Feral Tanking Build Update

I mentioned in this post that I’d swapped out a few talent points and would report back.  It’s time to make good on that promise, I suppose.  Fair warning: I’m slammed at work today, so this is a short post.

Here’s Luxul’s Updated Build.  The changes are pretty simple.

• Feral: Removed King of the Jungle and Improved Mangle
• Restoration: Added Natural Shapeshifter and Master Shapeshifter

Overall, my DPS has gone up by about 8%, for a total increase of about 200 DPS.  That’s nothing to sneeze at, but it’s certainly not a huge gain.

That’s actually a rather surprising result, since the only reason I made this change was for the 4% damage buff that Master Shapeshifter gives while in bear form.  Honestly, though, I’ve never been all that great with statistical math, so maybe this is a totally reasonable increase in DPS after the 4% per-hit increase is averaged out over hits-per-second.

Now as for the why of the change:

• King of the Jungle: Since I’m hardly ever in cat form, the instant energy gain from Tiger’s Fury was wasted.  The extra damage from Enrage is nice, but 10% for 10 seconds every minute averages out to around 2% overall increased damage if you pop Enrage every time it’s available.  Master Shapeshifter gives twice the gain, and you don’t have to remember to use it.
• Improved Mangle: I don’t have any math to back it up this time, I just felt like a 1.5 second cooldown reduction wasn’t worth the three talent points I was spending here.  *shrugs*  Sorry, I don’t always have a logical justification for what I do. =)
• Natural Shapeshifter: Just a gateway for…
• Master Shapeshifter: This was the goal of the change.  I wanted the extra 4% damage on all physical attacks.  I had a gut feeling that it would give better overall damage output than the situational bonuses from the talents I was dropping, and the numbers seem to be bearing out that feeling.

I’m curious to hear if anyone out there has had experiences with this build.  Drop a comment in the tray and let’s talk about it. :)

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