It's Raining. I Swear!

So, while I'm not sure I'm ready to commit to blogging on a regular basis again, I really feel inspired to write at the moment. Lately, I've been feeling the urge to return to my furry roots when we start moving into Northrend (Which means The Rambling Bear will likely REMAIN The Rambling Bear, not the Rambling 'Lock or some such). However, I've also been keeping a close eye on WotLK developments, and the current feral druid situation in the beta has me very, very worried. After reading today's installment of the Big Bear Butt (from which today's title comes, by the way), I've come to the point where I have to speak my mind.

Now, before I start my ramblings, let me make one huge disclaimer. I am not in the beta. Nor am I a psychic. And I realize that feral druids are still due a major second pass by the development team. I know that what is currently on beta is not what will be going live. But I also remember what it was like to be a horribly underpowered spec that people laughed at.

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The reports I've been hearing from the Beta are bleak. The most poingant of them comes from a guildmate of mine who plays a healer, and has been in Naxx10 with a variety of tanks. In short, Warriors and Paladins are rock solid, and a breeze to heal. Death Knights are a bit squishy, but their self healing abilities help to mitigate some of that. But bears are about as resilient as a wet sponge, and are a huge pain in the ass to keep alive.

This doesn't surprise me, though. Blizzard has taken away bears' one true claim to fame: our huge amounts of armor. In fact, they've stopped itemizing for feral druids altogether, we now have to wear rogue gear. I read somewhere that a bear in the best set of level 80 blue gear has somewhere around 29k armor. Meanwhile, my T4 geared arse sports 33.5k. On top of that, we no longer get an extremely high Agi->Dodge ratio.

"But Surania, look at all the awesome tanking talents we're getting to make up for that!".

Ok, lets look at those amazing new tanking talents:

We get another 6% "baked in" dodge for three talent points. Adding that to the 4% we already had, that gives us a total of 10% avoidance from talents. Guess what, folks, Warriors and Paladins get that, too, though half of theirs is parry. Our only advantage here is that we only spend 5 talent points, and they spend 10.

We get 12% across-the-board mitigation for three talent points. Warriors have this, more or less, as a base ability. Theirs (Defensive Stance) is only 10% mitigation, but they get a talent that boosts their spell mitigation to 16% (And judging from what Magisters' Terrace looks like, I expect to see more and more spell damage getting flung around in the expansion). Also, we can lose this mitigation during fights, while warriors can not. I don't know if you still get the full bonus if a party member dies, but I imagine it starts dropping if one of your allies gets mind controlled, and wouldn't be surprised if you suddenly lose some mitigation if a raid member loses connection suddenly during a fight.

We get an emergency button on a 5-minute cooldown for our 51-point talent. Last stand, to be exact. It's actually a bit stronger than the warrior ability, in that it has a shorter cooldown (8 minutes for warriors). And it also boosts our ability to generate threat while active, which is a nice side effect for sure. But I'm not worried about threat, really, I'm worried about survival. So great, we get last stand. As a sidenote, Paladins are getting a shield wall of sorts, themselves, in a re-tooled Divine Protection which only reduces damage taken by half, but does not drop aggro any more, and is on a much, much shorter cooldown than shield wall. And it also stacks very nicely with Ardent Defender, since SW tends to get popped when low on health to begin with.

We get crushing blow immunity. As do all tanks. The mechanic has been changed to only happen when mobs are 4+ levels above you. We also retain our crit immunity, as SotF has had its effect doubled.

We do still get a bit more armor than our plate brethren. The figure I've read (which I don't have a link to at the moment) seems to indicate bears will have about 6k more armor than plate wearers, 28k armor to 22k armor. Nothing to sneeze at, certainly, but it's nowhere near what we have now. Oh, and we still seem to have slightly more health, too, an extra 10% or so.

So, we're looking like plate tanks with extra armor, right? Well, kind of, except our one advantage (~6k more armor, and a slight health advantage) is offset by lots of things we DON'T have:

We don't get a block mechanic. Sure, blocking is no longer as critical as it once was, since bosses will no longer crush tanks, but at the same time, blocking has been seriously buffed via a revamped strength->block value formula. I haven't seen any numbers as far as how much a level 80, geared warrior or paladin blocks for, but I imagine it's probably breaking 4-digits per block. That, alone, will likely make up for our armor advantage.

We don't get parry. This alone wouldn't be a problem, but since they're also taking away druids' favorable agi->dodge conversion, and not giving us bear tank gear with +dodge or even +defense on it, our ability to avoid attacks is far lower than our plate brethren.

We don't get as many "Oh, shit" buttons as warriors. I'm not saying we should, but the fact is they get both shield wall and last stand, while we only get the latter.

So, basically, we get to be more-or-less on par with plate wearers as far as mitigating each hit goes, but we also are getting hit a lot more often. I have a solution, though, and it would, I think, both be thematically appropriate (as bear fur really shouldn't be harder to penetrate than iron plates) and a fair tradeoff.

Make Nurturing Instinct apply to all forms. I really think it's as simple as that. We get hit, say, 30% more often than plate tanks, but it's 20% easier to heal us back up from those hits. Combined with our health pool advantage, I think this simple change would make bear tanks able to compete with warriors and paladins, but without overshadowing them. We'd retain a bit of our flavor, as we'd be slightly less resistant to death by spike damage (due to the health pool), but would take a bit more mana to keep up under normal circumstances.

Think about it, Blizzard. The best solution to a problem is often the simplest, after all. Continue reading 'It's Raining. I Swear!'

When is a Bear not a Bear

So, you all may have noticed lately that not only have I not been posting much, but when I DO post, it hasn't been about druids. Lately, all I've been talking about are my paladin and other holy men (Well, technically I was married by a judge, but thats neither here nor there). And while I imagine most people who read this blog find other classes to be interesting, the general idea behind a druid-themed blog is, in fact, discussion of the druid class.

So, whats with the absence of bear-tanking goodies lately? Well, I have a confession to make . . .

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I'm bored. In a general sense, I'm a bit bored with the game as a whole, mostly because of my inability to participate in the activities I really want to be a part of. I haven't been able to attend our thursday/friday raid nights for a long time now, and those are our boss farming days (at least I don't actually need any gear from the farm bosses on Surania due to a combination of crap itemization and obscenely overpowered badge gear). Weekend raiding in Prophecy has been largely hit-or-miss lately; I haven't seen the inside of a 25-man instance for three weeks now.

Heck, I can't even get into Karazhan raids half of the time, as everybody-and-their-mother runs it while I'm at work on tuesdays. The midnight run I once hosted has fallen prey to earlier runs, summer schedules, and a general apathy which seems to have been caused by a combination of people jumping to Age of Conan, an early-onset pre-expansion (hyphen-inducing) slump, and the start of summer. Poor Jasminne is still in fairly crappy gear (though she did finally save up the 75 badges for that sexy paladin tanking chest).

Honestly, that takes away half of the reason I play the game these days. 5-man content is nice and all, but I've done every damn instance so many times that the runs bore me to death. PvP . . . well, if I really wanted to PvP, I'd probably join the folks jumping ship for AoC. And low-level content? Yeah, I'm rolling yet ANOTHER alt just to fill my WoW playing time, but honestly its about as engaging as farming gold (which I also detest, by the way). And as for the other half of the reason I play? I love my guildies, and hanging out with them, but alas, most of the folks who are usually online when I can play have started a set of Horde alts who I have no hope to catch up to.

All of that contributes to my lack of posting in general. But there's one other thing. Something that is hard for me to admit to, especially here amongst my fellow Druids.

Surania has been boring the crap out of me.

Thats right. I'm bored of my druid. I haven't completely hammered down why I've lost interest in playing Surania, but I've come to realize a number of contributing factors:

1:) I'm a spoiled brat who misses the limelight. I remember the pre-BC days, when getting to occasionally offtank an add in a raid was a huge deal for me as a bear tank. Compared to those days, I have it damn good. But I'm selfish, and miss the days when Prophecy was young, with just a handful of 70s. Back then, I was THE go-to tank, the best geared and skilled meat shield. When we couldn't take down Prince Malchezaar because he kept killing the tank in phase two, *I* was the big gun called in to take the hits.

I didn't know it back then, but that Malchezaar kill was to be the last guild-first I would ever get to maintank. I was on Shaman duty the day we downed Maulgar. Gruul himself was being tanked by me when he died, but only because our actual maintank bit the bullet halfway through. The two T5 bosses guides commonly suggest using a bear tank on were tanked by warriors; I was cat DPS/add offtank the first time Tidewalker fell (despite trying to clue in the raid leader to bears' superiority in the MT role on that fight), and wore bark the first time we cleansed Leotheras of his inner demon for good.

I know, druids are the ideal offtanks, not main tanks. And I know that my limited play schedule means I really SHOULDN'T be getting the premium tanking gigs. But God damn, I miss the rush of adrenaline as the big, bad boss who was beating on my furry hide fell for the very first time. Its an incredibly addictive feeling.

2: The class no longer challenges me. Perhaps there will be new challenges when we start progressing full bore into T6 instances, but right now we're preparing to tackle the old 3/4 - 5/6 T5 gatekeeper bosses (Kael'thas and Vashj, for those who didn't know), and my tanking roles have been boring me. "Take [insert add name here] over to that corner and keep him busy." just isn't all that exciting, especially when said add is weak enough to be tanked by a fury warrior in half blues (that is, the majority of non-boss mobs, including many bossfight adds). Half of my tanking assignments, I could literally smack the mob with a mangle, move them to my spot, and then go AFK, autoattack generating ample threat to hold the mob until it dies.

Yes, I will admit, I HAVE done that during raids. So sue me.

3: I have nowhere to go from here. I look at loot lists for the bosses my guild is killing and shrug. I see plenty of gear I'd die for on my Paladin, or my Warlock, but nothing I give a crap about on Surania. Sure, I could definitely fight for some upgrades to my cat DPS set, but since I wear my tanking gear more often than my damage gear on raids, I've never felt right in taking the gear over rogues, hunters, and DPS warriors (assuming we had any, all our warriors are tanks for some reason). And anyhow, even if there were upgrades to my tanking set available, I don't earn much DKP (as most of it is earned on the farming nights, which I can't attend, or by farming raid materials, which as I mentioned earlier, I detest).

