ThinkTank

[Druid]Pandarian Talents, cat bugs, and legendaries

2011-11-01T10:40:00.000-07:00

So hey - I have another child. That seems a lot more pertinent than anything else I could post. He's more than a month old and is one of the easiest babies ever. Welcome to the internet, Joshua. It's a scary place, but at least there are lots of boobs everywhere you could look.

State of the current game: more broken crap

On cat bugs: I haven't seen this reported nearly enough, so I'm doing my part. Reesi of Inconspicuous Bear found a wonderful bug where bleed buff effects other than Mangle do not actually boost shred damage. This is especially important if you have a rogue putting up hemo, as hemo overwrites mangle. Note that trauma does work, but tendon rip (hunter) does not. As of this posting they have not addressed or fixed this. So cats - if you've found your damage dropping suddenly when a rogue switches specs for some reason, now you know why. The 'solution' if you want to call it that is to yell at your rogues or, more likely, put up mangle manually every time it drops. And yes, that messes up all sorts of things like Ovale.

Mists of Pandaria: fare thee well, Antitank

On MoP: I was not particularly impressed. Mostly because I think Blizzard didn't do a very good job selling it to the raiders. Lissanna loves that we don't know who the end boss is, but this also means there's not a lot of excitement about who the next boss is. This is the first patch announcement ever (expansion or patch) that does not focus on the raid as the primary thing to deal with. So if you're a raider there wasn't a lot of info for you as far as things go.

I will miss the bearcat ability. I will especially miss that ferals are no longer both bear and cat in word or deed. This was a feral's identity for their entire lives, and it is no longer the case. It can be incredibly frustrating as a tank to be balanced around cat abilities (and vice versa) and it caused all sorts of pain in pvp. Rationally I understand the change and realistically it will not make a lot of difference, but emotionally it makes me a bit sad. Goodbye, antitank.

I do not like the talent tree removal. I am happy with the new talent tree system to a point, but I like in games when they have a clear differentiation between people who know how to play and people who do not. When all you do to differentiate yourself from the countless other class/spec combo is pick 6 choices that don't mean a lot, it's not really that great. Furthermore, choice with consequence is a Fun Thing in gaming. That's ultimately what a lot of gaming is all about - making choices and then seeing if they work or fail. And they're removing that.

Monks: what druids have always wanted to be, sorta

Drunken tanks that look like bears but have cool animations? Melee DPS with lots of movement and no autoattack? Healers that get into melee and have good defense? Wow, that sounds great!

For druids, here's something that's going to be interesting: I will bet you a shiny nickel that there will be at least one legendary that will be usable for ferals this expansion. Why? Because I believe they will make sure monks get a legendary, healers already recently got one, they've already done the two paired weapon idea and a legendary agility staff makes a lot of sense as far as a Mighty Quest. I could be wrong; they could go for a legendary awesome sword or something. But for monks their iconic weapon is a staff; I think we'll see a legendary for them that also happens to be usable by ferals.

The meat - the new talent tree and how to make it right

But I don't want to dwell too much on this; what I want to talk about is the new talent trees and how they can work for hybrids. Multiple druid authors have talked about how the talent trees presented for druids do not offer particularly interesting choices for most specs, and that is ultimately a weakness of this model and hybrid specs. It's easy to offer choices for rogues when all three trees are DPS, but how do you offer choices that matter for a class that can tank, DPS and heal?

We've seen some similar options for things like Guardian of Ancient Kings. That's a model for one of the three cooldowns on a given tree, but it's going to feel a bit annoying if that's what it's always like except for four modes. Still, it's a starting point. Keep that in mind.

Here are some rules as to what not to do:

Do not force a form. Anything that requires or puts you into a specific form is immediately unusable for a bear (unless it puts you in bear form). It's also unfun for most everyone else; why does a moonkin want to get stuck in cat randomly? These things hearken back to the days where warriors could only do certain essential things in certain stances. It was something they thankfully removed and should not do here. This sadly removes two of the three movement related abilities in the first tier right off the bat. The good news is that those abilities would be totally fine if they simply removed the 'in cat' part and this would make a good tier for druids. This is probably the biggest 'loss' throughout the tree; multiple tiers focus on 'cannot be cast in x' or 'when in y'. Don't do that!
Do not focus too heavily on one spec. Tier two (an instant healing spell and a special healing spell) both do that here. Cenarion Ward should be part of the resto kit, not a talent that anyone can take; why would a cat or moonkin take this most of the time when they could instantly heal themselves 30%?
Have a PvP 'tier' but make something useful for PvE. This is not a choice if there's only one thing remotely valuable for PVE. I'd be actually fine with an entire tier having nothing but PvP value talents - but do that!
Shapeshifter: sorry, but shapeshifting as the 'thing to do' for druids is no longer a mechanic and hasn't been one since BC days when T5 came out. It's been 4 years since this mattered. Please don't force moonkin to go cat. (not that bears or resto care about that either). I actually like the 'emergency awesome druid' as a cooldown, but that needs to be put in some kind of tier where all the fun things are. It really shouldn't be the level 90 tier; that tier should be the OMG awesome tier where every talent is amazing and you want all of them.

So based on that, what works? I'm using the calculator over at wowhead for reference.

Tier 1 has one talent that is okay - Feline Swiftness. The rest would be fine if the cat functionality was removed. This in general is exactly the sort of talent tier that druids should have; everyone wants movement abilities, but short cooldown vs. long cooldown vs. passive boost are all useful in various places.

Tier 2 is entirely too healing-centric. The only one that is generic is Renewal. Nature's Swiftness is not good enough compared to it and Cenarion Ward is far too specific and too healery. Realistically Nature's Swiftness should also massively boost some DPS ability so that it can also be a DPS cooldown or make it a group heal ability instead of the personal heal of Renewal. Cenarion Ward should be replaced with something along this vein.

Tier 3 is actually almost fine. Faerie Swarm needs to not be bear-centric and be great in all forms (resto doesn't care). Mass Entanglement needs to be castable in bear or cat, though it's not that useful for cats. Typhoon is perfectly fine and usable regardless. I would like to see Faerie Swarm have more use in general and specifically for resto use.

Tier 4 is almost perfect except for Wild Charge. Wild Charge really should be in the movement tier. Incarnation and Force of Nature are both fine Guardian of Ancient Kings-style CDs that could each have their own pros and cons. They need a third ability like this. Wild charge is a perfectly great ability but it doesn't belong here.

Tier 5 suffers the 'usable only in form x' issue. It's flavorful but not good game mechanically. The abilities are also kind of useless outside of PVP or tanking as well; these (like tier 2) are far too tied into a specific form. Bear hug should be specific to tanking and be a tanking-talent (if that), Ursol's Vortex is probably a good pvp talent and demo roar is really something that should be baseline bear. This entire tier probably should be reworked.

Tier 6 is...offensive. If you look at other T6 abilities for other classes they get things that are simply amazing. Just...wow. Death knights get a LK ability. Paladins get three great CDs. Priests get two great CDs. Rogues get shadow dance and killing spree. Warlocks get three talents named after the biggest badasses of the burning legion.

Druids get the ability to become emergency crappy druids, to force you to shapechange to get maximal DPS (hah!) or to heal yourself, which they already saw in another tier. Really, disentanglement should be nerfed and replace Cenarion Ward in T2 ( make it 10% health every 30 seconds and it's probably good enough to compare with Renewal). But these other two choices? Bah. Becoming herobear every 6 minutes is neat, but it's not exactly something you're looking forward to doing. Master Shapeshifter is horrible in every way possible; a bad idea and a bad implementation of a bad idea. This whole tier needs considerable work. Probably the best thing to do is make the T4 talents really really great and move them to T6 so that you're looking forward to your amazing CDs that you can get then. Then, change T4 to be a fun tier, have Heart of the Wild stick around as one of the two talents, and add two more 'herobear' level talents there as well. What those might be? Not a clue right now. Possibly Nature's Swiftness as one candidate (in all forms). Maybe some incarnation of Cenarius that turns you into a centaur and allows you to do all casting while moving while also granting bear/cat some boost?

I do think that this talent system can work, but they're going to have to be very thoughtful about how to do it for hybrids. Paladins, Druids, Monks and Shamen are all going to be tough. Warriors, priests and DKs a bit less so.

[Druid]Feedback for the devs

2011-09-13T13:14:00.001-07:00

I'd recommend everyone go over to the battle net thread and post constructive, meaningful feedback for their class/spec of their choice. Lissanna has been doing the resto/moonkin stuff, and it's great. Here's mine, reposted from the forums.

[i]What type of content do you focus on? [PvE/PvP/Both][/i]PvE

[i]If PvE, what type of PvE? [Heroics/Raids/Other][/i]Primarily heroics. Some raids when I have time or when I can fill in with my guild.

[i]If PvP, what type of PvP? [Arenas, BGs, Rated BGs][/i]

[i]What are your biggest quality-of-life issues? For instance, no longer requiring ammo could be considered a quality-of-life improvement for hunters[/i]. For bears, it is a lack of meaningful interaction with other party members or with the mobs. Aside from berserk attacks feel less than interesting and there is very little visual or behavioral change when doing attacks on mobs. Because it requires shifting out of bear there is even less interaction with the rest of the party while tanking.

Rage gain is poor and inconsistent, and ultimately meaningless past the first few seconds.

Too little control over incoming damage. Savage defense works, but there's no control over it - and that's all a bear has other than the long-term cooldowns.

Too little raid utility for a bear. Faerie fire is basically it. Innervate, tranquility and rebirth are all unusable while tanking.

Cats: poor options when attacking from the front. A very long buildup time for maximum dps means that anything that dies quickly doesn't die from cat DPS. Positioning in general appears to be fickle and odd at times. Charge takes long and doesn't actually go to the target if the target is moving. Compared to other classes ferals do not have a lot of burst DPS CDs to use regularly.

[i]What makes playing your class more fun?[/i]The mobility of a cat/bear is awesome. The transformation into multiple forms and activating different abilities in those forms is great. Flight form is awesome. Being able to do things like hibernate is great now.

[i]What makes playing your class less fun?[/i]For the bear side, the fairly boring rotation and relative lack of interaction with mobs other than hitting them. The lack of root/fear breaks. Missing out on all the druid abilities and being locked into just bear stuff. The gearing is also fairly boring and is very ilvl-dependent; it would be nice to care a bit more about things other than stamina or agility.

For cats: fewer burst options , fewer mobility options than other classes. Less raid utility (thoguh the raid utility I have is awesome, there's just not that much of it). No sign of gear in forms aside from a very small set of pieces. Having to deal with multiple mobs is not so fun. Having to have multiple debuffs on a mob to start optimal DPS isn't fun either. Having no real satisfying 'nuke' is kind of sad too.

How do you feel about your “rotation”? (Rotation is the accepted order in which abilities are used to maximum efficiency.)For bears: it's fine, if a bit boring. Multiple target rotation is dull and robotic. Single target is fine, particularly maximizing mangles. Would be nice to have something else to do for actual tanking other than demo roar.

Cats: requires external tools to track well, but it's fairly nice after that. I miss the complexity of WotLK. I miss wanting to do something other than rip or savage roar. The ramp up to get to the rotation is long as well.

[i]What’s on your wish list for your class?[/i]For ferals to be actually designed from the ground up. Ferals feel to me like an organically created class, where they have been built up from a poor foundation. Abilities feel tacked on that don't seem to make sense (savage defense, blood in the water, tiger's fury) and don't work that well together (lacerate/pulverize). Gear choices, especially for tanking, feel flat and lifeless; there really aren't exciting pieces for cats or bears any more other than weapons. Compare to warriors or paladins where everything is at least designed thematically well if not working perfectly in execution and it feels like ferals are duct-taped together. Things work, but they aren't nice. I would also like more druidry in the feral tree. Not being able to use any spells in forms is a drag. Getting things like wild mushroom as the 'big' spell this expansion and not having any use for it as a bear or cat was disappointing, especially compared to Guardian of Ancient Kings.

I would also like to see more interesting animations for cats and bears. Particularly bears. Bear tanking doesn't feel mean and hard. When you shield bash or shockwave it looks impressive; when you pulverize it looks fairly boring. Cats are a bit better but only just.

[i]What spells do you use the least?[/i]As a bear, I don't use challenging roar very often; it tends to not work well enough when I'd need it and that it aggros everything tauntable (including the boss) is problematic. As a cat, I never use pounce or start in stealth.

[Cat] Stat weights and you part 2:it doesn't matter

2011-06-27T15:21:00.001-07:00

Following up from an earlier post and Alaron's great recent post on the topic, I thought I'd talk about the futility of changing secondary stats given the current model.

So before - in that time when Alaron talked about the difference between Agility and Arpen - secondary stats varied all over the place. Agility was not as good as it is now (it only offered 1 AP), strength was fairly good, and the real debate for high-end druids was whether to go arpen-crazy or go agility. Arpen was an odd, nonlinear stat that gained value as you got more of it, which meant that having 1000 arpen was a very different value for arpen compared to having, say, 300.

This was all confusing and odd, but it meant one big thing: stat weighings really mattered.

But now? Now primary stats rule all, for everyone. The primary stat is the best stat by a long, long margin for all but the most confusing specs, and ferals aren't a shiny example. In this case, agility is 3 times better than the next secondary stat.

3 times!

So there's never a question about what to gem for: it's agility. There's never a question about sockets, really - unless you're getting 3x the value of agility, it's always worth it to get agility. In practice this means any socket bonuses get ignored unless they give +20 agility or are a red/prismatic socket. So as far as your gear goes - it's all agility, all the time.

That means for the most part DPS classes have almost no flexibility in what they gear for. There aren't many options for DPSers. They almost always have to get 4p of the latest tier, then they get one offpiece, then usually have a choice of one set of boots, belt and bracers or maybe two if they're lucky. They have one weapon that's king, perhaps two. Trinkets are very rarely make it or break it and don't offer reforging ability or gems most of the time anyway. Rings, amulets and cloaks are also one or two per slot at best. Now those things offer some customization, but most of the customization is in reforging and swapping one or two pieces, maybe.

How much does that really matter? The answer is...not a lot.

Let's take a current 372-geared raider like Reesi. Here are their total secondary stats:

haste: 503

crit: 1310

expertise: 780

mastery: 1667

dodge: 717

The total value for all secondary stats here is 5375. (for these purposes it doesn't matter that she reforged to dodge, since it's only the raw values we care about).

Now, let's take the preweighted values from wowhead for this:

Agility: 1

Mastery : .35

Haste: .32

Expertise : .29

hit: .28

crit: .28

Those are older weights from the 4.06 days, but for this experiment they'll suffice.

Let's do a thought experiment here: what if you could convert all secondary stats to the absolute best secondary stats possible. Let's say your gear was perfectly ideal (in this case haste/mastery on everything). We'll even split it 60/40 in favor of the best stat. What value do we get?

5375 * .60 * .35 + 5375 *.40 *.32 = 1816.75

That's the best we could possibly do.

So what's the worst? Well, we went for full hit/crit (and for this, we'll assume no hit capping). In that case, since they're the same value, you get the following:

5375*.6*.28 + 5375*.4*.28 = 1505.

So it's a huge difference, right? The optimal is 20% better than the suboptimal, and...

Oh, wait. That's just the value of the secondary stats. As far as a DPS gain, you can assume that one Hit/Exp correlates to about 1.0 DPS, which means that the difference here between the best possible value and the worst is...

1113 DPS.

So if you got the absolute perfect gear you would be 1k DPS better than someone with the worst possible gear choices. Which, given current DPS levels for most people at that gear level, is less than 5% difference.

This is why Alaron says things don't matter; it's not just that things are so close to each other that it really isn't a big deal one way or another. It's that realistically there's just not that much you can do with your gear. Your gems are spoken for you. Your gear doesn't have a lot of variety. As long as you're not going above hit/exp caps, stats aren't going to be wasted or horrible one way or another. This wasn't the case back in the day; gear choices and going full arpen could make a 20-30% difference in DPS. Now? not so much.

Note that this does not apply in one special case: Unheeded Warning. Thanks to the direct damage scaling increasing so much in the 4.2 patch this trinket is getting a large boost too; it is competitive with the heroic agility trinkets. Once again, ferals are going to likely be using a trinket that is from a prior tier well into the next one. Just don't use it on fights with tons of adds.

What this really means is that how well you do on a given fight is very much dependent on the fight itself, and not your gearing choices. If you do a lot of AoE, you'll find hit/exp/crit to be better than haste/mastery. If you do a lot of start & stop of fights (like Atramedes) mastery will be better. If you have a standup fight haste is going to be better. More berserks? Haste will shine. Lots of target swapping? Hit/exp will do better.

Ultimately this also suggests something else, which is that for progression fights where it really matters reforging should be done. It won't make a huge difference - the math above says that the upper bound of your difference can't be more than 5% no matter what - but when every little bit counts, that's a place to go. Understand what your role is and how to best do it.

Also note that if you care a lot about consistency, hit/expertise are going to win almost always. They are similar to stamina for bears in that while they're not optimal all the time they're never, ever wasted and make life easier. Given how close things are, you won't see much of a hit to your DPS and if you're not an amazing player chances are you'll see significant gains even on fights that don't punish misses.

[Cat] 4.2 stat weighings and you

2011-06-17T10:53:00.001-07:00

So, remember a while back when I wrote about what it would take for mastery to be awesome and haste to be less awesome?

Or when I wrote on how I would change it so that haste was more valuable to cats?

So in 4.2 cats have been buffed and changed around. Strength has been reduced to providing 1AP, which (with raid buffs) is about a 1k AP loss. However, Savage Roar has been buffed to give 80% more damage (from 50%), every direct attack does a lot more damage and scales better with weapon DPS (and thus AP), and ferocious bite has been improved to do more damage for less energy.

While it's still up for debate as to the end effect, there are some good indications that haste, not mastery, is going to be the best stat to stack after getting a good weapon. Haste had already started surpassing crit as the second-best stat, though the stats (other than mastery) were close enough to each other that almost any secondary stat was fine.

Now, though, it's looking more and more like haste is the winner. Why is that?

Bleeds got stealth-nerfed. While direct damage got improved across the board, bleeds got actually hurt a little by the strength nerf - and didn't get re-improved. End result is that when 4.2 hits your bleeds won't do quite as much damage as before.
The T11 2piece bonus is going away in 4.2. Okay, it's not going away - if you have it, it'll still be there. But chances are you won't have it for super long, especially if you weren't raiding heroic raids. That knocks rake damage down too.
The T12 2 piece bonus adds even more direct damage. Yay, shreds hit even more! (though there are issues with this bonus, as it probably won't be rolling damage and will overwrite itself).
Seriously, everything got buffed like whoa. A 20% boost to melee damage, a 15-20% increase in scaling for shred, mangle and ravage. It's a huge deal, and one of the things that it (sadly) does is make Unheeded Warning pretty awesome well into heroic raid gearing. If you don't have it already, make an attempt to get it before 4.2 arrives - because when 4.2 arrives chances are you won't see many of 'em on the AH.
Swipe doesn't get affected by mastery. Because missed swipes don't refund energy and get zero benefit from mastery, any time you're using swipe a lot all that mastery doesn't do jack for you. In fact, hit/expertise are far better for swipe if you can help it, and are the best stats for aoe-friendly fights. The next best stat? Shockingly, it's haste, as it allows for more OoC and more swipes in a given time.

Anyway, long story short is that mastery may be getting close to the point where it is not the best stat ever, and bleeds are not 40% of our overall damage relative to direct damage. Conversely, this is the point where haste overtakes mastery as a better stat per point. In some tests haste is significantly better than all other secondary stats (by 30%), in others it's neck and neck. Ultimately use mew, run simulations, and test based on your gearing. We'll get more clear ideas of what is best based on profiles of 378 and 391-geared ferals soon enough.

[Bear]Oh, the joys of savage defense continued

2011-05-05T13:58:00.000-07:00

I've talked about how Savage Defense likely would work and how good or bad it'd be, how it works on the PTR and how it continued to work there, how SD uptime works, how good and bad it is against specific fights, and then later comments on SD in cata, especially after we found out that the combat logs are probably bugged.

To be clear: I don't like the mechanic. I don't like that it is a static amount of damage in a world where almost all other mitigation mechanics are percentages. I don't like that it has weird interactions with multiple mobs (though at least that is better with 4.1). I don't like the interaction with vengeance.

But today: I really don't like how weak it is, and I really don't like the bugs in it.

I did some study on the mathematical importance of having Pulverize and having good pulverize uptime, and the results really shocked me. You can find the long topic at the wow forums, but the basic info is that I wrote a simulator that would simulate a boss attacking and dodging and then tested a few sets of values of avoidance, hit, crit, expertise to see what would happen - specifically what would happen when you assume pulverize isn't there and you lose the 9% crit.

I expected that it wouldn't be that big a deal in terms of uptime of savage defense. And boy was I wrong! Pulverize, depending on your gear level and avoidance/crit/cap levels, is equivalent to having about 5-6% block% for a paladin or warrior. In other words, you block 5-6% more of the attacks that land with pulverize active 100% of the time.

That's huge! That'd be a big, BIG bonus for a paladin or warrior. It sounds great! And for the first time I have a nice, simple way of testing various uptimes of Savage Defense in a way that is actually simulated and not entirely theoretical.

Then I dug into it some more. That 5-6% block? Well, on a boss that does 70k damage after armor (which would be one of the more harder-hitting bosses in the game currently, like Atramedes, but not as bad as Nefarian) this would be the equivalent of reducing the average attack damage (average after avoidance, blocks and not blocked) from 35.5k to 36.7k. And that's assuming a 20k shield - which as you'll see isn't a fair assumption.

Huh. That's...disappointing. And that's on something that hits every 2.0 seconds for 70k. For things that hit harder, it gets worse. For things that hit more often it gets MUCH worse; many many more missed attacks means that blocked attacks are even less frequent and less useful when they do happen.

Okay...so it's not as great as we thought. It's not as great as Tangedyn's spreadsheet would indicate or my prior calcs indicate or Rawr indicates. That's not the end of the world, and we never thought it was THAT good, right?

Then today there's a post on SD being 'nerfed'. And the usual folks say logs or GTFO, and that's fair, so they're actually produced. And you see things like this:

[00:55:48.039] Beradon gains Savage Defense from Beradon (Remaining: 18267)
[00:55:54.475] Beradon's Savage Defense is refreshed by Beradon (Remaining: 15009)
[00:55:56.929] Atramedes hits Beradon 54922 (A: 21286)

That's right; SD got refreshed by a later SD proc, but because vengeance was lower the SD shield it created was actually smaller. In other words, it'd be better to not have attacked during that time. That means that any streak of avoidance actually hurts mitigation down the road. Bleh.

There are countless other examples in that post about SD not working the right way with multiple mobs, but we don't know whether that's an actual bug or just issues with the combat log. It effectively makes it impossible to determine the actual usefulness of savage defense from log parses, however; either the log is telling us the truth and SD is bad, or the log is lying but we don't know how badly.

Man, do I hate this ability. So very, very much. I guess the good news is this: Savage Defense is going to be less and less relevant as we get better gear and as we face bigger mobs, so after a while it won't be worth worrying about.

[Cat] In case you weren't pumped up for Fireland raiding

2011-04-28T12:32:00.001-07:00

One thing I missed from blizzard's various previews of Firelands in the last couple days is this gem from Kotaku:

This time around they have, however, resulting in some sexy Ragnaros-styled armor, a new non-legendary version of his mace, Sulfuros, and a druid staff that drops off one of raid's other bosses that transforms the wielder into a molten cat.
The new dungeon even boasts three new mounts; one for competing all of the raid achievements, one random drop, and a special mount that drops every time Ragnaros fails. Just don't expect him to be a pushover this time around. Judging by Stockton's laughter at my suggestion, 25 frost mages isn't going to cut it.

Huh.

I might want that. Just a little bit.

ETA: one interesting part seen in the blizzard videocast at 10:10 is that he mentions that the staff will allow you to change into Staghelm's feral FORMS. He mentions the cat, but we know Staghelm has at least two forms - cat and scorpion. I suspect but do not know that as a bear you'll get to turn into a molten scorpion.

[Bear] The flood of bear gear in 4.1

2011-04-22T18:03:00.001-07:00

You've probably seen a bunch of posts on the great set of gear you can get from ZA/ZG when 4.1 hits - how there's finally some bracers that aren't blue, or another shot to get a weapon when malevolence hates you. Or heck, how to get twice as much VP per week from heroics as you could before.

All of that is true.

But that's not the real source of awesome. The real source of awesome comes from this little gem:

Conquest Points are now purchasable from the Valor Quartermasters at 250 Conquest Points per 250 Valor Points.

What does this mean? It means that you can now get any pvp item that doesn't require any rating no matter who you are, provided that you have the VP for it. Which turns out to be a fairly substantial list of gear. So hey, no more pvping for pve gear! You can now pve for pvp gear instead. Which...I guess you'd probably use for pve.

