This Cat is for Fite (Cat DPS rotations and hints)

On a druid, Cat DPS is pretty complex. There are a lot of timers and abilities you need to watch in order to maximize your damage output. There's a lot of gearing and speccing issues to worry about too, but today I'm just posting about rotation.

First of all, I really recommend a good timer addon. I use both DoTimer and ButtonTimers. ButtonTimers is really easy to configure to watch the few important abilities you need watched, whereas DoTimer is more complex and more customizeable, but harder to make it do precisely what you need. So I use BT to watch the key buffs and debuffs for combat that I control on a sub 1-minute timescale, and use DoTimers to watch things like my Blessing of Might and Well fed buff (and my hearthstone cooldown and stuff).

Generally speaking, you need to do these things as a cat druid, assuming you can be behind your target:

• Make sure the Mangle Debuff is up. If there's a bear druid or an arms warrior, you can skip this, as bears love to Mangle, and arms guys get Trauma. Mangle has a lower damage per energy than shred, so you need to minimize Mangle uses. The glyph is good for this.
• Keep Savage Roar up on yourself. It doesn't necessarily have to be a 5-point roar, as the CP scaling is just duration. Put it up when you can, refresh it with whatever you've got in the CP pool at the time.
  
• Make sure there's a 4 or 5-cp rip going. It's better, clearly to get a 5-point rip, but if you're at 4 cps, you're likely to "waste" a CP by getting a 2-cp proc from a shred crit, so it's probably good to go on 4cp. Do not clip your rips. Which is to say, if there's time left on your rip, do something else.
• Put the Rake debuff up. Rake does a lot of damage per energy, as long as it gets to tick out. So again, don't clip your rake bleed with another rake.
• Ferocious Bite. If you've got 4-5 CPs, and there's time on Rip and Roar, it's time to bite. This comes up especially when you're using Tiger's Fury and Berserk. But watch your timers - if there's only 2 seconds left on Rip, it's better to just wait and pool energy and refresh rip.
• Shred. This is your combo-point builder. Talented, and with the mangle debuff up, it does considerably more damage per energy than Mangle.

That's your attack routine. But wait, there's more.

• Tiger's Fury on Cooldown. Clearly don't use it when you would waste the extra 60 energy, but you should almost never be in a situation where that happens. Hit TF every 60 seconds.
  
• Berserk on Cooldown. But not really. You might want to not berserk right away (let the tank establish threat), you might want to save berserk for the burn phase, if using it at fight start means you won't have it during heroism (although berserk and heroism don't actually stack all that well anyway). You also want to use TF right BEFORE you berserk, since you can't while you're berserked. This is also the time to pop any on-use trinkets you have.

A word on energy pooling: this is when you take some time off the spam and let your energy regenerate. Typically you've got enough GCDs to burn all your energy rather quickly. So it's okay if you sit and just do white attacks for a second or two, provided you don't cap your energy bar. This is advantageous when you can see that there's a rip about to expire and you're at 5cps, or that rake is about to fall off, or whatever. The real key to being an amazing Cat DPSer is lining up the rips and rakes so that there's a continuous line of bleed ticks on your target without overlapping those ticks with clipping.