As most of you who follow me are aware, I’m not a particularly big keys guy. This week was pretty chill though so decided to just do +18 on every key. The routes weren’t that optimised, we just did big dam. I see some other feral struggling with the dam or what to do so I thought I’d probably put a few things down.
Very bizarrely, my comments from September (pre expansion) turned out to be mainly correct! Guess Beta Testing is a thing huh?
I’ll go through talents for Fortified, because let’s be real if you’re a pusher you don’t push on Tyrannical.
Row1: Predator -> Definitely the go here, even if mobs last for a long time.
Row2: Renewal -> I mentioned this before. After doing 18+ keys on live, this is 100% the correct play. I was doing 2k HPS on Prideful. With travel form, soulshape, natty dash and roar, you do not need Tiger Dash / Wild Charge.
Row3: Balance Aff -> Most of the time having your PW and Thrash hit all targets before they are stacked is a big dam increase. Sunfire weaving as mentioned in my September blog post is also a thing. You can take Restoration Affinity to carry your questionable healer friends in a +15 though (I’ve done it quite a bit, Resto Aff is about as broken as Balance Aff).
Row4: Mighty Bash. Pretty much every dungeon you will find a use for Bash to keep the key non-bricked which is infinitely better than a little Sunfire or Starsurge Dam.
Row5: SotF. The choices in my mind are SotF + Sunfire Weave or SR with no weave. SotF is a bit better and more intuitive on Single Target, so even though I prefer the SR gameplay, I recommend the SotF.
Row6: Primal Wrath
Row7: Bloodtalons. When you do the big boy keys, you need to have your highest damage abilities getting the big 30% buff. FF doesn’t cut it and MoC is 5 target capped.
Legendary: Circle of Life & Death. I chose this legendary because FB spam seemed like it had very significant drawbacks (e.g. you’re limited by GCD on large pulls, so even though faster DoTs and FB both increase per target, your scaling eventually caps out). I also didn’t take Cat-Eye Curio because I actually tested it on Beta and it didn’t seem like a material throughput increase. I was actually boggled when the sims for ST were released and it was topping. After it was discovered that the sims were refunding energy on all abilities, made sense that Circle is one of the top contenders for throughput in most situations.
Gameplay:
Couple of ways to open. On moderate sized packs, you want to get two PW out and try and get BT proc just after you cast your second finisher, then you can sunfire weave. Example: Rake/Thrash/Swipe: PW. Swipe, Pause, Swipe, Rake, PW, Thrash -> Sunfire Weave. On 2-3 target, getting rakes on everything is a noble goal. You can tell in my video I play it “okay” but there’s still way more experience I need to add to this to unlock 5%+ DPS.
On Single Target, don’t be afraid to swipe which deals similar DPE to Shred (meme swiping to get to 5cp is cheaper than Shred)
A couple of other things…
You want to finish a pack with TF rolling but off CD. Get a tracker for this. That way you can have a lot more abilities buffed and increase your %dam modifier for a key.
You can finish a mob with Shred (or rake if you’re a memer) and then use Swipe/Thrash in between packs to generate BT.
Experience will teach you which mobs need Mighty Bash. Even the ones that just melee hard or casts that usually get kicked you can Kick/Bash/Kick/Typhoon/Kick and control the mob. I recommend learning this rotation so you can easily execute it when required.
I also tanked my way up to pretty much all 18’s in time as well, and so I have that experience to reflect on what gibs tanks. I recommend you try healing or tanking some 15’s so you can feel what is threatening to the group.
Robosaurus was here 