Feral druid (Bear)

[mcriley]

Hi,

I started tanking again with my druid a few weeks ago. I've been reading up as much as I can but sometimes RAWR tells me one thing, a forum another and a FAQ yet another. Especially for the stats and Exp/Hit caps.

Could anyone please take a quick look at my char (gear/gems/reforge).
http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/characte...m/Fural/simple

We are not doing anything a HC at all, just a social raiding guild with 3/7. I just try to be as useful as I can

Thanks alot in advance

[Seamus]

I hear you on the multiple different opinions. I have been wondering the same think, Elitistjerks say to stack stam, askmrobot, says its agility all the way and multiple guides say that we don't have to worry about hit and expertise. To me it seems that we have to work our butts off to hold onto multiple mobs and at times one or two if dps aren't targeting properly will pull aggro. I have read that our Thrash DoT is being mitigated by armor which is part of our AoE threat levels not being up to par, which does explain a lot.

I can tell you though the route I have taken is that of stacking agility and reforging the lesser stats to dodge, basically every piece we have will be reforged to dodge. I run with a paladin tank and they are always sounding shocked that I am not stacking Stam as you know stam used to be the be all end all stat that tanks wanted, which has now changed.

From what all I have read it seems that warriors and druids don't have to worry that much on hit and expertise cause we have passive skills that make up for it, and paladins and dk's need it. Does this make sense to me, not at the moment because I don't fully understand how the passive skill mechanics work. But again that is just an opinion and well my opinion is still wanting clarification on the same issue.

[Tielyn]

I've heard both sides of the argument -- that you don't need hit and expertise, where others say that you do. I'm firmly in the 'need 'em' camp, because I work with DPS who go all in and all out from the start of the pull, and every time you miss, parry, or get blocked/dodged when they don't is a chance for them to gain aggro on you. I've had pulls where I was stacking stam trinkets (losing both hit and expertise since I have a reforged Fluid Death as one of my trinks) on early attempts on a heavy hitting boss (Onyxia at 352 gear level, a month or so back) and at one attempt, my initial FFF missed, my initial mangle got parried, and my initial white attack got dodged. Meanwhile, the rogue had pre-potted Agility, opened up with a Sinister Strike that crit, and whoom. Ony was his special friend.

My housemate also has a bear tank. She got new bracers and a new weapon upgrades one day, and lost 10 points of Expertise by switching them in. Suddenly people were pulling off of her when they weren't before. Switching back to her old bracers and weapon for the remainder of the night solved the problem temporarily until she could reforge for the expertise.

The main argument for 'you don't need it' is that 'get Vengance stacks and nothing can touch you on threat.' The key problem is that you have to have the mob hitting YOU to get the Vengance stacks, and you have to hit the mob back -with- those Vengance stacks running in order to keep making more threat. Worse still is when you're sharing tank duties with another tank -- and if you're the offtank, you spend the first chunk of time -not- getting Vengance while the DPS climb the threat tree above you. When you taunt, the MT has all the Vengance stacks and you don't, so -they- are going to pull off of you....sometimes when you really don't want them to. (cf. Argaloth, Chimaeron, Occ'ulthar....)

I run with a threat heavy build (agility, crit, and agi trinks) which is a little light on the health pool compared to most tanks, but with high agility also comes higher dodge, and as such I stay alive better than the stam stacker tanks. I'm presently running with 7% hit and 20 expertise, and that's enough to keep threat off of an entire 25 man group and steal threat from two of our MT folks without trying very hard.

Your mileage may vary; just relating stories from my own experience plus my housemate's.

-Tielyn

[sifuedition]

The previous story is undoubtably true...and his healers work harder for it. Any tank can increase their threat with hit and exp. They will be giving up 1000-2000 ratings points to do it. Those points can go into survival stats to help healers instead. It largely depends on what YOUR healers can handle.

[uglie]

I understand where people are coming from with wanting hit and exp but I've found it not needed at all with a proper rotation and dps learning to control their aggro. If a hunter or rogue is not using MD and tricks respectively and they pull aggro then that is their fault. This is also why you don't pull with taunt. If the other tank is pulling off you after a taunt switch then the other tank needs to stop attacking til you get aggro secured and that 2 or 3 seconds of not attacking shouldn't make the difference between a kill and a wipe, if it would then there is a problem with low dps.

