Spanking Heroic MgT and Target Dummies

So I came home from a miserable medsci examination experience and decided that I really needed some WoW time. Once the computer was vacated I jumped on and gamed for a few hours, contrary to all the promises I’d made to myself about taking a break until the end of exams. One reason for this is that I really wanted to test out some new stuff, Darksentinel has been only a Beast Master since the patch (51/10/0 and 50/11/0) and Beathooven has mostly been resto in order to heal random stuff (with a quick stint as Balance to test the new Spell Power changes. I wanted to test out Marksman and Survival, retry Balance and go Feral for the first time since hitting 70. So, prepared to spend a couple hundred gold, I headed to the training dummies. Well, actually first I did a couple of quick BGs, 1 AB and an AV, and concluded that one BM hunter can beat one arcane mage, and can almost beat 2 arcane mages. And ret still does way too much damage. But BM doesn't quite seem to be able to blow stuff up as it seemed to a few days after the patch when I did some druid/hunter arena and gibbed stuff.

First I tested Darksentinel, as the basic BM build he had (50/11/0), with just my current level 68 (69 now) Gorilla pet. Obviously this pet isn’t ideal for dps but then it turned out that a lot of the time he refused to hit the [training] dummy anyway. Oh yeah, here’s a comic about target dummies.

With a pet that refused to hit stuff, BM pulled in at around 700 dps (hunter only), which is pretty pathetic, really (using no cooldowns and only using a simple Steady Shot spam-based rotation).

MM topped out at 850 or so pet-less DPS, opening with Serpent Sting (omg), use Chimera Shot (why is the shot called 'chimera' but the beast is 'chimaera'?) whenever it's up, then spam Steady Shot and if Improved Steady Shot procs, use Arcane Shot (unless Chimera is about to come off cooldown). So probably on par with BM, or slightly ahead, depending on what pet is being used. I think MM scales better with crit than BM, thanks to Marked for Death (and I have a lot of crit, thanks to PvP gear).

SV has a whole bunch of nifty talents such as Lock and Load and some massive boosts to crit chance, but seems lacking in straight-up single-target dps (seriously, Point of No Escape and Sniper Training, how does that work?). It's pet-less dps was around 700, so presumably lower than BM (since the pet will deal less damage). But the mana regen is really sweet, especially when you get Thrill of the Hunt returns from free Lock and Load procs.

I will try to do more testing later (try a different pet, see if it will attack the dummy), although with Wrath only a week away it's not really worth it.

Basically the hunter is a bit meh now (except for Gorilladin grinding), too much PvP gear (10.5k hp, 27% crit, but only 1600 unbuffed AP), or I just really suck at playing the class.

So then it was Beathooven’s turn. First, I tried Balance. Hmmm. So many talents, and then there’s stuff in resto as well. Now how do I effectively rotate Wrath, Starfire, Insect Swarm and Moonfire, all the while taking into account Eclipse procs (which will also be Nature’s Grace procs)? I muddled around a bit, and seemed to do ok and ended up with a dps of 1000-1200, which is basically on par with my hunter (slightly higher, even, pet or no pet), who should be a lot better geared and is also the highest PvE dps class in the game. Hmmm. But after dragging the Moonkin into AV I decided that while it’s a powerful spec, I wanted to try Feral, cos it’s been a few months since I’ve been a proper cat or bear spec. New emphasis on the or, since some talents are pretty much good for only one form, cat or bear. I ended up with a 0/54/7 spec or something similar, focusing heavily on the tanking talents.

After that I spent a good 30 minutes sorting out gear for cat and bear, since I’d picked up a lot of off-spec pieces while resto. I ended up having 14k hp, 33% dodge and 14k armour. Now when I’d last been a bear I had 13.5k hp, 22% dodge and 22k armour, and my items were quite a bit worse. Numerically I actually seemed worse off, but with Protector of the Pack and a full group, my mitigation and avoidance were quite a bit higher (although it’s really annoying, now that stuff is 3 man-able, that you need a full group to have optimal Bear form mitigation).

So, I was a tank. Now to find something to tank. I joined a pug for Gruul with Arianwyn, but it quickly became obvious that this was going to end badly (by the time we had 20 people we only had two healers, one of whom was a Shadow priest, and while I don’t know exactly what tanks are needed for HKM, I’m pretty sure we didn’t have all of them either). Instead I convinced four guildies to run Heroic Magister’s Terrace, something I’ve never done before.

