Last night, I finally deactivated our WoW accounts.  I felt a little bad about turning off the subscriptions, but we’ve got way too many good friends who we only ever get to see in the virtual for this to be a permanent state of affairs.  In all likelihood, we’ll take a break to get real life stuff sorted out and dealt with then come back around the time that Cataclysm releases.

So thank you for all the readers that visited.  I also owe a big thank you to several Azerothian bloggers who added me onto their blogrolls and directed readers to this site.  I’ll see you all again when our “real” lives are calm enough for more WoWing. =)

– Luxul

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/underdev/equipmentpotency.xml

Heroic Entitlement, via World of Matticus.

So in lieu of a post, I’m going to link to a few blog posts I’ve found useful or interesting lately.  Please forgive me.  This site’s regularly scheduled rambling will resume once the dust has settled. :)

• Cynwise, on upcoming Battleground Changes
• Feral Aggression had a good, low-spoiler post about Downing the Lich King
• Ever wanted to play a DK Tank?  Psynister is doing it right now, and is blogging as he goes.
• For all you boomkin, Lissanna over at Restokin delves into concerns about moonkin.
• Big Bear Butt waxes philosophical about player styles, and I’m linking it because it’s nice to see that I’m not the only one thinking about it. :)

Okay, that’s all for now.  If you’ve seen another post recently that helped you or made you think, please share it in the comments.

Here’s Luxul’s Updated Build.  The changes are pretty simple.

• Feral: Removed King of the Jungle and Improved Mangle
• Restoration: Added Natural Shapeshifter and Master Shapeshifter

Overall, my DPS has gone up by about 8%, for a total increase of about 200 DPS.  That’s nothing to sneeze at, but it’s certainly not a huge gain.

That’s actually a rather surprising result, since the only reason I made this change was for the 4% damage buff that Master Shapeshifter gives while in bear form.  Honestly, though, I’ve never been all that great with statistical math, so maybe this is a totally reasonable increase in DPS after the 4% per-hit increase is averaged out over hits-per-second.

Now as for the why of the change:

• King of the Jungle: Since I’m hardly ever in cat form, the instant energy gain from Tiger’s Fury was wasted.  The extra damage from Enrage is nice, but 10% for 10 seconds every minute averages out to around 2% overall increased damage if you pop Enrage every time it’s available.  Master Shapeshifter gives twice the gain, and you don’t have to remember to use it.
• Improved Mangle: I don’t have any math to back it up this time, I just felt like a 1.5 second cooldown reduction wasn’t worth the three talent points I was spending here.  *shrugs*  Sorry, I don’t always have a logical justification for what I do. =)
• Natural Shapeshifter: Just a gateway for…
• Master Shapeshifter: This was the goal of the change.  I wanted the extra 4% damage on all physical attacks.  I had a gut feeling that it would give better overall damage output than the situational bonuses from the talents I was dropping, and the numbers seem to be bearing out that feeling.

I’m curious to hear if anyone out there has had experiences with this build.  Drop a comment in the tray and let’s talk about it. :)

Gear Score: What Is It?

There are a couple of answers to that question.  There’s the concept of a gear score, with websites and AddOns that will calculate it, and there’s also the AddOn called GearScore.  We’re going to focus on the concept.

Basically, the thought runs like this:  At the high end of the game, your gear contributes a sizable majority of your character’s effectiveness in combat.  All other things being equal, a level 80 character wearing all purples is going to out perform a level 80 character of the same class and talent spec who is wearing all blues.  So, why not give a numeric value to the gear you’re wearing?  Gear score addons and websites use various methods to calculate an overall score based on your gear’s item level, stat modifiers, enchantments, etc.

What Is It Good For?

One great example of a positive use for gear scoring is the WoW Heroes site.  (You can find a link in the Character Tools sidebar.)  It examines your gear, then gives you a color-coded bar telling you roughly how challenging you’re likely to find a given raid instance, as well as which ones will have the best gear upgrades.  Age of the Phoenix uses this site sometimes when we’re planning our raids, since we’ve found that a group of people who haven’t been in a given raid before will perform quite a bit better if the instance in question is given a green or yellow coding by WoW Heroes.

