What do Kitties Wear?

 
Now that my origins are out of the way we can get into the fun stuff. I get a lot of questions from guildies that have Cat alts or offspecs. The first question I usually get is:

"Where Do I Start? How Do I Gear for Cat?"
Gearing for a kitty is relatively straightforward, actually. First you want to get your hit/expertise caps. You will want 263 Hit Rating, or 8.02%. Cats get no special talents to increase hit rating, so QQ moar, and get that hit rating up. A missed attack is a wasted chance to proc OoC, wasted energy, and a wasted GCD while Berserking. Next get your Expertise cap. You need 26 Expertise (132 Rating) or 6.5% to soft cap. This prevents the level 83 Boss from dodging your attacks, resulting in the above DPS losses. You DO get 10 Expertise from Primal Precision, which makes this cap a little more bearable. Once you get those two caps, continue on, brave reader.

First off, it depends on what kind of gear you're in. If you're sporting 232 or 245 T9 gear (the stuff that's available from Triumph badge farming in Heroics), then your best bet is to pick up a Needle Encrusted Scorpion from Heroic Forge of Souls (2nd, or last boss). From here you want to hit the Armor Penetration soft cap, which is at 722 ArP rating. The reason for this is because at 722 ArP, when your trinket procs and gives you the last 678 ArP, hard capping you. The reason this trinket is so great for us is that even though it only procs on a crit, our white swing timer is less than 1 second, and we generally have really high crit chances. This results in almost no downtime when the internal cooldown of the trinket is up.

Now, you might be thinking, holy hell, I have a TON of Attack Power! I should stack more! No. Bad kitty. Attack power scales like it does for us because our white swing timer sucks. It's also balanced so that if we were naked compared to a rogue that was naked, the rogue would out dps us every time. At least with gear, it's closer. So where do you go from here? Well, to be honest it depends. If you have access to ICC gear, then you want to start working towards the ArP hardcap once you can get up in the 900-1000 range. Until then, stack Agility. +20 Agi in Red sockets, 10Agi/10Crit in Yellow sockets, and 1 Nightmare Tear to activate your Meta Gem (the +agi/crit damage one - Relentless Earthstorm). In this gear, you won't get close to your Crit cap (76%).

"So...am I done?" Yep, pretty much. As a quick recap:

1. Hit Cap
2. Expertise Cap
3. Soft ArP Cap with Needle Encrusted Scorpion
4a. If you have access to enough ArP gear to push you close to 900 unbuffed, drop the Scorpion, and keep stacking ArP, always staying hit/expertise capped.
4b. If you are restricted to ToC/Heroic gear, hover close to the ArP softcap with the Scorpion and stack Agility (or Agi/Crit in Yellows - careful though, pure Agi is > Agi/Crit!)
5. As your gear progresses, Haste gets better and better (especially after you near crit cap). More haste doesn't do a lot for our white swing timer. A baseline 1 second timer only gets minimal benefits from haste. HOWEVER - OoC doesn't have an internal cooldown. More white attacks = more OoC procs = more DPS. Pew pew!

I'll post about ICC gear, best in slot gear, and what kinds of trinkets/weapons to look for once I get past all of the basics of starting out a new kitty.