We ended up as retadin, feral tank, rogue, enhance and resto druid. And it turns out that I’m still a pretty terrible tank, especially where casters are involved. In my defense I’ve only tanked a handful of times, and the most recent of those was Durnholde Keep as a 66 bear back in August. Also, Growl was only working around half the time (although 20 yards IS nice). We wiped once on a trash pull where I pulled a pat slightly early so his friends came along, otherwise the massive amounts of dps carried us through (hence the title: more spank than tank), although I did pull off a cool battle res during the gravity distortion phase on Kael. All up it was a lot easier than the runs I’d done on my hunter in normal difficulty, back in the days of 2.3 and 2.4. Oh and just to show that the loot gods don’t reward excellent performances (but rather have their own sense of humour, see: Sonic Spear), the Priestess dropped Commendation of Kael’Thas, and since we didn’t have a mage I got it (anyone else see the article where a mage outrolled a tank on this, shortly after 2.4 came out?).

After the run (which took just over an hour) Darksentinel, still Survival spec, headed out to go see what all the fuss with the scourge is about, and collected some Necrotic Runes for the Paladin-on-a-Stick. No mail dropped, but with S2 shoulders and legs, S3 chestpiece and S4 gloves, it didn’t really matter (plus the non-S4 PvP gear looks a lot better). And that was it for last night (i.e. this morning).

A lot of today was spent killing scourge on Beathooven, healing a retadin tank (including a 4-shadow pull), and then getting down on all fours and doing it bear style. After clearing two spawn areas I ended up with a full 4-piece set of leather, and a full 4-piece set of cloth, plus the trinkets, the Burning Steppes flight path (first time I’ve ever been in that region on any character), and a few bits of Thorium. The leather was really nice and the new druid has 15.3k hp, 16k armour and 32% dodge. A bit of target dummy testing put cat dps at ~500, which is a bit low, but there's a few more buttons to press now that Rake and Tiger's Fury are actually useful, so I'm probably not using an optimal rotation.

The rest of today’s wow-time was spent getting my paladin to 52, tanking the last boss of OHB for a guildie and doing Gorilladin-stylez as Survival. Oh and drooling over BRK’s mammoth movie.

So in conclusion, I think Darksentinel will level as a Beast Master, and Beathooven as a Moonkin. And it's really nice that a lot of abilities that were previously pretty useless are now very useful, even if it does add complexity to my already over-taxed brain (this happens easily). Now I just wish someone would explain Gore to me (WHY? It does less damage than Bite).

Servers have just gone down, so enjoy doing whatever it is that you do during this period (sleeping, probably, you need at least 8 hours a week to survive ;) ).

All Quiet on the Madness Front

Yeah, I've been a bit slack on the posting front. I've had a couple of tests and essays to do, which have kept me kind of busy.
I have now finished my lectures at undergraduate level (I hope!), and am currently in the very narrow breathing space between the end of lectures, and the start of exams (I believe this space is meant to be devoted to what some call "study"). Having had a less-than-stellar academic record since taking up my alternative life in Azeroth, I do feel that I should focus a bit now, so over the next three weeks WoW will be droppng a bit on the priority list.

That being said, let's take a look at what I've done since 3.0.2, and include a few thoughts:

- hunters are a lot of fun, as BBB will tell you (seems to have been converted to eing a druid/hunter, which led to an interesting incident with BRK). New pets are totally, udderly awesome. Gorilla aoe grinding (using Thunderstomp and Volley, aka Gorilladin grinding) is bucketloads of fun (and a good source of leather) and should be better now that Smack and Cower no longer turn themselves on. I've created the following macros to aid my mass-slaughter of wildlife in Black Morass and Nagrand:
Macro 1: Turns Thunderstomp off autocast and allows you to gather mobs, target each mob and press it to make Gorilladin tag it
/petautocastoff Thunderstomp
/petattack

Macro 2: Use this once you're ready to start blowing stuff up, may need to press it twice to get Mend Pet to work
/cast [combat] Kill Command
/cast [combat] Bestial Wrath
/cast [combat] Thunderstomp
/petautocaston [combat] Thunderstomp
/cast Mend Pet

Then just Volley everything to death.