The Good, the Bad, and the Downright Stupid

Prior to having gear score addons invade Shadow Council, I saw my wife’s prot-specced paladin flat-out rejected from a group due to low hit points.  Never mind that she had hell’s own defense and armor values; the fact that she “only” had 25,000 hit points unbuffed disqualified her from running with this group on their assault on Naxx-10.  Our guild had run Naxx-10 several times in the past few weeks with her character main-tanking, so she had every right to be indignant about the rejection.  She’s a much better person than I am, however, so she just shrugged and moved on to another group who was happy to find a tank.

Simple hit-point bias for tanks was only the beginning, though.  I’ve now seen several members of my guild with perfectly acceptable HP or Mana pools who have performed more than adequately on guild runs turned down for a group running the very same instance due to a low gear score.  On the surface I can understand the utility of the mod, but once you really start to think about it, there are a couple of glaring problems.

First of all, nobody can agree on how to calculate a gear score.  Ask three different websites what your gear score is, and you’ll get three different answers.  I’ve seen in-game mods give a player a rating of 4200, while WoW Heroes says that someone in the green for everything up to and including ICC-25 still hasn’t broken 3000.  A good example of this was a dungeon finder run through Drak’Tharon Keep a few weeks ago.  A mage in the group started off the instance by complaining that the main tank (me) didn’t have any bonus to defense.  To his credit, he quickly realized I was a druid and said “nevermind”, but before the first boss made a very interesting comment.  ”It’s not good for party morale to ask a 3500 GS mage if he needs to wait for mana”.  Throughout the rest of the fight, he kept acting like god’s gift to mages while barely breaking 3000 DPS.  Considering that I routinely run with mages that hit the 4.5K mark, I decided to go look him up on WoW Heroes after the fight.  The score reported to me?  2100.  Only 50 points beyond my own, even though he was scoffing at everyone else’s scores throughout the dungeon.  I wish I knew what add-on he was using so I could see exactly how big of a gap it looked like to him.

Secondly, gear score isn’t an indication of your ability to play your character.  While waiting for a group to go kill the Apothecaries in SFK Sunday, I saw a bored alliance druid running around.  We passed a couple of taunts, then ended up in a duel.  He was quick, confident, and seemed to know what he was doing with his abilities.  It was a hell of a fight, but I won with about 8% of my health remaining.  We cheered each other, waved, and moved on when our respective groups arrived.  Later, while thinking about my next blog post, I decided to go check him out on WoW Heroes.  I just about dropped my teeth.  This druid was decked out in ICC drops that I’d never even heard of, much less seen, and rated nearly 800 points my superior by the website.  Using gear score logic I shouldn’t have stood a chance, yet I was the one standing at the end.

Combine these two problems, and you end up with a tool that can be useful for very specific things, but becomes totally pointless when you try to apply it in broad strokes.  If you’re running pick-up-groups through heroic 5-man instances, do yourself a favor and ignore the gear.  Sit back and have fun, and hope you’ll meet some other good players who are enjoyable to run with.  If you’re forming a group for a pre-ICC 10- or 25-man raid, it’s probably better to rely on word of mouth first, and gearscore only in the case of total unknowns.  Do what Age of the Phoenix and countless other guilds do; maintain a blacklist.  If you run with someone who isn’t worth the electrons carrying their commands to the WoW servers, mark them on the list and deny them from future runs.  At the same time, form an A-list of puggers who wow everyone so you’ve got a pool to draw from if you’re short on guild mates.  Gear score addons can never replace the first-hand knowledge of how someone plays their character.  And lastly, the one thing I’ve seen GS used for too many times; guild requirements.  For the love of Saron, folks, if you’re letting people into the guild based entirely on how well they’re geared, you’re just asking for problems in the long run.  Sure, they might be able to help with a nasty instance, but do they mesh with the other people they’ll be interacting with?  Are they going to be interested in helping the guild community, or only in going on runs to improve their own gear?  Again, things that no GS addon can answer for you.