From what I have been reading on EJ there is no one set rule on what to stack (agi or stam). I'm currently using shifting demonseye as it seems to be the middle road especially being not as well geared as my previous main and just switched to my bear as my main about 2 weeks ago. Though as I get more gear I am switching to agi more heavily and using dbl stam trinkets if more stam is needed.

In short I've found that going with a mix of agi and stam doing me well and going more agi as I get more FL gear with trinkets being the best way to make the switch between fights. As for hit and exp I'm finding it not worth getting near the caps and reforging out of hit first then exp.

[Tengenstein]

I understand where people are coming from with wanting hit and exp but I've found it not needed at all with a proper rotation and dps learning to control their aggro. If a hunter or rogue is not using MD and tricks respectively and they pull aggro then that is their fault. This is also why you don't pull with taunt. If the other tank is pulling off you after a taunt switch then the other tank needs to stop attacking til you get aggro secured and that 2 or 3 seconds of not attacking shouldn't make the difference between a kill and a wipe, if it would then there is a problem with low dps.

This. If you're having to stack Hit/expertise becuase of threat then it's to cover someone's poor play and the healers are having to ultimately make up for it. Stacking Exp/hit to increase uptime on savage defense seems fair enough, but having it so the meter whores can whore the meters jsut isn't going to serve your raid well. I sould however add the caveat that if you're in no real danger of dying like in a 5man where you're struggling for rage and the healer's strugling the stay awake go for threat stats, give the healer something to do an get thaid dailly LFG over all the sooner

Tielyn's rogue story makes me cringe, but its a perfect example of Tanks having to cover for Poor DPS play. If a Rogue pulls aggro on the pull he's just not doing it right, Tricks transfers threat gen for 6 seconds and gives the giver and the recipient 5/15% damage increase. Not using it on the pull, and hence forth on CD, is a straight 5/15% DPS loss for the rogue. A rogue not tricksing is a rogue that's turning down personal DPS, raid DPS, Tank TPS, and additional time on the target. In the first 6 seconds the bears gonna get 4 special attacks, potentially 2 mauls and a further 2 melee swings the chance of 8 of those not landing is slightly worse than 4 in a million, and if the tank in question calls out those failures to land there shouldn't be any threat issues.

[Tielyn]

Checking our WoL from last night, our rogue is using Tricks of the Trade early, often, and late (45 times over a 2 1/2 hour run).

The problem is that last night's tanks were "somewhat" undergeared compared to him and five of our DPS (the enhancement shammy, feral druid, rogue, arms warrior, and one of the mages) were continuously pulling off of both tanks even though the tanks were given generous head starts after the first wipe of the night on trash. Not coincidentally, the first three are also in our top five DPS.

After they died the first few times, I started monitoring the threat meters on mobs, and I could see them creeping up inexorably on the tanks, who were pulling less than 7K DPS versus the 20-22K DPS folks. The rule of thumb seems to be that if you pull 2.5x the DPS of your tank, your normal rotation will pull off of them.
Could they back off and take their hands off the keyboard? Probably. Should they? Maybe. Depends on what the tank is -- or isn't doing.

From last night's run, one of the post-mortem raid comments: "If the tank doesn't know to GTFO away from Felidius when he does his Glaciate, -and- our DPS are pulling off of him while they're switching back and forth between both bosses, isn't it really the tank's fault?"*

As far as survivability goes, I'm probably the least squishy tank in the guild at the moment as far as the healers have said -- a part of it is that I'm generating a lot of Savage Defense procs (on a 6:22 minute Rhyolith attempt, it was up 3 minutes 17 seconds of that fight (49.7% uptime)), since I've been lucky enough to get crit/mastery on most of my gear (also, much love for the latest buff to SD). Could I do better by dropping hit/expertise? Possibly. I do tinker with swapping things around now and again between fights to see what kind of change it makes, and I fine tune my play based on who else is in the raid. Most of the time I don't have to go to the stam trinkets, but the Mirror of Broken Images gets a lot of use on the high spelldamage fights.

