Unbearably HoT

Let’s face it—not all bosses are created equally.

Although we arguably have different tanks best-suited for particular encounters (a paladin AOE tank for Felmyst, a bear mitigation tank for Brutallus or a warbot with a shield to take Illidan’s shears), you can get the most out of your toon by min/maxing different gear sets. “What!!!” you say, ready to sucker punch me and shake your lack-of-inventory in my face, “I already have a resto set, a cat set, a PVP set, a bear set, and a super awful boomkin set! Between all that, my potions, my tokens, and my pets, I don’t have room for anything else!”

While I’d firstly point you to this post, suck it up, get a mod like Outfitter to manage your accessories, and start planning—being prepared for any and all scenarios will make you a better bear. Since I just recently wrote about the importance of hit-rating and expertise rating for tanking, I’m leap-frogging into a discussion on how to incorporate gear pieces and accessories that lend themselves to more TPS (threat-per-second) generation into your standard tank set.

Nocturneus writes:

I am one of the few Bear tanks I know that actually went the route of Defense over Resilience. I like the fact that Defense gives you avoidance as well as makes you uncrittable (provided you hit the magic number.) Being able to get enough Defense at end-game Raid level was rather difficult, which is why most take the easier route of Resilience.

I am currently uncrittable, have just under 40k Armor, 42% dodge and 20k health. The problem I have is trying to squeeze Hit Rating in there somewhere. Any suggestions? Most of my gems are Agility and Stam, Agility or Stam, along with a few epic Defense gems in there from Heroics.

Firstly, the use of a program such as Rawr or a few Post-It Notes can help you keep track of how any major gear changes affect your overall mitigation stats. I can make recommendations, but it’s up to you to check up on your math. Secondly, since I don’t have any sort of armory link for Nocturneus, I’m making suggestions based on my own experience; not all items are easily attainable.

Fortunately, gearing up as a low-level druid is ridiculously easy, and there are plenty of other great bloggers out there who’ve outlined how to do that. The Heavy Clefthoof set takes care of nearly all your chance-to-be-crit issues, allowing you to socket almost anything you please, and the Earthwarden, a great entry-level tanking weapon, is the only druid weapon to date that has expertise rating on it.

Back to the question—I’m sure Nocturneus knows his numbers, but for the rest of us out there, here are some basics:

2.6% = The chance-to-crit reduction necessary to avoid being critically hit by boss mobs; you can achieve this with 415 DEF or 267.8 Resilence, assuming all points in Survival of the Fittest and base DEF of 350, or you can use a mixture of RES and DEF to reach it.
2.36 = The defense rating necessary to achieve 1 DEF skill.
39.4 = The amount of RES rating necessary to yield 1% RES.
35,880 = The amount of armor necessary to reach 75% mitigation; any more armor beyond this point does not offer substantial protection.

Quick Math:
~176 defense rating = 415 Defense Skill
~103 RES rating = 267.8 Resilence

As Nocturneus mentioned, stacking Resilence is easier, especially at high levels when DEF rating isn’t present on our regular armor pieces anymore. Generally speaking, druids tend to pick up the lion’s share of their DEF rating from accessories like necklaces, rings and trinkets or from enchantments. RES rating, however, is present on just about any piece of PVP gear you pick up—and can be fairly easy to get your paws on. Why use DEF then? Each point of DEF skill gives you 0.04% to be missed, to block, to dodge and to parry—but for the purpose of our furry selves, the Miss and Dodge are the important parts. Basically, you’ll probably have to end up using a little bit of both. Here’s why.

Because you need less RES rating than DEF rating to reach crit immunity, a little RES goes a long way and allows for a little more socket/enchant play. Nocturneus clearly has a classic mitigation tanking set—great for repelling enemy attacks and for all-around-mob-bashing, but (as he says), lacking in the hit/expertise department. More than likely, this means that even though his attacks hit for quite a bit, they’re getting dodged, parried or missed more often than they should, potentially wrecking a normal tank rotation and diminishing the amount of TPS he could be generating. Nocturneus doesn’t need to get rid of his sweet mitigation set—he just needs to build other pieces to switch in for maximum threat generation when he needs it.

