Update, the Second

So last i posted about myself I was Jey the Kingslayer with 7/12 heroic. Just gonna do a quick update right now. So we have been having attendance issues in berserk lately and so the raiding has not been going as smoothly as we hoped but it is better than not raiding at all i suppose. we have moved from that 7/12 heroic number to 10/12 heroic with only sindra and LK left alive (would be nice if we could repeat the PP kill but w/e). We took some attempts at halion on heroic but it was just one of those nights where no one can concentrate well and it turned into just a big gongshow. Highlight though would have to be getting down Blood princes on heroic, that was pretty cool.

I am also going to link my blog to my YouTube channel now. I have had out a couple videos for a while now that have done alright. So I'm going to put the link to the YouTube channel HERE but i think i will leave the link to my blog out of my channel for now. My most recent video was a strat vid for twin valks in toc so it is not exactly up to date but i am trying to record all the bosses in ICC right now to put a sped up video of all the bosses up. The reason i am so far behind is that i had to rebuild my computer (ick) and i lost fraps and my editing software but i seem to be good now so when i finish that i will let you all know.

And one last thing is that i have another post all ready to go right now so if you are good to me and ask i will post it right away but if not i will post in 4-5 days.

Off tanking?

Ah off tanks. The redheaded stepchildren of tanking. The person you ignore completely unless they are causing problems for your raid. Generally regarded as lesser tanking when compared to the main tank role, the off tank is generally your second tank and the one with less gear. Historically your off tank is the person who you have less faith in, who has worse gear, is less raid-aware, or is not a warrior (vanilla).

It seems that within the community as a whole there is a stigma about off tanks. I think off tanking is usually seen as lesser tanking when compared to the main tank. After all who would rather be the guy holding the binoculars than the guy shooting the Barrett 50 cal? But I think that this opinion is somewhat dated in today’s raiding. Sure there are some fights where this distinction is still there but I for one see it slowly vanishing.

I was reading one of the breakfast topics over at wow insider called “Do you Prefer to be the off tank?” and reading through the comments and I think a lot of people feel the same way. Dps and healers may still feel that there is a distinction between the main and off tank but in the tanking community I am starting to see the shift from asking “who is main tank and who is off tank?” to “who are the tanks and who is doing what?” I am going to go through Naxx and through ICC in order to illustrate my point. The reason I chose Naxx is that it was a level 60 raid converted to 80 and ICC because it is the pinnacle of WotLK raiding (yes it could be argued that ulduar was the pinnacle of WotLK and I would tend to agree but at the end of the expansion it cannot be said that ulduar was the hardest).

Naxxramas:

Anub’Rekhan – Definite main/off tank responsibilities. The main tank found himself on the boss at all times and the off tanks found themselves on spiders and narubians that spawned. No tank switches at all.

Grand Widow Faerlina – Definite main/off tank responsibilities. Main tank on the boss and the off tank on the mobs already present keeping aggro until one was killed or MC’d or just left alone the entire fight for achieve.

Maexxna – There is only one tank on this fight and the off tank goes to dps for the fight.

Noth the Plaguebringer – Definite main/off tank responsibilities. Main tank on the boss and the off tank picking up skeletons that spawn throughout the fight with the main tank helping with adds at some point.

Heigan the Unclean – only the main tank on this fight however depending on your raid you may have the main tank simply stay in tank gear and just do the dance just in case (Boring).

Loatheb – only a main tank for this however you could have an off tank in case the main tank gets the spore debuff but I always just found getting the spore while tanking to make the fight more interesting.

Instructor Razuvious – It could be that you have two tanks on equal footing here in 10 man or that you have or two tanks keeping the extra adds from killing the raid on 25 man.

Gothik the Harvester – The two tanks do the same two jobs on this fight just at different times so there is no distinction here.

Four Horsemen – The two actual tanks do the same thing here and alternate in the front with the two melee bosses.

Patchwerk – Definite main/off tank responsibilities. Main tank on the boss and your off tank(s) just needs to stay second or second/third on threat and take hatefuls.

Grobbulus – One of my favourite fights in the game to main tank and I have no idea why, it’s not even that interesting. There is however a clear main/off tank distinction. Main tank kiting Grobbulus around the room and off tank picking up slimes that spawn.

Gluth – tanks on equal footing here with both switching off when there are too many stacks of MS on the other tank.

Thaddius – Definite main/off tank responsibilities. The two tanks start on the beginning mobs and then after they die the main tank picks up the boss and the off tank just runs back and forth when his charge changes.

Sapphiron – There is only the main tank in this fight. The off tank will just need to go dps for the fight.