As always, though, your mileage may vary.  In my experience, gear generally isn’t that important to how well someone does in pick-up instances.  In the rare few places where gear is a deciding factor, I’d still rather have someone in the party who I know is good at their job than a random stranger wearing armor he pried off the Lich King’s corpse.

What does it mean?

When someone refers to their rotation, they’re talking about the order in which they use their character’s abilities.  Depending on their role in the group, the rotation will be set up to either achieve maximum threat, maximum burst damage (that is, “I need a lot of damage NOW, and I don’t care if I can maintain it”), maximum sustained damage (or “I have no idea how long this fight will last, so I’m going to pace myself”), maximum burst healing (“Holy crap the tank’s almost dead!”), or maximum sustained healing (“I’ll top you off, and you, and you, and you…”).

Rotation Precedence

That being said, it’s important to note that your rotation isn’t a fixed sequence of keypresses.  If that was the case, we’d just macro the optimal rotation and sit back and watch the fight.  Even in ideal circumstances, where there is only one mob with no adds, your next ability choice depends on several factors.  Bears actually have it pretty easy compared to some of the other tanking classes, from what I’ve seen, but it’s very important to keep up with the following:

• Your target’s debuffs
• Your current rage
• Your ability’s cooldowns
• Self-cast buffs on yourself
• Your current health
• The amount of threat you have on the target
• Whether or not one of your party members has pulled aggro

You don’t have to know absolutely everything about each of these factors at all times, but you need to get in the habit of checking each of them regularly.  Addons like NeedToKnow and Omen Threat Meter will help you keep track of some of it.  NeedToKnow provides a configurable list of timer bars that can track buffs and debuffs on yourself, your target, or your target’s target.  Omen gives a continually-updated display of your target’s threat table, showing who’s currently top on their hate list (hopefully you), and how quickly the DPS is catching up to you.

Our Rotation

For a bear tank, your rotation is going to be a sustained DPS rotation.  We have very few ways to generate pure threat, but several of our bear abilities (Mangle, Faerie Fire, Lacerate) generate truly grotesque amounts of threat.  Your decision list will look something like this:

1. Maul as often as possible.  Unless you’re low on rage, you should never take a melee swing that isn’t a Maul attack.
2. If the mob isn’t bleeding, Lacerate.
3. If the mob is bleeding, and Mangle is off cooldown, Mangle.
4. If Mangle isn’t off cooldown, but Faerie Fire is, cast Faerie Fire.
5. If FF and Mangle are both on cooldown, and you’re just fighting the one mob, and he’s got fewer than five stacks of Lacerate, Lacerate again.
6. If FF and Mangle are on CD, and your buddy has five stacks of Lacerate, swipe.

Okay now; why?

Maul is your primary damage dealing ability.  It doesn’t cost much rage and can hit every time you take a melee swing.  If you use Glyph of Maul (I’ll do a glyph post later), Maul will also help you with holding aggro on multiple mobs, since it will randomly choose a second target to hit every time you use it.

Bleed effects are a must to sustain damage and therefore generate more threat, due to our wonderful Rend and Tear talent.  At max ranks, RnT gives us a 25% damage boost to Maul on a bleeding target.  Therefore, if nobody else is using bleed effects, or you don’t have something else to spend the rage on, Lacerate becomes your best buddy.  As an additional bonus, Lacerate generates an inordinate amount of threat for the amount of damage it deals.

Mangle should be used as often as possible due to the 30% increase to bleed damage debuff it applies.  That will increase the amount of damage dealt to your target by anyone using bleed effects.  In addition, if you read the Maul ability, it points out that effects that increase bleed damage increase your Maul damage, meaning that combining Mangle with RnT gives you a 55% damage boost to your main attack power.  Double-dipping for the win! :)

Faerie Fire is mostly a filler ability, since it deals a fairly small amount of damage, but the bear version of the spell also generates extra threat.  Since it’s a free cast, that’s an easy win.  Just don’t use FF at the expense of any of your other abilities!  An extra stack of Lacerate or an additional use of Mangle will almost always be more effective in the long haul.