First thing’s first—eliminate all DEF or RES gems. I know we often rely on that one Seaspray Emerald to throw us over the cap, but in my opinion, you’re better off modifying your gear with RES or DEF enchants. Why? You can’t enchant for melee +hit, but you can socket for it. Putting 12 DEF on your bracers, 15 RES on your chest or 12 DEF on your cloak can give you the edge you need while still allowing for a reasonable amount of STA and dodge.

Next, evaluate how much more DEF or RES you need to reach crit immunity, and bring in one or two pieces of PVP gear or a RES based cloak. The notion that you need to PVP to PVE may not be a palatable one, but it’ll help round out your armor sets. Think about it like this: even if you despise PVP, you can dick around in arena every week, take home some welfare points, and still find yourself able to pick up a T6 comparable chestpiece in a few weeks. What pieces of PVP gear will you get the most out of?

Nearly every piece of Vengeful Dragonhide armor (S3) has hit rating on it. The pieces with the highest resilience on them, however, are the legguards and chestpiece. As you can easily make the socket bonus on the chestpiece and add another +4 Critical Strike rating to your gear (nevermind enchanting the chestpiece), I consider that the best piece to incorporate into your arsenal. Previously, bracers were also an easy addition, but the new rating requirement (while still an easy grab at 1575) may be prohibitive to some players. Still, the RES rating on the bracers virtually eliminates the need for enchanting with DEF, and with another Glinting Pyrestone in the socket, you pick up the 4 RES socket bonus. I’ve offered up S3 comparisons here because they’re now cheap pick-ups free of rating requirements, but if you have the opportunity to pick up the Brutal Dragonhide Tunic (at 1600, also a fairly easy grab), go for it. Let’s quickly compare the Vengeful Gladiator’s Dragonhide Tunic and the Thunderheart Chestguard.

Ultimately, our biggest losses switching chestpieces are in the STR and AC categories—and we stand to gain an awful lot more: hit rating, armor ignore, and critical strike rating, all stats that will help increase your TPS against an enemy target. I chose Glinting Pyrestones for every socket, but I’ve also seen folks stack straight AGI, hit, or a mixture of both. Remember: the point of adding this piece of gear is to enhance your threat generation. While AGI does nothing for hit or expertise rating, it offers a buffer to your critical strike rating, your armor, and your dodge—nothing to sneeze at. With one piece of gear, you can pick up an extra 25 hit rating, the TPS stats previously mentioned, make up the AGI difference (36-31) in gems, and pick up 25 RES rating, all for the price of 23 STR and 252 AC.

Make sure you’re watching that 35,880 armor cap though, keeping in mind that raid buffs such as MotW will also affect your final tally. PVP gear can offer similar stats to tier gear but is often lower in armor and STR. If you’re someone like Nocturneus who is already above and beyond the armor cap, supplementing your gear set with one or two PVP pieces will not drop you below your cap (in Noc’s case, 40k-252 = 39,748, still way above cap) . If you do, remember that you can set up a potion macro and take Ironshield Potions whenever the cooldown comes up—when wearing my TPS gear on Brutallus, I used that particular strat.

Other useful hit rating items include:

Brooch of Deftness = 21 expertise rating, 22 hit rating; badge reward
Pendant of Titans = 20 hit rating; drops off the Reliquary of Souls
Thunderheart Waistguard = 23 hit rating and 1 red socket (potential for 5-10 hit rating); token drops off Brutallus

Now, expertise. As I mentioned in “I want you to Hit me as hard as you can,” the only expertise we druids gain from set pieces is on the Thunderheart Treads. If we want any more than that, we have to look toward items such as trinkets, necklaces, and cloaks. I pointedly exclude rings from that list, because rings are usually items that carry a significant portion of our armor and DEF rating—generally, substituting one of those puts us at a much bigger loss than substituting say, a trinket. The three most easily attainable items that can net you expertise rating for tanking (there are other leather expertise items that are suitable for DPS) are:

