoured over the previous.  Even controlling for my deviation from the original run's 90% of prediction, I end up with the second run at +442, and the third at +1050.

The competition
So what does a hunter get from a melee weapon, anyway?  Let's find out.
I imported our top hunter DPS, who's in pretty comparable gear to myself, into Rawr, but their prime theorycrafting tool - their version of Toskk's - is Femaledwarf.com, so I gave that a try too. 

Both reported that Distant Land was about an 850 DPS upgrade.

... over an EMPTY SLOT.

Assuming you have a feral druid upgrading from, say, a 245 Twin's Pact to a 264 Distant Land, to be an approximately equal DPS upgrade for a survival hunter, the hunter would have to be rocking Lightning Giant Staff.  No, that's not a mistake.  That's for srs.

No, DRUID loot
The blindingly obvious conclusion from the two simulators and the test runs is simple.  If you do item priority in your guild based on largest upgrade, every single hunter gets to wait for every druid to grab a weapon, even if the ilevel gap is enormous.  No question, no arguments, the difference is ridiculous.

As I said up front, if your guild doesn't award priority on anything, then anything goes.  Mine doesn't, and I had to dump an unholy ton of points on my Distant Land, but that's cool - I knew I would have to, and I'd been saving them.  And so should you, if you can't be guaranteed priority, because as you can see, there is absolutely no single piece of gear that will grant you even one third of the DPS increase that you'll get from a single raid tier's worth of weapon upgrade.

3.3.3 - John... Madden?

It's looking an awful lot like 3.3.3 is going to go live this Tuesday.  With it come a few feral changes, two of which affect cat DPS:

• Mangle: The debuff from this talent now lasts 60 seconds, up from 12 seconds.
• Glyph of Mangle: This glyph now provides 10% increased damage done by Mangle instead of increasing the duration of the debuff.

These changes are really, really significant for about 50% of raiding ferals, and barely noticeable for the other 50.  They are also a boon to ferals who play more in small groups, PVPers, and positive for leveling as well.

Haha, bitch duty
The main effect of this change, though, is to catch the raiding ferals who don't have a manglebot up with those who do.  No other class has their gameplay or their damage change quite as much as a cat without somebody else keeping the 30% bleed debuff going, and apparently Blizzard agreed that it was a little punishing.  So now, those poor unfortunate cats who hitherto have been responsible for their own debuffs will only have to mangle one fifth as much.  The rest of us?  We'll notice absolutely no change at all.

But what does this mean for their DPS?

Yawning of course updated Toskk's Calculator almost immediately.  For my own stats and raid buffs, direct comparison to the live mechanics reports a mere 135 DPS gain.  A more modestly-geared feral, say in the pre-raid BIS set, sees about 100 DPS difference.  So, it's there, it's measurable, but it's also fairly minor.  The former set is good for more than 11k in the calculator's idealised and averaged universe, the latter around 9k.  100 DPS either way is small potatoes.  Real-world, I would expect to see more, because nobody is perfect at refreshing their mangle exactly on the 12-second mark.  Sometimes it drops, sometimes you have to clip it a little, so I'm guessing people could even see 200-300 more DPS, depending on their mangle-refreshing skills prior to the change.

But really the primary effect of this change is increased quality-of-life (and, on encounters with void zones, sometimes duration-of-life) for ferals on "bitch duty".  It means you only have to watch ONE short-duration timer.  It means less planning ahead, and pooling energy is a little less vital, because you won't drop mangle as much.  And it turns getting your three shreds per rip from a "maybe" to a "definitely" even when the clearcast procs aren't flowing.  Yeah, you still have to keep Mangle up, but it's so much easier now.  If you've never had a manglebot before, welcome to the club.

Improved Mangle vs. Feral Aggression
"Hang on", you say.  "If we're only mangling once a minute now, doesn't that make Improved Mangle terrible for anything but soloing?".  Well, yes and no.

