Expertise, Hit, and YOU! Part Two: Bear Druids
Hmm. Odd that Cat Form druids get to be kitties, but there is no charming diminutive for Bear druids. I suppose I could be all Alamo about it (Bare Durids!). Anyway, for the kitties, check out part one.
Someone stumbled across this site with the following search term: “druid tank minimum hit expertise.” I’m certain I didn’t have what they were looking for and I hope they found it. As I was pondering that implied questions, it seemed to me that should be a very simple thing to answer, but as I think further about it, I find it is not a straightforward answer at all. For both tanking and dps druids they provide benefits, but how much benefit?
Before I get into a discussion about those specifically, if you aren’t familiar with the attack table and how one-roll and two-roll systems work, WoW-Wiki has a good page on that. For a more in-depth look, check out the ElitistJerks Theorycrafting Think Tank page on Melee Combat Mechanics.
To properly determine the benefits, let’s first define them. Items that provide Hit Rating increase your chance to hit your target by reducing the miss chance on the attack table. At level 70 it requires 15.77 Hit Rating to reduce miss chance by 1%. Against a level 73 target (which raid bosses are) a normal attack, unmodified, by someone wielding only one weapon has a 9% chance to miss. 9 * 15.77 = 141.93 or 142 Hit Rating to eliminate the chance of your attacks to miss. (WoW-Wiki: Hit)
Expertise reduces the chance of your target to dodge or parry your attacks. It takes 3.9 Expertise Rating to increase your Expertise by 1 point, and each point reduces dodge/parry by .25% (or 4 Expertise per one percent). According to the EJ post, boss mobs have been parsed to have a 6% chance to dodge and a 12% chance to parry. To remove dodge from the attack table would require 24 Expertise (94 Expertise Rating) and removing Parries would require 48 Expertise (188 Expertise Rating). (WoW-Wiki: Expertise)
That’s what Hit and Expertise do, and how much benefit they provide is different for DPS and for tanking.
Bear Form
For tanking druids, the application of Hit and Expertise generally fall into the category of Threat stats. Warriors and Druids generate threat by attacking. Druid threat is largely generated by scaling threat modifiers on damage done, and warrior threat is largely a static amount based on abilities. Different strokes and all that. Paladins have a weird thing going on with a lot of their threat being generated by reactive abilities.
For druids, attacks need to land for threat to be generated. Hit, obviously, is useful for that because it can counter some of the 9% miss chance. Expertise counters the 6% Dodge and 12% parry chance. The block chance cannot be reduced.
It’s a lot harder to quantify threat scaling due to these effects than it is for DPS. As a general statement average optimal TPS (threat per second) will increase by 1% per increase of 1% of Hit chance. It can only be said that that is reflective of optimal performance only. In situations where there are adds or rage issues or any of that, hit may be more or less important.
In terms of threat generation, Expertise is twice as beneficial as Hit because it increases your chance to hit by 2% by reducing both dodges and parries. If you want to stack one to improve threat, Expertise is the way to go until you reach the 6% mark. From the 6% point onward, you have pushed dodges off the attack table and are only reducing parries, so it is equal to Hit as a means of increasing TPS.
The real benefit of expertise is that it is also a mitigation stat. Due to parry mechanics, when a boss parries a blow, its next attack may be sped up:
Parry & Attack Speed Reduction
When you parry an attack, it reduces the time of your next main hand attack. This applies to both players and NPCs, so when an NPC parries an attack its next attack may occur more quickly than normal. Depending on how much time is left until your next attack, one of three things will happen to your main hand swing timer:
- 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.
For example, with a 2.0 speed weapon, if your next attack would normally occur .3 seconds after the parry, it will still happen at that time. If it would normally occur anywhere between .4 and 1.2 seconds after the parry, it instead happens .4 seconds later. And if it were to normally happen 1.5 seconds after the parry, this would be reduced by .8 seconds causing it to happen .7 seconds later.
The benefit of this is high. If you reached the soft cap on Expertise and reduced parries by 6%, that would reduce the number of incoming attacks and the amount of incoming damage. How much is an amount that is hard to quantify because it is highly situational.
Should you stack Expertise?
Personal preference: I wouldn’t be stacking it on my normal tanking set. I fall onto the Effective Health side of the fence rather than Avoidance right now. When I start building a more avoidance-centric set, I probably will stack Expertise in it. Why? Because the greater avoidance would mean I’d be taking less steady damage, meaning rage generation would be less stable. Being able to hit more reliably will offset some of that, the attacks would hit and the damage from them would help generate rage. Also, a heavy avoidance kit would be sacrificing survival stats and reducing damage by reducing parry gibs would be a good thing.
