[Druid] The Polar gear

The T7 guide for gear will be out either later today or tomorrow, and should be a fully integrated guide with the other one so you won't have to swap back and forth. Which...is why it's taking a bit longer. :)

This is an addendum to that guide and the other ones I've written. And that addendum is: the polar gear ( Polar Boots, Polar Cord and Polar Vest) are not as good as the guides say.

And yes, they have a TON of stamina.

If you go by Rawr right now, these are either best in slot or damn close to it - especially for pre-naxx gear levels. And Rawr encourages you to put as much stamina in there as you humanly can. With those three items alone, you can have 595 stamina (assuming 24 stam gems). And that sounds awesome, right? Except it has no avoidance, no AP, no crit, no expertise, nothing. Same with my rating system - polar gear comes either on top or close to it.

But that's not quite right.

Now, at level 213 the Polar gear is definitely good starting material. There really aren't that many good chests that you can get pre-Naxx, and you can very easily make it a good basic chest - with 169 stam and 48 agility, for instance, it's pretty sweet. But it really isn't the best overall thing you could get (which is what my rating system would say) or close to the best (what Rawr says). Let's compare the Polar Vest to something similar (and not horribly hard to get): the T7.10 chest. The Naxx (and emblem) chest loses a socket and 80 stamina, straight out of the gate. Sure, it has potentially 56 more agility, but 56 more agility to 80 stam?

Yeah, that's actually a pretty good trade.

Why? Because you really don't need a trillion stam to tank in Naxx. There are two fights where stacking as much stam as humanly possible makes sense: Malygos's breath (where you can take 30k damage before reductions) and Sartharion + 3 adds (where you can take 35k-39k depending on whether or not you're debuffed in a certain way).

And that's it. And if you're raidbuffed, you can get that easily, in your sleep, if you have proper gear. Heck, that's just the agility; you'd also be giving up 132 AP, 54 crit and 35 expertise.

What about the Polar Boots? Well, compared to the Slag Footguards, you're losing 30 agility for 70 stam. That sounds like a bad tradeoff, save that stam doesn't matter so much and you'll be gaining some threat. For the belt it's worse - only a 51 stamina vs 30 agility difference and you'll lose about 130 AP and 30 expertise (assuming you're going after the Sharp-Barbed Leather belt, the best belt pre-or post-naxx save PvP gear).

Like I said - all of these things are viable. They're just not 'best', and don't let that huge stamina and people in LFG fool you - having a 40k health pool when you have 25% avoidance is a recipe for a really unsatisfying PUG.

[Druid] Emblem of Heroism badge gear for cat & bear

Mitch brought up an interesting point in the comments of one of the guides - why no emblem gear? At the time I did the lists I wanted to do it to get gear as quickly as possible for people, and I figured most folks wouldn't be grinding heroics to get gear they'd be replacing in Naxx-25...but would they?

The answer is definitely yes. Especially since you can get T7.10 items from badges. It was an omission from the earlier guide and I apologize. I've updated the guides to have this information and their ranking as well, but felt like y'all deserved another post that specifically highlights these things.

I'll also be listing the Emblem of Valor rewards and how they compare against other Naxx and pre-Naxx gear levels, but that's a post for another day.

Emblems of Heroism rewards:

Heroes' Dreamwalker Rainments - Bear score: 82.35 (ranks a slight #2 on list). Cat score 37.33. (ranks #1, #2 is 35.77 on list)
- this is only behind the PvP arena gear for bears, so it's definitely valuable to get. And it is about 16 points higher than the next available PvE piece from WotLK. That makes it a very good upgrade and probably the best choice to get first. For cats, it is the best DPS chest before Naxx, though it's not that big of an upgrade over some heroic rewards. I'd probably skip it for a while.

Heroes' Dreamwalker Handgrips - Bear score 52.16. (ranks #3 on list) Cat score 25.24. (ranks #3 on list)
- the hands are very disappointing; the best bear hands still come from a CoT Strat quest, and the cat hands are better in heroics. Upgrade this if you really want the set bonus for some reason, but otherwise wait.

Jorach's Crocolisk Skin Belt - Bear score: 49.23. (rank #4 on list). Cat score 28.18 (rank #1 on list; #2 is 24.71.)
-The crocolisk skin belt gets a bit more highly ranked by Rawr due to the ability to put even more stamina on the belt along with expertise, but my ranking favors agility a bit more. I would recommend buying the trollwoven belt instead if possible. For cats, it's a very big upgrade and likely worth spending the badges if you have them.

