Kitty Swipe: A Week in Review
January 29, 2009
I have written an updated review of “Swipe (Cat)” which can be found here.
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Well it has been a little over a week now with my new best friend, Kitty Swipe, aka “The Easy Button”. While I had been anxiously awaiting the addition of Swipe (Cat) since I heard rumors of its incoming existence back in December, I didn’t really expect it to be as awesome as it actually is.
Let us review what it does again, shall we? Swipe (Cat): Swipe nearby enemies, inflicting 260% weapon damage. Pretty sweet, huh? Well if you, like many a Feral, picked up “Feral Instinct” in your Talent Tree, then you are in for quite an extra boost. Feral Instinct not only reduces the chance that enemies will see you while Prowling, but with all 3 points put into this talent it will increase the damage done by your Swipe ability by 30%! WoW wee!! So if you do the math there, that will put your Swipe damage at 338% weapon damage to all your nearby enemies (which also happens to be what the tooltip says if you have Feral Instinct). Now add in “Naturalist” which increases the damage you deal with physical attacks in all forms by 10%, “Tiger’s Fury” a move that increases damage done by 80 for 6 seconds, and “Savage Roar” which will increase your attack power by 40%, and you are really starting to add up the damage. There is also an Idol worth mentioning that will increase your Swipe damage as well. I will write more about this Idol of Perspicacious Attacks, and other Idols, in a future post.
Of course, if you could exclusively spam Swipe without a care that would be ridiculously OP, so there are some limitations on the ability. Swipe normally costs 50 energy, which is half of our precious 100 energy that we have. There are, however, things that can be done to make this awesome ability a little more friendly to our energy wallets. “Ferocity” will bring down the cost of Swipe by 5 points to a total of 45 energy. Berserk will reduce the cost of all Cat Form abilities by 50%, leaving Swipe to cost only a mere 22 or 23 energy (I am not sure if it gets rounded up or down, as it is 22.5) for a full 15 seconds. With points put into the Restoration Tree, you can pick up “Omen of Clarity” (which every druid should have, feral or not) which gives a chance for any damage, healing spells, and auto attacks to cause the caster to enter a “Clearcasting” state, which essentially gives you a free move.
So what does this all mean? I could sit here and do math all night, but really the results speak for themselves. In Naxxramas, with Savage Roar, Tiger’s Fury, and Berserk active while attacking a group of mobs I can hit 12K DPS. Yes, that is 12,000 Damage Per Second. And I have hit that 12K DPS on both trash pulls and Boss Fights, like Grand Widow Faerlina 25 with all adds up. This is rather on the high side of things, but on groups of mobs when I have extra energy through Berserk or Tiger’s Fury I am usually on par with Mage AoE DPS. For the record, the only time I have seen anyone else get near my insane 12K DPS in a similar situation is a Rogue using Fan of Knives. Its so much DPS that people make funny faces in Raid chat, and say all sorts of “Huh?”s in vent. Which really just makes me giggle about my love affair with my newest of abilities. I am in no way saying that this is 12k DPS sustained, it is merely just very high burst DPS (oxymoron?).
Saying all this, you would expect me to say that I am having a litter of Swipe-Kittens after we get married and head off on our honeymoon. While we are clearly in love, and I do not regret my addition of Swipe at all in the least, I feel a bit of sadness. This ability can just be mashed throughout just about all of instances and raids on trash mobs and bosses with adds. Yes, my DPS is through the roof with it on trash, but Swipe makes it too easy. Before there was thought and strategy put towards how to optimize DPS on trash pulls or bosses with adds. Now I can just lazily drift my eyes to my other monitor and read twitter while raiding.
I both love and loathe Swipe.
But knowing Blizzard and how they deal with all things OP, I’m sure we can expect some sort of nerf to this in the future. I know that the other 24 people in my raid group would be thrilled that the silly Girl who plays a cat wouldn’t be kicking their bums in DPS (temporarily) anymore.
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I have written an updated review of “Swipe (Cat)” which can be found here.
Druid Kitty 
[…] Druid Kitty takes the new Cat AE attack Swipe for a test run into Naxxramas and clocks 12,000 dps. Will it get nerfed? DK looks at the talents to maximize Swipe’s effectiveness and explores the nerf issue. […]
This is silly. Have you played any other dps class since wrath came out? Every single class does one thing on trash pulls now: spams aoe. Now that cats finally have that ability (which we’ve been wanting for ages) you’re saying it’s OP and boring? You can’t please some people…
Swipe spam hits hard, yes, but I’ve seen Warlocks and mages pull similar numbers on trash when they bust their cooldowns. Balance druids can do the same thing if they bust theirs. What you are talking about is 15 seconds of extremely high burst using your best cooldowns on trash mobs. This is not unheard of for almost any class these days.
Further, it’s not like you can do nothing but hit one button to come out on top, the way you suggest (hich is what many caster classes can do by the way). You have to open with a rake or mangle, pop savage roar, swipe to low energy, tiger’s fury, pop berserk, swipe more. If you remove the berserk, there’s a lot of waiting in there to swipe as well. That’s hardly a one-button win-mode.