General Context: If you find survivability is not an issue and can either add Expertise or replace some items to add it, you can increase your threat generation. The more threat you as the tank can generate, the wider you are opening the window for raid DPS to shoot through.
Further Information:
Wanderlei - On Avoidance
Effective Health Theory
Finding the Expertise Hard Cap
Expertise, Hit, and YOU! Part One: Kitty Druids
Someone stumbled across this site with the following search term: “druid tank minimum hit expertise.” I’m certain I didn’t have what they were looking for and I hope they found it. As I was pondering that implied questions, it seemed to me that should be a very simple thing to answer, but as I think further about it, I find it is not a straightforward answer at all. For both tanking and dps druids they provide benefits, but how much benefit?
Before I get into a discussion about those specifically, if you aren’t familiar with the attack table and how one-roll and two-roll systems work, WoW-Wiki has a good page on that. For a more in-depth look, check out the ElitistJerks Theorycrafting Think Tank page on Melee Combat Mechanics.
To properly determine the benefits, let’s first define them. Items that provide Hit Rating increase your chance to hit your target by reducing the miss chance on the attack table. At level 70 it requires 15.77 Hit Rating to reduce miss chance by 1%. Against a level 73 target (which raid bosses are) a normal attack, unmodified, by someone wielding only one weapon has a 9% chance to miss. 9 * 15.77 = 141.93 or 142 Hit Rating to eliminate the chance of your attacks to miss. (WoW-Wiki: Hit)
Expertise reduces the chance of your target to dodge or parry your attacks. It takes 3.9 Expertise Rating to increase your Expertise by 1 point, and each point reduces dodge/parry by .25% (or 4 Expertise per one percent). According to the EJ post, boss mobs have been parsed to have a 6% chance to dodge and a 12% chance to parry. To remove dodge from the attack table would require 24 Expertise (94 Expertise Rating) and removing Parries would require 48 Expertise (188 Expertise Rating). (WoW-Wiki: Expertise)
That’s what Hit and Expertise do, and how much benefit they provide is different for DPS and for tanking.
Cat Form
For Cat form DPS I’ll assume you’d be Shredding and Ripping in a standard DPS rotation. Shred has to be done from behind the target and when attacked from behind a boss cannot parry or block (though nothing can reduce blocks anyway) so we only have to concern ourselves with Misses and Dodges. With no Hit and no Expertise you would miss 9% of the attacks, 6% would be dodged, 25% would be glancing blows (which also we cannot reduce), the remainder would be regular hits and crits.
Here is where the math starts to get fuzzy: Hit, Expertise, and Crit are all scaling effects. Depending on your stats they will all have different inherent values. As a general rule, removing one percent of misses (via Hit Rating) increases the Hit portion of the attack table by 1%, as does removing 1% of dodges (via Expertise Rating). Increasing your crit chance by 1% replaces 1% of your Hit.
Basically, Hit takes 1% that does no damage and lets it do normal damage. Expertise replaces 1% of no damage and makes it do normal damage. Crit replaces 1% of normal damage and makes it do double damage (before talents and meta gems, some of which increase the effect of critical hits and thus the value of Crit Rating). Without taking anything else into consideration, normal attacks on a normal attack table increase damage by 1% no matter which you choose.
Some special attacks, however, are resolved on different combat tables. For instance Rip cannot crit because it is a damage over time effect. Crit does not improve that ability at all, though Hit and Expertise do.
Attacks like Mangle and Shred seem to be on the two-roll system, so an attack has to hit before it can crit (normal attacks do not follow that rule). That increases the value of Hit and Expertise with the marginal increase in crit due to the special attack hitting in the first place.
Based on that, Hit and Expertise provide more benefit than Crit: they affect all attacks and on specials are increased by the marginal increase in crit chance the hit provides.
The talent Primal Fury, however, increases the benefit of Crit. Each time (if you have both points) a combo-point-generating-attack crits, you get not one combo point, but two. Given the time Energy takes to regen, it is not possible to have your four combo-point rip on a twelve-second cycle without having some of your special attacks crit. Even if you were to only Mangle, the 40 energy that costs would take four seconds to regen: the twelve seconds in between rips would only generate three combo points (assuming no misses, dodges, parries, blocks). A four CP Rip would be on a 16 second cycle using only Mangles. Using the higher DPS Shred you end up on an 18 second cycle! That is a 33% reduction in Rip damage (instead of total damage over 12 seconds it is over 18 seconds).
If we had a 33% crit rate, instead of four attacks to generate four combo points, we only need three attacks to do the same. Only using Mangle, generating four combo points would require 12 seconds, just in time to refresh Rip. Shred is improved to a 14 second cycle. At crit rates approaching 50%, mangle would generate those 4 CP in 8 seconds, far faster than Rip could be reapplied.