Chained Military Gorget - Bear score: 32.95. (#2 on the list) Cat score 9.66 (rank #8 on list)
-this is a very good avoidance neck but still not as good as Titanium Earthguard Chain is. Still, TEC is going to be expensive. I would probably avoid spending the badges on this though, as Amulet of Wills even post armor changes will be very close to this value, and should be easier to get.

Pendant of the Outcast Hero -Bear score: 26.91. (#4 on the list) Cat score 18.13 (rank #1 on list; #2 is 15.40)
- Clearly a cat neck, and (thanks to poster Mitch) the best cat neck pre-naxx that you can get. At only 25 badges this is pretty cheap too. For cats this is the biggest value upgrade, possibly second only to the trinket depending on what you have.

Valor Medal of the First War - Bear score: 14.53. Cat score 0.
-Post armor change, this is going to be a very solid trinket choice for a lot of ferals, especially on fights where avoidance is desired. I would honestly prefer Darkmoon Card:Greatness and Essence of Gossamer as my two trinkets, but this certainly is good for various fights. A bit more expensive though.

Mirror of Truth - Bear score: 0. Cat Score: 11.04
- A really stellar cat trinket, especially given how well cats scale with AP and crit.

Idol of the Ravenous Beast - Bear score: 0. Cat score: ?
- I mentioned this in the original post. It should be a strong but not best DPS idol, especially if you are not using 2pT6 and are doing a primarily shred-based cycle. This will likely end up being the top DPS idol until more armored bosses are faced.

[Druid] FAP FAP FAP FAP FAP

This is going to get so many of the wrong redirects.

Okay, GC also announced that Feral Attack Power is going away, and instead of FAP we're going to calculate the AP gain based on the DPS of the weapon:

FERAL ATTACK POWER
We are no longer going to have weapons in the game which improve feral attack power. Instead, your attack power will scale based on the dps of the item. Practically speaking this means almost no change for any gear you currently use -- you should not see your dps change. What it does mean is that we can create the occasional dps staff that could be used by druids or hunters (or very undergeared warriors), and that Ferals may occasionaly use two-handed dps maces. We are going to convert all existing Feral staves over to this new system (but again, you should not notice any change to your dps). We are also adjusting the UI so that when druids look at these weapons, you will see what the improvement will be to your damage in forms. This does not mean we are no longer going to create bear and cat weapons, just that those weapons will be slightly less niche than they are now.

This is a huge nerf, and I have the ...

Wait a second, this isn't a nerf at all. This is actually pretty awesome. But the more important question is - what does this mean to you? What gear might change? What should you go ninjaloot?

For starters, this beauty becomes one of the best feral weapons in the game:
Inevitable Defeat. Stam, agility, strength, and a ton of expertise - combined with a great DPS value. It doesn't have as much stamina as Origin of Nightmares and not as much agi as The Undeath Carrier, but the expertise is stellar for tanking and it would make an excellent threat weapon for bears. Another nice benefit is that something like Titansteel Destroyer becomes a good weapon too, though probably not as good due to the lack of agility. Still, if you're rich and need a starting weapon, that's not the worst thing you could do. Want something a bit lower end? Well, the Mojo-Masked crusher is a pretty nice drop and should have high DPS. A bit easier to get, the Argent Skeleton Crusher should be decent too, though again the lack of agi makes this subpar.

Based on comments from Jelement and Mitch, here are the values of what the DPS should be for the feral staves. The conversion is simple: the DPS of a staff will be FAP/14 + 55.

Journey's End: 223.1 DPS
Staff of the Plaguehound: 203.9 DPS
Origin of Nightmares: 203.9 DPS
The Undeath Carrier: 203.9 DPS
Staff of the Plague Beast: 186.8 DPS
Staff of Trickery: 186.8 DPS
Enraged Feral Staff: 169.4 DPS
Lightning Giant Staff: 169.4 DPS
Stave of Shrouded Mysteries: 169.4 DPS
Hewn Sparring Quarterstaff: 156.3 DPS
Witch Doctor's Wildstaff: 148.9 DPS
Staff of the Sorrowful Chieftain : 145.5 DPS
Bloodwood Greatstaff: 132.9 DPS
Jailer's Baton: 145.5 DPS
Stanchion of Primal Instinct: 140.5 DPS
Staff of the Forest Lord: 134.3 DPS
Pillar of Ferocity: 130.6 DPS
Wildfury Greatstaff: 125.9 DPS
Earthwarden: 105.9 DPS

Mostly what makes me excited about this is that they can start designing weapons that are built for actual tanking. Why? Because both death knights and druids can use 2h maces, and both want to have tanking stats on those items. It'll be possible to get craftable weapons that don't suck as well, which will be nice, but the shared pool and what could be allowed there is really what thrills me.

