Feral tanking builds and other useful information...

If you are a feral tank, you know that there are a lot of different builds out there. Deciding what to put points in over something else can be tough and finding a build and the reason for that build is even harder, I know, I've had to deal with that for years. I'm going to go over my tanking build step by step and explain why I chose to put points where I did.  So, below is an image of my current tanking build...

level 85 feral druid tanking build

Ok, so lets go over this one step at a time shall we, starting with the feral tree

•  2 points in Feral Swiftness because it gives you an extra 4% dodge in bear form, which adds to your avoidance which I spoke of my last blog.
• 3 points in Furor. This gives you 100% chance to gain 10 rage when you shift in to bear form. This might nit sound like much, but if you are caught in a situation where a dps pulls a group and you are not ready yet, the second you get in to bear form, but once you get in to bear form and pop your enrage, you will have more then enough rage to start right off scrambling to get control of the situation.
• 1 point in Infected Wounds.This is one is very nice as it reduced movement speed of the target, which is good, but we want it mainly for the fact that it decreases the attack speed of the target by 10%.  Why don't we put both points in here?  Simple, it does not affect bosses.  Every boss I have found is immune to this, so 1 point is fine for trash pulls.
• 3 points in Fury Swipes as this gives you a 15% chance to deal an extra 310% weapon damage to the target.  This translates in to extra damage and extra threat generation.
• 1 point in Primal Fury.  This is also a nice one as it gives you a 50% chance to gain 5 rage anytime you get a critical strike. More rage is always a big plus.
• 2 points in Feral Aggression.  The main reason for this one is to make it easier to use Faerie Fire. In bear form, your Faerie Fire will automatically stack 3 time with one use.  Since it generates threat and does damage while in bear form, this is a very nice feature to have.
• 3 points in King of the Jungle. Anytime you use enrage you will gain a 15% damage increase.  Now most people say, "but I really only use enrage before a pull to get up rage before I charge in.".  And that is fine.  You can use Enrage all the time it is off cooldown or just before a pull, either way, you will be getting a nice damage buff while it is up.  More damage means faster threat generation and a happy group.
• 1 point in Feral Charge. This is a must have for all bear tanks.  Not only does it give you the ability to charge in the a group of mobs and start building threat on them quickly, but the stun that you get on the target you charge can play a very useful tool.  Say there is a group with a healer and 2 melee mobs, you charge in on the healer which stuns it for 4 seconds.  You swipe/thrash to hit the other mobs to get some threat generation up on them and focus on the healer with the dps.  You can have the healer dead before it comes out of the stun in many cases.  Just remember that this DOES NOT work on bosses.
• 2 points in Stampede. This is the only real case where you will use haste.  It gives you a 30% haste buff after you charge a target for 8 seconds.  This plays in with the scenario described above in charge.
• 3 points in Thick Hide. This is another needed stat for bear tanks.  It gives you an extra 10% armor on all cloth and leather gear as well as an additional 78% more armor while in bear form.  From what I have seen, this does in fact stack.  It also reduces the chances you will be critically struck by 6%, which is always nice. lol.
• 1 point in Leader of the Pack. This is not only a nice group buff (giving the group or party an extra 5% critical strike), but it also causes you to regenerate 4% of your total health while in bear form. Now if you have 140,000 health, you will regenerate 5600 health about every 6 seconds or so.  Not too shabby for just being in bear form.
• 2 point in Brutal Impact. This will increase how long your bash stuns a target by 1 second and decrease its cooldown by 10 seconds.  But the real reason you want this is the fact that 2 point here will decrease your skull bash/spell interrupt by 50 seconds.  This brings it down to only a 10 second cooldown and makes it far more useful.  This will also cause any target you hit with Skull bash to have their spells cost them 10% more mana, which a bit more of a PvP stat, but can come in useful on some boss fights.
• 2 points in Primal Madness.  This will cause your Enrage and Berserk to instantly generate 12 rage.  As a rule of thumb, the more rage you can get, the more you can use to continue to build up threat as quick as you can.
• 1 point in Survival Instincts. Since this reduces all incoming damage by 50%, this is a great ability to use if the healer is running low on manamana while you are only taking half the normal amount of damage.  This is also great for raids if you suddenly find yourself down to just 1 healer on a boss fight that will need to heal 9 other people by himself/herself.
• 2 points in Natural Reaction.  This is another must have for bear tanks.  Reduces damage taken by 12%, increases dodge by 6% and you regenerate 3 rage ever time you dodge an attack while in bear form.  There is nothing here in the talent that is a bad thing.  Everything here is designed to boost your damage mitigation and avoidance. To not put both points here is to be cheating yourself of buff that will help you be a better tank.
• 3 points in Rend and Tear. This will increase the damage done by your maul by 20% to a target you already have a bleed affect on.  If you look through your attacks, you will see you have a few attacks that cause a bleed affect.  Extra damage is always good.
• 1 point in Pulverize. This is a nice item to have in your abilities list.  Deals 80% weapon damage plus 361 damage for each lacerate you have up on a target.  It also increase the critical strike chance of lacerate by 3% per application.  This means that if you stack 3 lacerates up on a target, and you use Pulverize, you will not only do the 80% extra weapon damage and the 1083 damage (361x3), but all 3 of those lacerates have a 3% chance to crit as they are absorbed by the Pulverize.  The damage output on this can be very high.
• 1 point in Berserk. This is a one of my favorites.  It gives your lacerate a 50% chance to refresh the cooldown of your mangle AND make t cost no rage.  That that is without even using the ability yet.  When you use Berserk, your mangle will now hit up to 3 targets and have no cooldown for 15 seconds.  This is a HUGE threat generator.  It's great for boss pulls in heroics where threat can be an issue or in raid boss fights when Heroism/bloodlust/timewarp/Ancient Hysteria is used, allowing your to generate threat faster then the dps are with the huge buff they get.