1% Crit, therefore, increases normal damage by 1%, special damage other than Rip by 1%, and rip damage (through faster CP generation) by up to 33%. 1% Hit or 1% expertise increases normal damage by 1%, special damage by 1% and a bit. In an effort to make this even more complicated, missed specials refund 80% of their cost and missed finishing moves do not. That weighs against the value of Hit/Expertise for specials because the energy cost of a miss is not 100% and Energy is a more scarce resource than global cooldowns (1 second in cat form).
None of that even takes relative values of AP into consideration!
Some people really like Hit and Expertise for keeping dps constant and not missing finishing moves, which is a valid argument. To the best of my knowledge, the dps benefits of any of them weighs out to very similar amounts in real world scenarios (hehe). Which you choose is going to have to be balanced against with the real items you would be equipping and the stat allocation. All of them are good to have.
My advice, is to not worry about Hit and Expertise. With the changes in 2.3 (I think it was 2.3) to Heart of the Wild made pure rogue leather much more attractive since it now operates off the derived stat of AP rather than strength. Most of the rogue gear is going to have some Hit or some Expertise on it, which is nice to have (rogues benefit so hugely from Hit that almost all of their gear should have it). I would never gem or enchant for it, however. And I would never chase pure crit. What comes on gear is nice, but I would focus on Agility. Point for point, the benefits of Agi providing both AP and Crit make it superior to every other stat for Cat DPS.
Additional resources:
ElitistJerks Feral Druid Megathread Check the first few posts for information.
Why is +hit good for DPS? A somewhat dated discussion, but the underlying math has not significantly changed.
Development Plans
Keredria of Tree of Life has mixed the corporate world of the warcraft world to come up with her "development plan." While I am forced to agree that these usually are a waste of time, they can serve as useful tools and help in clarifying goals and providing focus in achieving them. Keredria tells us:
So here in a nutshell is what it looks like. It starts by asking:
* What are your short term goals/plans?
* Your long term goals/plans?
* What are your 3-4 areas of skills/knowledge that are your strengths?Then in the next part you have to come up with a couple of "development needs" (bleh… corporate mumbo jumbo). And for every need, you list out:
* Why is this a priority?
* What is your action plan to achieve this need?
* Do you need anything to achieve this need?
* What are possible obstacles and constraints?
* What are the projected results and how will you measure success?
What are my short term goals /plans? This is an interesting question all by itself. Mage from 69.3 -> 70 is one. Raid at least once per week is another. I need to spend more time figuring this one out is a third.
What are my long term goals/plans? Somewhat easier of a question to answer. I have 4 level 70 characters, with a fifth quite possibly this weekend. I would like to have nine. I have a Paladin and a Warlock at about 50, so they won’t take long, but the rogue from 35 and the Warrior from 16 will take more work. I would like to tank Brutallus. This is a crazy dream, but I would love to go toe-to-toe with him on Lushere (druid tank).
What are 3-4 areas of skill or knowledge that are my strengths? A chance for hubris! I am a fairly good player. I know the classes I play well, I know the theorycrafting behind them, I have no problem doing the research outside of game to support that.
Development Need #1: Lushere needs Tier 4
Why is this a priority? Even if I never tank Brutallus, I want to "be on the path" (1)(2). Overall, I have gear that I can go into Tier 5 content with, but it would not be enough to excel. The Tier 4 set bonuses for feral druids are really good, particularly the two piece bonus in context of cat-form dps. I know that as a druid tank I will be spending a disproportionately large amount of time not tanking and that means I need to be able to both tank and dps at those end-game levels.
What is your action plan to achieve this need? I have to continue running Karazhan until I can get the two pieces from there and attempt to organize or join runs to Gruul’s Lair and Magtheridon’s… Lair?
Do you need anything to achieve this need? Sadly, 9 to 24 other people in appropriate class balances that have goals of their own that can be worked on by pursuing those activities.
What are possible obstacles and constraints? There are two giant obstacles: The Stormseekers guild can barely and only sporadically field a Karazhan run, let alone move into 25-man content. Goals related to content progression may require changing guilds, which I am not happy about. The second obstacle is that even if The bosses are defeated, there is no guarantee that the items I desire will drop or that I will get them.
What are the projected results and how will you measure success? Honestly, the projected result is that I will fail. As of today, I lack the desire to guild hop which is probably the only way I can accomplish this. Success is measures in having the items or not: no equivocation possible.
Development Need #2: Four more 70s
Why is this a priority? I like variety in play, sometimes jumping from character to character every twenty minutes. I like the flexibility (when other goals are not in conflict) in being able to fill a wide variety of party roles/
What is your action plan to achieve this need? Continue leveling my additional characters.
