Tanking Movement Guide

I just realized that I promised you a guide and then posted it on the forums and forgot to post it here, so here it is now. It has only been complete for about 3 days now so this isn't too far behind. Also the guide is posted HERE on the forums so if you like it go sign in on that forums and up-vote the post. Also you could post a quick comment on the forums to bump it but now i am just getting greedy.

I wrote this guide partially for fun and, and of course to help. These are things that I have often taken for granted as common knowledge, but having paid more attention to people after I started writing it, I have a feeling that even some of you more advanced tanks may learn a thing or two. If you are reading through this and you find something unclear, wrong or would like to add something, then by all means drop a comment. I am not above admitting I am wrong (if I am) and care more about this being comprehensive and correct than buffing my ego.

As you start reading this you may feel that I started with an approach that is much too basic but I tried to move away from that quickly and use it as a quick step to the more complex movements, and if you keep reading you will find that it does get much more in depth. This guide will have a large focus on moving yourself but will have a large component of ways to move your enemies by moving yourself.  And Just before I get started, some of you may be reading through this and say to yourself, “Hey, I saw that on TankSpot,” and I will let you know that I did learn some of these things from a video put up by Ciderhelm, but I am hoping that I can elaborate more fully on some of those things to give the average a player a way to understand them, and not just the elite (not that I am elite, but just saying).

Moving yourself

The most basic way to move yourself is with either the arrow keys or with the WASD keys however this is rarely an efficient way to move and often leaves you either too slow or having to make less desirable moves in order to make up for your lack of speed. The problem with using only these keys is that you often cannot turn fast enough because the game dictates the speed of your turn. Even if you are absolutely perfect in your response time you will often find yourself too slow and may be given the title that everyone dreads, “keyboard turner.” But you aren’t handicapped so you knew all this already.

The easiest way to remedy this slow movement is to use your mouse to turn your camera. This allows you to basically move your camera as fast as humanly possible. If you can’t move any faster than you could get a new mouse and if you can’t move any faster after that then you probably just disconnected from moving so fast.

“But Jey, if I turn with my mouse I can’t click my abilities!!!” No, you can’t, and that is why you need to learn to keybind or at least use your binds. Pretty much everything from this point on will be hinged around being able to do things on the fly and that will require you to use your binds. You don’t need to have a bind for every ability, but having one for those abilities that you use often is a must. I personally have a bind that I am perfectly comfortable with for each of my four main tanking abilities and for my taunt and charge.

Strafing

The next evolution of movement is to learn how to strafe. Strafing is moving sideways or at an angle, instead of turning and then running forward. I have found that as I have become more comfortable with strafing it has slowly taken over as my dominant form of movement while tanking. In my opinion it allows you to keep much better tabs on all that is happening around you.

There are two dominant ways to strafe. The first, and easier way, is to use your strafe buttons on the keyboard. These are originally bound to your Q and E buttons and they move you sideways without turning you around. You can also use these buttons in conjunction with your forward key in order to move at a 45 degree angle in either direction.

The second method of strafing is to use your camera in conjunction with your arrow keys. I think that this method affords you a larger amount of control over movement, but you may feel that you prefer the other way or a mix of the two. I also find this is much more natural way to strafe when you are using your mouse to turn anyways. To do this you simply hold down your right mouse button and use your arrow keys to move sideways, or your forward and sideways arrow keys to move at an angle at an angle forward. Using your mouse this way eliminates your ability to keyboard turn and forces you to move more efficiently. It also grants you easy movement between strafing sideways and strafing at an angle.

Either way you use, don’t ever hit your backward arrow as that will just make you start backing up at an angle.

Reasoning

But why strafe? Strafing affords you better movement because you are never slowed from backing up. It allows you to always know where your enemy is because they are never behind your camera if you don’t want them to be. Strafing also has the distinct advantage of allowing you to move away from your enemy at full speed and still be able to dodge, parry and block your enemy where simply turning and running does not. It is worth noting that just because you are strafing the mob could still be “behind” you when you think that it is in front of you, in order to rectify this you should try to turn in a very large circle in the direction that your camera is facing. The direction that your camera is facing is the front side of your character and the direction opposite your camera angle is the back, so if you are moving in a circle to your backside you might as well just turn around and run away. The avoidance advantage alone makes it worth learning to strafe masterfully, but remember that strafing adds style points while you’re tanking so you look like more of a boss, and who doesn’t want to look like more of a boss?