Swipe is a filler ability that mainly exists to keep your damage output high while other things are on cooldown.  It’s very useful for maintaining aggro in a large group of creatures, however, and since the damage it deals scales up with your attack power, it can do some serious damage when you’re in good gear.

One additional note about Swipe:  If you’re in a large group of enemies, it’s typically better to use Swipe instead of Faerie Fire, and only cast FF if you’re low on rage.

So that’s the bear tank rotation, hopefully explained a little more thoroughly than elsewhere on the web.  The main thing to remember is that your “optimal rotation” is only optimal in, well, optimal circumstances.  For example, in a multiple target fight, you’ll probably end up Swiping more, and I tend to cycle through the targets to add Lacerate stacks.  Also, if you’ve had a bad pull or one of your DPS members is constantly pulling aggro, you should switch things up to try and get the encounter under control as quickly as possible.  Unfortunately, exactly how to do that varies with the situation, and isn’t something that can be summed up in a blog post.  Experience is the best teacher for that.*

Please feel free to leave comments if you have any specific circumstances where you found a good use of your abilities, or if you have an alternate viewpoint on any of the tips I’ve given.  Happy gaming!

– Luxul

* – Actually, the very best teacher for that is to level your tank from 60-75 with a Ret paladin and an Unholy DK who have good gear, an excellent grasp of their abilities, and absolutely zero sense of self preservation.  The massive pulls, random burst damage to random targets in the pull, and general mayhem is good preparation for heroics and raiding.  Yes, I know this from personal experience, and the perpetrators know who they are, even if I refrain from naming them.  I still run randoms with these guys, and the rules to their favorite group-time game are, “If I pull aggro from the tank and die, I win!”. ;)

First of all, here’s Luxul’s Build.  Now, here’s why I spent the points I spent.

[UPDATE: I've respecced, pulling points out of Improved Mangle and King of the Jungle and moving them to Natural Shapeshifter and Master Shapeshifter.  I'll let you know how it goes in a later post.]

Restoration Tree

This is the tree I have the most doubts about.  I’m actually considering an alternate build at the moment, so I’ll probably be updating this post later with the results.

• Improved Mark of the Wild : This is mostly useful if you’re soloing or running heroics, since any raid group is very likely to have a boomkin or tree with this talent.  However, the two points go toward filling out the first tier of the tree, and they’re pretty much completely useless in either of the other two talents, so as long as you have any points in Resto, you might as well have IMoW.   [EDIT: As Paperclip pointed out in the comments, I forgot to mention that IMoW also makes Mark of the Wild convey a 2% bonus to your total stats, which is another reason to keep two points in this talent instead of moving it somewhere else. ]
• Furor : This talent is mostly filler so we can get further in the tree.  The 60% chance for extra rage is nice, since it’ll occasionally give you a free charge immediately after a shift, but it’s not enough to rely on.  If I need to charge into a pull, I’ll typically use Enrage to fuel Feral Charge, rather than shifting out and back to bear in the hopes of a Furor proc.  Also, when you’re clearing the trash in an instance, leftover rage from the previous pull is typically going to be more than the measly 10 you’d get from this talent.
• Naturalist : Now here’s a worthwhile talent.  10% physical damage bonus across the board.  I don’t think I even need to justify that. :)  Just remember: more damage = more threat = you’re doing your job better.
• Omen of Clarity : This is the one I’m on the fence about right now.  When I was doing solo questing and heroics, the clearcasting proc was useful to keep my damage output high.  In a raid, however, I’ve typically got so much stuff beating on me that it’s physically impossible to spend all of my rage.  I’ve got a second build I want to try out soon, so I’ll update this post when I’ve managed to gather some more data.  Bottom line: If you’re leveling, this can be a lifesaver due to free Healing Touch or Maul casts, but its utility is very much questionable after you hit end-game content.