Now on to the Resto tree.

• 2 points in Natural Shapeshifter.  This will reduce your mana cost of changing in to bear for by 20%.  This is not a bad talent to have as you always have the ability to use your mana in fights, more in raids then dungeons.  On a boss fight where you tank swap, if the dps has some low health, you can always pop tranquility to help out a bit before still having enough mana to pop in to bear form to taunt the boss off the other tank.  Or even tossing a battle rez and an innervate to a dead healer when you have a chance.  Saving 20% mana on shapeshifting can help out int he long run.
• 3 points in Heart of the Wild.  This will increase your stamina by 6% in bear form.  Pure extra health.
• 2 points in Perseverance.  Now a lot of tanks don't put points here and I don't understand why.  This reduces all spell damage taken by 4%.  Now, your normal avoidance is nice, but this will give you an edge because in my experience normal avoidance does not work perfectly against spells.  Here you have a chance to boost that ability to take less damage by instantly decreasing any damage from spells by a full 4%.  If fireball comes flying at you to do 30,000 damage.  With this talent, when it hits you, it will only do 28,800.  Add in any other damage reducers and your are taking far less damage.

I was going to go over glyphs, enchants,. gems and reforging for feral tanks, but I think that this blog is long enough as is for now. lol.  That stuff will have to wait until my next blog.  Until then, keep up the good work bears and remember we have to teach these other tank classes how tanking is really done!

Don't forget, if you have any questions or comments, please feel free to comment.  If you enjoy the Challenging Roar, please become a follower so you can keep up on all the blogs here.

I don't believe in stam stacking. There, I said it, now lets move on.....

Ok, so let me be a bit more clear about the title, lol.  I've been a bear tank for a very long time.  I've seen bears go through major trends, on more then off, of stacking stamina over any other stat.  Many tanks will argue that by "stam stacking" it gives them a lot more survivability in raids and dungeons.  That having more health makes it easier on healers to keep them alive.  I feel that they could not be more wrong, and let me explain why I think this (please remember, this is what I have found, this is not hard facts, just what I think works better).

First, by stacking stamina, yes, you have far more health and it does in fact give the healers a lot more time to get off a heal before your health pool is empty.  However, healers, no matter what Blizzard or any forums posts say, have a need to keep your health bar as full as possible at all times in a fight.  By having a huge health pool, you are still taking large chunks of damage and thus, more mana is used to keep you up. This can be a very bad thing as healers can tell you.  Here's a little secret, *looks around to see if anyone is listening*, if healers run out of mana, you get no heals.  lol.