Here's the comparison with gear obtainable outside of pvp. Some interesting highlights:

The PvP helm, with mastery, is a great bear helm and better than anything non-heroic. This is a hard spot for a lot of people to get anything, and that it beats anything you can get until really rare drops makes it pretty nice. At 2200 conquest points - the same, essentially as legs and chest - this is a good deal, especially considering that the best alternatives come from drops from heroic Nef and Cho'gall (and Al'akir, kinda) Note that if you have Tsanga's Helm the difference is probably not worth getting it.
Similarly the PvP shoulders are a pretty nice deal and better than anything but heroic gear. If you get the head and the shoulders you also get 70 agility, which is a nice little bonus. It doesn't make it better than getting heroic pieces, but it should salve having two pieces of PvP gear. This isn't quite as great a deal as the helm given that you can get good shoulders off of Omnotron, but it's still pretty good - especially if you're not doing a lot of heroic raiding. The difference here is actually higher than the helm for the comparable nonheroic piece, so still reasonable to consider. They're also a huge upgrade from the troll drop.
The pvp chest is interesting; it's a very big jump between it and the normal tier chest (which is pretty badly itemized for bears) - bigger than the jump between the normal pieces and the pvp pieces in the head and shoulder slots combined. At the same time, you already likely have the tier chestpiece. Still, consider it; it's a nice piece of gear that is priced to move.
The PvP gloves are about as 'better' as the 359 best gloves as the helm is - so it's a decent upgrade. The big advantage is the energy/rage cost reduction of skull bash, which is great if you're the interrupter. Thus, these are a pretty good buy at some point even if you're just replacing Liar's Handwraps.
The pvp bracers are actually worse than the normal drop, but they're also very easy to get. And they are significantly better (about 5%) than the troll drop.
Fasc gets his own boots, but they're significantly worse than the BoE valor boots and much much MUCH worse than the PvP boots. Somehow, I think Fasc would have wanted it that way - to be beaten by pvp gear.
The pvp weapon is about as good for a bear as the troll weapon due to the lower ilvl on it and the wasted resilience. Of course, the real win here is the BoE Mobius' Halberd, which drops from the rare worldspawn and is just slightly worse than Malevolence
Finally, the relic slot is actually best in slot now for bears in pvp land. The haste on the other relic is essentially worthless, and the slight gain in agility and stamina make up for the lost stat otherwise.

Most everything else is a slight upgrade in the slot - the boots, belt, gloves are all slight upgrades and the legs are basically a wash. But that should give you plenty of things to consider spending your valor points on for a while, especially if you're working on some hard hitting content like Nef and want some easy upgrades for tanking.

As to cats? It's not quite as simple. Every troll piece beats the corresponding PvP piece as far as a cat is concerned. And honestly, most of the time it's not even close. All that wasted secondary stat really hurts. Even on the wrists, though it's close. So unless you're very unlucky or sitting on a lot of valor points, getting this stuff isn't as good as just going to troll town.

[Bear] The best case for Savage Defense

2011-04-01T11:29:00.000-07:00

TL;DR version:
If you take anything from this article, take this bit: to maximize SD uptime make sure that mauls happen on your special attacks' cooldown, so the rotation for multitarget mobs looks like this:
swipe/thrash&maul/swipe/mangle&maul

Obviously you can do demo roar or lacerate or whatever on that mangle bit, but maul is the key thing here. That also means to maximize your SD procs now, you should be doing something like this:
swipe/mangle&maul/thrash/lacerate&maul
Though in practice this doesn't work as you need to have the swipe & thrash right away to get the best threat.

Anyway, onto the article.

Savage defense is getting a nice buff in the 4.1 patch, in case you hadn't heard. It will go from having one charge that is used up regardless of attack strength (more on that in a second) to an absorption shield that will absorb the same amount of damage maximum that it could before, but will not go away with partial hits.

So yay! It's now a fully fledged PW:S that only works on physical attacks! That's awesome, and it fixes bears and makes it just as good as shield block or DK heals or...

Okay, that's not true. Sadly.

As Ahti put it very well on the tanking forums recently:

The problem is that the upper bound on this is set extremely low compared to
blocking (and compared to Blood Shield, I guess, although I'd prefer to stick
with the blocking comparison for simplicity's sake). And many encounters already
have add situations that push past that upper bound.You don't need that many
adds hitting you (and they don't need to be hitting that hard) before you reach
the point where the probability is that every single Savage Defense proc is
consumed before you can possibly generate another one. Past that point, you'll
continue to take more damage, but Savage Defense won't get any better - whereas
for a warrior or paladin, block will scale upwards indefinitely.

Yep. But what is that upwards bound? Let's go with the best case scenario here.

Let's assume that you get an SD proc whenever you can. That means you get one every 2.4 seconds (minus haste) for each autoattack, and you get one every 1.5 seconds for every special attack, and you get one every 3 seconds for every maul. This averages out to a SD proc every 1.03 seconds. Note that this is insanely optimistic - it assumes a crit on each of those attacks AND a SD proc on each crit ,which is only 50% of the time. But again - this is the maximum upper bound you can possibly get.

For ease of computation we'll go with a 20k shield. That means every 1.03 seconds we can absorb 20,000 damage intake before taking any more physical damage. Again, sounds pretty awesome - and then it refreshes magically after that 1.03 seconds later. (note that it doesn't; SD doesn't happen every 1.03 seconds but happens on attack boundaries, so you can get times where you don't have much happening and then times when you have many procs - but 1.03 seconds is the average and will be easy to work with.

Now, let's go comparing to a blocker, who always blocks 30% of all damage. They're block capped, so they will always reduce damage by 30% no matter what.

Where do these things become equivalent? That's pretty easy to figure. It's simply when 20k/1.03 seconds = 30% of incoming DPS. And that turns out to be 64.7k DPS.

This means that whenever you're taking more than 64.7k DPS, no matter what, Savage defense will be worse than block. Of course that changes as you add more SD shielding.

The real trick is that the above is completely insane with respect to the number of expected procs, especially in a single target scenario. For a multitarget you can expect multiple crits per swipe/thrash, so you'll often see a shield every 1.5 seconds. But you'll also be without a swipe/thrash every 4.5 seconds - and you're not guaranteed to get a shield even when you swipe.

Realistically how many shields do bears get? It's tough to say. Another problem is that shields can get overwritten without being used at all, especially on attack boundaries where the normal attack lines up with the special attack. And since Maul always lines up with a special attack, any time you get a crit with the special attack and a shield with it (like with swipe) chances are that you're not going to get two shields worth anything.

Actually, that's a good point: to maximize SD uptime on multimob packs you should always - ALWAYS - time it so that a maul happens when both swipe and thrash are on CD. So it should look a lot like this:
swipe/thrash and maul/swipe/mangle and maul as the rotation for trash.

But realistically you get one every time you swipe or thrash and then one kinda randomly after that. The random part is the most frustrating part; some times shields will be completely wasted as they get refreshed every .6 seconds or so, like this:

[19:23:22.825] Maeltne Mangle Halfus Wyrmbreaker *30730*
[19:23:22.878] Maeltne casts Maul on Halfus Wyrmbreaker
[19:23:23.148] Maeltne's Savage Defense is refreshed by Maeltne
[19:23:23.228] Maeltne Maul Halfus Wyrmbreaker *18089*
[19:23:23.666] Maeltne's Savage Defense is refreshed by Maeltne

(this one is fine, as both the mangle and the maul procced SD)

[19:23:50.678] Maeltne crits Halfus Wyrmbreaker *12134*
[19:23:51.194] Maeltne casts Thrash
[19:23:51.448] Maeltne Thrash Storm Rider *8881*
[19:23:51.448] Maeltne Thrash Nether Scion 4456
[19:23:51.448] Maeltne Thrash Halfus Wyrmbreaker *9167*
[19:23:51.285] Maeltne's Savage Defense is refreshed by Maeltne
[19:23:51.590] Maeltne's Savage Defense is refreshed by Maeltne
[19:23:51.590] Maeltne's Savage Defense is refreshed by Maeltne
(this one's more frustrating, as that second SD proc just goes to waste)
All those refreshes are basically wasted here.

Ugh, this is making me mad about SD all over again. This is also why it's much more important to look at SD uptime and not number of SD procs when doing SD analysis. Or if you like, just look at the amount of damage SD absorbed.

Anyway - the important thing to note is that while having partial SD absorbs is nice, it doesn't fix a lot of the issues with SD. SD still doesn't scale infinitely like block does, so at some points it simply will be worse than block for mitigation of damage (like on heroic Nefarian currently). At other points it will be better. Sometimes it (like WotLK-era block) will be WAY better than avoidance or partial blocks, as it will reduce far more than 30%; a great example of this is when you can assume you'll get a SD shield every 1.5 seconds and you won't get physically attacked for more than your shield strength, you'll be effectively invulnerable during this time. When 4.1 hits, try out going to Kara and seeing how silly it is. My gut feeling is that you'll be able to do most trash that doesn't have heavy magical components without losing almost any health.

This, among other things, makes old-world content far easier. 15k shields every 1.5 seconds when you're taking 15k damage every 1.5 seconds sounds a lot like most heroics from before and some raid content. This wasn't nearly as good when one hit removed the shield and then the rest piled on (though with latency and the spell reflect bug, that wasn't always the case and often many attacks got absorbed), but now it should be significantly better.

But for current heroics and raids, it doesn't help a lot. The cases where you are going to get a shield and the shield would have been not used up AND would not be refreshed before being used up are small in raids. Most multimob scenarios in raids have mobs hitting for 10-12k each, and while it adds a bit more value here it doesn't add so much as you could reasonably expect to have a shield up fairly quickly. On mobs that hit for more than the shield strength anyway (Mal adds, as an example) this change does literally nothing for you.

[Druidl] Antitanks in Cataclysm part 2: enchants, gems, gear and reforging

2011-03-29T14:27:00.001-07:00

Continued from the last post.

While Reesi and Tangedyn (note: no guarantees they'll stay in their feral spec/gear) did an awesome job about what to do for the spec and glyphs for a hybrid build, I didn't see a lot on the gear. And...I still don't. Probably because it's a lot harder to evaluate.

Also a note on the glyphs: don't be afraid to take a stack of disappearing dust and swap glyphs as needed. You should be doing this on a case-by-case basis anyway. If you don't use feral faerie fire, the glyph for it is not great. If you're not hitting multiple mobs, why take maul? The prime glyphs are almost always going to stay the same for any fights that have you using hybridity, but if you're just tanking swap them out!

For this I'll give two choices: max DPS and max survival. The Max DPS will give some credit to survival (and vice versa) but ultimately what you need is up to your role; if you're primarily DPSing with occasional tanking light stuff max DPS should be fine. If you're tanking all the time you'll likely have to go with maximum survival.

Gear choices:

The best stat for a hybrid set is agility. Everything should have it. That's true for DPS or survival. The second 'hybrid' stat is mastery. This is the best secondary stat for cats and the second-best for bears. So far, not a lot changes, though your gemming priorities may change somewhat (favoring agility gems over anything else and disfavoring stamina over agility/hit gems).

For max DPS go mastery above everything else. For reforging, the primary reforging target should be mastery if the gear doesn't have mastery. The second one should be expertise (if below the dodge cap), then crit, then hit. Why? If you're planning on being a bear expertise is going to benefit you from a threat perspective and from a savage defense uptime perspective more than crit or hit as long as you're below the dodge cap. After that crit and hit are fairly similar. As has been shown recently, going hit/expertise/crit/haste/mastery is really a matter of choice more than massive changes in overall DPS value for a cat.

For survival, the best secondary stat is dodge. Reforge the highest non-mastery stat to dodge whenever you can, favoring haste, then hit, crit, expertise in that order.

Avoid tanking rings, necks and cloaks. They'll be basically horrible for dps and do not give enough survival gains to warrant their value unless they're significantly higher ilvl (2 tiers) more than what you have.

Tier pieces:

On Tier pieces: the 4 piece for cat is very, very strong when going cat 100% of the time. The problem is that whenever you switch out of cat the buff disappears completely. That means that on any fight where you're switching back and forth every 30 seconds the buff is just going to not be worth it; using 3 GCDs to mangle just to have the buff for 30 seconds isn't going to be as good as having suboptimal stats for bear or cat.The 4p is pretty nice for bears too, but the actual pieces really vary, and for hybrids (especially ones caring about survival primarily) the biggest importance is ilvl over basically anything else. If you have the choice of getting a heroic non-tier piece to replace the nonheroic tier piece - for a bear, this is a good choice. For a cat it's a harder choice but likely the right one.

Note that the 2p for cats is just perfect in this setup as the rake will keep on ticking while in bear form. Yay threat!

In terms of what nontier piece or pieces you should have, it depends. For non-heroic content, Tsanga's helm is the best. It is the only helm with mastery. The tier helm has hit and crit, the offset from Cho'Gall has haste and expertise (ugh). A second choice is the Poison Protocol shoulders, which also have mastery. The Double Attack Handguards are also not bad compared to tier; at least they don't have haste.

For heroic, the best bet is the Sark of the Unwatched, which has crit and mastery vs. haste and expertise.

The best tier piece is the legs, which have crit and mastery and nothing is better at either level. Then the head, then maybe the chest due to the socket bonus being better. In a perfect world I'd go for (non heroic) Tsanga's helm, Double attack handguards and purchasing Morrie's and then going for tier legs and shoulders. For folks getting most of their gear via valor points by necessity you'll likely pick up the tier chest; buy a helm and then work on shoulders and buy Liar's handgrips. For heroic mode go for tier legs and helm, then Double Attack handguards, Sark and Poison Protocol shoulders.

Trinkets are interesting. Ideally you will swap trinkets as needed for certain fights and use others for others, but there are some 'much more better' ones than others here and there.

Max DPS:

Fluid Death has high agility and a reforgeable hit to mastery. Good stuff.
Essence of the Cyclone has the raw agility but the proc is almost completely useless for bears.
Unheeded Warning has lower agi than many of the choices here and has a proc that is completely useless for bear survival (it doesn't even affect SD). Still, it's one of the highest DPS trinkets that exist.
Tia's Grace is almost as good as Fluid Death for cats and actually a bit stronger for bears on most non-Heroic Nef fights due to the extra mastery. (But don't use it for Nef tanking!)
Quicksilver Talisman has tons of agi and reforgeable crit. The potion part isn't particularly useful but it's a good alternative for a second trinket.
Prestor's Talisman also has high agility but has a meh proc for bears.
DM: Hurricane is similar but even more useless to bears.

Max survivability:

Fluid Death has high agility and a reforgeable hit to mastery. It's likely the best hybrid trinket.
Tia's Grace is almost as good as Fluid Death for cats and actually a bit stronger for bears on most non-Heroic Nef fights due to the extra mastery. While Fluid Death has more overall agility the mastery can overtake it, especially when taking smaller hits. (thanks, Nica!)
Mirror of Broken Images only has a survival proc, but that it is mastery as the main stat helps both specs and the actual on use ability is amazing for this tier's raiding content.
Vial of Stolen Memories is horrible for DPS, but between the high stamina and the huge dodge use (which will be very high in an agi-centric gearout), it can be very good - especially on magic-heavy fights.
Symbiotic Worm is a good but not great stamina trinket; use it if you don't have the vial or need a ton of stam for some reason.
Quicksilver Talisman has tons of agi and reforgeable crit. The potion part isn't particularly useful but it's a good alternative for a second trinket.
Prestor's Talisman also has high agility but has a meh proc for bears.
Bedrock Talisman is good for survival but completely useless for DPS.
Essence of the Cyclone has the raw agility but the proc is almost completely useless for bears.
Unheeded Warning has lower agi than many of the choices here and has a proc that is completely useless for bear survival (it doesn't even affect SD). Still, it's one of the highest DPS trinkets that exist.
DM: Hurricane is similar but even more useless to bears.

For me personally the choice is clear - Fluid Death is a win for both specs. An alchemist is probably in luck too. After that the generic one would be something like Unheeded warning or Prestor's talisman depending on what you have. For harder fights swap to a stam trinket + mirror of broken images. Trinkets are the easiest, best way to customize your gear on a fight-by-fight basis, so really do collect them all.

Enchants:

Head:

Max DPS: Arcanum of the Ramkahen

Max Survival: Arcanum of the Ramkahen or Arcanum of the Earthen Ring

While 90 stamina is quite hefty you may be fine with the stamina you have - in which case the 60 agi beats 35 dodge rating any day. The haste is useless for bears, but it's okay for cats. Note that this is a very good place to get a ton of stamina cheaply, so consider doing so if you need more health.

Shoulder:

Max DPS: Greater Inscription of Shattered Crystal

Max Survival: Greater Inscription of Shattered Crystal

While the Unbreakable Quartz enchant is solid, getting both agility and mastery makes up on the hybrid side compared to both. Again, if you need the stamina go with stamina - but otherwise this is a good place to compromise in favor of DPS and avoidance.

Chest:

Max DPS/Max Survival: Peerless Stats

No real debate here. The stamina is nice but this gives enough overall value that it's worth it.

Legs:

Max DPS: charscale leg armor/dragonscale leg armor

Max survival: charscale leg armor

Okay, so technically the dragonscale leg armor wins for DPS - but it's much closer than you think. 55 agility gives 110 AP as well as crit; based on weighings right now that's about 85 EAP vs 55 EAP, which is way smaller. So is 30 EAP worth 145 stam? In most cases you're not going to be able to find a better tradeoff than that. So I'd recommend in either case to go with the charscale legs.

Feet:

Max DPS: Major Agility

Max Survival: Assassin's step

If you can afford it I'd go with assassin's step in either case, but technically major agility is better for cats since they gain nothing from the movement speed increase while in cat form. Lavawalker is also a good choice for a hybrid that favors a bear.

Wrist:

Max DPS/Max Survival: Enchant Bracer Agility

Easy choice here. For leatherworkers it's a bit more tempting to go for the stamina enhancement,but I'd recommend going for the superior agility there as well.

Gloves:

Max DPS: greater mastery

Max Survival: Glove reinforcements (old world)

Yes, the glove reinforcements are still just that good for bears. Sigh. The mastery enchant isn't too bad though.

Cloak:

Max DPS: Greater Agility (old world)

Max survival: protection

For this I'd recommend having two cloaks if you can or going max survival here; the old world enchant is not super strong (22 agi isn't huge) and 250 armor is quite good for bears (it's worth about 40-50 agi for bear survival depending on the fight).

Weapon:

Max DPS/Max survival: Mighty Agility

Fortunately this is an easy choice.

Gems:

The primary goals for both specs is getting agility whenever possible. Where things differ is mostly in which hybrid gems you use and which sockets you go for.

For max DPS go for these choices:

Red: Delicate (agi)

Yellow: Adept (agility/mastery)

Blue: Glinting (agi/hit)

For max survival, go with these:

Red: Delicate (agi)

Yellow: Polished (agi/dodge)

Blue: Shifting (agi/stam)

Then we get to the metagems. And that's a problem. The metagem for DPS is at least a 3% dps gain overall; no single item or enchant or gem comes remotely close to how good it is. The metagem for tanking, however, boosts the one thing that bears are great at - armor. While that's a clear sacrifice, the second sacrifice is that the tanking gem also requires having multiple yellow gems, which are also a somewhat contentious choice. Ultimately what you choose is going to have a big effect, and since helms are hard to come by this may be really tough. Since I think that the hybrid build is about tanking first, DPS second I'd likely go with the austere - but either is a reasonable choice. Just make sure you understand what you're choosing.

[Druid]Antitanks in Cataclsym

2011-03-29T12:16:00.000-07:00

(the antitank image from that article oh so long ago - because russian dogs with explosives strapped to them charging tanks needs to be shown at least one more time)

Recently we've got a lot - and I do mean a LOT - of various bloggers talking about the joys of feral hybrids and the greatness that is being able to do tanking and DPS in the same spec and the same gear. Reesi and Tangedyn from the Inconspicuous Bear do a great job of illustrating where it's useful and what the tradeoffs and considerations are for doing it. Alaron brought it up again (and that came from Wowinsider too). Even Jacemora got into the mix.

Hell, it's not like I hate it. I talked about it way back in the day. (Ironically the build is actually a bit less friendly now than it was then for this sort of thing.

It's all the rage! It's awesome! It makes you 100% more awesome than just having flight form!

And it's also really, really bad for some folks who want to play ferals. But I'll get to that at the end.

Here's the build I'd use (and am likely to switch to soon), if you were curious. The biggest pain point is the loss of feral aggression, which hurts. For doing dailies having nothing that boosts ravage also hurts, but not so amazingly. Because I took nothing that boosted FB, I did not take Blood in the Water either; while it is a DPS boost it is not such a tremendous one that it's required, and more importantly the chances to actually use it when you're tanking and swapping are pretty low, as you're not usually able to get a rip up and then reapply it with the CP necessary. The primary reason I'd switch is simply to get an idea of how to play a moonkin.

Here are some guidelines on when it is good and when it's not that useful.

When it's good:

When the tank is not tanking 100% of the time. Any time that you have downtime on tanking and would otherwise DPS is a time when the hybrid gear/hybrid spec can be significantly advantageous. As Reesi points out, doing 8k more DPS than the next tank is a good reason to bring you over another tank. Being able to do that regularly means that you can either afford to bring an extra tank and drop a DPS slot with little loss to raid viability or be able to bring more utility and survivability in your DPS and make up for raw damage with what you can bring. There are a lot of encounters in this tier where there are significant portions of the fight that you aren't actively tanking and which threat is not a primary concern (such as tank swaps) and Reesi does a good job of talking about them.
When you need to tank only for short amounts of time. Any time you're only tanking for a small chunk of time and that time can largely be covered by defensive CDs is a good time for a hybrid build. Druids are great for this because of things like barkskin.
When your raid for whatever reason likes letting tanks die. This is the herobear case Alaron talks about above, and it's vanishingly rare to happen - but if you find it happening a lot in your raid, consider this as a very useful piece of utility.
When bosses don't hit for a lot or avoidance is otherwise awesome. This one is crucial. This was the primary reason it was okay when I talked about the antitank stuff for WotLK - because bosses hit for almost nothing and avoidance was great since druids hit their stamina check very early, avoidance was much better - and because of that, agility was a big win. Aside from heroic Nef, the bosses this tier don't hit for a huge amount. As a result you can simply adjust gear slightly (using things like stamina trinkets) and have enough health to deal with most bosses while actually taking less overall damage. And since mana is an issue right now, this is a Good Thing.

Now the thing is that all of these things are true right now. That's good to realize. That's good to understand. But it's not necessarily going to be true in the future. Encounters will be designed with all tanks in mind, and those other tanks don't do things like get gear loaded with strength and crit on it. Bosses will hit hard enough to scare those tanks who are stacking stamina. Keep that in mind and make sure you understand when it's bad.

When it's bad:

When you're tanking 100% of the time. If you're the single tank with no swaps, there's not a lot of advantage to being a hybrid. You have more avoidance thanks to your gear selections, but you could have done that anyway if it was better - and chances are that you've reforged primarily to mastery, not dodge, which isn't as good. The difference between a bear in DPS gear and a bear in stam gear in terms of damage isn't so amazing; you get your dividends in dps not from doing it in bear with dps gear, but from going cat. So you're tradiing utility and potentially damage reduction (especially if you skipped infected wounds or perseverance) for...nothing.
When you're DPSing 100% of the time. Herobear notwithstanding, you are losing DPS if you're speccing this way. Even with pure DPS gear you lose somewhere between 5-10% DPS just from going this route depending on your talent choices. You can also lose some utility that most will expect from you - Nurturing Instinct is often the one that goes by the wayside, and a NI-powered tranq is about twice as good as a non-NI powered tranq. In this case, you're trading DPS and utilty for the ability to not get crit when...nothing attacks you.
When specialized gear really matters. Being able to hybridize is mostly a function of gear choice, not spec choice. The spec differences are fairly minor, and the glyph differences aren't going to necessarily kill you (though the 'important' ones are almost all kitty), but the gear choice is huge and is easily a 20-40% difference in damage for a cat. Between the meta, the enchants, the gemming and the reforging it's a very large swing in stats. If as a bear you need to have 200k health and a ton of dodge and mastery doesn't matter (like, for example, if you're going up against heroic Nef as the MT) being a hybrid won't help you. This was the primary death of the antitank in Ulduar times - things just hit too damn hard.

As Reesi illustrated above right now the number of encounters that require a 100% tank is not nearly as much as the ones that don't. And the fights that benefit from more DPS from a tank are more common than the ones that wouldn't. Right now, it makes quite a bit of sense.

Except...well, except the bad parts.

What are the bad parts? They're basically TBC all over again, is what.

If bears are the best tank to do things like tank some of the time, they will almost never be the tank that tanks 100% of the time on fights. If you like being a tank on every single encounter, this is bad news for you. If you like tanking 100% of the time on a single encounter this is also bad.

In raid guilds, bears will be deprioritized for tanking gear over the 100% tanks - and rightfully so. Why should they get that awesome tanking trinket if they only use it half the time? This is tough to deal with for some.

It's sometimes going to be a fight to get gear as a DPS as well. Why give it to you when you're just using it for offtanking? Shouldn't it go to a DPS who will use it to do more DPS more often?