Feral Tree

• Ferocity : A 5 rage cost reduction may not seem like a lot on the face of it, but Maul, Mangle and Swipe are the three skills bear tanks rely on the most.  Over the course of a single encounter, you’re going to be pounding those buttons a LOT, and all those 5 point savings really add up.  But, even if you’re not sold on that, the alternative of Feral Aggression is completely useless for a tank.  Demoralizing Roar is something we should drop purely for a threat boost; other classes are better equipped to decrease the enemy’s attack power.
• Feral Instinct and Savage Fury : These talents are pure damage buffs.  As a tank, more damage is always good.  Feral Instinct is one some people will argue about, claiming that tanks don’t need the AoE damage from Swipe.  Those people have’t ever played a bear tank.  Swipe is the single most useful ability you’ll have to gain threat on a group of adds.  (We’ll talk about all of that in a later post.)
• Thick Hide : 10% increased armor contribution from cloth and leather.  At the end-game, this is going to be counting for as much armor as some mid-range shields.  We’re mainly focused around dodge, but an extra 2% damage reduction from armor can’t hurt, right? :)
• Feral Swiftness : Bear tanks focus more on dodging attacks than reducing the damage from a hit, so the extra 4% dodge chance from this talent is priceless.
• Survival Instincts : This talent can be a bit tricky to use well, but it can really save your bacon if things go wrong during a fight.  Even a good healer can be silenced or stunned at a bad time, and popping SI will give you that extra buffer you need to survive until they can stitch you back together.
• Sharpened Claws : The extra critical strike chance is good enough on its own, but this talent also opens the way for Primal Fury.  Having a high crit chance and Primal Fury is one of the best ways to ensure you never run out of rage during a fight, even if you’re not being mobbed by attackers.
• Predatory Strikes : An increase to your attack power means you’ll be generating more threat, which is our main function in a fight.  Pretty straight forward. :)
• Primal Precision : This is the first talent that I would consider really optional.  Currently, Luxul doesn’t have a lot of hit rating on his weapons, so this talent makes up for that deficit.  If, however, you’re hit-capped just from your gear, there’s a lot to be said for dropping this talent and taking Brutal Impact instead.
• Feral Charge : Very useful during fights that do knockback, or when adds come in from behind the party to pick on the squishies.  One of my favorite things about being a bear tank is when a boss knocks me through the air, and I can turn around and close the distance again before I even hit the ground.  Plus, there’s a really neat trick you can do with it once you’ve got Flight Form.  It’s what gives this blog its name, and I’ll have a post about it eventually. :)
• Natural Reaction : Another buff to your dodge rating.  As previously stated, that’s a bear’s bread and butter defense skill.  In addition, this talent helps you fuel your attacks by sidestepping incoming damage, so it’s a non-negotiable must-have.
• Heart of the Wild : The intellect bonus is nice, but the real tasty morsel is the 10% buff to stamina when you’re in bear form.  For Luxul, currently, this works out to an additional 2000 hit points.  Hardly a number to sneeze at.
• Survival of the Fittest : Another absolute must-have for bears.  At level 80, a raid or heroic boss has around a 5.5% chance of critically hitting you.  Most tanking classes have to stack defense until they hit the defense cap (around an extra 150 points of defense) in order to ensure bosses don’t deal critical strikes.  SotF replaces that for druids, immediately dropping us into the uncrittable range required for any raid tank and leaving us free to stack other stat bonuses from gear.
• Leader of the Pack, Improved Leader of the Pack, Protector of the Pack : Between these three talents, you’ll gain 5% chance to critically hit, a 6% bonus to attack power, 12% reduction of all incoming damage, and a chance to heal yourself for 4% of your total health each time you critically strike.  In addition, the crit bonus and healing chance apply to all raid members within 45 yards.  Do I really need to make a case for these talents? :)
• Infected Wounds : The main benefit of this talent comes from the 20% reduction in enemy attack speed.  This effectively works out to an increase in your damage reduction, since the baddie won’t be beating on you as much.  It’s not strictly necessary for a tanking build, but your healers will thank you in the long run.
• King of the Jungle : Honestly, I picked this up as filler.  The 10% bonus damage will generally outweigh the 27% reduction in armor — after all, you’re trying to dodge more than you soak — but I try to save enrage for the rare cases where I need extra rage for generating threat.  This is a complicated one, and I’m still on the fence about it.
• Mangle and Improved Mangle : This is another non-negotiable purchase for bears.  Mangle is one of our biggest threat generators, and when combined with Berserk, it becomes a massive boost to our AoE threat generation.
• Rend and Tear : Your primary skill rotation while fighting will include lots of Lacerate stacks, which is a bleed effect.  RnT’s 20% boost to bleed damage will turn Lacerate from a really good source of threat to an excellent source of threat.
• Primal Gore : And, building on the statement about Rend and Tear, this talent will cause Lacerate to occasionally critically hit, generating more threat, rage and dead bodies. :)
• Berserk : Another talent that can technically be done without, Berserk is very useful in some situations, and adds a very nice boost to your DPS, should you require it.  It’s also a good way to gain threat on multiple enemies at once.  I’ll likely put up a full blog post about using berserk at some point in the future.