- is it just me or do Boars kind of suck now? For a special skill, Gore doesn't seem that awesome, especially compared to the focus-dump Bite which all pets get anyway (or an equivalent thereof)

- arena as BM is very cool. I ditched my Core Hound for a level 67 spider (shock! horror! although there are far too many Core Hounds running around at the moment anyway; no love for Spore Bats? And why no Worms, they're exotic too). A 4 second web on a 28 second cooldown is very nice for keeping people in the right place for Bestial Wrath to rip them up. Teaming up with my old partner Meellow facilitated the gibbing (with extreme prejudice) of various enhancement shamans and the like, and with the new addition Octavio (Stupidcow's retadin) I had the entertaining experience of blowing up a warrior who had ventured up one ramp on our side of Blade's Edge arena before his druid partner got a good view of what was happening. No more lengthy irritating drain games for me!
I will say though, that the white Core Hound is still the coolest looking pet in the game, imo.

- although title-ratings were locked prior to the release of 3.0.2, it was stated by Blizzard that we could continue to acrue arena points right up until the release of Wrath of the Lich King in November. Yet I have received no points for activity this week; possibly they were lost in the various server FAIL! of the last week

- "The Hallowed" is an awesome title, and my druid has avidly been trick or treating all over the world in order to obtain it, but neither the Squashling nor the Helm have made their way into his hands. I do hope he can get them, since "Beathooven Jenkins" is just not the same

- on that note, I'm pretty indifferent to the new Achievement system, since I've done stuff like Trophies and similar in a number of MMO games. The titles are pretty nifty though, although I think the Loremaster will take too much work to be worth it (e.g. another 300 Eastern Kingdoms quests on my hunter), although I may try for it at 80. At the moment the Achievements just seem like a way to keep people spending more time on WoW. But that's what we do, right?

- I'm currently leveling my mage and paladin, both are now at 46 (edit: paladin now 47). Flamedancer has swapped elements from Fire to Frost, and is enjoying her frequent 950 damage Frostbolt crits (although her crit rate against Frozen targets is a lot less than what Shatter should be producing). Ephylia has decided that the incredibly powerful Judgements of the Wise, together with the rather awesomely-named The Art of War make Retribution a much better specialisation than her previous Protection training, and with the buffed Consecration (and ridiculous mana efficiency) she can still down 3-5 opponents insanely quickly

PS: kinda only just sunk in that I'm done with lectures for my degree O.o
PPS: Purple Death is one of the oddest drinks I know of. A fortified wine, it is brewed exclusively in West Auckland and tastes a lot like grape-flavoured bubble gum disolved in cough syrup. Thankfully the bottle, which we've had for about a year now, is finally empty.

Ode to Lifebloom

Well, as mentioned all over the place, it's not long until 3.0.2 hits us (all 1.17GB of it).
I’d like to remember the 2.x.x patches with a dedication to one of my favourite spells of The Burning Crusade. It’s slightly shorter than originally intended, but I found I was repeating myself after a while. For reference, the old LB, and the new one.

Lifebloom,
You’re awesome

When I get feared
And the tank’s about to die
Your bloom’s right there
Keeping them alive

Outheal a mage’s burst
And a warlock’s DoTs
Hunters do your worst
Cos I’ve got HoTs

Lifebloom,
You’re awesome

You make me a four-tank healing tree
And OP me in PvP
Seven seconds of health regen
Then a bloom so we’re good to go again

Keep my team alive
While I pillar kite
Heal them while I drink
Out of line-of-sight

Lifebloom,
You’re awesome

My life comes back
With every tick
Dispel my buffs
At your own risk

Totally OOM but I can heal
With the epitome of efficiency
220 mana, is that for real?
Keep healing for all eternity

Lifebloom,
You’re awesome


There, wasn't that cheesy.
Now back to this essay...

[Druid] New Druid on the Block: Gearing a Bear Tank Part 1

[Druid] New Druid on the Block: Gearing a Bear Tank Part 1
Overview of Bear Tanking in Regards to Itemisation

EDIT: Due to the proximity of the WotLK release date, I'm not sure whether to actually write part 2, since it seems kind of redundant. LET ME KNOW (by posting a comment) if you want to see Part 2 (items to get in order to become an effective Feral tank, and start tanking the harder 5 mans, and possibly Heroics/Kara). I'm more than happy to write this if there's any interest in it.

Note: this post was turning into a monster, so I decided to break it into pieces. While overall it's meant to be on gearing a tank, and items to pick up at 70 (or before), this installment will cover the stuff to look for on items.

