Best. Comment. Ever.

One of my non-WoW playing friends is a pretty good web designer. I asked him some questions before I started this blog about design tips and such (almost none of which I ended up using--because I'm lazy, not because they weren't good).

Earlier today he asked me whether or not I ever did end up starting a blog. I sent him here. This is what he had to say:

reading this is like reading lorem ipsum text
all the words are correct.....
but i get the feeling that if i rearrange them, then they might make sense

IMMD.

Bear Tanking Rotation

Update: This post was made for Wrath content. To see an updated post for Cataclysm Bear rotations, click here.

As I alluded to a couple weeks ago, Bears have the easiest tanking rotation of all the tank classes. I don't know this for a fact...I've never gotten a Warrior or a Paladin past 20 and I've never even considered attempting to tank on my DK (he's mostly a change-of-pace character). But from reading around the WoWsphere and talking to people who play those classes at high levels, I feel fairly certain that I have an easier time of it than they do.

That said, there's another side to the coin. Bears don't have a lot of room for error. If we're not performing our fairly simple rotation correctly, we just can't keep up.

Bear tanking mainly revolves around four abilities:
Maul
Mangle
Lacerate
Swipe

To a lesser extent, Faerie Fire.

This is speaking strictly from a threat generation perspective. In this post I'm not going to worry about things like Demoralizing Roar, Frenzied Regeneration, etc. Just threat.

To start off, I'm going to post two Recount screen shots. These were from the exact same fight (the Patchwerk weekly raid a couple weeks ago). The two tanks were me and another Druid in our guild, who we'll call Eve for sake of argument. It's a good fight to get a tanking comparison because we're both on the same target, stationary, whacking away at it the whole fight.

Before I go further I want to make something very clear. I am not picking on Eve. She's an alt who's used to healing (Priest) which, in my experience, couldn't be more different from tanking. I also made sure she was okay with me using these screenshots in my blog before I made this post.

Eve's recount:


My recount:


Now, what's important here is the percentages, not the actual damage numbers. Threat is in the numbers and it will come with gear, but a good tanking rotation is all in the percentages. In fact, if you look closely at the raw numbers, most of her abilities out-damaged mine on a hit-for-hit comparison. But I out damaged her 325K to 195K on the overall fight, which means I put up a ton more threat.

The biggest difference that you can see right away is the huge chunk of my damage (almost 60%) that came from Maul. The vast majority of a Bear's threat and damage come from this ability!

Maul replaces your normal melee attack with a much more powerful one. Notice the difference in Maul-to-Melee ratio between me (66-1) and Eve (3-62). What's more, it's off the global cooldown (because it's not an ability that's executed the moment you cast it) so you can just spam this while you're working through your normal rotation.

I think I said it in a previous post, but with the exception of Growl and Maul, I'm a clicker. I use my mouse to go through my rotation. However, I have Maul in the 4 spot so that I can easily reach it from the WASD movement keys.


(Growl is a quick reach with my middle finger, by comparison.)

During any fight no matter what else I'm doing (except strafing to the right) I'm just pounding my 4-key into dust. I never have to worry about watching when it's ready or not. I just know that as long as I have the Rage available, my next melee swing will always be replaced by a Maul.

The rest of the tanking rotation after that is cake. Your priorities are Mangle, Lacerate (up to 5 stacks), and Swipe. Any time Mangle is off of cooldown you should be hitting it, as it's our second-highest threat ability. So assuming you pulled with a Faerie Fire (which you should be on bosses in order to immediately put up the debuff and some initial threat) you'll want to Mangle as soon as you're in melee range.

Next, start stacking Lacerate. You'll end up with 2 or 3 stacks (depending on how many points you've spent in Improved Mangle) before Mangle is off cooldown and you can hit again. Keep alternating between Mangle stacking Lacerate until you're up to a full 5 stacks.

At this point I start throwing Swipes because they do more damage than Lacerate. My general rotation is 2 Swipes, Mangle, Lacerate (to refresh stacks). In my spec Mangle is available after 3 global cooldowns, so this works perfectly for timing.

Note that Lacerate still does more threat than Swipe, even though it's lower damage. So if you really need the threat help (on a single target), drop the Swipes out of your rotation and fill them with Lacerates and Faerie Fires. It's also good to throw a Faerie Fire if you find yourself rage-starved. It'll fill a GCD and give you some extra threat. Plus it'll make sure the debuff stays applied through the duration of longer fights.

And that's pretty much it. Our standard rotation.

Pretty simple, eh?

ICC Time Woes

So the Crimson Halls have been open for a little over a week now. And the Frostwing Halls is set to open on Tuesday. That'll be the full deal. All of ICC.

