Patch 4.1

So patch 4.1 is deemed to be coming out tomorrow and i thought i would talk about some of the stuff happening.

For druids:

Ferals are seeing a few quality of life changes and a few straight up buffs

the physical damage increase from enrage is being removed so you can now use it more often than just before a pull. This also makes it viable to get king of the jungle in a tanking spec.

The cooldown on swipe is being cut in half and thrash is no longer affected by the bug that causes its bleed to be mitigated by armor.

The bonus threat that was on FFF, lacerate, swipe, and maul have all been taken away and converted to damage. This change changes the scaling on our abilities so that we should now be using thrash and FFF during our single target. This means that you can take the two points out of feral aggression for the instant lacerate 3 stack and the extra point that most people put into stampede into king of the jungle.

For our resto brethren we are seeing a buff to effloresence (spelling?) and the removal of the pushback while casting tranq. This means no more having to save barkskin if you want a full tranq to go off when you are taking damage, nice buff for everyone.

The new content coming out that you no doubt already know about is the new ZA and ZG raids being made into 5 mans. The new instances have retarded amount of new gear and you are now able to get full epics for a feral set from those instances i think.

There has been a conversion of VP to CP at 1:1 in lots of 250 which will allow all non pvp inclined ferals to now get their BIS tanking relic from the PvP vendor. For DPS its still the golganoth relic for you but for tanking the vicious is the best relic you can get. (if you want me to go over that in more detail i can)

But obviously the biggest thing getting attention all around the forums and blogosphere is the introduction of the Call to Arms feature in the RDF. This is the feature intended to increase tanks and to a smaller extent healers in the RDF and decrease queue times for DPS. I want to do a write up on this but i want to see the guaranteed rewards first and do a couple as a dps to see how big a dif it is making with tank quality being a factor.

Also i want to get a video out quickly of the new instances and their associated boss strategies for those people who want a runthrough of those but i will probably have to wait a day or two to get it recorded cause i would prefer a guild group, or mostly guild.

When I'm Right...

So just less than 2 weeks ago I posted THIS about how Gamon was becoming level 85 and I forsaw people forming up to kill him.

Well i was logged in for about 2 min before i saw someone yelling in org that Gamon was alive and about 30 sec later i saw him being kited around org and being nuked down. He doesnt appear to get DR's on slows so he was just being kited around while people attacked him. Every once and a while someone would pull off the kiter and Gamon would turn around and one or two shot them and then turn back to the kiter and keep going. I saw him die about 3 times in the half hour i was running all over org. This was not any major prophesy that i made but i think it shows you that you cant break a 6 year habit of killing a level 12 neutral npc by simply making him a level 85 elite with 2mil health.

Oh, and i have only been inside Org and ZF but so far i am very impressed. Can't wait to see the 80-85 zones, especially deepholm.

Patch 4.0.3a

So mmo-champion is saying that the new patch will be dropping tomorrow and i felt like there were a couple things to go over before that happens.

First off, obviously this will completely change the old world so you will have some alt leveling to do if you want. I know that I will be leveling my shaman who is just about 50, to 60 if i can find the time. This means that for any of you who don't have a druid...get on that.

You will be getting access to the new race/class combinations for the expansion so you will be able to roll your tauren paladin or blood elf warrior if you want. That being said, anyone who rolls a troll druid, you are a bad person. I don't know why but i just have a serious issue with trolls, they just don't look right.

There are going to be some class changes going in with this expansion that you have to look forward to. Your health will drop, your swipe damage will drop, your LotP heal will be reduced and your brutal impact debuff will be less potent. Aren't things looking up? On the plus side, if you are ever in cat form you will not have to target something before you can swipe.

None of these nerfs seem too bad tbh though. We will make it.

If you you are a Druid, Paladin, Priest or Shaman your talents will be reset. this leaves us with a free respec going into cata that we can use to get ready. I dont know how many of you used the last reset as your "lets get ready with a cata spec" reset but this patch is close enough that i would advise you to just spec for cata this time around. The last reset i went for the (I think) optimal build so that i could do better in my raid. This time, no chance.