Do you need anything to achieve this need? Time.
What are possible obstacles and constraints? Few things can interfere with this. The only issue is whether I devote sufficient time to this endeavor or not. The additional characters will not be well-geared or progressed, that is understood up front, but time is the only issue.
What are the projected results and how will you measure success? This one is constrained primarily by the release date for the Wrath of the Lich King expansion. I may not finish by that point (at which point the goal becomes ten level-80 characters) but it can continue past that. Success is measured by character levels. Again, objective.
**********
Hm. Not sure what else needs to be added. I’ll call this a work-in-progress, I think.
Kitties Pounce!
A brief introduction to Druid Cat Form DPS.
Note: this will probably be entirely invalidated by the release of Wrath of the Lich King. Deal.
TLDR version: Wear good rogue gear, get a Stranglestaff. Get behind things, mangle, shred three times, wait until you have 80 energy, rip, repeat.
While Cat Form druids have a lot of similarities with Rogues, there are some notable differences in play style. It is possible, using pounce, maim, and shifting to bear form to bash, for a small amount of stun-locking, but it is not going to last very long. Unlike rogues, who can have a variety of specs and playstyles that ultimately all stabstab, kitty dps is a pretty streamlined endeavor.
Solo DPS
When soloing, I find the best way to deal with single enemies is to pounce, shred twice, then mangle until it dies. Ferocious Bite can be handy if the mob is a runner or self-healer and you kill them with it. Maim is useful to stun the self-healers if you won’t kill them in one blow. If there are two or more enemies, I kill the first enemy the same way, then on the remaining enemies using mangle to four points then rip, cycling between them all.
Raid DPS
The biggest difference about dpsing in a raid environment is that you usually can be behind the target. Whatever the main target is, you have two main goals: keep rip up and keep mangle up. You keep Rip up because it is your best DPS finishing move. Aim for four combo points then hit it after the previous rip has just faded. You aim for four combo points because the additional benefit of the fifth combo point is not worth aiming for, and if you crit on your last combo point, you get that benefit for free. A five point rip is good, but not good enough to be your goal.
Mangle is important to keep up because it increases the damage from Rip and from Shred, and if any rogues are using bleed effects, they get a nice bonus too. A general rule is to start with mangle, then Shred for DPS until you have four combo points. At that point, let your energy regen until you can Rip then mangle right away. If you have a buffed crit of 30-35% it should only be three attacks before you have your four combo points, so a tight 12-second cycle should be possible.
On certain fights, such as Prince Malchezzar, where you expect to be running out of melee range, I often try to get my rip cycles to line up so that I rip right before I run out of melee range to keep the damage ticking nicely.
Gear and Stats
The core of kitty dps is based on the same stats as a Rogue: ap and crit. Agility is a very nice stat to stack because it generates both! A general goal is to get crit to 30-35% to keep the combo point cycles quick. AP always generates more damage. Hit rating is nice to have, but I wouldn’t recommend going out of your way to chase it. Getting hit capped is important, but a lot of rogue gear (which you’ll be wearing) has it, so most of your hit rating needs will be taken care of along the way. Expertise is of little value, as you should be attacking from behind. Haste will increase your white-damage dps at a rate of 1% haste to 1% white damage. Depending on your gear/rotation, your white damage is probably half your damage, so 1% haste is .5% dps. Correspondingly, crit is beneficial to everything but rip and pounce, which are probably no more than 20-25%, so 1% crit is .75% dps- a better value, and it will help build combo points faster.
Personally, I would suggest looking for gear with the following order for stats: Agility, Crit, AP, Hit, Haste, Expertise. Any bonuses to stamina or intellect or mp5 is basically worthless for DPS. You need a certain amount of stamina, but that is an arbitrary amount based on any damage you expect to take. Intellect and Mp5 are marginally useful is if you intend to powershift.
For a weapon, get a good Feral AP weapon. The large amounts of AP those proved even on green items outweigh almost any non-FAP weapon.
Powershifting
Kitty DPS uses energy, just like a rogue. Energy regens at 20 points every two seconds. If you have a large enough mana pool, it is possible to "speed up" the energy regen by using the Furor talent. If you have that talent at max ranks, you generate forty energy when you shift into Cat form. If you shift out of cat form and then immediately shift back in, you get forty energy. This can be done pretty simply using a macro:
/cancelform
/cast Cat Form(Shapeshift)
I wrote this from memory, so you may want to shift-click the cat form into the macro from your spellbook. There are other options for the powershifting macro, including some that check energy and/or mana levels, but this does what I need. Also, this lets me click from flight form into cat form while in the air and not getting a silly error message.
