Monday, October 27, 2008

[Druid] Rumors of my bad threat may have been greatly exaggerated

In an earlier report I commented on how it felt my threat was poor, I was taking more damage than other tanking classes, etc.

I was a whiny git.

The real thing to understand now is that bear threat isn't as static as it was before. In bear tanking gear threat isn't nearly as good as it used to be, especially relative to the other tanks. This is because they largely expect you to be tanking in rogue leather at 80, so have budgeted accordingly. So threat...doesn't feel so hot in your tanking gear.

But when you start stacking AP? Oh, yes. We start going to 11. Or, for instance, you start putting out 1500 DPS while tanking a boss. Note to those who might be unfamiliar with the fight: this isn't a gimmick or anything. The fight has one add that I tank, then the boss himself. There aren't multiple adds coming out that would inflate dps done. There isn't any special thing from odd abilities that inflates it (fire bloom does get counted to you, but it's a minor boost and almost everyone gets it). It's just boss tanking - mangle, maul and lacerate.



Yep. 6th on damage, 1577 DPS. This is tanking in my DPS gear. Which is fine, honestly; the change to SotF means I'm uncrittable, the protector of the pack boost helps a lot with mitigation lost due to armor and on KJ armor doesn't matter anyway. I'm at 18k health, which is more than enough for soul flay tanking - and barkskin every minute helps with random fire blooms and the occasional orb hits.

But boy, is that some good threat. And just in case you're wondering, this wasn't an isolated pull; I was averaging 1400 DPS for the fights. This one was a bit high because we wiped shortly after I popped my second berserk, but it wasn't so insanely high that it was an anomaly.

So if you're wanting to have a good time, put on that Staff of the Forest Lord and go to town.

I still am taking more damage than other tanks are, but threat wise it's damn fun, and damage is through the roof.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Waow amazing.
Just my two cents, can't you use swipe instead of lacerate when you reach a high AP ? I think I remember Karthis said that once (but it might have changed whith 3.0).

Kalon said...

Hey, Stef - thanks for coming by. :)

You can use Swipe for more damage, but since 3.0.2 lacerate scales much better with AP than it used to and does much higher threat than it used to relative to swipe. The ideal situation for highest damage is to get a 5x lacerate stack up, then swipe and mangle with the occasional lacerate thrown in to refresh the stack.

If you're going max threat though, lacerate beats swipe hands down now.

For KJ, because I get knocked back a lot, I tend to just focus on doing lacerates and not as much swiping. Losing the lacerate stack is a huge TPS hit. I could probably just swipespam and up my DPS though...it's not like I need the threat boost on the fight. :)

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the reports, good to know. Good to know the mechanics are tuned for the generic lvl80 leather gear too.

I'm always using my staff of the forest lord these days - used it to great effect on the flames of azz last night. But I should start switching in more dps gear too and see what happens.

Thanks for admitting you were whining :) Didnt see your earlier post, but I wish other players (any ret pallies out there?) would do the same, hehehe.

Kalon said...

Tomlins, hey :)

You should always have been using Staff of the Forest Lord on Azzinoth flames anyway, since they ignore armor. It's got better avoidance. In general most of my gear for that is dps gear since it has higher agility and thus higher avoidance anyway. That is, the gear that isn't FR gear. Not that it really matters now; they die so fast and the eyebeams come out so slowly that the whole thing probably could be done with half FR gear and be fine.

Anonymous said...

Oh yeah good point its all magic damage on the flames.

Oh well its all kinda moot since the bosses are so easy.

Lots of fun to be 1st & 2nd on the damage charts in the 5 mans too. Our main warlock wsa bottom the other day in a ramps fun - how funny!

Anonymous said...

Ok, thanks for the details, Kalon !
GL on KJ by the way, must be awesome :)

Anonymous said...

Was tanking KJ the last two nights in tank gear, and no problem with threat either. Admittedly, my dps was lower - around 1100. Our top dpser, an arms warrior, put out about 2300 dps there but I always had a good lead over him. Since we still struggle with this fight due to the required movement and people watching out for this and that, I rather stick to my 23k health for now :)