[Druid] Now that's an armor nerf

The bear armor change has been announced. Here's the relevant text:

This is an update to my previous post on Feral armor changes.

ARMOR
As previously announced, we are changing the way bear armor works so that bonus armor on items does not receive the bear armor multiplier. Specifically this means that weapons, trinkets, rings, necks and cloaks with bonus armor will not be multiplied by the bear bonus. Only cloth and leather will benefit from the Bear and Dire Bear multiplier.
We are compensating Ferals for this armor loss by improving the Survival of the Fittest talent. In addition to its current effects (stats and crit prevention), it will now also increase armor contribution from cloth and leather items by 22/33/66%. That should be very close to your current armor bonus. This makes Survival of the Fittest rather over-budget by talent standards, but we figured it was one talent we can be pretty certain most tank-oriented druids will have (and to be honest nearly all Ferals).

These changes will be in place in the next patch. This patch will ship sometime before the 3.1 major content patch featuring the Ulduar raid.

With respect to the esteemed bloggers Karthis and BBB, the recent announced change to armor and how it works is a huge nerf.

It is bad.

It is not good.

I did the math before this and showed that, but this time other folks jumped in and did the math for me. On the main forums, we have this nice bit of math:

pre nerf

armor from leather: 3326
other armor: 3980
total armor: 7306
bear armor: 37772
mitigation %: 69.42


after this nerf takes effect we will see the following, with no gear being changed out.

armor from leather: 3326
bear armor: 28544
other armor: 3266
total armor: 31810
mitigation %: 58.46

That can't be right, can it? Yes, yes it can:

Surprise, surprise Blizzard botched it

Tier Set (10 man) : 2294 + 952 (item level 200 bracers, belt, waiste) = 3246
Tier Set (25 man) : 2350 + 978 (item level 213 bracers, belt, waiste) = 3326

Stuff getting lost :
Cloak of the Shadowed Sun http://www.wowhead.com/?item=40252 490
Defender's Code http://www.wowhead.com/?item=40257 850
Offering of Sacrifice http://www.wowhead.com/?item=37638 550
Amulet of Autopsy http://www.wowhead.com/?item=39246 350
Keystone Great-Ring http://www.wowhead.com/?item=37784 490
Gatekeeper http://www.wowhead.com/?item=40370 448
Origin of Nightmares http://www.wowhead.com/?item=40280 714

Total: 3892

Old multiplier : 5.17 = 37.3K

New Multiplier 8.58 tier + 1.1 other = 28.5K + 4.3K = 32.8K

Enjoy the nerf and broken scaling mechanics. The correct number for it not to be a nerf was .91 if anyone cares.

I mentioned what the 'right' number was going to have to be in order to make this not a nerf, and how hard it would be to balance early tanking if that number was used. However, if it was NOT used, bears suddenly have a huge gulf of mitigation relative to other tanks. And that's what we're seeing now.

Essentially what we're seeing is that druids lost the ability to wear two armor trinkets at all. Or if you like, they took out the usefulness of Defender's Code. Here's the thing though - druids were balanced around trinkets like that. This change was supposedly specifically made so that druids wouldn't have to go to extreme efforts to get something like it or Offering of Sacrifice, but with this change it is essentially like not having armor trinkets at all.

Which leads to druids at the higher end of the scale having significantly less mitigation than every other tanking class. Yes, DKs will actually have more mitigation.

As I've mentioned elsewhere, the way to fix this was to do exactly what they did in some form and give some other scaling mechanism back. When they removed bonus armor from leather before, we got Protector of the Pack. With this...there's nothing. I argued before that some kind of nerf was necessary so that druids didn't hit the armor cap too early, and I still believe it - but they also needed to change something in druid mechanics to compensate.

We didn't get that change.

So...basically we're looking at being the tank with about the same mitigation as a warrior from armor, less avoidance, less ohshit buttons, and no block mechanic to increase mitigation.

Charming.

[Death Knight] Why dual wielding sucks for tanking

Wait, what? A death knight post? Seriously?

This blog actually started with my wanting to expand arguments I had made several places - most notably at EJ. Seems appropriate that a post I make there spawns my first post on DK tanking here.

Caveat: I don't know anything about DKs, really, other than they're the tank that looks like they belong in a rave when using their abilities. However, one thing I do know a lot about is parry mechanics. Here's the post I made over at EJ:

How we figure out whether a DK is better off using a 2h or 2 1-h comes down to a few things. These would be nice to have, data wise, but don't end up mattering hugely.