Bears already have a prejudice towards them as being 'bad' tanks (mostly for their AOE threat and AoE mitigation). This isn't going to help.

And if you like being a cat - it's also bad news. If you don't care about tanking at all, if that's not interesting to you whatsoever and you like being a feral cat, chances are this is a huge hit. Feral DPS was already meh - but having the trend being doing DPS while not tanking and then tanking something? That's what raids are starting to expect from ferals. Being an awesome offtank means that a lot of time that's what they'll expect from you. They'll want that to be the case and want you to go tank and if you suck at it, or don't like it, or whatever - that'll be a knock on you.

And yes, it sucks hard for heroics. You'll miss having things like IW or skull bash on a 10-second CD, you'll miss that utility, and it'll not feel right. That's not a big deal, but it's something to consider; it's something I went through when I had my awesome spec for HAnub that didn't have 5 rage reduction on abilities. For HAnub it didn't matter; I was getting tons of rage and I didn't need it early. But for heroics? Ugh, it was like molasses.

And honestly? Feral DPS is so meh in raiding right now and ranged is so awesome that it makes a lot of sense to go feral hybrid/moonkin as your two specs; it gives a lot more flexibility while doing a hell of a lot more damage when not tanking. That's sadly the way it is this tier.

For me, personally, this is fine. I enjoy tanking, I enjoy DPS, and I plan on doing both in raids when I'm raiding. If it makes sense to go hybrid on fights because of tight DPS checks, then it's great. Being able to make other tanks cry unfair can be fun.

But it can also be fun being the main tank. And it can also be fun being competitive with rogues and warriors on DPS. And as long as hybrid builds are possible and having 'high dps while tanking some of the time' is a feature, it will be very, very hard to get improvements to tanking or DPS for ferals. Keep in mind that for every TBC-era feral that loved being the best offtank and loved being able to do tanking or DPS depending on what mood fit them and loved the herobear, there was a feral that was pissed off their class wasn't being considered for MT and didn't want to screw around with being a DPS - or a feral that loved being a cat but didn't want to tank at all. Hell, in Fire and Blood we had all three kinds of ferals at the same friggin time.

I guess that's where my animosity comes from (if I have any) - from remembering the arguments from people in my own guild that said that I clearly couldn't get the things like barkskin or shield wall or even a reliable interrupt because I can dps, and you shouldn't be able to both be as good a tank as anyone AND be as good a DPS as anyone. The niche of being the best offtank is not the most fun for a lot of people, and there is some genuine frustration there. Or not being able to be buffed for DPS because hey, you can tank! That changed quite a bit in WotLK, but there's a chance that things are going back to the old way.

My gut feeling is that because this is the opening tier things aren't hitting super hard - but they will. That tank damage and danger will start ratcheting up, and EH will start ruling the roost once again. When that happens and stamina, armor and resistance start making more of a sway on gearing choices I suspect that it won't matter on hybridization, and if you're a hybrid you'll be doing tanking only very rarely because you'll need two tanks who can be hit like a nail. But that's just a guess.

[Bear] Agility vs. stam? No, that's not right

2011-03-17T13:35:00.000-07:00

This got inspired by a comment I made on the wow forums.

Most bears these days don't gear exclusively for stamina like they used to - and that's the right choice. Stamina has always been a big win back in the day when the following was true:

All that mattered was that a tank could take big, crushing hits one after the other but then get healed up almost immediately after a certain point
Tanks were getting routinely smashed by nonpredictable damage (such as crushing blows)
Bears got 25% more health from stamina (or more) compared to other tanks, making it a major gain for them
Healer mana wasn't an issue

In Cataclysm virtually none of that is true. Sure, a tank needs to be able to survive the Giant Damage of Doom here and there, but after that stamina doesn't do much. It can increase your vengeance damage (and thus savage defense shields are better) but not nearly as much or as reliably as simply having more AP and more crit. Healers aren't going to heal you to full most of the time and certainly aren't going to be able to do it in one GCD or two at most. And bears (sniff) don't have a stupid OP amount of extra health compared to other tanks.

So it's clear that the strategy should be go for stamina until you have enough, then go for agility. Right? Good, so we can move on and...

Um....

Wait.

This may shock you, but there are more choices to make than just agility vs stamina.

In particular, the advantages of armor and resistance continue to be massively understated for bears (and tanks in general).

Now I've talked about some of the secret advantages armor had over stamina, but that was just talking about effective health. Armor's primary advantage is shared with agility or any other avoidance - a reduced attack does less damage and thus requires less healing. This is a Big Deal in an age where mana matters for healers and tanks are left at partial deficits for longer periods of time. But now, I have some easy math to showcase this.

Thanks to Tangedyn's spreadsheet over at Inconspicuous Bear, I have an example of this. Namely, me. While I'm not remotely geared to the gills or anything of the sort, the changes should not be significant between me and a very well-geared bear - especially as far as armor is concerned. I'll play with it later with a more geared tank at some point in the future. And if you look at that spreadsheet, 1 point of bonus armor is worth .18 points of agility.

So clearly agility wins out, right? Well, that's where it gets tricky. Things like Bedrock Talisman have a veritable ton of armor - 1285 to be precise. That's equivalent to 231 agility on its own - but it also has a large chunk of avoidance that could be useful at various points and would cause a big reduction in damage too. Many of the other agility trinkets like Essence of the Cyclone have a ton of agility but nothing particularly useful for anything else.

But the big thing that wins here is that armor is predictable. While avoidance is nice - good even - being able to consistently mitigate damage from every single physical hit is very nice. Being able to plan on that incoming damage on a regular basis is great.

So how does this compare to the two best agility trinkets out there - Tia's Grace and Fluid Death?We'll assume reforging to dodge.

Tia's grace: 340 agility effectively + 171 mastery + 114 dodge.

Fluid Death: 380 agility effectively + 193 hit + 128 dodge

According to the spreadsheet, mastery is worth .2782 agi, dodge .9110 agi, hit .0838. So we get a total value of:

Tia's Grace: 491.42

Fluid Death: 512

Okay, but what's the value of the proc on Bedrock? In a perfect world you'd get 963 dodge for 1/3rd of the time (which is unlikely), meaning you get 321 dodge.

Bedrock Talisman: 1285 armor *.1808 + 321 dodge *.9110 = 524

Huh. So that means that in a perfect setting where you get procs all the time, Bedrock Talisman is actually better for time to live and dtps than Fluid Death or Tia's Grace. (at least for me).

How about someone more geared? Well, while it's not perfect let's go ahead and use Sejta from Paragon. (it's not perfect because while they're more geared they go for mastery and stamina over agility and dodge primarily)For them, bonus armor is only worth .1632 and dodge .8322 agi. Mastery is worth more (.323) as well, so for them the values of Bedrock are a bit lower - Bedrock, even in the best case, is still not as good as Fluid Death for Sejta. (And I'm sure that breaks his heart).

Still, the value of armor's predictability combined with the value of the mitigation is quite nice and something to consider. Especially if the pattern of damage would give you that high avoidance in spikes. Heck, even something trivial like Heart of Thunder can be good if the cooldown is more useful than avoidance would be (for instance, on something where you take predictable chunks of large magical damage.

Congrats Fasc!

2011-03-11T00:05:00.000-08:00

Just saw over at MMO-Champion the loot lists for Zul*, and lo and behold Fasc - a longtime contributor to bear tanking and general tanking theory and help - got an item named after him.

Congrats, Fasc!

What's awesome about the loot list: a freakin wrist item!

What's not? No feral weapon.

[General]Site update, general thoughts

2011-02-24T14:14:00.001-08:00

I've simply stopped posting much any more. Really, I've simply stopped writing much altogether about WoW.

This is mostly to do with me not raiding any more. Cataclysm hearkens back to the days where heroics were decently hard and raiding was challenging, and while that's awesome and everything I wanted improved, it's not nearly as easy to balance farming, rep grinding, valor point capping, and doing all the other things I like doing while also keeping a schedule of 4 hours where you do nothing else but play.

So raiding is done, at least as a srs bsns raider.

The theorycraft and news side of me has been...well, pretty down too. Part of it is that honestly, Alaron and Yawning were doing such a kickass job that anything I'd add would be largely irrelevant. With them taking up most of what was needed there just haven't been that many topics to discuss.

With them likely to be (or already) taking a hiatus, though, don't expect a lot more from me. The thing is that - and Yawning alluded to it - that feral has left me somewhat cold this expansion. Bears haven't grabbed me like I had hoped the dynamic rotation would have, and while it's not quite as boring as it used to be it's still not feeling like my abilities really...well, do much. And cats...well, I spent a lot of time on Alaron's blog talking about why I'm not really thrilled with ferals, but allow me to quote myself as I think this is the clearest indicator:

If you switched cata and wotlk in order, here are the buffs ferals would get:
-bleeds would be reduced in duration to increase the value of being on the target as well as making the rotation more potent.
Mastery changed to a scaling reduction of the opponents armor.
FB changed to use all available energy and do significantly more damage, buffed by bleeds and bleed modifiers.
Blood in the watermremoved to increase difficulty of rotation.
Swipe buffed by approx. 300%
Savage roar increases all damage instead of just autoattack, increasing it’s performance in the rotation and making the time on target more important
Berserk removes fear.
Shifting forms removes slows and snares
Fury swipes removed; it was not useful to have so much of the rotations damage on a noninteractive autoattack. This has been readers as damage to other abilities.
Instead of some attacks scaling with weapon damage all weapons have a ‘feral ap’ stat, allowing all feral attacks to scale with weapon damage naturally.
And that’s just off the top of my head. Yes, it’s nice to not be bound so much by arpen. Yes, skull bash is nice. The rest has been nerf after nerf, affecting either overall dps or simply the fun involved.

Add to this that ferals are underperforming both overall on DPS and in the melee group aside from one fight (Chimaeron) and you don't have the most compelling experience. At least I haven't. Things are easier, there's less to actually do, and it's not as fun for me. Other ferals differ, and that's awesome. But it's a good reason why I've been so malaise-y.

Then there's the 'we can't have nice things' function of PvP. It's amazing how much I miss removing snares by shifting. This was a really class-defining ability that really, really makes me sad to lose it. I don't pvp, and i don't care that much about pvp balance, so it's doubly sad for me; it's like I can't have nice things because out there, some other cat is thumbing his nose at people. Same thing with zerk removing fear; it's shocking how often I ended up using this in PvE. It's not something that's required, or something that's really awesome. It's just something that is nice, and you miss it when it's gone, and makes the class that much less fun to play.

But anyway, to answer some long-held questions that I seem to get all the time:

On weapon DPS: the weapon DPS is the best stat to 'stack' if you can for ferals; nothing comes close. But weapon speed or weapon damage don't matter in the slightest. All 200 DPS weapons are exactly the same as far as a feral is concerned. This is also why Unheeded Warning became so amazing for ferals.

On warstomp: sadly, it does have a cast time - and that means it can be pushed back on and (more importantly) you can't dodge while doing it. It's still very good for some things, but it's certainly not as great as you'd hope as a bear. It's actually a bit better as a cat, assuming you don't piss off the tank by doing so.

On stam vs. agility as a bear: stamina isn't nearly as awesomesauce as it was. Bears get roughly the same multiplier that other tanks do, so getting more doesn't help. Bears don't get a whole lot of gain from vengeance with that high stamina either; you get far more AP from agility. Most importantly, stamina marks in heroics are fairly small in terms of what you need to survive big hits. Longtime readers will remember that this was also the case for the Naxxramas era, and that didn't survive very long. I don't know whether or not stacking agility will be better in the long run, but if I had to bet on it I'd always bet on harder encounters having bigger hits to stress out everyone.

On capping hit/expertise as a bear: the only reason to do this now is for threat and to a lesser extent, skull bash (which is going away as a reason in 4.1). That being said, threat is kinda sketchy for bears and no other stats are remotely nice.

On capping hit/expertise for a cat: theoretically it is the least important thing to do. Realistically a lot of people have a much easier time with a rotation with high hit and expertise. Ultimately the difference between a hit and exp-capped feral vs a mastery/haste/crit feral is fairly small, so as long as you're stacking agility over everything else you'll be fine.

On the state of dps and ferals - yes, ferals are low. Yes, the simulators and the actual results agree. No, you probably won't see this as an issue if you're not in highly competitive raiding guilds. But statistically and mathematically this is entirely true: ferals are both doing poorly relative to overall DPS and to melee DPS (which is completely getting hosed so far this expansion). Any argument otherwise is essentially baking the numbers in a really quirky way. For instance, looking at the top 10 ferals and seeing that they are performing close to the top 250 overall (on a fight that favors ferals, no less) and thus declaring ferals are doing fine. Err...no. That being said, it's not hard to fix ferals to be more competitive: give them much better AoE and give them more base damage from either white damage shreds, or make their startup cost a bit cheaper. It's really not that hard to fix and ferals aren't so broken that they require a complete change.

On blue posts and ferals: no, ferals aren't getting a lot of attention. I don't know why either. I do know that it's much, much faster to bring up an actual broken problem to a person who knows a dev than it is to bring it up on the forums. One has a chance of being fixed. Another...almost never does.

I'll still very rarely post, and if you do have something you'd like me to talk about I'll be happy to. Otherwise I wish you the best of luck in Cataclysm. :)

[Bear]The most important PTR change for 4.0.6 is...

2011-01-06T13:36:00.000-08:00

Sure, you've seen the patch notes at MMO talking about bears getting nerfed in damage but boosted in armor, and cats getting nerfed on bleeds but boosted on shred & mangle.

Alaron talked about it, as did Jacemora.

But what did they miss? Oh, they missed this little beauty.

The tauren racial trait War Stomp can now be used while shapeshifted.

Oh, HELL yes.

Even on a 3 minute CD this is great for PvE, especially heroics. Interrupts, stopping a lot of damage early on, being able to get stupid achievements like the one from BRC - it has tons of potential use. Just awesome. Of course ,it's something we should have had for a long, long time - but at least we get it.

[Bear]FYI - looks like skull bash can miss

2011-01-05T16:37:00.000-08:00

The rumors of skull bash's awesomeness and lack of need for hit (at least as a bear) appears to be a bit dead now, as logs have shown that skull bash can actually miss. Well, okay, it could always miss - but the interrupt can now also miss, and that means hit is actually more useful than it was.

What I'm not clear about is whether or not skull bash uses the melee or spell table for hit. More testing is required. In any case, make sure to have some backup hit gear just in case you're the interrupt guy; interrupts are a Big Deal nowadays.

[Druid] General comments on GC's recent post

2010-12-28T12:49:00.001-08:00

Wanted to handle this separately, since it was a Big Deal over the holidays.

Ghostcrawler recently had a very big update on PvE and PvP balance, and actually mentioned ferals a couple times! I know, I was as shocked as you were. The whole thing is over at MMO-Champ, but the important relevant bits of ferals I've copied.

We’ll make a pass to make stats that aren’t attractive (but are supposed to be) more attractive. For example, we don’t want Assassination rogues to dismiss crit or Feral tanks to dismiss haste. We are considering making some physical attacks such as Lacerate, Steady Shot, and Slam scale with haste.

Okay, that doesn't sound THAT bad. Ferals shouldn't dismiss haste like they do now for the junk stat that it is, and improving lacerate and making it scale with haste sounds good, right?

Kinda. See, right now lacerate is the filler attack for bears. It's what bears do when Mangle's on CD and they have rage, or it's what they do to get Pulverize back up while waiting for berserk procs. This works not because lacerate has an awesome bleed, but because lacerate's threat and damage got boosted on the front. It used to be that the actual lacerate attack was pretty insignificant but the lacerate bleed was awesome; they changed that.

Why did they change that? Well, mostly because (I think) they didn't want bears to be doing thrash and swipe as their 'filler' attacks and only use lacerate for the bleed. They also wanted Pulverize to be less of a threat-negative situation.

Right now, haste could make lacerate dots tick twice as often per % and it still wouldn't be worth it. The bleeds just don't do enough damage or threat and the uptime of lacerate is low enough that it's not worth it anyway. Haste could only really improve how often the lacerate dot ticks; it's not like haste can make us gain more lacerate attacks. Thus, the only real way to make haste work better for ferals is to make the actual dot do more damage.

Which would put bears back in the 'backloaded, slow threat' mode that they were. Except...well, bear threat is almost entirely defined by maul and mangle. Pulverize is done almost entirely to make maul and mangle hit harder. Lacerate should be up on the target to make mauls hit harder. So even if lacerate is boosted, it's still a very small portion of overall threat.

As an example of this, let's say for argument's sake that the lacerate bleed component was a whopping 20% of overall threat for a bear. It isn't that - not even close. And it's not been that, either. 1% haste - 128 haste rating - would improve that bear's threat by .2%. If melee attacks are another 20% of overall damage that makes haste give a whopping .4% threat per 1% haste.

Not that thrilling, I know. And because lacerate bleed crits don't proc savage defense any more, you have the fun times of only improving your savage defense via the white attacks.

So...how do you make haste more attractive to bears? Here's a few ideas I had.

1. Make haste also improve avoidance directly. Have a deep feral talent that allows haste to give avoidance at 50% of dodge rating. Intuitive, easy, no real math. If that's too much, make it at 25% or something.

2. Make lacerate ticks crit at an absurd rate and be able to proc Savage Defense. Then improve them via haste. You'd need to get like an 80% crit rate on lacerate dots to make this matter, but it could really help.

3. Make white attacks have a chance to proc savage defense or some other defensive ability.

4. Nerf maul and mangle and make lacerate better.

5. Make pulverize not consume the lacerate stack. This alone would improve the threat of the bleed greatly.

6. Revamp bears to make rage matter for for survival and less for threat.

Of these, I really want 6 to be the case but it won't happen. The main reason that bears don't care about haste is that they don't care about rage, and they don't care about rage because threat isn't ever as important as survival. I don't think that threat is going to be nerfed hugely (though it might be), so it really comes down to making rage actually matter for a bear. What if a bear had to keep x amount of rage to keep their mitigation higher, by improving their armor? Or a bear took 1% less damage for every 10 rage they had stored? Or if barkskin, survival instincts and even savage defense required rage to use? Then we'd care about haste quite a bit.

But bears aren't rage capped. They're GCD capped. And rage only helps with threat. So...we just don't care.

Onto cats: the other statement in the big post was about druids in general (especially for pvp):

Even after we fixed their mastery, Feral druid bleeds still do a lot of damage and are undispellable. We plan to shift some of that damage back to main attacks. They are also a little too hard to control. Given that they are already hard to root, snare, or polymorph, we think the fear immunity from Berserk is too much.

So the fear immunity from berserk is gone. Oh well. Not hugely missed but it was very nice on a few boss fights, especially as a cat. As to shifting some of the damage from bleeds to main attacks - GOOD. 50-60% of damage coming from bleeds meant ferals were really funky on some fights. When they could establish a bleed rotation or at least establish rake and rip and they could tick for a good long time, ferals could rule. If a feral could get bleeds going on multiple targets at once, they could be good. But on fights where there was a lot of down time or rampup time, ferals kinda sucked. They took a while to get rip up, and often rip wouldn't tick for the duration anyway or couldn't be refreshed properly. Target switching was really lame. Haste, hit, and expertise all were ignored for bleeds since none helped bleeds do more damage once they were applied. It was just a bad move.

Really, I want haste to be better for cats. There are two ways to make that happen - either make bleeds scale with haste like they were going to originally or make bleeds do less overall damage and make white and yellow attacks do more. Note that ferals don't have a lot of yellow attacks to do; shred and mangle are basically it, and you don't want to mangle more than every 30 seconds (if you have t11) anyway. Still, haste making things faster and making more OoC procs, more white damage and more shred damage would be a good thing. It really doesn't have to be much to swing it that way either; simply make bleeds do about 10% less damage and make shreds and white attacks do about 10% more.

[Bear] Some early bear thoughts

2010-12-28T12:21:00.000-08:00

A couple posters asked me to go back to writing some things about bears.

Well, they're fuzzy. And shouldn't be petted.

K. Happy holidays!

Oh, fine. Real things to consider. Let's start with some basics:

1. Interrupts and taunts cannot miss. Note that the interrupt attack (like skull bash) can miss, but the actual interrupt effect will never miss. This has been confirmed by repeat experimentation a ridiculous amount of times. This means that other than threat (and savage defense procs), there is no reason to gear for hit as a tank.

2. Parry haste does not exist for anyone. For players, for mobs, anyone. That isn't to say that mobs can't parry - or that they don't quite a lot - but it does mean that using expertise to get less of a chance of gibbage is a bit silly. Thus, other than threat (and savage defense procs) there is no reason to gear for expertise as a tank.

3. Haste improves the speed of autoattacks for bears. This improves rage generation slightly, but only slightly. It can slightly increase the number of SD procs you get, but only barely. In theory it will let you maul more, but not a whole lot more; mauls are usually a function of damage intake, not white attacks. Thus, other than threat (and savage defense procs) there is no reason to gear for haste as a tank.

4. While vengeance improves savage defense, it does have a fairly high ceiling. For most bears this means that they are not vengeance-capped (where vengeance is equivalent to 10% of their health). Which means adding more health does not improve mitigation; just because you have more health doesn't mean you'll be hitting for more via vengeance. This will vary between tank to tank and encounter to encounter; I expect that as you get into heroic raids you'll start pushing the limit of vengeance stacking and it'll improve again. But for the most part, stamina doesn't help mitigation (stopping damage intake), it only improves survival.

5. Most of the time stamina isn't helping survival all that much. We are at the point where effective health is not nearly as relevant as taking less damage and being smart with mechanics. Tank healing is pretty simple as long as the tank doesn't screw up a mechanic. Tank survivability is quite high; I've been able to survive for 20 seconds without external healing - and that's with a mishmash of tanking and dps gear. There aren't that many fights where the tank is going to be taking a ton of damage, at least not on normal modes; Heroic Nef hits for about 70-80k on a tank in normal 25-man, and he's by far the worst offender. What this means is that stamina past a certain point is just not that great. Gone are the days where bears got way more multipliers for their stamina, and gone are the days where a stamina gem gives 1.5 times the benefit it does to other tanks. Stamina is not the be-all, end all of a bear's use.

What all of this means is the following:

1. For heroics, don't bother stacking stamina unless your gear level is very low (like, just barely able to go into a random). Stack agility and reforge the highest value to dodge.

2. Understand the fight and be able to redo gear cheaply. Flasks for agility are good (especially since the stam flask isn't as good as it should be). Swapping cheap enchants is another idea. Use justice points to buy second sets of gear and redo them for stam and agility.

3. Threat is largely unimportant right now. If you're really concerned about it chances are you're doing something wrong; on a single target fight it is very, very hard for dps to touch you past 10 seconds.

4. There's no reason to worry about misses on important stuff.

The end result of all of this is that agility is Very Good. Mastery is Good. Crit rating is Good. Stamina is Good (to a point). Dodge (which gives about 50% more dodge% than agility does) is Good.

Hit, Expertise, haste, strength, AP? All meh.

Which, interestingly enough, is very similar to what the priorities are for cats. Other than dodge, that is.

And armor. Oh yeah, armor! If you are going to go stacking effective health despite what others are saying, keep in mind that armor improves both survival and mitigation. Also keep in mind that the best heroic armor trinket - Heart of Thunder - has worse armor than the worst old trinket you can buy - good old Glyph. If you can get your hands on a Petrified Twilight Scale it's well worth it.

Some other fun tricks:

1. Entangling roots is awesome. You're the only tank out there that has not only one CC but two. Both are situational and not perfect, but both are great and are good in a pinch. Know how to utilize them in various dungeons. Get used to them.

2. Remember that you can shift out of snares. There are a TON of snares in dungeons now - Ozrek's paralyze is a good example. Instead of waiting for the damage to free you, why not free yourself?

3. Get used to Line of Sight. You don't have an easy silence but you do have a ton of LoS abilities. This helps a ton with caster pulls. Otherwise casters should almost always be CCed; you can take a lot of physical punishment but don't have the control of caster that other tanks do.

4. Remember that skull bash is a short charge, too.

[Cat] Optional talents (that aren't optional) for cats

2010-12-17T16:21:00.000-08:00

While Cataclysm's kept me tons of busy, it's been a fun busy. I love the new heroics and their difficulty level and requirements for encounter awareness and ability use. I love the look of most of them as well. The fights are interesting and fairly hard, and most importantly hugely unforgiving. Trash is hard and needs to be respected. Kill orders need to be followed. CC should be used, even creatively at times.

And normal modes of raiding have gone back to being very interesting in design and scope. Halfus, Maloriak, Theralon and Valiona, Omnitron, Magmaw - all have multiple phases and roles and a lot of movement and raid awareness. They really reward a good druid who can utilize all of their abilities and knows what to do and when to do it. I was very ready to bash Cataclysm's design and the 'coolness' of heroic modes compared to Ulduar, but so far the encounters are really great.

