Survival Instincts: A (Somewhat) Official Guide to Druid Guardian Tanking

The extra absorb/reduction from Armor is not constant, the extra EHP (at same base armor) is.
The rating needed for 25% Haste (2.5->2.0) = 25 * 425 = 10625
At 3386 Haste, you get an average of 2,59 swings in a random 6s interval (or 3 attacks 59% of the time, 2 swings 41%), or 0.19 attacks more than at 0 Haste.
This is worth an extra ~2 Rage at 0% crit chance and ~3.14 Rage with your 40% crit chance.
The same amount of Haste turned into Crit grants an extra 5.64% crit chance, good for (6s / 2.5s swing) * 5.64% * 15 rage = ~2.03 Rage.
Result: Haste is giving you an average of 54% more rage during SD than crit does.

God damn it Airo.

also remember haste stacks multiplicatively with it's self unlike crit , so if you have the 10% melee haste buff you only need 13.64% haste (5796 rating) from other sources to get down to 2 second swing time.

*nods* Okay, you math-oriented folks, have you figured out what the sweet spot is where I should stop gearing/forging for crit and start forging for Haste, then? :) Airo's numbers seem to imply that Haste is better than crit once I hit 40% crit, and I vaguely remember Teng saying something back in the beta days about wanting 40% crit, 15% Haste or something like that (correct me if I'm wrong), but this was also before the re-buff of melee swing rage income. 13.64% soft cap sounds like a good thing, too, though 5796 is a long way to travel from 0. :)

-T

I'll revisit the RPS calculator later this week. I suspect though that if haste is better it will always be better, no soft caps just the hard cap of inifinity.

EDIT: some one remind how glancing affects crit? and theres still a 4.5% crit depression agianst boss levels right?
EDIT2: I've uploaded a seperate bear calc. i'm so out of touch with my own sheet i expect mistakes. also screw bears bear form modifiers i've left the inputs as percentages, i'm too tired to sort out rating conversions.

Hard to say from my WoL parses, since I've got trinkets that boost my crit on some runs and ones that boost my Agi by others. But it looks like Glancing is always more or less constant as always.

New twist data - Tooth and Claw now makes Haste more valuable. As of the 5.1 patch, white melee swings have a 40% chance per swing of proc'ing a buff that applies a debuff to a Maul target. Said buff causes the target's next melee swing to absorb your current Stamina(x1) in damage, after which the buff goes away.

I took the new buff into a few 5 mans last night, and it threw my active mitigation rotation out of whack. It's sorta-kinda like a poor man's Shield Barrier or the original v1 Savage Defense, in the sense it blocks a set amount regardless of how much you get hit for and then goes away -- if you get hit for less than the debuff, it shows as an Absorb and you take 0 damage.

So now the AM choice becomes:
- Savage Defense (60 Rage, +45% dodge, but take full damage when you don't dodge)
- Maul (30 Rage, on Tooth and Claw proc), absorb your Stam in damage when the next melee swing hits you, so you could have both up at the same time, but highly unlikely
- Frenzied Regen (up to 60 rage, heals variable amount, but does nothing for you defensively)

Some numbers (damage is average, source is my WoL parses in the last couple of weeks):
Stone Guard dogs hit for an average of 20,238
Feng hits for an average of 49,909
Garajal hits for an average of 59,753
Elegon hits for an average of 70,237

Right now my unbuffed Stam gives me a little over 20K absorb. So for Stone Guard, any time you hit TaC, the next melee swing by the dog goes away. But the bigger damage on Stone Guard is the Rend Flesh, which with enough SD uptime and a lot of luck can be also avoided, but usually doesn't happen very much.

Taking 20+K off of any melee hit is nothing to sniff at. But it costs half of the Rage you were already building to get to your next Savage Defense/Frenzied Regen. If this were old-style Rage-on-getting-hit, definitely. But it's a tradeoff -- any way you slice it, that's two more hits you have to make to make up for the Rage you just spent to mitigate a single hit.