Kel’Thuzad – Definite main/off tank responsibilities. Starting in phase 2 the main tank will get agro of the boss and then at 45% health the off tank will then pick up the guardians of Icecrown and tank them until the end of the fight.

Alright so what we have for Naxxramas is 7 fights where there is a clear distinction of roles, 4 fights where there is no off tank at all and 4 fights where the tanks have equal jobs. So of the 15 fights in Naxxramas we have 11 bosess that have a main/off tank setup or simply just a main tank. That means for 73.33% of your run you have a distinct main tank. It is no wonder that there is a stigma attached to being the off tank as you generally had the lesser role or did not tank at all.

Icecrown Citadel:

Marrowgar – this fight is interesting as the tanks stand together and soak damage but after bone storms usually it should be the tank in the better position that should pick him up and the other tank should go and stand on the tank with agro. For my purpose there is no main/off tank (feel free to disagree).

Lady Deathwhisper – The tanks start off picking up adds and then switch to the boss when the shield breaks and the tank switch when the threat debuff gets high enough. No main/off tank distinction.

Loot(gun)ship – No main/off tank distinction both pick up add(s), it is just whether you jump or not.

Deathbringer Saurfang – You have to taunt off each other about every 20 seconds and that goes through the whole fight. No main/off tank distinction.

Festergut – the tanks switch at 9 stacks or the raid wipes...not much leeway. No main/off tank distinction.

Rotface – The first fight you see with a distinction where the main tank is on the boss and the off tank is on the ooze.

Professor Putricide – This does have a main/off tank distinction up until p3 when the tanks assume the same job. I’m going to call this as having the distinction but I’ll talk about it later.

Blood Prince Council – No distinction. With 3 bosses there is always a boss on a tank unless you range tank with a hunter or lock but I’m not counting that.

Blood Queen Lanathel – I am going to call this the same way as Marrowgar because when I tank with someone who is a good sport I like to have a threat race and it feels like you are doing the same thing then. But once again argue if you wish.

Valithria Dreamwalker – Both tanks tank adds and that is all that they do. No distinction.

Sindragosa – same as patricide in that there is no second tank until P2 but I am going to call it the same way because the off tank essentially does nothing until she is grounded and that is more than half the fight.

The Lich King – Ok this fight has no main/off tank duty and I will tell you why I feel this way. First of all yes I have tanked LK and yes I am a kingslayer so I feel I have a certain amount of credibility. At no point during this fight have I ever though “boy I am doing so much more than my off tank” it’s more like “crap crap crap crap crap crap crap.” But in all seriousness there are very few points where one tank is doing more than the other and LK bounces back and forth between the 2 tanks so much there is no distinction.

Ok so from my perspective Icecrown Citadel has 3 fights where there is a distinction between and off tank and a main tank and 9 fights where the tanks are on equal footing. So of the 12 fights in icecrown there are only 3 where there is a main/off tank distinction and that is only 25.00% of the fights.

One last thing that I want to bring up is that in Naxx it was possible to use 1 tank for Gluth, KT and if your dps were attentive Grobbulus on 10 man once you had good 25 man gear. I would like to see you 1 tank festergut or BQL in an average guild (if you do it record it and I will eat my words). As a whole I think that the expansion has moved to a point where there is only an off tank on a select few fights from a point in the game when it was mostly main/off tank fights.

Some of the comments I was seeing on that breakfast topic made the point that in ICC off tanking was more fun than being the main tank anyway or that it was much harder but I respectfully disagree. Take a look at the fights that you could say have an off tank. Putricide: have you done the abom because it is super boring and super easy, and if you are not doing the abom as the off tank you are not doing anything. Sindragosa: You don’t do anything till p2 and then you are doing the same thing as the other tank so that isn’t any harder. Rotface: this would be the only one I might agree with that assessment on; the main tank is on rotface but the off tank is on the ooze but there are 2 things that affect how easy/hard that fight is. First is what class you are, druids and warriors got the short straw with warriors having the shortest of the straws but for paladins and DK’s who both have considerably more ranged attacks I cannot see it being that hard since it isn’t really even that hard on a druid depending on the second point...the skill of the rest of your raid. If the rest of your raid members are bringing the small oozes right to the big ones, not making second big oozes and not pulling agro (I’m looking at you balance druids) then it is a whole lot easier.

Now just to finish off this entire post I thought I would look at Ulduar and ToC to see what the numbers looked like there, and here is what I got:

Ulduar – 7 bosses with main/off tank or only main tank duties applied, 6 bosses requiring both tanks to do the same job and 1 boss that required no tank at all. So of the 14 bosses there were 7 with main/off tank designations or 50.00%.