Not that getting upgrades would make much difference these days. Like I said, I'm usually tanking stuff that could be tanked by fury warriors in half blue gear.

So, in short, the class I once absolutely adored now has me absolutely a-bored. What's a guy to do? Well, I'm not 100% sure yet, but its looking more and more likely that, once WotLK hits, Kirari (my warlock) will become my main character. I never used to be much for straight damage-dealing characters in games, but I've become rather addicted to the affliction warlock lifestyle. And, on the plus side, if blizzard continues bringing out encounters like Shade of Aran, Teresian Illhoof, High King Maulgar, and Leotheras the Blind, I'll have plenty of interesting challenges that I, as a warlock, will be uniquely equipped to deal with.

Thats a decision to set in stone later on, though. I refuse to change mains before the expansion simply due to the fact that Surania has benefitted greatly from her time raiding with Prophecy in terms of gear. I would feel like I was cheating the guild if I did not continue to use said gear to further our raiding efforts until such time as said gear becomes obsolete. Not to mention, I'd never be able to catch up in gear if I switched mains now, I can't attend the raids Kirari's upgrades would drop in.

I'll try to come up with some druid-related topics to discuss in the future, I promise. I just don't want to bring you guys some half-assed, uninspired posts simply because I'm not feeling it.
Continue reading 'When is a Bear not a Bear'

Epic Tanking Weapons. Yep, All Three!

So, I was recently surprised to see someone say that the Earthwarden was a druid tank's best option until the legendary LOL that is the Pillar of Ferocity. And while I'm not sure if he felt that the weapon commonly regarded as our best tanking staff (Wildfury Greatstaff) was inferior to the Earthwarden, or if he simply didn't know about it since its a trash drop, I felt compelled to compare the three items formally.

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The Suspects:
All translated values assume a standard spec with all tanking talents taken.

Earthwarden
Drops From: Cenarion Expedition Exalted Reputation
500 Armor
39 Stamina
27 Defense Rating
24 Expertise Rating
712 Feral AP

--Which Translates To--

0.46% Crit Reduction
2750 Bear Armor
0.91% Avoidance
663 HP
712 AP
3.05% More Accuracy (Dodge/Parry Reduction)


Wildfury Greatstaff
Drops From: Serpentshrine Cavern Trash
500 Armor
75 Stamina
54 Dodge Rating
992 Feral AP

--Which Translates To--

2750 Bear Armor
2.86% Avoidance
1275 HP
992 AP


Pillar of Ferocity
Drops From: Anetheron (Hyjal Summit, Second Boss)
550 Armor
47 Strength
96 Stamina
1059 Feral AP

--Which Translates To--
3025 Bear Armor
1632 HP
1166 AP


Round 1: Earthwarden V. Wildfury Greatstaff

Earthwarden Advantages:
0.46% Crit Reduction
3.05% More Accuracy (Dodge/Parry Reduction)

Wildfury Greatstaff Advantages:
1.95% Avoidance
612 HP
180 AP

The Lowdown: Crit immunity comes first. If you ned that defense on Earthwarden to stay crit immune, by all means stick with it for the timebeing. However, once you find a way to replace that with a few gems or some PvP bracers (for examples), the story changes. Earthwarden's only advantage here is the 3% effective hit provided via Expertise (and some slight avoidance via reduction in parrys, though not enough to make up the 2% gap). Assuming 2500 AP and 30% crit with the Earthwarden, if we plug in the threat stats into the handy, dandy threat calculator, we find that the hit and AP almost exactly cancel each other out (Wildfury comes out 1 TPS ahead). So it appears that Wildfury is a cut-and-dry upgrade from Earthwarden, with more health, more avoidance, and the same average threat.

Hold on, though, don't go vendoring that hammer just yet. There are situations where you just might want to swap it in: Pick-ups. No, not those horrendous groups of slackers you get for 3AM Steamvault runs, I'm talking about picking up mobs on pulls and after threat dumps. Three percent more effective hit makes it much less likely your Maul/Mangle combo will miss. Lets say you have 82% effective hit without EW, and 85% with it. Earthwarden increases the chance both Maul and Mangle will hit from 67.2% to 72.3% (Yes, 5% more likely, funny how that works huh?), and reduces the chance both will MISS from 3.24% to 2.25%, which means more than 1 in 4 of your double-whiffs would no longer happen, causing a very sensitive threat situation. Normally, this isn't a big deal, but on threat-sensitive fights like Hydross and Leotheras, losing a bit of mitigation for some increased threat reliability can be a very good idea. And you can always switch back to the Wildfury once you've picked up your target.


Round 2: Wildfury Greatstaff V. Pillar of Ferocity

Wildfury Greatstaff Advantages:
2.86% Avoidance

Pillar of Ferocity Advantages:
275 Bear Armor
357 HP
174 AP

The Lowdown: First of all, lets remember where the Pillar drops: Early T6 content. At that point, most bear tanks are already going to be butting up against, if not exceeding, the armor cap, making the extra armor on the Pillar more or less useless. Even if we don't take that into consideration, though, 275 armor isn't a whole heck of a lot (Probably about 0.6% less damage taken), and even combined with the 357 extra health the Pillar affords us, I would much rather be hit 3% less often, thankyouverymuch. So even though the Pillar drops from a later instance, its actually the inferior mitigation weapon.

But, as with the Earthwarden V. Wildfury comparison, the Pillar of LOL does have one redeeming quality: Superior threat generation. If we assume the same basic stats as before, Wildfury would boost our threat by about 31 TPS. Not a whole heck of a lot, but if you're really struggling to stay ahead of your DPSers on threat, it might be an option to swap this in. As a bonus, you'll be getting hit more as well, so will have extra rage to work with (Yeah, even lower mitigation can be an advantage sometimes).


Round 3: Earthwarden V. Pillar of Ferocity

Earthwarden Advantages:
0.46% Crit Reduction
0.91% Avoidance
3.05% More Accuracy (Dodge/Parry Reduction)

Pillar of Ferocity:
275 Bear Armor
969 HP
454 AP

The Lowdown: So, since Wildfury wins out against both of its competitors, I guess we should go ahead and compare Earthwarden, obtainable via rep, to the Pillar, obtainable through deep endgame raiding. The good news is, the Pillar comes out ahead in my opinion. The bad news? Not by much. In terms of threat, I'd call it even between the Expertise rating of the Earthwarden and the extra AP on the Pillar, as the pillar's overall threat advantage is counterbalanced by the earthwarden's higher reliability. In terms of mitigation, though, I would actually have to give the advantage to the Earthwarden. The Pillar's armor gives about 0.6% less damage per hit, granted, but assuming you're around 50% dodge, the 0.9% avoidance on the EW actually translates to about 1.8% fewer swings landing (I refer you again to "The Diminishing Returns is a Lie")

Why, then, to I give the Pillar top billing on this matchup? Nearly 1000 more health, thats what. While I'm a firm believer in getting enough health and then focusing on mitigation, that amount of health would take over 5 Solid Stars of Elune to make up, and thats a lot of gems I could switch from, say, +12 stamina to +8 agi to make up the avoidance difference.


Putting It All Together

So, in terms of overall quality as a tanking weapon, it seems that the Wildfury Greatstaff is better than the Pillar of Ferocity, which in turn is an upgrade from the Earthwarden. Not surprising results, really, as most druids already knew that the Pillar is one of the worst itemized pieces of gear Blizzard has ever come up with. Not that the Living Root of the Wildheart is terribly incredible either, mind you. Seriously, though, hold on to that Earthwarden for making those critical pick-ups, since having a bit less mitigation is always preferable to that mob going and beating on a clothie or three because your aim sucked. Continue reading 'Epic Tanking Weapons. Yep, All Three!'

Set Bonuses and the Feral Druid

So, for those of us who have been feral druids since long before the Burning Crusade, the expansion brought us a great number of new concepts. Before Survival of the Fittest, crit immunity was something only the ignorant ferals strove for. Raid viability was when your healing set was good enough to overcome the fact that your spec sucked (for healing). And, while it didn't set in for a while, those of us who are fortunate enough to at least be killing Prince Malchezaar on a regular basis got one more system shock: Feral Set Bonuses. Well, ok, so some folks may have had 3-piece Genesis Raiment, which yielded a couple bear tanking bonuses, but that was far from mainstream gearing.

Adding to this "Set Bonus System Shock" is the fact that Tier 4 has some EXTREMELY good set bonuses on it, bonuses which quite frankly dwarf T5 and T6. This, unfortunately, means it is very hard for us to upgrade beyond our first feral set into the higher tiers (mind you, for some of us, there are other conditions keeping us from Tier 6 gear as well, like that pesky "gotta kill the T6 bosses" requirement). And so, today I want to take a look at our raid set bonuses, from the ungodly two-piece T4 bonus for cats, to the utterly craptacular two-piece T5 bonus.

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Malorne Harness (T4)

Two-Piece Bonus:
Your melee attacks in Bear Form and Dire Bear Form have a chance to generate 10 additional rage.
Your melee attacks in Cat Form have a chance to generate 20 additional energy.

Does this set bonus look familiar? It should, because its essentially a second Omen of Clarity for feral druids. At a procrate of 4% per hit, combined with an average of about 5 attacks every 4 seconds in catform, the set bonus alone will give the average cat druid 1-2 more shreds per minute, which could easily yield an extra 20-30 DPS! Bears dont necessarily get as much benefit from this, getting only about 2 procs per minute, but that should still be enough for one more maul (Remember, maul costs more than the 10 rage the tooltip tells you it does due to loss of autoattack rage generation). This is such a strong cat bonus that many people keep two pieces of tier four all the way up to four-piece tier six (And with T6 being expanded to an 8 item set, cats may NEVER get rid of it).

Four-Piece Bonus:
Increases your armor by 1400 in Bear Form and Dire Bear Form.
Increases your strength by 30 in Cat Form.

For catform, this is a fairly decent buff, giving us about 80 attack power with raid buffs. But lets face it, strength as a set bonus is kind of. . . boring. For bears, though, that 1400 armor is damn nice. Sure, the set bonus isn't affected by the bear modifier, but even so, 1400 armor is approximately the same as 255 armor on an item, about 5/6 of the armor on the coveted Badge of Tenacity! Much like the two piece bonus for cats, many bears hold on to their four piece malorne bonus until they start picking up T6 pieces. However, while this is a signifigant chunk of armor, the overall stat upgrades on T5 can easily overtake the benefit of this bonus, especially when you factor in T5 bonuses (or, better yet, lets not bother factoring in T5 bonuses, for reasons discussed below.)