Now that it's a savings of a whole 6 energy per minute, well, that's pretty awful.  A direct comparison with Feral Aggression in Toskk's yields:

Live Improved Mangle:DPS = 160.9683 (53.6561 per Talent Point)
Feral Aggression:DPS = 125.303 (25.0606 per Talent Point)
3.3.3 Improved Mangle:DPS = 29.4166 (9.8055 per Talent Point)

Or barely a SIXTH of its original value, and just over a third of the value per point of FA.  And if every fight in ICC was Festergut, I would be standing on the deck of the R.M.S. Improved Mangle, ringing the bells, throwing out lifejackets, and yelling ABANDON SHIP!

But plenty of ferals who usually expect to have a manglebot now, including myself, keep Improved Mangle anyway.  For every Festergut, there's also a Dreamwalker, where the talent's savings come not from buff maintenance, but from applying mangle to a new target on every switch.  Then there are those who do dailies and other soloing, never mind other personal niche uses like running BGs without respeccing.  So not all ferals will be moving those three points over.  However, it will no longer be part of the "optimal" single-target build.

Ultimately, which of the two you take will come down to your personal preference, based on the content you're doing, what you enjoy doing outside of raids, and how much you care about your DPS on add fights.  Either way, we're probably talking about a 100 DPS difference in a *perfect* situation, so keep that in mind - leaving it because you're lazy is perfectly fine.

Manglespam
A question that came up all the time on the forums after the new Glyph of Mangle was announced was "is Manglespam viable now?  Well, Manglespam has always been "viable".  By "viable" I mean "demonstrably a lot worse than using Shred correctly, but still capable of passable DPS".  But the answer here might surprise you - despite the new glyph, the difference in pure DPS output in 3.3.3 has hardly changed.  Yes, Mangle does more damage with the new version of the glyph.  But this is offset almost exactly by the increase in DPS gained by a Shred build not having to Mangle as much.  The only situation in which the DPS gap has narrowed appreciably is in the presence of a manglebot, and in THAT situation, it's just as easy to shred as it is to mangle, so there's no reason to take the option that does 500 DPS less.

So if anything, the 3.3.3 changes have made manglespam LESS attractive for raid DPS.

Oh, and it's a myth that you get more FBs with manglespam than shred.  Yes, you get more CPs.  But you also spend them faster, and actually get just slightly less per Rip cycle.  A 16-second Rip will contain around 6 CP-generating abilities, while a 22-second one will fit about 7.  The final outcome for me is about 0.53 bites per rip with shred, 0.29 with mangle - about two bites difference per 6-minute static boss fight, in shred's favour.

Don't buff me, bro!
Of course, druids being druids, there were quite a few people who found reason to argue AGAINST what is undeniably a no-strings buff.  "You're dumbing us down!", they said.  "We LIKE our carpal tunnel-inducing cycles!  We're not Retardins!".  And this is all well and good - feral IS, in my opinion, so much fun to play (and to theorycraft) because it's not a fixed rotation, or cooldown whack-a-mole.  But, well, all that was needed was to track the post history of some of the most vocal complainers to find the posts saying "I have an arms warrior in my raids...", or "I really love having a bear tank in my group".  Mmm, if there's one thing that I really dislike in people, it's internal inconsistency.

I've honestly never heard a single druid complain about having a mangle bot.  Nobody has ever said "damn it, bear tank, that means I don't need to mangle... faceroll ftl".  I've never heard "hey, can you go fury so I can do my own mangle?".  No, it's all "sweet! trauma!  <3".  And that's all this buff does - it puts druids without a mangle bot on approximately level footing with druids who have one.  Arguing against it is unfair - you're saying "because you choose to raid with guild A, you should have a harder cycle than an identical druid raiding with guild B, because they have different makeups" - and frankly retarded.  Feral DPS is still plenty challenging - just ask those of us who've been raiding with manglebots since Wrath launched and still got one-shot plenty by void zones because keeping all our balls in the air* gave us awful tunnel vision : /

* Not, you know, literally.  I let at least two of my balls rest comfortably while I raid.

Oh hai