Quoting the feral druid: "If it's you tanking, I know I can push you hard and get all the DPS I can out on the boss, because at worst, I might pull off of you once, but you take it back immediately. And then I never get it back after that because you up your game." It makes the difference between her pulling 18K and 20K, because she throttles back on the other tanks -- and still pulls off of them sometimes.

Again, this may well be just my guild/raider loadout. If I don't mind them pushing the envelope if I can handle it, and the healers aren't complaining about me (they do about some of the other tanks), and I actually contribute to the DPS meters instead of just playing fuzzy meat target, it's a win-win. IMHO. Very, very, IMHO. (We're just waiting for the mediocre DPS to catch up to the heavy DPSers.)

-Tielyn

* One of the officers pointed out that in all three cases of wishy-washy threatgen we've seen over the past month, the tanks were paladins. Is this something that's common to the class due to nerfs or something -- slow rampup time?

[uglie]

In your first line you said the rogue was tricksing early. Are you meaning on the pulling? I know my rogue and hunter are putting up their md and tricks when I start the pull countdown.

The only one of those top dps doesnt have either a complete aggro dump or threat reduction. The shammy can wind shear and feral can cower, granted not a aggro dump but every little bit helps. the rogue has vanish and the mage invis. As for the warrior, I hear they're pro floor tanks.

The 7k dps sounds slightly low for tank dps depending on the fight. I say this because it could be pointing to an incorrect rotation/prio system from the tanks.

In the end if you are 100% sure that you are getting tricks/md on the pull and throughout the fight on cd, as well as the dps using their threat reduction/drop cd's then exp will do more for your threat than hit. If it comes down do this as a last resort I would advise only making small changes. Like reforging the crit on the crit/exp piece instead of normally reforging the exp and see how that works. Even a small change can make a huge difference.

Just read the note at the end for a second time. there's only been 3 times that the dps have pulled in the last few months?

[Tielyn]

The rogue asks me to give him a countdown on the pull -- he pre-pots and tricks me as I pull, so he has that giant boost to start a fight. But he relies on me to actually hit a few times in those first 6 seconds. "Early, often, and late" is just a saying that means that he's using Tricks a lot in his rotation. The weird thing is I see him using it on the hunter and the boomkin sometimes, too, but it may just be they're the only ones in range or something.

I run a fairly fluid roster -- we configure the raid loadout depending on who shows up. We have three tank-only folks (two pallies, one warrior), one hybrid bearcat (me), and three heavy DPS (two warriors and another feral) who also make really good tanks. If two of my 'can't DPS their way out of a bag' tanks show up, I go cat or heal for the night, or we split into two 10's groups. If only one of my 'tanks' show up or we do one of the multitank fights (we use four tanks on Nef/25), we go with me plus one of the DPSers going tank for the fight. I try and rotate all of the tank folks through the fights, so everyone gets a chance at learning all the aspects of the fight -- but I give the hard parts to the smart tanks first until we get it down. (Nothing wipes a raid faster than a tank that doesn't speak up that they don't know the fight.)

If it's me (I'm up in the 13-15K DPS range while tanking), or one of the three heavy DPS/tanks tanking, the DPS doesn't yank off of us.

If it's the pallies tanking, we pull off of them. We also had a guest raider pally who had come to heal for us in the past, and we were heavy on the healers for that day, so I let him tank because he claimed that his tank gear was better than his healing gear and that he had no problem holding threat off of his 10 man group.

The problem showed up when we were doing the Ascendant Council; I let him establish position on Ignatius, counted five, charged, ravaged, and had the boss on me. He taunted. I cowered. Started up my rotation. Yanked off of him again. Then the OT on Feliudius went down. I shifted to bear, ran over, picked up Feludius, and held onto him while we battlerezzed the OT. Waited for the OT to get rebuffed; they taunted back from me and then I went back over to Ignatius... and promptly pulled off of the pally tank again. It was then that I saw that the rogue and the other feral druid were dead on the floor. :|

Needless to say, after the run I took the guy aside and said that I probably would prefer to bring him as a healer next time. I'd rather not do that to our guildies unless I absolutely have to, though.

-Tielyn

[uglie]

It sounds like that pally didnt have on righteous fury or just has no clue about pally tanking. I don't think it's possible for the issues on AC to be caused by lack of hit/exp.

