Post by Aadramelekh
The answer exists but it lies buried in a few forgotten topics.
To clear things up a bit for you, I'll elaborate a little regarding how the concepts of 'paw damage' and 'DPS' apply to pussy cats.
About the fact that weapon damage and speed don't matter for druids attacking in feral forms (cat or bear) you are 100% correct, like
hashmel also said. Weapon DPS matters only indirectly, as you'll see the value of Feral Attack Power that's derived from it anyway, so the weapon DPS number is also of no importance to you as a druid. You were also correct in this regard as well.
The damage you see on your character sheet is, as you have said, a function of attack power. It is also a function of damage modifiers from talents / buffs.
Let us work on a real example -
CLICKThe base paw damage and attack speed are 55 and, respectively, 1 second. 55 is an average value, as the paw damage is actually a little influenced by a random factor, being something more like 53-57, for the sake of a little variability. But the value that's generally accepted is the average 55 because the variation is so small.
Attack Power is converted into damage per second at a rate of 14:1, which means that the extra damage you gain from AP is calculated by the formulaD(AP) = AP * 0.0714
Moving further from D(AP) to the actual weapon damage. The weapon damage is calculated like this:Paw Damage = 55 + D(AP)
On the screnshot I linked, we have (I'll round numbers down a bit for clarity):
Damage: 736-761 (I'll work with the average value of ~748)
Power: 8753
8753 AP = ~625 DPS. This value is added to the base 55 paw damage. So the base damage is 680. We add on top of this the Naturalist talent, which increases physical damage done by 10% in all forms. 680 * 1.1 = ~748.
This damage is what you do with each attack. The actual DPS (damage per second) that you do with auto attacks will be also influenced by your haste. In that screenshot we see 0.92s attack speed. This means that you will actually do 813 DPS, calculated by the formulaDPS=Damage * (Base Attack Speed / Actual Attack Speed)