Patch 4.1

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

For druids:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nefarian Strategy Guide

I have posted my video, it was actually a few days ago and so i decided to stop putting it off.

the video can be seen HERE.

I was going to embed it but the way the blog is formatted cuts some of the video off

lastly, I was experimenting with masking and some other stuff and some of it has errors that I am aware of, I know how to fix it now, and will for future, but I'm not changing it on this one.

Let me know what you think, i will get responses here faster but feel free to leave feedback on the video too. I am looking to improve them so i wont take offence to criticism but try and be constructive.

video update

just a quick update on the video

i have all the audio ready to go, the background music is looped properly and the voiceovers are done now.

i just have to do the editing to make the highlights and things match up with the audio

on a side note the voiceovers took a lot longer to do ( like actually do not just get time to do) and so i ran into exams and had to take a break.

i hope to have it done *crosses fingers* by the end of the weekend

Edit: given that nothing has gone wrong with my second attempt at rendering, the video is now done. I will hopefully be able to upload it tonight and will post it on the front page tomorrow afternoon as i have an exam in the morning. If you want to check it out before i get around to posting it on the blog my youtube account is JeyHK.

Empty Promises and Bad Excuses

So i realize that this will be the third time that i have said this but i plan on working on a video tonight. I have made three really bad excuses for not doing it and i feel as though its time to just man up and do it.

I originally told myself that i did not have the time to do them and that is def not true, i just have to make the time to do them.

I then said that i didn't have anything recorded that would be a good fight to explain but i def did.

And finally i thought that i would wait until i got new fights recorded since i had just redone my UI.

Well i now have have H chimeron, H Halfus, and Nefarian recorded with my new UI and they are pretty interesting fights to explain so i throw it out to anyone still reading this.

My guild has been ultimately useless in helping me decide which fight to do a video for and so the first comment (if there is one) that has a fight name in it (options are the three above) before i sit down later to start is the fight that i will do, no need to justify it, can be completely selfish and self serving reasons i dont care. If there is no comment i will decide for myself and once i start making the video i will not switch so comment quickly.

I will also keep you posted on any additional fights that i have recorded as I finish each video so that you can weigh in again if you like.

20k Gold

No, I don't have 20k gold. I don't have the time to play the auction house. But...

Our core raiders just finished up running a guy through ICC to get his 10 man drake. He paid us 20k to get it and it took 2 weeks to get everything but Orb Whisperer. We finished up and got Orb Whisperer yesterday and pulled in the full amount from him. I think I made a little over 2k gold from the whole thing and overall i would say it was worth it. It did not really feel like we were carrying him, just that he was tagging along to get the achievements.

It wasn't too bad but i dont really want to do any of the achievements anymore. Except maybe the Lich king one for one of our recruits who says he will give us 20k for that one ahieve. We are planning on just extending the lockout and working on H Lich King until Cata.

I remember when people were paying good one to just kill the Lich King on regular and now you have to get people the whole drake, what is the world coming to?

Hardest Boss in the Game

So we have been trying to down H LK and get our "Bane of the Fallen King" titles because they are super cool but we have been having some trouble with the hardest boss in the game, which is probably not the one you are thinking of. I actually dont know how hard H LK is because we have been losing to the attendance boss for 2 weeks now. It seems like after we got our drakes, that the people who weren't part of our original group of about 6 or 7 have just stopped showing up. This sucks. Luckily we are still able to do most of the heroics with pugs and are currently trying to get someone who is interested his drake for 20k gold which we will partially split among the regulars so I guess that is alright.

Also I am almost done with my CC basics post but i have to put it together and i have been really busy and been having internet issues so I'll try to get that out soon as i think it could become a valuable resource.

On the Wings of Death

A busy schedule has been kind of reducing my output a little but I am going to try and get this off in between two of my classes.

First off anyone at Blizzcon I hope that you are having fun and I totally wish I was there. A student’s budget does not make for a very whimsical traveler.

