State of the Cat post 4.0.6

Hi there. I have followed Alaron, Yawning, and many other cat bloggers and EJ etc for a long time. I appreciate all the thought and work and energy and time that goes into keeping us all updated and for the braindump you do for us! Thanks, Alaron.

For the past couple weeks I have seen a lot of distress and consternation over the current state of cats, and I have to say, in a 10 person normal difficulty raid environment, I’m not sharing the same despair.
I want to respond to Alaron's comment: "For skilled players, our damage is low compared to other classes. (Currently fighting the shamans for last place, if you leave out alternate PvE specs like Arms, BM, sub, frost/arcane.) I don’t mind being at the tail end of the meters…if the tail end is 5-10% below. Right now, we’re at 15-20%.)"

My overall conclusion, after raiding four days a week in normal 10s, since Cataclysm’s release, is that cats are not imbalanced or below other DPS post 4.0.6.
Currently, while I'm not thrilled with swipe's nerfiness and target switching dps loss due to bleed dmg nerfs, and sitting on 5 cps and spamming shred, I am happy with my dps output overall on normal difficulty 10 person raid bosses post 4.0.6. And I’m actually a little relieved to have some mindless shred spam moments. It’s like.. a little vacation mid raid.
My world of logs records show me as ranking 17th worldwide on Nefarian the week that 4.0.6 released. It also has parses that show that cats are competitive with other dps classes post 4.0.6.
While, this is for 10s and from my perspective, the data is all there on world of logs, and shows that cats are also competitive in 25s. Just count the specs that are below ferals on Cho'gall for example: survival, enhance, combat, elemental, demonology, frost dk, frost mage, arms, subtlety, beast mastery, and arcane.
And the ones less than 1000 dps higher than cats? Marksmanship, assassination, unholy, destruction, fury, affliction, and ret.
I think that data reflects some pretty balanced dps parsing.
And that means, cats are not in the lower ranks of dps, for skilled players, as compared to other classes. We’re clearly not at the tail end of the meters and definitely not 15-20% below the rest of the dps classes.
This is good news! Cheer up, catworld! There’s hope for us. I think the key word here that Alaron used is, SKILLED PLAYERS. And we’re talking raid environments with parsed, empirical data, not anecdotal stories and impressions.

A caveat for those who rely on simulators and theorycraft over in game real raid experience: Real game experience trumps theorycrafting. While simulators and theory helps us experiment and find min/max ideals, in the end we have to roll our sleeves up and get our paws dirty to see what is real in terms of our performance.
Also, I notice that Mew did get more accurate for real fights, post 4.0.6.
But, remember, simulators only simulate a Patchwerk type fight, which in Cataclysm is zero fights. Cho'gall is probably the best measure of a cat's max dps output capability in Cata, but it still isn't accurately measured and reflected by simulators.
Even Chimaeron, which tends to be a "bad" fight for cats, had us go from 5th in a loose pack of about 10 specs to 5th in a tight pack of 15 specs.
So, regarding the claim that cat dps has gone down... I don't think so. Not in raids. Not overall.
=^..^=
Nyt, Lightbringer

Other Druid Places

http://fluiddruid.net/
http://elitistjerks.com/f73/t110359-[feral]_cataclysm_simple_q/p6/
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/2089200852?page=2
http://dkkitty.blogspot.com/
http://theincbear.com/
http://wowthinktank.blogspot.com/
http://thebigbearbutt.com/
http://www.skill-capped.com/classguides/

Why A Nyt in WoW

If you were to browse to a site, like wowarmory.com, with statistics about the mmorpg (massively multiplayer online roleplaying game) called World of Warcraft, (aka WoW) you would notice -if you happened to search for it- that there are one hundred and six (yes, 106)characters named Nyt.

I play one of these characters named Nyt, so I am a Nyt in WoW.

Enjoy!
For here I shall share stories of my adventures therein!