I'm still mulling over the utility of it - especially in light of the recent discussion. It's a flat 40% proc chance, not affected by Crit or Mastery or anything else, so Haste increases the number of procs. Someone who went all Haste and got their swing timer down to 2.0 would have up to three Maul absorbs every 6 seconds, but taking a page from the Warrior book, I'm thinking that this is a 'nice to have' rather than a 'replaces SD in priority' thing -- when you are about to taunt the boss, hit Maul, and it'll smooth the transition for the healers a little bit sort of thing, or a 'oh hey, soft enrage (cf Garajal) incoming, pop Incarnation/Berserk and use the extra Rage income to reduce your damage that much more' sort of thing.

Also, 5.1 patch did not deliver new boots/belt from August Celestials/Klaxxi. Still 489 gear.

The first things I boosted with my maxed out Justice Points: my Spear of Xuen (which will guarantee that a Qiang will drop this week) and the Searing Words trinket. Still have things to buy with my Valor points.

-Tielyn

Preliminary results on Tooth and Claw show that it does, in fact, reduce the damage taken from Stone Guard Melee to zero, a full absorb -- but by its very nature it winds up making it so you have less Savage Defense casts available because you wind up wanting to hit Maul every time the graphic for the proc appears. Over a 6 minute fight, it reduced my average damage taken from Melee swings, week over week, by about 400 points, since I took more damage more often by way of the things I didn't dodge because I wasn't Savage Defense-buffed, but a number of those hits were for less damage. Out of 57 ToC procs I was able to cash 25 of them; this is because I was perpetually clearing my Rage on Savage Defense and Frenzied Regen, so I rarely had any Rage to spare for Maul.

Does that mean that Tooth and Claw isn't useful?

Actually, there's one situation where it seems to be extremely useful -- when you aren't the active tank, like for Feng and Garajal. Because you gain the buff when you hit the boss with a melee swing, and you apply the debuff to the boss for its next melee swing regardless of whether or not you're the tank. So the boss hits the -other- tank for less damage, it counts as an absorb for/on them, and you now have a real reason to hit Maul to spend your excess rage while you're waiting for your turn to tank. It's ... kinda similar to Intervene, then, yes?

Not fully confirmed, but stay tuned until I get some better data. WoL shows absorbs happening, but not for how much just yet, since ToC doesn't seem to hold the normal rules for buffs/debuffs applied to PCs.

-Tielyn

Using maul while not actively tanking was always usefull imo for the added damage you do, unless there is high aoe dmg and using FR to heal yourself would be more beneficial, Especially for the 20 seconds after your "tanking turn" ends and you still have high vengeance so FR heals kinda like a ton.

Me personally, i ignore TaC procs while tanking, and i use them to reduce the dmg on the other wank while i am not tanking. On any boss. (well not SG and lei shi and sha of fear normal :p)

PS: all my experience is from 10 man only. This may differ in 25 but i have no idea.

Nice to hear from you, Tjomek. :) I was wondering how you were doing these days.

I'm actually having to avoid cashing TaC procs more often than not on fights where you get a big spike and then swap tanks. But this is because I outgear and outthreat my offtanks lately and wind up pulling off of them if I high burn DPS while I'm not tanking (though one of my better bear tanks suggests using Shadowmeld to avoid that...) and sometimes even from white damage / leftover Lacerate ticks. :(

I'm a big fan of Savage Defense, but I've been seeing more and more tanks skip SD altogether in favor of Frenzied Regen/Maul only -- or Maul-only defensive button presses. Works great in LFR where you have a lot of healers healing you, for sure.

But Tjomek's thoughts are good ones -- when you have full Vengance stacks, a good FR hit can heal for most of your health and help the healers out quite a bit to save you -- especially on fights like Bladelord where you know a big hit is incoming and you can top yourself off easier. Stone Guard is another where if you've got less than a full health bar, FR likely is a better way to go (again, thanks to Tjomek's experience) if you don't want to play RNG roulette by dodging multiple Rend casts in a row.