Part of the design for Cataclysm was to give everyone a chance to pick talents that were 'fun' or 'interesting' but didn't specifically boost DPS, because any DPS class that picked a non-DPS talent was obviously wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong. In any given build for a class/spec, this means (in theory) that you have 5 or so talent points kicking around that can be used for a preferential talent or two but you don't really 'need' in order to play well.

And today, I'm going to put that to the dirty, horrible lie that it is.

The basic cat build is something like this: the 0/31/6 build with 4 points remaining. Even with that you have some options that people are going to argue about - do you take Feral Aggression, Predatory Strikes, Stampede or Infected Wounds? You have to spend at least 5 points in some of those. Later on, do you take Brutal Impact, Nurturing Instinct, Survival Instincts or Primal Madness? Of all of those, you have to spend at least 8 points in there. And that's not even counting herobear/bearcat mixed specs that use something like Thick Hide or Natural Reaction! So you've got a monumental 12 points to play around with.

So even if we wanted to skip some of these talents we can't. Here's the dirty secret: many really aren't optional. Here's the list of talents that every raiding and heroic-queueing cat must have, and why:

Must haves:

1. Nurturing Instinct. Healing is very, very hard, and anything that makes it easier to heal you is good. However, that's not what makes this talent must-have. What makes this absolutely needed is the huge boost it gives to Tranquility. While it's on a very long cooldown Tranquility is something every druid should be using or ready to use in many situations in raiding, and being able to get a lot of healing out of it is important. It'll never be as good as a Balance druid's version, but it still is much better. Think of it as the new version of innervate; instead of giving mana back to a healer, it's giving mana back to a healer in the form of smart heals that heal for a ton.

2. Brutal Impact. The argument against Brutal Impact was that so many other classes have good interrupts that it's really not necessary. Okay, that's true in 25 man to a point - though there are enough 'random stack on this add' that that isn't quite as true, and it does add a small but significant charge effect.

But what about 10-man? In a 10-man you're probably one of 2 or maybe three melee. The chances of any of them having a good interrupt is fairly low. Chances are you'll have to have an interrupting team - and Skull Bash is just as good for it as anything out there.

Where it really shines is in 5-mans. While there aren't that many bosses that have 'must have' interrupts in 5 mans, there are a few. More importantly almost every single trash pack has interruptable abilities that do a ton of damage or cause chaos. If you can interrupt those, the runs go much more smoothly. Help your healers and tank out and go interrupt stuff. Learn how to do it now - because you will be asked to do it later.

3. Survival Instincts. This one is pretty easy to understand: every 5 minutes it's very, very hard to kill you. Again, another mana-saver for healers, a life-saver for you, and a very easy way to prevent damage by going bear, popping this and Frenzied regen. Get used to using it regularly in boss fights, particularly in heroics. It also helps go herobear and use this too. Raid strategies will be based around being able to use personal cooldowns to survive big attacks - and honestly Barkskin just doesn't cut it sometimes.

Most everyone expects you have this, and you do have it right?

1. Feral Aggression. This was almost must-have. The primary reason isn't the boost to Ferocious Bite (though that is a small DPS increase at 25% and less), it's the applying sunders instantaneously, 3 at a time, for 5 minutes. This is far better than the warrior or the rogue version. The rogue version takes energy, the warrior version takes rage and a GCD. Faerie Fire gets applied at range (usually before the fight starts), cats aren't GCD bound and usually can pool energy without any DPS issues and having all three sunders up early is a great boost. If you don't have this you're going to take up 3 GCDs and 12 seconds to put up all the FF stacks. While the GCDs don't hurt, this means you're going to be doing a decent amount less damage in those 12 seconds. What's worse is that all your friends are too. It isn't a requirement, but given that it boosts personal DPS and raid DPS and is the best way to put up sunders you should have it - just like you forced those warriors to sunder so the rogues didn't have to, you should too.

The rest are pretty much your choice. Note that if you take these talents you basically have 5 points to split amongst the rest of the optional ones - one of which must go into a tier five talent or less.

Some of you might be asking why Primal Madness is considered optional. The reason is that it's a very situational, small DPS increase. For two talent points you get 20 more energy, which by itself is half as good as Tiger's Fury. That's not great but is okay. The problem is that when the buff fades, you lose up to 20 energy right away. It's very rare that you can end at 0 energy just as the debuff goes off, so most of the time it'll be at best a very small DPS gain. You can in theory micromanage it so that you cancel the debuff just as you use the ability that causes you to lose the energy (for example, macroing shred to cancel the Primal Madness debuff) but even then you're likely to lose 4-5 energy simply from latency. It's just not that great.

So the reality is that you basically have 5 talent points to spend as you see fit outside of the above, and at least one needs to be in a tier-5 talent. This is one reason that it's hard to do the bearcat build - you have to skip out on at least one of those talents, and chances are it's either Nurturing Instinct (which is incredible) or Brutal Impact (which is mandatory for 5-mans). Or you gimp your bear slightly, not taking Infected Wounds or Pulverize. It's a hard choice, and ultimately one I can't advocate - even though there have been a ton of times I've had to go herobear and tank something for a while.

That being said - bear gear and cat gear have never, ever been closer. And if you want to be a herobear, all you really need is Thick Hide.

[Cat] Cataclysm heroic drops by slot and by dungeon

2010-12-13T11:57:00.000-08:00

This is a quick and dirty list of all the drops that come from the heroic dungeons. I did this mostly for me to be able to see where I should queue if I have a choice of doing only one or two dungeons a day. Note that there's almost no difference between pieces on this list and other pieces at the same ilvl, so don't worry too much about getting the best piece.

The list used.

Back:

Cloak of Thredd - Deadmines

Twitching Shadows - BRC

Kaleki Cloak - Lost City

Cape of the Brotherhood - Deadmines

While there are a lot of options here, there are almost as many options outside of dungeons. There's the Revered Earthen Ring cloak and a cheap LW pattern cloak that are just as good, and one that's even better from Valor points. So don't run things just for this - it's a nice thing if it drops.

Chest:

Defias Brotherhood Vest - Deadmines

Vest of Misshapen Hides - Grim Batol

Hieroglyphic Vest - Halls of Origination

Another embarassment of riches here. The justice piece is also good, there's a great LW crafted piece and an even better T11 piece. There's even a reasonably competitive 333 piece from honored Hyjal. So don't bother running dungeons for just this slot.

Feet:

Crafty's Gaiters - Lost City

VanCleef's Boots - Deadmines

Boots of the Predator - SFK

These have much fewer rivals. There's only one vendor piece, and it's a valor cost. The next best thing is off of a long quest chain for Halls of Origination - and it's normal. This is a good one to go for if you want to go for something.

Finger:

Ring of Blinding Stars - HoO

Skullcracker Ring - BRC

Nautilus Ring - Throne of Tides

Ring of Dun Alguz - Grim Batol

Rings are always in short supply early on. While there's a good ring for exalted with Earthen Ring that's only one thing - and as you'll see you'll want to get exalted with Dragonmaw first. One of the best rings is a JC recipe, but those are going to be hard to get early on since they cost 4 chimera's eyes to make and 5 to acquire. A better choice is Therazane's revered ring, which you'll be going for rep-wise anyway (unless you're a scribe). So do try to get one of these and get the Therazane rep ring, with the aim to go for Earthen Ring later.

Hands:
Gloves of Haze - Vortex Pinnacle

Ouch. The best comes from Dragonmaw Exalted rep, but that might take a while. The next best is a justice point drop. Vortex Pinnacle doesn't have much, and I'd really aim for getting exalted with Dragonmaw - but if you're unlucky the JP purchase might be the best way to go. Hopefully you get lucky :)

Head

Helm of Numberless Shadows - Stonecore

Double ouch. The other option is a justice point drop. Well, or a trash drop from a raid, but chances are you won't be getting that any time soon. Stonecore is a good instance to run for this and for the weapon, so try to get this early. Otherwise it should be one of your earliest justice point purchases as it won't be wasted any time soon.

Legs:

Beauty's Chew Toy - BRC

Another low-drop slot with even less competition than the head - the only other piece is the justice point legs. Note that there are a lot of good 333-level quest rewards for legs and helm, so this might not be as huge an upgrade for you as other slots (notably the hands) - but this will not be wasted. Also BRC doesn't have that much to offer, making this even better.

Neck:

Pendant of the Lifeless Grotto - Stonecore

Mouth of the Earth - HoO

Not many dungeon drops, but all sorts of weird options abound. There are world drops that are super expensive but awesome, JC recipes (which are also expensive), a Guardians of Hyjal Revered purchase, a justice point purchase and another random BoE. While GoH doesn't have much going for it to get to revered, you might already be close to it if you did Hyjal - so consider doing that. Otherwise go to Stonecore.

Relic:

Sandshift Relic - BRC

Relic of Arathor - SFK

Forgot this category in the prior list...oops. So this makes BRC and SFK even tastier. The options you have are an inscription crafted item or the eventual valor purchase. This isn't a crucial slot, so I'd recommend just trying to get it as it comes in one of the two above dungeons.

Shoulders:

Caridean Epaulettes - ToT

Thieving Spaulders - SFK

Another set of short options. The justice point vendor is good for this if you don't get lucky, and there's almost nothing else. This might be a good thing to buy early since chances are you won't have a good set of shoulders from questing, though a decent entry level piece comes from a quest out of Lost City.

Trinket:

Grace of the Herald - BRC

Skardyn's Grace - Grim Batol

Tia's Grace - Lost City

Key to the Endless Chamber - Stonecore

Left eye of Rajh - HoO

The first two are certainly awesome. I'll go more into trinkets when we move into raids, but there's good reason to first go for the quest in Uldum and then go for BRC or Grim Batol.

Weapon

Darkling Staff - Stonecore

Seliza's Staff - Lost City

Berto's Staff - BRC

Ah, the real reason to do Stonecore - just like you did Violet Hold last expansion. There is a BoE that drops from a world boss, but it's likely that you won't be killing him any time soon. There's also a revered weapon from the Tol Barad dailies, but that will take a while to get just because of the daily limits. Finally, there's an absurdly expensive weapon from blacksmithing, but don't bother unless you really are loaded and want something now now now.

Waist:
Red Beam Cord - HoO

Yeah, not a lot of drops. HoO is good because of the sheer amount of bosses in it (and thus JP). But there are a lot of options for belts. There's the epic LW belt which will compete until you get to heroic raids. There's a JP belt as well. I'd personally go for the revered Ramkahen belt, since you want revered with Ramkahen to get your head enchant for cats anyway. Finally, there is a BoE belt from random guys in Uldum, but chances of this being around are rare.

Wrist:

Double Dealing Bracers - SFK

Poison Fang Bracers - HoO

This slot has almost no options. One of the 'best' is the PvP bracers from LW. Another is the normal version of Halls of Origination, but that's painful to do just for this (even if it drops from the first boss). So running SFK and HoO should be something of a priority until these drop.

In terms of dungeons, here's how I'd rank the priority of doing them.

Blackrock Caverns:

Twitching Shadows - BRC

Skullcracker Ring - BRC

Beauty's Chew Toy - BRC

Berto's Staff - BRC

Grace of the Herald - BRC

Sandshift Relic - BRC

Legs with no other drop competition, a weapon, a trinket and a ring? Awesome. Number one for me. Heck, it even drops the best relic!

Stonecore:

Helm of Numberless Shadows - Stonecore

Pendant of the Lifeless Grotto - Stonecore

Darkling Staff - Stonecore

Key to the Endless Chamber - Stonecore

A weapon, a neck, a helm without a drop replacement and a trinket make this a really high choice for me.

Lost City:

Kaleki Cloak - Lost City

Crafty's Gaiters - Lost City

Seliza's Staff - Lost City

Tia's Grace - Lost City

Boots, a decent trinket and a weapon are good reasons to do this one. This gets the nod over HoO simply because of the importance of getting a weapon.

Halls of Origination:

Hieroglyphic Vest - Halls of Origination

Ring of Blinding Stars - HoO

Mouth of the Earth - HoO

Red Beam Cord - HoO

Poison Fang Bracers - HoO

Left eye of Rajh - HoO

So much stuff! There's nothing insane here, but there's a ring, bracers, an okay trinket, and a belt if you don't get the rep one.

SFK:

Boots of the Predator - SFK

Thieving Spaulders - SFK

Double Dealing Bracers - SFK

Relic of Arathor - SFK

Boots and bracers are both hard to come by replacements. The shoulders aren't bad either. Not amazingly great, but definitely good. The relic doesn't hurt matters either.

Deadmines:

Cloak of Thredd - Deadmines

Cape of the Brotherhood - Deadmines

Defias Brotherhood Vest - Deadmines

VanCleef's Boots - Deadmines

While cloaks and chests are easy to come by, boots are not. Plus this is a fun, fun dungeon. Still, it does take a while and is a beast to pug.

Grim Batol:

Vest of Misshapen Hides - Grim Batol

Ring of Dun Alguz - Grim Batol

Skardyn's Grace - Grim Batol

The trinket is the only super awesome piece here.

Throne of the Tides:

Nautilus Ring - Throne of Tides

Caridean Epaulettes - ToT

I wanted to be excited about this because it's a great instance, but honestly? Skip it. It takes a while and there just isn't that much stuff there.

Vortex Pinnacle:

Gloves of Haze - Vortex Pinnacle

While gloves are hard to get a replacement for, that there's only one drop at all is bothersome. It's a somewhat fast dungeon but not very pug-friendly.

[Druid, general] Yeah, I heard there wuz a Cataclysm

2010-12-08T13:29:00.000-08:00

No excuses; I've just had too much stuff going on recently. But I'm around. Fortunately, awesome bloggers galore are out there.

For starters, on cat DPS: don't use the built-in weights of wowhead for cat DPS. They overvalue mastery and undervalue agility and weapon DPS significantly. Instead, use the great results that were generated by Mew and provided by Alaron at Fluid Druid. The only thing I've done is save the filter that he used in a link - he did all the heavy lifting, and even did a gear list for cats that is mostly complete.

For your bear needs, I point you to the inconspicuous bear, who really rocks. Hasn't done a gear list yet, but a lot of it looks much like you'd expect it to - stuff with sockets and stamina for leather, stuff with lots of stamina and dodge on jewelry (though the jewelry looks competitive from both dps and tank side). A quick and dirty bear weighing can be found in the Elitist Jerks bear thread for both pre-heroics and post-heroics. As pointed out by Alaron, the important thing isn't to quibble about how close things are to each other, it's to get something in the same tier of good gear - and towards post-heroics there really aren't that many choices.

I've updated the sidebar with the quick wowhead links too.

Why dodge and not mastery? With mastery getting nerfed after 4.01, dodge rates already fairly low, crit rates WAY lower and overall things hitting you for metric butt-tons of damage, mastery doesn't work quite as well. When you can regularly absorb every non-dodged attack by 8-10k, it's great. When it works about 1/3rd the time, absorbs only 8k out of 80k, and isn't reliable? Compared to dodge, it's crap.

On leveling: well, chances are you're already 85, exalted with everyone and raiding. If you haven't started yet, I would recommend (as a druid) doing Vash'jir. It's not nearly as populated and seal form gives huge, huge benefits to a druid in the zone. However, as soon as you hit 82 get to Deepholm and do as much Therazane (specifically, this questline which opens from this one) as you can. Then get 83, do Uldum, then once you're 84 do Twilight Highlands. Don't bother completing each zone at this time; the leveling gulf is brutal, and it's much more efficient to quest in the harder places.

One of the things I'm going to work on is a set of gear that you might miss if you don't do all the quests and where to go for those. That's mostly because I like that sort of thing. If you'd like to see something else, please ask.

[Cat] Current best in slot items for WotLK for cats

2010-10-19T14:26:00.000-07:00

This was written by me over at EJ; figured it would be useful to folks here as well. Apologies for lack of linkages.

Since you can't gear for mastery, the only compromise you're making is whether or not you want haste, crit, expertise or hit. That's all. There is no other compromise to be made. The question then becomes what gear gives you the most potential mastery value while also giving you the most hit and expertise (up to the cap) and the most agility.

Doing something like this and evaluating 40% of the highest secondary stat as mastery (no matter what it was), I came up with the following values for gear. This was using 1.1 for agility, .6 for expertise and hit, .5 for haste and crit, 1.1 for mastery, 22 for each socket and assuming that the highest stat would always be converted to mastery.

shadowvault slayer's cloak back 228.12
sylvanas' cunning back 196.3
  
gloaming sark chest 416.28
ikfirus chest 431.86
T10277 chest 412.98
  
footpads of silence feet 289.6
frostbitten fur boots feet 297.6
taldaram's slippers feet 265.6
  
Endless Vengeance ring 209.66
bone colossus ring 232.5
frostbrood ring 228.12
saurfang ring 194.6
seal of many mouths ring 234.12
Signet of twilight ring 244.72
  
aldriana's hand 306.4
t10277 hand 297.2
  
discarded bag head 331.4
geistlord head 370.38
t10277 head 383.46
  
gangrenous legs 423.18
T10277 legs 423.58
  
sindragosa's cruel claw neck 228.12
baltharus' gift neck 216.56
precious neck 201.18
rimetooth neck 203.4
  
cultists shoulder 306.4
T10277 shoulder 297.2
  
Oathbinder weapon 434.58
Bloodfall weapon 422.18
distant land weapon 416.58
tainted twig weapon 380.86
hersir's weapon 328.32
shaft weapon 361.32
  
astrylian waist 297.6
soulthief waist 271.64
vengeful waist 283.2
  
umbrage wrist 247.02
toskk wrist 228.12
vambraces wrist 203.4

The highest non-tier piece is Ikfirus compared to any other. The gain is small but there. Another surprise is Seal of Many Mouths, which wins out over the other 277 rings due to the expertise. (note that this doesn't take into account the proc of Endless vengeance, but that shouldn't matter. Mouths, bone colossus, frostbrood, endless vengeance is the order for the 277s.

The head and legs for T10 were both superior to their non-offtier values. The shoulders are identical to the Aldriana's in terms of gain; you could use either T10 shoulders or hands as your offtier piece, if it suited you.

Based on this you would have the following gear set as a best in slot:
Cloak: Shadowvault's (40% of haste to mastery)
Chest: Ikfirus (40% of hit to mastery)
Feet: Frostbitten (40% of crit to mastery)
Rings: Signet of Twilight (40% of crit to mastery), Seal of many mouths (40% of crit to mastery)
Hand: T10 (40% of crit to mastery)
Head: T10 (40% of crit to mastery)
Legs: T10 (40% of crit to mastery)
Neck: Sindragosa (40% of crit to mastery)
Shoulder: T10 (40% of crit to mastery)
Weapon: Oathbinder (40% of haste to mastery)
Waist: Astrylian (40% of crit to mastery)
Wrist: Umbrage (40% of haste to mastery)

This naively would result in the following (including the idol slot)
agility: + 1799
crit: +753
expertise: +272
haste: +719
hit: +126
mastery: +482

This is clearly over the cap on expertise and under on hit, so you can simply reforge the ikfirus' expertise instead. Giving you 230 expertise and 171 hit. Not perfectly capped, but pretty close.

I believe this is the maximal value of mastery you could get currently. It also has 21 sockets.

[Bear] FAQ for 4.0.1/Cataclysm

2010-10-14T11:20:00.000-07:00

Gah! So busy. This needed to be up, like, yesterday.

Introduction

Q: What's the point & purpose of this FAQ?
A: Short & simple answers for people who want a quick fix. You don't need to have followed the beta changes since day one. This is for those who didn't read everything on EJ, didn't pour over changes and just want to know what the heck is going on.

Q: You're wrong! My research says blah!
A: Maybe. And if so, point it out and I'll correct it. But I warn you - I do a lot of research and I'm good at it.

Q: But what about 5-mans? Or PvP?
A: I don't care. This is for bears who are MTing 10 and 25-man content, especially 25-man. It is probably suboptimal for other choices.

Q: You smell, and I hate you!
A: Enjoy the WoW forums then. I get flamed over there all the time too.

Q: You don't talk about trash mobs, enchants, or detailed gear selection!
A: Nope, this is quick and dirty. I've talked about professions, gear choices, various good stats and other things elsewhere.

Q: You're just repeating stuff on EJ, Tankspot, and Toskk's forums!
A: Largely yes. That's kind of the point - I do the reading so you don't have to.

Mechanics & play changes:

Q: What rotation do I use?
A@80: For single target it's mangle when it's available, lacerate if there is no lacerate on the target, swipe when it's available, pulverize to keep the buff up after 3 lacerates, lacerate otherwise. Faerie fire if you're in a low-rage situation. Maul if you're in a high rage situation. For multitarget it's largely the same, save that you should prioritize spreading lacerates around to proc more mangles if possible. And start the pull by thornsing yourself.

A@85: For single target it's mangle off CD, lacerate if there is no lacerate on the target, thrash off CD, swipe off CD, pulverize to keep the buff up and lacerate otherwise. Faerie fire when you're low on rage, and maul if you're in high rage or need a quick boost of threat. And start the pull by thornsing yourself. On multitarget, rotate between swipe and thrash and lacerate otherwise, throwing mangles and mauls in when you have the rage.

Q: Stack lacerate to 3? But I thought it stacked to 5?

A: Nope. Lacerate is only three stacks. And even better, the damage it does to start with is significantly better, and the dot is pretty weak. Which makes it quite spammable.

Q: Pulverize is that good?
A: Yep. Pulverize helps with more savage defense, helps with rage, and does a good amount of damage by itself.

Q: So the single target rotation uses both of our AoE abilities?

A: Yeah, at least right now; both do significantly large amounts of threat and damage.

Q: What's thrash?

A: Thrash is an ability learned at level 81. It's great threat and applies a bleed.

Q: So no more swipe spam?

A: Nope! Swipe has a 6-second CD, as does Thrash. You'll want to plan to use swipe based on the fight and make sure that it's up if adds spawn at a specific time.

Q: So no more faerie fire?
A: Faerie fire costs no rage but isn't that great in terms of threat any more, at least not compared to lacerate.

Q: Wait - so what happened to mangle? What's the new berserk thing?
A: Berserk now gives a 30% chance to your lacerate ticks to reset mangle's CD. There isn't an improved mangle any more - but the lacerate ticks mean that you have a good chance to get extra mangles if you're paying attention. That means lacerate should be up all the time (it should be the first thing you do after pulverize) and ideally you should pulverize only right after a lacerate tick.

Q: All my attacks had /cast maul associated with them - should I keep doing that?

A: No! Maul has a 3-second CD, is off the GCD (so you can use it whenever) and doesn't do nearly as much threat and damage as it used to. Plus it's a huge rage sink, and chances are you don't want to mess with your rotation too much to use it. It's better used in multitarget situations or at the start of a fight to get a good threat lead.

Q: So the magic number for defense was 156 defense rating or 103 resilience rating before. What is it now?
A: 0. Bear form & Thick Hide automatically take care of being uncrittable.

Q: What are the new cooldowns bears have?
A: Survival instincts has changed to be a true shield wall - 60% reduction every 5 minutes. Barkskin is unchanged. Frenzied Regeneration (with the glyph) is now sort of like the old survival instincts but doesn't increase your current health unless you're very low, but adds the guardian spirit ability. All are very strong.

Q: Okay, those are pretty big changes - what else has happened?

A: Skull Bash is your new interrupt. And it's a mini-charge too!

Q: Anything else?
A: Vengeance is pretty neat for bears. Especially since Vengeance combines with Savage Defense to make blocking kinda ridiculous at times.

Q: Wait, Savage Defense? Isn't that kind of a lame skill?

A: Not any more! With it being modified by mastery, increased via vengeance and being fairly large anyway it means big, big blocks quite often.

Q: So what other goodies am I getting come Cataclysm?

A: Not a lot, sadly. I mentioned thrash, which feels like an answer to a question that doesn't matter any more (how to tank lots of mobs easily, which you shouldn't be doing!). At 83 you get stampeding roar, which is somewhat neat but has such a small radius currently it's not super useful. Still, it's another dash and it's in bear form. And at 85, you get wild mushroom...which is essentially as useful as hurricane.

Q: What's with innervate?

A: It's horrible now for ferals; it gives back mana based on the caster's mana pool.

Q: Rebirth has a 30-minute CD? Yikes!

A: Yeah, it's a bad design. I hope it goes away soon.

Q: is there any good news?

A: well, you can use tranquility to heal anyone, sort of like a divine hymn, but unless you have nurturing instinct chances are it won't be useful.

Gear:

Q: Where's all my extra armor?
A: On leather, extra armor is long gone. On nonleather there's a bug that removed a lot of it; it should return soon.

Q: So what, we're supposed to wear rogue leather?
A: Yep.

Q: That sucks!
A: Not really, not any more. Most leather pieces have as much stamina as plate pieces do. It's not nearly as bad as it used to be.

Q: What rogue leather is best then? It's got all these weird-ass stats...
A: The only stats that help mitigation/avoidance directly that are on rogue leather are agility, stamina and mastery. Crit somewhat helps make more savage defense procs, as does hit and expertise, but they aren't big deals. And agility is huge now.

Q: How is agility huge?