Nordrassil Harness (T5)

Two-Piece Bonus:
When you shift out of Bear Form, Dire Bear Form, or Cat Form, your next Regrowth spell takes 2 fewer sec. to cast.

Umm. . . oooooookay? From the stellar PvE bonuses on our first Raid set, we go to this. Frankly, this is a PvP and soloing bonus, and nothing more. Sure, you could whip out that raid-saving spot heal, but odds are you're going to be too focused on doing your job (DPS) to notice someone moments away from death in time to heal them before the actual healers do. And even if you do get the heal off first, you're going to heal what, maybe 1800 if you specced Nurturing Instinct? Odds are, if you really need to pop out to help the healers out, you're going to need to throw more than one spell, and ultimately, all this bonus does is cuts HALF A SECOND off of the effective casting time for Regrowth, since the global cooldown delays you for 1.5 of the 2 seconds you thought you just saved. Oh, and dont even THINK of capitalizing on this bonus while getting beaten on by a raid boss, since you'll get stuck out of bearform for about 1.5 seconds too long. Seriously, Blizzard, give the raiding gear raiding bonuses next time.

Four-Piece Bonus:
Your Shred ability deals an additional 75 damage, and your Lacerate ability does an additional 15 per application.

Ok, this bonus is at least a bit better than the first one. 75 bonus damage on shred can add up pretty quickly. But 1.5 extra shreds per minute would tend to beat it out, both in terms of raw damage, and because of the extra combo point generation of the latter. And while I haven't specifically done out the math, I suspect the superiority of the 2-piece T4 bonus wins out, even after considering the increased stats on T5 (if only because a lot of people stop at 3-piece Nordrassil). Oh, and lacerate DoT damage boost? Whoopdy-freaking-doo. Wake me up when my lacerate is as good as Nalorakk's bleeds so I can care about its damage.

Thunderheart Harness (T6)

Two-Piece Bonus:
Reduces the energy cost of your Mangle ability in Cat Form by 5 and increases the threat generated by your Mangle ability in Bear Form by 15%.

Ok, well, its not a crappy one like Nordrassil had. Actually, for bear form, this one is rather nice, giving us a nice big chunk of extra threat on our heavy hitting Bear Mangle, improving both snap aggro and long-term aggro generation. The catform mangle bonus leaves a lot to be desired, though, since the only reason we have for using that ability is re-applying the debuff every 12 seconds. Kinda leaves something to be desired, especially if you have multiple feral druids, and thus have to use mangle even LESS often.

Four-Piece Bonus:
Increases the damage dealt by your Rip, Swipe, and Ferocious Bite abilities by 15%.

Another reasonably solid bonus. 15% more damage on finishing moves in catform can really add up. And more swipe damage means more swipe threat, boosting both multi- and single-target threat generation in bear (remember, by this gear level, Swipe will do better single-target threat then lacerate). I'd hit that!

So, in short, T4's bonuses are made of epic win. T5's bonuses are the dregs from the bottom of Blizzard's Tea (though the swipe damage boost is a rather tasty looking dreg), and T6's bonuses are fairly solid without being too obscenely good. This just reaffirms my decision to pass on my T5 tokens to let those who need them more have them first. And remember, sometimes the best way to make yourself better is to make the warrior, priest, or other druid next to you better. Continue reading 'Set Bonuses and the Feral Druid'

Pulling With . . . Cat Form??

Usually, when a druid talks about making a pull, they either talk about using Feral Faerie Fire to do it from bear, or they fire off some balance spells and then quickly shift to bear. Details of such pulls have already been covered in a previous post, but there's one more type of pull that I find myself using, in specialized situations mind you, to great effect. . . the Cat Form Pull!

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The cat form pull is, at its most basic, simply another form of Line of Sight pull. Pulling using line of sight refers to aggroing a group, and then ducking behind some form of solid object in order to force those mobs (mainly the casters and ranged mobs) to follow you. In most situations, this can be done simply by pulling from next to a doorway, corner, or other solid construction, then taking a few steps to one side or another. However, in some situations, such as the four ghost pulls immediately before and after the Shade of Aran in Karazhan, there may not be convenient obstructing materials near your pull site. This is where the cat pull comes in.

The key difference for pulling in cat form is that you need to move a significant distance, for whatever reason, between the place you aggro the mobs, and the place you use to move out of LoS from them. As you may have guessed by now, the reason for using catform is Dash, also known as the "I can recover from wipes faster than you schmucks", or the "Oh shit, I didn't notice Malchezaar's enfeeble!" button. Bearform has the armor to take a hit, but catform has the speed to avoid taking any hits in the first place, and as we all know, the only thing better than taking a hit for the team is that hit never happening in the first place!

Now, since not everybody who reads this blog is necessarily in Karazhan, I'd like to first discuss this pull in a context most of you should be familiar with: Shattered Halls. One of, if not my favorite instance to run. So, lets assume you have gone through the first hall, done the slime gauntlet (or picked the lock on the door), killed the first boss, run the orc gauntlet, and killed Porung to end the event.

Now you're staring at the training hall, with gladiator groups sparring in the alcoves to the sides, some single-pull orcs beating on training dummies in the hall, and most importantly, two big groups of orcs in the middle of the rooms. Now, if you're here with a decent group on nonheroic mode, you may very well just kill off everything in here.

But lets assume that you're going to leave those groups be, either because your group cant handle them (they're not the easiest trash pulls in the world), you dont want to bother with them, or you dont have the time to deal with them (you're on heroic mode and want the badge/potions/primals from the Executioner). You pull the patrol, pull the first big group into Porung's room using the doorway to LoS pull, and clear the orcs sparring with training dummies. And now you're faced with a second large pull, deep into the hallway. You dont want to fight them where they stand, because the third and fourth group of gladiators are right nearby and likely to get pulled (either accidentally or via someone getting feared by the Darkcaster). You cant pull back to where the first group is via LoS because gladiator groups 1 and 2 are still there. Your options are to fight them where the training dummies are, leaving it up to the ranged DPS to take out any casters ASAP (which wont be for a while, due to the urgency of killing the Legionnaire) or pull all the way back to Porung's room.

Obviously, we're going to pull back. First off, mark the pull. The Legionnaire needs to die first, and the casters should either be next, or should be sheeped/trapped/seduced. Once the group is marked, and the rest of your party is patiently waiting in the previous room, its time for the magic. Target the Legionnaire, and drop a Hurricane on the group (remember to use proper hurricane positioning). After a couple of ticks, quickly do a 180 degree turn while shifting into catform, running down the hall toward your companions, and hit your dash. As long as you didn't cast hurricane for too long, and have good mobility, you should at most get hit by a single shadowbolt while running. once you get to your group, take a hard left (or right, but left takes you to a more open area to kill in), shift to bearform, and prepare to mangle that Legionnaire the moment he sticks his head around the corner! Congratulations, you just used 3/4 of your class on a single pull, more or less (Balance spells, catform, and bear form).

There is one other place where this pulling technique is highly recommended, and that is the four-ghost pulls in Karazhan on either side of Aran's room, specifically the first two and the last one, all of which are found just after an upward ramp. Here, the issue is not the potential for adds, but instead the not-so-ideal terrain itself. Your options with these groups are to fight them where they stand (which can lead to some nasty line of sight issues on the initial pull), fight them on the ramp (a fairly cramped area), or pull the group down the ramp to the previous room. Obviously, I prefer pulling down the ramp, and its not that long of a pull, but there's a catch: The LoS issues at the top of the ramp means you have to pull at close range.

Because of the range issue, I pull the ghosts a bit differently. Instead of pulling with a couple ticks of hurricane, prowl to the top of the ramp in catform, face back down the ramp, and when the time is right, pop dash, pull with a feral faerie fire on your tanking target (or one of, if you have multiples) and run like hell. Once the ghosts arrive at the bottom of the ramp, pick up yours as normal. Assuming the other tank and crowd control pick up their targets in a timely fashion, you should only ever get hit by your own tanking target.

Now, while the dash pull is extremely situational, it does illustrate an important point. Always be on the lookout for ways to use your skills that may not be obvious. A healing spell may be the perfect way to grab aggro on mobs (Tidewalker's Murlocs). Rebirth may be usable while main tanking, even when it may not seem like it (Gruul, before shatter). Sometimes tanking a mob means rooting them to the ground (Scouts on the way to Dragonhawk Boss). Sometimes bear form can be used to increase the time you spend doing damage (Feral charge after Aran's AE). Figuring out the little tricks is how a good druid becomes a great druid.

Or so I hear. . . Continue reading 'Pulling With . . . Cat Form??'

Are You Cat or Bear Specced?

I imagine that for the majority of druids, the answer is "both". But while most feral talents dont favor one form or the other, it is still possible to build a spec that leans further one way than another. So today lets take a look at the feral talent tree (and the extension to it in the resto tree) to get a good idea of how our talents break down. Note that this is strictly from a PvE raiding standpoint, as well. Oh, and dont worry, I'll still be playing with the new pages on my calculator, but I'm a sucker for a special request, and this topic was big enough to warrant more than just a casual reply in comments.

Please note, I am not advocating cat-only or bear-only builds. No matter how good you, your gear, and your skills are, you WILL be asked to perform both roles during your career as a feral druid, so you wont want to skip the critical skills for these roles.

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Universal Talents: These are the core talents that any feral, whether bear, cat, or balanced between the two, will want to take.

Sharpened Claws 3/3: More crits means more rage and threat for a bear tank, and more damage and combo poitns for cats. A must have.

Predatory Strikes 3/3: 105 attack power ups your DPS and threat a little bit, but the real reason this talent is a must have for all specs. . . its a prerequisite for Heart of the Wild.

Primal Fury 2/2: This talent ups your rage efficiency in bear form (ESPECIALLY while swipe tanking), and speeds up combo point generation (Remember, keeping rip up is our first priority) for cats. Cool beans.

Heart of the Wild 5/5: The shining star of the feral tree. Incredibly good bonuses in both forms (and if you powershift, you get the extra bonus of a much larger mana pool). If you dont take it, you're insane.