-Tielyn

Quick and dirty notes for 5.2 (based on the patch notes, servers are still down at the time of this writing):
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Buffs:
- Thick Hide now reduces the chance to be crit from all damage sources by 6%. Unless NPC mobs can crit you with spells, this seems to be pretty much just a PVP thing.
- Soul of the Forest now gives 10 Rage per Mangle instead of 7. This makes it a bit more attractive to use for rage income.
- 20% buff to armor gain per point of Mastery. But remember that Mastery still only affects Physical attacks.
- Nature's Vigil's cooldown was reduced to 90 seconds rather than 3 minutes, which makes it a lot more attractive to use (but see Nerfs) considering that it'll be up 30 seconds out of every 90.
- Force of Nature trees got buffed in damage, but I seriously doubt that it'll compete with Incarnation for damage unless they buffed it a _lot_.
- Cenarion Ward healing was increased by 100%. This'll bring it more in line with the other healing powers on that tier (Renewal and Nature's Swiftness) and actually might make it better than Renewal for raw healing over those 2 minutes. I'll run some numbers and compare them to the ones I took a couple of weeks ago.
- Frenzied Regneration now scales 10% more efficiently with attack power. It's not a huge buff, but I'll take it.
- Tooth and Claw now scales 10% more efficiently with attack power. Still doesn't make it a replacement for SD on Melee-heavy fights, but every little bit counts, and you should definitely be hitting it to help your co-tank when you aren't the boss's focus.

Nerfs:
- Nature's Vigil buff is only 10% damage/healing bonus, so it does half the buff but is usable twice as often. This will also disconnect the massive chain combo of Incarnation+Nature's Vigil, but allows you to hook it up with Berserk when Incarnation is cooldown.

Recommended Changes (aka 'this is what I'll be doing when the servers come up')
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- Try taking Cenarion Ward for a spin. With its 30 second cooldown, guaranteed healing on being hit, it makes it more of a utility situational heal for damage spikiness. And it can be cast on other people. It's still not as good as the paladin Sacred Shield, but it's much closer. (I really need to put up that discussion on the various heal tier talent comparisons. Soon!)
- Keep stat priorities the way you have them. None of these changes really affect what you were already doing, though the buff to Mastery will make reforging -to- Mastery more attractive to Passive Defense style tanking.
- Take Nature's Vigil and use it on cooldown, preferrably with Incarnation and/or Berserk on a /castsequence combo. It'll increase your damage output somewhat, but the nerf will cause the raid healing part to be even more negligible than it was before.

Since the launch of 5.2 i have been using Cenarion ward. It is better healing compared to the other 2, doesnt get affected by vengeance (figured some1 should say it :p) but it is affected by agility making it a lot stronger during trinket procs, the individual tics can crit so with a rage build it really works well. The only drawback is that it is a HoT, where as NS + HT and renewal are a "o crap" button, Cenarion ward doesnt have the instant save.

Comparison: my current avg ilvl is 512 (648k hp raid buffed)
Renewal : 193k instant off GCD heal
NS + HT : 84k non crit, 160k crit instant on GCD heal
Cenarion ward : depending on procs between 30 and 40k ticks with 60 to 70k crit tics, on GCD but can be pre cast (also, maybe a small detail but this heal is affected by HoTW making it a litle OP during HoTW uptime, i was getting between 180k and 250k ticks hehe)

Yep! I'm getting the same results you are -- been using Cenarion Ward as well, and getting a feel for it before I recommended it on the guide. I _definitely_ miss the 'oh crud' save feel of NS+HT plus the loss of the instant battlerez, but I've been practicing on elites and big dinos, and we finally got Windlord down last week while I was using it, but I only managed to get a couple of casts off because the GCD was getting in the way :(

What makes Cenarion Ward shine (now) is the 30s cooldown and overall greater output versus Renewal in the same time period. The negative on that is that it is on the GCD, which has meant that sometimes I'll hit it while I'm inside the GCD, think I've hit it, and nothing happens -- in order to use it I've got to stop hitting other buttons and wait for the next GCD to use it, so it feels a little clunky to use when I've gotten so used to a 4-count rotation.

If Vengeance affected CW like it does Sacred Shield, that'd be a slam dunk. As you said, though, Agi trink procs (and Dancing Steel) -do- affect it, so trying to time it during one of those procs is a bigger heal. Probably the biggest bang for the buck from it comes from using it in Resto, though. :}

-Tielyn

I'm just getting back into the game and Guardian is my first tank class. I've read through the thread, but there are a couple things I don't quite know yet, and I'd appreciate any feedback.