A: Well, for a bear it gives crit %, dodge %and 2 AP per agility point. It's quite the one-stop shop for the well-to-do bear. Note that it doesn't give armor any more. Yeah, I don't know either.

Q: Mastery?

A: It's a lame name, I know.

Q: Okay, but that wasn't the question. What does it do?

A: For bears, Mastery increases the size of your savage defense shields by 4% per mastery point. This sounds wimpy, but it ends up being quite substantial; each mastery point at 80 increases absorption by about 400-500 damage, and that increases quite a bit with vengeance.

Q: But doesn't that mean PvP gear has the best stats for tanking then?
A: Yep! At least it has the best mitigation/avoidance stats. The PvE gear is better for threat. Sadly this hasn't changed in 4 years either.

Q: So great...I have to pvp now, don't I?
A: Not really. It may give you a small advantage, but since you can't reforge resilience away it loses a lot of item budget.

Q: Reforge?

A: Yeah! This is the biggest thing for bears in a long time. You can convert 40% of a secondary stat (not agility or stamina or strength) into another secondary stat that isn't on the item. For bears, this means that you can convert haste (which is pretty weak for bears) or extra hit into dodge rating or mastery.

Q: So what you're telling me is...

A: Yes! Tanking leather is back! Sorta.

Q: What about the non-leather items?
A: This is sort of a tough one. On the one hand, the tanking non-leather items can have extra armor. On the other hand, the DPS ones have agility and more threat, which can give more boosts. I'd recommend taking the non-leather tanking pieces with + armor when they exist, take the tanking trinkets that give stamina and armor, but look for high-agility and high-mastery jewelry otherwise.

Q: So defense is gone...what does that mean for gear?
A: It means look for gear with armor, agility, mastery, and dodge. Strength is okay but not thrilling.

Q: How about gems?
A: Stamina is still the king. Agility is better than it was before, but avoidance still isn't thriling compared to the gains you get from stamina.

Q: You have mongoose on your tanking staff?
A: Sadly Mongoose is still the best bear enchant at 80. At 85 there are going to be better ones, at least.

Q: Okay...what about other enchants?
A: In general, go for stamina and agility, then avoidance.

Talents:

Q: Wow. What happened to our tree?

A: It went boom. You now pick a specialization (feral) and then get talents roughly once every other level. The total talents that you can have at level 80 is 36, and at 85 is 41. And you can't get any talents from any tree other than feral until you've spent 31 points in feral.

Q: Survival of the fittest is gone! So is MANGLE? HOW IS I DON"T EVEN GAAARHRGHG

A: Relax. Both are baked into the feral specialization or part of Thick Hide.

Q: So what spec would you recommend?

A: At 80, you can't go deep into the resto tree - so I'd go with something like a 0/33/3 build.

A: at 85, you want to get perseverance and you might as well get master shapeshifter along the way, so you end up with a 0/32/9 build. There are a few options available for those points.

Q: There don't seem to be a lot of options for bears.
A: That's not a question, but yeah, you're right. Most of the talents that are somewhat situational are either completely suicidal (King of the Jungle) or just aren't useful for bears at all (like Nurturing Instinct). Your options come down to brutal impact, infected wounds or stampede, basically. Of those I'd recommend skipping stampede, as it's only useful at the start of a fight.

Q: What about natural shapeshifter/master shapeshifter?
A: Master shapeshifter would be good if it were only 2 points, but it's essentially 3. And natural shapeshifter is worthless. There's not a lot else to spend your points on, though.

Q: King of the Jungle?
A: One of the best cat talents, but only meh for bears. Nice for an early threat lead but not all that useful otherwise. And threat really isn't that big of a concern right now. Still, get it if you plan on doing any decent amount of kitty.

Other choices:

Q: What Inscriptions?
A: Mangle, Berserk, Lacerate, Frenzied Regeneration and Feral Charge. Also Challenging Roar. I'd recommend swapping between the rebirth and the thorns glyph for the third major.

Q: What professions?
A: Too early to tell, but my guess is jewelcrafting (since it's useful for all specs of druid) and either leatherworking or engineering.

Q: If I'm taking all these bear talents, how do I dps as a cat?
A: Much better than before. The main cat talent you don't have is King of the Jungle, but your shreds, rakes, and rips all hit fairly hard. You also are missing out on glyphs which hurts, but it's much better than it was before.

Q: Wow...you're a sexy theorycrafter. You're so smart when you explain things. Where can I find ~~the places that you stole this from~~ more information?
A: EJ forums on Cataclysm Feral druids - the big one.
Combat Ratings at 85, which talks about diminishing returns
Beta forums, which kind of suck right now
MMO Champion, which has the latest updates on specs and talents
Rawr, the best damn optimizer on the planet.

Plus a whole ton of places that I can't be bothered to mention.

[Cat] Cataclysm cats part 4: the case for haste

2010-10-08T17:30:00.000-07:00

Previous posts here:

Cataclysm part 1: the basics

Cataclysm Cats part 2: the case for mastery

Cataclysm Cats part 3: the case for crit

After a lot of digging on EJ, I found good evidence for the haste regeneration formula, and it roughly corresponds to my somewhat loose testing so it seems to make sense. The haste energy regeneration formula is as follows:

energy regeneration/second = 10*(1+ haste%)

In other words, if you have 20% haste, you regenerate 12 energy/second. If that sounds underwhelming...you're probably right. At 20% haste, in order to gain one extra shred you wait 20 seconds. That's helpful, don't get me wrong, but with the sorry state of damage on shreds this isn't nearly as impressive as you might think.

Furthermore, the relative percentages of damage aren't close to what they are now. With the loss of arpen and the loss of Feral AP, melee damage is significantly less. Ironically bleeds are significantly more than they were before (or perhaps they're the same, but as a relative level they went higher. I'm seeing reports of bleed damage being as high as 50-60% of overall damage at raid-buffed levels, and melee close to 25-30%.

With melee that low and with bleeds that high, haste only improves about 50% of your total damage. If you assume that shreds are 20% of your damage (which is actually a bit high) and melee is 30%, each percent of haste does the following:

1% haste increases your melee damage by 1%, which increases your overall dps by .3%.

Assume the rate of shreds per a fight is roughly constant. In a 40 second period I showed that you have about time to do 7 shreds. This means that each % of haste in a 40 second period gives you .1 shred, such that 10% haste gives you one extra shred in that time. This equates to 1/70 more shred damage per 1% haste, or:

1% haste = 1/70 * 20% = .28%

The total gain of dps for haste is thus about .6% directly. In addition more haste gives you more combo points, which is potentially a source of ferocious bites - but only a small one. You'll get haste%/70*crit rate more combo points per % of haste in a 40 second period, which at 50% crit rate is about .07 CP per haste%. Not thrilling.

Sadly, this is about as good as I'm going to get without a simulator, but it roughly confirms reports from others about how well haste scaling and haste conversion is compared to other stats. This disappoints me; I want haste to be an awesome ability because haste is fun. Being able to do more things is more fun. Hitting harder, bleeds doing more, critting more often - these don't directly impact the rotation and ability to do actions like haste does. Sadly, haste doesn't look to be that great.

Note that if haste made dots scale, haste would immediately be competitive with crit rate and likely close to agility. Which...is what blizzard wants, right? Sigh.

[General] Raid Warning podcast

2010-10-05T12:08:00.000-07:00

Just FYI to everyone - I'll be on the raid warning podcast October 12th, as part of a general druid roundtable. I'm really excited to be a part of it and getting to talk with folks like Astrylian, Graylo and Lissanna.

If you have questions that you'd like raised, please send them in! I'll do my best to answer them. You can submit questions by calling in or emailing raid warning.

I'm going to try and talk about the direction ferals are going in Cataclysm, the general lack of...anything about ferals in the beta so far and what I think that means, and some ideas for how to get started in 4.0.1 without killing yourself. If you'd like to know more, let me know!

[Druid] some groovy glyphs for ferals

2010-10-01T13:18:00.000-07:00

Thanks to lissanna over at restokin, I have a better idea of what glyphs ferals are going to want come the 4.0.1 patch. Note that it's a very good idea to pick these up now if they're cheap, as if you learn them once you'll have them for the rest of your life. Note that I've not figured out exactly what is going to be best; I'm simply posting them to let you be aware of them. They are ranked in order of what I think will be best to worst.

Bear glyphs:

Prime:

Glyph of Mangle
Glyph of Lacerate (increases lacerate crit by 5%)
Glyph of Berserk

Major:

Glyph of Frenzied Regeneration
Glyph of Maul
Glyph of Feral Charge (cooldown on feral charge reduced by 1 second)
Glyph of Faerie Fire (faerie fire range increased by 10 yards)

Minor:

I don't think the faerie fire extension will be that critical, but it might be nice. And feral charge going from 15 to 14 seconds isn't that amazing of an ability unless they remove the dead zone and allow us to charge in and get the 15% haste.

Cat:

Prime:

Major:

Glyph of Ferocious Bite (does not convert excess energy)
Glyph of Feral Charge (cooldown on feral charge reduced by 1 second)
Glyph of Faerie Fire (faerie fire range increased by 10 yards)

Minor:

5 prime possibilities are interesting. The reason Tiger's Fury is so high right now is that Tiger's Fury appears to be one of the things they'll want ferals to manage, as it adds 15% more damage for 6 seconds. Being able to do this ability every 27 seconds instead of every 30 means that you'll get 11% more TFs in a fight, potentially, which gives a 3.2% DPS increase. Furthermore, right now DoTs don't update with buffs like TF, so you'll want to time it so that your rips and rakes are refreshed when TF is up. This might lead to an optimal rotation where you have this, the Glyph of Shred and the Glyph of Rip and skip the Glyph of Savage Roar - because if you do this you can always update your rips with 15% more DPS, no matter what. More testing is required of course.

Glyph of the Wild is included because of its ability to trigger Omen of Clarity effects very easily. With feral mana regen fairly low, being able to do this more often will be a good thing.

[Druid]The 4.0.1 specs/gear/glyph post

2010-09-30T10:18:00.000-07:00

Still working on the haste articles, which is proving a bit difficult in the mathy departments. The short answer is that haste is going to be awesome as long as bleeds aren't more than half our overall dps - but there's some good evidence that this might actually be the case. In which case...mastery is teh bombzors, and haste is teh sux.

Anyway.

Since it's very, very likely that the 4.0.1 patch is going to come out next week, I thought I'd prepare folks for the coming...uh...cata...err...patch day. Yeah, patch day. There's lots of articles about what you should be farming or what you should be doing in the final days. I just want to let you know how to gear and how to spec.

Bear spec: 0/33/3:

At level 80 you won't be able to get either perseverance or master shapeshifter, so you might as well go for some of the less useful talents in the tree - like Stampede and Fury Swipes. You could consider taking King of the Jungle instead if you have 4pT10, but I wouldn't bother - and definitely don't if you don't have 4pT10. Otherwise it's about as cookie-cutter as you can get; there are almost no talents in the bear arsenal that are nice to have, and most of the skipped talents are either entirely for cats or are super weak for bears.

For glyphs, here's what I'd use:

Glyph of Mangle

Glyph of Berserk

Glyph of Rip (right now you literally only have two prime glyphs for bears, so might as well)

Glyph of Frenzied Regeneration

Glyph of Maul (substitute Glyph of Rebirth for this if you like)

Glyph of Growl

Not horrible, but I hate having that rip glyph.

For gear, you'll lose a LOT of extra armor from your armor rings/trinkets/cloak, so it's a good idea to pick up the higher ilvl gear without extra armor and get some of that stamina back. Double stamina trinkets are likely not a bad idea if the armor nerf on gear continues. Do consider getting non-'tank' rings and amulets as well for dual use; they'll have as much stamina as the tanking jewelry, and should be good options. As an example, the often hated Seal of Many Mouths is probably going to be one of the better pieces you can get. Remember that you'll be losing 10 expertise right off the bat, so replacing that should be up on your list; while things won't parry haste, it will be good to keep threat high. Similarly, Sindragosa's Cruel Claw should rival some of the better tanking necks out there. Gemming should almost certainly be stamina, since it now provides both health and some mitigation via vengeance-fueled Savage Defense

On reforging: haste is the least useful stat for bears given how GCD-focused they are; while it does increase rage income, it won't do so insanely well. As a result, you should consider reforging all the haste you can into mastery or dodge. My gut feeling is that your dodge% will be ridiculously high, so mastery will likely provide a better overall result of reduction of damage per point. If you really need to, get expertise or hit, but try to get pieces that have that instead.

For raiding, Bears are actually in a pretty decent spot. Their threat has been rebalanced significantly and mangle proccing off of lacerate combined with mauls every 3 seconds and very high frontloaded swipe threat and lacerate threat puts bears in a good spot. Savage Defense in a weird, backwards way ends up scaling with bosses...kinda...and certainly is better than it is now. Reforging helps bears quite a bit, and all that extra stamina on agility pieces gives bears tons of options they didn't have before. Skull bash even acts as a mini-charge of sorts, and the cooldowns are significantly better than they were. If you were tanking at a high level before, I think you'll be in great shape to tank now.

Cat spec: 0/33/3

Similarly to bears, as a cat you can't get master shapeshifter, so those points have to go into the feral tree. This time, though, there are a lot more options. This build focuses more on utility and survivability, picking up Nurturing Instinct and Furor and skipping Predatory Strikes. In fact, that's the only dps-related talent that was skipped, and it was skipped because at level 80 you will have an absurd crit rate and don't need the boost to ravage.

The rotation hasn't changed at all, though the length of some of the buffs have. At level 80 it should be absurdly easy to maintain a rotation, given how fast you are with haste.

As to the glyphs, there's some interesting ones:

Glyph of Savage Roar

Glyph of Shred

Glyph of Rip

Glyph of Claw (which will be Glyph of FB)

Glyph of Rebirth

Glyph of Entangling Roots

Not the best options for DPS in the major glyph categories, but hopefully these will change soon.

In terms of gear, you won't have any armor pen - you'll be swimming in crit and haste. Your first goal should be to regem to hit the hit/expertise caps if you aren't already (including the missing 10 expertise from Primal Precision) then go pretty much all in on agility or haste. As I state below consider going for agility, since you can reforge to haste. Ignore crit rating; at level 80, in T10 gear that wasn't BiS, I had something like 82% crit rate. Because of that, the Arpen trinkets lose value compared to Herk or WFS, since you'll have such high crit rates anyway. DBW is still kinda awesome because of the trigger, however.

For reforging, you can't reforge to agility, so consider reforging to either haste or mastery. My money's on haste, but this is one of those things I'll have to test and retest. Numbers are (still) not remotely set in stone for ferals, so this is likely to change some. My gut feeling is that if the 4.0.1 patch comes out on Tuesday and it's anything like what we currently have, cats are going to be doing ridiculously low damage compared to what they do now - likely around half the damage. I'm not sure they're a reasonable option for any hardcore raiding at this point. Hopefully they fix things a bit more.

[General]Cataclysm ratings

2010-09-21T11:36:00.000-07:00

Just an aside before I start digging into haste, hit, and expertise - some of the complaints about the previous articles were that the ratings at 82 aren't the same as they are at 85. Which is true, but it doesn't matter as I was comparing them to each other.

If you're curious, the ratings at level 85 have been figured out. You can see the results thanks to Whitetooth over at EJ. They're reprinted here for ease of use at level 85.

Dodge: 176.71
Parry: 176.71
Block: 88.36
Hit: 120.109
Spell hit: 102.446
Crit: 179.28
Haste: 128.05
Expertise: 30.02
Mastery: 179.28

A druid starts with 7.4755 base crit %.
At level 85, it takes 324.85 agility to get 1% crit.

The agility to dodge conversion is unknown at this time.

The important point to note here is that everything stated before was correct. Agility is still 1.8x as expensive as crit rating to get crit. Mastery and crit rating are equivalent, and haste is much cheaper. Hit and expertise are slightly cheaper than haste per 1%.

[Cat] Cataclysm cats part 3: the case for crit

2010-09-17T18:34:00.000-07:00

Following up on the previous articles:

Cataclysm cats part 1: the basics

Cataclysm cats part 2: the case for mastery

Now it's time to dig into crit. And not just crit rating - but agility.

From the first article we know that crit rating and mastery rating are basically equal (at least right now) in terms of what they give, and the same amount of crit rating to give 1% crit is the same amount of mastery rating that gives 2.5% bleed damage. That's nice; it makes it very easy to equate them without going nuts.

In addition to that, agility gives crit% as well. It takes 1.8 points of agility to give the same amount of crit as 1 point of crit rating, if that helps.

How does crit help you?

Well, let's see. Crit gives you 200% damage on all critical strikes. This includes bleeds, melee, and any special attacks. The 220% boost on crits is either not implemented or purposely taken out at this point; my guess is the latter. Add the metagem into the mix, and your crits do 206% damage.

For every 1% crit you should in theory get 1% more damage, roughly. That's not exactly true. For starters, there is a cap on crit% for white attacks (76%). There's a soft cap for things like ferocious bite and ravage as well, though that doesn't often come into play. And mostly, it's a matter of degree; if you sit at 0% crit, 1% crit will increase your damage by 1%. If you're at 40% crit, the crit boost only increases your overall damage by .7% (since you can't make your crits...uh...crit again). That sounds awfully close to the mastery bonus in terms of damage potential - so are they equivalent?

Well, without knowing what the crit rates at 85 are going to be, it's hard to say. Chances are that a 40% crit rate is pretty high, actually. At level 80, assuming ICC gear you get absurd amounts of crit thanks to every bit of arpen converting to crit (almost) - but that crit decreases very fast. Instead, we'll look at median damage values for crit rates:

0%: 1% crit = 1% dps gain

20%: 1% crit = .83% dps gain

30%: 1% crit = .76% dps gain

40%: 1% crit= .71% dps gain

50%: 1% crit = .66% dps gain

Note that this is the case for bleed damage too - as your bleed damage multiplier increases, the overall damage increase each point does is less relative. The overall damage increase from a raw standpoint should the the same though, and note that in order for bleed damage to keep relative pace with crit%, bleed damage has to be around 40% of your overall damage.

Anyway, that's part of crit's success, but the neat part is when you talk about the extra combo points generated. Here's where we get more meaty bits.

The cycle in cataclysm is mostly unchanged from wotlk; you keep savage roar up, you keep rip up, and you keep rake up while shredding when you have spare energy. Rip always at 5 CP. SR when you can (and as I'll point out, it's actually a bit more efficient to SR early). The change comes from the endless carnage talent. Rake now will have a duration of 15 seconds (up from 9) and SR will add an additional 6 seconds to its duration regardless of combo points. Rip's duration is unchanged, and because the glyph of rip is being changed to a straight DPS boost instead of a duration boost, the maximum duration rip will have is 22 seconds.

This means in practice that you must generate 5 combo points every 22 seconds to keep rip up - and do three shreds in that time as well. In addition, you should be keeping Savage Roar up. For ease, I'm going to assume a 5CP savage roar, which means 40 seconds total. Realistically this means that you need to be generating 15 CP every 40 seconds or so just for the basic rotation.

That doesn't sound so bad until you look at the energy that takes. In 40 seconds you'll have 400 energy with zero haste, along with another 60 from at least one Tiger's Fury. You need energy for two rips (30 energy each, so 60 total)and a SR (25 energy) in that time, and we'll assume you're a pro at keeping rake up too - so you need energy for 2.6 rakes (90 energy). That leaves 285 energy for shreds, and shreds are 40 energy each currently.

In other words, 7 shreds. You have 2.6 rakes, 7 shreds, and you're needing to generate 15 CP in that time. The effective crit % required to keep that up is 56% if all you did was that. Now, you'll hopefully get at least one OoC proc - probably 2, so let's assume that. Even so, in that case and assuming no extra CP get wasted (going from 4 to 5) you need an effective crit rate of 30%.

So forget about ferocious biting; you won't have the CP generation. In fact, if you're below 40% crit rate, your rotation is going to be pretty horrible. Rake is the most efficient combo point generator you have, but you won't be raking that often compared to now (every 9 seconds or so vs Cataclysm's 15 seconds or so). What that implies to me is that crit is going to be very, very important early on.

Which makes sense; some of the basic advice from most ferals in the early and midtier of WotLK was to get crit at 50% at least before going for arpen, and the same advice applies here as well. Except we don't have anything like arpen in terms of boom or bust stat, so it's much more forgiving to go for.

One of the things I expect is some criticism for this post as I assumed 0% haste - which isn't realistic, not by a longshot. The point is to illustrate how important crit rate is for ferals (especially compared to mastery), not to devalue haste. I'll get into this in the next post, but as a teaser - the above assumed 0 haste. If you assume around 20% haste (which with stats and buffs is about right) you get 100 energy every 8 seconds. That means that in 40 seconds time instead of 460 energy, you get 560 energy, meaning that even in the worst case scenario (no OOC procs) you get 2.5 more shreds than the 0 hasted situation - which requires an effective rotation crit % of only 25%! if that sounds awesome, it's because it totally is. That it increases your OoC procs by 20% and increases your melee damage by 20% doesn't suck either. But like I said - we'll get into that next time.

[Cat] Cataclysm cats part 2: the case for mastery

2010-09-13T09:44:00.001-07:00

This is the second article in the series, following up from the basic one. Today we're going to talk about mastery - and what mastery does for a cat.

Upon gaining mastery, Feral Combat specs get 8 points of mastery, which increases your bleed damage by 20%. Not bad - this would be (if on live) about a 3% DPS upgrade. Each point of mastery - which is similar to points of expertise - increases all bleed damage you do by 2.5%.

At level 82 it takes 79.15 points of mastery rating to get one point of mastery skill. This is the same value that it takes to get 1% crit from rating as well, so mastery and crit are likely equallly valued as far as gems and itemization goes. Which makes crit rating a very good comparison, overall, in terms of value.

For crit rating, since all dots can crit and all attacks can crit (up to the glancing blow cap) we have almost a pure 1% DPS upgrade per 1% crit. It's actually better than that due to how the meta works (gives 3% more crit damage), whether or not the 10% more crit damage boost is baked into the spec or not, and the addition of extra combo points on crits. But let's just assume that 1% crit only increases overall damage by 1%.

What would it take to have mastery do the same thing?

Well, simple math says that as long as bleeds are doing about 40% of your total damage, each mastery skill point will increase your DPS by 1%.

That's not how much bleeds currently do, on live. And for various reasons, that's certainly not how much damage they do in the beta, either. But that can be fixed.

In live, assuming you have a fairly good rotation and a reasonably static fight, bleeds account for about 30% of your total damage assuming 4pT10 and a high-armor pen build. (I'm basing that on my performances on Saurfang, which is a fairly good gauge of a basic single-target fight). On beta, there are a couple problems that cause this to be even worse:

Savage Roar was changed to only improve autoattacks - which nerfed all bleed damage and all other yellow damage by 30%. This hasn't been baked back into the yellow damage, and as a result bleeds do less.
While autoattack, mangle and shred are based now on weapon DPS, rip and rake are based only on AP. With the removal of Feral AP, this results in about a 30% reduction in those damage sources as well.
The glyphs had not been particularly well-optimized for bleed damage until recently. Both rip and shred increase rip duration, but with dot clipping gone from cataclysm duration of bleeds is not nearly as important. The new glyph of rip increases rip damage by 15%, which will help this, but shred is still suboptimal (especially since it...sigh...doesn't help with the horribly newly named talent Feast of Flesh)

Now, all of these things can be improved. And I expect some of them to be improved a great deal; rip and rake can't only scale on AP forever, for instance, and glyphs will get a serious overhaul. At the same time, other abilities will get buffed too. And while it would be an interesting way to go, it's hard for me to imagine that two bleeds will do 40% of overall damage for ferals. It's possible - but I think it's unlikely. It's more likely to me that they'll buff mastery so that it's a bit more inline with the other skill points.

In any case - my recommendation for the beta right now is to either ignore mastery or largely avoid it. I'd like it to improve; it would be very boring if the new skill we can get is basically meh. But we'll see.

[Cat] Cataclysm cats part 1: the basics

2010-09-07T16:48:00.000-07:00

Cataclysm changes a lot of things in terms of stat values - far more than they were changed from TBC to WotLK. While this doesn't have a huge effect on bears (the tank changes were largely around block, which bears don't have), the cat changes are pretty massive.

Specifically:

Agility provides 2AP

AP is gone completely

DPS of a weapon is used to calculate base ability damage

Arpen is gone completely

All bleeds can crit

Mastery exists and improves bleed damage only (the opposite of arpen, basically)

Haste improves energy regeneration as well as attack speed (ETA)

With all that, I thought I'd go through a series of articles that talks about the various ratings and what they mean. Note that I am not going to evaluate them based on the current values of damage, as they are no where near current. Instead, I'll evaluate them based on what they would do given a certain plan. That plan is based entirely on our current ratings of damage, with the savage roar change factored in.