Leader/Improved Leader of the Pack 3/3: These two talents combined give us our incredibly valuable raid buff, with a group-wide total of 25% crit, and a lot of health returned if in a fully melee group.

Predatory Instincts 5/5: Ups your crit damage by 10% (Making crits hit for 220% damage, not 210%). More damage is. . . well, more damage in cat form, as well as more threat for bears. Also helps you against those hard-to-avoid AoE spells, like Tidewalker's Tidal wave (assuming you're tanking it) or Magtheridon's fire patches (assuming you get shaken into it during an earthquake, or are having a blonde moment).

Mangle 1/1: I was tempted to say this is skippable for cat druids (as long as you have another feral druid keeping mangle up in a raid), but really, for one point, every raiding feral druid should have mangle, especially since sometimes you just cant get to a foe's backside to shred (Aran during flame wreath, for example).

Furor 5/5: I recommend this for both flavors of feral druid, if only because Improved Paw is such a crappy talent, you need one or the other to get to the rest of the resto talents, and your friendly neighborhood tree druid probably has it anyhow (And nice side bonus: You dont have to help rebuff *snerk*). Its a very nice talent though, giving bears another 10 rage to start a pull with (and 10 rage to start with after hitting the Hunnypot). But the real beauty is cat druids with this, as they can use it to powershift for extra DPS (and if you're trying to get into a raid as pure DPS, you should probably be looking for all the boosts you can get).

Naturalist 5/5: 10% Bonus damage means a lot of extra DPS and threat. Dont even think about skipping it.

Omen of Clarity 1/1: Who can complain about free attacks? With how amazing the 2-piece T4 bonus is for us, who would dare pass up a 1-point talent that gives us twice the effect or more (assuming equal proc rates).

This gives us a total of 33 talent points that any feral druid would be INSANE to skip. Notice that I didn't include quite a few talents that most people consider core abilities. . . I'll explain why a singleminded druid might possibly skip them as I get to them.


Bear-Focused Talents: These are talents which a druid focusing on only bear tanking would take, while one who only cared about catform might possibly skip.

Ferocity 5/5: For bear druids, ferocity is a crucial part of our arsenal, making our Mangles, Swipes, and Mauls cost 5 less rage each. If you never plan to don your bear skin, you might be able to skip it, though, since these days, a raiding kitty only benefits from the reduction on Mangle, an ability you only use once every 12 or more seconds, and may never need to use if you have a bear tank or other cat druid putting up the debuff for you. I'd still recomment getting it though, since there are some fights where getting behind the mob may not be an option (Aran during flame wreath comes to mind), and at that point you have to use Mangle as your main attack.

Feral Instinct 3/3: This is absolutely critical for maximum bear threat generation. All that a pure cat would get out of it is a bit stronger stealth, something that is by and large useless in a raid, since you're unlikely to be grouped with 24 rogues and druids doing stealth runs on Tidewalker.

Thick Hide 3/3: Although some folks say that you can drop this talent once you get armor values over the cap, I think keeping this talent and using some lower armor, higher stamina/agility/hit gear would be preferable, or just keeping the extraneous armor for mobs that sunder and the like. For cats, this would give a minimal reduction in damage taken by physical AoEs, and as most such AoE attacks are avoidable, can be safely skipped.

Feral Swiftness 2/2: 4% pure avoidance is, well, at the very least 4% less damage taken, and taking less damage as the tank is always a good thing. For cats, the movement speed is completely moot unless you mainly raid ZA, and the dodge is, once again, only good for dodgeable AoEs, which are generally avoided entirely.

Feral Charge 1/1: Its a bear form ability. One that I wouldn't skip as a bear tank, as it allows you to quickly get to a mob that may have peeled off of you to taunt/threat dump it back to you. Generally, if a cat needs that much mobility, they need to run AWAY from a mob (and lucky us, we have dash for just such occasions).

Faerie Fire (Feral) 1/1: Feral Faerie Fire is extremely helpful as a pulling move, if nothing else. It can also give you something to use if you're rage starved for a small bit of extra threat. Honestly, I'd advise all druids to get this, since its just one point, and cat druids are in the best position to reapply Faerie fire mid-fight, since they often are stuck autoattacking to regen energy.

Survival of the Fittest 3/3: Another absolutely crucial bear talent. This is the only way a bear will ever reach uncrittability without heavy investment in PvP gear. Cat druids may find that 3% extra Agility, Strength, and Stamina are helpful as well, and thus I advise both cats and bears to pick this one up.

Primal Tenacity 3/3: This is something only bears will probably be interested in. It'll give you a small chance of resisting things like Nightbane's fears, or those annoying stuns that leave you unable to dodge or build threat. Ultimately, though, I find this talent to be too unreliable to, well, rely on, and thus feel it is an optional talent for bears, and quite nonessential for cats (though resisting those same fears from nightbane can save you from some painful cleaves, tail swipes, and the like). Nonetheless, a bear-focused druid would probably pick this one up.

Intensity 3/3: This does absolutely nothing for cat druids. For bears, it lets you, when combined with Ferocity, start any fight with at least 40 rage, enough for a very respectable front-loaded threat pile. Another one of those talents you can live without, but if you're only focusing on tanking, a very good choice.


Cat-Focused Talents: These are talents which a druid focusing on only cat DPS would take, while one who only cared about tanking might possibly skip.

Feral Agression 5/5: Especially when 2.4 comes out and makes undead and mechanical mobs bleedable, this talent is not that great for most boss fights (which I always focus on, trash mobs are called trash for a reason). But a focused cat build would likely pick this up (as well as Ferocity) to improve their trash DPS, especially since the second tier feral skills are largely useless in catform on raids. PS: You'll notice I don't even mention the improved Demo Roar component of this talent. Thats because, even improved, a warrior's unimproved Demo Shout will overwrite our shout, and a warlock's Curse of Weakness will drop any mob's AP to 0 (I dont remember the exact number, but mobs only have something like 250 AP)

Shredding Attacks 2/2: Shred is your bread and butter DPS ability in groups. Reducing its cost by 18 energy is HUGE. If you dont have this talent, you have no business being in catform on a raid. Bear druids will generally want this too, at least until they reach the breakpoint where swipe is better threat on single mobs, since its basically one free rage per second on your typical Mangle->Lacerate x3 threat rotation.

Savage Fury 2/2: This talent falls into the same category with Ferocity, really. It only affects your mangles, and if you're in a raid group where someone else is keeping the mangle debuff up, this does nothing for you. But, once again, if you ever cant get to a mob's back, this talent will up your yellow DPS signifigantly. Absolutely WORTHLESS to bear druids since 2.0.10.

Natural Shapeshifter 3/3: In a raid setting, the only reason you really need this talent is if you're using Furor to Powershift in cat form. a 30% reduction in shifting cost means you can powershift nearly 43% more often. A bear tank will only really shift into form once every 2 minutes at most (to pot), and should regen more than enough mana in those 2 minutes to forego this talent.

PvP Talents: These two talents (as well as Nature's Grasp) are not likely to be taken in a pure raiding spec, and are more geared toward PvP purposes.

Brutal Impact 2/2: The only time I ever stun in raids is when my growl is resisted while reacquiring a rogue mob (in which case if I cant get aggro back in 4 seconds, I'm probably not getting it back in 5), or to pounce those annoying drum-pounders on the way to dragonhawk in ZA (But usually just spam Entangling Roots on them instead). Generally, you only need that one extra second of stun in PvP (or if you prefer using stealth tactics when you solo, but we're talking raids here).

Nurturing Instinct 2/2: Feral druids make CRAPTACULAR offhealers, since they wear absolutely zero spell gear (save for maybe a couple pieces of gear with a little int on it). If you find yourself needing to shift out to heal often, a macro to switch to a healing weapon/offhand/idol is going to do you much more good than this talent. In 2.4, it looks to be getting a buff, but even then, I doubt cat offhealing will be a very viable strategy, and the only reason to get this for raiding would be the 20% extra healing recieved while in catform (which I dont see warranting 2 talent points).


Putting Together Specs:

So, lets use this breakdown to put together a cat-only spec and a bear-only spec. First, we pick up our universal talents, giving us a 0/22/11 core build that must be common to both specs. It leaves us with a lot of holes to fill in our feral tree, especially near the bottom.

Filling in our bear spec will all of the bear-focused talents, we come up with a 0/43/14 spec, though we still have a single talent point hole before the 25-point talents. Going back a second time and picking up all the cat talents that are recommended for bear (That is, shredding attacks), we fill that hole in, and come up with a 0/45/14 + 2 spec.

If we instead fill in our cat spec, we first come to a 0/31/14 build, with plenty of holes in the feral tree. Picking up the recommended bear talents for cats, we still come up short, with a 0/40/14 build. Lets say we pick up Feral Swiftness to fill in that hole (and giving us a better chance to survive when we're stupid and stand in front of that cleaving mob). So our final cat-focused build is 0/42/14 + 5.

Now, both of these builds are similar, but not *quite* similar enough to allow us to make them the same with those few extra talent points left over. HOWEVER, lets say we drop Feral Agression (Trash killing and soloing/PvP talent, we can live without it in our raiding build) and Primal Tenacity (Personal choice, you can drop Furor or Natural Shapeshifter if you don't need the extra 10 rage on pulls, or don't powershift). Now, looking at our cat spec, we have 10 talent points to blow. Just enough to pick up Feral Instinct, Thick Hide, Feral Charge, and Intensity. And in our bear build, we now have 5 spare points we can put into Natural Shapeshifter and Savage fury. And guess what, doing either of these two things gives us something interesting. . . MY spec! And I really dont miss the talents I lack from both the cat- and bear-focused builds, so its not like I'm sacrificing to be a hybrid, we can literally get the best of both worlds. Continue reading 'Are You Cat or Bear Specced?'

Using the Calculator to Compare Gear

So, as promised (albeit a bit late), today I want to show the kind of thought process I use when considering gear upgrades. In particular, I want to look at two items: Upgrading my Heavy Clefthoof Chest to T4, and swapping in the new Alchemist's Stone upgrade for my Pocketwatch. In order to facilitate multi-swapping, note that I've added space to put in up to 5 new items and 5 old items in the spreadsheet, instead of having to calculate the total changes yourself. There are also new tabs for talent spec, but those are a work in progress. Lets start with the chest, since I already have some numbers prepared from the other day. . .