1. Is Incarnation the generally accepted level 60 choice now? I've been running with Soul of the Forest, and while I like the rage, my crit's getting up to the point where I'm not sure how useful 3 extra rage on a Mangle is for me. I like the idea of Incarnation, but the uptime is so low I'm having a hard time seeing how it can be that much of a benefit mitigation-wise.

2. Your guide suggests gemming red into Agility: is 1 Agi really worth more than 2 crit/haste? I'm still at the point where I generally have to gem into exp/hit to remain at caps, but with the double itemization on secondary stat gems and the 50% boost in bear form, it seems like Agi's not that great a stat.

3. Why do we use the dodge cap for expertise rather than going all the way to the parry cap? With the way expertise works now, we reduce parry at the exact same rate we reduce dodge, so going from 7.5% to 15% is exactly the same improvement as 0 to 7.5%, and it's the same amount of rating. Parry only applies when we're in front of the boss, but if we're not OTing and waiting for a swap we'll be there, and if we're waiting for the swap we're not as worried about Rage. The Dodge cap seems like an arbitrary place to stop.

4. What health number should I be shooting for for various raid tiers? I'm not planning on gemming Stamina, but wrist, shoulder, and leg enchants all give me a choice of stam versus agi, and I'm not clear what's better here.

1. depends if you want passive rage gen or controlled periods of high rage to deal with specific mechanics.

2. Agility converts into Dodge and crit at nigh 100% when in bear form and fully buffed, so theirs nigh no difference between an agility gem and a crit/dodge gem apart from the extra AP agilty gives

3. you don't go for dodge cap, you go for enough expertise to be comfortable or 15% whichever comes first

4. unles you under gear the instance you should have enough health for any given instance so 463 for MSV, 476for HoF/ToES, 496 for ToT normal. you might need to waggle a stam trinket or two for some fights. if you under gear you will need more stam.

What teng said is mostly true but

2. i will have to disagree with. geming crit outperforms geming agi for the simple fact that you get 2 crit rating for 1 agi from gems, last i checked agi was better than crit but not to a ratio higher than 2/1

and i would add to 3. that going for exp hard cap is nice but hard to get with current gear without sacrificing a lot of other usefull stats, once your gear ilvl goes higher you will notice that getting 15% exp will become easyer

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Q_221

I'm just getting back into the game and Guardian is my first tank class. I've read through the thread, but there are a couple things I don't quite know yet, and I'd appreciate any feedback.

1. Is Incarnation the generally accepted level 60 choice now? I've been running with Soul of the Forest, and while I like the rage, my crit's getting up to the point where I'm not sure how useful 3 extra rage on a Mangle is for me. I like the idea of Incarnation, but the uptime is so low I'm having a hard time seeing how it can be that much of a benefit mitigation-wise.

2. Your guide suggests gemming red into Agility: is 1 Agi really worth more than 2 crit/haste? I'm still at the point where I generally have to gem into exp/hit to remain at caps, but with the double itemization on secondary stat gems and the 50% boost in bear form, it seems like Agi's not that great a stat.

3. Why do we use the dodge cap for expertise rather than going all the way to the parry cap? With the way expertise works now, we reduce parry at the exact same rate we reduce dodge, so going from 7.5% to 15% is exactly the same improvement as 0 to 7.5%, and it's the same amount of rating. Parry only applies when we're in front of the boss, but if we're not OTing and waiting for a swap we'll be there, and if we're waiting for the swap we're not as worried about Rage. The Dodge cap seems like an arbitrary place to stop.

4. What health number should I be shooting for for various raid tiers? I'm not planning on gemming Stamina, but wrist, shoulder, and leg enchants all give me a choice of stam versus agi, and I'm not clear what's better here.

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1: I've got them set as equal nowadays because it's a personal preference. SotF works better when you're having rage generation issues; Incarnation shines when you don't, because you tie it together with Nature's Vigil and you can chain Mangle/Lacerates and burst heal yourself up to full during damage spikes a couple of times during the fight.