Currently my damage spread (I'm close to BiS, so take that into consideration) is something like this:

Melee: 38%

Shred: 25%

Rake: 15%

Rip: 15%

Ferocious Bite: 6%

Savage roar is being changed from a 33% boost to all damage to a 53% boost to melee only. The new breakdown just from that would be:

Melee: 56%

Shred: 18%

Rake: 11%

Rip: 11%

Ferocious Bite: 4%

I'll be using these numbers to showcase the relative strengths and weaknesses of ratings. Note that this is in no way a perfect scenario of what Cataclysm will be like in terms of damage spread. Here's some quick thoughts on that, however:

I do believe melee damage will increase and yellow damage will decrease due to how Savage Roar now works.
Ferocious Bite will likely increase in use due to the lengthening of duration of rake and savage roar and the effects of Nom Nom Nom.
Because dots cannot be clipped, the uptime of dots should be very high - close to 100% with a near optimal rotation. This should increase bleed damage a small amount.
Because there is no armor penetration, non-bleed damage will decrease some.
Combo points are going to be harder to come by instantly; 4 or 5 yellow attacks are going to be necessary to get 5 CP easily due to less crit%, at least to start.
Hit and Expertise may be required depending on whether refunds on yellow attacks still work. I suspect the refund will be built in, but it may not be.

Now, here are the specific effects of each stat as you gain them:

1% crit:

At level 82, it takes 79.15 crit rating to give 1% crit
All of your direct damage melee attacks crit 1% more often (for 220% damage)
All of your bleeds crit 1% more often (for 200% damage)
Shred, mangle and rake provide 1% more double combo points

1% haste:

At level 82, it takes 56.5 haste rating to give 1% haste.
You attack with melee attacks 1% more often
Your Omen of Clarity has a greater chance to proc
You regenerate energy at a rate 1% greater
~~Your bleeds tick 1% faster~~ (removed per GC recent comments)

1 point of mastery:

At level 82, it takes 79.15 points of mastery rating to get one mastery point.
All of your bleeds do 2.5% more damage

1 point of agility:

At level 82, it takes 143 points of agility roughly to get 1% crit.
Increases your attack power by 2x, increasing all damage by a small amount.

1% worth of hit:

At level 82, it takes 53.2 hit rating to give 1% hit.
Increases your chance of all abilities hitting by 1%, up to a cap.
Does nothing for bleed damage
Increases your chance for spells (FFF, hibernate, soothe) to hit by 1%

1 point of expertise:

At level 82, it takes 14.05 expertise rating to give 1 expertise skill. (The assumption is that this is the same value for hit as 4 expertise skill would be)
Increases your chance of all abilities not being dodge (or parried) by .25%, up to a cap
Does nothing for bleed damage
Does nothing for spells (growl, FFF, soothe, hibernate)

Of these, does something stand out to you? It certainly does to me. My theory going into this is that haste is going to be a very, very desirable stat for ferals - possibly the most desirable stat by a long margin. In the next few articles, I'll explore that.

Of course, this can be adjusted for ferals or whoever. The problem is that haste isn't that valuable for a lot of other classes due to the energy regeneration. My suspicion is that they're going to nerf that part hard once they see ferals and rogues going nuts with haste, but it'll be a while.

[Druid (and really, what else is there] - setting Cataclysm expectations

2010-09-01T11:09:00.002-07:00

It is almost September. The Cataclysm approaches.

I don't know any more about when it'll launch than anyone else. Except that it will launch sometime this year, and Activision likes late November dates. So I thought it was a bit educational to look back on what was done by this time 2 years ago, when WotLK was about 2 months away.

By the end of August we had:

mostly finalized talents and a talent tree (berserk had the last stand effect)
removal of crittability
removal of crushing blows

What we didn't have:

A finalized talent tree (survival instincts was still not there, as an example, and FFF was)
Fully balanced skills (rake wasn't even considered for rotation, barkskin wasn't usable in forms)
Any idea of what itemization was good or not
Glyphs
All the stuff that came in WotLK proper (Feral AP removal, bonus armor removal, nerf of stam, FF's buff, mangle's duration buff, primal gore

By the end of September we had:

A completed talent tree (essentially)
More tweaks to skills (bash interrupting, growl taunting at range)
Additions of things like an OoC res, barkskin in forms, pots in forms
More of a clear idea of what is going to drop
Removal of +armor from leather (but not from items)

What we didn't have:

All skills finalized
Full lists of all gear
All numbers balanced

By the end of October we had:

Talent tree still complete
addition of skills like Savage Roar (seriously, it came THAT LATE)
Swipe hitting infinite targets
Mostly finalized glyphs (the SI glyph wasn't in there yet)
Things like on hit procs working with cat/bear form
Mostly finalized professions (including the bonus for each being largely normalized)

What we didn't have:

Many of the early fixes in WotLK (like bonus armor not being multiplied, Feral AP being removed)
Some balance issues (like swipe doing a lot more threat)
knowledge about the armor change or the FAP change (this came early November)

Now, let's assume for a moment that the release schedule is basically exactly the same as WotLK. There are reasons to expect otherwise - such as the huge amount of stuff that simply doesn't work in the beta right now - but let's go with that. What does that mean?

First off, the talents are largely finished. They might juggle some (I expect berserk to be changed significantly) but we're not going to see game changers like Titan's Grip or Chakra. For the most part, the tree is pretty well done in terms of what's there. We didn't see a lot of changes to the feral tree between August and October 2008 - the changes were to SI, FFF and Berserk with a couple of modifications to how many points each talent cost. Not a lot else was changed.

Secondly, the skills aren't remotely finished. Between August and October we had Savage Roar added, rake buffed, barkskin buffed, FFF and SI changed (and FFF made trainable), growl given a range, swipe given unlimited targets and a threat boost, bash made into an interrupt - and that's just the stuff I can find easily. There is likely to be a lot of churn in the next couple of months on skills, and even moreso on skill numbers.

Thirdly, the overall themes of the expansion are pretty well set for ferals. Don't expect big sweeping changes or big design overhauls like you saw for paladins recently. The expectation is that cooldowns will be normalized, things like incoming damage rates will matter (because mana of healers will matter), avoidance will be important, CC will be important and the longevity and time to live of tanks will increase while the survivability of DPS will hugely increase. Talent trees will still continue to focus on giving interesting talents, not ones that boost DPS or tanking specifically.

Fourth, expect a LOT of itemization coming later. Itemization happens quickly and easily for the most part. Don't worry about it any time soon.

So what kind of predictions can we make about this?

Well, here are mine:

Berserk is going to get changed...again. With Mangle being completely without a cooldown and with cleave/AoE abilities largely being nerfed or deprioritized, berserk is really without a purpose. As the marquee 31-point talent, it will need to be changed - or bears will spend that point elsewhere. Expect it to be redesigned.

Expect a couple more skills down the pipe. My gut feeling is that they're going to add at least one bear skill (or allow a non-bear usable skill to be used in bear form like thorns) and possibly two. I expect there is going to be at least another way for a bear to give themselves some more rage as well.

Talents will get juggled around a bit. The tree is weirdly unbalanced right now for both cat and bear, requiring way too many or too few talents (tier 2 for bears is almost all things you want; tier 4 is almost all things you don't). That will be fixed or at least improved on.

Numbers aren't remotely final. Don't bother number crunching unless you want to figure out (for example) what the effect of savage roar going only to melee damage is (it makes haste really awesome and hit/expertise even more awesome), or how bad fury swipes is right now (it makes baby Phaelia cry).

Rotations aren't set in stone either. Rake got added late, FFF got added as a useful damage/TPS ability late, SR even got added late!

Balance -especially tank balance - hasn't been touched. And bears are going to be nerfed at least in health and likely in a couple other places. I wouldn't expect Savage Roar to be looked at for a while, even if you know it's going to be pretty lame.

What this means for you, as a member of the community:

Don't spend a lot of time working on huge revisions to talents or adding tons of abilities. That's just not going to happen. Juggle talent trees, but don't expect big changes.
Do think about what the bear and cat are missing and what is fun and isn't fun, and how it can be improved. Barkskin got changed to be usable in forms, and SI got split from berserk because of this kind of input.
Don't stress too greatly that ferals haven't gotten a lot of love; ferals historically have been late bloomers.
Don't expect huge revisions in general. As far as I can tell developers felt ferals were in a pretty good place at the end of WotLK and weren't going to rock the boat too hard. If you didn't like them before, this is a good opportunity to switch classes. If you did like them before, chances are you'll get some nice quality of life fixes.

With that all said, I'm not planning on doing a lot of number crunching for a while - at least until level 85 folks are able to do some threat and damage assessments. Until then it's pretty much a waste of time. When we get more solid numbers I'll start looking at the various rotations and the value of stats for different rotations as well as showing how bad certain things are (like fury swipes). But doing anything before that is a bit of a pointless exercise.

Also, thanks to folks who asked me to start blogging a bit more over on wow.com. And thanks for everyone that checked that article out; Skunkworks is one hell of a special guild, and I'm very proud to be a part of it.

[Druid]Could it be - a Cataclysm talent tree that almost works?

2010-07-30T14:24:00.000-07:00

With build 12644, the Cataclysm beta has a feral tree that is almost functionally useful. I say 'almost' because...well, you'll see. But it's certainly better than what we've seen before, and so far it's the most reasonable feral tree since the 31-point massacre.

For the first time one can spec bear or cat and not actually have to take cat/bear talents. That's pretty neat. Sure, most of the talents still don't do anything, others are not working as intended, and many of the actual abilities related to those talents aren't working properly - but who cares, right? Let's look at the talent trees.

First up, a basic bear build:

This is a 0/33/8 build, in case you were curious. Most of the points are mandatory, though one could spend the last two points from Improved Feral Charge and put them into the last point of Natural Shapeshifter and one point in Master Shapeshifter. No purely cat talents are taken here, and anything that could give some survival as a bear is taken. It's a very basic build, but as stated above there's not a lot of room for flexibility here. All the talents that aren't taken are basically cat talents with marginal or negative usefulness as a bear. Even Natural Shapeshifter is just filler for Perseverance, as the mana cost for shapeshifting is absurdly low currently. Thanks to giving a mini-charge, I consider Brutal Impact to be mandatory for all ferals. I guess one could spec out of Infected Wounds, but there's really not a lot else you might want as strictly bear.

I do have to say I'm thrilled with the change to Feral Aggression; between it making it apply all three stacks at once, FFF not costing rage any more, and it being a lower tier talent it is much, much better.

One big problem here is that the resto tree, as far as ferals are concerned, is very, very poor. Furor still only gives rage back 60% of the time, but it's the best tank talent there is in the first tier. I assume it'll be improved and made 100% with three points, but that's still not amazing. Blessing of the Grove is useless for a bear, and Natural Shapeshifter is almost useless. It's all filler to get to Perseverance. Then we have the rest of the tree, and one can literally take every single talent that affects bear performance positively with the points. I'm assuming that Enrage still reduces armor (it does currently) - in which case King of the Jungle and Primal Madness remain cat-only. So while the tree looks workable, it's not exactly fun, and there's certainly not a lot of agonizing over what choices to make.

Similarly, let's check out the basic cat build:

This is a 0/34/7 build. And similar to bear, there's not a lot of 'choice' here, though there's a bit more than bear. I'm assuming that Predatory Strikes remains mostly a pvp talent, as doing three rakes at the start of a fight with a 90% crit rate sounds like a stellar way to...pull aggro. While Natural Shapeshifter and Master Shapeshifter are marginal (4 talent points for 2% crit) there's really not a lot of option to spend it on otherwise. The only cat-like utility that could exist is Infected Wounds; I elected to buy Survival Instincts and put the final point in 1/3 Furor. And again, given that it gives you a 10-second charge, I consider Brutal Impact a mandatory talent.

Again, the resto tree just sucks for ferals at this point. There's no compelling reason like Omen of Clarity to go deep in the tree, and no talent like Naturalist that gives a really awesome boost to damage per talent point.

So...if bears don't hugely want resto, and cats don't hugely want resto, why take resto? And that leads me to the main reason why I believe the talent trees themselves aren't done yet: the 0/41/0 build.

This takes almost every useful talent in the feral tree, skipping only Predatory Strikes and a point in Nurturing Instinct. One could swap that around as well, having only one point in infected wounds or something like that. This basically would make a completely functional bear and cat build all in one. What does it lose?

From bear, it loses 6% spell damage reduction, 60% chance of 10 rage on shifting to bear, and potentially 2% more damage.

From cat it loses 4% shred damage, 2% crit chance.

Is that optimal? No. But it's very flexible, and if you don't tank a huge amount (or primarily offtank heavy physical damage dealers) or want to have a feral build AND a spellcasting build, this is a pretty nice choice. It loses no utility from bear, compromises very little on threat and only a small amount on incoming damage. It loses a small amount of damage from cat that may be irrelevant depending on how good mangle turns out to be compared to shred; right now mangle is actually neck and neck with shred with the 10% mangle glyph, though all of that is likely to be modified.

This is made possible by the complete lack of super compelling talents in the resto tree. And not a ton of compelling talents in the bear/cat tree, either.

I don't really like this, honestly; I want the difference between a cat and a bear build to be profound. If you wanted to do that before, you'd lose out on quite a bit of good damage dealing talents (like 10% more damage on crits) and have almost no utility. Now you gain all the utility and only lose a bit of damage. That's not enough.

I hope that the feral tree will gain a few more interesting, cool abilities that make you want to take them and make you sweat about which one you didn't take. I also really want resto to have some close to mandatory talents for both specs, so you can't spend all your points in the feral tree like a n00b who thought they could ONLY spend their points in one tree. Unfortunately we're likely to be pretty close to being done with ferals, at least as far as their talents go; my gut feeling is that we'll see a couple of juggled talents here and there, but largely the next step is going to be balance and number crunching. Still, a guy can hope - and at least this time the tree is mostly sane.

[General]The dirty secret about armor

2010-07-21T09:52:00.000-07:00

This is somewhat based on a post I made on tankspot a while back and references common tanking terms like Effective Health and Time to Live. If you don't know what these mean - read Aggathon's excellent treatise on these things over at Tankspot: Why we do what we do. There's nothing new there for many tanks familiar with these concepts, but it's a well-done document.

But, there's something it doesn't cover - and that's the advantages armor has over stamina. Or at least it doesn't cover it hugely. Similarly, it doesn't cover the advantages that resistance has over stamina in some circumstances.

Effective health is simply how much total incoming damage you could take at once. It is normally referring to physical damage (noted as PEH, or physical effective health) and is simply the following:

health / (1-armor reduction)

So if you have a 50% armor reduction and 50,000 health, you have a PEH of 100,000 - meaning you can take 100,000 physical damage (before armor reduction) before you die. Now, other things like general resistance to all damage (such as protector of the pack) fall in here too, but ultimately it doesn't matter; the important thing to consider is effective health combines the reduction in damage with the amount of health you have.

Similarly, you can look at magical effective health (MEH) as:

health / (1-reduction)

which factors in general resistances and specific ones. Note that for the purposes of effective health, you can't take into account chance; if something could happen that's beneficial (like a block or dodge or SD proc), effective health assumes that it won't happen. Thus for resistance purposes you can take only the minimum resisted value.

So that tells you how effective health works. And you can combine the two values depending on the % of magical damage and physical damage you're expected to take at a given time, and optimize based on that. Now most folks will tell you - often rightly - that the best way to optimize for this is to always go for stamina, even over more armor - because health is in both physical and magical EH and benefits both. And that's true - but only for the calculation of how much damage you could ever take.

Where it gets interesting is in the notion of partial health. And this is where the dirty secret of armor comes in. While effective health is awesome, stamina only helps how much damage you can take at a given time; armor magnifies both how much damage you can take AND how valuable healing can be.

Let's take a very simple example that should be at least somewhat realistic - two tanks with precisely the same physical effective health. One tank has 50k health and 50% armor reduction and no other sources of reduction (or for our purposes they're the same as each other, so they go away) - so using the formula above they have 100,000 EH. The second tank has 40k health and 60% armor reduction, giving them also 100,000 EH (40000/ (1-.6)).

Now, we'll hit both of them with a hit that takes half their EH - a 50k hit. The first tank's health is now at 25k. The second tank's health is at 20k (50k *.4 = 20k). Still the same EH, right?

Now, let's heal them. We'll heal both of them identically for 10k health. This is where it gets interesting.

The first tank goes from 25k to 35k - and their EH is 70k.

The second tank goes from 20k to 30k. Their EH is now 75k. That's a 7% lead in EH over the first tank.

Let's give them another 10k heal:

The first tank goes from 35k to 45k. Their EH is 90k.

The second tank goes from 30k to 40k. Their EH is 100k - up to full. At this point the second tank has a 10% lead in EH over the first!

And that's the dirty secret of armor - and why armor is good. Because it improves the value of healing, partial healing on a tank, it increases the EH of the tank after they've taken damage but before they've been healed to full. That it also makes it more likely they can be healed to full is a nice side effect too. This seems somewhat obvious - since armor reduces damage taken, of course it reduces the amount of health needed to go to full - but the EH model doesn't often talk about partial healing or what happens when your tank is somewhat healed but not entirely. And the bigger the deficit and the larger the amount of heals it takes to get there, the more this becomes obvious.

Yet we don't often have the case where a tank takes damage and then sits there with no heals until they get all the heals at once. Many tank deaths happen because of a combination of lack of enough healing with a set of hits; this was what killed people on Algalon, as an example.

Now the side part of this is that since armor doesn't help with magical damage, this is obviously not as great for things with massive magical burst; in the above example the 40k tank has 40k MEH, and the 50k tank has 50k MEH, which is a big disadvantage. The neat thing though is that resistance math works exactly the same here as armor does - with similar advantages in partial damage and healability. And that means that resistance at certain steps becomes far more valuable than health due to how much damage you can reduce. We've seen this before with Sarth3D and with heroic 25-man Anub'arak, and it's been used nicely sometimes for Sindragosa as well. And resistance also gets a boost from simply being way better at increasing EH than health does; while you can get 110 stamina from a wrist enchant, you can also get about 5% resistance (or 50% of the way to 10% resistance), which is a much bigger boost to MEH than that 1300 health would be normally.

Anyway, hopefully this will give you some intuition as to why things like Unidentifiable Organ is good regardless of whether the stack wears off, or why Petrified Twilight Scale is awesome even with the proc being somewhat meh. It should also give you an idea of why bears were so ridiculous before this as far as being healable, especially back in the day of TBC.

[Druid] Feral Druid Intentions

2010-07-19T11:42:00.000-07:00

This is a copy of a forum post I made on the beta forums. I'd love to hear more feedback about it. Note that I didn't make it with the idea that this should be a bitch fest; I honestly don't know what the intentions are of the developers, and this makes it a lot harder to figure out what's going on. I think that if I have a better handle on what the goal is and where they're going, I can make more reasonable suggestions and start tweaking numbers to show where they need to be. WIthout that, it's basically 'that rules' or 'this sucks', and that's not that useful.

One of the problems I've had testing as a feral is that I'm not sure what the intent of a lot of the changes are. Without knowing what the goal is, it's hard to say whether or not something is working, not working as intended but needing tweaks, or simply broken and needs entire revising. I realize that a lot of this is opinion and subjective (whether or not you actually like something is different than whether or not it's working as intended) but I feel like it would be greatly helped if some answers along these lines were provided.

With that said, here's the questions I have.

General:
1. Innervate: Is it intended that innervate is based on the druid's mana? This is a reversion from live, and it effectively nerfs innervate for ferals. That might be the intent, and that's fine, but it would be nice to know.

2. Skull Bash: is it intended that to interrupt, bears and cats back outside of melee range and charge in? This seems like a clumsy mechanic to me (it's like feral charge) but it isn't horrible, just annoying.

3. Primal Precision : is it intended to have 10 expertise baked into the feral forms?

4. Is it intended that berserk remain on the GCD?

Bear:
1. Pulverize: How should pulverize fit into the rotation? Currently it is not worth the loss of lacerate applications to do a pulverize; you would gain about 30% more threat and 50% more damage simply by keeping your lacerate stack up and doing mauls/lacerate/thrash instead. The buff for damage and tanking is not particularly high. The actual damage is pretty low; lower than mangle and significantly lower than maul. Is pulverize intended to be used without lacerate stacks? With them? Should the goal be to keep the pulverize buff up at all times?

2. Lacerate: Lacerate scales very poorly with AP and does not scale at all with weapon damage. Is this intended? It has a high static threat component, but this makes it scale badly at all levels.

3. Swipe: is it intended to be doing about 1/4th the damage that it does on live, currently? As it stands it is usefess as a threat tool, even if thrash boosted it.

4. Maul: is it intended that maul remains the #1 threat tool for bears? Maul still does 18-20k damage compared to a mangle's 6-7k, and the best rotation is still to maul on every possible opportunity.

5. Mangle: is mangle intended to be just used for putting up a debuff? It is very weak, especially compared to maul.

6. Berserk: what is the intent of this ability? As a 31 pointer, being able to do multiple mangles when mangle is so very weak is quite lame. Bears can entirely skip berserk and only essentially miss a fear break. Is that the intent - that berserk is so weak compared to live?

7. Faerie Fire (bear): it costs 45 rage and 18 seconds to put up a full armor debuff. Is this the intent, or will there be a shortening of the cooldown for FFF?

8. Armor: what should the armor values for a bear be? Currently armor values are about 25% lower than a similarly geared and specced warrior at the same level. Is that the intent?

9. Savage Defense: is it intended to be a static reduction of damage, or will it be changed to a percentage reduction?

10. Endless Rage/King of the Jungle: is this intended to be a useful bear talent? If so, is the armor reduction going to be removed from enrage?

Cat:
1. Swipe: is swipe intended to be doing about 25% of the damage it currently does on live?

2. Improved Feral Charge: is it intended that feral cats get out of melee every 30 seconds or so, pool energy and ravage 3 times? Or is this intended as an opener but not a constant part of the rotation?

3. Damage in general: my lvl 82 feral in the same gear as on live (a mix of 277 and 264 gear) does about 10% less damage than live. At 80, they were doing about 50% less damage. Is it intended that damage is reduced so significantly? I believe this is mostly due to the loss of armor pen combined with bad scaling, but I don't know whether or not that's the intent.

4. Energy refund: is it intended that cats lose their energy refund on finishers? There is no talent for it any more, but because PP did exist I'm still getting it. I don't know if this is a bug or a feature. It could be an intended design that makes ferals want to gear for hit and expertise more highly, but I don't honestly know.

5. CP transfer: it was mentioned that there was going to be a way for ferals to transfer some CPs around, or at least remember the CPs on other mobs and not lose them. Is this still intended?

6. Ferocious Bite: Is it intended to be used only as a refresher for rip at 25% or in burst situations?

7. Endless Rage: is this intended to give an extra 20 energy?

[Druid] the first iteration of the 31-point talent tree

2010-07-14T11:46:00.000-07:00

As seen on MMO-champ, the latest build of the beta has been released, and with it comes the new 31-point maximum talent trees.

And they're horrible for ferals.

Note that ferals are one of the classes that have had the least amount of time spent on their tree. Expect this to change drastically in the near future. Which is good, because as it stands things are totally broken.

Here's some of the things I know about that are broken that need to be addressed at some point in the Cataclysm iteration:

Talents

Tier 1:

Predatory Strikes is a mandatory talent. Not useful at all for bears, and only marginal use for cats.

Tier 2:

Primal Fury is missing the extra combo point generation for cats. So it's a bear only talent.
Bears want all 9 talent points at tier 2. Cats want 5 at best.

Tier 3:

A cat must take either improved feral charge or thick hide.
A bear must take charge or King of the Jungle (which isn't that good unless you're using 4pT10 or they remove the armor loss on enrage) unless they spent all 9 points in tier 2.

Tier 4:

In order to progress, a cat must take one point in nurturing instinct, infected wounds or primal fury.
There's no improved leader of the pack.

Tier 5;

A cat needs to take Survival Instincts to progress. Or natural reaction, I suppose.

Tier 6 and 7 are 'fine', though Rend & Tear has been reduced to a 3 point talent without changing the scaling (so a nerf from 20% to 12%). Nom Nom Nom has stayed in. Berserk is largely useless for bears, but more on that later.

Resto tier 1:

Furor has been changed to a 3 point talent (yay) but the scaling has not changed, so it only does a 60% chance no matter what (boo). Bears can choose between boosting their claw and shred damage by 4% or reducing their shapeshifting costs. Yay.

Resto tier 2:

There is nothing worth getting for cats past furor and blessing of the grove. For bears, they want perseverance. Even then, it's only 8 points total in the tree.

Outstanding bugs:

If you ever had primal precision, you will have 10 expertise.
Combo point generation for cats is horrible without getting extra CPs from crits.
Rake bleeds crit for only 1.5x damage.
Improved feral charge does not work at all.
Thrash does not have any interaction with swipe at all.
Mangle debuff lasts for 12 seconds.
The mangle ability you get at lvl 10 is the mangle debuff and not the actual mangle attack.
Faerie fire (cat) doesn't exist.
Bleeds do not scale with haste.
Energy regen does not scale with haste.
Nom Nom Nom does not function (does nothing for rip duration less than 25%)
Shred's cost is not reduced
There is no crit damage multiplier for cats (so it's base 200%)
Ferals lost 10% AP
No improved leader of the pack - no mana regen or health.
Innervate scales with the caster's mana, not the target.
Pulverize still does almost no damage compared to maul.
Mangle does very little damage compared to maul.
Swipe's scaling is horrible and does about 1/4 the damage it does on live
faerie fire costs 15 rage
Savage Defense scales statically with AP.