So after a little hard work I would just like to report that Jey, Guardian of Cenarius is now the proud owner of a Bloodbathed Frostbrood Vanquisher. I can’t post pictures right now because I don’t have any access to wow but I will try and get some up within a few days. Overall I found that the ICC Meta achievement was pretty fun to work towards. Some of the achieves became a lot easier after the patch so I would say to anyone that is looking to get their drake to go for it and not wait till Cata.

Generally we have been doing pretty well but we did have about a month where we were losing to the pre-expansion attendance boss so I would say that about 4 months worth of time to get us our drake doing at most 9 hours a week, usually about 6, was pretty credible. We have finally, within the last 3 or so weeks, gotten 10 people who are reliable and good players *crosses fingers* and if they all stay for Cata I think we should be a force to be reckoned with when 10 and 25 are on par for difficulty.

As for our plans for the rest of the expansion...well if you know what is involved in the Meta achievement then you know what the only thing left is. That’s right, it is time to smash our face against the wall that is Heroic Lich King and hopefully get our “Bane of the Fallen King” titles. And if we do get them, you can bet that I will make a post about it.

One last thing. I am planning on doing a post about crowd control that should pretty long like my basics posts but I have yet to start on it, as well as, if I am quick about it, a general walkthrough of the Meta for 10 man. So stay tuned for those (if there is anyone tuned in anyway).

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.

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.

Tanking Basics

Alright, well this was my first idea for a nice long post to get me into this blogging thing. I am going to do a general tanking guide for beginners. My hope for this guide is for it to be general enough as to not become outdated by Cata releasing but specific enough that it isn’t just mindless reading material; you will have to let me know if I hit that mark. Alright here we go…

I am going to split this into sections that I feel make sense and then elaborate on them. I will try and order them from what I believe is the most basic to the most complicated, or in other words most to least important. I hope that every tank does everything in the post to some degree but the later things will be not as important to do your job.

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 leveling 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 and instance I know my stat weights good enough that almost ever 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 other tanking classes. You need to know them a step better. They are there with you doing your same job and you aught to show them a little more respect. For the other three tank classes you want a general knowledge of how they tank and pull as well as the usual patterns that they follow. Its probably a good idea to know what their defensive cooldowns are (except pallys cause they all sound the same :P).

5) Relax
So often you hear new tanks or perspective tanks worried about dealing with pugs and how they will react to them. In the end it really doesn’t matter what they think. No one is expecting you be the best in the world even though some people might seem like they do. All anyone in those groups wants is for you to be competent and you cant do that if your all nervous and freaking out and tense. Talk with guildies over vent, eat while you raid (healthy food though :P), or my personal favourite is to make funny noises IRL when no one is around. However bad you feel the run is going, or you are doing, just take a step back and relax.

6) Practice
The only way you are going to get better is to practice. If you need to learn your rotation, your abilities better, how to pick things up better or anything else, you need to practice. You can’t learn to tank by going out and doing dailies, you learn to tank by tanking. If you are so worried that you are going to be a bad tank and that people are going to make fun of you that you never queue in the dungeon finder, im sorry to say it but you are going to be a bad tank. You have to queue to get experience tanking; you don’t need experience tanking to queue as a tank. Just let your group know you’re new and get on your way. If they kick you shake it off and queue again. You wait 3 seconds for a group they wait 5 min for a tank. If you really do not want to do a random dungeon group, go with friends. They will know what’s going on and even though they might poke fun at you while you are learning they probably wont be hostile. That being said there are two really good ways to learn to tank that I have found, the calm gentle way and the one that forces you to get better. The calm way first, queue for a group in a dungeon that is under your level by say 2 or 3. This way you probably will not have to worry about dying or wiping but a really good player might give you some threat issues to deal with and it will help you learn to pick up mobs. This way is really good for learning how to pull and position and lets you get a rhythm for your tanking. The second way is to go into a dungeon of your level where everyone else in the dungeon over gears you. This forces you to improve you reflexes, gives you better vision for mobs that are running and given enough time will help you relax. This method is stressful at first but I find it a lot more fun once you get a hang of it.