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The Chest/Bracers Double Swap:

So, we already have the stat difference from simply swapping the two chests (corrected for my gem preferences: 12 stam, 6 stam/4 agi, and 6 stam/4 defense). But alas, theres one glaring problem from this straight swap: I become crittable, as I'm right now at -2.61% crit out of -2.6 I need. So I'm going to add a second item swap to this: Swapping out my Bands of the Swift Paw for the Vindicator's Leather Bracers *gag*. I'm also going to swap out my 5 resilience/6 stamina gem for a +8 resilience gem (the resilience on the bracers, alone, isn't enough to shore up uncrittability). So, with the double gear swap, my change in stats looks like this:




Now, at first I was worried that the downgrade to my bracers was going to overcome the upgrade to my chest, but looking at these numbers, I guess not. I still gain 293 armor and over 2% avoidance, as well as a nice chunk of threat (mostly crit, and I forgot to add in 26 attack power also), as well as 1% less DoT damage (hello Nalorakk. . . ), at a measly cost of 68 health. Now if only Magtheridon would only drop the dang token when I'm there!

Not likely now, though, since he and I got REAL friendly last Saturday. Got to tank the sucker for the first time, and it was a oneshot despite doing the fight with only three tanks (I tanked the first two 'locks, paladin tanked 3 and 4, both of us had misdirects to help pick up the seconds). But, that is completely off topic. . .

The Guardian's Alchemist Stone

For those who haven't heard, there are four new Alchemist Stones available on the 2.4 PTR, created from the original stone, some Nether Vortex (which will be purchasable) and other materials. One of these stones is the Guardian's Alchemist Stone, which trades in the +15 to all stats in order to pick up a whopping 54 defense rating. If I decide to make this (which requires making my base Alchemist Stone as well, ick), I would be replacing my Moroes' Lucky Pocketwatch with it, losing a bunch of dodge and half of BearVasion. On the plus side, I would be getting an extra 1200 or so health from the Hunnypot, so its not all a loss from an emergency button perspective.

The question becomes, is it worth losing bearvasion over? Well, lets look at the upgrades I can pick up via re-enchanting, regemming, and getting rid of those PvP bracers from above (gee, that was quick, eh?).

Right now I have one enchant that is solely there for crit reduction: 12 defense on my bracers. Additionally, I have that 5 resilience on the gem in my bracers that I could replace with a +8 agility gem (yellow gems kinda suck, and as I've stated in the past, I prefer sticking agility into items I use for my cat set as well).

Just looking at those replacements, I'm looking at losing 25 resilience from the bracers and gem swap, and 12 defense from the bracer enchant. Which, when I check my overall stat changes, still gives me a net gain of about 0.075% crit reduction, pretty close to the break-even point. As for the rest of my stats:




So, it looks like I'd gain about 700 more armor, my avoidance would go up a very small amount (0.1%), I'd gain a laughable 34 health (every bit counts, right?), and would take a little more damage from DoTs. And while 700 more armor is nice, and the extra health from potting is a nice bonus, I dont think I'm prepared to lose an "Oh, shit" button for it. So, thanks for the offer, Blizzard, but no thanks.

Tomorrow on The Rambling Bear: A look at one of my favorite Druid-only pulling techniques, useful for occasions like the ghostly trash around Aran's room, and the big pulls in the latter portions of Shattered Halls. 15 points to anyone who guesses what it is, and an additional 10 points to anyone who can direct me to a free, easy to use capture program so I can make some video for it! Continue reading 'Using the Calculator to Compare Gear'

Calculator, Round 2

Time to put a little more work into that Excel calculator of mine! Today, I've whipped up two new, interconnected toys. First, I've condensed all of the stat conversions a feral druid would ever want into one table, giving both base conversion values, and overal values based on talents and buffs. In addition to this, I've taken those values and used them to build a Gear Comparison calculator. Simply plug in how your stats (Base stats, combat ratings) will change with a particular change of gear/enchants/gems, and out pops how the values you really care about (Health pool, chance to dodge, Attack Power) will be affected!

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To play around with my new toys, simply click on the Threat Calculator link on the sidebar. Eventually, I'll be renaming the calculator itself, as I plan to continue to expand it. I also plan to make it more intuitive to use, probably by creating pages for full talent specs and buff selection, but that will be for another day.

"Screenshots:"

Here we have the stat conversions table. Simply multiply a stat by the conversion value for the effect you're looking at to see how much that stat is really helping you. The overall multiplier column currently takes into consideration Survival of the Fittest, Heart of the Wild, Thick Hide, and if applicable Tauren health bonus and Blessing of Kings. The base multiplier, in turn, only considers what form you're in, and assumes you're unbuffed.



And here we have the gear comparison tool. Simply plug in the differences between the base stats of any two pieces, and see how changing between those two items will change your overall stats in the appropriate form. The comparison used for the example here is going from the Heavy Clefthoof Chest (Socketed with 12 stam and 6 stam, 4 defense gems) to T4 (Socketed with a 12 stam, a 6 stam/4 agi, and a 4 defense/6 stam). It tells me that I lose about 153 health and .47% crit reduction, but get over 1.75% additional avoidance, nearly 1,000 more armor, and a bunch of threat stats (including over 1/4% hit, which I forgot to factor in in this shot).

So, like before, I plan to make use of this new toy. Tomorrow, I'm going to look more closely at this particular chest upgrade, and then switch over to something you may or may not have heard about: upgraded Alchemist's Stones! Continue reading 'Calculator, Round 2'

What is a Hybrid; or, Why its called Living Shard of the Wildheart

First off, just let me say this: I am in FULL support of my healing brethren in their fight against the Lifebloom nerf. Having gone through similar PvP-induced raid nerfs in the 2.0.10 patch nearly a year ago, I hope that Blizzard wakes up and finds some way to prevent this nerf from totally screwing over the raiders (Like they did for feral tanks by giving Mangle a threat multiplier, and making lacerate generate threat against bleed-immune mobs). However, I feel there is a TON of coverage of the LB nerf from Resto4Life and the rest of the druid blogging community, so I'm going to leave the actual discussion about it to them. Keep on fighting the good fight!

Instead, what I want to talk about today, at least initially, is the concept of a hybrid, and how it fits (or doesn't fit) with the druid class. At first look, druids are THE hybrid class of the game. We're the only class that can perform all 4 of the primary roles found in the game: Tanking, Healing, Melee DPS, and Ranged DPS. By comparison, warriors can tank and do melee DPS, priests can heal and do ranged DPS, Paladins can tank, do melee DPS, and heal, and shamans can heal, do melee DPS, and do ranged DPS. However, while these classes, to varying degrees, are in fact hybrids, the individual MEMBERS of these classes, I contend, are not. In my opinion, to consider a character hybrid, they have to be equally good in multiple roles at the same time, something that no class can do without at least a change of gear, and for most roles a change of spec, as well.

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Ask any responsible hybrid class player how many sets of gear they have, and they will have at least 2 full sets of gear: A tanking or healing set, and a DPS set of some sort (for grinding if nothing else). If they only have one set of gear, they're either not playing their class to the fullest, or they're still levelling up (and even when levelling, many hybrids carry multiple gear sets for instance running). I personally have three primary gear sets that I carry with me at all times: my tanking gear, my cat DPS gear (which only shares a few pieces with the tanking gear, namely my T4 gear), and my healing gear. I also maintain a set of caster DPS gear, and have plenty of other gear for use on specific encounters (Resist gear, various trinkets, high stam set, etcetera).

If I were a hybrid, I would have one set of gear, and that set would perform equally well in all roles. Sure, I could put together a set of gear that is, in fact, hybridized, but I would never wear it. When asked to a group, a hybrid is asked to perform a specific role, be it tanking, healing, or DPS, and that one role alone. Sure, there may be times when a hybrid is asked to perform a secondary role, such as offtanking or offhealing, but in those cases, they know of it beforehand, and change into gear appropriate for that new role. We dont wear hybrid sets, because while a hybrid set can let us perform better in roles we may fill 10% of the time, its at a huge cost to our effictiveness the other 90% of the time.

Now, look at any hybrid player's spec. See many 20/20/21 specs out there? Didn't think so. Thats because, while an individual class may be capable of performing multiple roles, since a person will only be filling one role at a time, it is best to complement that one role with a spec which matches the role. A priest who heals most of the time is going to avoid the shadow tree in favor of holy and discipline. A druid who sits back and casts balance spells isn't going to go into the feral tree, they're going to dig deep in balance, and then pick up some complimentary caster talents in the restoration tree to round it out. This is why when people are looking to fill out a group, they dont generally ask "Want to heal our Blood Furnace run?" Instead, they ask "Are you Resto?" or "Are you Holy?". Sure, its possible to have a feral druid or shadow priest heal your run well, but your odds are MUCH better if you get a tree or a holy priest, and with how bad PuGs usually are, group leaders want to stack the deck in their favor as much as possible.

Why do I bring all of this up? Well, this past saturday, Prophecy hit another milestone, killing off Hydross the Unstable in our third night of attempts. And sure enough, to commemorate our victory, Hydross dropped what is known to be one of the crappiest druid items known to man: the Living Root of the Wildheart. A trinket that at first looks like it might be a decent item, giving the wearer 4070 armor in bearform, 64 strength in cat form, 209 spell damage in moonkin form, 326 healing in tree form, or 175 damage/heal in caster form. But when you realize that those bonuses only happen when the trinket "procs", and that the trinket has a whopping 3% proc rate, you start to realize that in any one form, the thing is pretty crappy and unreliable.

The one useful role this trinket could potentially play is as a hybrid item. However, as we already mentioned, hybrid gear isn't really useful, as a druid will always wear the appropriate gear for every fight, and there really aren't many fights where druids will be asked to fill a hybrid role (Ironically, the Hydross fight itself was one such occasion, as I tanked adds until they were dead, then shifted to cat form to contribute more DPS on hydross until the next add phase . . . too bad the armor from the living root is completely useless against elemental damage, eh?). And even if you WERE to switch roles a lot, that would just increase the chance that the root would proc 4000 armor right before you switch to caster form to do some offhealing. . . wasting the proc entirely. And of course, procs at the end of a fight would be wasted as well.

