More on the Mangle Change

So I finally got my furry butt over onto the PTR last night to do some actual testing of the Mangle changes. Interesting stuff.

Anyway, I have some recount screenshots. Now you all get to see how much my knowledge of my class exceeds my actual skill. :-P

All these tests are 5-minute sustained runs, self-buffed with IMotW.

First, the live test:

Not my best, but not much lower than what I'm used to seeing on solo DPS tests. It was good enough for a general benchmark.

So then I went over to the PTR. Didn't change a thing. Same spec, same gear, same glyphs...all of it. Here's what happened:

350 dps increase. And you can see the way all the damage percentages jumped around. I used 20% of the Mangles I used before (which is exactly what should be expected) and increased the number of Shreds by 50%.

It was definitely easier to tell, at a glace, what my next priority should be. Mangle was almost out of the equation completely, so I only needed to juggle Rake, Rip, and Savage Roar.

My Rip count did take a bit of a dip, and I'm not sure why. (Oddly, it dipped even further in the next test.) I think I may have just been getting tired.

Last test I did was respeccing to take 3 points out of Improved Mangle and move them to max out Ferocity. Here's how that panned out:

Not a huge increase, and what increase there was had nothing to do with Ferocious Bite. As you can see, I got one more in on this test than I did on the last and still did about the same damage total.

FB is a hard beast to categorize, though. Because of the small sample size, one more or one less crit can make a huge difference in the total. Plus the amount of damage done by FB is partially dependent on how much Energy you have when you use it. So it's hard to get a good baseline for comparison. There's too many variables.

That said, even if the averages had been the same, we're talking an extra 30dps or so. Nothing spectacular.

As a quick aside, apparently there was something going on with Glyph of Mangle. I think they're planning on keeping it in game, but changing to make it just increase the damage of Mangle instead of the time. However, it's bugged and is allowing Ferals to pretty much one-shot Mangle anyone in a PvP situation. I don't have Glyph of Mangle in my Cat spec, so I wasn't able to test this. But it seems to be an indication of what they're planning on doing with the Glyph.