2: Agi gives you base AP/crit/dodge, which starts your 'floor' a little higher when it comes to initial threat gen and holding onto stuff on after a taunt easier. I suggest it for red mainly because you can't get agi from any other source other than socket bonuses, and there's nothing wrong with going agi/crit, agi/hit, agi/expertise, or agi/stam if you need to. You'll find that there will be sweet spots where you can squeeze over the next point of crit if you swap an agi gem for a agi/crit, but 40.1% crit is the same as 40.85% Another minor side effect of Agi is that it'll bump your spellpower up -- which helps if you took Cenarion Ward or Nature's Swiftness+Healing Touch, but not so much if you took Renewal.

3: I'm working with ~15% expertise now as a test, but when I'm the OT, I'll switch around behind the boss if it's a long pause between taunts (Ji-kun, for example) -- it's a question of whether or not you can live with a handful of parries or not from the front versus a higher crit/haste. I'm leaning towards changing the recommendation to 'try for 15%', but it's wasted reforge/gems if you can change positions. I'm on the fence about this, and in the beginning (heroic 430 gear) it was impossible to get to 15% expertise without seriously gimping your crit/haste in the process. I have an OT bear who is sitting 15% lower on crit, and I rip threat off of her without trying very hard and generate almost double her rage from Primal Fury.

Some hard numbers: With 7.28% hit, 10.16% expertise on Tortos (had to double stack stam trinkets to avoid getting eaten alive by bats) 8 minute fight:
Attack: 64 crit (42.7%), 51 Hit (34.0%), 33 Glancing: (22%), 1 Parry (0.7%), 1 Missed (0.7%).

4. MgV: 400K. HoF: 455K. ToES: 525K. ToT: 575K (600 on Tortos), bare minimums based on empirical data. I've never had to gem for stam except on Tortos.

Hope this helps...

-Tielyn

Um, why do we even care about our DPS when we're behind the boss? if we're behind the boss we don't generally have much vengenace so our DPS is gimped anyway. Surely it would be better to maximise our DPS whislt tanking even at the cost of of losing some whilst not tanking. Failing to conect a mangle backed by 5k vengeance is not much of a DPS loss compared to failing to connect a mangle backed with 250k vengeance, and when you're not tanking you are going to want to back off anyway whilst the other tank ramps up and you vegenace ramps down.

The other tank being ripped off because she's 15% lower on crit is a little unfair; if we assume all other things are equal then its no suprise having more of a beneficial thing make you produce more aggro, if all other things aren't equal wheres it coming from? i higly doubt that the difference is shes lost 15% crit becuase she's gone the to the hit exp caps and you haven't. Are you both playing identically? i highly doubt it unless you're both robots (which would be cool). Anecdotal evidence is anecdotal. same with your "hard numbers"; a single result just isn't statistically meaningful.

She's lower on crit because she went the dodge/stam route and doesn't bother even trying to reforge for crit. :P (And to support your theory, she's at 7.5% expertise.)

To answer your question 'why does a tank need to care about their DPS?'

In a good raiding guild, your DPS are usually good-to-great DPS. They kill the meter and pesky things like add phases don't slow ya down much. A tank is supposed to be about survival and connecting with the boss, so misses/parries/dodges don't help the situation, hence the argument for the full 15% expertise, which I do, in fact, support, just not quite officially yet. The DPS should be a side effect, not the goal, in most cases.

I raid with a guild that doesn't have a lot of heavy DPS, but they're the friends I've raided with for years; every ounce of DPS counts for us when we're having to use three healers where two good ones will suffice, and a good third of the DPS we have are sometimes closer to the tanks' DPS than the other DPS -- or lower than mine. (And I'm not talking about just the gimmick fights.) When we're hitting enrage timers, I'll take any advantage we can get in the damage department.

So for us, having a tank that can carry the load of a medium-weight DPS while being non-squishy at the same time is one of the things that has gotten our guild as far as it has gotten. And yes, while I'm not tanking the boss, my Vengeance is slowly ticking down over the next 20 seconds, but I'm still hitting the boss, refreshing my Lacerate and Thrash, and otherwise contributing to the fight damage while it's ticking down.

And you're right. Anecdotal data is exactly that -- those were the numbers I put up there were from last night's run that I'd just gotten out of before writing the post, so I had them in my Skada log. I'm not seeing a huge difference between 13% and 15%, but I do see one between 7.5% and 13%. I'm at 14.87% expertise with my normal trinks, but when I had to switch 'em out for extra stam, it dropped a bit for the one fight.