That being said...you may be wondering what the spec you should be going for is. well have no fear because I am here. This will be the bear spec only because there are more knowledgeable people out there that can give you a cat one. If you really want me to take a stab at it i will but i am far less comfortable making decisions about cat than bear.

So here we have the bear spec that you should be pushing for at 85 that will be your general raiding spec for tanking:

This will cover all your needs for tanking. The one point in stampede can really be put wherever you want but that will be where i am leaving it. This is the spec you should be working towards as you level from 80 to 85.

At 80, if you are planning on working  towards this you will probably want to take this spec:

Natural shapeshifter is not the best choice but it will allow you to move into the third tier as soon as you hit level 81. You can start off with points in perseverance and then move to master shapeshifter or go the other way. I would suggest going with perseverance first because i think damage will be quite high when tanking dungeons. If you are having issues with threat though, you may want to grab master shapeshifter on your next level as it is basically a 4% threat increase (not exactly but roughly). The last point you have left over after that can be put wherever you want, i chose stampede but if you have somewhere else that you would want to put it then go for it.

So there is your specs for 85 and 80. You could choose to go with the better spec for right now and put two points into stampede instead of natural shapeshifter but the difference is negligible so i would just go with the one i posted with it being so close.

All that being said, have fun in your newly shattered Azeroth!!!

4.0.1 Tanking First Impressions

So patch 4.0.1 went live yesterday and I took some time to play around on my druid and run some heroics so I am going to share my observations with you. Keep in mind that I haven’t done any raiding yet so I don’t have any real idea of how much damage I am taking relative to before but today I should be raiding so I will do a second post to follow up.

First just a little about my character so you know the perspective I have. I have just over a 6k GS. Unbuffed I have about 40% crit chance and 50% dodge with about 5000 attack power. As of yesterday I am hit capped and am about 2.2% off of the expertise hard cap (parry cap).

Rotation:

Fiddling around on the target dummy I had enough rage to do a full rotation so this is pretty accurate. The rotation has moved more towards a priority like the cat system.

You want to try and keep lacerate up (even one stack) so that you can benefit from berserk procs for more mangles. You want to mangle as soon as it comes off CD. You want to use pulverize on a 3 stack of lacerate to maintain the buff but get up lacerate up very soon after so that you can still get the berserk proc. Pulverize is not worth hitting just because. Try and maul when you proc OOC. Use FF when you are low on rage (which should not be very often) and maul when you are high on rage. Hitting maul at the wrong time now actually sucks. Lacerate is now your main filler ability however swipe is a little better so use it if you remember. And one note about lacerate is that the bleed sucks, most of the threat is front end loaded and the bleed is just there to proc berserk. Not looking good for the current manifestation of the T11 set bonuses but that will probably change.

I am noticing that my threat seems to have increased in live.

AoE tanking really sucks right now because they put the CD on swipe w/o giving us thrash and the threat that is on swipe is reported to be half of the threat of live on the beta. I have a feeling that we might see the swipe threat stay the same until cata when we will be able to get thrash to supplement our aoe threat. That being said however, if you just warm up that tab button and throw out 3 lacerates/mangles on your targets in between each swipe it is not that bad, just remember to spread them around. You may choose to let the other tank do the plague wing trash but we are doing fine.

Gear:

Stam is more important that armor now whereas there used to be a decent trade-off before. In T10 before you had a lot of arm pen which was rather weak as a stat. Now that arm pen is haste which is also weak as a stat. I have been reading some ideas on what to reforge that haste into and it seems like a lot of people are saying crit or mastery are the good choices. I think a little different though. Right now my dodge and the SD bubble are quite high with my dodge being much higher in ICC due to the dodge reduction being removed.

I think that if you are going to be reforging haste you should try and get to the hit cap and then start getting expertise. These two stats are going to give you a lot more rage than crit and are going to cause a lot more threat to keep up with the dps that have recently received a dps buff that is reported to be as large as 30% more in some cases. If I am wrong however I will eat my words and rereforge my haste to be mastery.

That is really all I have to say for now and I will update this as I experiment more and do a little bit of raiding and see what my threat and damage taken are like. My assessment so far...we are in a good spot.