ToC – 2 bosses with main/off tank responsibilities, 2 fights with equal share of the tanking (northrend beasts is mostly equal as p3 is shorter than the rest of the fight) and 1 fight where no tank is required. So of the 5 bosses 2 had main/off tank designations or 40.00%.

Man I love when things work out nice. In order of release the instance had less and less main/off tank fights with Naxx=73.33%, Ulduar=50.00%, ToC=40.00% and ICC with 25.00%. To me that looks like blizzard is trying to eliminate the main tank off tank distinction and move towards a raid environment where the tanks are equal. Now obviously we cannot get rid of fights with a boss and adds that have to be tanked at the same time so this will always exist to some degree. But I for one will look at it as the tanks and everyone else who just can’t handle it.

The State of Maul: Past, Present and Future

I have been really busy lately with the start of university and so I haven’t been able to devote much time to writing anything but I have whipped this up and I am posting it now just for the interim.

So the week before I left for vacation I was reading some of the forums and comments on some websites and it seems to me that people are afraid to not be using maul constantly because they think that they need it in order to comparable threat. While I am used to hitting maul continuously to hold threat, I am not by any means attached to the ability and I will certainly be happy about not having to spam my 1 key in order to pull decent threat.

I have seen people worried about themselves losing threat from not having that ability to use constantly. I am inclined to say that these people are not really thinking about it. Through all of Wrath Blizzard has been attempting to make all the tanking classes similar in ability. This means that they are trying to make it so that threat difference is marginal, survival difference is marginal and that every tank is able to do anything that he/she needs to.

With them making all healers able to tank and raid heal well enough is further proof, in my opinion, that this same idea for tanks is only going to become more of a reality and not backtrack. I really think that we will not have any effort holding threat when we are competent. I do however hope that they make threat something that is earned and not given to you. With maul being redone so that you don’t spam it anymore that threat will be something that all players can do but good players can master.

Now with all that said, I had originally intended this to be a post about maul and so I will get back on track with that idea. Currently maul is that button you always push. If you have only enough rage for a maul or a mangle...hit maul. The boss is not hitting you and you have no rage...do a white hit so you can hit maul. In pretty much any circumstance hitting maul is the correct choice because the threat is just that high. Currently the only reason you might forgo hitting maul is that you have carpal tunnel from hitting maul so much.

Now I would like to tell you about a time when maul did not fulfill this role. There was a time when maul had an actual purpose. When people across the internet actually wrote more than a sentence about how to use maul. This was the time of pre-wrath. Disclaimer now though...I never actually raided in BC and I was still levelling my first character (a warlock that only made it to level 19) during vanilla. That being said, even though I never raided, I did do a fair amount of tanking. At least from my perspective, the barrier to entry for a feral tank who wanted to raid was quite high. You had to know what you were doing and you had to be able to do it well.

But what does this have to with maul? Practically nothing. But in that time maul was that ability that you hit when your circumstance was right, not every moment of every day you spent tanking. This was because maul had a purpose. Tanks were not balanced around always having maul queued, they were actually balanced around using maul to bleed off rage because at least when I started learning, being rage capped meant that you were doing it wrong. This is how I feel that maul will be used in Cata.

With rage being normalized I hope that there will be enough rage to do your rotation under normal circumstances and maybe a little extra rage than you need so that occasionally you can use maul to keep yourself from getting rage capped. I hope that being rage capped means that you are making mistakes and losing threat similar to how a rogue or cat loses dps when they allow themselves to cap energy. Obviously there will not be much difference between the person that hits rage cap and the person who doesn’t, but if you always find that you are rage capped you should probably be hitting maul more in order to bleed off that rage. Gone are the days when your rage bar is always full regardless of what you are doing...

Or so I hope.

Feral Tier set bonuses

So I know that the internet will be all a twitter with what just dropped on mmo-champion so I am going to hop on the bandwagon and give my own two cents on it. There are a couple things that almost all raiders look forward to a preview of when they are promised new raid content. The first of these is the bosses and what they do, and guess what....you still have to wait for that. But the second thing is tier gear and if you want to see what it looks like in game you are going to have to, once again, keep waiting. If you are still reading I will reward you with the important stuff:

Druid T11 Feral 2P Bonus - Increases the periodic damage done by your Rake and Lacerate abilities by 10%.
Druid T11 Feral 4P Bonus - Each time you use Mangle (Cat) you gain a 1% increase to attack power for 30 sec stacking up to 3 times, and the duration of your Survival Instinct ability is increased by 50%.

