Savage Roar

Mudpaw dinged 75 yesterday, after the delay of that whole "I have a real life on the weekend" thing. As soon as it happened, I rushed to Thunder Bluff to get training, because I sure as hell was not going to forget or miss out on Savage Roar for a second.

I'd heard a lot of things about SR from my guild's token feral druid and from various people on my frequented WoW community. But even then I don't think I was really prepared for the huge difference it makes. I remember at one point asking this community about dps rotations, because I was pushing out a grand total of about 500 dps (embarassing) until I got Cat Swipe... then it was more like 700-1k dps (depending on the group.. oh, PUGs, how I love/hate you). But now I'm really, really curious to try an instance with this whole Savage Roar thing. On Sarathstra, the elite bone-dragon you have to kill for a quest in Dragonblight, my damage increased by about 500 dps from the last time I'd seen it. Of course, this may also possibly be due to the fact that, oh, I hadn't trained new ranks of anything since level 72. I am notoriously bad about this kind of thing :( But still, that makes me really optimistic about the SR ability.

My next challenge is getting out of the rogue rotation. As combat, I'm used to Garotte, SnD, Sinister Strike x5, SnD, Sinister Strike x5, Rupture, Sinister Strike x5, Envenom (usually). This is not really applicable to feral druids (obvious), but it's difficult for me to remember that while I'm watching my combo points building because that is just how my fingers want to push the keys. I'm trying to get used to the whole "priority, not rotation" thing, because so far all my characters have had set rotations for pretty much anything.

So I'm told that the kitty dps list of priorities is this:
Savage Roar (only 1 point needed; new concept here D:)
Mangle
Rip (always 5 points; awesome, I can do that)
Rake

After that, my issue is going to be timing. I am still in the stage of "holygod there is only 5 sec left on Mangle I should hit it again amirite??" when this is not the case, especially considering the Mangle debuff is only 12 seconds to begin with (or 18 if glyphed, which I am not right now.. oops). Pushing buffs/debuffs to their fullest is something that's going to take a lot of practice, as it always does, but getting to that point is both an interesting challenge and a royal pain in the ass.

I tried downloading Rogue PowerBars to manage all these debuffs that I'm not used to seeing (and to have a more obvious place to watch Savage Roar timing), but then I realized that I was just totally covering up my character by trying to put them in an obvious place, and that's not really helpful either. I'm still in the process of perfecting my UI though, so hopefully it will all fit together... some day, anyway...