Some of these will be addressed really soon. Others will be addressed as we figure out balance. In any case, it's not exactly fun to play a feral right now; you have to spam claw.

That's right, claw.

It'll get better. Don't panic! But don't think that things are all that hawt right now. If I don't mention a lot, it's because there's not a lot to mention.

[Offtopic] HLK deaded!

2010-07-14T11:36:00.001-07:00

On our fourth pull of the night Skunkworks downed Heroic Lich King on 25man, making us the 70th guild in the US to do it and the 244th overall. Again, we raid 8 hours a week max. Not too shabby.

Congratulations to everyone who has worked so hard to get this done. It's been a long 3 months working on him and sometimes it seemed hellish, but it's also been a lot of fun and an incredible show of what folks can do.

If you're curious we did no strategy changes from last time I talked about it. Well, save one - we brought only 5 healers. It helped but mostly in getting to P3 faster.

Cataclysm news shortly. Spoilers: things are broken and suck.

[Druid]What are the defining abilities for ferals?

2010-07-07T16:29:00.000-07:00

So being lazy pays off - I no longer have to write an indepth analysis of the feral trees, because they're all being nuked to hell. Yes, it's shocking that during the beta things would change so much.

But one bit of interesting news here is the notion that all classes will have their spec-defining ability given to them early on in their life, at level 10 when they choose their specialization. That got me thinking - what really is the defining trait for ferals?

The only one I could really think of was Mangle. Mangle is the thing you build towards that is amazingly rewarding at level 50, and allows you to plow through mobs like butter for the next 15 levels. It was defining for bears and cats, sounds great, and does satisfying damage and threat. It's obviously not the top-DPS thing for cats, but at least from a leveling experience it's all about Mangle.

Now there are other defining abilities too, but that's the big one. I think that if I wanted to get people used to feral abilities early, I'd give them something like this:

Bear:

Mangle

Swipe

Barkskin

Savage Defense

Growl

Bearform

Cat:

Mangle

Rake

Savage Roar

Tiger's Fury

Catform

and maybe the combo of Pounce/Ravage or one of the two.

The nice thing is that this would allow for the completely lame claw to be removed entirely. And get you forms early, which has always been an annoyance.

As far as the end game goes, I don't think this really is going to matter. They've said repeatedly that the dps, utility, rotation, tanking skill or healing skill is not going to change; this is almost entirely a leveling and utilitarian cleanup. It might affect how you get that awesome other talent in another tree, but I even doubt that. It'll affect PvP, but I honestly don't care about PvP, so I'm not going to talk about that :) Still, it'll be nice to see the new trees and hopefully get some rebalancing of the bear/cat talents. And maybe some of them will actually be functional!

[Druid]Some quick Cataclysm observations for ferals

2010-07-07T10:09:00.001-07:00

I'll be doing a more in-depth analysis of where ferals are in cataclysm, but that'll take a bit of time. In the meantime, here are some answers to some questions I've seen here and elsewhere.

General questions:

Feral AP is gone from weapons entirely. Attacks now scale with weapon damage, and are normalized by speed.
Faerie fire is broken for cat and bear; it is untrainable.
Mark of the wild boosts stats by 7% and does it for the entire raid/party/whatever.
Thorns appears to have been slightly boosted; it does about 110 damage per hit without any spellpower boost.
I gained about 5k health simply by leveling up in caster form.
Shifting forms costs about 5% of base mana, so it's very easy.
Primal Precision has been removed.

Bear questions:

Savage Defense has a 50% proc chance per crit, and the shields are 75% of AP * (1+ bear mastery bonus). So with a naked bear, it's 75% * (1.32) == about 99%. Note that because the bear's AP has gone way, WAY down due to the feral AP going away, shields are still pretty small.
Maul is king in terms of damage and threat once you get a mangle and bleed debuff up.
Maul glyph hits a second target for 50% of the base maul damage.
Maul currently is the best thing to do no matter what.
Pulverize consumes all the lacerate stacks active on the target.
Swipe (bear) does significantly less damage currently; it does about 500 damage per swipe on a crit, whereas it was doing upwards of 2k damage on a crit before.
Mangle is effectively pointless aside from as a debuffer.
Faerie Fire (Bear) costs 15 rage, if you could use it.
Improved Feral Charge doesn't work right now for bears.
There is no dire bear form. Bear form is it. Mangle works in bear form.
Armor has been significantly nerfed in bear form; I believe it's about 75% of what it was. I'll have to do specific comparisons to see what it is.
Tanking, right now, is incredibly frustrating and really not worth it; any multitarget tanking is worse than it was in TBC time, the rotation is lacking, etc.
Thrash currently doesn't do anything useful other than damage. It doesn't buff swipe.
The tree feels incredibly bloated and not particularly fun.

Cat general questions:

Endless Rage doesn't work with Savage Roar.
Improved Feral Charge removes ravage from your bars entirely. So it's untestable at the moment.
Cats have lost about 30% damage from shred and mangle due to the loss of arpen.
Arpen turns into straight crit.
With the mastery bonus and the other talents, my cat has a paper doll crit rate of 82% with only self-buffs at level 80. This went to 70% at level 81.
Nom Nom Nom doesn't appear to properly refresh rips at the moment.
The cat tree in general feels sparse, and the 'fun' talents are basically whether or not you want FA, IW, or something like that. You can take all the damage increasing talents and some of the nice to have things like brutal impact and have talents to spare.
Thanks to Darksend: Cower reduces threat by 10% instead of a static amount\
Swipe does about 25% of the damage it used to; it's essentially not worth using unless you have more than 8 mobs.
In general, most 'new' things are broken or not worth playing with at the moment.

Things I want to test: With primal precision gone, is there a refund on missed attacks and specials any more? I believe there is not - making hit and expertise very important to cats now.

[Druid] Heroic LK, or wtf is up with your spec?

2010-07-02T15:17:00.000-07:00

The overwhelming large request for further articles was on Cataclysm talent analysis and reports. I am in the beta and was in the alpha, so I can test things out specifically if you're at all curious - and plan to do similar reports to what I did back in the PTR days with savage defense.

So because most everyone wanted my views on Cataclysm, I'm going to talk about Heroic Lich King.

Well, first I'm going to say that Skunkworks is still recruiting, but not a resto druid for the time being. We are recruiting one Holy Priest (as of 7/2) so if you're interested drop us a line. And if you're totally awesome but only want to demonstrate that awesomeness 8 hours a week, drop a line too.

Second, Heroic Lich King. Ugh. It's a great fight, and it's a hard, hard fight. Defile is one of the most horrible mechanics ever to grace a boss fight; it combines all the intricacies of every single 'don't stand in stuff' you've ever seen and combines it with personal fail issues that you have only seen from things like Teron Gorefiend, where you pray to whatever gods might be listening that "That Guy" doesn't get defile, or someone doesn't DC, or whatever.

We are getting better. We got another 17% wipe this week, and this week was short due to our server maintenance - only 4 hours of raiding. Two weeks to go with the 25% buff. I really think we are on the verge of a kill; changing our stuns helped immensely.

Ah, stuns. What am I talking about here? The hardest part of the fight, IMO, is dealing with the valkyrs that carry off three people while defiles are being dropped on random people and the tank on LK is getting WTFPwned. Aka, Phase 2. Tank deaths are actually not that horrible to deal with and we can often recover from a tank death without losing anyone. Defiles are...getting better, though we (and I) have the occasional fail that wipes the raid. The valks, however, we have conquered.

The valks are a neat mechanic. In case you're not familiar, what they do is target three random people who aren't high on threat on LK and pick that person up, damaging them. They travel in a straight line towards the edge of the room, and drop that person off the ledge to be killed and unrezzable. If they go below 50% health (they have 3 million health) they drop their target and fly to the center of the room, and spam the highest threat target they have with random bolts of death. The goal is to get all three valks moving in the same straight line and reduce all three valk's health to 50% as quickly as possible. Both slows and stuns work on them.

Originally we had a stun rotation of an AoE stun first, then two rogues and a feral building up CP and doing their stun, then emergency stuns. And this...didn't work well. It worked some of the time, but the CP generation was slow, the overall stun time was slower, and we'd get situations where the stuns would be staggered so the valks wouldn't be grouped up well enough. We changed this so that the single target stuns are done by paladins and a prot warrior, then the AoE stun hits, and then we go to other single target stuns come in. And we have backups in case those folks are taken.

Which is where my weird-ass cat spec comes in.

The big one here is Brutal Impact. This doesn't affect Maim at all. Why use it? Because the primary stun I provide is no longer maim, it's bash. This increases the duration by a second, but more importantly reduces the cooldown to 30 seconds - meaning it's available on every valkyr phase.

Of course that means I have to go to bear AND have enough rage when I get out of bear to bash right away. Which of course means...5/5 furor. Sigh. I hate this, so very very much. But it's the right choice. After that I had two points to spend pretty much anywhere I chose, so I went with Nurturing Instinct. Partially this helps with healing me, which is good; more survivability on a fight like this is good anyway. But there's a second benefit - it also improves the power of Tranquility.

When would I need to use Tranquility? Well, when a disc priest is picked up and we have to deal with infest. Or in the throne room for some extra heals.

It's not the 'normal' spec, not by any means. It's certainly not DPS optimal; my ferocious bite crits went significantly down, even with the 25% boost. But with this my stuns became far more reliable and far faster to operate, and I could fill in on a quick stun on each valk phase without worrying about the next. It's very useful, and if you've been doing the maim thing I'd recommend doing this instead; you can still build up CPs on your target, but when it comes time for you to stun just switch to bear and bash; you'll have all that energy pooled when you switch back and not lose any CPs on your target, making it far cheaper than maim.

As to strategy on this fight as a feral cat, here's my basic deal.

Stage 1: stay with melee. Pre-pot using a haste pot, blow berserk after the second shadow trap is placed so that I will likely not have to move and most of the rotation has started. Try to get a full rip and fresh rake and 5 CP and a mangle debuff on LK right before he transitions, so I can get a full SR up when the first raging spirit spawns.

Transition 1: run out if targeted by an orb. Innervate a healer. Use CPs from LK on SR when first spirit spawns, then get 5 CPs as fast as I can, rip, build up more CPs, potentially FB or SR depending. Move to second (even if not dead; dots and others will take care of him). Build to 5 CP, rip ASAP. If I had to SR instead, don't rip - FB. Move to third. Build to 5 CP, rip, rake, move to LK.

Stage 2. Stay on LK for the most part. While you would think swipe damage would be insanely awesome, it turns out that it's not nearly as good as damage on LK can be as a cat. The idea is to build CP on LK, keep SR, rake and rip up, and swipe when you can. Run out early for defile to the non-throne side. Watch to stun if necessary. Use barkskin if targeted by valk. Jump over defiles using feral charge. Use Tranquility in an emergency. Don't waste CPs on FBs if you're moving from LK to a valk; refresh SR early instead. Use berserk on the second Valk phase (the one that coincides with Defile) right after the defile lands, and swipe your ass off. If not then, do it on the third phase.

Transition 2: Again, try to get both bleeds and 5 CP for SR on LK right before. Ignore valks. Same basic strategy as before for the raging spirits, though you may want to get bleeds up on both targets if possible at the end. DPS the hell out of the 3rd spirit and waste all your CP.

Phase 3: go into throne room, don't be a retard. Think about using tranquility. Get out of throne room the first time, run like hell, then move back onto the raging spirit. Kill him. Avoid vile spirits or use CDs and bear form to survive them. Get back on LK. Avoid defiles. Then go back into throne room, don't be a retard, use haste pot with bloodlust, use berserk when you can. Ideally you'll use berserk on the first throne room and then the last one.

It's a lot harder than it sounds. :)

[General]Some quickie updates

2010-06-30T13:09:00.001-07:00

Long time, no post.

I'm no longer a part of casually serious. I'm now a part of Skunkworks. Which...is Casually Serious, but renamed. And 100% more awesome. With it comes a web page redesign, some personal rules about behavior outside the game, and really snazzy graphics. We are recruiting a resto druid, and will always consider fantastic applicants no matter what their class and spec. If you're totally amazing and also would rather do more progression with fewer hours, send us a note.

I am back to raiding, at least on a trial basis. My work schedule changed enough that it seemed feasible. We're currently trying to kill HLK 25 man, and we've gotten as close as 17% enrage. I think he'll die in the 25% buff.

I'm planning on writing a retrospective of how ferals did from TBC to WotLK. It'll be a bit fluffy, so you mathy folks won't be satisfied all that much.

I'll also update the loot lists for Halion's loot table. Other than the Sharpened Twilight Scale, there's not a ton of super sexy stuff from there for cats. If you're hurting for rings the Signet of Twilight is neat, but otherwise...meh. For bears, the Umbrage Armbands are not too shabby, but not exactly exciting, and the Petrified Twilight Scale is a nice armor trinket but the proc is sad and doesn't compare well to Unidentified Organ.

I'm likely not going to comment much on the posted Cataclysm talent trees. Most of what I would have said has been said elsewhere and more eloquently than I could have. I will say that so far, they've not met the goals they set out to do in their design statement, and there's a lot of work left.

So I ask readers - what kinds of things are you looking for? Tips on HLK? Gearing strategies? Reviews of talents? Philosophical rants on the pointlessness of an infinite universe? Hello Kitty Island Adventures?

[Druid] NOM NOM NOM

2010-05-20T11:31:00.000-07:00

While I won't be talking about leaks in the alpha for the most part, I do want to say one thing:

If - and only if - there existed a talent called "Nom Nom Nom", it would be the best named talent in the history of ever.

[Druid] The (possible) shape of things to come

2010-04-14T17:08:00.000-07:00

Out of curiousity, I went through the feral tree (along with the resto tree's small bits) to look at talents that just boosted x by a certain amount - because in theory most of them are going to be replaced with more 'fun' talents. In addition, I wanted to get rid of any talents that only boosted buffs, as they're going away too. I also looked at what might get cut or pruned down, since only part of it was buffing random stats and whatnot.

Here's the list of things I think will be removed:

Improved mark - almost certainly out
Naturalist - out (at least for ferals)

Master Shapeshifter - out, most likely

Thick Hide - out? (only boosts armor, which might fall into the generic survival part for mastery)

Sharpened Claws - out (flat increase to crit, and that's all; covered entirely by mastery boost in cat)

Heart of the Wild - out (while it does a bunch of things, all of them are either damage or health or intellect, and we don't care)

Protector of the Pack - out. Sorry, Darksend, but both of these things are entirely in the scope of the mastery abilities for bears.

Rend and Tear - out? It only affects damage but does so on certain abilities. It's a definer in terms of damage on cats and bears currently - but is that the sort of thing they want 45-point talents to be?

Primal Gore - out (they've already stated all dots and hots will crit, so this will do nothing)

Here's what I suspect they'll prune or modify:

Feral Aggression - Pruned (may only affect Ferocious Bite, since the Demo Roar part is going away)

Predatory Strikes - Pruned (does too much, and part of it is a pure damage boost)

Natural Reaction - Pruned/in (depends on if 'gains more dodge' is going to be acceptable or not)

Survival of the Fittest - pruned? (the crit reduction in bear form and the armor contribution may stay. The 'all stats are awesome' boost is likely to go or be split out.

And here's what I think is largely going to stay pretty similar:

Furor- sadly, probably in

Natural Shapeshifter - in, possibly

Omen of Clarity - in

Feral Instinct - In (boost of swipe and boost in prowling, fun talent)

Savage Fury - in (boosts specific abilities, not generic damage)

Feral Swiftness - in (fun)

Survival Instincts - in (fun, new ability)

Shredding attacks - in (specific ability)

Primal Fury - in (rage/CP gain is a spec definer)

Primal Precision - in (though possibly pruned or split)

Brutal Impact - in (useful)

Feral Charge - in (fun)

Nurturing Instinct - in (fun, interesting)

Leader of the Pack - in

Imp Leader of the Pack - in; while it boosts a buff, it does so in a way that sometimes you may not want, and the buff isn't a generic one

Primal Tenacity - in

Predatory Instincts - in (though may be split up)

Infected Wounds - in, but probably reduced to one rank

King of the Jungle - in

Mangle - in

Imp Mangle - in (though hopefully made a bit more interesting)

Ferocity- In (rage/energy reduction isn't straight +damage or stats)

Berserk - in

Behold, the face of your new tree:

Too soon? Okay, sorry restoers. Keep the tree form alive!

No, this (thanks to my crappy MSPaint skills) is something like what the new tree will not have, or have modified:

What's really interesting to me is the amount of resto talents that are going away. Almost all are boring talents that we take to get to OoC for. I don't know how they can make talents that are interesting to take for all three specs, but these...aren't them. The rest of the tree though...it's not going through (or doesn't have to go through) huge changes. I was honestly expecting it to look like a buzzsaw, but it really doesn't seem that way. I do home more cat and bear abilities become baseline; it's not that much fun to take a lot of talents that basically allow you to function in that role. For example, mangle isn't a 'fun' talent, exactly. It's a necessary one. Giving mangle the shred treatment (making it cost absurd rage/energy if you didn't have it talented) would allow people to have mangle but not clutter up the tree with it.

Also, congrats to Casually Serious, who got down Professor Putricide last night. They're now 11/12 Hard modes. :)

[Druid] Druid Cataclysm preview thoughts

2010-04-12T14:43:00.001-07:00

By now most of you will have seen the druid cataclysm preview at WoW, and seen countless takes on it. I'll try and not rehash it all, but instead point out some interesting bits you might not have seen. This (and the emphasis) is by GC and was brought to you by the fine folks at Darksend:

We do want to make sure that 10 player raids can get all of the major buffs a little easier. You should feel like most reasonable comps (3 warriors and 7 rogues is not what we'd consider reasonable) give you all of the major buffs and several of the more minor ones. There will be a little more consolidation than what we've described so far.

We are scaling back the magnitude of some of the buffs, as we did with Sunder Armor. We want you to feel awesome when you have strong good synergy, but we don't want the buffs to overwhelm say your gear or skill. We're also planning on getting rid of any talent that buffs a buff. Any buff that is earned solely by talent needs to have a selfish component thrown in so that you don't feel like you should respec if someone else with that buff comes along.

Obviously things like Rebirth can't just be handed to out to more classes unless we did something like a second exhaustion mechanic for battle rez or whatever. For now we're going to try the cooldown at 30 min again. In Icecrown's world of limited attempts, a 30 min cooldown likely meant you just cooled your heels until the cooldown was available again. In Cataclysm the hope is sometimes you'll have the benefit available but not every time, which scales back on how much of a game-changer it is.

Interesting, no? Battle rez going back to 30 minutes implies all sorts of things. It implies that limited attempts are going away (which they've mentioned as something they want), it implies that other classes might get a battle res, and it almost implies it'll show up in forms.

It's also implied that improved demo roar will be going away too. Which...awesome. Finally.

Anyway, I don't have a lot to say about the changes announced. They're useful, they get the job done, but they excite me not one bit. At least for feral; I'm excited about mushroom and treeform going away for different reasons. The changes that were announced that are concrete amount to:

A new AoE attack that does bleeding damage and has a longer CD (Thrash)
An interrupt off the GCD for cats and bears
Maul not a next-attack ability
Vengeance, which might not actually happen for bears at all
Stampeding roar, a raid speedup on a 3-minute cooldown for all druids (I expect there to be stampede rotations for certain fights, and guilds with 4-5 druids winning fights they shouldn't)

That's really it. The mangle change might make it in, but that's not likely to affect much. Bleeds being easier (likely a longer debuff) will likely make it in, but who knows?

There's really not a lot to go on. Nothing earthshattering like catform becoming a cooldown, or bears getting bloodlust, or ferals getting the ability to thunderclap while leaping.

The only really 'exciting' bit of news...which isn't that exciting, to be honest, is this set of sentences:

We want to add tools to cat form and depth to bear form. If a Feral cat is going to fill a very similar niche to that of a rogue, warrior or Enhancement shaman, it needs a few more tools -- primarily a reliable interrupt. Bears need to be pushing a few more buttons just so the contrast between tanking and damage-dealing is not so steep.

And that's really it. I love the idea of cats getting more utility; right now, cats are essentially a single-target DPS sponge that has a couple of decent raid buffs. They are...well, they're basically rogues in TBC. And that's really funny, honestly. Bears getting more buttons is all well and good too, so long as pressing those buttons is a decision point and not a cast sequence macro.

So...yeah. That sounds great. I was really hoping for more information on how bears' threat woud be balanced now that maul is gone from being 70% of our threat. I was hoping to hear more about other offensive and defensive options bears might have. I was hoping for more than 'interrupt' as a utility piece. I was hoping to hear more about how savage defense would be retooled in the face of all static blocking removed, and how it would scale with offensive abilities.

Now, of course, I am hoping for one and only one thing: wild mushroom in bear form. Think about it - wild mushroom (assuming it scaled with bear stats) would suddenly become one of the things bears have wanted for a while - a ranged aoe pull. And unlike consecrate and DnD, it's an AoE pull that does a lot of immediate damage to a group. It requires finesse and positioning, and does something no other tank has - ranged, burst threat to a whole pack. It would be an awesome (if totally hilarious) ability for a bear, especially compared to thrash.

Please, blizzard - let the bears have shrooms.

[General]CS downs HSin, Vengeance

2010-04-09T17:20:00.001-07:00

Last night I raided for the first time in 3 months. In essentially the same gear I left save one more piece of T10, which was important; that was the 4pT10 bonus. I was doing this mostly because due to some burnout and churn, we had lost a few raiders recently and we were short.

We were doing Sin on HM - a progression kill for us. It had been a hard, annoying fight for some time. Aside from the mechanics which are very punishing for individual mistakes, the annoying voice just grates beyond belief. Ugh.

Anyway, we downed her with me in the raid, filling in for our resident feral whose hard drive decided to melt down the day before. (Sorry, Bone) I didn't even do that horribly despite only doing the fight once on 10 man normal; I didn't kill people with blocks, I didn't break out blocks too early, I didn't blow up (until the fight was done) and was (mostly) okay. Didn't even do horribly on DPS, though certainly not what I was doing when I left; losing two tiers of gear progression will do that :p Congrats to Casually Serious on getting 10/12 HM down, and getting US 182nd kill of her.

I gotta say, it felt great. It felt great to be a part of progression kills, especially ones that were frustrating. It was great to be able to hang out with friends in that kind of environment again. It was fun to see the old folks and meet the new. It was great knowing I did contribute some and I wasn't a detriment to the fight. It was great to finish up the instance too and work on PP hard mode and get a kill of Lich King - my first on both. Even ended up with Astrylian's Sutured Cinch and a 264 tier piece. I desperately wanted the former to just have; it would have bugged not getting the tribute gear for the guy who did so much for the community.

Mostly, it was just fun to play.

I'm very grateful to CS for giving me that chance again. And for giving me an excuse to write some things again. It's still not going to bring me back to raiding; I didn't give up raiding because I didn't enjoy it, and it's still too conflicting with personal time, family time and missing time with my children to do so on a regular, scheduled basis. That's the real difficulty; if I could simply log on whenever I wanted and raid, that would be great. More importantly, if I could just stop raiding mid-raid and help out or eat dinner or play with the kids, that would be ideal. But that's not raiding.

Still, I hope that I'll get to do more things like this in the future. And while I hope CS fixes their attendance and roster soon, I'll be happy to help out when I can. :)

Speaking of: CS is still recruiting. If you are an outstanding player and want to work on hardmode progression without spending 5 nights a week killing yourself because raiders can't move out of fires and don't understand things like 'move left', this may be the guild for you. CS's needs change constantly, so check csguild.org for our specific needs at any time.

Onto the announced preview changes. The one I want to talk about today is Vengeance. Vengeance is an interesting idea: here's what the blue preview had to say about it:

Vengeance: This new mechanic is designed to ensure that tank damage output (and therefore threat) doesn't fall behind as damage-dealing classes improve their gear during the course of the expansion. All tanking specs will have Vengeance as their second talent tree passive bonus. Whenever a tank gets hit, Vengeance will grant a stacking Attack Power buff equal to 5% of the damage done, up to a maximum of 10% of the character's unbuffed health. For boss encounters, we expect that tanks will always have an Attack Power bonus equal to 10% of their health. The 5% and 10% bonuses assume 51 talent points have been put into the Blood tree; these values will be smaller at lower levels.