So where do I stand in completion? Deathbringer Saurfang.

I've seen the inside of the Plagueworks once, and Rotface stomped us all night long. We had one reasonably good attempt (~30%), one fair attempt (~50%), and mostly miserable attempts the rest of the time. It was to the point where I didn't even know where to begin suggesting improvements because it felt like nothing was going right for us (which, as a raid leader, is the most frustrating thing in the world). Plus I was the Rotface tank, which means my job consisted of "stand there and tank." So I didn't even feel there was anything specific I could to do help out in my role.

So what's the primary reason for this? Time, really. Right now our guild has 4 scheduled raid nights. Tuesday and Sunday are the weekly raid for however many people we get signed up and want to go. More often than not we end up running a 25 and a 10 there. Friday and Saturday are our scheduled guild 25-man runs. That leaves 3 (4, tops, if you count Tue and Sun as half-nights) nights where we can make attempts at ICC. Most Mondays are out for me because I play hockey that night. Every other Tuesday is out because those are guys'-night-outs.

Because of the geographic spread of our core raiding members (Nova Scotia to Cali) and their own personal obligations, an average raid night for us lasts from 8-11 server time, if we get grouped and started right away. We often lose anywhere from 30-60 minutes in that area.

We've still cleared the Lower Spire almost every week. We've got that down to about a 90-minute run. Hell, we can even do it on alts, as we found out. But then because of schedules or raid member availability, we haven't even been able to get a second night in after that since the first week of the Plagueworks. Not even attempts.

I don't mind being in a spot where I have to continually work to down a specific boss. I don't expect to get every boss I try down in the first night. But I do mind that I'm not even getting the chance to try.

Could we extend the raid ID? Sure. But we're still not sharding things from the Lower Spire. Plus that's a guaranteed 8 Emblems of Frost that I hate to pass up. So it seems inappropriate to just save our progress past that content. But at the same time, it's starting to look like the only way we're going to continue to get real chances.

Oh, the trials of a casual raiding guild...

Feral Cat Raiding Spec

EDIT: This post is now updated to reflect changes in patch 3.3.3!

The following is my raid talent build for Cat. "Raid" being the key word here. In this build I pass over abilities that are nice during solo or PvP play and focus strictly on what's useful for raiding. This is also not meant to be a hybrid build of any kind. It's optimized strictly for raiding as a Cat. (I'll post up a hypothetical hybrid build at some point.)

http://www.wowhead.com/talent#0ZvG0cfrz0eR0IuVkbAczb:pVmmz

I'll try and explain why I picked the talents I did. In the Feral tree I'll also explain why I passed on the talents that got no points.

Balance - 0 points
There's just nothing in there that's useful for cats. Maybe if Genesis affected our bleeds...but, alas, no.

Restoration - 16 points
Furor - 3/5
As of 3.0, Cat Energy regenerates at the normal rate regardless of what form the Druid is in. For each point in Furor, we will have up to 20 of that Energy ready to use the moment we shift into Cat form. All 5 points would equal 100 (full) energy. But in PvE there's not a whole lot of shifting going on, especially in a build optimized for one role/form. It helps when resuming DPS after having tossed out an Innervate or a Battle Res, but if there was somewhere else to (reasonably) put points to get down to the next tier, I'd spend even less here.

Improved Mark of the Wild - 2/2
The other 2 points to get past the first tier of the Resto tree. Easy buff to our buff and a stat increase to boot.

Naturalist - 5/5
Since all Cat damage is physical, this is a straight up 10% DPS increase. No brainer.

Natural Shapeshifter - 3/3
Really a useless PvE talent, but it's required for getting Master Shapeshifter (below).

Omen of Clarity - 1/1
Basically amounts to a free attack every time it procs. From the information I can find, this has about a 6% proc chance off your auto-attacks, or 3.5 procs per minute (on average). That's a significant DPS boost.

Master Shapeshifter - 2/2
With the bleed damage from Rip (and Rake, if you have have your 4-piece T10 bonus) now being able to crit, this is a pretty amazing talent.

Feral - 55 points
Ferocity - 5/5
Any talent that reduces the energy cost of any of your abilities should be picked up. For cats this affects Rake and Mangle, which will free up 10 Energy per attack rotation (on average). That's a full second of Energy regen!

Feral Aggression - 2/5 4/5
This is one of the iffy talents. It's a direct DPS increase, even if the increase is on an ability (Ferocious Bite) that doesn't make it into most rotations very frequently. If you're looking to max out your single-target DPS (i.e. bosses) you should put 5/5 here, though. I have 2 to get the needed points to hit the 4th tier. I've noticed (especially in 25 mans) that I end up using FB quite a bit anymore. I chose to move two of the points formerly in Improved Mangle up to here.