7) Bind Taunt
In a perfect world you could stick taunt off on some obscure action bar where you would casually mouse over to it and gently click it in order to properly tank switch on a fight that requires a tank switch. This is not a perfect world. You bind taunt in the most natural, most easy to hit place that you can hit in the least amount of time possible, because in this non perfect world you are going to use taunt, and you are going to use it a lot. I don’t care if you are a clicker and you key bind nothing, if you are only binding one thing to one button on your keyboard or mouse it better be taunt.

8) Always Be Prepared
To a lot of people this most likely seems like second nature; they go to a raid with flasks and a well fed and they are ready to go. But are you really prepared with just a flask and a well fed? As a dps player all you have to know for the fight is there anything you shouldn’t stand in or that you have to move for and are there target switches. Tanks need to know everything. Being prepared to go to a raid isn’t just limited to having a flask and a well fed, you need to understand the fight and almost all the spells and abilities and adds that come during the fight. Any little ability in the fight has the potential to change what you are doing drastically as a tank. When you go into a fight you need to have a solid knowledge of what is going to happen to everyone. Now ill lay off the preachy part for a second. Being prepared does not mean that you have read all the abilities and memorized them, while also having watched three different strat videos showing you every thing that you should look for in the encounter. For each individual person this will be different. 95% of the time your raid leader will give a rundown of the fight and positioning that they want…take that into account. You will most likely have a wipe or two while everyone is learning the fight…take that into account. When I was doing naxx I watched every strat video that tankspot put out, I was new to raid tanking and wanted to be absolutely prepared. Now I often just read the boss abilities and listen the raid leaders description and then jump into the fight. Your goal for the boss should be that after a wipe you understand the majority of the mechanics and then after that you simply work to improve your reactions to them. One more thing…don’t take heroics lightly, it used to actually require a little knowledge to kill those bosses when they were fresh and I don’t know how many times I’ve seen a tank just eat Ingvar’s smash in UK when it is really easy to avoid and can almost one shot you at appropriate gear levels, Just saying.

9) Know What Is and Is Not Your Fault
Too many times I have seen tanks take blame for things that are not their fault and are totally out of their control. Even worse though is when tanks do not take the blame for things that absolutely are their fault, and this happens even more. When you understand a fight this will be much more clear to you and having this simple knowledge will help you to relax. Do not use this as a means to attack people who mess up but instead just know for yourself so you can tune them out or accept it and move on. As a start follow this simple (and entirely incomplete) tanking mantra:
If the tank dies it’s the healers fault,
If the healer dies it’s the tanks fault,
If the dps die it’s their own friggin fault.
While not always true it’s a good point to start from.

10) Find Your Own Rhythm
As you become more comfortable with tanking this will naturally happen but it is a good thing to note. Some tanks are extremely spastic and move all over the place when they don’t need to. In guild chat I once referred to tanking as a dance where you are leading and the mobs are dancers that are following. That was a brilliant metaphor imo. It’s exactly how tanking should be. There should be a way you move that is always the same and appears to be graceful. There will be times when you will fall out of step and lose that, but always return to that natural tanking rhythm you set for yourself. Now I may be overdoing this now but so ill stop but having that rhythm helps everyone. Healers will know how to expect you to move, tanking will become so much more natural for you and dps will thank you because they know how the mobs are going to move all the time. This rhythm is going to be slightly different for most people but it helps immensely. The people it helps the most of anyone in the raid however are your other tanks. After tanking with someone for a while you pick up their rhythm and you learn to adapt to it and you work so much better together than if the other person was erratic. It goes along with practice but its something to keep in mind while you are learning.

11) Get a Threat Meter
This is one of the most important things that you can have as a tank as far as addons go. I will not tell you what to use or how to use it but get one. Currently I use Omen3 for single targets and the underrated and imo extremely powerful built in blizzard threat meter for all my off targets. I know that there are probably better ways to show this. Grid I believe can be set up to do this, John “Big Bear Butt” Patricelli over at thebigbearbutt.com likes to use the threat plates skin for tidyplates (which I am slowely becoming a fan of) and I am sure there are more I am missing. “Sorry I didn’t know I didn’t have agro” is not an excuse, its just because you were being to lazy. Not being able to react in time is fine but simply not knowing an add is running around is not acceptable.