Just as a quick note for that ‘future post’, currently the Idol of Perspicacious Attacks has absolutely zero effect on Swipe (Cat) damage.. the Idol of the Wastes doesn’t proc on Swipe (Cat) hits, either. 😦 I’ve done a writeup on all Idols that do/would effect Swipe (Cat) damage, and it can be found on the druid wiki here, if you’re interested:
http://druid.wikispaces.com/Swipe_Cat
Not to burst your bubble but 12k aoe burst dps is really quite low, I seen mages, locks, yes and even shadow priest pull off consistently 18-20k aoe dps on trash in naxx 25. And further more… You have no way to substance a constant high trash aoe dps output with your limited energy pool. Unless your tank pulls small amount of trash and do it at a pretty slow pace there by giving you time to regen. Most raiding guilds have their main tank pulling the next pack of mob while the OT is still holding the last few from the last trash pack, so there is no break time and the dps can just continue though. Taking short 30secs break every few mins when everyone mana is really low and even that, does not happen often. Other classes on the otherhand are build to substain aoe dps. Sure you can compete for the first 8 secs or even 15secs using your 3min all in one button but even then it is still a great burst but poor substain tool. So while it is a huge improvement over what we use to have, it really is not at the same level as other classes that are designed for aoe. Assuming they know how to play their class of course.
If you read my full post, I say that this is in no way sustained DPS. I also did not mean to elude to that Swipe will lead to the highest burst DPS of all classes, or that my guild is the best on the server (we’ve cleared everything except Malygos).
Previous to 3.0.8 and the addition of Swipe (Cat) my DPS on trash pulls was extremely low because I had no AoE unless I cast Hurricane, which really did not do much damage either, and made me go OoM very quickly. Post patch, I can now happily keep up with the other DPS classes on trash, and be top if I blow my cooldowns.
Trash is just trash, but the more damage done the faster we all move, so it does help the raid. Just for measure, I am almost always top 3 DPS in 25s and that is without the use of swipe, for the most part, unless it is a boss with adds.
Maybe it just feels OP to me since I really do not have the time to put into playing other classes. But with the addition of one new button to press I shot from the bottom of trash DPS to the top. It certainly feels a little OP to me.
I like the competitive edge of Jaggy’s post.
Yeah, mages can blow out more burst damage, but 12k is pretty decent… and a heady increase on any previous kitty counts.
Any kind of trash-DPS competition is just epeen, though. Uncountable groups wipe every day thanks to Meter Watchers trying to top ‘Overall Data’.
For me? Swipe is nice to throw in here and there, but I mainly run out my old habits. Practice boss-openers or whatever. It hasn’t changed my life… and I’m usually more conscious of pulling aggro I shouldn’t than I am of speeding up a 20 second fight by a second or two with my cooldowns.
To each their own. ^_^
18-20k dps on trash.. i know it’s fun to sound all awesome and stuff on anonymous forums, but.. don’t be ridiculous.
and now back to the point. kitty swipe was sorely needed – we were the ONLY class that could do almost completely negligible dps on aoe trash pulls (and all trash pulls in wotlk are aoe pulls), until swipe. now we can finally contribute, and hey, if we can even top the meters once in awhile then great. no one expects kitties to sustain that kind of aoe dps – kitty’s not an aoe dps class. but to be able to do it for a few seconds is a very welcome change.
i dont really think they’ll nerf it because, as was mentioned, it’s not sustained dps. it’s more like a gimmick – but a fun one. 😛
I’m not sure who was posting anonymously on forums with 18-20k DPS on trash, but that certainly wasn’t me. I don’t use forums, except for my own guild website, and I certainly don’t ever post anonymously. Whenever I post anywhere about WoW, I include a link to this blog – after all I am trying to promote it so people can read about it.
Yes, back to the point. I wrote this a week after we got “Swipe (Cat)”. My views have changed (slightly) since then, which I should sum up in a new blog post soon.
18-20 doesn’t sound totally rediculous to me. I have hit 16,358 with kitty swipe on trash pulls (spider wing 25 man trash pulls and little rock pulls in halls of stone) one of the tricks is getting the trinket from the oracles – with two of those equipped you really can SPAM swipe. This doesn’t work on every trash pull because some don’t proc the trinket and give back energy but it works often enough that you can really boost your damage significantly.
hey, was just trolling the net looking for someone who could agree with me that swipe spam is one of my favourite non-raid-boss encounter buttons to play with! i know it’s been over a year since you first posted and we’re all geared up in shiny new icc and t10 gears… but still wanted to make a comment.
i’ve been pulling personal bests on the group trash pulls right before precious and stinky (the 2 minibosses right before festergut/rotface). just hit 25k last night woot! haha, swipe spam is always good for s**ts and giggles, all the while sitting #1 on the dps meter woot!
yeah total necro but swipe never got nerfed and i have screenies of me doing 52k dps in icc10.
win 😀