Shattered Sun Pendant of Resolve = 18 expertise rating; SSO rep item
Brooch of Deftness = 21 expertise rating, 22 hit rating; badge reward
Shard of Contempt = 44 expertise rating; drops in heroic MgT

Slightly more difficult to obtain:

Collar of the Pit Lord = 29 expertise rating; drops off Brutallus
Thunderheart Treads = 20 expertise rating; token drop from Felmyst
Crimson Paragon’s Cover = 28 expertise rating; drop off the Eredar Twins

If you mouseover the tooltips for each of the necklaces (a gear slot where expertise seems to be stacked), there are reasonably clear trade-offs for each one: some have defense rating (a bonus to be sure), high STA, or dodge rating—I happen to have all four for different occasions, but I generally default to the Collar of the Pit Lord for the DEF rating, expertise and 68 STA. Additionally, the proc on the Shattered Sun Pendant of Resolve is reportedly more useful (for tanking) if you’re a Scryer; an expertise capped warrior, for example, can apparently become “unparriable” for the buff’s duration.
Recap
To allow for getting the most out of your gear’s sockets while remaining crit immune, utilize PVE and PVP gear that combine DEF rating and RES rating—without gemming for it. The sockets you free up can be used for AGI/HIT gems, and the addition of one or two pieces of arena gear will net you itemized hit rating and a plethora of other TPS boosting equip stats. Finally, keeping a myriad array of accessories such as different necklaces, trinkets, rings, and cloaks can allow you to customize your gear on the fly and better equip yourself for different encounters. Keep track of all your new armor-sets using an equip mod such as Outfitter, and make sure you remain crit immune and at your armor cap with a good ol’ pen and paper or a program such as Rawr.

One of the most recent purported reasons that Blizzard doesn’t want new WotLK content “leaked” is because they “would much prefer to avoid theorycrafting that isn’t based on real gameplay when we can.” this, of course, is considerably milder than Blizzard’s initial response that leaking data is “extremely offensive and inappropriate.”

Let’s get real. I’m sure no one with half a brain expects that he or she can get away with all the same theorycraft information once the expansion hits. Even if every shred of information we have now went live tomorrow AND followed all the same stat rules as today, we’d almost certainly be guaranteed a swift series of checks and balances soon after to make sure that every class was “functioning appropriately.”

But the natives are getting restless. I’m eagerly anticipating new content as much as the next person, and while I’ve away from the rumor mill since WotLK tidbits first leaked, some things are just too good to pass up. There’s recently been an incredibly dirty rumor about Dire Cat Form that has supposedly been leaked by a “reputable source”. While I certainly question the validity of both the information and the so-called informant, these kinds of speculated changes would require a dramatic rethinking of how we DPS. Let’s take a look. As a reminder, I am exceptionally poor at math, but I’ve attempted to do the best I can. I will look at any corrections. The new tooltip supposedly reads as:

Dire Cat Form
Instant Cast
35% of Base Mana S
hapeshift into Dire Cat form, increasing melee attack power by 110% plus agility, armor contribution from items by 180%, feral attack power contribution from your equipped weapon by 100%, and allowing off-hand attacks. Also protects the caster from Polymorph effects and allows the use of various cat abilities.

The act of shapeshifting also frees the caster of Polymorph and Movement Impairing effects.

Before I jump into what immediately makes me boggle and LOL, the “old” Cat Form tooltip:

Cat Form
Instant Cast
35% of Base Mana
Shapeshifts into cat form, increasing the melee attack power by 40 plus agility. Also protects the caster from Polymorph effects and allows the use of various cat abilities.

The act of shapeshifting also frees the caster of Polymorph and Movement Impairing effects.

To start making a comparison, I am going to make a few assumptions that may be entirely untrue in WotLK but are necessary for the sake of extrapolation here: that cat DPS itemization will remain similar and closely follow that of rogue gear, that base stats such as AGI and STR will be valued in the same fashion as today, and that we will still be using two-handed weapons. I am not taking into account any particular WotLK feral talents yet, although they will be pertinent to introduce in a secondary post to elaborate on how rediculous this new Dire Cat formula really is.

