[Druid] Tanking T6 content in 3.0.2

Anon, from yesterday: you were right. The content now is so trivial that theorycrafting is kind of silly. Yes, you can regem or re-enchant things that were used in other ways (like for anti-crit). Yes, you can find cool new trinkets. And yes, you can put on some PvP gear.

But really, it's just not that important, and you're better off saving your money for WotLK. If you've got mats, I'd recommend you sell 'em. If you've got arena points, spend them now on that tanking gear (they're going away anyway) but don't stress if you don't get everything, and don't bust your ass trying to get a rating.

The PvP gear will be harder to replace in WotLK, so it's worth something, but it's not worth stressing over.

And wow, are things easy. I had most of the night off last night, but my wife was doing our guild's first BT run. Some highlights:

• Teron dying after spawning one and only one construct (and not because he targeted rogues, either)
• Bloodboil going to 22% after his first Fel Rage
• RoS's biggest danger was people killing themselves
• Killing Mother despite losing 5 people to idiocy

And then I got to come in for Illidan. We had a total of 5 tanks in the raid at the time, so that should give you an idea of our 'awesome' dps. Here's what we saw:

• Illidan going to P2 after two flame crashes
  
• Illidan's eyebeam happening once - after the first flame was dead
• Illidan's barrage happening once during P2
• Got Illidan to 34% in the first P3
• Downed Illidan in first P5 (as he was transitioning to demon)

Yeah, that's right - we saw exactly one demon within phase. If we brought a few more DPS - which we could, healing is a joke right now) we could likely never ever see a phase 4. Just sad, but on the flip side I don't mind; I saw all the fights when they were hard, and I don't mind a relaxing night of farming for glaives and shields.


Runy asked this yesterday:

I had heard that Swipe was scaling pretty poorly, but I'm not sure if that's still the case. Have you seen any evidence of this? Additionally, I was taking a metric fuckton of damage (although admittedly, I had like 7+ mobs on me at times). I'm interested in seeing how this plays out in a raid environment (we're considering seeing how much T5 content we can 10 man).

My experience with swipe is that it holds aggro poorly, especially compared to consecrate. With 4pT6 and feral instincts and a threat weapon my swipes were doing around 290 damage before crits. The prot paladin that was with us (we were doing a fun run for achievements) was holding aggro far better with his consecrate. I would frequently lose a mob when the lvl 66 mage started doing AoE; he never would.

However, I do FAR more damage than he does. Things just melt under swipe, especially with high crit and a threat weapon. I was doing over 1k DPS regularly.

I'm not sure how they can fix this, to be honest. They can nerf the damage and cause it to do more threat, but then lacerate will be put aside. They can introduce static threat components, but that also sucks. And having to spam swipe all the time and use every single GCD to hold aggro is very annoying when AoE tanking things. I do like that at least I can keep everything off the healers fairly well, but it's not nearly as good as a paladin or warrior or DK's version. It's a band-aid fix to a problem that's a bit more rooted in the core mechanics of the class.

On the flip side, something like Battlemaster combined with swipe becomes very, very stupid. I think that I could reasonably solo most heroics with that. I was planning on putting goose on the Forest Lord anyway; I think I may put battlemaster on it first and go and have some fun. My suspicion is that swipe as the AoE generator is broken due to swipe actually hitting things (instead of consecrate or D&D, which are weird DoT mechanics, or TClap, which is basically an AoE spell). Battlemaster is nice because it causes a lot of self-healing when dealing with mobs...but what about something that causes a lot of damage? There has to be a large number of stupid 'chance on hit' things that break when you get a ton of procs.

Now to find them.