You will probably lose an auto attack by doing this, but if you do it at zero energy , or as close to zero as possible, you get a net benefit of 20 energy. This can be handy if you are in a situation where you are using Ferocious Bite, as it reduces you to zero energy.
As druid class lead, I think I should have some quickly available references for people new to the druid class or to each role. If any of you have thoughts on this or see something glaringly, horribly, wrong, or have questions, comments, etc, let me know!
It’s not fair!
I have killed Curator many, many times on my Druid and have never seen the T4 druid token drop.
I have killed Curator once on my shadow priest, and the token drops. I was the only one in that raid that could use them.
WTB Malorne gloves tonight, kthxbai.
Killing Time
Another lengthy post and not enough no pretty pictures. TLDR: /whine, as a raid group we need to clean up our act, /whine. But scroll through and check out the links.
That’s what raiding has more or less come to mean for me. And I don’t mean killing in the sense of filling time before something important, but, rather, making it deadified and useless. Last night was our Kara run, started 45 minutes late (as usual) and ran an hour late (as usual). Perhaps I’m just crazy, but we have start times and end times for a reason: so that people know how to fit the raid into their schedule. For some people that really matters, and I’m one of them!
We also started the raid invites and had four tanks and no healers. Kara needs two tanks. We had four. I have to admit curiosity on how we ended up with four. the KaraT2 MT was on, as expected, the KaraT2 OT (supposedly me) on, the prot paladin who OTs when she shows up was on, and an arena-spec DPS warrior had respecced prot and was on. WTF?! We have so many tanks already, why would you give up a pretty guaranteed DPS spot (as one of two dps warriors) to join the tank corps which, at a quick count, is over 10 people!
I switched to my resto shaman and healed through Maiden, then swapped to my shadow priest to DPS/shackle the skeletons before Opera, then stayed in because the Resto Shaman that we picked up was freakin’ awesome and was solo healing just fine. Got Big Bad Wolf, I died immediately (hint: pulling while someone is still buffing and they get turned into Red Riding Hood = splatted spriest), then a mage died pretty quickly, too. The six people still not disconnected and alive finished it out and we disenchanted two epics, yay!
At a quick personal rundown, the only character I have any real interest in endgame got 0/16000 Violet Eye rep needed for exalted, 0/10 badges for the Waistguard of the Great Beast (I think that’s right), Edgewalker Longboots didn’t drop anyway. My shaman, resto for the moment, got the Bracers of the White Stag (a solid upgrade for her healing set) and 7 badges that will be unused, and my Shadow Priest got two badges that will be unused. This is worth my time, right?
To make this something other than just whining, I have to categorize problems and offer constructive suggestions for improving, yeah? Okay:
- Raid time: starting nearly an hour late is wasteful of everyone’s time. If the time or the night doesn’t work, which is consistently the case, we need to change that. If the run needs to be nine to midnight, change it so I’m not jumping in front of Karazhan no one is standing around while they could be doing something useful.
- Raid leadership: the team needs a Raid Leader, recently it has shuffled around a bit. A position of responsibility and little reward, I admit, but someone needs to be in charge, needs to be getting the right group composition, one person doing invites, etc. My personal experience finds the MT to be good for that role, as they are generally the person most responsible for the pulling and pacing, anyway, though it need not be. Our MT doesn’t seem to want the job and doesn’t talk
on vent, so I don’t think he would be best. But someone, and someone knowledgeable about Karazhan needs to do it. I would, but I’m an asshole and no one would like it. - Raid composition: Four tanks does not work. Four physical tanks is used for a couple of fights in 25 man content, right? Not Karazhan. Zero healers is a bad, bad thing. On balance, we need to recruit healers and some of our tanks need to be told “no.” Most of them have other level 70 alts and could do the run on another class. If we feel it necessary to have this many tanks and have them all active as raiders, we need to rotate through them (OT-MT-dps/alt-dps/alt) so that
no one tank is always relegated to an alt or a role they are not interested in. This is where the raid and guild leadership needs to think about priorities. If we have teams that are mean to be working
as teams, the rosters need to be consistent. Consistent groups mean better groups. Playing tank roulette is not going to further progression. - Gear: We don’t have any gear requirements at all. This has meantsome people who are very undergeared have been coming to Kara, and, ok,this isn’t always a big deal, but some of these people don’t seem to bedoing much to improve their gear level but in Karazhan. This is disrespectful. Most of the guild has spent their time in level 70instances and battlegrounds and heroics to get the gear they need to be competitive in their role. For people to be joining the raid and not be doing that… disrespectful. Slower runs, more durability loss,more wipes. The guild hasn’t been big on organizing gearing runs, but the LFG tool is in WoW for a reason-use it. Gear issues lead us to:
