Quite a few people ask me how I get high DPS in heroics and raids. With the new changes to our abilities, it’s quite easy. However, there are a few rotations you have to do based on the situation. This post is going to cover the situation of basic trash, which you’ll find this in raids between bosses and 5-man dungeons. Now some people might say, “Trash? No one cares about that!” But think about it, even if you’re overgeared and have an instance on farm, you spend majority of your time on trash. Needless to say, the faster you get trash down, the faster your run goes, or more attempts at progression.
Now on to some trash talk! ( 
get it?) Trash is all about doing a bunch of damage really fast, which is perfect for cat druids because we deal our damage in bursts for the most part. Trash usually doesn’t have high health, and you have a lot of people doing AoE’s like yourself, so there isn’t much time to really establish a complex rotation. So, first thing to do is get in position.
Being that swipe is our only AoE that we have, you want to get where you’re behind the middle most mob, and turn your character so that you’re facing the most mobs nearest to you. I know this is kinda like a “Duh!” statement, but I don’t know how many druids forget good positioning. Also, wait for your tanks to establish aggro. Another fault that I see a lot of cats have is they will see the tanks pull one of the mobs, Feral Charge in, and start their rotation. This will most likely lead to your death, and ultamately lead to you having lower dps. So, with that said, getting positioned without the help of Feral Charge helps give your tanks a few extra seconds that might be vital for your survival.
Secondly, you need to get Savage Roar up as quickly as possible, and to do that, you’ll need combo points. As you can tell from the tool tip on Savage Roar, it’s ability lasts longer the more combo points you have. How many points you hold out for depends on how quickly your group clears trash, but for the most part, you should be able to get by on one or two (If you are speced into Primal Fury and crit). Now to get these points are up to you, I usually go for Rake, It’s cheap, and I get extra damage from the bleed while I’m swiping. Although a Mangle will do the trick as well, and it does a bit of burst just incase you’re killing something that dies before a few ticks of your bleed goes off. Once you land that first blow, be it Rake or Mangle, you need to hit Savage Roar.
Side note: If you have not speced into King of the Jungle, this would be the time you would hit Tiger’s Fury for extra damage on the next step.
Once Savage Roar is applied, the fun begins. You need to start Swiping. You should be able to get one off after landing Rake/Mangle, and Savage Roar unless you’ve speced into Clearcasting, and it has proced, then you get another Swipe in. Once you cannot swipe again, you have two choices, you can either wait for enough energy to regenerate to swipe again. Or, if you’re speced into King of the Jungle, you can activate Tiger’s Fury and gain energy (up to 60 energy) and some extra damage on your next swipe. However, after you activate that, unless you get a Clearcasting proc, or 30 seconds have gone by (and you dont have the tier 7 set bonus to reduce the cooldown of Tiger’s Fury to 25 seconds), you’ll have to wait for the energy to regenerate, and by that time, your mobs could be dead.
Once the pull thins down to one mob, chances are they are almost dead, so you cant quite start up a standard single mob rotation and have to do as much damage before they die. So again you’re faced with one of two choices that I see, and that is either Mangle and then Shred them to death (Mangle increases the damage of Shred), or you can just Mangle spam till it dies. Rake does low initial damage, and the bleeds might not make up for the damage of Mangle and Shred by the time the mob dies, and your other abilities for the most part require combo points you may not have to equal the damage you could do with the two abilities mentioned above.
Side Note: Some people might say it might be better to Mangle one time and then Ferocious Bite(FB), but with one or two combo points, you would have to crit, and hope for the high end of the damage range on FB to equal the damage that you could easily do with Mangle or Shred.
Below is a flow chart that I usually run through my head for trash, and it might be useful for someone so I’ve decided to post it. (Also, I’ve never seen a rotation as a flow chart and thought it would be fun. )
Another Side Note: For the chart below to be 100% accurate you need to be talented into all energy reduction talents, King of the Jungle for the 60 energy when Tiger’s Fury is used, and also Clearcasting.