Ok, now, on the opposite end of this, if you stack other stats totally over stamina, you will have a much smaller health pool and thus make it hard for the healers to keep you up.  The trick it to find a nice balance of stats to make the healers life easier.  Remember, the best thing for a tank is to take your epeen and throw it away.  Epeens only end up causing problems, espeically for tanks and healers.  Now, the tricky part is to remember, you need to have some stats over any other stat regardless of how you feel.  Here is my breakdown of stats and the order I feel that should be dealt with.

Hit Rating - 961 or 8% hit  is needed for raid boss or 721 hit for heroic 5-man boss. That is the long and the short of it.  Now, I have found that there is leeway here. If you go in to a raid with 5%, you will notice a huge problem in threat, you won't produce enough.  If you go in with 7.5%, you will usually be just fine. But the closer to 8% you are, the more threat you will be able to generate and the happier your group will be.

Expertise - The soft cap is 26 expertise or 781 rating. This soft cap is a MUST!  I can't express this enough as I see so many tanks below the soft cap and pay the price.  What is the price you ask? Hit rating is great to hit the boss, but think of expertise and "The Force".  It allows you to predict when a mob/boss is about to dodge or parry your attack and allows you to counter act it and still hit him. Now granted that this is all just numbers in the system and there is no thought involved in the counter action.  However, as you can see, being able to not be dodged or parried will also help you to gain maximum threat generation.

Dodge Rating - This to me is far more important then stamina.  This is a major part of your avoidance/not taking damage.  The less damage you take, the happier the healers will be with you. Now, as I stated earlier, you should not focus solely on this stat as a way to be "WINNING!!!".  You will need to balance this stat with stamina.  I have however found through trial and error that this stat is a very good one to improve over stamina at first. I usually shoot for a dodge rating of atleast 30%, in bear form, before I start tossing in a few stam gems in my gear.  Now, your best way of getting dodge is to grab as much agility as you can.  Dodge just gives you dodge rating, but agility gives you 2 AP while in form, 1% Crit per 324.85, 1% Dodge (pre-DR) per 243.58.  So you can see that agility is a far more helpful stat then straight dodge.

Stamina - Stamina, this is what I consider to be a tricky stat.  Every tank out there will tell you that having a large health pool feels good, that it helps you to feel like you can do about anything.  This is totally not the case.  If you have a huge health pool and little avoidance/damage mitigation, you will likely drop like a sack of potatoes very quickly, no matter how good the healer is. Once I got my dodge rating up to 30%, I worked on getting my stamina up so that I had a health pool of about 138k health in bear form.  Now I know that this does not seem like a lot, but remember, the more you avoid taking damage, the less health you need to stay alive.

Mastery - This is a very good stat to work on next.  This is your damage mitigation stat.  This stats works with your Savage Defenses.

Savage Defense: Each time you deal a non-periodic critical strike while in Bear Form, you have a 50% chance to gain Savage Defense, absorbing damage equal to 35% of your attack power for 10 sec.).  

Your mastery for bears reads "Increases the damage absorbed by your savage defense ability by 32%. Each point of Mastery increases the absorb by an additional 4%.".  So as you can see, this brings a very nice amount of damage mitigation to the table.

Critical Strike - Crit, well, this is purely a threat stat.  The harder you hit them, the more threat you generate.  It's much like when dps have huge crits and you can see them climbing the threat meters quickly.  It works the same for you.  Although this is a nice stat for threat, it is the second to last you wanna work on.

Haste - This is a stat you DO NOT want. Any and all haste should be reforged in to dodge rating. For a tank, it's not how fast you can hit them, it's all about generating threat through avoiding damage and other attacks in your arsenal to generate the threat.

Now, through my personal experiences, I have found that if you follow this guideline, you will find that feral tanking will go far smoother then most would lead you to believe. Remember, avoidance is a huge part of staying alive, not just your health pool.  The more damage you can avoid/mitigate, the less damage you will take, the happier your healer will be and the more confident you will be since you will tend to find healers saying how easy you are to heal.

Next post I'll talk about the current tanking build and glyphs as well as enchants for tanking.

Keep up the good work bears and remember, we gotta show those other tank classes how tanking is really done!

Can we go?