Ultimately, there are some people who claim that the proc rate of the root, while small, keeps the buff up enough to make the trinket worthwhile to a single form. I find this hard to believe, though. For example, lets say you're a tree druid spamming lifebloom at every single cooldown. This means that for every cast of lifebloom, the buff will be up if any one of the last 9 casts procced the trinket (10 if you have absolute perfect timing, maybe). This gives your odds of the buff being up at just shy of 24% (not 27%, since double procs simply refresh the timer instead of giving you twice the buff). Averaging out the value of the trinket, then, we get .24*326 = 78.24 bonus healing on average.

Looking at the other forms, we get 50.16 spelldamage in moonkin form when spamming wrath and moonfire (Same math as lifebloom spam), 28.16 strength in cat form (assuming 3 auto attacks and one special every 3 seconds, 44% uptime), 1493 armor in bear form (6 autoattacks/mauls and 10 instant attacks every 15 seconds, 36.7% uptime), and 42 damage/healing in caster form for what its worth.

When you look at the averages here, the trinket looks *okay*, but remember, we're assuming absolute maximum effect, while reality will be much lower on 95% of situations. For example, I'd only get about half benefit from the armor in bearform due to the fact that I'm only about 2k armor shy of the cap, and if we're assuming an average 750 armor, I'll equip my Mark of Tyranny and get just over 1k armor all the time instead. And my hat goes off to the moonkin who can sustain wrath spam through an entire bossfight (though if you're that advanced, why are you using this trinket for 50 spelldamage, when Darkmoon Card: Crusade gives you 80, and Icon of the Silver Crescent gives you an average of 69, and the proc is useable as controlled burst damage. And that 78 bonus healing in tree form? Pick up an Essence of the Martyr for an average of 134 bonus healing (again, with a controllable proc for burst healing) from badges, and then tell me the 78 from the Root, under ideal circumstances mind you, is worthy of a T5 item drop.

So, the trinket is subpar for single role druids, and while it may be better for druids in hybrid gear, with a hybrid spec, pulling a hybrid role, those druids dont exist in raiding. On the plus side, the LRotWH isn't alone in the unwanted hybrid gear club, though it is the shining star of the group. See also: Idol of the Raven Goddess (Which, despite its hybrid nature, can actually be decent in a 25-man raid setting when a full group can make use of a druid's auras. . . alas, by that time you have better idols though), Dungeon Set 3 (Properly socketed, and with its 2-piece bonus, at least somewhat decent as stop-gap healing gear), and the old hybrid epics from heroic dungeons that were visually the rest of the Dungeon Set (oh, but blizzard changed those into good feral pieces, since nobody used the hybrid gear).

Oh, and I forgot to mention. . . I won the trinket. Not that I plan on using the thing, I just hate to see items from a guild first kill get sharded. In my bank it will sit, at least for now. Eventually, either the trinket will be made useful like what happened with the heroic epics, or, much more likely, I'll get sick of having no bank space and vendor it, making it infinitely more useful than it was by using the proceeds to buy a stack of Mad Alchemist Potions for myself. Continue reading 'What is a Hybrid; or, Why its called Living Shard of the Wildheart'

Macro Polo

Today's theme came about partly because of something I omitted in yesterday's post about catform DPS. When doing catform DPS on a boss, if you're fairly confident you wont need to be using it to heal, you can utilize your mana pool to get extra attacks for free by abusing Ferocity via "Powershifting". And since 2.3, powershifting has been easier than ever due to the change in how shapeshifting (and indeed all spells) are handled by the game, as a power-shift can be performed simply pressing a macro. . . one of the three I want to present to you all today. And so, with no further ado, my four favorite (only) feral macros of all time!

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1: The Hunnypot
#showtooltip Super Healing Potion/Mad Alchemist's Potion/Super Rejuvenation Potion
/cancelform
/use Master Healthstone
/use Charged Crystal Focus
/use Super Healing Potion/Mad Alchemist's Potion/Super Rejuvenation Potion
/cast Dire Bear Form

(Yes, the Hunnypot. Named so because Surania is actually my Fiancee in RP-terms, and she is absolutely obsessed with Winny the Pooh.)

What it does: Pretty much any feral druid who hasn't been living under a rock knows about this by now. Due to changes in how spellcasts are handled by the client and server in WoW, druids can now shift out of form, consume a potion and a healthstone, and shift back into form with a single press of a macro (and with little, if not absolutely zero, time spent out of form).

The first, second, and last lines are fairly straightforward. The first line is there so your macro will display your potion of choice as its icon, and more importantly, the cooldown on your potion. No point in hitting the macro if you're not actually able to use the potion/stone, it'll just shift you out and back in, with nothing to show for it but a reset rage bar and a thousand less mana. The second line takes you out of whatever form you're in (most likely bear, but can also take you out of catform if, for example, you accidentally pulled aggro while DPSing and need to both get your health back and switch to a more durable form until the tank re-establishes aggro). The last puts you into bear form. The second line will consume a warlock-provided healthstone, or if you dont have one, the third line will instead eat a self-farmed Charged Crystal Focus. The fourth line, in turn, chugs a health potion of choice, regardless if which, if any, stone was consumed.

A few notes: First, you have to be VERY careful when using this macro. NEVER hit this button unless you're sure you are not currently on global cooldown. GCD wont stop the bulk of this macro from going off, as shifting out of form and using potions/healthstones are independant from it, but shifting back INTO form triggers, and thus is prevented by, GCD. That means if you hit this macro immediately following a lacerate, maul, faerie fire, demo roar, growl, or anything of the sort, you will shift out, drink your potions, STAY out of form, and probably get smashed by Mr. Big Bad Baddie MacBadderson for much, much more than you just got from the potions. If you think you're going to need a health infusion at any moment, stop mangling and lacerating to avoid issues (you can, however, still use Maul, as its cooldown is your swing speed, not the GCD).

Second, I want to HIGHLY recommend that all tanks, bear or otherwise, spend some time and farm up a stack of Charged Crystal Foci. They aren't quite as good as even an untalented healthstone, but they're a heck of a lot better than nothing when you don't have a warlock, or already used your stone(s).

Third, I give you three choices of potion. Most of you will probably just use Super Healing Potions, as they're relatively easy to get, and usable by anybody. Mad Alchemist's Potions are for alchemists like me, since they're only usable by us. They also have the added benefits of slightly higher average healing, a free random buff (if not elixir buffed, IE tanking easy stuff), and they're dirt cheap to make, taking only a couple ragveil and a crystal vial to make. And the Rejuvenation potions have the same health return as mad alchemist potions (And PS: They give mana too, though you're not likely to need it if you're tanking), but also take much more expensive mats than healing potions, and the health difference is not all that much.


2: The Power Shift:
/cancelform
/cast Cat Form

What it does: This is basically a super-stripped down version of the potion macro. It simply shifts you out of whatever form you're in and puts you into cat form.

Sounds pretty useless, eh? Well, not if you know about powershifting. Basically, powershifting is a tactic used to convert your caster-form mana into cat-form energy via the Furor talent. To do that, you need to do 2 things:

1: Use up all, or nearly all of your energy.
2: Press this macro while NOT on the global cooldown.

Essentially, hitting your power shift macro will reset your energy to 40, no matter what it was at beforehand. If you had full energy, you just lost 60. But if you had, say, 3 energy, you just got 37 more. Note, however, that it is not so easy to do this effectively, because once again, we have to be off global cooldown in order to shift back into cat, and we need to be in cat before the next "tick" (which occurs every 2 seconds and gives us 20 energy). On the plus side, catform abilities only have a 1 second GCD, instead of the 1.5 seconds most other abilities have. However, that only leaves us a 1 second window to powershift, due to the order of events that have to occur (Energy remaining in parenthesis, note that this is assuming a perfect powershift, you wont often actually get to 0 energy):

(22) -> Energy Tick (42) -> Shred (0) -> Power Shift (40) -> Energy Tick (60)

Oh, and if you do a lot of powershifting, its highly advisable to pick up Natural Shapeshifter, as 3 points in NSS lets you powershift nearly 50% more before running out of mana. I'd also advise picking up a DruidBar or similar addon that tracks your mana while in forms, or you're likely to try to powershift when OoM, and end up stuck in caster form.


3: Stealth and Stuns:
/cast [modifier:shift]Prowl; [combat] Maim; [stealth] Pounce; Prowl

What it does: This is one of two macros I use to save space on my cat bar. I'm really proud of this one, because I managed to combine three skills into one button, and it automatically chooses the right skill for the current situation:

First, the macro checks to see if I'm in combat. If I am, prowl can't be cast, and pounce either can't be cast either, or would be useless to me (because being in combat means I either already got hit, thus am not stealthed any more, or means a boss put me in combat, and bosses are immune to stun). Therefore, the macro assumes I wanted to use maim to incapacitate my target.

If I'm not in combat, the macro then checks to see if I'm stealthed. If I am and am within range of my target, it assumes I wish to pounce upon whatever I'm targeting, stunning it so I can run behind the mob and shred it to death.

And finally, if I'm neither in combat nor in stealth, the macro knows that I WANT to be stealthed, and casts prowl for me.

Basically, the only time this macro doesn't do anything if I push it is when I'm in combat, but have no combo points. Handy, no?

EDIT: I improved on this macro today, but wanted to test it before I posted. . . I added the [modifier:shift] Prowl to the beginning. All this does is give me an easy way to DEstealth if I should so desire, just hold shift and press the button.


4: Backbiter:
/cast [stealth] Ravage; Shred

What it does: Well, after the conditionals of the last macro, I imagine you already know what this one will do. If I'm in stealth, I unleash my most devastating non-finishing move, Ravage. If I'm not in stealth, I instead shred. And of course, given the nature of these two abilities, this macro does NOTHING if I'm not behind my target. Which of course means I'm soloing, and the mob isn't stunned/incapacitated. Because a druid in catform will never be standing in front of a tanked mob, right? RIGHT? Right. Continue reading 'Macro Polo'

The Bear Goes . . . Mew?

Minigame time: While writing today's post, I noticed myself inadvertently using the names of my fellow druid bloggers quite a bit. So, lets make a game of it. Can you spot all 8 blog names? Highlight below for the "answer key":

Big Bear Butt, Druid Tank, Ferocious Bite, Of Teeth and Claws, Lost in the Grind, Natural Perfection, Omen of Clarity, Rawr Kitty Kitty

I'll be honest, when I think feral druid, I pretty much only think Bear Tank. Yes, I do know about catform DPS, and have done more reading about the proper care and feeding of cat form than I care to admit. But ultimately, I'm in it for the big bear butt. . . no, not like that! Sicko.