Feral Instinct - 3/3
Until cats got their own Swipe ability, this was a solo/PvP talent. Now it's much nicer. On most trash pulls you can open with two Swipes right from the start then hit Tiger's Fury and get two more plus (maybe) an OoC proc, dishing out a significant amount of damage. The Berserk + Swipe spam is also insanely fun, but will usually kill you. :-)

This is great for Heroics and large, weak trash packs like we used to see in Naxx (which is when I made this build). If I ended up going Cat more often in higher tier raids (ToC, ICC), then I'd probably move these points up to fill out Feral Aggression.

Savage Fury - 2/2
Again, a straight up DPS increase. Rake and Mangle will be seeing heavy use in your rotations.

Thick Hide - 0/3
You should never be taking sustained physical damage in a raid. 'Nuff said.

Feral Swiftness - 0/2
Again, nothing in a raid should be trying to hit you, so there should be no reason to need to dodge things.

Survival Instincts - 0/1
This is more of an emergency (tank) button than a raiding Cat necessity. If you ever need to hit this as a cat, it's probably too late anyway.

Sharpened Claws - 3/3
6% increased crit? Yes, please. Even if this talent wasn't necessary for two more very good ones, I'd be filling this out. Good Cat DPS is heavily reliant on crits.

Shredding Attacks - 2/2
Shred will (likely) be used more than any other single combat ability you have. Reducing its Energy cost by 18 is very important to keeping your DPS high.

Predatory Strikes - 3/3
Straight up DPS increase.

Primal Fury - 2/2
Free combo points on crits. Which you should have a lot of.

Primal Precision - 2/2
Once you start loading up on the iLvl 226+ gear you'd have to actively try to get below the finisher hit cap, but the energy return on misses is still very nice for the starting raider. Above and beyond that, though, the 10 Expertise this talent gives lowers the Expertise Rating you need to collect on gear/gems from 214 to 132 to make raid bosses unable to dodge your attacks. If your gear takes you far enough over that cap, you can shift one or both of these points elsewhere.

Brutal Impact - 0/2
You should never be Pouncing in a raid.

Feral Charge - 1/1
Not a key ability, but useful for getting into combat faster and for quicker switching between targets in multi-target fights. This roughly equates to more DPS.

Nurturing Instinct - 0/2
This is mostly a PvP talent, but if you find you're dying a lot to AoE or random-target damage, you can move some points here until you gear up a little better. It may hurt your DPS some, but a dead cat does no damage.

Natural Reaction - 0/3
This talent has no affect on cats.

Heart of the Wild - 5/5
10% AP increase.

Survival of the Fittest - 3/3
The only useful part of this for cats is the 6% increase to all stats. But that's still very, very useful.

Leader of the Pack - 1/1
Gives everyone near you a 5% bonus to crit. Including you.

Improved Leader of the Pack - 2/2
This is a utility talent that will not have any effect on your DPS, but if (like me) you're the only Feral in most of your raids, you should invest points here. If another Feral in your raids has this covered, feel free to move these points elsewhere.

Primal Tenacity - 0/3
This is primarily a PvP talent. Not really worth spending points in a raiding build.

Protector of the Pack - 0/3
The tooltip on this is somewhat ambiguous due to bad use of grammar, but PotP has no affect on cats. Both the AP bump and damage reduction apply only to bears.

Predatory Instincts - 3/3
+10% damage on all crits is the big deal here, but the reduced AoE damage helps the healers focus a lot less attention on you.

Infected Wounds - 2/3 3/3
Again, this is a utility talent that won't matter to your DPS numbers, but I have a really hard time not putting points here. At full 3/3, your target's attack speed is reduced by 20%, which means your tank is taking (roughly) 20% less damage while this debuff is active. That's just...wow. So helpful. At least one Feral in your raids should have points here. If another one has this covered, feel free to move these around. I used one point from Improved Mangle to top this talent off.

King of the Jungle - 3/3
This is Blizz's attempt to make Tiger's Fury not be a useless (actually, wasteful) ability like it was in TBC. They succeeded. 60 free energy every 30 seconds.

Mangle - 1/1
Absolutely required. No questions asked.

Improved Mangle - 3/3 0/3
As already stated, any talent that reduces the Energy cost of your attacks is a must have. When 3.3.3 came along and buffed the duration of the Mangle debuff to a full minute, this became a virtually useless talent. We just don't mangle very often anymore. It's still good if you PvP a lot, as you'll be Mangling far more often than you Shred. But of PvE, it's gone the way of the dodo.

