4.0.1 Tanking Second Impressions

So I raided last night and as promised I am going to share my experience with that.

First off, in my last post I said that I reforged to mass hit and expertise for this patch and I am maintaining that that is the way to go right now because...

Threat and Damage:

My threat in the raid was really high yesterday. I was previously always in a threat race with our destro lock during some fights but yesterday on marrowgar he was at about 50% of my threat. My damage also seems to have increased, I was hitting mangle for like 13k at some points and with the berserk procs I was hitting it quite often. The Berserk mechanic seems very strong right now for aoe and single target. I was finding that I always had enough rage to use my abilities but I may have to put my rage bar in the middle of my screen since it actually matters right now for knowing whether to use maul or FF.

As proof of the increased threat: the instance bugged out last night and the whole raid had to jump off of the boat before saurfang and die so that we could get out of combat so I took off my weapon and jumped off to save some money. Fast-forward to me standing in front of rotface’s room after killing heroic saurfang and the festergut achievement thinking to myself “that’s weird my weapon isn’t displayed in caster form.” So yes I did tank those two fights without a weapon on and did not even notice until 2 bosses later when I thought that my character looked funny.

Abilities:

Maul damage seems rather low but I am still trying to use it on OOC procs since it is instant, does not trigger the global and has such a high rage cost. I think that the net gain is higher using OOC for maul because if you can have maul on CD and still be using it often while having loads of rage it seems like that can only be a dps increase. Like I said before however do not use maul at the wrong time because it is actually possible to run out of rage but the consequences are not as bad for that happening as I think they may become when we level up and start losing our high crit chance and get big reductions in the potency of our stats

Mangle hits like a truck now. If you can use it you should be because the damage and threat is just so high. That’s all I really have to say about mangle right now. It is your top priority so use it every time.

Lacerate is pretty much all front loaded now for threat and is going to be your filler ability just like at the start of wrath. Its threat seems pretty good now and it actually seems to function as a sort of secondary resource for bears. You can consume it to gain a crit buff or let it stand and generate mangles for you. I am beginning to see lacerate as a buff instead of rebuff since the bleed damage is so low but having it has such good return.

Pulverize was an ability that I was not sure as to how it would function but I think with its low damage it is a mock savage roar. Pulverize puts up the crib buff so you want to always lacerate at 3 stacks to get 9% instead of 3% or 6% but you want to always follow it up with a lacerate. I’m thinking that lacerate is better to use after a pulverize than a mangle since lacerate will take a couple seconds to tick and by then you will have been able to use a mangle and will be closer to the next berserk proc w/o missing the first one but we shall see.

Swipe is decent right now. Its threat is actually really high so you should be able to hold threat pretty well in aoe packs if you don’t only rely on it. Its threat is actually higher than lacerate right and having just been told that swipe is still going to be better than lacerate after the buff you should get used to using it in your single target rotation.

Faerie Fire is not the same way as it was before, where you wanted to use it every time it came off CD. Right now it is good as an armour debuff, a ranged pull and as a filler ability to use when you accidently hit maul out of instinct at low rage.

Both our CD’s I have yet to use because healing and survivability is so good right now.

Talents:

I’m only going to go over the ones that have really impressed me thus far in this patch.

Feral Aggression: so I got into a discussion with kalon over at wowthinktank and now it is time to put my tail between my legs because I love this talent especially with the glyph to increase the range.

Stampede: I have not even noticed the effect of this talent so what does that say? But at the moment there isn’t really much else to take.

Brutal Impact: I haven’t noticed the talent too much but I sure have noticed the 10 second interrupt that I have now.

Endless Carnage: Keeping up the pulverize buff for longer is something that I have noticed will be rather handy if pulverize does not get a big dmg increase.

Berserk: Who cares about the actual ability (I have always thought it to be completely underwhelming) but the proc from lacerate ticks is frigging amazing. I love this change.

Ratings:

Agility is really good right now as it has always been but it may be even better now.

Stam does the same thing as before.

All of our secondary stats seem to be about the same in value as they were before.