Remember, other than the leaked tooltip, we’ve been given no other information—will this “Dire Cat Form” be available as a talent in the feral tree? Will it be a quest? Will this just be a standard “learn” spell for all druids? The base cost for transformation remains the same and, if Furor doesn’t change, powershifting for a little extra DPS juice still seems possible.

The next sentence, however, is where we start noticing the major changes. In our world, Cat Form increases our AP by 40 plus AGI. If you assume base caster form AP of 1500 and base AGI of 500, shifting into Cat Form gives you 540 bonus AP, bringing your sum total to 2040 AP. In the new language, we have an increase of approximately 110%. Assuming that same base AGI of 500 and base caster AP of 1500 again:

(BASE AP * 2.1)+AGI = Total AP or basically (1500*2.1)+500=3650

So if you add the bonus AP to your base AP again, you’d be seeing a Dire Cat Form boost to 3650 AP. At first glance, 110% looks like a huge number—far more significant than 40; however, using our old little system of numbers here, we’re only netting 1650 AP. Isn’t that tremendous? It’s awesome, but no, I don’t think so. I tend to think that we’ll see a revaluing of itemization—all signs right now point to Blizzard streamlining their armor so that multiple class can gain the same useage from it. Rogues and druids sharing more than they already do? Probably, and I’m willing to bet we’ll see more higher base AGI and crit on gear than we do right now, and a lot less STR, which will decrease our base AP and possibly even out those big numbers.

Let’s continue.

Our Dire Cat Form “tooltip” elaborates on the awesome, mentioning that we’ll be getting armor bonuses as well. Assuming base caster armor of 4000 in DPS gear, shapeshifting into Dire Cat Form goes a little something like this:

BUFFED ARMOR/BASE ARMOR = 180%/100% or basically, (4000*180)/100=7200

That nearly doubles our base armor, bringing us up by 3200 points. Wow. To be honest, I wasn’t initially certain why this was added (assuming of course that this leaked information is even halfway legit). If you’re performing a PVE DPS role, you shouldn’t be taking unnecessary damage (unless melee in WotLK will start taking substantial physical damage). But for all the ferals who bitch about their lack of arena viability, this could be a huge boon.

I imagine some concern might be due to rogue comparability: a rogue can Feint or Vanish to drop aggro, use Cloak of Shadows to ward off magical damage and debuffs, and pop Evasion to dodge any physical damage. While I’d argue that we don’t need to be furry rogues (afterall, we can transform into a giant fucking bear if we’re really getting destroyed), we cannot shrug off damage in the same fashion without giving up our primary form of DPS. PVE? Not a big deal. But in a PVP scenario where a rogue can slam Evasion or proc Cheat Death and they can still dish out an obscene amount of high damage, feral druids can only attempt to toss a few heals on themselves, go bear, and hope for the best. So perhaps with this AC contribution and a few of the new feral talents, Feral Combat might be a more competitive (easy) spec for arena.

Erdluf writes in and reminds me that if we apply the same rules from our Dire Bear Form tooltips:

Note that your current bear tooltip says that your armor from gear is increased by 400%, but that means you get 500% (400+100) of what it says on the gear. Likewise, I’d expect a 180% armor boost to mean 280% armor. Your dire-cat friend gets 11200 armor, not 7200 armor. Apply the same logic to the 110% (seems iffy to me) and your AP jumps from 1500 (in caster) to 3150 (before adding agility and FAP)

If the same rules apply, then he’s definitely correct in assuming that. Thanks!