You only get the Vengeance bonus if you have spent the most talent points in the Blood tree, so you won't see Frost or Unholy death knights running around with it. Vengeance will let us continue to design tank gear more or less the way we do today; there will be some damage-dealing stats, but mostly survival-oriented stats. Druids typically have more damage-dealing stats even on their tanking gear, so their Vengeance benefit may be smaller, but the goal is that all four tanks will do about the same damage when tanking

So what does that mean for you? Here are my concerns (posted at Tankspot as well):

My concern is that health is not going to grow at the same rate that DPS grows, which means that this buff is not going to be enough. My secondary concern is that while it does add more damage, it is still not a huge amount, and it is only off of one stat; even given two stats (strength and stamina) this simply is not going to compete against DPSers gaining benefit from 4-5 stats on an itemization value unless the scaling is totally weird.

On the first point, let me illustrate. In tier7 most tanks were approaching or exceeding 40k health buffed, and maybe 30k unbuffed. Most DPS (buffed) were able to do 4-5k DPS. By tier 10, however, the unbuffed health had risen to 50k or so (not druids, mind you). This is an increase of only 66%. By comparison, DPS are able to routinely hit 12-13k DPS - an increase of 140-160%. That's bad. When you have a stat you want to scale not scale at the same rate as another stat, you're going to have problems.

Then you have the issue of the actual talents scaling with AP. Right now, many tanks have horrible scaling with AP. Druids at least have a ton of 'this does additional threat' which screws over AP scaling - and lacerate even divides the AP by 2!

Then you have the issue of stats. This is what druids have had to deal with for eons: that because they only scale with 2 or 3 important stats relative to other tanking classes, those scaling factors have to be pretty insane for them to be competitve. And naturally, that means imbalance for certain outliers, like polar gear. Same thing here; either things are going to scale too well or not well enough.

I think it's a decent idea - it gives tanks a boost to DPS based on health but only when being hit - but it's not sufficient by itself.

Now, Jere pointed out (Rightly) that while the scaling is bad the base threat may compensate for this; tanks started out significantly ahead on threat at the start of WotLK, and if they do so in Cat that might work out okay. But it's certainly something to think about and consider.

Anyway, that's it for now; I'll talk about the actual druid changes in a bit.

[Druid] Maul is very, very good (and other quick notes)

2010-04-07T17:01:00.000-07:00

Just a quick note: despite what you might have read recently, maul is most certainly not your second-biggest source of threat behind faerie fire. You might be able to make an argument that it's the second biggest source of threat per rage point, but most of the time who cares? On most raiding bears maul is 50-60% of your overall threat for a single-target encounter, and for higher-end bears it is as much as 70%. For multitarget fights it still remains huge due to the glyph of maul, and only is eclipsed by swipe (and only when you have at least 4 mobs and preferably a lot more than that).

Also, swipe is not at all inefficient compared to lacerate on a per-threat point. Unless you have shredding attacks - and what bear build has that? - lacerate costs the exact same amount of rage that swipe does. Swipe on a single target puts more threat on that target than lacerate does; the only time this is not the case is when you have a lacerate-5 stack up, and you should only do that on long fights or when you really want to do max damage. It is otherwise as expensive as lacerate, and definitely on multimob fights is far more efficient.

Yeah, I'll post from time to time when things get really wrong (like they did above) or when it strikes me. But some other quick notes:

The rage normalization stuff I've talked about elsewhere; maul being removed from on next swing is great. Rage normalization is a bit scary, but mostly because it's going to be a focus on warriors (rightfully so) and not on bears.
Shockingly the LK weapons are good, in case you were wondering.
Bears are really awesome on LK too. There's a reason the only guild that's killed LK25 has a bear with a pvp weapon as their main tank, and 3 ferals on the kill.
You should get stacks of glyph of mangle and carry them around too, and swap them with your glyph of maul when you don't need multitarget stuff.
No, manglespam doesn't beat shred. Even with 4pT6.
Ferals aren't going the way of blood DKs, and our mastery will be split between cat and bear the same way our tier gear is.
Yes, frost resist gear on Sindragosa is good
Yes, you should get out of improved mangle in cat form and put those points elsewhere.

Any other quick bits of news you'd like my opinion on before I disappear into the ether?

[Offtopic]CS is recruiting

2010-01-21T12:11:00.000-08:00

Last one for a while, I promise.

Casually Serious is recruiting right now - and I really recommend coming by and seeing if you have what it takes. CS is looking for a feral (DPS with occasional OT duties, aka, my old role), a rogue, a hunter and a healing (disc/holy) priest ,but as always outstanding apps are always interesting.

The official recruitment thread is over here:

I really can't speak enough about CS. If you're in a situation where you would like to raid but have limited time and you know your stuff, this is an amazing guild. We don't waste time, we don't mess around, we don't care about loot whoring or drama and don't tolerate it. We simply want to kill as much content as we possibly can. There's no recruiting for the bench, no giant raids, no one's on a special status or anything of the sort.

It's just be at raids and win.

Two nights a week, 4 hours for those nights, 7-11 PST. That's it. And for that 8 hour raiding schedule, CS has downed:

Naxx, Maly & Sarth3D (and gained the protodrakes)

Every hard mode in Ulduar + Yogg0 and gained Death's Demise & Celestial Defender

Every hard mode in ToC and gained Grand Crusader

Everything in ICC save BQL (which we haven't tried yet).

Realm firsts aren't that special on Balnazzar, I'll grant you - but being US 150/world 400 is, and wanting to do Yogg0 long after gear was irrelevant also was.

Anyway - if you're a good feral who does their homework and doesn't like to mess around, I can't recommend CS enough. Especially if you're like me and like tanking and DPSing both. And if you're a good player regardless, come see if it's what you're looking for.

[General] Pimpage and shoutouts

2010-01-20T12:52:00.000-08:00

I never do a good job of saying goodbye :)

First off - many folks asked for good resources out there on various things, so I figured I'd give my recommendations and try and encourage some bloggers to write more.

On cat stuff: Coldbear has done quite possibly the most exhaustive writeup of feral dps that exists or that could exist. The video is awesome (especially if you happen to be taking ritalin) but the thing I most commend him for is the literally amazing wowwiki feral dps entry. The sheer amount of work on this is insane. Some great tips I learned from him are some of the UI fun bits, using GotW right before the pull to get an OoC proc and using nature's gift to maybe get one while pooling energy. But really - he's got it all.

I linked him before when he did some work on Arpen mechanics and the tricky question of when to switch - but you should still go visit Vallen at Feral Aggression and bug him to post more. He writes with a great style in a very approachable way, and he has a lot of things to say. Go say hi, show him you're interested and ask him to explain more stuff.

On bear stuff: there's sadly just not that much out there. The one I can wholeheartedly recommend is Darksend's great I'm not Feral, I'm a bear. He does a good job posting over at Tankspot and putting up movies, but you should bug him to post more otherwise.

For a newer set of all-around info, Alaron and the Fluid Druid is great and I hope that he continues to post a lot. The basic starting point on bear tanking and cat DPS should be required reading for any bear wanting to do any raiding. He's a bit busy right this moment, but hopefully he'll get back into the swing of things.

I really encourage you guys to comment on their blogs, ask them questions and in general go say hi. There's nothing more encouraging or inspiring to a writer than readers, and I've written some of my best work simply because someone left a good comment. If you want more things written - ask :)

Other than that, the EJ forums, tankspot, and the dreaded wow forums are all good resources. And Rawr. Always Rawr.

Onto some shoutouts for peeps out there. I'm sure I will miss a ton of people, and that's my personal failing.

-Andrew/Karthis - you were my biggest inspiration for starting writing at a good clip, to the point where my blog looks and is formatted a lot like yours was. (imitation is the sincerest form of flattery?) Your taking a break made me write more, and you leaving made me write even more, but no matter what I provided I could never fill that void. You were a great read and a good person to talk to. Thank you for giving so much back and doing it so well.

Flyv - it was awesome when you and Karthis and I were all bouncing ideas off of each other and getting more and more information. It really felt like a community and it was really synergistic. Sorry to see ya go.

Runycat - theory comes and goes, but your writing went way beyond that. You were seriously awesome and amazingly helpful, and damnit you were fun. The world needs more people like you. Some day it'd be great to bring the significant others and have a beer.

Copey - one of the best contributors to comments on this site. I'm really glad you spent the time to write.

John Patricelli - you gave me my first big break, and my success is almost entirely because of that. I'm sorry we didn't get along; that was entirely my failing.

Fasc - my partner in crime over at the wow forums. I didn't always agree with you, but I always respected what you were saying and why, and it was nice to have some sanity in the wilderness.

Astrylian - I don't think anyone has written something as profound as you have for this community. Thank you for doing such an amazing piece of work and for writing so well about it.

Communism - thank you for providing such clarity and quantitative analysis on the wow forums. It kept me from killing people with my bare hands. :)

Phae - congratulations again on the sprout. He's beautiful. :) You were the best of us, and you made me want to join the druid community.

Toskk - you were doing it before it was cool. Just astounding work that every feral owes a huge debt to.

Jacemora - write more, damnit!

Tigerfeet - sorry that you got burnt out. More sorry you're not writing more. You have a ton of style and wit, and I envy what you can do with graphics like no one else.

All my commenters: Thank you for the support and well-wishes and saying hi. I'll miss talking with you and helping out more than you'll know.

So long, guys. Kick some icecrown butt and may Blood Queen always drop Bloodfall. :)

Goodbye (at least for now)

2010-01-18T09:15:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure how to really start this or end it, and this post has gone through revision after revision.

I talked to my officers over the weekend and let them know that I'd be taking a break from raiding, which is likely going to be a permanent one.

The main reason has nothing to do with my guild or drama or anything like that; Casually Serious has been about the best guild that I could imagine for what I've wanted out of Warcraft, and they're an incredible group of people. They have shown that smart raiding beats long raiding times, and that if you're skilled and do your homework you can have good success on progression with only a small amount of time.

No, it's personal life issues. Simply put, being a father of a newborn doesn't coincide well with raiding on a set schedule. Thinking on it it seems almost ludicrous to believe otherwise, but this was exacerbated more recently by other life events to a point that became...bad. And I told myself a long time ago that when WoW started interfering negatively with my normal life, it was time to stop.

It might be better in the future. I may be able to get back to raiding or playing. But honestly, a lot of the joy I had in playing I got from playing with my wife, and until that changes (which is not going to be very likely) I don't see me coming back as a raider.

Looking back, it's been a lot of fun and I'm very proud of what I've been able to accomplish with two great guilds. Being able to kill Kael, Illidan and Brutallus pre-nerf (and KJ after that), Maly, Sarth and all of Ulduar with Fire & Blood, and doing all the Ulduar hard modes (including Yogg0), all of ToGC on 25s - not a lot of people get to experience those things. I feel like I was a good contributor on those fights and did my part to down them. That's a great feeling and one of the most addictive parts of raiding for me - that you contributed to something greater than you.

Oddly enough, one of the hardest things for me to face is that this blog is going to stop. I also told myself that if I wasn't experiencing the content I didn't want to write about it; theorycrafting is good, but it only goes so far in place of real experience. I really did enjoy writing this, and again it was very rewarding to hear how many people got real, quantifiable help from my writing. One of the reasons I switched guilds (instead of outright quitting) was so I could continue writing about WoW. That's how important it was to me.

Thank you all for reading for the last two years. I've had some of the best readers I've ever seen on a blog, and it wouldn't have been so much fun without you.

[Druid] The threat value of arpen

2010-01-13T11:58:00.001-08:00

UPDATED: thanks to Ciopo I went and redid a bit of the math here; sunder and FF stack multiplicatively, the armor for a boss was reduced (from 13083 to 10643, per experimentation) and the math was redone. Turns out arpen is even better than I originally calculated. And thanks to Ramenchef at EJ, I've updated again.

In an earlier post I mentioned the value of threat for every 100 points of itemization for a bear...and kind of glossed over one specific value, that of armor penetration. Here's what I said about it back in the day:

Now, this definitely doesn't do a good job of modeling armor pen, and I didn't want to go into the insanity of that; it's quite complex. It does do a decent job of it given that in general, bears aren't going to have a ton of armor pen.

That's all true, but it doesn't really help a lot. The real trick though is that bears are going to be likely swimming in armor pen by the time they're geared out to the gills; every single tier piece has it, all the offtier pieces have it (at least from icecrown directly), and even some of the weapons have it.

So what's the actual value of arpen on threat? How good is it? The TL:DR version: Armor Penetration is the best threat stat for bears after hit and expertise.

First, we have to go back and revise some of our assumptions. We'll start with the boss base armor: that's 10643 (corrected from 13083), from experimental testing. That's kind of the assumed number. It might be off; anecdotally people have indicated that (as an example) the Mimiron tank and Vezax both had higher armor than this, but we'll go with that since its' the accepted value.

We'll assume sunder and faerie fire are both up on the target. Before anything else, these take off 24% of the armor since they multiply. (this doesn't stack the way you'd think with armor pen). So that's 10643 *.8*.95 = 8088.68.

Next we get into an odd thing, which is that armor pen can only affect some of the armor on the target. There's a lengthy explanation over at wowwiki about this from ghostcrawler and an even lengthier conversation from EJ about how he's slightly wrong, but the long and short of it is that the formula for determining the affectable armor by armor pen by a lvl 80 mob (it was thought to be towards a level 83 mob, but it's attacker level that matters) is:

(935/6)*80 + armor/3 - (44335/6)

Which ends up being the magical number of 7773.727 for a boss. That's the maximum armor that armor pen could remove, and the percentage that it goes against. So for example: if you had 700 armor pen, you would have 'removes up to 50% of armor'. The target's armor after sunder and faerie fire is 8088.68. You can remove half of the minimum of (8088,7773.727) which is 7773.727.

(7773.727*.5) = 3886.8635. This is the total armor that can be removed, leaving 4201.8165 left.

Now to figure out what that actually does, we go to the armor formula, which tells you the damage reduction by armor. That is:

(armor / (armor +(467.5*80 - 22167.5))) for a level 80 attacker and a level 83 mob.

For 4201.8165 armor, that ends up giving 21.6% damage reduction. Not bad, given that before this the armor reduction was almost 35%.

Okay, okay - enough about the math. Let's see what the threat values are. Again, this is a mangle/ff/lacerate/swipe rotation, assumes lacerates don't fall off, and doesn't take into account any T10 bonuses.

We'll start with the basic idea that you're expertise soft capped on dodge (132 expertise) and have 100 hit. You have 10k AP and a 40% crit rate. For a 3 mangle/3lacerate/3 swipe/3 FF rotation, your base TPS is 5131.187 with 0 armor pen. And here's how we scale with 100 armor pen:

armor pen	TPS	difference
0	5412
100	5517	105
200	5626	109
300	5741	115
400	5863	122
500	5992	129
600	6128	136
700	6272	144
800	6425	153
900	6588	163
1000	6762	174
1100	6948	186
1200	7146	198
1300	7360	214
1400	7586	226

Yep, that's right - at the highest level of arpen arpen gives 226 total threat per 100 points of it, which is huge! Before you look back at that prior article note that this is relative; at that same level of arpen expertise is worth 220 TPS per 100 rating, and hit is worth 240. All the stats go up in value as arpen improves. And this is with some fairly vanilla stats (no haste for instance); numbers will change some.

Still, even at lower levels it's worth a lot more than I had anticipated. It's certainly worth more than 100 haste or 200 AP, as an example.

Why is that? Well, part of it is simply that bears have big, meaty attacks that do a lot of damage. Maul and Mangle are good, and swipe is up there too. Only FF and the lacerate bleed don't benefit from it. Also, the benefit is fairly high on a per-point basis. I'm a bit more surprised that the static threat values from maul don't overwhelm this, but apparently not.

And part of it is the scaling nature itself.

Now, what level of arpen are we looking at? Just based on my prior list for 264 gear, you have something like this:

Frostbitten Fur Boots - 64 arpen

Sanctified Lasherweave Handgrips - 80 arpen

Sanctified Lasherweave Headguard - 92 arpen

Sanctified Lasherweave Legguards - 108 arpen

Sanctified Lasherweave Shoulderpads - 72 arpen

Ikfirus's Sack of Wonder - 0 arpen

Vengeful Noose - 80 arpen

Toskk's Maximized Wristguards - 60 arpen

For a total of 496 arpen! Yikes. At that level, here are the values of stats per 100 rating (assuming 100 hit and 132 expertise):

hit: 185 TPS

expertise: 168

arpen: 129

haste: 86

AP: 76

crit: 69

In this situation, arpen becomes the next best threat stat after hit and expertise, and it's almost competitive. At higher rates it does become competitive with expertise - but hopefully as a bear you're not quite at the point where you're trying to reach the hard cap of armor pen.

I'll go back and amend the previous values. I may end up changing the weighings for itemization, but I suspect it won't matter that much one way or another.

ETA: you can check my spreadsheet out over at google. It's a bit messy, but it does have the various numbers and formulae.

[Druid, general] Deathbringer's Will now 33% more awesome

2010-01-06T14:05:00.001-08:00

Earlier this week Blizzard had this to say about Deathbringer's Will:

We are concerned about proc’ing a stat that can be readily capped especially on an item that provides a rather large passive armor pen bonus already. It could end up just never being attractive enough. Right now we are strongly considering just having it proc base-stat (strength, agility, etc.), haste, or crit depending on spec. We’ll be sure to let you know if we make this change.

Apparently they weren't kidding. Reports are that the new procs are agi, strength...and haste. Which is much better than arpen since chances are you're either soft-capped or close to being hard-capped.

Whereas haste just makes you more awesome. And there's no real danger of hitting the hard cap any time soon.

So if you were at all in doubt about whether or not you should get this trinket: you should get this trinket. It's going to be significantly better than anything else save what perhaps Arthas drops, all three stats are going to be a huge boost to DPS by themselves, and all three are very valued by druids. Point of fact, this might make a good argument for DBW going to ferals first; with this, even assuming best in slot trinkets DBW should be about a 200 DPS upgrade over the next best thing. Currently the stat value itself is worth around 300 DPS by itself; the proc is another 250. This will increase the DPS value of the proc by about 33%, making it close to a 650 DPS trinket - and that's the normal mode.

I know that rogues don't care about it nearly as much (they don't care about arpen as much); neither do enhancement shamen. I would imagine that it's going to be arms warriors and DKs, basically.

And you can bat your eyelashes and say how lovely it would be if you'd get it. :)

Also, this makes it the premiere threat trinket for bears. 600 haste is a lot of extra mauls.

[General] ThinkTank 2009 retrospective

2010-01-05T10:16:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year!

First, some tooting of my own horn. This year ThinkTank had, according to analytics, 594,000 visits over the year with 850,000 pageviews over that time.

Wow.

Average views per day were about 1500, with a peak of 2500 on April 24th - which was likely based on a post that got linked on wowinsider.

The most popular posts are things like the Icewell Radiance post, gear analysis for cats, and other loot lists. Not a big surprise, that; the first one is linked in my wow forums sig just so I don't have to explain over and over how druids aren't screwed by losing 20% dodge. :)

Pretty amazing to me that there are that many people reading this stuff. Thanks, guys - you really make this special, and you really make writing this worthwhile.

This year I changed guilds, changed my primary focus to DPS, changed jobs multiple times (stupid economy) and played on 4 different computers. I downed the hardest bosses in T7, T8 and T9 and earned two server first titles (though to be fair, our server is a bit ass). It was quite the tumultuous time. Thanks for reading through all that. :)

I wanted to quickly look back at some of the articles I wrote this year and revisit some, or at least point out some nice ones that I was particularly proud of.

10. How to: Sarth3D. While a lot of druids had done Sarth3D with big stam and external cooldowns, only a handful up to this point did it with resist gear - mostly because the resistance math was so unknown. Thanks to Shamgarr's really excellent work we were able to figure out the sweet spots and how to get there. I really like this one mostly because I know of at least 3 guilds who had trouble with this who switched to this strategy and knocked it out of the park. :) I expect this to be relevant for at least Sindragosa.

9. The antitank series. While this is almost entirely defunct (other than using it for heroic farming) between the awesome picture of Russian antitank dogs and the concept of just doing massive DPS while tanking, it was good times.

8. Toggling Maul. I really like this one just because it's so simple; how to toggle maul so that you can choose to use it all the time - or not. Hopefully this becomes not an issue in Cataclysm.

7. Sample values of stats for threat. This was simple, fairly easy to understand and got right to the point - and illustrated very quickly what was best for threat and also how badly bears scale with threat stats. I liked it because it was definitely a guiding point for a lot of people who weren't quite sure how best to go about getting threat.

6. The Future of Block. I like posts like this in general, and this one made me think the most of all the posts this year. It'll be interesting come Cataclysm to see how close I got.

5. Glyphs are the new Flask. I still think people don't do this enough, which is a shame. Glyphs are cheap enough to make (though usually not cheap to buy directly) that getting a guildie to make you a stack or two of glyphs and swap accordingly is almost always the right choice. I typically toggle maul glyphs or growl glyphs (ohai, Saurfang).

4. Savage Defense analysis. There still aren't a lot of math models around SD, and this was one of the first - and it turned out to be largely correct. Another one that dismissed a lot of bad math and conceptions that people had on forums. It's still not perfectly accurate but it's on a reasonable order, and showcases both how good armor is and how decent SD is.

3. Icewell Radiance. Another hugely popular post, I'm happy with this because it seems to basically end arguments about it. People reference it regularly to defuse bad thoughts about bears. It's useful, informative, and the math isn't so complex that it throws people.

2. Nerfing Stamina the right way. This was another post that started from the wow forums and continued here, and I liked both the reasonable math associated with it, the other commenters providing information, and the actual conclusion I got (which was oddly one of the most popular posts I ever wrote)

And my favortest post of all:

1. Phat Lewts. Nothing could remotely top this, and I thank all of you for the well wishes and feelings. He's just over 9 months old now, is very healthy, happy, and I love him. He's the best thing I've ever helped make.

[Druid] Some highlights of plague wing gear (like a boss)

2010-01-04T12:13:00.000-08:00

While I don't think I'll be doing a full Like a Boss type of gear readout, I figured I'd point out some of the gear that is going to be open to everyone tomorrow.

The big one that will interest all druids (and pesky hunters) is Distant Land, which is the best non-heroic weapon for cats and the second best weapon for bears. That drops from Festergut in 25-man, and is the first weapon available from ICC. In 10-man Rotface drops a similarly decent weapon - Shaft of Glacial Ice. This isn't as good as the heroic Twin's Pact, but it's better than virtually anything else and has a nice amount of hit on it.

But those are just the tastiest bits. There's a lot to offer in this wing.

Rotface:

Aldriana's Gloves of Secrecy - Rotface 25 (#4 bear, #5 cat) - note that these are the recommended offset piece for cats, so definitely take a look out for them if you're not planning on getting T10 gloves.

Bile-Encrusted Medallion - Rotface 25 (#2 bear) - the only thing that beats this is the heroic version.

Seal of Many Mouths - Rotface 25 (#12 bear, #7 cat) a decent ring that has expertise on it. Nice for cats to meat their exp cap with T10 legs.

Shaft of Glacial Ice - Rotface 10 (#12 bear, #17 cat) - there are better, but it is likely an upgrade if you don't have Twin's Pact.

Festergut:

Plague-Soaked Leather Leggings - Festergut 10 (#11bear, #14 cat) - a good sidegrade but nothing special

Precious's Putrid Collar - Festergut 10 (# 11 cat) - it does have hit rating on it, which might be nice.

Distant Land - Festergut 25 (#6 bear, #6 cat) - best weapon you can get right now, and best weapon for a while until heroics for cat

Gangrenous Leggings - Festergut 25 (#6 bear, #5 cat) - a surprisingly decent piece, but chances are the rogues are going to want this and not want to upgrade it; you want this until you can get your T10. So pass to them unless you're greedy or there aren't rogues.

Professor Putricide:

2x vanquisher mark of sanctification - Putricide 25. Being able to get 4 of these a week is going to help a lot and make it a bit easier to get the higher 4 piece. By the time the 3rd wing opens chances are good that you'll have at least one of these and hopefully two.

Astrylian's Sutured Cinch - Putricide 25 (#4 bear, #3 cat) Much better for cats than bears here; the ToGC 25 drop is better for bears. But it's still very close, and you definitely want a piece of gear named after the creator of Rawr.

Tiny Abomination in a Jar - Putricide 25 (??? cat) - this is likely much better on a ret pally or 2h DK or warrior, but it might be good on a cat. No one knows a lot about how it works yet.

Discarded Bag of Entrails - Putricide 10 (#12 bear, #8 cat) - surprisingly good for cats, the low stamina hurts it for bears. Might be worth it for a cat if you don't have a T9 piece there or aren't planning on upgrading any time soon.

Unidentified Organ - Putricide 10 (#2ish, bear) - while I don't like the stacking stam buff, the fact is that that's almost gravy; the 2000 armor is worth it for this trinket alone, and adding 270 stamina on stationary fights without phases is very strong. Sadly the number of fights in Icecrown that this works on appears to be kind of small; Festergut looks like it requires tank swapping, Saurfang definitely does, Gunship does, Marrowgar has big spots where it won't work, Deathwhisper does, Sindragosa and Valithiria do...about the only one that doesn't that we know about is Lana'thel, and she doesn't hit that hard. Still, a very good trinket.