Nerf Bat...run for your furry lives....

It seems, that we bears are in too good a place right now and on Beta. In a blue post about tanking, the are changing our Survival Instincts to 50% from 60% and moving the cooldown from 5 minutes to 2 minutes. Okay, that isn't so bad.

But wait there's more.

The are also lowering our stamina bonus from 20% to 10% and our Heart of the Wild stamina bonus from 10% to 6% so that we are closer in health to other plate tanks. Um, What? I thought the whole point was that bears got more health because we lacked other abilities that the plate tanks have. Can anyone say parry? This is a very large nerf for us, like 14% of our current health.

As it stands right now, I don't have that much more health than my off tanks. Fully buffed in ICC10 (with the extra 30%), I have 78,600 so, if I'm losing 14%, that puts me at 67,596 which is well below my off tanks which have around 75,000 and they have parry. Am I missing something? Are all the plate tanks going to lose health with 4.0.3 and I didn't see it?

Growl! I'm not a very happy bear!

Tanking and Guild Questions

So I updated the look of the site, it had been a while and I got my new header image from Pike so if you need one and like mine, I would head over there and speak with her! I really really love mine!

On the bear front, I am tanking nightly with my guild and I have to say, other than the sad, sad AOE situation, bear tanking is doing fine. I have this pally friend who swears she would rather heal me than anyone else, and that is good to hear! I am not really taking much damage and single target threat is doing pretty good.

I have also been tanking on my pally since the patch, and while she is only 75, I have to say that pally tanking has changed a great deal. Consecration on a 30 cooldown? Wow, and now I have to build up Holy Power? It is truly a different way to tank! And I'm topping the dps charts for AOE pulls! But I kind of enjoy it. :D I am still trying to get used to the new rotation, but I seem to be doing quite a bit of threat and damage while staying full on mana and so I am happy with pally tanking.

I have also run some dungeons on my 75 DK tank, and since she was frost before, blood tanking is a bit different as well. However, I am still not having issues holding threat for the most part. Occasionally some dps will unload on a target that is off on the fringes and start taking some hard hits, but I will taunt and grab the mob back. And according to my healer I'm not taking that much damage so that is nice!

My guild is fixing to set up a group 1 and a group 2 10 man raid group. I see some issues with this since we really only have a couple of good tanks and a couple of good healers on main toons. If we do it on different nights, we would have no problems since most of us have at least 3 well geared 80s. I have one toon with GS over 5600 and 2 toons over 6100 and I am competent at all three. The real issue will be how people who don't make group 1 feel. I have run into this before in guilds where there is an elite group and a not so elite group. The second group ends up resenting the first group and it causes nothing but drama. And I really don't want drama.

Add that we as a guild are trying to decide if we want to change how loot is done or not. When we ran 25s, we used dkp, which I liked because you showed up, got your points and could spend them. If you didn't show up, you didn't get points and I could outbid your ass for a piece of gear if you were there because I had more points. :D The current debate is whether to keep dkp or to go to a /roll system. The problem I see with a /roll system is that people who show up every week could really get screwed pretty quickly if their rolls just suck. I have had it happen to me a lot in our last guild. I mean, if we bring person X one week to fill in a spot and he gets the highest roll and the loot over person A and then the next week, person X can't make it so we bring person Y and they get the highest roll and get the loot instead of person A, that would piss me off.

No loot system is perfect, I know that, but does anyone have a good suggestion for a loot system they use?

Well, keep it wild and furry!

Bear Tanking

I have looked at several websites (EJ, Think Tank) and I'm pretty sure I'm using the right rotation, but man, I am having a hell of a time holding threat off of this one particular warrior buddy of mine. I will just call him Bay. Is he well geared? Yes. Is he a good warrior? Yes. Does he wait for a count of like 10 before engaging? Yes. And he still catches up to me in threat. Damn it Bay, you are killing me! On Sindy, he even waits until after the first air phase to start dpsing, and he still ends up in second place but at least he doesn't catch me when he does this.

My current rotation is FFF, Mangle, Lacerate x 3, Pulverize, Lacerate x 3, Maul, Pulverize, Lacerate x3, Maul, Pulverize, repeat with Mangles thrown in as they proc. I only Maul if I have a lot of rage, and I spam lacerate a lot even when I have a stack of three if it is a single target and I don't need to refresh Pulverize yet and I don't really need Swipe. For AOE, I spend a lot of time tab targeting to put Lacerates up and using Swipe and Maul.

I also have quite a few agi/stam gems instead of just stam so that my threat would be higher and I am typically between 18000 and 30000 TPS so I know I'm doing okay but it is very frustrating.

I have to say that overall, bear tanking is in a good place. I have spoken to the healers in my guild and they much prefer to heal me than our warrior tanks. My dodge is up to 54% and my mastery is at 14% so I'm sitting pretty good there. I don't really take much damage to speak of at all.

I really do miss being able to spam swipe and hold tons of AOE threat, I always found that lots of fun. I find it interesting that Blizz has once again made it more difficult (i.e. thought provoking) to tank given that everyone is always short on tanks for Heroics. Not that I mind in the slightest, but I think the number of "bad tanks" is about to go up again since most classes have had their AOE threat reduced and we will be using CC again and it will take more effort on the tanks part to make sure everything goes well.

Keep it wild and furry!

Glyphs

Get them now before tomorrow otherwise you are very likely to be paying at least double for them. I don't know if the patch will actually come tomorrow or not, but it is better to be safe than sorry.

I personally have an inscriptionist and will spend this evening making lots and lots of glyphs that I know will still be there tomorrow. You may ask why I am making them early. Well, because from everything I have read, creating glyphs will cost 3 times the inks that they do now. I have a stockpile of inks at the current moment, but that could get depleted quite quickly if everything costs 3 inks instead of 1. I have 500 of each type of ink except Ink of the Sea of which I have 1500. I have spent a lot of time and money getting ready for this and the last thing I want is to cut my self short. So, make your glyphs tonight!

Been a while....

I haven't posted in a while because lots of people are posting about the changes coming up in Cata. I do however have a few thoughts about it myself.

I think the new glyph system should be interesting. I like that we have the Prime glyphs for min/maxing and Major glyphs for other good stuff that we never got to have, and then the minor glyphs for the misc. stuff that is useful, just to make things a little nicer. I was checking out the druid glyphs and noticed they don't have the glyph of growling. I hope that it gets changed so that our growl miss chance is based on melee hit instead of spell hit or they give us the glyph back.

And I think the masterys will make feral a bit more fun to play. Especially cat, which is good because I don't get to tank nearly as much as I used to. However, looking at bears for cata, I think they sound like they are going to be in a good spot for tanking. From what I have read, they are producing quite a bit of threat and their damage mitigation is still quite nice.

I also can't wait to make a troll druid, I think their skins look awesome! It reminds me of the 80s! Stay away from the VooDoo!