But that’s not all! We have another added bonus for Dire Cat Form that our regular pussies can’t handle: feral AP on our weapons increased by 100%. If we take an easily obtainable item such as the Staff of the Forest Lord that has 1110 Feral AP on it, we get this:

(Feral AP*2.0)=BONUS AP or, (1110*2.0)=2220

This effectively doubles the feral AP contribution on our weapons. If we add those numbers to our imaginary AP from earlier, we get:

[(BASE AP*2.1)+AGI]+(FERAL AP BONUS * 2) or, [(1500*2.1)+500]+(1111 * 2)=5870

Wowzers. Those are some massive numbers, especially since I assumed some fairly basic baselines for AGI and AP. But how does that actually compare to now? Unbuffed, Runyaruso has somewhere around 3590 AP in Cat Form.

5870-3590=2280

Given today’s standards and gear and using the new Dire Cat Formula, I stand to gain 2280 base AP. That’s nothing to sneeze at, but feral druids do tend to accumulate AP in spades. But why wouldn’t I jump for joy today? One of the reasons that rogues can still heavily out-damage us in a raid environment with half our AP is because they rely more heavily on white damage whil druids rely more heavily on yellow damage. Here’s a quick explanation using a very very old, pre-Sunwell Illidan split:

Firstly, Illidan is a poor measure of melee DPS because half the time we’re running around dick in hand, unable to DPS save throwing, shooting, or halfheartedly casting off-spec spells. One of our best rogues did about 465,592 white damage during that fight, which ended up being about 65% of his total DPS. My white damage, on the other hand, equaled about 171,994, which ended up being 36% of my total DPS. The majority of my damage is put out by “specials”, and while our rogues’s specials sure hurt, they didn’t account for the majority of his DPS output. Why? I single-wield, and he dual-wields. Think about it: if every auto-attack consists of two successive hits, that’s twice as much damage as me smacking a mob with one paw. Now, take Haste Potions, Slice and Dice, and Windfury into account, and that’s a lot of two-handed whacking.

But don’t worry—according to our little Dire Cat Form tooltip here, that will all change. Dire Cat Form will allow “off-hand attacks”. After years of only beating people with one paw, we’ve apparently learned how to really get our claw on and dual-wield. What does this change?

Beyond the white/yellow damage discussion, stats that weren’t super useful to druids pre-WotLK will become important in the expansion, further cementing the argument that Blizzard will only itemize one piece of armor for both rogues/druids. Like haste? Yes. When you’re not dual-wielding, haste isn’t a decent enough stat to stack as it primarily boosts your white damage DPS (already not our forte). If cats dual-wield, we too will be focusing on boosting our white damage. We’ve already heard that Windfury will affect transformed druids, so that adds a little credence to our leaked information. This is cool. Really cool.

With that much AP and being able to attack with both a “main paw” and an “off paw”, wewill do an absolutely ridiculous amount of damage—providing, of course, that we still retain the same levels (or greater) of AP now. Additionally, if we’re still using our two-handed weapon, I am also making the assumption that we’ll get our off-hand damage based on a percentage of our AP rather than the weapon damage itself. Interesting. Rogues, presumably, will also have to get a major AP boost, otherwise I’m sure we’ll be hearing the “nerf druids” battlecry all over again.

What isn’t cool is that moving from single to dual-wielding means we need to rethink our hit cap. Right now, druids need approximately 142-146 hit to effectively DPS a boss level mob. Rogues, on the other hand, require more than double that amount of hit to be capped on a boss level mob. While I won’t delve into a discussion of how important I think hit is right now, you can think about it like this: if you can’t hit a boss, how much damage are you really doing? Historically, druid gear has been absolutely shit for hit, and we’ve already been taking rogue gear to boost our ratings. Come the expansion, it looks like we’ll be competing even more—in more ways than one.

I didn’t accomplish anything I set out to do last night except for running Lycentia’s alt through all the Scarlet Monastery questlines. Instead of going to Sunwell last night to keep getting destroyed by the Twins, we decided to head to Black Temple and farm up a few pieces folks still need, kit out the new people, etc. Of course, I ducked out just before Supremus last night to let in some folks who, you know, actually needed gear. No sooner did I teleport back outside did I put my head down on my desk and promptly pass out on my keyboard. The next thing I know, Lycentia is telling me to go back to sleep, and at some point I remember fuzzily transferring from computer to bed. Oops, my b. Did I mention we raid from 10 PM to 1:30 AM EST?