There you go, that is why I am slightly excited right now and here is what I think of our first tier set bonuses.

2 set Cat- this is a straight damage increase for rake. Your rake ability will now hit for 10% more. Kinda boring, but with the new changes in Cata rake can also crit so I think it will be making up a more substantial part of our damage, and as such this may be slightly better than it would be on live ( since you can’t have 2 set T11 and 4 set T 10).

2 set Bear- Just like cats it is a straight dmg increase except this time for lacerate. This seems kind of boring at first to me but then I noticed that it says that it is only for the periodic portion of the lacerate dmg. Now you might be thinking “Who cares?” but I will tell you why this peaks my interest. Up until now I have been slightly worried about the interplay between lacerate and pulverize and since I don’t have access to the beta I can only make guesses but I’ll tell you what this leads me to believe. In that they are buffing the periodic lacerate dmg and not simply lacerate dmg I would imagine that you will be trying to keep a stack running as much as possible. This leads me to 3 conclusions as far as pulverize goes.

1. Lacerate is intended to be part of the rotation in a major way and you will only pulverize when the buff falls off.
2. Lacerate is intended to be part of the rotation in a major way and there will be a glyph that allows pulverize to not consume the stacks but have something like a longer CD or something.
3. Lacerate will suck even with the set bonuses and you will only use it so that pulverize hits harder and you will have a wasted 2 set.

Obviously number three would suck but I wouldn’t want 1 to be the case either. I’m hoping that 2 will be what happens because pulverize seems like a fun ability that I want to use for more reason than as a glorified savage roar, but that is just me.

4 set Cat- First impression, this sucks. 1% attack power for using mangle. I would be completely fine with this except that it is mangle that is the trigger. This should trigger from either shred or shred and mangle imo. Basically what is going to happen is that instead of needing to mangle once every minute to keep the debuff on the enemy up is that we now have to mangle every thirty seconds to keep the buff up. Also if the buff falls off it is not as simple as using mangle to get it up again; if it falls off you have to use mangle 3 times to get it back up. And finally if you have someone else putting up the bleed debuff you will still have to mangle in order to keep this buff up. It will need to be seen whether it is a big enough gain in dps to counteract the trade-off of shred for mangle. I see this needing either a slight buff or a redesign or I can see some cats taking off pieces instead of going for 4 piece but I cannot be sure because we don’t have any solid numbers right now.

4 set Bear- I looked that this and I said to myself “wow another crappy bear tier set bonus”, a duration increase of the increased health effect is kind of underwhelming. /facepalm. This is a really good set bonus with survival instincts reducing dmg by 60 % now this is markedly better. Having 60% reduction is good but having 60% reduction for 18 seconds is way better. It’s almost like its 50% better...

That’s all I got for now and I have no idea what I am going to post next.

PS. Nom nom nom getting renamed Feast of Flesh sucks. That was like the best name for a talent ever.

DPS Basics

So my blog has not died, i just have not posted in a while because of some outside circumstances. I had this post ready for a bought a week cause i was having issues bringing it over from a word document to here but i figured it out now and then about a week after I finished I went on vacation for a week and a half so here i am with a day off and im going to at least post this and update my telents post so that it is correct and current again.

This one is not as directional as the tanking one was because my thoughts on tanking are fully developed and my thoughts on dps are developed from tanking. Some of this post (parts of the agro portion) sound like a rant from a tank and I thought about removing it and rewriting it but I think that it shows some of the frustration that I have with dps sometimes. That being said I think most of it is neutral and probably a good thing to read. Here we go.

1) Know Your Abilities
This is what I believe to be the most important thing that ANY new player should do. It is especially important for those with more responsibility in fights such as tanks and healers and dps with special roles. When I say know your abilities, I don’t simply mean the ones that are used regularly by your spec but all of the abilities you might ever use if you played every role you are able to. You should never say to yourself, “I know all my bear form abilities so I am set to tank”. Tanking is about being prepared and one of the best ways to do that is to know your class extremely well. An Example: did you know that if you want to root 2 mobs it is possible to do it, pull with entangling roots and then cast natures grasp on yourself. You can refresh roots without the NG one breaking and you can redo NG by having that mob hit you again. Now a lot of people may be saying to themselves what useless information that is and I will admit that it is almost completely useless for PvE. I have never used it and probably never will but I know that I can.