Okay, that’s the current state of Luxul’s build, and my rationale for most of the choices made.  Feel free to post comments, questions, etc.

I’ll put up the first actual mechanics post later today, but for now, a little background information.  I’ve been playing WoW for about five years (yikes!), with several multiple-month stretches of downtime peppered throughout.  My initial focus was on DPS classes, but I kept burning out on those characters in short order.  I’d get to the current end-game, and get bored, completely unable to enjoy the group experience.  Recently, fed up once more with my 80 rogue, I took a level 30 druid out of mothballs and started playing him again.  He’d leveled most of the way in cat form, but just to be different I started playing him as a bear.  Something clicked.  I was obsessed.  In eight days, I gained twelve levels, stopping at level 52 for a short break and to assure my friends I hadn’t grafted my hands directly to the computer.  I slowed down a bit at that point, but less than a month later I hit 80, and started grouping with my guild and my wife again.  (That’s not a euphemism.  She’d been patiently waiting for me to regain interest in WoW, and was very happy to have me in-game again.)

Luxul has very quickly geared up, and is now equipped to tank Onyxia 25 and Icecrown 10.  I hadn’t really thought about it logically very much, but last night my wife and I had a long conversation in which she was trying to talk me out of some hair-brained ideas I had about raiding.  That got me to thinking.  Why the sudden change of attitude?  Why was I not only enjoying pick-up groups, but actively seeking them out?

I think it all boils down to player temperament.  As anyone who’s played more than one class can tell you, each role in a group feels different.  My wife, for example, was an excellent tank while we were leveling our characters.  Once we hit heroic level 80 dungeons, however, she started feeling stressed and frantic during the fights.  She’s respecced holy, and is much happier healing.  A good friend of mine has a warrior, and he seems to enjoy playing both of his specs, but if you watch him you’ll notice a subtle change in personality between the two.  When he’s tanking, he’s very cautious and not terribly aggressive.  The pace we progress through dungeons is much slower than when we’re in with an assertive, confident tank.  That’s not to say he’s a bad tank, he’s just a cautious tank.  Switch him to his DPS spec, however, and he’s a monster.  He’s got amazing focus, and can always stick with the tank’s main target, even if the tank is switching up a lot to maintain aggro.  His situational awareness improves, and he does an excellent job of intercepting mobs that break aggro and go for the clothies, but still manages to keep his own threat down to the point that the tank can pick the mob up from him again when they’ve got breathing room.

The point I’m trying to make is that part of the challenge of not just playing your class, but excelling at it, involves finding a class that fits the way your mind works.  When you’ve found it, you know it, and everything before that moment feels a little emptier somehow.

Okay, enough philosophizing.  If you agree with my point of view, wonderful!  If you don’t, that’s fine, too!  Either way, you’re here because you either have a feral tank you want to improve on, or are looking for the information you need to get started with one, and I hope I can help enrich your playing time by some small amount.

– Luxul