Rend and Tear - 5/5
The 20% bonus to Shred attacks (the single most common attack you'll use) was nice before. The crit chance increase on Ferocious Bite was not too bad either. But now 5 points are required in this talent to unlock the MacDaddy of cat talens...

Primal Gore - 1/1
Rip already does a huge percentage of Cat damage in good rotations. With this...oh my. Watch your spot on the meters, rogues. (And if you can get the 4-piece T10 bonus, well...the thought makes me tingle.)

Berserk - 1/1
Your once-every-three-minutes omgdps ability. When your raid leader says "Blow your cooldowns," this is what you should be doing.

Optional Moves:
There are 12 points in this build that I consider "optional." Removing some will lower your DPS, though mostly situationally, others will have you lose a little bit of utility, but nothing that can't be overcome.
The 15 points are those spent in the following talents:
Feral Aggression (4/5) (if you rarely use FB)
Feral Instinct (3) (if you need less AoE abilities)
Primal Precision (2) (if you pass the Expertise caps with gear)
Feral Charge (1) (if you never use it)
Improved Leader of the Pack (2) (if another Feral in your raids has this)
Infected Wounds (3/3) (if another Feral in your raids has this)

The points then could be shifted around to some other areas:
Feral Aggression (1/5) (if you want higher single-target DPS)
Feral Swiftness (2) (mostly for running around during solo play, but good on high-movement boss fights, too)
Survival Instincts (1) (if you're having survivability issues and want an emergency button)
Nurturing Instinct (2) (if you're having survivability issues)

Pugging Sanity ProTip

With the advent of the LFD tool, a lot of tanks are tanking PuGs at an unprecedented rate (as opposed to safe guild-runs). The problem with these groups is that they're often filled with exceptionally well-geared DPS that you don't know and that are only interested in getting through the dungeons as quickly as possible.

What this often leads to is serious aggro issues that have you alternately questioning your skill/value as a tank and cursing the stupidity of dps who insist on opening up full throttle on the entire pack the moment you've pulled with Faerie Fire on one. (I would like to note here that I am one of those stupid DPS, both in Cat and when playing Enhancement on my Shaman. I blame the fact that I spend most of my time actively trying to be top threat.)

If your group is full of AoE classes, there's not much you can do about this. I would suggest throwing your Faerie Fire while in mid-Charge and then start Swiping and Mauling for all you're worth.

However, if you have some targeted DPS classes in your group, there's more you can do to help. As you're getting ready to pull the group of mobs, throw a mark (usually Skull) on the primary kill target. You don't have to mark the whole pack. Just that first target. Just mark, FF, Charge, and tank. Usually by the time it goes down you have enough threat on the rest of the group that DPS can do whatever they want. With the 3.3 change that allows anybody in a dungeon group (as opposed to just the leader) throw marks on targets, it's even easier. Even though most groups will throw lead to the tank, even if you don't get it you can still mark.

DPS should have a /assist <tank> macro, true. But most don't, and not all that do use it. Plus sometimes the tank will switch targets for whatever reason and they may not want you attacking their target right at that moment, so it's slightly unreliable. But most DPS--from the fresh first-time 80s right up to the prima donnas--will kill a single marked target before going on to do their own thing.

In the image in this post you can see one of the Addons I use called LuckyCharms2. (Yes, I know it's been updated...I pulled that out of a Naxx-era screenshot.) It allows you to put raid marks on your target without trying to navigate menus or filling your action bars with macros. If you don't have it, or something like it, I suggest you check it out. Even when chain pulling through Heroics, this addon gives me ample opportunity to mark a primary target while running from group to group.

Hell, even if you're in a group and you're not the tank, you can help out this way. If you see that the tank isn't tossing out marks, use your /assist macro (you have one, right?) as they're moving to the next group of mobs, mark that target, and then do whatever it is that you do best. Some tanks may ask you to stop, true. If they do, let them tank their way and deal with aggro however they want to. A lot of times, though, you'll find that they'll start respecting your marks, too. :-)

What I've learned while keeping up on blogs during vacation:

Blogger may have let me include the Wowhead JavaScript, but Wordpress's mobile site compatibility is amazing. I wonder if I can dual host... :-)

You know you play WoW too much when...

So I'm walking through the airport on the way to my flight's gate and I see a lady with a pug. My first thought was, "Hey, she's grouped with 100 random people."

My second thought was, "That sounds really bad out of context."

Posting from my iPhone on the tarmac. Hooray technology!