Feral is the Druid's melee damage spec, played in Cat Form. Energy refills at 10 a second, and you spend it on Shred from behind the boss for combo points, then put them into Rip, a bleed that is your main finisher. Forever swaps Tiger's Fury for Shifting Power, which turns a slice of your mana into 40 Energy about every 7 seconds. Your paws now hit with your weapon's DPS on a fixed one-second swing, so a cat chases weapon DPS like any other melee, whatever the weapon's speed. The cat in this guide does 750.0 DPS on a one-minute single-boss fight, which places it 16th of 25 damage specs.

Strengths and weaknesses

Strengths

• A burst opener. Berserk gives every combo-point builder 100 % more crit chance for 15 seconds, and you open on it with Ravage from Prowl. On a one-minute single-boss fight Berserk is worth 5.0 % of your damage.
• Gear you can buy. The weapon, the idol and the belt come from vendors, and the head, chest and legs are Leatherworking crafts that bind on equip.
• A party buff. Leader of the Pack gives your group 3 % crit with spells and attacks.

Weaknesses

• No area damage. Swipe is still Bear-only in Forever, so against three bosses only your sapper, your Dragonbreath Chili and, on some sets, a trinket reach the other two. On a three-minute fight against three bosses that leaves the cat 22nd of 25.
• Lower half on one boss. Even on its best ground the cat sits 17th of 25 on a three-minute single-boss fight.
• Mana caps your Energy. Every Shifting Power costs as much mana as shifting into Cat Form, 684, so a long fight drains you. The flask's extra 2,000 mana is worth 0.5 % on three minutes and 0.0 % on one.
• Shred only works from behind. If the boss turns to you, you lose your builder.

On every fight

The cat's rank hardly moves with fight length, 16th on the one-minute boss against 17th on the three-minute one. Shifting Power and Rip come round every few seconds, so most of your damage is the same loop on any fight, and only Berserk and the opener are front-loaded. What moves you is the number of bosses: on three, every spec with an area attack pulls away. The fights in the table are links, and each one sets every page of this guide to that fight.

Races

On a one-minute single-boss fight the strongest Alliance cat is a Night Elf. Its Elune's Light adds 10 % crit for 15 seconds and goes out at the pull with Berserk, which matters most on a one-minute fight, where 15 seconds is a quarter of it. For the Horde, Tauren is the pick: Endurance's 1 % hit counts on every swing and every Shred.

What a Druid brings to the raid

A cat's contribution to its group is Leader of the Pack: 3 % crit with every spell and attack, which in Forever doesn't stack with a Moonkin's aura. Below, it and the class's other buffs are priced for each spec that gains from them. The benchmark already puts a Feral Druid in every melee group, so on the Talents page your own copy reads as zero.

Changes

The table tracks this build's result on this fight through every simulator and game-data update, the 12 October fix to the cat's form-shifting lines among them. The Updates log says what changed in each.