PvE Feral DPS Druid Stat Priority & Reforging

PvE Feral DPS Druid

Gems, Enchants & Consumables

Stat Priority & Reforging

Best Professions

Pre-Raid Gear

Rotation & Cooldowns

Talents, Builds & Glyphs

Best in Slot (BiS)

Addons & Macros

The stat priorities for a cat are deceptively simple. With the introduction of Mastery to boost our bleed damage, and our excellent scaling from raw Agility the other stats are mostly unnecessary to pursue. Although there are Hit and Expertise caps to worry about which will be talked about further on.

Stat Priority

1. Agility
2. Mastery
3. Hit
4. Expertise
5. Crit
6. Haste

Agility is something we scale extremely well with now that Cat Form converts it into Attack Power more efficiently than other stats. It also provides a small amount of crit as a bonus. Far and away the stat you should attempt to stack as high as you can, although as a primary you cannot reforge to it.

Mastery is a new stat introduced with Cataclysm and in our case increases damage done by bleeds by a percentage. Considering we have multiple ways to bleed targets, and it’ll make up the majority of our damage – this stat is bonkers for us.

Hit is a tough one as it has a cap that you’ll want to attempt to reach without exceeding it. If you have 8% Hit you’ll be guaranteed not to miss with your autos against raid bosses. You’ll want to go for that cap (Although Mastery and Agility are so potent you don’t want to sacrifice any of them to do so) as there is a decent amount of damage tied up in autos through the Fury Swipes talent and the buff Savage Roar gives.

Expertise is similar to Hit, but affects the boss’ ability to parry or dodge our attacks. Similar to Hit, it’s going to have a soft cap where the value of the stat falls off a cliff after achieving it. For Expertise this is going to be 6.5%, or 26 expertise, so that attacks can no longer be dodged. That said, this stat is slightly less of a priority than Hit, and much less than Mastery/Agility, as you should be positioning behind the boss at all times anyway to make use of your full kit. Enemies are only able to parry attacks from the front, making it mostly pointless to go past the soft cap.

Critical Strike Chance is pretty self-explanatory in that it boosts our chance to hit a critical strike. We have a lot of innate crit built into our kit already, devaluing the usefulness of this. I put it slightly above Haste at the moment due to the synergy between critting and Primal Fury offering us increased combo point generation.

Haste is going to increase the rate of our melee attack speed, and in Cataclysm now also increases the rate of energy regeneration for us in Cat Form. While not useless, it’s a fairly low priority and any gear with it will likely be reforged to Mastery or Hit if the piece already has Mastery.

Reforging

This is an interesting mechanic introduced in Cataclysm so that you can take 40% of a secondary stat on a piece of gear and transform it into another secondary stat that is not already present on the piece of gear naturally. This will not work for primary stats like Agility or Stamina. This is going to be an extremely important tool to tailor gear for us that isn’t 100% optimal out of the box.

Reforging for a feral cat is going to be fairly simple. If you can reforge it into Mastery, you probably should! If you can’t, then go for your 8% Hit cap. If Mastery isn’t possible and Hit isn’t appropriate, then go for your Expertise soft cap of 6.5%. Things will get a bit more complicated as tier bonuses and other elements impact our stat priorities later on, but for now it’s pretty easy.