So now you know how to move yourself but tanking isn’t something you do by yourself, if you are doing it right you always move with a partner.

Moving Your Enemy

Tanking is like a dance, and you have the man’s part. Everything that you do will cause a predictable response in the enemy you are tanking. Most of the things here will be mostly geared towards tanking bosses in raids and dungeons as it will be hard to properly execute some of these things with more than one target trying to branch out around you, but a better knowledge of movement will never be a hindrance.

Large Groups

When you are dealing with large groups of enemies you want to make sure that all of your targets are within your front 180 degrees so that you are able to be able to have your avoidance be effective. Large groups of enemies naturally try and spread out around you and get behind you, they are trying to accomplish the exact opposite of you. You need to develop a strategy to make sure that most, if not all, enemies are in front of your character.

The easiest way to counteract the problem is to back away and force them to move towards you. The farther that you move, the closer to the middle of your front cone that they get. So there you go, problem solved. But you get a problem sometimes when you can’t simply move backwards and you need to move in a more confined manner, not to mention that you may be ticking your dps and possibly your healer off. This may work sometimes but it won’t work always. You want a system that will work 95% of the time not one that works only 80%, and in a perfect world you want a system that is more predictable and causes the rest of your group to need to move as little as possible.

Many tanks get it in their mind that they are above the group, and that they are truly better. They feel that the world revolves around them and that their movements should be adapted to. The fact is that you are in a group of 5 or 10 or 25 and you are no better than any of them. It is up to you to limit your impact upon the group as much as you possibly can and then require the group to move for you. Blah, blah, blah, who cares? The less the group has to move the less chance there is of you dying because a healer lost range on you and the more damage your dps can do to your enemies. /Rant over. ( this is not to start a fight, simply to illustrate my reasoning)

So how should you move? Pick a direction, left or right, strafe that direction and then turn 90 degrees back to the direction you came from. If you move just past the enemy to that side, all the other enemies will be in front of you and the movement is very small. It also has the distinct advantage of never requiring that you move in the same direction twice, so that you can move in a very small area and continue moving forever in that space (but let’s hope you don’t need to). You may wish to make a small sidestep after you have moved through the enemies in order to make the positioning better but that will come with practice. Also, this is not so important on groups of 3-4 but when they start to get larger is when they really start to move around you.

The Hit-box

Just quickly on the hit-box because it is somewhat critical in tanking. The hit-box is the range from which you can melee attack the enemy. Some enemies have rather small hit-boxes but raid bosses tend to have rather large hit-boxes. The enemy is considered to be standing at the center of the hit-box and the edge of the hit-box is sort of like their personal space. You also have a hit-box, though it is generally much smaller and enemies really like to get into it and whack you in the face, that’s good.

Moving the Big Guys

This is where the fun stuff begins. This is where you make your mark and become that guy that always has the enemy exactly where he wants it. Others may not notice all the time but you will. If you have ever seen the enemy move with the tank instead of after the tank you will know how.

Strafing to Move Your Enemies

Did you think you were done with staffing? Nope. One final advantage to strafing, that I did not mention earlier, is that it forces the server to keep better track of your movements. Basically, when you strafe, the server registers your position more times per second than when you are simply running. This has the advantage of helping you move out of bad stuff on the ground better and is the reason that people sometimes say that the fastest way to get the game to realize that you are outside of a building is to strafe after across the threshold.

But that is not all that that means. Strafing has a unique way of interacting with enemies that are attacking you. When you are simply running forward the enemy you have following you will run towards the center of your hit-box. He will run towards you. When you are strafing however, the enemy will run to a point that is in front of you in the direction that you are traveling, not the direction you are facing, but the direction that you are traveling (thats important). Imagine that you are running and carrying a tennis ball on a short stick. You can face whichever direction that you want, but you must point the tennis ball in the direction that you are traveling. Now there is someone else trying to catch you but he isn’t running after you, he is always running straight at that tennis ball. This is what is going on when you strafe.