Despite this, I was realizing today just how silly it is for a feral druid blogger to have an entire post dedicated to the proper use of balance spells (albeit in the context of tanking), but nothing at all about catform DPS. And so, today I want to talk about cat DPS rotations, both for soloing and, more importantly, raid DPS. No PvP stuff here, mostly because I have about as much experience in mewkitty PvP as I do in Nuclear Reactor Control Theory.

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Soloing:

When roaming Azeroth/Draenor slaughtering the wildlife and denizens, catform is the obvious shapeshift of choice. Occasionally you might find a challenge worthy of using bear form (either large groups or tough elites), but in general the raw killing power of some well placed mangles and a ferocious bite is the order of business.

There are two general approaches used by most druids while soloing: Some, such as myself, prefer to go quickly from target to target, using brute force to kill a mob with a faerie fire pull, mangles to 5 combo points, and a FB to finish the job. Other druids, though, prefer a more elegant approach, utilizing our stunning abilities to keep a mob locked down for most of the fight. They use stealth, pounce a mob, mangle it for the debuff, shred until the stun wears off, and then maybe even use their combo points to maim the target to move into position for yet another shred.

While I personally believe brute force leads to an overall faster killing speed in most situations (and it also lets me use less of my brain, allowing me to just sit back and get lost in the grind), stunlocking does have the added advantage of minimizing the amount of time you have to spend out of form healing yourself, and on tougher mobs can even mean the difference between successfully soloing and spending some time dashing away or ghostwalking back to your corpse.

There really isn't that much to say about soloing. For the most part, you can just kill whatever you want, being careful to not let your health drop too low. There isn't much in the way of an optimal skill rotation when slaughtering nonelites, they dont live long enough to use our best finisher (rip), or to even bother with proper timing of trinket popping (pop it before you aggro, the mob should be dead by the time the buff wears off anyhow). If you get multiple mobs, you might need to shift to bear form and swipe spam the mobs to death, though if you can get away with staying in cat form, I find that doing so gives me more DPS, even if I have 3 or more mobs to swipe.

Bleed-Immune Bosses

Now, lets say you're invited to a group or raid and asked to go all rawr kitty kitty. Even here, most of the pulls are going to be more about spamming abilities until the mob is dead, and less about efficiency, because trash mobs die just as fast, if not faster than nonelite mobs you'd be farming in the wild. Feral Faerie Fire on the approach to a mob, mangle, then shred until the mob is dead. Using ferocious bite when the mob is near death is optional, I tend not to do it unless my energy happens to tick into the 35-40 range at just the right time.

On bosses, though, the name of the game changes. Now you have PLENTY of time to worry about efficient DPS rotations. This is also where your A-game is most important, as bosses are generally the real challenge of an instance/raid. First off, lets say we're fighting a bleed-immune mob like Mechanolord Capacitus or Nightbane. Ew. We have to do this without the assistance of our best finishing move: Rip. Instead, we have to use ferocious bite as our combo point finisher, or just not use a finisher at all.

The truth is, ferocious bite has one MAJOR flaw when it comes to raid DPS. . . it eats all of your remaining energy, converting any extra you had at a very inefficient rate to raw bonus damage. 2.7 damage per point of energy, to be exact. At first glance, this may sound like a good thing, letting you store up extra energy to unleash a bigger bite, but think of it this way: 42 energy adds 113.4 damage to the bite. 42 energy, assuming you have a good feral spec, could instead be used to fire off an extra shred. And if your shreds only do 113.4 damage, you need to file a bug report with blizzard, because I'm pretty sure I could do at least twice that NAKED.

So, when ferocious bite is your only combo point dump, you may not actually want to bother using FB at all. In general, you will only want to bite if you have 4-5 combo points, 35-41 energy, and no Omen of Clarity proc up. That way, you only waste up to 6 energy, while still cashing in your combo points for a rather nice chunk of damage. Note that I'm not providing any numbers here. I might come back to this topic on a later date, but for now, I'm simply quoting conventional wisdom. If you find its more effective to use FB every time you get 5 combo points, you just might be right. And if you find that FB is a waste of energy even when you hit 35 energy exactly, so be it. Just dont be saving up 100 energy just to get the big numbers on a bite, because your overall DPS will suffer for it.

So, how do we DPS against a bleed immune boss? Well, just like any other mob, we open with a faerie fire while approaching the target (or, if preferred, open with a ravage from stealth, but be careful about aggro!). If you have any use: trinkets equipped, pop one, Mangle, and then start shredding. Keep going with the shreds until you either have enough combo points (and the right amount of energy) for a Ferocious bite, after which you should resume shredding, or until the Mangle debuff wears off. When the mangle goes down, do NOT immediately reapply it. Instead, you now want to wait until you have 81+ energy saved up, and then you want to start the process all over again.

This bursty DPS style is used for one very specific reason: Shred is a much more efficient source of DPS than Mangle, but you never want to shred while the mob doesn't have the Mangle debuff due to the 30% bonus shred damage. By saving up your energy, you get to toss an extra shred or two after each mangle, thus upping your Shred:Mangle ratio, and your overall DPS in the process.

Of course, there is one other way to up your shred:mangle ratio, and that is by having another feral druid grouped with you. If you're grouped with another cat druid, they will probably keep up the mangle debuff for you (unless they're expecting you to do likewise), and thus you're likely to never have to apply a mangle at all. And if you have a druid tank, mangle should be up most of the time as well (realize, though, that two missed mangles in a row is not uncommon to a bear, and a double miss will cause the debuff to fall off). If you find yourself running with feral druids often, I would recommend downloading the DeMon (Debuff Monitor) mod and adding mangle to the list of debuffs it tracks. This can give you an easy way to make sure your shreds will be at full effect without having to stare at a million debuff icons.

Bleedable Bosses:

Ahh, this is where a feral druid can really put some hurt on a boss. When bosses can bleed, it allows druids to whip out our big gun, that weapon of natural perfection: Rip. No more do we need to worry about wasted rage from Ferocious Bite. Nor do we want to concern ourselves as much about maximizing our shred:mangle ratio (though its still better if you can use as few mangles as possible). Instead, we now want to focus on Rip uptime.

There are two important facts to know about Rip. First of all, the difference between a 4- and 5-point rip is next to nothing. And since we're now focused on keeping it up as much as possible, that means that its much better to rip with 4 combo points and get that bleed ticking sooner than it is to wait for a fifth combo point. And second, Rip takes 12 seconds to do its damage, ticking every few seconds. Mangle's debuff also lasts 12 seconds. Coincidence?

The attack sequence for rip is a bit different than it was for bite. We still only want to use shred when Mangle is up, obviously, but we also need to make sure Mangle stays up throughout the entire rip, and still want to reduce our casting of Mangle to a minimum. So here's what we do:

1: Keep faerie fire up at all times. Every little bit counts.

2: On the initial pull, mangle and shred up to 4 or 5 combo points (5 only if your fourth point is a crit). When you get there, STOP and autoattack.

3: This is the part you'll be repeating until the boss dies. Wait until you have 81+ energy. When you get there, rip, and as long as the rip hits, follow it up IMMEDIATELY with a mangle. Do NOT mangle and then rip, or the last tick of your rip will happen after the mangle debuff falls. The first tick of rip doesn't happen until 3 seconds in, so you have time. Once mangle lands, spam shred until you get back to 4 or 5 combo points, then let your energy regen again (note that this time spent waiting for energy is the perfect opportunity to refresh faerie fire). Repeat this cycle over and over.

4: Trinkets: You want to pop your trinkets just before you rip. If a trinket's effect lasts 10 seconds, you'll get a rip, mangle, and a few shreds in under the effect. Longer trinkets will apply to multiple rips, and even more shreds and mangles as well. Basically, you always want to save trinkets until you're just about to open up on another burst of DPS.

5: Too many, too fast: Sometimes, high crit and/or lucky crit strings, Omen of Clarity procs, and 2-piece T4 can cause you to hit full energy and 4-5 combo points before your rip is done ticking. When this happens, dont let that extra energy go to waste, throw an extra shred in there! The extra combo point will go to waste, but its better than missing out on "free" shreds! Actually, with regards to Omen of Clarity, you may find it best to always shred when you get a proc, even if you're already at full combo points, if only because it cant proc again while you have a free attack waiting for you.

And. . . thats pretty much it, at least in terms of attack rotations. Follow these simple rules, and you'll be well on your way to inducing a new world of hurt via a flurry of teeth and claws. Nothing too complex, but thats good, because I dont have time to practice complex DPS rotations, I have to work out my bear-pecs!


Continue reading 'The Bear Goes . . . Mew?'

Sum Bare R 4 MOONFARE?!?!

For most tanking classes, pulling is a rather straightforward affair. Warriors can fire their sidearm of choice at a group to get their attention. Paladins can channel the essence of Captain America/Xena, Warrior Princess. Both also have the option to run up to the mobs to initiate combat (albeit warriors get to do so a little bit faster). Druids, on the other hand, have options. Lots, and lots, and lots of options. Starfire, moonfire, wrath, hurricaine, faerie fire, feral charge, body pulling, tossing a sacrificial gnome, all are options in our arsenal (well, except for the gnome).

All of our options have distinct advantages and disadvantages, but alas, spellcasting is not the strong suit of most of our feral brethren. And while, generally speaking, pulling is only a small part of our job, its still part of what we do, so those of us obsessed enough with our class to, say, read blogs on a daily basis (let alone write them *cough*) should really know what we're doing when we decide to call down orbital lazer fire from space.

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First of all, lets meet our arsenal. Lets just go ahead and assume we have 0 bonus damage and 0% chance to crit, because thats basically what we should have in tanking gear:

Starfire: That would be the big laser with the long cast. Averages 588 damage for 370 mana. 3.5 second cast. 168 DPS, 1.59 DPM


Wrath: The big ball of nature's . . . well, wrath. Averages 405 damage for 255 mana. 2 second cast. 202.5 DPS, 1.59 DPM


Moonfire: The little lazer that burns for hours. . . or at least 12 seconds. With DoT, averages 931 damage for 495 mana. 1.5 second global cooldown, instant cast. 620.7 Damage Per Second of effective cast time, 1.88 DPM.