2) Know your Talents
With the overhaul coming to talent trees in Cata this may not be as important but I will still list it here anyway because for the time being I believe that it is very important. Different from the abilities, you should know the talents trees of the specs you play inside and out. I will probably never play resto so I only really know the top three tiers that I use for feral but in my feral tree I know tons of details. When I finished levelling to 80 and was creating my raiding spec for WotLK I spent almost an hour and a half combing through the talent tree individually looking at each talent and researching it. I came up with the cookie cutter build for druid tanking at the time all by myself and I know the pros and cons of every talent. Now that may have been extreme but knowing all my talents like that I have had to adapt to changing talents only very slightly and I knew what they all did and was able to make a very educated decision about my spec. It is not good enough to simply go to elitist jerks and copy their spec for the patch, sure your spec may end up looking the same anyway or you may want to use that as a very strict guideline but do something yourself so that you know what your talents can do for you. You may not need an hour but do 20 mins and have a better knowledge of what you are putting points in. You decided that you want to tank, now you have to do some work to get ready.

3) Know How to Pick Gear and Weight Stats
This is easy and only takes about 15 min to find out. All you want to know is maybe your 4 or 5 most important stats and their weightings relative to each other. There are lots of guides out there that will tell you what gear you should use over another and I use them quite frequently but when I am out in a raid or an instance I know my stat weights good enough that almost every time I will pick the better piece anyway. This is definitely worth your time.

4) Know the Other Classes
This knowledge will be very general. Know the other classes buffs, major debuffs, big cooldowns, and the basic abilities used at max level for each spec. You don’t have to be able to have a thought provoking conversation about the ins and outs of arcane blast and arcane missiles and how they relate but at least know that they are used by arcane mages. The exception to this is the four tanking classes. When it comes to the tanks you want a better knowledge of their abilities so that you can react better because messing up in regards to another dps may cause you to lose a little damage but messing up when it comes to timing in regards to a tank will most likely leave you face down on the ground not moving a whole lot. Just saying.

5) Aggro
So you all knew that this was coming but here is the problem that I have. There are just too many parts of this topic that I want to share and not all of them are negative so grouping them all together wasn’t really an option. At the same time they all seem very important and I want them near the beginning, so you can see my dilemma. I did come up with a solution however...SUBHEADINGS!!!!!!!
5a)Don’t Pull Aggro
Yeah we will just get this out of the way early; you all saw it coming anyway. There is never a good time to pull aggro off the tank. Often you are only focusing on what you are attacking and how much damage you can do (don’t lie to me I dps too) and you don’t pay any attention to much else because you believe that the tank will magically always have aggro. Its people like you that cause problems. At any one time a tank is keeping track of any number of things such as the number of mobs, their positioning around him, any adds coming, paths of pats, healer location, location of himself relative to dps, mob abilities, boss abilities, fire on the ground, and probably more things I can’t remember. Ok now tanking is not the hardest thing in the world and keeping track of lots of those things overlap with one another however you should try and shoulder more responsibility and make the tanks job a little easier by not riding their tail on threat. There are exceptions to this such as high burst situations but most of the time it’s not a big deal and it isn’t even really that hard to do. Most times all that is required is a small bit of patience and then you can go nuts. Tank threat is generally not a problem after they have aggro but when the target is bouncing between them and a dps it makes it very hard.

5b) If You Die, It Probably Is Your Fault
When you stand in fire do you blame the healer for your death? When you jump from too high and die do you blame virtual gravity? When you auto-run into the boss and die do you blame ready checks? I would think unless you aren’t all that intelligent you probably answered no to all those but there is one last question that begs asking. When you pull aggro and die do you blame the tank? “but Jey that question is not even the same at all”. Well I believe it is, and this is coming from me as both a tank and a dps. It is your responsibility to stay alive. It is the responsibility of the tank to keep aggro off of everyone, not you. If you are dumb enough to simply pull off the tank then you deserve to die. If the tank loses aggro and multiple people die that is their fault. More often the former and not the later is the case. Man up and take responsibility

5c) If You Pull It Prepare To Tank It
Many tanks have the mantra that if you want aggro you can have it but many times it is out of the tanks control. I often am guilty of this in heroics as I simply do too much dig too fast due to dps scaling a lot better in heroics. Every time I pull however I expect that I will have aggro of whatever I am attacking until it dies that way I am not surprised to have it for the remainder of the fight but always pleased when the tank pulls it off. If I really do not want to pull off I can wait a few moments and then attack or can wait till I get high aggro and then lay off but it is always within my power to stay below the tank more so than the other way around.

