Healing is part of your job too.

Now I know that people think, "You're the healer. it's your job to heal, not mine!",  or "I'm here to dps, not heal.". Well, for a feral tank, this is just not true. Healing yourself is part of your job and makes the healing easier for the healer and will keep you alive longer.  Now, this is not something you have to go out of your way to do. Part of it comes totally natural from talent points alone:



Leader of the Pack
While in Cat Form or Bear Form, the Leader of the Pack increases critical strike chance of all party and raid members within 100 yards by 5%.  In addition, your melee critical strikes in Cat Form and Bear Form cause you to heal for 4% of your total health and gain 8% of your maximum mana.  This effect cannot occur more than once every 6 sec.


This alone is a big heal in the long run.  Any healing you do to yourself here is mana not being used by the healer and mana that can be utilized in a "crunch time" situation.  I share this here as some people take a tank build that they see from a blog (I've posted mine here in an earlier post) or off the wow armory or from other places, which is fine.  Problem, some people don't take the time to read the talents and why they should be chosen.  This is one that should be.



Another thing you can do it use a glyph for your Frenzied Regeneration:



Glyph of Frenzied Regeneration
Major Glyph
Classes: Druid
Requires Level 52
Item Level 52
Use: Permanently teaches you this glyph.


While Frenzied Regeneration is active, healing effects on you are 30% more powerful but causes your Frenzied Regeneration to no longer convert rage into health.


Now this is a big step for some tanks as this makes you put full trust and faith in your healer and takes some of your self healing abilities away from your.  To me, this is a great glyph to have since it infact boosts the healing done to you by the healer AND by your Leader of the Pack talents. At the point you hit Frenzied Regeneration, you will want to do something very important. Keep your eye out for a Lightwell or any kind of AoE healing effect on the ground.  If you see these, get in them.  Some would argue that a Lightwell is really only for the dps so that the healer can focus more on the tank and not so much on dps.  This could not be farther from the truth.  Any and all healing you can do to yourself will help save the healer mana for use when it is truly needed to keep your bear butt up, lol.

Remember, tanking is part of the team effort.  If you want to succeed, you need to think like part of the team and not as just the tank. Any and all thing you can do to help the healer must be high priority. The healer and dps will thank you for this.  If the healer goes out of mana (oom) or dies, you will not be standing for very long after.

Keep up the good work tanks.  Remember we all want to get through a run alive, working together will make that happen.

The power of the handy dandy addon....

If you have ever taken a moment to look over the addons on curse.com or wowinterface.com, you have probably been a touch overwhelmed by all the addons that are out there that are supposed to make playing easier in one way or another. With all the addons out there, what are some of the better addons for tanking and all around playing? How do I pick an addon?  How will I know if it's any good?  These are all valid questions, questions that I hear from guildies all the time. I have taken a my current tanking UI and will break it down as to what I use and why.  Maybe this will inform you of an addon that you have been looking for.  Maybe you don't run addons and wanna know how they work.  This should make things a bit clearer. Here is a screenshot of my current tanking UI:

click image to see a bigger view

Ok, now lets break this down in to its parts.  Below is a key.

click image to see a bigger view

1) BasicChatMod: This is a nice little addon to clear up your chat window.  It's also nice if you are lazy like I am and hate having to constantly type /o to talk in officer chat.  Once you enter a chat channel, you stay there until you enter a new one.

2) Bartender4:  This is a very nice way to organize your buttons and make things smoother and easier to organize.  Place any number of action bars anywhere on your screen.  Also allows you to move around your bags, menu bar and everything else.

3) Skada:  This is a nice alternative to Recount.  It will show you any information about the fight from dps to threat to CC broken and so on. Can be set for current fight or over all.  Since 4.1 dropped, I had nothing but trouble with recount, since I switched to Skada, I've never been happier with a meter since I used DiamondThreatMeter back in BC.

4) SexyMap: This is a nice addon that allows you to move your minimap to anywhere you wish.  It also allows you to give it a nice custom look, far nicer then the standard minimap.

5) Raven: This is a buff/debuff display addon.  You can create and move bars that show buffs, debuffs, timers and lots of other things.  Very handy in helping to keep your UI clean.

6) TitanPanel:  This is a nice little bar that sits at the top of your screen, it allows you to display brokers (addons that show things like gold, durability, latency, ect.) and make things far more organized and easier to see at a seconds notice. On TitanPanel, I currently run:

• Currency - This will let you list right on the panel all your currencies, from gold to tokens to points.  Also lets you see what you have on other toons by just hovering over it.
• CPU - Let you see what addons are running and how much memory each one is using. This is a great tool, if you are having lag issues suddenly, you can hover over this and see what is going on. See if an addon pulling more then it should.
• DurabilityInfo - The name says it all, lets you know your current gear durability.
• Volumizer - This allows you to adjust the volume for everything ingame.  No more having to go in to the sound menu and changing stuff for you.