- Loot: Basically we do a loot council kind of system. Whoever gets the best upgrade out of an item gets it as, in theory, this buffs the raid the most. There are some issues with this. The people who
spend a ton of time working on their own to get solid gear are going to have better gear than those who don’t, and therefore got smaller upgrades from drops, if they even get upgrades and often then do not get the drops they are looking for. I don’t inherently favor DKP (I really like suicide kings), but the system we have does not work and penalizes the better geared player. Loot council could work if there really was a “team” of ten people who were all progressing though
this content at the same level and it was theorycrafted out, but “Well, it’s more of an upgrade for” without serious looking at specs and gear sets and gearing the core of the raid fails. To quote a quote (via the Pugnacious Priest: “and to quote someone else’s blog ( no idea whose, sorry) If the item was that much of an upgrade for them that it took priority over everyone else, then they didn’t belong there”
Back to the personal level, I’m at the point where I don’t think it’s worth it. For a whole bunch of reasons, I’m not having a good time in these raids. Except when I’m tanking. I’d really like to be main tanking, but it seems my tanking skills are unregarded by my guild mates and I end up DPSing while crittable tanks
(a pairing that should not exist in raid content) are on the mobs. SuraBear wrote a good piece about this, though it sounds like his guild wants him to tank (/target SuraBear /bow) but I think he really summarizes the issue for feral tanks well: “Now, don’t misread this. I can do DPS. I can do pretty good DPS, as a matter of fact. I just dont particularly WANT to.”
So, I’m not sure if I even plan on logging on for night two. I have to take Lushere on the off chance the T4 gloves drop and on the off chance that I get them. And on the off chance that the few other things I want might drop. Hanging out on Ralendra and leveling and begging to join the Sidhe Devils sounds like a whole lot more fun, though. i r conflicted.
Introduction-Ralendra
This is Ralendra, and you can tell from the snazzy green (cloth) dress, a druid. I rolled a druid for the Gnarled Ironwood Pauldrons or Pauldrons of Tribal Fury, either is fine, I just really like the look. Correspondingly, I haven’t decided if it’s to be (eventually) resto or boomkin. So, hello server Kael’thas, you have my permission to tremble in fear or engage in mocking laughter as you please.
Focus, determination, and ten freakin’ people
Logged onto Lushere last night for Stormseekers Team2 Karazhan raiding. I figured if a tank was needed, i’d go, otherwise there would be enough people I wouldn’t be needed anyway. It’s very disappointing on Fridays. We have quite a few people who claim to want to go to Kara, but when raid time comes up (8 P.M. EST, hasn’t changed) there are maybe five or so on.
We ended getting a full group at 8:45, and the plan is to cut the raid at 11. We took things a bit later than that. One shot Attumen, Moroes, Maiden. Wiped on trash because I pulled a stagehand and
got two performers as well. Had the group been prepared, I think we could have done it, but I wiped the raid. Unintentionally, I assure you. One-shot big bad wold, then headed to Curator. Two wipes at 12%-7%, one at 1% (someone said 6K health left, ouch) then we got him. I, feral tank, took Pauldrons of the Solace giver and we destroyed the T4 gloves for paladin/rogue/shaman. I am starting to hate that mechanical monstrosity. Got Nightbane down on try 2, and called the raid sometime around 12 or 12:30. Hopefully tonight we can get a group quicker and clear the rest of the bosses. I’ve never done Illhoof or Netherspite, and Illhoof has my damn staff!
Walked out of Kara:night one with the clothy shoulders and Stonebough Jerkin… my healing set is starting to look disturbingly purple. WTB loot I will use! I’m pretty sure the rest of them have at least one thing I want, so [fingers crossed].
Why I Tank (And it’s not to see Bear Butts)
As I wrote this, I realized this would be a lengthy post. For the attention challenged members of the community, I am providing a TLDR version for you: Cleared instance-happy druid, wipes-sad druid
My first character was a Hunter. Leveled to 60, joined a guild, did some raiding. I found raid dps as a hunter was dull process. Stand in one spot (41 yards away) and click aimed shot every time I could. That’s a bit of a simplification, true, but before steady shot hunter dps was a very repetitive task. Then I rolled a priest to heal, went shadow at 29 and never looked back, except for brief period of time where I was leveling other characters and went disc/holy to help out the raid. I never had a tank; I never thought to roll a tank: I never thought it would be fun. You had to stand there and get hit!? Why in the world….
But then Lushere hit Outland and started getting dungeon quests. I was unguilded at the time, pretty much starting fresh in WoW, and to run instances at all I had to run them in pick-up groups. And what’s worse, they didn’t need kitty-dps, they needed tanks . Bootstrap time, there’s the button for bear form, time to work.