I didn’t really check out armour at all.

I have no idea about mastery but Kalon over on wowthinktank.blogspot.com is saying that it is quite good so I may reforge some of my haste into mastery instead of expertise just to see but I’m not sure if I want to do that yet.

Glyphs:

Prime: Mangle, Berserk, Lacerate

Major: Frenzied Regeneration, *I took Faerie Fire but it is not optimal*, (your pick)

Minor: imo go unburdened rebirth, dash, challenging roar

So that’s all I got for now but if I find that my opinion changes on anything or that i learn something new that makes a difference for me i will do another post. Good luck in 4.0.1 but be positive for right now cause we are looking good so far.

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.

Raiding in WotLK

Just a note that I have been really busy lately so that’s why this took so long to get posted

Wrath of the Lich King raiding is too easy. It is a very common statement that you see touted by raiders on the internet. While I was never actually a part of it, I have heard stories of wiping on Neltharion for months, never even seeing the inside of Naxx and the dreaded C’Thun eyebeam. From my understanding of BC, it was much the same where a very select few people saw the very highest content and those that did were raiding 4-6 nights a week. It is usually to these raids that people refer when they talk about raiding in wrath of the lich king being too easy but I would like to deposit another take on that.

I never raided in vanilla or BC so I have a somewhat incomplete view on those raiding environments but I would like to take the stance as a purely WotLK raider and go off of some of the things I have been told about the previous raiding spheres. Blizzard has openly stated that the average raider in WotLK is better than the raiders that were pushing into Naxx and AQ40 in vanilla. Now I am not saying that these vanilla raiders were bad players, simply that the game has evolved so much since then and the average skill level of players has increased so drastically that the fights that were previously extremely difficult would not create the same difficulty among the raidership of wow as they did when they were released.

That being said I think that blizzard has also changed its view somewhat. In vanilla you would wipe simply because the game decided that you were going to and there was nothing you could do to prepare. The Insta-gibbing that happened in vanilla is not really a part of the game anymore except for a select few fights. We no longer have fights that require your entire raid to farm reputation or get absurd amounts of resistance in order to have a chance of living. Tanks are no longer killed because they got a bad string of parries from the boss only to have the boss’ hits get hasted and land a crushing blow on them. To the best of my knowledge there is only one fight in wrath where you cannot taunt the boss whereas there were numerous bosses that were untauntable in vanilla.

I think the main reason for this shift in raiding ease is the plentiful knowledge of how to do bosses. Before a patch or expansion even leaves the PTR there are numerous strat videos out that only need minor revisions. There is far greater knowledge of how the game itself works. In the recent year or two the blue posters have given out far more information as to how the game works. There are actually direct formulas that are known by people as to how to do the most possible damage without human error. Players can easily look up what is the best order for their abilities. There are countless people theorycrafting what is the best stat for you to have on your gear given your gear level and the stats that you already have. There are numerous BiS gear lists out on the internet. If you type “World of Warcraft” into Google you get 77,330,000 hits and if you simply type “raiding” in you will get 6/11 hits on the first page of Google related to WoW. The wealth of information available on the internet for this game now is just astounding. Players today ask a question and it has probably been answered numerous times before or chances are good that there is someone somewhere working on answering it. The days of wondering what to do are gone.

But knowledge alone does not make players better. World of Warcraft is coming up on its 6 year anniversary and it is not slowing down. The group of players that are moving into raiding today are the ones like myself who have grown up with a controller at an arm’s reach. We have gained the ability to raid better because we have grown up playing video games. Trying to teach my dad guitar hero was a painful experience but most people my age can just pick it up and play. And with a game like WoW with such a longstanding tradition of pushing the gaming experience there are more and more talented people drawn in daily.