7) TomTom: This is a simple coordinate addon.  It does have nice features such as you can place a "pin" on the map anywhere and you will get an onscreen arrow that will point you the way and how far you are away.  Arrow also works for quests that you are tracking as well as trying to find your way back to your corpse. 

8) DeadlyBossMod (DBM, not pictured): This is a must have to anyone running anything.  It gives you a nice heads up when bosses or mobs are about to do something you should really avoid/interrupt.  Also gives you timers for such things as boss enrage timers, time to next cast from boss, even battleground timers.

9) Altoholic (not shown): This addon lets you see what is on your other toons.  Now not just what they are wearing, but in their bags, bank, AH and you can also use it to look at your alts professions and even link them in chat without even logging out of your current toon. This is a very handy addon to have.

10) Addon Control Panel: This I HIGHLY recommend. This allows you to look at a list of ALL your addons, on or off.  You can turn some on and turn others off, click "reload ui" and POW! no more logging out to turn on or off addons.

11) CBH Viewer: This is what gives me the black gap at the bottom of my screen where all my stuff is.  This doe snot just give you a black area, it actually zooms the screen out, giving it a true widescreen feel to it.  this also allows you to see more and makes tanking a bit easier.

As you can see, I find that a clean UI is a huge benefit for tanking.  The more that you can see, the more control you have on a situation.  You will be less likely to be surprised by a stay mob walking around or miss that fire pillar until it hits you.

I hope these help out a bit and do you as much good as they have done for me. Remember, keep up the good work bears! We gotta show them how it's done!

What we can expect at this point for feral druids in patch 4.2.

Well, it would seem that so far on the PTR, Blizzard likes us.  There are not to many changes for feral druids.  In fact, it seems that most of the feral changes are going to affect cats more then bears. The official patch notes for the PTR 4.2 state:

• Ferocious Bite damage has been increased by 15%. In addition, its base cost has been reduced to 25 energy and it can use up to 25 energy, for up to a 100% damage increase.

• Mangle (Cat) damage at level 80 and above has been increased to 530% weapon damage, up from 460%.

• Ravage damage at level 80 and above has been increased to 975% weapon damage, up from 850%.

• Shred damage at level 80 and above has been increased to 520% weapon damage, up from 450%.
• Frenzied Regeneration's health bonus is now reduced by 50%.

• Swipe (Cat) now deals 600% weapon damage at level 80 or higher, down from 670%.

• Glyph of Berserk duration increase is now 10 seconds, up from 5.

• Omen of Clarity clearcasting buff from now lasts 15 seconds, up from 8 seconds.

Look at these notes, the changes to Glyph of Berserk and Omen of Clarity are the only ones that really affect bears at all, and both of these are changes for the good. 

•  First, I know that I'm not the only one that feels that getting an extra 5 seconds to really pound on mobs with Mangle is a good thing. Mangle does large amounts of damage and when you use Berserk, you hit 3 targets instead of 1.  How can this be a bad thing?  No way I can see, lol.

• Second, the change to Omen of Clarity is a great one. Omen of Clarity reads:

Your damage spells and attacks have a small chance to cause you to enter a Clearcasting state. The Clearcasting state reduces the Mana, Rage or Energy cost of your next cast-time damaging or healing spell or offensive feral ability by 100%.

If specialized as a Feral Druid, Omen of Clarity will also have a chance to occur from your auto-attacks.

To add on to this timer is nothing short of awesome.  You now get more time to use this buff that makes your next attack cost no rage....ZERO!  I know that through my own experiences, it will in fact proc often from your auto attacks. Heck, I've had it proc just from changing in to bear form.  Come on, I get a free attack from the word go?  Thank you Blizzard, you must really like us, lol

The only changes that I am aware of that will be a change for some tanks is Blizzard making strength an undesired stat for us.  At the moment, 1 strength gives us 2 attack power.  This obviously has an advantage in threat since as you hit harder, you build more threat.  Blizzard wants us to focus more on stats like agility and get away form rolling on rings and other items that other tanking classes would use that have strength on them.  This is not a horrible thing they are doing.  Yes, some of us will be forced to make some changes in our gear, gems or enchants.  But with all the gear available in the game, and with the heads up you are getting now, you should b able to make yourself ready for the patch to hit.  The other is the changes to Frenzied Regeneration. Although this might seem like a large hit, but between glyphing in to it and the fact that it will still be a very viable resource in a pinch, I think that this will go almost completely unnoticed.

I'll keep you updated here on any ad all feral changes that come up on the PTR, until then...

Keep up the good work bears!  We gotta show those other tank classes how it's really done!