Hurricane: Why hit one when you can hit 'em all? 206 DPS for 10 seconds on all mobs under it. 1905 mana.


Faerie Fire (Feral): Proof that druids now how to cast fire spells. Or not. Free cast in forms, generates just enough threat to get the attention of your enemies.


One of the first things you might notice is that, without any spelldamage gear, Wrath is just as efficient as, and has higher DPS than, Starfire. Starfire has the advantage of being a bigger single hit, though, something that will come into play later, and make Starfire a favorite choice of this bear.

Second, Moonfire is actually more efficient, and has much higher DPS, than either of our straight nukes. Note, however, that this is only true if you use moonfire only once per target. Multiple casts on the same target wont stack the DoT portion, which is 2/3 of the actual damage.

Third, hurricane kicks the crap out of everything else on pulls of 3 or more, though its damage is more spread out. It does, however, eat a signifigant chunk of your mana, especially if coupled with barkskin.

Now that we've met the players, lets look at one of the game rules that you may know about, but might not have considered when it comes to pulling groups to your furry behind: The Global Cooldown *cue ominous sound effects*. For those who don't know, the GCD is a game mechanic which makes it impossible to start casting a spell if you have started another spell within the last 1.5 seconds (or 1 second for energy users). This is why spamming your moonfire key wont bring down an endless rain of lasers, and why resto druids don't maintain triple-stack lifeblooms on 25 people at a time.

Now, you may have noticed one tricky fact about the GCD. Unlike the five-second rule for mana regeneration (whose namesake 5 second timer starts counting whenever a spellcast is completed), the global cooldown timer starts ticking the moment you START casting. Thats why it tends to really only be noticable when casting instant spells, such as moonfire or lifebloom, and not on casted spells like Starfire or Wrath (save for balance-specced druids and their occasional 1-second Wrath cast).

Why is the GCD stuff important? Well, at first glance, it may look like Starfire and Wrath are pretty pointless to use if you only want to get a little threat on as many mobs as possible. Starfire looks especially worthless here, until you consider the cooldown. Lets say we open our pull sequence with a moonfire, since its the highest DPS/DPM spell in our arsenal. Great, you've effectively applied about 931 damage/threat to a target with your pull. However, you have also just engaged the global cooldown, and must wait 1.5 seconds before performing another action, such as firing another moonfire or shifting to bear form. If you instead open with a Starfire, the global cooldown expires 2 seconds BEFORE that initial burst of aggro, meaning the moment Starfire's 588 damage/threat goes off, alerting the mobs to your presence, you're able to follow it up with another spell immediately (possibly even that same moonfire you would have pulled with before this paragraph). This is, as far as I'm concerned, the best (and only) way to use Starfire as a bear tank, the initial, free (since really, mana doesn't matter as long as we have enough to shift) shot.

Small Group Pulls:

So, lets say you come to the pull just after the first boss in Sethekk Halls: 2 melee mobs. Not really worth busting out hurricane here, best to stick with the single-target damage. How do we want to pull them? Well, lets assume that once our mobs are pulled, we have 3.5 seconds before they're in our face smacking us on the head. Lets also assume we want the bulk of the threat on our primary kill target, because our DPSers have a tendency to jump the gun a bit, especially after seeing a bunch of lasers rain down on the mobs' heads. Standing at max range, we target the primary mob and begin to cast Starfire. Then, with starfire still casting, we switch targets to the secondary mob, and hover our mouse over the primary mob. The moment starfire casts (0 seconds after the pull starts), we fire off a moonfire (which immediately fires, since the GCD expired two seconds ago) on our secondary target, as that was the mob we had targeted, and then immediately click on the primary target again to regain focus. As soon as the global cooldown from that cast expires (1.5 seconds after the pull starts), we moonfire again, this time hitting our primary target. And when THAT cooldown expires (3.0 seconds after the pull starts), we shift to bear form to prepare for taking our first hit 0.5 seconds later. By pulling in this way, we have built up over 1500 initial threat on our primary target (though it will be another 10 seconds before the full effect of the moonfire has been felt) and nearly 1000 threat on our secondary target (again, once moonfire takes full effect).

Two things to note here: While waiting for global cooldowns, you can extend the time it takes for your foes to reach you by either backing up, or turning and strafing/running away from them. I usually just back up to maintain visual on the mobs. Second, even though you're building up some nice initial threat, DPS can NOT immediately lay into the mobs. It would not be hard at all for someone to out-aggro you by the time the mobs got there, especially in your caster-stat-free gear. This is merely an extra buffer for your DPSers to make them safer to go all out once you get a mangle and some swipes into the mobs, and some leeway for the healer to keep you up should your initial attacks all miss.

Now, lets say you had a little more time than that to build threat. This is a rare occasion where wrath might be a good pulling option. Lets say you now have 4 seconds, and can extend that time to 5.5 by backing up during global cooldowns on 2 moonfires (obviously we're assuming a good bit of foreknowledge regarding the particular mobs here). If you're feeling daring, and really want to build some threat on your primary target (or just want to put up some better numbers on the damage meter), try this on for size: Starfire on the primary target to open. When the starfire goes off (0s), start casting a wrath on it, and switch to the secondary target. When the wrath goes off (2s), starfire, switch targets back to the primary target, and start backing away. When the global cooldown is up (3.5s), moonfire again, this time hitting the primary target with it, and keep backing up. Once you're out of that GCD (5s), its time to shift to bear and lay into them both when they reach you half a second later. Same amount of threat on your secondary target, but another 400 threat and damage on your primary.

Large Group Pulls:

Now that we've absolutely obliterated that pull, lets move a bit deeper into the instance. Eventually, you go upstairs, kill off a wind serpent and 2 guards, and are then faced with the biggest pull of the instance: 10 hawks. Now, I know as well as the next guy that these guys are a joke, but lets pretend this is serious business, and we absolutely need to maintain aggro on all ten while not getting hit by any of them outside of bear form. Now, your first reaction to this pull is probably to pull out hurricane, center it over the birds, and fire. However, we want to build maximum threat here, so we're going to do this a little differently. First of all, we're going to target the closest bird and get to maximum starfire range. Then, we're going to start casting starfire, since we already noted that starfire is essentially a freebie when looking at a max-threat pull. Then, while starfire is casting, we are going to click hurricane and get it targeted (yes, you can be targeting it while another spell is casting, aren't you glad starfire takes so long now?). But we're not going to try to center the hurricane over the mobs. Instead, we want to drop it closer to us, hitting the area in between ourself and our targets.

Why target hurricane like this? Well, the answer is simple. If you center it over your targets, those targets only have to pass through part of the hurricane to get to you. If you drop it in between you and them, however, they have to travel the full width of the spell to approach you, and thus spend much more time getting bolts dropped on their heads. More bolts = more threat. Just make sure there is a little distance between you and the near edge of the hurricane so you have a chance to switch to bear form before the mobs start hitting you.

Ok, now, lets get real here. Those birds are a joke, and as long as they get heals, a mage could "tank" them with little problem. So, instead of worrying about getting hit, lets just do as much damage as we can to them. This time, we'll still start with a starfire, but instead of targeting hurricane while its casting, we get ready to run toward them. Once starfire goes off, cast barkskin, and run toward the group. Then, once you reach the mobs, drop that hurricane right at your feet and enjoy the rain of numbers. Just be sure to watch your health, in case the healer cant keep up with the damage you're taking. Bear tank DPS at its finest, my friends.

At this point, I've shared with you what I consider the major tricks a druid can use to build maximum threat on a pull: Always start with a Starfire (unless you cant due to aggro range or arcane immunity). When building threat on multiple enemies, either hit as many of them as possible with moonfire, or drop a hurricane where they have to walk through the whole thing before getting to you. If you need to build as much threat as possible on a single mob before it gets to you, spam wrath, and use moonfire as your last spell before going to bear (takes less time than the wrath, and allows you to back away while waiting for GCD). Additionally, you can do things such as precasting HoTs on yourself, though this will really only give your healer a little more time before they have to start healing you, especially since HoTs cast outside of combat apparently generate no threat (at least thats what I hear, I have never actually tested this, maybe I'll do that tonight).

But, there's one more spell you can pull with. . . Faerie Fire. Specifically Feral Faerie Fire. Practically no threat, but it will bring the mobs to you. And frankly, its what I use for 90% or more of the pulls I make. While FFF isn't going to build you any sort of threat cushion, it has some great advantages. First of all, theres no risk of a sudden lagspike leaving you stuck in caster form with mobs beating on you. Second, once the mob you hit with it gets to you, you can open up with a slightly stronger Maul/Mangle combo because of the mob's reduced armor. Third, if you have a lot of rage built up from the previous pull, you dont have to lose it by shifting out of form. And fourth . . .

You really shouldn't need the extra threat from all those silly balance spells in the first place. Yes, thats right, while optimizing your pull sequence is a fun little exercize in theorycraft, it is also by and large unnecessary, despite what I said about knowing how to call down the lazers at the start of this post.

There are only two reasons to seriously use your non-FFF spells for pulling in general: Polymorph/Seduce, and huge pulls like those 10 birds, or the big pulls in Shattered Halls. The former case, the cast time on Starfire gives your mage/warlock the chance to coordinate with you on the pull. I shed a tear of joy when a mage polymorphs his target a split second after my starfire goes off, because I know I wont have to worry about that sheep straying anywhere near my swipe killzone. And my healers shed a tear of joy when I hit a 7-mob pull with 3 ticks of Hurricane, because they know that 600x7=4,200 damage I just did to the mobs means their first heal on me isn't going to send 4-6 mobs barreling down on them.

Oh, and there is one other reason to put effort into your pulls. If you're like me, and have run pretty much every heroic a dozen times, and at least that many karazhan clears, unloading a bunch of flashy spells into mobs on a pull can be a way to keep from getting bored. Heck, I once moonfired all 6 mobs of a pull while bringing them all back to the second boss' room in heroic Shattered halls for fun (and because I thought the hunter that was with me might be amused by the fact a druid tank was jump-shotting with moonfire in a heroic. Jumpshots: they're not just for hunters any more!) Continue reading 'Sum Bare R 4 MOONFARE?!?!'