Background:
So, my druid turned 70 on Tuesday afternoon, at about 15:15.
I really want to heal in 2v2 and 3v3 arena, but figure I should also gear a tank, especially since I spend a lot of time in Feral spec.

So I thought I'd quickly document what I'm doing to gear my druid up. I was wrong. This is gonna take a while, lol.

(NB: where ratings, e.g. defense rating, are mentioned here, they will be treated as for a level 70, since the effect of ratings decreases with level).

WARNING: contains numbers, I'll italicise some of the theory (viz., numbers) to make it easier to read.
Intro:
For bear tanks there are a few things you really want from items, basically as much armor, agility and stamina as possible, since bears scale incredibly well with these stats (especially items like Thoriumweave Cloak, since you get a massive armor multiplier in Dire Bear Form).
Tanks need to reduce the damage they take by as much as possible, and make life as easy as possible for healers (healers oom = dead tank). For bear tanking you want a lot of health, a lot of dodge (since this is the only avoidance available to bears) and a LOT of armor (the only mitigation available to bears). Most importantly, however, you want to be uncrittable.

Mitigation vs. Avoidance:
To avoid confusion here, I'm going to use 'mitigation' to mean reducing damage taken, and 'avoidance' to avoid taking damage. E.g. armor is mitigation since it reduces the physical damage you take from attacks by a %, and dodge is avoidance, since when you dodge an attack you take no damage at all. M'kay?

Uncrittable:
(NB: most of the information covered below can be found in WoWWiki.)
A raid boss is treated like a level 73 mob, and will have a crit chance of 5.6% against you, while a heroic boss at level 72 will have a 5.4% crit chance against you. If you can be crit (for double damage), you run the risk of being crit-spiked to death before the healers can react. This is not a good thing.
If you're a Bear tank you MUST have 3/3 Survival of the Fittest, in which you only need 2.6% crit-chance reduction to be uncrittable in raids. Crit-chance reduction is obtained through Defense Rating, and Resilience Rating.
60 points of Defense Rating (and there is a difference between Defense rating, and straight up defense, in that Defense rating converts to defense skill at a decreasing ratio as you level) or 39.4 Resilience Rating to be uncrittable in any and all Raids. You'll need a total of 415 defense skill to achieve the 2.6% (this includes the 350 base defense at level 70), or 156 Defense Rating. Alternatively, you can use 103 Resilience Rating to achieve the same effect.
In essence you want to make sure that (Defense Rating/60) + (Resilience Rating/39.4) >= 2.6. In this case you'll be uncrittable, and this should be the number one priority of all raid tanks (Paladins and Warriors will achieve uncritability in other ways).

Resilience versus Defense:
Resilience, at 39.4 points needed to reduce chance of being crit by 1%, is obviously more efficient than Defense, at 60 points needed to achieve the same effect. However, Defense also increases the chance that you will be missed by an attack and that you will dodge an attack by 1% per 60 rating, thus giving you some avoidance as well (although resilience will give you reduced damage taken from DoTs, a minor effect). NB: Defense skill will also increases your chance to Block or Parry attacks, further increasing mitigation gained from +Defense, but Dire Bear druids don't use shields, and can't parry with their big clumsy paws, so Bears gain a lot less benefit from +Defense than Warriors or Paladins (making Resilience a more viable option for Bears than the plate-wearers).

Thus although Defense Rating is less efficient than Resilience at making us crit immune, it's secondary benefits make it worth more point-for-point if we can get enough to reach the 2.6% mark - despite the fact we don't obtain maximum benefit from Defense.

In conclusion, if you have the options to become crit immune through using defense, go for it. If you're just under the 2.6% uncrittable mark, however, and you need to really squeeze maximum efficiency out of gem slots/enchants, then go for resilience. And be prepared to resocket fairly often as your gear gets upgraded (although feral tanking items from raids are few in number).

Also, don't throw away stuff that has high defense or resilience after you get an upgrade, you never know when those 5 points of defense you can't seem to fit in anywhere can be obtained through a minor downgrade.