I can think of one final reason that the game is evolving and causing previous content to not be as hard as the stuff that is being released later. Exceptional players make the group as whole better. Here is a basic example that illustrates my point well. When Tiger Woods started playing golf it was just reaching mainstream society and gaining popularity. However Tiger Woods started playing and he began to win more and more. As he got better people started to get interested in how he was so good and wanted to get better. There started to be a large base of players not content with being average anymore, wanting to do the things that Tiger Woods could do and the skill of the professional golfers started to increase at a much faster rate than previous. Now this is golf but I think it applies to WoW quite directly. When I started playing WoW I was content with being beginner or even average. It was a game I played to pass the time, I didn’t know anything about raiding or even care. Well then I met a guy who was into that “raiding” thing and it sparked my interest. I wanted to become more like that so I started doing my research and gearing up so that I could raid. That was my warlock. Well I got bored and left that server and made my druid and when he hit 80 my friend told me that druids couldn’t tank past Kara. I wanted to prove him wrong and so I immediately started gearing to raid but I was too late and by the time I got close to being geared enough it was too late and WotLK came out. So when I got wrath I made the mad dash for 80, I was the 6^th 80 in my guild and before we had 10 people that were ready to raid I was rearing to go. I knew the fights and I was ready to go and I have been going since. Now this has been really long winded but it shows how a couple people who are better than you can cause you to improve drastically really fast. I went from not knowing what a raid was or that there was such thing as a “raid lockout” to raiding 25 mans in WotLK.

But I have getting away from my original point slightly. Is Wrath raiding really too easy? I would say no. I believe that Naxx was almost perfectly tuned for what it was. When WotLK came out Naxx was the first raid you did and it did the job it was supposed to do...Get players hooked. Then Ulduar dropped and brought with it the hardmodes that we have come to enjoy so much. I would say, and I’m sure that many would agree, that Ulduar was the bet raid we had. It felt like it was tuned just right at the beginning and then when you felt you were good enough you could take a shot at the hardmodes. The simple switch on/switch off system we have now wasn’t in the game so when you wanted to do a hardmode you had to earn the right to do it and you had to earn the right every time.

Then ToC came and the raiding difficulty fell apart. Regular ToC with its no trash and relatively easy boss fights felt the longest of all the raids. However when you moved on to ToGC you felt like they really had upped the difficulty and it was refreshing. It was a difficult fight in some cases.

ICC was harder than ToC and you were challenged more than before...but only once you got past the first couple of bosses. The first 4 bosses were considerably easier than they should have been and I think this is where the distinction lies. Many people say that pugs should not be able to do the best raids and I partially agree. I think that if you want to pug you should have to resign yourself to the fact that you will probably never finish the instance unless you pug into a guild run but I think you should still be able to raid the beginning of the instance. But the first 4 bosses are just too easy to be the last bit of content for an expansion, as it stands the first 4 bosses just kinds roll over and die with a half decent group. I think if you are going to pug you should have to work harder and be ready for a couple wipes before you get it down.

So is wrath too easy? No I think that the barrier to entry is not high enough for the last two tiers of raiding. The beginning bosses should have been made harder in order to make it harder for the average player that is not willing to dedicate to get in. Now I may sound slightly elitist but I think my point is valid. At this point in the game we have a large group of people that pug raids but don’t have any patience for wipes and leave after one or two wipes in an instance. By making the first bosses harder you would be able to limit the ability of these people to get gear and make it so they have to work to get groups making them less likely to just drop group at the first sign of trouble. And if someone is not the best player but they work on gearing up, doing a heroic every day, gemming and enchanting their gear correctly and then want into a raid I think they should have that right. but make them work for it a bit more so that they feel some dedication to it. At that point in the patch cycle, if they want to pug, it should be easier but still not a joke. They should feel that wiping numerous times is not uncommon given that they are in a pug with much less diligence and coordination.

Is this possible? I don’t know. I do feel that the later bosses are really quite challenging and that they have good tuning and you really do feel a sense of accomplishment in killing them (yay run-on sentence). I would imagine that the players who have killed HLK aren’t saying that it was too easy and I know that what I have done recently has been challenging enough to not leave me thinking underwhelmed. But we will have to see where raiding goes from here. I definitely think that we are headed in the right direction as far as having it open to everyone who is willing to do a little work.

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.