We have so many tanks right now that I’m actually being pulled in more and more just to DPS. Generally that doesn’t happen, because whether or not I have 4k AP raid buffed, a rogue or DPS warrior with 2k will almost always beat me on meters. Usually, this works out—when I’m tanking, I can be happily shuffled into the melee group, give them my crit buff and continue doing my job. I’m an optimizer, obviously, but I don’t often do it while DPSing. Regardless, it’s a new avenue for improvement, and I’ve been working to tighten up my rotation, resocket my gear again (since I took a HIT loss on my new necklace and ring) and possibly pick up Nurturing Instincts for the extra 26% heals to me while I’m in cat form.


So let’s take a look at my current spec. I’m giving the general disclaimer here that I’m trying to optimize for raiding and only raiding, and that my spec is currently tailored to allow for specializations in other people’s specs. WTF does that mean? I’ll explain in a sec. As mentioned in an earlier post, I went resto the other evening for Sunwell. The next night, I had to spec back for tanking, and with 50 gold from the guild bank clinking in my metaphorical pockets, I decided to stop being lazy and realign a few Talent Points. The changes are staggeringly minor. 0/47/14 is the cookie cutter feral spec for dr00ds everywhere, but some people stack points in different places.

NEW




Thus far, I’ve had Feral Aggression maxed out, increasing the AP reduction of my Demoralizing Roar by 40%. It also gave me a bonus to Ferocious Bite, but as the Eviscerate of the cat-world, we all know that’s useless when you’re raiding anyway. With the Improved Demo Roar, I was making sure I was keeping debuffs up on mobs, overwriting the un-talented version of our warriors’ Demoralizing Shout. A quick look:


Untalented
Rank 6 Demoralizing Roar = -240 AP
Rank 7 Demoralizing Shout = -300 AP


240 * .40 = 96; 240 + 96 = total of -336 AP


Taking 5/5 Improved Demoralizing Shout, however, also offers a 40% boost to AP reduction, giving us:


300 * .40 = 120; 300 + 120 = total of -420 AP


My point, here, is that there’s absolutely no reason to have 5/5 in Feral Aggression if you have a warrior who’s always in to keep up Improved Demoralizing Shout. Since our DPS warrior specced 5/5 for Brutallus, talenting my roar (-336 AP) is pointless in comparison (-420 AP).


The other talent I didn’t have maxed out previously was Primal Tenacity for the sole reason that maxing it out would prevent me from picking up points in Natural Shapeshifter (due to having maxed out Feral Aggression). While Natural Shapeshifter definitely spares the mana pool on fights where I’m powershifting excessively, it’s otherwise a vanity talent—I’m not PvPing, and I’m usually not worried about running out of mana, ever. Taking 3/3 in Primal Tenacity, however, offers me a 15% resistance to Stuns and Fears. With that talented and the addition of my Powerful Earthstorm Diamond, I have a passive 20% stun resistance (when I’m tanking). Any time I can resist a stun or a fear means that some pissed off mob isn’t running after a squishie and that I’m generating more TPS rather than letting the DPS come perilously close to aggro pulling range as the mob beats the shit out of me while I’m doing nothing. Additionally, it even helps my DPS during fights where a boss or mob AOE stuns and I’m able to resist and keep on trucking (Kaz’rogal, for example).


So now, I’ve gone from 5/5 Feral Aggression to 0/0 Feral Aggression, and from 1/3 Primal Tenacity to 3/3 Primal Tenacity. I was still able to pick up 3/3 Natural Shapeshifter, although I’m already considering moving two of those points over to Nurturing Instincts instead to make it easier for healers to keep me up when the raid’s taking AOE damage. Most of the rest of the talents are self-explanatory—there’s no reason to pick up Brutal Impact unless you’re PvPing, and the obligatory talents in the Restoration tree allow for Rage/Energy clearcasting, STR bonuses and optimized powershifting capabilities.