5d) Use Threat Dumps Proactively
Ok so when I say threat dumps I mean stuff like tricks and misdirection but also things like feign death and soul shatter. If you have any abilities that allow you to get rid of threat or to make it go on to someone else you should use them early rather then when you have already pulled off of the tank. Some people like to say that the mob will run to you then be out of tank range and when you threat dump it will go to another dps or the healer and potentially cause a wipe. While I highly doubt a healer will have high enough threat to cause the mob to go to them it is very possible to go to another dps. These things should be used before you pull aggro but when you are very high on threat allowing you to get the most use out of them. Using these dumps or threat wipes around 100% threat is a good place because you are getting very close to pulling but everything is still on the tank. Hunters and rogues...use tricks and MD often. As a tank nothing makes me warm up to a dps more then getting their threat so I don’t have to worry as much. I currently am levelling a hunter that is level 77 and I can’t use misdirection enough, I just love the ability and it has made a couple really bad instances successful.

5e) Know Tank Aoe’s
This could very definitely go out of date with Cata but for the time being it will still hold true. Each tank has some abilities that they use when they are tanking multiple mobs at the same time. Knowing these and being able to look for them before opening up on the group. I was thinking hey I can make a video about that but I had already read a post about that on the wayward initiative that was about this exact topic so here it is.

6) Don’t Tunnel
This is probably the number one thing that gets dps killed on fights in raids and instances. Just by the nature of the role, dps do not need as much awareness as tanks and healers. Dps only watch two health bars and most often that just becomes one health bar. While doing damage to the boss is important it is not the only thing you have to watch for and this singular need to do dmg to the boss is what leads to tunnelling. You should always know what is going on in the fight so that you can react pre-emptively to some things or just be able to react in a timely manner to everything else. Most often the people who get hit by bad stuff or die in fires are dps. Yes I realize the ratio of dps to tanks and healers is very skewed but dps are usually the ones that stand in things. Just work on knowing what is going on around you and you will be much better off.

7) The Best Player Is Not Always Highest On the Meters
How many times have you seen a dps link a dmg meter parse in order to show that his e-peen is the biggest? Probably countless. That is probably not a player that you want with you in a raid. The way most dps choose to show their skill is by linking dps meters and this is rarely an indication of a good player. If you want recognition don’t link meters. Generally if you link meters people ignore it and don’t really care but if you do good during the fight and have the highest dps then people around you will make comments. The best dps are usually the ones that are consistently near the top of the meters, switch targets when they need to and keep quiet. If someone is overbearing and bragging they probably don’t realize that no one wants them there. The most successful dps I ever played with was always highest on the meters by a wide margin, followed all the fight mechanics almost flawlessly and didn’t say much at all over vent or raid chat and I found myself wanting to raid with him again.

8) Switch to Adds
When your raid leader tells you that you need switch to adds you need to do it. I cannot even count the amount of times that I have been in a raid and we have wiped repeatedly to getting overrun by adds during a boss fight. For something so simple to wipe the raid is just dumb. I realize it sucks to switch at almost any time during the fight. I play a feral druid, trust that I know but I would way rather kill the boss then wipe repeatedly just because I don’t want my dmg to drop.

9) Special Jobs Make You More Valuable
If you get tasked to do a special job during a boss encounter never complain. Yes you may lose damage but it will make you far more valuable to the guild. Most special jobs during boss fights require you to pay attention to more than just the boss and they help you to develop your awareness. Also if you become good enough you may soon find that you become irreplaceable. I’m sure you have noticed that good tanks and healers seem to be guaranteed a spot in raids and in most cases they probably are. You could have a spot like that if you are the guilds go to guy for dps tasks that they don’t feel comfortable giving to everyone and that may be all you need to be guaranteed a raid spot.

10) Happy Tank Happy Life
There should be no reason that should be causing a tank to be unhappy with his group. Most tanks dread tanking heroics and for good reason. Lots of dps are colossal losers and just make you infuriated. Now obviously this is not always that case and there are people that renew your hope in dps but the fact remains that a lot of them don’t. No matter how annoyed you are you should hold your comments to yourself. Go into guild chat and make fun of him, talk with other dps in the group behind his back, w/e you have to do but don’t voice that directly to your tank because if you keep him happy you will have a far better run. I have had tanks that suck, they make the run long and annoying but in almost every case I have kept those comments to myself and I think that it helps. I know that it is extremely hard to not say anything sometimes but unless they tank starts blaming others for something that is blatantly their fault but only if you are positive that it wasn’t your own.

11) Give Some Compliments
This will not make you a better player or improve your game experience directly but from a tanking point of view this can help you more than you think. If your tank or healer is doing a good job it is very usual that you simply note that and carry on with your life and never think about it again. If they are doing a good job let them know. It is always nice to hear that you are doing well from your guild but hearing it from a complete stranger is usually a lot better. And if every dps did this for all the good tanks that they came across then there would probably be more tanks out there that were doing a good job and more tanks in general thus making your queue times for randoms shorter.