Dodge and Agility:
Bears are special. Everyone knows it, even if they won't admit it. In terms of Dodge, Bear Druids (and Kitties) get 1% chance to Dodge for each 14.7 points of Agility which is a better ratio than every other class (Rogues are next at 20 Agi:1% Dodge, Warriors worst at 30:1%, and everyone else is at 25:1%). And then there's Dodge Rating, where Druids, like everyone else, get 1% Dodge for around 19 Dodge Rating. Phoaw. So basically, Agility is more efficient for avoidance than Dodge Rating? And it gives a decent increase to Crit chance (improving both rage generation and threat), plus some small amount of armor? Talk about maximising returns, that's pretty awesome. In essence, Agility >> Dodge Rating if we are forced to make a choice. Which doesn't mean Dodge Rating isn't nice, more mitigation is always welcome, but Agility is just bucketloads better. And it goes well with Blessing of Kings, and leather items with Agility are pretty common (apparently Rogues use Agility for something as well, or so I've heard). Agility is awesome. Remember this.

Stamina:
So as we've seen, Agility is pretty damn awesome for Druid tanks. But we also need a bit of health to survive the hard hits, the crushing blows, and those nasty spellcasters that Blizzard does not give us any mitigation against. None at all. While Warriors get Defensive Stance and more (and even more), and Paladins get a few nifty tricks (such as Spell Warding, and Ardent Defender), Druid tanks must rely on large health pools and hope the healers are both well geared and can maximise their mana efficiency.
So, "large health pools", but how large is large? Quite large, actually. A properly spec'd Feral Druid can make each point of Stamina go a long way, and a properly geared Feral Druid will have a lot of Stamina.
Let's have a look at all the bonuses I can currently think of/remember (bearing in mind that by default, each point of Stamina provides 10 Health).
Dire Bear form - the biggy, and the reason we're writing this. A solid 25%. That's a lot.
Heart of the Wild - another 20% from talents if you put 5/5 points into it, why you would do anything else as a Feral druid is beyond me. This is a key talent.
Survival of the Fittest - remember the discussion on becoming uncrittable above? This talent is the reason we only need to reach 2.6% (rather than the normal 5.6%), which frees up a lot of very difficult itemisation (i.e. having to wear mostly PvP gear for the resilience), and also gives us 3% increased stats.
Tauren racial - gives us another 5%. Since we can't all be cows (it'd be Udder Madness), we'll point out that "those other guys" get 1% dodge.
All in all not bad, giving us a total of around 15 Health (14 if you're purple) for each point of Stamina we have (this is a lot). So Stamina is another stat Bears should stack wherever possible.

Armor:
Armor is the last big stat that really defines the Bear Tank. Dire Bear form grants a massive amount of bonus armor, and the Thick Hide talent boosts this some more. The way I understand it, Thick Hide is applied multiplicatively on top of Dire Bear, so an item giving 100 base armor would yield (100+(100*400%))*110% = 550 Armor to a Bear tank. That's a lot. And if we choose items with a heckuva lot of armor already (Blizzard really gave bears some love in TBC), we start seeing some big numbers. More on this in the items section. (NB: items like Glove Reinforcements do not receive this bonus, and neither do enchants. Only the base armor on the item is considered for the bonus).


Anyway, with some of the numbers and general concepts out of the way, it's time to move on to items that are worth noting for the starting druid tank.
A good guide can be found here, however I'm going to make a list of my own with commentary on items.

At the moment I can't seem to find the time to do any instancing, so my gear is almost entirely crafted, obtained through soloing or one-of group quests.
I've pretty much finished getting items that don't require me to run instances, except for the Shattered Sun Pendant of Resolve, with the Scryer proc (which is completely and totally nuts). In fact if your druid is going to go feral a lot, seriously consider Scryer over Aldor; Scryer prioritises +Defense and Aldor +Dodge on the shoulder enchants, and the Scryer proc for Shattered Sun Pendant of Resolve gives +100 Expertise, compared to +100 Dodge from the Aldor proc. As discussed above, while Bears are masters of dodging, they don't really need dodge rating, because Agility is vastly more efficient for us. On the other hand, Expertise can really boost our threat by decreasing the chance our white (rage-generating) and special attacks will hit the target and not be dodged/parried/blocked.

And after that brief tangent on the awesome of SSO necklaces, it will soon be time for me to move onto 5mans and heroics to get the last few upgrades I want for Kara. The items I'm particularly looking at are Thoriumweave Cloak (from Mechanaar), Earthwarden (requires Exalted with Cenarion Expedition), Verdant Gloves (from the pre-raid part of the BT attunement chain, requiring a trip to the Arcatraz). But all of these will be discussed in the next post (or perhaps the one thereafter).