So I queued up for a nice heroic run today after having several successful and fun runs (I know, can you believe it.) and I got in to Lost City.  I like this place, I like the pulls, I like the bosses and even the layout.  It's one of my favorite dungeons in Cataclysm.  However, there always ends up being 1 thing that makes a nice set of runs stumble a bit.  Today it was a frost DK that queued in a dps.  Now mind you, there is nothing wrong with them at all.  I like DKs, but this guy started off the run with a bang.  After he "accidentally auto ran" in to the first pull while the healer was still buffing up, the healer asked for a moment to turn off some addons due to bad lag.  No problem, I perfect the healer to be healing me when I need it, not 3 seconds after I needed it, lol.  So the healer goes offline to turn off stuff and about 5 seconds later we get, "This should not be taking this long." from the DK.  I though, wow really?  This from the person that pulled the first group with his/her face is now complaining?  After a couple more complaints about "how long this is taking"  which was only about 2 mins by this time, I kindly said "Feel free to bail if it's taking too long.".

OMG, you'd think that I just killed his family.  Starts talking in chat about how rude that was and whispering me about how rude I am and that that was totally uncalled for.  I responded that I was only being honest and if we were taking too long, then maybe he would be happier in a different group.  The hunter in my group then chimed in with "Well, impatience is rude as well.".  I love that guy, he's a good friend and guildie and doesn't usually say anything unless it is really deserved.  by this time, the healer has come back online, apologized again having to turn stuff off and was obviously a bit shocked what he came in to. I had to pst him to let him know that it was really not his fault, the DK was just out of line and no one else minded. Finally, we started back up and were on our way.

After 1 boss fight, the DK makes fun of the hunter and laughs at him because he lost a roll on a polearm to me.  My bud and I laughed about it abit in pst and just moved on.  But after the 2nd boss kill, the DK began to talk to us as if we had known him his entire life and were interested in everything he had to say.  He began talking about the nachos he was eating and other odd bits about his life and what was going on.  This totally through us off as a bunch of "????" started flying though whispers.  We get to the last boss and the DK dies almost right away from standing in the green swirls that usually mean "don't stand here or you die", you know, standard Blizzard meanings.  We down the boss and rez the DK while we loot.  No sooner is he up then he drops group.  not a "thanks",  "bye", "get bent", "you guys suck"....nothing.  At the very least, this gave me a great subject to put here in my blog.  I just don't understand people like this.  Starts off a total PITA and by the end acts like nothing ever happened and everything it happiness and light.  Talk about deserving of the "insane" title.

Ok, so where is the bears archaeology item?

I was going through the list of items you can make through archaeology in wow and I noticed something.  Besides all the really nice and fun items you can get, including a very awesome AQ style bug mount, I noticed there were tanking items on the list.  The 2 handed sword Zin'Rokh is an amazing Death Knight tanking weapon and the Extinct Turtle Shell is great for Warriors and Paladins.  So where is the great bear item?  Unless I am missing something, which is entirely possible, there isn't one. I was very disappointed about this.  Looks like for the moment, bears get the shaft again. However.....

Here is my idea to fix this.  Give us a weapon that will be perfectly suited for almost primarily bears.  A new weapon that will strike fear in the hearts of our enemies and cause people to write songs about us.  Blizzard, give us......The Scythe of Elune!  It has been lost to history forever, an amazingly powerful weapon used by druids ages past to try to help "lost" druids only to result in the formation of the Worgen race.  This to me makes it a perfect item for bear tanks.  Other races could in fact use it as hunters and a few others tend to like the same stuff bears do.  This would make it so that others could make use of the item which would make it a good archaeology item.  I feel that it is time to bring the Scythe of Elune back in to being, and what better way then through archaeology!

Bear tanks are back baby.....

So as many feral tanks can tell you, when we got patch 4.0, a lot of changes were made to bears. They removed the ability to spam swipe, which was great for rounding up lots of mobs, by giving it a 6 second cooldown.  This felt odd to me as I also had a Death Knight Tank and a low level pally tank.  Both of these tanks still had very nice AoE attacks that they could use, some in a short rapid fire style, while the bear lost its good AoE attack for the most part. They changed talent around in the trees and just generally made it a totally different game for feral tanking. Sure we were still bears and had large health pools, but so much had changed that a lot of us felt that that's all we had going for us.  Many I had talked to then and now, as well as myself, felt that with all these changes and after trying to make them work for some time, felt it was time to hang up the tank gear and play a new spec.  Most seemed to go in to the balance tree while there were some that went in to the resto tree (lol, resto tree.).