What is the typical expertise value of a DK?
What is their typical avoidance %?
What is their typical HP?

They don't matter because either the DK is dealing with content that is trivial (in which case min-maxxing tanking weapons is not important) or the DK is dealing with content that is not (in which case their avoidance, expertise and HP are on the cusp of what is needed to deal with a boss).

After that, we need to take typical tanking weapons into consideration. I would say that a 1.6 speed 1h would be typical (I realize there is a great, slow 1h in naxx, but that is not the standard), and a 3.0 speed 2h weapon would be typical.

The special hit rate between 2h and 1h will remain unmodified. That leaves only white attacks and weapon speed to consider.

With 2 1.6 weapons attacking, you will have 3.75 as many attacks in 3.0 seconds as you would a 2h weapon. This means you have 3.75 times as likely a chance of being parried. Clearly, as you get slower tanking weapons this value goes down. The question is whether the value of using two tanking weapons is worth getting parried almost 4 times as often.

Comparison time. Let's take [Titansteel Destroyer] vs two [Red Sword of Courage].
124 str
105 stam
54 hit
vs
50 str
116 stam
76 defense
52 hit

The gain of 76 defense rating (15.4 defense, or 1.83% total avoidance) is great, but the loss of 74 strength is pretty poor. Still, that's only 18.5 parry rating, or a bit less than .4% parry. So the total avoidance gain is around 1.5%. So to deal with being parried 3.75 times more often in terms of white attacks, you are gaining 1.5% avoidance and about 12 stamina.

To me, this doesn't sound remotely good enough. And note that using the comparison above, it's actually worse; you get parried 4.25 times more often from white attacks.

Finally, note that the overall parries is not 3.75 times as many times due to the special attacks also having parry chances. In a 200 second fight, you would have 133 special attacks (assuming one every gcd, which I admit is fudging things), 67 attacks with a 2h, and 250 attacks with 2 1h. Or 183 more attacks total. That is 1.9 times more than with a 2h alone. So basically you're trading at best 2% avoidance for a doubling of the chance to be parried.

Really, not worth it to me.

Now, what I didn't say at EJ: the effects of a boss parrying you are hard to model, but fairly easy to understand.

When a parry occurs, the target that parried the attack has a chance of having the current swing hasted, as follows:
* If the next attack would normally occur within 20% of your weapon speed after the parry, there is no effect.
* If the next attack would normally occur between 20% and 60% of your weapon speed later, it happens 20% of your weapon speed later instead.
* If the next attack would normally occur more than 60% of your weapon speed later, the time until your next attack is reduced by 40% of your weapon speed.

The overall effect of a parried attack is to speed up a boss's swing timer by roughly 30%. In the worst case it is 40%, but that doesn't happen all the time. ) This means that for using 2 1-handed weapons, you are giving the boss 30% more haste. You have effectively bloodlusted the boss after each parry. 30% more normal swings may not be a lot for someone like Rage Winterchill, but for Patchwerk? And remember, this is not 30% more swings over a nice, long extended time; this is 30% overall more damage that comes in tasty, bursty chunks of death that tends to take your healers off-guard.

Note that I'm not saying doubling the parries makes the boss have bloodlust the entire fight; it depends a lot on how much expertise you have, and I've written about this and parry-gibbing prior to this.

Now, if you're expertise-capped for parry that's something else entirely. Then you'll be trading basically some damage for some avoidance, and that's a great thing to trade. But getting to that 64 expertise value (or 500 expertise rating) is going to be pretty tough, and I bet that you could have just gemmed/enchanted for avoidance and skipped the expertise part anyway.

ETA: one thing I did not factor into consideration is the ability to use two enchants. Having dual goose would help somewhat with the mitigation factor, but even then we're talking about at best 3% total avoidance vs. 30% boss haste. That still doesn't sound like a good deal to me.

[Offtopic] Wrath leatherworking 375-440

This was originally written for my guildies and is a rough guide to 425.

So Leatherworking in Northrend...ugh. I've not found a good guide to powerleveling yet, so I decided to try a hand at one.

ETA: The important thing that I got wrong from wowhead is that heavy borean leather is not actually trainable until 390. What I did to level was the following:
375-380: 6x Borean armor kit (turns green at 380)
380-385: 5x Iceborne Gloves
385-390: 5x Nerubian Legguards (only did this to have some variety)

From 390-405 I made heavy borean and fur linings.