Though it had been quite a while since I had run the Hellfire Citadel instances, I’ve run them a fair bit, so I knew how the instance worked, I knew how the bosses worked, I knew how growl worked. “At least I’ll be getting the quests done,” I thought as I stepped through the instance portal. “Do you want lead so you can mark?” “Sure… trap square, sheep diamond, kill skull.”
Hmmm… this isn’t so bad. It’s kinda fun to be standing over the corpse of your foes. Second pull- oh no! we got the second group- demo roar and swipe, mark on the fly. When I’m on my priest, clicking shadowform and hearing that sound effect sends a chill down my spine, I love it; tanking four mobs on a bad pull and not losing a party member on my second pull ever tanking, it was a close second. The rest of the instance went petty smoothly, then into Blood Furnace, Slave Pens at 60, and on from there. Whoa, tanking is fun! Why do all these warriors complain and go arms? (My warrior is only level 10, though I helped S level her warrior to 62 before Real Life(tm) happened. So I’ve never tanked end-game as a warrior, but leveling as arms is fun /digression)
Ultimately, I think I’m a control freak, and tanking allows me to pretend to be in control. Usually, as tank I’m setting targets, setting the pace, deciding strategies. I find it to be a more challenging role than DPS or Healing. To excel at it, I feel it is pretty necessary to have a good grasp of the abilities of every class and spec, as well as the players behind them if you know them, and to know the instance as well as possible. With the ease of finding information on sites like WoWHead, there isn’t much excuse not to. I also feel a much more personal stake in the group when I’m tanking. Whether or not it’s realistic, it’s my responsibility to control the mobs and not let people die even if they do stupid things like pull a second group along with the first pull. Wipes are my fault: clearly there had to be things I should have done differently to hold aggro on all the mobs, or I should have used a different strategy, or, whatever.
It’s a roller coaster ride as a tank. With a great group (sometimes even a pick-up group can be great) when everyone just seems to click into place like Voltron, instances are maniacal fun. With good people, even wiping over and over again can be an enjoyable time. There come runs where you just can’t do it, and those suck. You know, sitting there in your fur (and I imagine it would be the same for the plate wearers) that just that bit more health you don’t have, just that extra armor you don’t have, just that AP you don’t have, would make the difference. Never, on any other character, DPSing or Healing, have I ever felt that I was incapable of filling my role. When I’ve healed and there was a wipe, no big deal, I healed what I could. As DPS (or as DPS/CC), do your job, try not to get aggro, stay on the right targets, and if it goes bad, do what you can. While I have seen (and done) those crazy, heroic, group-saving tricks, they aren’t expected, but they are applauded. However, as the tank to do those heroics, and when I can’t, it weighs heavy.
This week [note: this post was written some time before it was posted. I’ve run Magisters’ Terrace twice: once on Patch Day and once on Friday. On Tuesday, I got home from work, updated, logged in, hopped in LFG. About two minutes later, I’m summoned out to the Isle of Quel’Danas and we’re into the instance. No one in the group knew it, and I was looking forward to experiencing new content. I hadn’t read much about 2.4 because I wanted to keep it new, surprising. From the get-go it was tough. We had two hunters for trapping, neither survival spec, so CC was hit and miss. With so many caster mobs to deal with, CC was almost an afterthought anyway. After a few pulls I started to get a grasp of what mobs did what, started assigning targets a little differently, and without too much trouble we get the first two bosses down. Then downstairs and we’re looking at the Very Large Pulls of Insanity. The first half of the instance took around an hour. I spent four more hours in there. Wiped on almost every pull, just hoping to kill one or two so they could be cleared the second time. Skipped as many groups as possible. Got to the third boss. I’d say this was almost two hours. Eventually, we got it done, but it was messy. One pull, then Kael. One pull. One pull that I Could. Not. Make. Work. I could not hold aggro on the five mobs who were AoEing and CCing all their own. I failed.
Spent a couple of days on other characters doing some leveling, watched other people run MrT, enjoyed the Zen of Hunter Shot Rotations. Friday I logged in on Lushere expecting to see a Karazhan run, didn’t, ended up starting a MrT run with an Elemental Shaman of Pwnage and a Rogue of… well he’s awesome too. Picked up a druid for healing and a survival hunter for trapping and we go. I consider the amount of magical damage I’ll be taking, and swap out half my tanking set for dps gear-the armor value won’t matter and while my health takes a big hit, more damage from me means more threat means things die faster and do less damage overall. This is the theory anyway. I don’t know if my performance was overall any better (tanked one pull in cat form, hit the wrong button and I could not see my character to tell. The action bars are totally different but did I notice? No.), but the group was better able to work together. The hunter was a chain trapping master and I didn’t die often, so the healing was probably really good. Wiped once before the second boss as my pull of the mana worms brought, someone said, five groups at once. Wiped once on the 6-pull before Kael. The third boss was rough, but we did it. The Kael encounter is really fun.