Questions and comments are, of course, welcome.

Over at MMO Champion, the forums are buzzing with the latest WotLK whispers, speculations and skeptics. Usually, I don’t pay attention. Trying to make predictions based on alpha release information is a little like trying to wick away information from a Sales bid: they’ve got an idea they’re really

But because I can’t help myself and, if I’m lucky, it’ll start some tremendous rumor that snowballs into other players using feral druids as mounts or priests getting holy form, I’ll indulge.


What follows are supposed data-mining hacks from WotLK’s alpha release to friends and family, which illustrate some class-defining new “talents”. Normally I’d only list what applies to druids, but let me set the tone with this particular gem from the warrior’s fury tree:

Titan’s Grip: Allows you to equip two-handed axes, maces and swords in one hand, but you attack (insert % here) slower than normal.

Listen, if Blizzard is genuinely dumb enough to let me run around with the Torch of the Damned in one-hand and Cataclysm’s Edge in the other, I’m main-switching back to my warrior. But now, the information most of you are probably hoping for:


Balance

1. Nature’s Fury: converts (insert % here) of your bonus healing into bonus spell damage. In addition, your Wrath and Starfire spells have a (insert % here) chance of applying the Nature’s Fury debuff on the target. The Nature’s Fury debuff increases Nature and Arcane damage done to the target by 2%. Lasts 10 sec. Stacks up to 3 times.
2. Starfall: you summon a flurry of stars from the sky on all targets within 30 yards of the caster, each doing (insert % here) Arcane damage, and an additional (insert % here) Arcane to all nearby targets within 10 yars. Maximum 20 stars. Lasts (insert time here).

Feral

1. Infected Wounds: Your Shred, Maul and Mangle attacks have a (insert % here) chance to cause an Infected Wound in the target. The Infected Wound reduces the movement speed and casting speed of the target by (insert % here). Stacks up to 5 times. Lasts (jnsert time here).
2. Berserk: Removes all Stun, Fear, Snare and Movement Impairing Effects and increases your energy regeneration rate by 100% while in Cat form, and increases your total health by 20% while in Bear Form. After the effect ends, the health is lost. Effect lasts 20 seconds.

Restoration

1. Living Seed: When you gain a critical effect from your Swiftmend, Regrowth, Nourish or Healing Touch spell, you have a (insert % here) chance to plant a Living Seed on the target for (insert % here) of the amount healed. The Living Seed will bloom when the target is next attacked. Lasts (insert time here).
2. Flourish: Heals friendly party or raid members within (insert distance here) yards of the target for over (insert amount here). The healing is applied quickly at first, and slows down as Flourish reaches its full duration.

What do I think? I won’t dismiss the possibility of any of the above outright, since Blizzard has done retarded things before, but let’s take a closer look at the Feral talents first (since I don’t care about the lazer chicken, sorry).


Although Infected Wounds reads like a disease debuff that could then, presumably, be cleansed, it’s basically like hitting a target with Crippling and/or Mind Numbing poison simultaneously—except you know, raking them with your rabid claws. I see little use for this beyond PvP and might represent a diversion in the previously PvP neglected feral tree, but it also might allow a druid tank or DPSer to seriously assume the role of a rogue or warlock whose job it’d be to periodically apply a cast-time increase debuff on a target. Obviously, this “chance” to apply a debuff isn’t nearly as reliable as, say, Curse of Tongues, so I doubt the applicability even there.


As for Berserk, what we’re seeing is a long draught of Thistle Tea, Last Stand and the fear break that the name implies all rolled into one. I cannot possibly envision this as being anything other than an ability that everyone and their mother QQ’s about. How come? Warriors have a Last Stand, why not bear tanks? Warriors can stance dance—why can’t bears get some sort of ability that allow them to tank through a fearing mob without the use of Fear Ward, Tremor Totems and PvP trinkets? I’d argue that point, since I PvE extensively over PvP. But raid buffed, that’d bring my bear from roughly 23k HP to nearly 28k HP—and every single PvPer on the planet will get pissed that the already “overpowered” bear now has something like 5k more HP to cut through, even if it is for 20 seconds.