From 405-410 make Arctic Wristguards, which are 12 normal leather each and go green at 410.
From 410-415 make Jormungar Leg Armor, which are 5 heavy borean and a jormungar scale each. And hopefully they'll sell decently. Also around this time get some arctic fur and make your fur linings, since that should ding you. If you have legs that are worth a damn you can get a couple of jormungar scales or nerubian chitin and make your cheap leg reinforcements too.

From 415-422 make pack of endless pockets, a 32-slot inscription bag. This takes 8 heavy borean. This is the only one that's trainable directly; the other nice bags (mining, leatherworking, and the quivers) require rep. If you have the rep, I'd recommend doing the leatherworking bag instead, as it requires kal'uak revered which you might have that early.

From 422 on it gets really sketchy.

From 422-430 (you can stop at 425 and do the next one if you want better chances, but it may be more expensive) do eviscerator's bindings or stormhide wristguards, depending on whether eternal air or water is cheaper/easier for you. They take 8 heavy borean + an eternal air or water. At 425 I'd also recommend pimping out yourself and looking for work so that you can get skillups on frosthide leg armor and icescale leg armor with their mats. These take two arctic furs and either two nerubian chitin or two icy dragonscales. If you're lucky or persistent, that can take you from 425-440 by itself. If you're unlucky or impatient, you'll need to make things like the eviscerator treads and eviscerator waistguard to 435. These should sell well at least, since there will be lots of people who want a starter pvp set. They take 10 heavy borean + an eternal air/water each.

At 435-440, about your only reasonable option is to make more leg armor patches. You can make more eviscerator gear, but it goes green at 435 and gray at 440, so you're looking at making a LOT of those.

And then you're done doing it for practical reasons. 440 is the max leatherworking you need for any recipe. Leg armor goes green at 440 and gray at 445, so past 445 the only things you can make are items that require frozen orbs.

Anyway, that's what I'm looking at doing. If you can get to 440 using just their mats, you're basically looking at the following mat requirements to get to 425:

838 borean leather (of which, 80 will be used to make actual items)
8 jormungar scales
3 eternal waters/eternal airs
+ an arctic fur for your wrists and scales/chitin for your legs, if you so choose.

If you're going from 425-435 using your own mats, you will also need:
130 heavy borean leather (or 780 borean leather) + 13 eternal airs/water as desired.

If you're going from 435-440 using your own mats, you will also need:
14 arctic furs + 14 nerubian chitin or icy dragonscale as desired.

[Paladin] what would you like to see?

My wife recently noted that despite this blog being about, well, ya know, tanking, there are more posts about cats than there are non-druid tanks.

And "ThinkCat" doesn't really have a good ring to it.

Looking into this, I found out that one of the most popular articles I've wrote happens to be the post on a paladin getting uncrittable. So I'm neglecting a fair amount of people who read this and want info on plate tank wearers. Sorry, guys.

In the future I'll be writing more about Death Knight tanking, I'm sure. Death Knights look to me like the odd bastard child of a paladin and a druid; they have the ability to do good dps and good tanking with one build while sacrificing very little (and in every single talent tree, no less), they can do good AoE tanking, and they have to do weird juggling with their gear including wanting armor aplenty. Plus they're damn cool. I'm not making a death knight my main right now; I don't have the time to get a DK to raiding-level in time for Wrath. But I'll be making one and hopefully using it as a nice alt in the near future.

For now, though, I'm at a loss. I was thinking about doing a gear guide similar to the bear and cat posts I made for Pre-naxx...but this has already been done. At Maintankadin, Zamach has put out a great list of pre and post-naxx gear. One thing it doesn't do is compare BC with WotLK gear, but fortunately honorshammer has done that as well, in an easy to use spreadsheet. There's no need to do a FAQ for paladins, as that's what mine was modeled after. While paladin mechanics were tweaked early on, and they're still getting nerfed thanks to ret fallout, in general they've been very stable and solid - so no 'OMG the sky is falling' posts similar to druids. And unlike druids, their gear is basically the same as a warrior in terms of what they want so their gear is pretty solid too. Their rotation hasn't changed since early beta, and the 969 rotation is still the best. There are plenty of arguments on how poor paladin mitigation is relative to warriors and druids - and that may see some value - but right now they're very close to warriors and have significant enough advantages that I don't believe it'll be an issue. The biggest issue right now is the amount of damage a paladin does relative to a warrior, but that's still a bit silly; it doesn't matter how much threat you do so long as you're doing enough, and right now it's definitely enough. There's even cool addons that show things like AD avoidances and values of your gear as a paladin.

In short, the paladin basic stuff is well covered. Whereas the druid stuff...hasn't been.

So I ask you guys - what paladin or warrior or DK information would you like to see? Or heck, what druid information would you like to see?