Unbearably HoT

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.

Unbearably HoT is currently having moderate formatting problems. Please bear (HAHA GET IT) with me while I attempt to fix the issue. Sorry for any folks who read the RSS! EDIT: Big thank-you to Phaelia from Resto4life for helping me troubleshoot. And by troubleshoot, I mean totally fixing my mess.

While my new job has foisted some necessary scheduling changes on me, I am still raiding—although admittedly, I pass out almost as soon as we call it. Leveling alts has ground to a halt, farming is a trial and it’s been an effort to log on for anything beyond normal raid time. In the meantime, I’ve been staring at an ever-growing backlog of posts that I haven’t had the proper time to fine tune, and (more exciting) I’m making inexperienced forays into the world of video editing.

To capture video, I use Fraps and then import the massive video clips into Adobe Premier for further editing. I have no idea how to utilize the veritable toolshed of capabilities Premier presents, and I’m still just trying to figure out how to render my workspace in the proper aspect ratio. Regardless, I wanted to include one of my trial videos with a discussion of the Brutallus encounter and thus present the following:

The above was not rendered properly (as you can see that the sides were cut off), and the picture quality didn’t end up being as crisp as it should have. Additionally, there isn’t an intro like I wanted, and the end screen disappears more quickly than it should. My UI is another issue altogether, and I’m attempting to maximize the viewing area for videos while still including all the information I need to use for tanking. The video is taken from my (a feral druid’s) perspective and showcases an ill-fated 1% wipe on Brutallus. The encounter is approximately six minutes long (that’s the time before his enrage) and has been sped up by 280% for ease of viewing. The enrage is clearly visible as that’s when he beats the shit out of me and one-shots Lycentia through Shield Wall.  Premier advice is greatly appreciated (and anticipated). Music is “See the World” by The Kooks, and was chosen purely on a basis of tempo and duration. Discussion of the encounter to follow. 

While I was attempting to write up an article about druid tanking weapons and which I preferred and why (this will eventually get thrown up down the road), I ended up chilling out on the DruidWiki looking at game mechanics. Translation: MATH OH SHIT. Thinking that I might use these particular numbers at some point down the road, I casually scrolled down to the Bear Tanking section and pondered over the bit about Mangle. According to DruidWiki:

Mangle (Bear): Damage done * 1.3
Example: Mangle crits for 1000 damage. 1000 * 1.3 * 1.3 = 1690 threat (1885 for 3/3 Feral Instinct).

The above formula assumes the 30% inherent threat caused by Dire Bear Form. The problem, however, was that when I tried to find out how they arrived at the 1885 number for 3/3 Feral Instinct (which assumes an increase of 15% to inherent Dire Bear Threat for a total base threat gained of 45%), I couldn’t get the numbers to work out.

Mangle crits for 1000 damage. 1000 * 1.45 * 1.45 = 2102.5

Lol, wut? Now, I’m certainly not any sort of math genius and I occasionally have problems with basic arithmetic, so I asked the hottest paladin I know to take a look at it. Almost right away, he told me that the way they arrived at 1885 was to use this formula:

Mangle crits for 1000 damage. 1000 * 1.3 * 1.45 = 1885

Additionally, he explained to me, using their base formula doesn’t take a critical hit and multiply the TPS twice; the formula effectively calculates 30% of 30% rather than 2 * 30% (if that’s how critical hits actually scale with TPS in Dire Bear Form). An amended formula that calculates the TPS gained from a critical hit with Mangle (assuming 3/3 Feral Instinct) might look like this:

Damage+(2*Damage*.45) which can be simplified to:

Damage+(Damage*.9)

In the case of the assumed mangle crit of 1000, we’d be looking at this a little more accurately as:

1000+(1000*.9) = 1900

Neither of us is sure whether this is correct, but it makes a lot more sense. I’m going to attempt to test this out in game as soon as the regularly scheduled maintenance is over. If you have any questions, comments or corrections, please let me know.

EDIT:

Grundie has reminded me that Bear threat is not (as warrior threat is) calculated multiplicatively. He asserts that the value of 1.3 is the mangle mod regardless of the inherent threat (of 30%) that Dire Bear Form produces, and thus if you’re going to calculate it correctly, it should be:

Damage * ( 1.3[initial mangle mod] + 1.45[talented Dire Bear threat mod]) which can be simplified to:

Damage*1.75

1000*1.75 = 1750

Interestingly enough, all of the above end values are remarkably similar (between 1600-1900), which leads me to believe we’re definitely in the ballpark, here.

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.