If you have ever seen the tank move an enemy, and they both seem to move at the same time, in the same direction and the tank didn’t really appear to have to change anything after they stop. This happened because the tank strafed and the enemy wasn’t trying to chase the tank, they were chasing that point ahead of the tank. This particular way of moving the enemy with you is actually rather difficult to do. I probably only get it to work about 15-20% of the time, but when it does work it is a really nice bonus to your movement. Usually what happens is the enemy doesn’t start moving till a split second after you so he ends up following you instead of moving with you.

Then there is a second way that you can exploit this enhanced server response to your advantage. Imagine you are still running around with that tennis ball on a stick (boy you are cool) and that guy is still following you but that you run into a fence. Yeah you aren’t the most skilled runner but you illustrate my point nicely. So you run into the fence, where is the tennis ball. In real life the tennis ball would have hit the fence and the stick would have jabbed you in the side, but this is a magic tennis ball and it just goes through the fence (I’m almost done with this, I swear). So know that guy following you is going to run up right next to that fence also, trying to get the tennis ball. You can actually do this while tanking.

So let’s say you want the enemy right up against the wall. That’s actually kind of hard to do when you are not strafing, but if you strafe it is actually rather easy. All you have to do is strafe towards the wall. Now when you get to the wall don’t stop cause then the enemy will stop, just keep running into the wall and the enemy will move right up next to the wall and you can rotate them and have them perfectly positioned. I used to do this in the twin valkyr encounter in ToC when using the door strategy. For those of you who don’t know what that means, you had to get the two bosses (yours, and the other tanks) into the doorway so that your raid didn’t get hit by exploding balls that hurt a lot. Well often I would strafe into the door and keep moving till the boss got to me, and then I would turn around and position him nicely, and then the hunter would get mad at me because the boss was too close to the door, but the other boss never was. Its minor but it helps a ton sometimes. It’s cool to note that it is actually possible to reset some encounters by moving the boss through a door using this technique but I have never done it (ciderhelm on tankspot shows how to do it with 4 horseman).

Turning Your Enemy Around

There is no collision detection in WoW when it comes to Units, which you no doubt know, which enables you to run straight through your enemies. This comes in handy when you want to turn your enemy to be facing the opposite direction very quickly. There are three common ways to do this, I prefer the second but I know a lot of people prefer the third so just get used to doing one and stick with it.

                                          

This is the most basic one. Simply run straight through your enemy and when you get to the edge of their hit-box just turn around. The problem with this is that while you are facing the other direction the boss will be guaranteed to hit you, it isn’t a very large amount of time so the probability of you dying is quite small, but there are better ways to turn the enemy that you should get used to.

The second way is to use strafing. I prefer this way because I don’t lose control over my movement ever but it is largely personal. The way to do this is to strafe just barely to the side of the middle of the hit-box on the side that allows you to keep your camera facing the boss, if you start strafing and your boss is between your character and your camera then you are on the wrong side. After you move past the midpoint on the hit-box you can turn to face the boss and just back up until you are a comfortable distance away from the boss.

The third way is like the first with a key difference. You are going to start off and just run straight at the boss, however, you want to make sure that you jump before you pass the middle of the hit-box. When you pass the middle of the hit-box you want to be in the air (thus carrying your forward momentum) and turn your character around to face the boss at his new position relative to you. When you land just back up until you are a comfortable distance away. I find that I use this way much less than the second way, but I find it useful to do this when I am less worried about positioning and more worried about getting through the boss to avoid something.

Backing Your Enemy Up

I have used this many times on the new Omnitron Defence System in BWD. When Toxitron is up he drops a cloud on the ground that increases damage taken by 50% for anything inside it. You will often find yourself tanking the boss who is just about inside the cloud but not really. You want to get the boss in the cloud because it is a nice buff for your raid damage but you don’t want to be inside it yourself. Now you could just properly turn the boss then strafe until you have the boss in the cloud and then properly move back through the boss again to get yourself out of the cloud :), But then you have been in the cloud for a good 5-10 seconds and you could possibly die from an ability from the other boss, such as a buffed arcane annihilator (this isn’t an interrupting guide), so that is not a very good option.