[Destruyen]

i use an agi heavy setup, and while my dmg taken is slightly more than the ctc prot warr i tank with, my healers don't have a problem with keeping me up when i tank. i have around 43% dodge raid buffed with dual agi trinkets (usually ancient seed reforged to dodge and fluid death reforged to exp). i lose about 200 ratings on my usual tanking set that i have reforged to exp instead of dodge but that's a small amount and nowhere close to the "1000-2000 lost ratings" someone mentioned in a previous post.

i pre-pot agi and pop enrage (3/3 king of the jungle) and berserk on the pull and never have threat problems unless one of the dk's is accidentally in blood presence. i have around 15 exp and 4-5% hit, but from reforging my crit/exp pieces like belt from crit into dodge instead of from exp into dodge. i'd rather have more expertise than hit currently since it would eliminate dodges/some parries and help with my sd uptime than just adding more crit would.

i just don't understand why ppl would want to stack stam outside of the very very top progressed bears. their healers can handle it while the average healer can't. for example, last week on h shannox 25 i dodged 52 normal melee attacks that hit me on average for 53k and 4 arcing slashes that hit me for roughly 70k. that's a possible ~3mil dmg avoided and possibly would have been more if i had 4pc t12. agi is just too good to not stack if you aren't trying to push world firsts where most tanks go eh over avoidance to get healers a bit more breathing room while undergeared.

[mielikinna]

I see a couple of different things here. I feel the need to respond with some questions.

1. Are you dying too fast for healers to heal you? Get more stam.
2. Are dps pulling off you consistently, or is threat a problem? Get more hit/expertise.
3. Rawr will drastically change its values depending on what you set the surviveability cap at. Basically, it asks how much EH do you need to survive the highest damage output the boss will do to you? Once it knows that, it will push you for stamina up to that point, then avoidance/threat after that point. You can also manually set the threat values needed higher, to help it value threat more if that is your problem.

[Tengenstein]

The rogue asks me to give him a countdown on the pull -- he pre-pots and tricks me as I pull, so he has that giant boost to start a fight. But he relies on me to actually hit a few times in those first 6 seconds. "Early, often, and late" is just a saying that means that he's using Tricks a lot in his rotation. The weird thing is I see him using it on the hunter and the boomkin sometimes, too, but it may just be they're the only ones in range or something.

Tricks gives a 5/15% damage increase to whomever get tricksed, for maximum raid DPS you give it to the player wth the highest DPS that isn't going to pull threat. I beleive they upped it's range to 100 yards so generally range isn't an issue anymore. Becuase i'm a lazy rogue, i always give it to a tank unless it's going to be dicey beating the enrage timer or DPS is an iossue for some other reason(like Occuthar''s or Rhyolith's adds). the important thing is he's using it alot and on the right people.

I have threat issues on normal T11 if i wear my full mitigation gear, more so since the nerf. the bosses just don't hit hard enough i get bugger all vengeance and bugger all rage. So now i wear my arms gear with a sword and shield. It could be that your tanks are so out geared that they run into the same problem as me (which assume starts happeing once your mainly above 346 gear level)

BUt like i said in the other thread, if peeps don't research the fight they shouldn't be given a spot in the raid. Ever.

[Tielyn]

I had a long talk with the rogue over the weekend. He has a Tricks macro set to tricks whichever player the mob was attacking at the time. What it meant was that the boomkin and the hunter were pulling off of the pally tanks -despite- them being Tricksed and Misdirected, getting the Tricks instead of the tank, and that's part of why they kept aggro from the tanks after being Tricksed. Arguably, if the boomkin and the hunter are pulling off the tanks on the skull target, then it's still the tank's fault for not establishing aggro fast enough (the boomkin's player lives with me, and I -know- they're waiting to launch in, because they count audibly to five before firing off her first attack).

I also ran an experiment in a heroic over the weekend -- I swapped out all of my hit/expertise gear for Mastery gear, including the Porcelain Crab (proc increases Mastery), which brought me up to 20 base mastery (80% Savage Defense absorb) and the proc took me up to over 100% absorb, dropping my hit down to 4.57% and my expertise down to 10. I ended up absorbing 25% of the incoming damage across the whole instance, but my threat gen on trash packs was noticeably worse -- people who would normally never pull off of me in a raid were occasionally pulling aggro as mobs would Dodge or Parry or even be Missed by my Swipe/Thrash/Mangles. After that I swapped my raid gear back in and ran another dungeon with the same group -- no aggro pulls. And the healer had more mana because they didn't have to rescue the other DPS.