The two resto talents are actually sort of interesting, but only because it looks as though Blizzard (if datamined info can be trusted, and it can’t) is giving druids a PoM type ability in Living Seed and a CoH type ability in Flourish. I realize that neither seem to be as powerful as the regular priest abilities, but that kind of passive/AOE healing might mean that resto druids can occupy a bigger space in raiding scenarios. This, of course, isn’t to say that every other healing class won’t have something amazingly ridiculous that slides druid stacking the backburner again, but it represents a concession that Blizzard may understand what’s favoring stackingCoH priests and Chain Healing shamans right now for raid healing.


It’s fun to think about right now, but I’ve got to admit that one deep resto talent I’d like to see is this, offered by a fellow druid guildmate:

“I’d like to be able to have some Sprout ability where you grow apples, you know, like Healthstones, and then you pick it off yourself and throw it at someone’s skull to make them fucking eat it.”

Sathrovarr’s been vanquished. Kalecgos can fly off and inevitably get possessed again, as those pesky dragons tend to do, and there’s only two trash pulls between the raid and Brutallus. You toasted Illidan—you were prepared. This guy doesn’t have any adds, and he dual wields just like Illybeans. Shouldn’t be too hard, right? Wrong. Brutallus effectively makes Illidan look like a flame-spouting Girl Scout and brings back nostalgic memories of the gear test Patchwerk presented in Naxxxramas.

Regardless, you’re optimistic. The raid easily dispatches the token trash pulls and charges into the Den of Iniquity. Suddenly, you’re greeted by exceptionally bad voice acting and a panoramic view of the Dead Scar:

“Hold friends! There is information to be had before this devil meets his fate!”

Madrigosa, the chick blue dragon who you can see taunting Brutallus during “Distraction at the Dead Scar”, bids you sit quietly and wait while she tries to grill the enormous pit lord. The scenic vista seals up with a sheet of impenetrable ice* and you essentially get to watch a psionic death match that sounds like it’s dubbed over by the original American voice actors from DBZ. Despite some cool giant-beam-of-death shit, Madrigosa dies in a dramatic heap, and Brutallus turns his attention to the raid. With a cry of challenge, he tilts his head back and roars, shattering the ice and sending your raid flying. None of us were expecting it the first time, and it’s particularly awesome seeing a bear soaring through the air. The once dynamic Brutallus now sits dormant in the Dead Scar, patiently waiting for your raid to take thirty-five minutes to figure out how they’d like to set up.

(more…)

This might not be worthy of another post entirely, but after resocketing some of my DPS gear and finally being able to take advantage of myT4 two piece bonus, I reopened Rawr to take a look at things. Needless to say, I was a little surprised. While I was wearing the Mask of the Deceiver and the Gloves of Dexterous Manipulation, Rawr suggested that the Cursed Vision of Sargeras was the best helm upgrade in terms of raw DPS. When I uploaded my armory data today, however, Rawr only presented me with a few different socketing options for the Stag-Helm of Malorne instead.

Compare this screenshot to the ones from my last post:

 

What happened? Rawr took into account the fact that I was wearing two pieces of DPS socketed Tier 4 gear and acknowledged the energy restoring set bonus as an overall DPS upgrade. Once I get my T6 feral shoulders and pants I’ll be able to better utilize the T4 set bonus for DPS by switching my Stag-Helm of Malorne to something such as the Cursed Vision of Sargeras (I think I might be up next for it) and then resocketing my T4 shoulders. It might look a little something like this:

 

While I realize the image is a little difficult to read because of the small numbers, you’ll notice that there’s an overall damage increase by replacing my relatively junky Razor-Fury Mantle (which arguably doesn’t have a decent upgrade besides PvP until 2.4) with a resocketed Mantle of Malorne: more AP, more AGI, a considerable +HIT increase, and a much bigger crit rating. And of course, I’m still rocking my energy restore bonus. Very nice.