So just make the boss move backwards. How you ask? Well I will tell you. This is a very simple move that is extremely useful in many positioning oriented encounters. All that you want to do is move towards the boss and into the hit-box, you are going to want to do this kinda slowly until you get used to it because it is really easy to overshoot the point that you want to get to. There is a point in your movement when the center of your hit-box will get very close to the center of their hit-box and they will turn ever so slightly in one direction. STOP. That is the point you want. If you go too far past this point the boss is going to spin around and start to melee you in the back, which is bad.

This point will be the point when the middle of your hit-box is starting to get close enough to the middle of theirs that small forward movements are causing the boss to rotate. They are going to move just the slightest amount and then you need to stop. It should be about a 10 degree turn in the direction they are facing or less the better you get. Now what is gonna happen is that the boss isn’t going to like you being all up in their face and they are going to get intimidated, so they are going to back off. This may take a second but if you do it right it will happen. The boss should turn around walk about 3-7 yards away depending on how big their hit-box is and turn around to face you. Tada.

One thing to note about this move is that the boss is never going to actually turn around. It will look as though they are walking away from you and then turning back around, but as far as the game is concerned, bosses don’t have a back-up animation so the game makes them turn around. For all intents and purposes the boss is actually backing up, evident by the fact that they actually move slower than normal. This is nice on a boss with a cleave or shockwave as you can back them up a bit without needing your raid to reposition. People may freak a little when the boss turns towards the raid and then back to you but just ignore the people and know that there is almost no risk to doing this. So try it out.

Moving Into/Out of Things

This was brought up in the comments and it seems like a lot of people don’t know about it. When you are moving out of things don’t jump. Jumping has the opposite effect of strafing in that it causes the game to only register your movement once you land. So if you are standing in fire/ooze/lava/void zones and you need to get out don’t jump out of them. Perhaps you may have some experience of this with the big worm boss in Stonecore who burrows and then jumps out and one shots anyone standing above him in the dust cloud. If you jump out of the dust and don’t land before he jumps then you are going to die. So just remember that if you are trying to move out of things, even though you feel like jumping means you are technically no longer standing in lava, you are.

On the flip side of this, if you do have to move through something for some reason, such as needing to be on the other side of a line of fire. Jump before you enter the fire and you will have a little bit of carry before you land and you will take less damage or be slowed less by a frost path (sort of like jumping before entering stealth or going into the water).

Conclusion

You were probably worried that I was a moron when I started talking about moving with your keyboard at the beginning but I wanted this guide to have some useful info for every level of player ( I may have over-done it a tad). I hope that some of you read this and take one or two of the things and try them out. You will find that as you learn to move more efficiently, and as it becomes more natural, that you will be able to focus more on tanking and awareness and less on getting yourself positioned nicely because it will just happen. If any of you have any feedback just leave a comment and I will get back to you.

Lowbie Bears

Just a quick post before I go to class.

Most of you probably came here from BBB in which case you probably already know about Reesi's blog, but this is for everyone anyway.

There is a post there, at www.theincbear.com about lowbie tanking for bears that you should go check out. I still plan on doing my own when i get more time but you can go check that out if you want the info now.

Reforging

So i did actually end up going back and changing my reforging and i think overall it is better. I was originally going for hit then expertise. I am under the impression now that hit cap is still good to get to so go for that. But after you get that hit capped you should move to going for mastery. I have not fully flipped everything over yet but i am thinking that we should turn our haste into mastery after we are hit capped. And on rings and trinkets where you don't have haste, turn some of that dodge into mastery because with the DR's from dodge you are getting higher return by making it into mastery atm. Also those rings and trinkets and necks and capes with armor on them are not as good as they were before the patch so if you get an opportunity to get a jewelry or cape with high stam and agil and no armor you should grab it even though it is meant for dps players because in our present state we are balanced around agility so it is alot better right now than strength because strength doesn't do almost anything for us, if it even has a purpose. Stam still=good though.

Its a short one but i am working on my CC post and right now i am trying to get pictures of all the CC methods which is taking a little time, but the post is 3500 words and not totally finished yet so it is very thorough.

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.

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.

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.

What's up now Jey?

So i have not posted as i said i would but here is to starting. I have a lot of big ideas about blog posts to right that would be really good but in the end i find i just cant get myself to start writing them so this is all you get for now... a quick update.