I'm going to have to look at the pallies more closely. I know one is fairly undergeared compared to the DPS, because he was gone for a month while his computer had a melted motherboard, but the other didn't have the same excuse. Putting the two of them as the tanks while not having one of the stronger tanks to hide behind was a tactical mistake on my part, but it also highlighted the problem. :| And the raid leaders were both thinking that the tank that didn't know the fight KNEW the fight, because he didn't speak up and we thought he'd been with us on that fight before. (He had, just not as the tank.)

-Tielyn

[Katarn]

Gearing for Savage Defense (Exp Soft Cap, Crit, Mastery) will perform better in 5mans than Dodge gearing will.

Dodge gearing performs better in raids.

Also I should point out that Rawr's default EH requirement for T12 normal content was way off. I think it was corrected recently (yesterday?) so it should be giving more accurate results now.

[Tengenstein]

I had a long talk with the rogue over the weekend. He has a Tricks macro set to tricks whichever player the mob was attacking at the time. What it meant was that the boomkin and the hunter were pulling off of the pally tanks -despite- them being Tricksed and Misdirected, getting the Tricks instead of the tank, and that's part of why they kept aggro from the tanks after being Tricksed. Arguably, if the boomkin and the hunter are pulling off the tanks on the skull target, then it's still the tank's fault for not establishing aggro fast enough (the boomkin's player lives with me, and I -know- they're waiting to launch in, because they count audibly to five before firing off her first attack).

I also ran an experiment in a heroic over the weekend -- I swapped out all of my hit/expertise gear for Mastery gear, including the Porcelain Crab (proc increases Mastery), which brought me up to 20 base mastery (80% Savage Defense absorb) and the proc took me up to over 100% absorb, dropping my hit down to 4.57% and my expertise down to 10. I ended up absorbing 25% of the incoming damage across the whole instance, but my threat gen on trash packs was noticeably worse -- people who would normally never pull off of me in a raid were occasionally pulling aggro as mobs would Dodge or Parry or even be Missed by my Swipe/Thrash/Mangles. After that I swapped my raid gear back in and ran another dungeon with the same group -- no aggro pulls. And the healer had more mana because they didn't have to rescue the other DPS.

I'm going to have to look at the pallies more closely. I know one is fairly undergeared compared to the DPS, because he was gone for a month while his computer had a melted motherboard, but the other didn't have the same excuse. Putting the two of them as the tanks while not having one of the stronger tanks to hide behind was a tactical mistake on my part, but it also highlighted the problem. :| And the raid leaders were both thinking that the tank that didn't know the fight KNEW the fight, because he didn't speak up and we thought he'd been with us on that fight before. (He had, just not as the tank.)

-Tielyn

Target of Target Macros Are Cool till the boss Targets a non tank with one of his random target abilities, and you end up dumping 120k of threat on a non tank and force tthe boss to squish them. You kinda have to pay attention to whom the boss is targeting if you use them.

In regards to your experiment I'm not surprised, 5mans hit even softer then the nerfed T11, you're not gonna stack vengeance, you're not gonna stack rage, of course people are gonna pull off you, It hits so lightly you can tank it as a plate DPS class, in Plate DPS gear. However Firelands is current content and hits somewhat harder the Girm Batol or Zul aman, You will can't really apply the same conclusion to both of them, In firelands you will get Rage and you will get vengeance, and for most part threat becomes such a non-issue, and half the fights you don't even have competition for a good while; Shannox and his tanked dog aren't the primary DPS targets, Most of the DPS aren't spending most of their time on the drone, Alyzrazor's hatchlings fixate on their targets, and you only need to actually hold aggro for about 15-30 seconds a cycle.

I wouldn't worry too much about the pallies gear, Having worse Gear will increase the rate at which he stacks vengeance, given two players of equal skill the one that takes the most damage will produce the better threat, and usually less geared tanks take more damage. More likely if he isn't researching the fight he's not researching his class either, or researched at the beginning of the expansion and hasn't kept their class knowledge up to date.