[Druid]Pandarian Talents, cat bugs, and legendaries

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:

1. 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!
2. 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%?
3. 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!
4. 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.

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

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

hit: 398

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.

[Bear]Oh, the joys of savage defense continued

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.

[Bear] The flood of bear gear in 4.1

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.

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

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:

1. Fluid Death has high agility and a reforgeable hit to mastery. Good stuff.
2. Essence of the Cyclone has the raw agility but the proc is almost completely useless for bears.
3. 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.
4. 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!)
5. 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.
6. Prestor's Talisman also has high agility but has a meh proc for bears.
7. DM: Hurricane is similar but even more useless to bears.

Max survivability:

1. Fluid Death has high agility and a reforgeable hit to mastery. It's likely the best hybrid trinket.
2. 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!)
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. Prestor's Talisman also has high agility but has a meh proc for bears.
8. Bedrock Talisman is good for survival but completely useless for DPS.
9. Essence of the Cyclone has the raw agility but the proc is almost completely useless for bears.
10. 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.
11. 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.

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

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.

[General]Site update, general thoughts

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...

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

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

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

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

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

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.