I'm pushing closer to 15% expertise these days as promised, and have been for the last few weeks. I mostly like what I see, even if I miss the extra crit. I am collecting as much data as possible before I change the guide over, but I'm definitely not against you on this. :}

-T.

you've missed my point Tielyn.

why do we even care about our DPS when we're behind the boss?

I know that that tanks do more DPS when thye have high vengenace. we rarely have high vengeance when the boss isn't attacking us. the only time we would is shortly after a tnak swap, in which case we need to throttle down to not take aggro back. justifying not being expertise cappped becuae it does nothing when tyour not tanking is pretty much saying you'd rather have a low vengeance mangle crit and high vengeance mangle parried than have a low vengeance manlge hit and a high vengeance mangle hit. form astrict DPS stand point you might aswell say that if you're under the caps you should pop berserk when your not tanking as it will only connect 100% of the time from back there. That's crazy logic.

Nah. I'm not saying that at all. All I'm saying is that I am, in fact, repositioning myself when I'm not actively tanking, especially on fights where you don't want to be in front of the boss with the other tank (Tsu Long and Lei Shi, for example). Yes, I have to be careful not to rip back off my OT, but a good OT should be able to hold off of me by doing their rotation right so I shouldn't have to throttle back for more than a couple of seconds after they taunt, as our Vengeance is going in opposite directions. I moonlight with another guild who has an equally geared DK, and I have near-zero threat issues while keeping up my full bore rotation (She's also hit and expertise capped. ;) )

I am agreeing with you that the 15% hard cap is important. Have been for a bit. But I'm less adamant about it being so important that it should be done first and foremost without at least some consideration towards crit (the source of half of my Rage) in there between the soft cap and hard cap.

I pop Berserk when I know I'll have the boss for a bit. Maybe 4% of my Mangles might miss if I'm not expertise capped, but right now I'm as close to it as I can be, so maybe 1% of them miss, but they crit 6% less often. I care about my DPS the whole fight, not only when I'm tanking.

Well, I've swapped over to Incarnation, and I basically haven't looked back. It's a boatload of threat, pretty much guarantees I won't drop for its duration, and allows me to pop a useful cooldown every 90 seconds in addition to saving my tank CDs for fight-specific issues. My only issue is that I can't figure out what I'm supposed to be doing with it on AoE fights. Generally my rotation is Mangle-Swipe-Thrash-Swipe, and it seems like with Incarnation all I could really do would be changing that to Mangle-Swipe-Swipe-Swipe when I don't need to refresh Thrash. Should I just be avoiding popping Incarnation when the fight mechanics don't permit Mangle spam?

It's good to hear you guys agree on the 15% cap: I was having a hard time understanding why the first 7.5% is more important than the second, aside from OT considerations. Is there a specific crit number that once you hit, you should start moving towards expertise? Is it worth reforging haste into expertise on pieces where we don't need other reforges?

I'm not sure how convinced I am on Agility. I've had a heck of a time digging up numbers for what Agility converts to, but everything I find says 1259.52 Agi per 1% crit and 951.16 Agi per 1% dodge. For ratings, 600 crit rating per 1% crit and 885 dodge rating per 1% dodge. I don't think there's anything that directly affects Agility besides Mark of the Wild's 5% boost, and nothing that affects Crit rating besides Bear Form's 50% buff (and nothing that affects Dodge, we're just gonna look at them both pre-DR).

You can do the calculations yourself to verify, but I'm getting .4000% crit off of 160 crit rating versus .1334% crit off of 160 Agi, and .1766% dodge off of 160 Agi versus .1808% dodge off of 160 dodge. This means that if there was a Crit-Dodge gem (I'm aware they're both yellow) we'd actually get more mitigation from gemming that than pure Agi. And the guide doesn't suggest gemming for dodge anyway, so we'd probably stick a 320 Rating gem in there for .8% crit, which is a pretty significant 2% crit boost off of 2-3 gems. That's about as significant as gemming choices get. As far as bonus power on Cenarion Ward, I'm getting about 500 extra healing per Cenarion Ward with an extra 160 Agi, and 450 extra healing per NS'd Healing Touch. I'm less confident on those numbers, but if they're right they're basically rounding errors on your health bar.