That’s all I got right now but same with the tanking basics post I will update it if I think of anything else and if you give me ideas that I like I will throw in your name beside the title.

Me and Malfurion

So just thought I would drop a post to let anyone reading this know that i am working getting my thoughts together for the dps counterpart to my tanking basics post and that i have not forgot about the blog already...again.

On a second and completely unrelated note: there is a picture of the new? model for Malfurion Stormrage on mmo-champion right now and i have to say i am sorely disappointed with it. I like im sure many others have grown up on Warcraft games through my childhood. my first adventures into azeroth came with Warcraft 2: tides of darkness when i was really quite young. I remember sitting in the living room playing Warcraft 2 and trying to hide that i was using cheat codes from my dad. I also remember just sitting there for long stretches of time watching my dad play because i thought he was the most amazing player ever.

Then came Warcraft 3. It was at this point in the game that i started to rival my dad in skill. I have spent countless games with and without cheats learning the races and while i am still relatively not very good i do enjoy playing a lot. I have had the expansion for quite a while now and have even bought a second copy of the expansion so that i can hook up the computers upstairs for some LAN games with a friend of mine.

That all being said i am sure you can gather that i have probably played through the story a few times and what an awesome one it is. It was with Warcraft 3 that i was introduced to all of the night elf major players including Malfurion Stormrage. Now if you have played the game you will know that Malfurion Stormrage is a tall and very wide individual. He is more like a watermelon in appearance and that is how i have grown up knowing him.

This new model in the game right now has left me severely disappointed. I play a tauren and hope that my interaction with Malfurion Stormrage in cata is limited if the model stays the same because i just do not like how it looks at all. In his new version he looks like some lean hardcore bearded fighting machine where in the original games he looked more like the wise humble and peaceful demi-god that he is and i don't like it.

I don't know if you feel the same way but that's how i feel. Have a good one.

Feral Talents Runthrough

So my initial thought on the Cata talent trees was to leave them alone as a blog topic until they were closer to the release trees but I have thought of nothing better to write on so I am doing this.

Overall I think if they were to polish up the tree and release it right now I wouldn’t be too put off but a couple things seem slightly wrong to me but ill talk about them as they come up. I am going to try to show equal respect to bear and cat but I am a tank at heart so no promises. This is current as of build 12857 and I will try to keep it updated.