But, with the coming of patch 4.1, feral tanks got a few needed changes.  One of the more notable was swipe, Blizzard dropped it's cooldown from 6 seconds to 3.  This might not sound like much, but with Thrash, a second AoE attack still on it's 6 second cooldown, this gave us a nice stagger to any need to use AoE hits to hold stray mobs.  They also did a major overhaul to our damage mitigation mechanics as stated in the official 4.1 patch notes:

"Savage Defense has been redesigned slightly. Instead of a single charge absorption, it now places an absorption effect on the druid absorbing up to 35% of the druid's attack power (modified by mastery, if applicable) in damage and lasting 10 seconds. There are no longer any charges on the effect."

To me, the charging effect was a real pain.  With this new setup, it makes it nice ans smooth and, as most healers will say they like it, predicable.  Giving the healer predicable about a damage incoming is a good thing as is reduces the amount spiky damage and the amount of "OMG, I CAN'T HEAL FAST ENOUGH!!!!" situations.

I think I can speak for most druid tanks when I say thanks you Blizzard for listening to us.  We love being bears, we love getting smashed in the face as we protect our groups.  We really missed it and I for one and very glad that we got some changes made to the spec which gives us a more viable feel and place in the tanking world. As many people I know have noticed, bears kinda dropped off the face of Azeroth shortly after the big changes took place.  However....

Bear tanks are back baby!!!

Life Happens....

I just wanted to take a moment to apologize for the lack of posts for the last couple of days.  I've been dealing with my fathers health and going back and forth to the hospital.  He is fine now and all settled back in at his home and doing well.  I also wanna take a moment to say that I have great guildies!  I'm currently the only reliable tank in the guild and everyone has been totally understanding about me not being available the last few days and been very supportive. It makes this game great when you get to play with such good people.

If you don't know, just ask.

So I'm sure you have all had this situation happen, probably in the same place too.  I get in to a group for H Blackrock Caverns, not my favorite place but not too bad (just glad it wasn't Grim Batol).  Kill the first trash, down the first boss pretty easy.  All is going nice and smooth.  We kill the next trash, still smooth.  Now we are at the next boss.  I have the rogue block the middle beam, feral druid block the right and mage the left while I tank the boss between the rogue and druid cat.  I always make sure to ask "Everyone know what to do with their target?" to which the healer replied "Ummm, heal him?" ( I love a touch of comedy in a run, lol). I got a yes across the board so  I made the pull and everyone jumped in to position quickly.  Interrupting the fear and doing good so far......until the druid turns in to a giant freakin mob bent on killing us, followed by the rogue.  Ok, we all come back in, rebuff and remark the mobs.  I charge in, position the boss........giant freakin mobs, again.  Come back in, rebuff, remark, charge in......HUGE BEAR KILLING MOBS.....AGAIN!!!!!!   After every wipe, there are a ton of excuses from "I don't know what happened, I was right there." to "I was feared" (which could account for 1 mob, not 2).  So we come back in and I, as nicely as I can being as how the cat was a guildie of mine and having the GM going off on you is usually a bad thing, I like to keep it down as much as I can, say, "ok, just so we are all on the same page, block beam until you get 70-80 stacks of debuff, get out of beam, wait for debuff to tick off, get back in beam, rinse & repeat.".  Everyone says "ok", so we rebuff and I remark.  I make sure everyone is ready and then I charge in as I have done for several tries.....and what do you know, we down her with no effort at all.

Look people, if you don't know the detail of a fight, just ask. If you are afraid you will look dumb because you don't know, you will look even worse after you have killed you party members. People don't mind filling you in about the details of a fight, not everyone has done them all.  But people get a bit mad having to spend gold on repairs that could have been prevented had you just said something, not to mention wasted gold on any food, pots or elixirs that were used and wasted on a fight that ended in death due to lack of knowledge. So please, for the love of all that is good and right in this world.....

If you don't know, just ask.