12) Never Tunnel
DPS are known to do what is called tunneling. Tunneling is when you focus only on your dps and your rotation and don’t notice what is going on around you. When a dps tunnels they die, when a tank or a healer tunnels other people die. You chose to be a tank and so you chose what goes along with being a tank. The simple greatest skill you need is awareness. A whole lot of awareness can make up for a lot of crappy play. Some things that you need to keep track of are not easy such as specific debuffs on specific players that affect you as a tank. I can’t really give you many pointers as to how to get this skill but move your camera…a lot.

13) Install a Boss Mod
More experienced tanks will wean themselves off of relying on boss mods but when you are learning they are extremely helpful for knowing what is going to happen and when. As you get better you will find that you look at it less and less. You may find it kind of annoying but most of these addons are very small on your UI and you get used to them being there. If you feel that you are beyond using boss mods I am not going to say you are an idiot for having them but even though I rarely look at mine, I would far rather have it and not need it, than need it and not have it. The three I know of are Deadly Boss Mod, DXE, and BigWigs.

14) Don’t Seek Acceptance, Expect Rejection
When you are tanking you will rarely, if ever, get any sort of gratifying compliment outside of your guild members, and even within your guild it is not a given. A good tank is not often recognized until they screw up, once. You wont often hear that you did a good job for picking up that group that just came without casualties, but you will know in about 3 seconds if there is a level 1 spider attacking the healer. You are the unsung hero of the instance or raid group and you better get used to it. If a group thinks you are a good tank they will invite you back or take you off of guild trial status. If a group thinks you are a bad tank…you will know.

15) Make Your Healers Life Easy
Of all the bars of all the people in your dungeon group you watch your healers bars the closest. If there health is low see if something is attacking it, If there mana is low toss them an innervate or stop so they can drink. In raids this becomes a little different, there is too much going on during some fights to be constantly watching your healers bars but If a healer tells you that you are out of range or turned in a bad direction you better be moving, don’t be dumb but always make sure that you are trying your best to make their life easier. And remember that being a healer is like being a tank in that often there is little said when you are doing good, so if a healer is doing good just let them know, takes 5 seconds and it lets them know they are on the right track.

16) Learn How Strafe Works
I will briefly explain this and you can do some looking of your own. Strafing is moving side ways instead of turning around for lack of a better definition. You can strafe one of two ways: The first is the strafe keys, which are Q and E if you have not rebound them. The second is to hold down your right mouse button and hit A or D or the turn left/right buttons. In essence you are just turning around and running however when you strafe the game responds entirely different to the actions you make. When you strafe you move at full movement speed as opposed to backing up which severely cuts your move speed. A second advantage is that you can see more of what is going on easier than if you turn around and run. Probably the greatest advantage to strafing however is that you are considered to be facing the target and because of that you are able to dodge, block and parry as usual instead of just getting wailed on without having any avoidance like what happens when you are fully turned around. Another thing that happens is that strafing forces the server to track your position more often and what ends up happening is that any mob that is following you runs to a point in front of you in the direction you are running instead of directly at you. Imagine running with a long stick in your hand and pointing it in the direction you are facing and having someone chase you but instead of running at you they run at the end of the stick when trying to catch you. While not entirely useful knowledge all the time there are certain times when it helps to position an add. A better look at this can be seen in this tankspot video around the 7 min mark however for a new tank this is a very informative video to watch.

That’s about all I can think of for the moment but after 3300 words I think it is good for the moment. If I randomly think of anymore I will add them in before this little blurb. If you leave a comment with another idea and I like it I will write on it and/or copy it and add it in with your name beside it so that everyone knows. I would like to also follow this with some things that I feel are more of tanking conveniences but I think ill just wait and see If I can think of enough to just make a new post.

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.