Feral Tree
Tier 1
Feral Swiftness
For Bears this is pretty much a no brainer same as in live right now, more dodge is good. For cats it is move speed, if you want more move speed over something else go for it.
Furor
This is the same as live at full now and scales at 33/66/100% but otherwise unchanged
Predatory strikes
This is absolutely useless for bears so leave it alone. For cats this is mostly just a choice if you want to move faster from feral swiftness or if you want to have an occasional instant spell such as a Brez when dpsing, I would probably take the move speed
Tier 2
Infected Wounds
This is the same as live for both specs so all the same arguments apply
Fury Swipes
I think this is a very cool talent for both specs and will probably take it in both. For cat it is an obvious dps increase but for bears there has been some skepticism around its actual benefits. I think with the normalization of rage however this will become an increasingly valuable talent but that is just my initial thoughts at the moment.
Primal Fury
This is the same as live and is just as good, you should be taking this.
Feral Aggression
Having faerie fire stack up to three instantly from one use and i think that the rage cost of faerie fire has been removed meaning that the feral version of faerie fire will be the same as live except that it will be 12% armor reduction instead of 5%.
Tier 3
King of the Jungle
Same as live? For cats it should be taken but for bears it is kinda still useless unless you have 4piece T10 and those 3 points are better spent elsewhere imo
Feral Charge
Same as live. Take it for both.
Improved Feral charge
I am iffy on this for both specs. For cats it seems useful as ravage does more dmg than shred and it would be a good way to open a fight or use after running away. For bear im just not so sure about this. For some fights it will probably turn out to be fantastic as you are charging all over the place but for other fights where you don’t charge at all this is totally useless. It seems like the kind of talent where you would almost have to make a point of taking advantage of it. Im not sure.
Thick Hide
Same as live and the same outcome for the talent. Take it for bear leave it for cat. This now also includes the crit reduction that was previously baked into survival of the fitest for tanking.
Tier 4
Leader of the Pack
I would say just take it, other classes may have the same thing but 5% crit is 5% crit. In the last build this was changed to also have the effects of improved leader of the pack but only for the druid that has the talent, if i read that correctly. This means that the buff will never become obsolete by another class having it.
Brutal Impact
With the new skull bash ability this gives cats and bears their reliable interrupt on a short CD. Definitely worth taking.
Nurturing Instincts
I am biased against this talent because of the current raiding environment but in Cata when mana is more of an issue you might see a niche for this talent. Obviously cat only.
Tier 5
Primal Madness
If you are like me and didn’t take king of the jungle for bear then this doesn’t matter anyway, other wise I think it is rather sub-par for the exact same reasons. For cats it was improved so that not only does it increase your max energy but also grants you extra energy.
Survival instincts
This ws redesigned int eh latest beta build to be the same as shield wall and have a 5 min CD instead of 3 min. It now, for those not staying up to date, it reduces all dmg taken by 60% for 12 seconds. hopefully this doesn't mean that they are taking away barkskin from ferals. The current effect of survival instincts is now tied into frenzied regeneration so that not only does it regen loads of health but also increases your max health by 30% for the duration. This should not be a big deal because i suspect that most people use survival instincts and frenzied regeneration together anyway to get the most bang for their buck and this just puts those two abilities in the same button.
Endless Carnage
This is obviously good for cats to ease the rotation and improve dps and it is looking like we will be balanced around having the buff from pulvarize using up lacerate stacks and so having the increased duration could mean the difference between it falling off or having full uptime.
Natural reaction
Bear only talent and all bears should have it
Tier 6
Nom Nom Nom
Aside from having the best name of any talent ever this looks very nice for cats in situations where the enemy is low and you don’t necessarily want to use 5 combo points that you happen to have on another rip that isn’t going to last. Not useful at all for bears.
Rend and Tear
We will have to see how much maul gets used in Cata but I see this being good for both specs, this could very likely get changed to be more than just maul or a different ability entirely.
Pulverize
This will very likely be a core bear talent but I want to see it in action personally. Not useful for cats.
Tier 7
Berserk
Ahh berserk, how I love you and how I hate you. I love this ability in cat form, it is a great dmg increase and burst cooldown for use on longer fights and has a fear break to boot. I really have an issue with this for bear tanking. It kinda sucks. Having looked at the new tree i think that i will still take it given the amount of points that we are to need.

Resto
Tier 1
Blessing of the grove
Looks good for cats and cats only
Natural Shapeshifter
Has not changed and probably would only get taken if you want master shapeshifter
Heart of the Wild
For both specs this should be taken. More health for bears and AP for cats. In the newest beta patch the it increases your max man instead of your intellect making it markedly more useful for ferals that have to shift alot.
Tier 2
Perseverance
This is a tank ability or a cat ability if you suck at getting out of fires really bad. But seriously only take it if you are a bear.
Master shapeshifter
I don’t know where to stand on this. For bears it will probably get picked up because you are getting pretty much forced to take at least two points in natural shapeshifter but cats have more options and I can see this losing for furor but that is just me. However right now this talent is all just passives so maybe it will change. This was changed from 2% to 4% lately.


I have mostly determined the path my spec will take in live however i have to do a little napkin math based on a raid and i don't think i have a recount parse saved so i may have to wait a little bit for some more information, that being said i will post my spec options here with the info that right now I am trying to decide between master shapeshifter and improved feral charge as far as dmg goes.

For the 2 specs above and the one below note that the position of Heart of the Wild and Furor have been switched but it makes no difference in the way you distribute your points. I am not going to redo the pictures for bear because they are more of a pain than cat and nothing has changed. These will be the main choices for almost all feral druid tanks out there. The spec on the left contains improved feral charge for the increased haste after a feral charge and the spec on the right contains master shapeshifter instead for the passive 2% dmg increase. For the small percentage of bears there is one more option however:

This spec is for those lucky druids that have the benefit of having someone to put up the attack speed reduction almost 100% of the time. If you have someone that is very reliable doing that for you, you have the option of dropping infected wounds and picking up both improved feral charge and master shapeshifter. And now a spec for cats.

So this is what i think will be the cat spec so far come cata. Keep in mind that there are 2 points missing to put wherever you want. Being a feral tank who has to take infected wounds that is where i think you should put it but i think most everyone disagrees with that so probably nurturing instincts would be good to turn down the strain on healers. I am inclined to say that you should not get predatory strikes as ravages with 50% more crit which will probably be joined with imp. feral charge and that just sounds like a good way to die at the beginning of the fight.

That is all I have to say for now. I will try to keep up with the changes but this is a very solid point unless the tree gets a major overhaul. So have fun on live or in the beta if you got lucky and have a good day.