As I said in my last post, i went back to Heartless Knights for the interim while i waited for my schedule to become stable (curse you part-time work) so i could commit to a raiding schedule. Well about a month and a half or two months ago my old guild leader asked me if he started another guild if i would join, it is a predominantly 10 man guild that is basically just building a player base before Cata hits. I casually said that I would once my schedule stabilized but that i couldn't commit to anything now. Well about a 3 weeks ago i got a job full-time for the summer and let him know w/o really thinking too much about it because i thought he was gonna wait longer anyway. One week later I log in to a GMotD saying that my old guild leader had created this guild and that they want the small split off to be as painless as possible. I'm really good friends with the guys in Heartless Knights and left some of my alts in the guild but decided to duck out with my druid to join Berserk.

Well if your good at math you will have realized that we have been formed for 2 weeks now. In the first week we cleared up to sindra with 4/12 heroic done and knocked out a Halion kill which I had not done yet. This week however we stomped through the instance going 7/12 heroic and killing Lich king (getting me and 8 others their kingslayer). Now I know this can't last forever and I know we have a massive buff but I'm pretty pumped that in 2 weeks we killed LK. If this keeps up we will be in good shape for Cata when 10's and 25's will be the same.

A Bit About Me

So i had this up before but i have recently decided to try and put more effort into trying to get the ball rolling so i deleted my old posts and im starting fresh. My name is Jey and the following is about me so far.

I started playing WoW slightly before the Release of the Burning Crusades as an undead warlock which I only leveled up to level 20 or so. I then decided to go for a different mana using class and opted for a Human Mage which got me up to level 46 and into a good guild. I played as a mage through those 46 levels but found that staring at a screen that was constantly turning grey (yay squishie class) was not something that I overly enjoyed. I then decided to go back to playing a warlock but decided that I wanted to stay with my guild and ended up rolling a gnome warlock on the same server. The Burning Crusades was released as I was leveling my warlock and so I had the drive to get to 70 so that I could start doing some instances. I did end up reaching max level on this character and was starting to get into instance runs when some of my friends wanted to all make characters on the same server.

I decided that it would be fun to play a druid because another guy I knew had one and he made it sound like a lot of fun. However I ended up playing three different druids on three different servers before deciding that I wasnt gonna have anymore level 30 druids and decided to stay on Darkspear US server where I currently play.

It was on this server where I made my Druid Jey and decided that I was going to tank even if I had grind out a long time for gear. One of the guys I had transfered with told me that I was doomed to offtank but I politely told him to shut up and proceeded merily on my way leveling up my feral druid. I leveled up my Druid to 70 and then proceeded the long grind for clefthoof leather only to find myself constantly below defence cap and as such stuck to regular instances and not heroics.

Then WotLK dropped and I took off. I was the 8th person in my guild to hit 80 and within 4 days we were running 10 naxx and I was MT'ing due to all the awesome changes made to feral druids and mostly their tanking ( because Kitty dps was lol l2tank in my opinion). After the first night I decided that I needed better gear so grinded out for my crafted gear and we went back and things started dropping. We then proceeded with Naxx 25 and then into ulduar 10 and ulduar 10 hardmodes. We tried running 25 man ulduar but it was very hit and miss due to attendance and then when 3.2 hit and ToC came out we started loosing people including one of our tanks and it was at that point that I decided to duck out and ended up joining Dauntlëss so that I could do ToC 25. We pushed through ToC and were 4/5 in ToGC when icecrown dropped and got to 10/12 in ICC 25.

Quite Recently Dauntlëss broke up when our GM went away (it was a legit reason, none of that im taking a break crap). And so i moved back to heartless knights for the interm while i sort out some things in my real life. My plan is to hop into more aggressive raiding in cata but for the time being im content with an occasional raid with my old guildies.

And thats it about me and everything up right now. One thing I would like to note is that I am not a hardcore theorycrafter and anything I do will pretty much be napkin math and speculation however my speculations have been pretty much bang on since Wrath dropped so you can listen to me if you want. One last thing to note is that if you see an error on any of my posts just let me know so that i can change it, dont be a loser and start flamming cause i messed up a bit, we are all in this together.