Classic Feral Druid Melee DPS Stat Priority

1. Hit chance until 9% (Hit Cap)
2. Agility;
3. Strength;
4. Critical Strike Chance;
5. Attack Power;
6. Intellect;
7. Stamina;
8. Spirit.

Feral Druids scale extremely well with crit and AP, and the more crit you get the smoother your rotation will be. Ferals start out with less stats than other classes early since Feral Druids are locked into using two relatively low level, poorly itemized pieces with Wolfshead Helm and Manual Crowd Pummeler due to their amazing secondary effects. Additionally, Ferals scale extremely well with Strength, but finding Strength on leather pieces can be a challenge, especially early on when gear choices are limited. You should be looking for Hit, Crit, Strength, and Agility wherever you can.

Against targets your level, you have a 5% chance to miss attacks. Raid and dungeon bosses are considered to be 3 levels above you, meaning your chance to miss attacks is slightly higher at 8.6%. Reaching the cap on hit means having a 9% increased chance to hit through gear. As a Feral Druid, your rotation is quite fast-paced and complex at times, and a missed ability could ruin a cycle, forcing you to waste Energy or wait for an extra global before power shifting. Getting hit cap is both numerically your biggest damage increase and your best quality of life increase for when you will not need to worry about Shred missing, potentially throwing you off your rotation.

Critical strikes as a Feral Druid deal 100% increased damage. Additionally, Feral Druids benefit heavily from crit due to Blood Frenzy, which causes your generators to award an extra combo point when they crit. More crit means more Ferocious Bite casts since you will be generating more combo points per Shred. Crit does have a soft cap, however, and is only exceptionally good up until that point, at which point stacking AP through Strength and straight AP becomes a higher priority.

As a melee DPS, you have your auto attacks and your abilities. When you use an ability like Shred, there are four options: it will either be dodged, miss, crit, or hit. Your auto attacks have 5 options, adding in the possibility of a glancing blow where the attack deals 70% of its normal damage. For dodges and glancing blows, the chance of those happening does not change. You can lower your chance to miss by reaching your hit cap, but the dodge and glancing blow chance is still there. Specifically, this becomes an issue for glancing blows because of one key reason; glancing blows cannot crit. Because of this, the actual chance that an auto attack has to crit cannot be 100% or anywhere close to it because if it is dodged or is a glancing blow it will never crit. Your crit soft cap is equivalent to the chance that an auto attack will hit normally since those are the only attacks that have a chance to crit. As a Feral Druid, your crit soft cap is 54.4% minus your chance to miss. If you are at the 9% hit cap, then 54.4% is your crit soft cap, and you should not go for more crit above this amount. At a higher amount than this, your abilities will still be able to crit more, but your auto attacks will not, which greatly diminishes crit's value.

Feral Druids get 1 AP and 0.05% crit chance from each point of Agility. Until you approach your crit soft cap, Agility is going to be better than Strength due to the value that the crit chance provides. After you are at your crit soft cap, Strength becomes more valuable due to the crit not being as valuable. Agility and Strength are very close however, so do be afraid to take more of either.

Druids receive 2 AP per point of Strength, but this becomes 2.4 AP with Heart of the Wild. This is your strongest stat for pure AP gain, which will increase your damage done by all attacks. Even though this is a very strong stat for Feral, it is not quite as a good as Agility early on due to the importance of crit. After you reach your crit soft cap, Strength becomes your best primary stat. Note that it is sometimes challenging to find end game gear with Strength since it is not a common stat on leather pieces.

AP is the base stat off which all of your damage is calculated. For Feral Druids, this is especially true since your auto attack damage is not based off your weapon DPS. In fact, weapon DPS has zero value to Feral Druids. Your auto attacks are normalized on a 1-second swing timer, and the damage is calculated based on your AP. All of your abilities have their damage calculated either as a multiplier of a single auto attack's damage or are based on your AP as well. You generally will not want to pick up straight AP pieces, however, because while it is a great stat that scales exceptionally well for Feral, Agility and Strength will offer more of it point for point.

Stamina increases your health and is important for your survival. A higher amount of health means that you can take more damage before dying, which gives healers more time to heal you during raids or dungeons.

Intellect increases your Mana pool, which is incredibly important for Feral Druids. Power shifting is extremely Mana intensive, but is a key part of your rotation for doing maximum damage. More Mana means more power shifts over a fight, which means more Shred casts, thus more damage.

Spirit increases your health regeneration and your Mana regeneration. Your Mana regenerates according to the 5-second rule, which is quite difficult to follow for Feral Druids due to the specific windows that you need to power shift in. If you find yourself out of Mana on a fight, sit in Cat Form without power shifting until you have regenerated enough Mana for more power shifts.