Probably an hour and a half to do the whole run which was a full clear. I’m far, far, from a master tank, but it was personally redemptive to go in and finish that instance. It’s not that it makes up for the failure, but it did remind me that we succeeded because of the work done by the team, not by me alone.
It would be nice if there were a tool that could evaluate performance as a tank. DPS can track their DPS and see if it has places for improvement. Recount and WoWWebStats can be used to determine which elements are the most effective to provide DPS. Omen2 (if it starts working for everyone) sets the limit, DPS just has to maximize their usage of what threat the tank provides. But how do you quantify tanking effectiveness? Mitigation, survival, TPS, group coordination, tactics… not all of these things can even be broken into numerical values for analysis. That, I think, is the problem. The only way I can judge my effectiveness is by overall success, which I am not the sole arbiter of. Something of a dilemma there, I guess. I’d be curious (for anyone that reads this and is a tank), how do you determine your quality as a tank? Am I crazy for thinking I should be responsible? If not, how do you deal with the failures? There’s no way I’m giving tanking up, it too exhilarating when it’s going well, but when it’s not…. I guess that’s one of the reasons I have so many characters, to switch to easier roles from time to time.
Introducing Lushere: Green Hair Seemed Appropriate For A Druid
My current ‘main’, if you prefer to think about characters like that, would be Lushere, a level 70 Feral Druid. Way back in time, I was frequently running with a small and consistent group of people, one of which was a Resto Druid (who shall henceforth be called E) and a fury warrior (henceforth K). E was a rockin’ healer, no doubt about that, and it probably had a lot to do with healing our main tank, K. K lived in DPS gear, may not have owned a shield (just kidding), did not like main tanking, but usually ended up doing it so we could run whatever instance we felt like (usually Scholomance). S (frost mage and polymorpher extraordinaire) and I as Raleena, the incredibly rare Survival specced hunter (Wyvern Sting ftw!), filled out the core of a 5 man. Sometimes we’d grab a fifth, sometimes we would 4-man runs, whichever. We had this crazy idea-doing runs as all druids would be fun, so in that vein S rolled W to take over as healer so E could go Boomkin and I rolled Lushere to mewmewpewpew. Clearly, there were flaws in this idea, but as it developed over time, S became W full time and went feral to tank (pre-2.0 even), E went balance/resto (at BC) and Lushere got sidetracked because I rolled a shaman when BC came out.
The plan of all druid runs got scrapped, as well as the group of friends (real life ftl), but my Druid stayed, lingered on my character select screen, accusingly staring out from her level 48 eyes. Then I broke down and leveled her to 50, then 58 for outland, then 70, and it was a crazy, fun ride. Who would not love being a sneaky, little kitty that can POUNCE?
Then I started tanking through Ramparts, Blood Furnace. Hit up Slave pens at 60. How had no one told me how fun tanking could be? DPSing is fun, don’t get me wrong, but I found tanking considerably more engaging. [This resulted in a lengthy digression about tanking which will be it’s own post, returning to commenting about the druid now.]
Since hitting Outland, I’ve been working to get respectably geared as both a Tank and as DPS. I’ve only been
70 on this character for roughly six weeks and I’ve just about finished the non-heroic game. I have a few group quests to do and a couple of normal instances, but there isn’t much left that can be called progression outside of heroics and raids. I’ve been doing a fair bit of PvP for some specific bits of gear. I’m looking forward to Arena Season 4 because I can buy the Season 2 gear for honor-most of that will be decent upgrades. I would really like to see these sets have pants instead of skirts! But in bear form no one can see that you’ve taken off all your gear to avoid the repair cost of a wipe anyway (A note: I haven’t done this. Yet.). I’ve been doing Karazhan as DPS and as Off-Tank pretty much since I hit 70, and, while I enjoy it, I’d really like to move into the Main Tank spot. Probably won’t happen with my current guild as there are quite a few protection warriors and paladins to fill that role. The only thing that worries me is WoW returning to the pre-Burning Crusade raid mentality where having a heal-button meant you were a healer, anything else was wasting a raid slot. While tanking Magisters’ Terrace on patch night I definitely felt my limitations as both a player and a druid tanking that instance (another possible post, must make notes). No respeccing for me, though. If I need to be a healer, I have an enhancement Shaman I’ve gone resto with, but only for the time being, and my paladin will, one day, be a holy paladin and will Flash of Light for fun and profit.
