Furry Bear Ass

Frenzied Regen

2010-12-22T13:05:00.002-06:00

Okay, so I have been tanking heroics for a week or so now and they are pretty tough. I don't mind this though, but I realized last night, that when my healer goes down and I pop Frenzied Regeneration, it wasn't working. A wonderful friend of mine pointed out that I was glyphed, so it isn't going to convert rage to health but instead increases healing done. Okay, fine. But why when my health was at 8% didn't it at least put me up to 30% like it is supposed to? It didn't increase my health again when I was at 11%.

So, basically, having it glyphed is pointless. It isn't raising my health, and it isn't giving me health back like I thought it was. I am removing the glyph when I get home but I want to give you some numbers a friend of mine came up with while we were discussing this. I'm quoting from an email chain a group of us were having.

If numbers would make you feel better about the whole thing though, then here's my best guess at it:

(a) Glyphed

in 3 minutes, for 20 seconds your healers get 30% more effective heals. If used optimally, let's say healers can do 10k hps. This will give 60k bonus heals over the 20 seconds. 30% to maximum health doesn't change this number, but healer output will.

(b) Non-Glyphed

if used once when your health drops to 10%, the average bear has about 140k health, so that's at 14k health.

- first, health increases to 182k maximum
- second bear gains 40k health immediately (to bring them to 54k health or 30% of their maximum)
- over the next 20 seconds the bear will gain up to 60% of their maximum health, or about 109k health.

So, non-glyphed, you're looking at about 149k health if used at about 10% health in an emergency, or only 109 k health if used any other time.

Glyphed, in order to do more than that, healers would need to be able to put out about 24.3k hps.

So, maybe you're right, maybe a healer can do that in optimal situations, but non glyphed is 109-149 k health that doesn't use any of a healer's mana, vs a healer needing to put out 24.3k hps in order to keep up with it.

So looking at the numbers there, I have no idea why on earth I would ever want to glyph it!

Just something to consider out there for your furry backsides! If we take away our only way to regen health on our own, in the case of a boss being almost dead and your healer dying... You will do. And just for grins, here is a conversation from last night during a guild heroic.

Wife has just died.
I click frenzied regen.
Me: "My frenzied regen is not WORKING?!?!?!"
Wife: "WHAT???"
Me: "I am clicking it and it's doing NOTHING!!!"
Wife: "Then you are f*cked babe, cause I can't help you"
Me: "Oh it's ok now. I'm dead."

Finally! LK 10 Down!

2010-11-09T21:44:00.001-06:00

We got 25 man LK months ago, but for whatever reason, 10 man had eluded us. So this was sweet for us.

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

2010-10-29T12:49:00.009-05:00

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

2010-10-28T16:40:00.007-05:00

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

2010-10-22T10:35:00.003-05:00

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

2010-10-11T16:31:00.003-05:00

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....

2010-10-07T20:05:00.003-05:00

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!

Where is your set bonus?

2010-09-03T15:44:00.002-05:00

So I have been playing my druid in our 25 man groups and there is another druid who has been doing the tanking. Now I find this interesting because said bear has not purchased the T10 pieces and has used his emblems for other vendor pieces. Here is what bothers me about this, I asked him why he hasn't gotten the set pieces and he said he had not had enough emblems but looking at his cloak, belt, idol, trinkets, and offset I know he has had enough to get the 4 piece set. Nor does he even have the Sack of Wonder.

Now, I am not going to tell anyone that they have to have X piece, but damn, it would be nice if he had that extra cooldown. He dies A LOT. I don't know if he just sucks, or manages his cooldowns badly or what. And having spoken with the raid leader, I know why I'm not tanking. My DPS is twice his dps. So we are stuck with him as a tank and me as a kitty. And I have the 4 piece T10 Sanctified set and Heroic Sack of Wonder. I would love to be able to re-gem my T10 for kitty because some of the pieces are delicious for kitty, but I tank on the 10 mans we do and we are doing heroic modes and I want my set bonus.

So I guess I will just continue to collect badges until I have enough to have all the extra pieces I want for kitty. Sigh, but I really just want to be bear!

Starcraft II

2010-08-10T11:18:00.002-05:00

I never played the original, so it is completely new to me but I did try it out on the beta and enjoyed it so I chose to purchase the game. I am having a lot of fun and I have to say the story in the campaign is very nice. I like the cutsceens that you watch and the way the story flows.

I finally got the wife to purchase it last night. Some friends are playing with us and we are playing the multiplayer vs. AI. It is a lot of fun. Not only have I learned about the terran, I am slowly learning how to play zerg too.

If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up!

Wow, I have access again!

2010-08-10T10:54:00.004-05:00

So several months ago, my work blocked access to any blogs and so I couldn't post. I mean, I could in the evenings when I got home, but I rarely had the time. So the good news is that I should be able to post more now that I have access from work again.

To update:

The wife and I have joined another guild, I now raid on my enhancement shaman in 25s every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday nights from 7-11pm. We have cleared ICC 25 and are 9/12 in ICC 25 Heroic. We are still working on Deathwhisper, Sindy and LK. We have also done RS25 but are still working on RS25 Heroic.

I raid on my druid on Saturdays in the GDKP ICC 25 runs and ICC 10 mans and I tank/kitty as needed.

Overall, we are having a lot of fun raiding again, which is nice because it had become a chore in BotH. Sometime all you need is a change of pace!

Rage

2010-04-05T13:25:00.002-05:00

Quote from: Bornakk (Source)
We are going to take the opportunity in Cataclysm to try and fix some of the problems with the Rage mechanic for both warriors and druids. Some of these problems include:

Warriors/druids in the lowest levels of gear can be Rage-starved.
Warriors/druids in the highest levels of gear no longer have to manage their Rage when it becomes infinite.
Warrior/druid tanks lose Rage income as they improve their gear and take less damage.
The gameplay of warrior and druid tanks loses a lot of depth when massive boss hits means never having to manage Rage.
Heroic Strike and Maul are effective, but tedious abilities for using up extra Rage.
In general, warriors and druids don’t have enough control over their Rage.

To resolve these issues, Rage will be normalized in Cataclysm. This will make the Rage gained by characters more consistent and avoid drastic differences between low-end and high-end gear.

The concept of normalized Rage may leave a negative impression on some veteran players, as we tried it once before in The Burning Crusade and it wasn't successful, resulting in them feeling weakened. However, we think that the concept is still sound -- it was just that the previous implementation didn't balance the values correctly, leading to players being Rage-starved. That is not the goal. As part of the change, we want to give warriors and druids a lot of ways to control their rage, so even in the worst-case scenarios they won’t feel like they lack the resource to do their job.

Here are some of the ways the Rage mechanic will change in Cataclysm:

1) Rage is no longer generated based on damage done by auto-attacks. Instead, each auto-attack provides a set amount of Rage, and off-hand weapons will generate 50% of the Rage main hands do. This amount is based on a constant formula which factors in the base swing speed of the weapon. This means the Rage gained should be averaged out between fast and slow weapons. The constant formula also gives us the ability to easily increase the rage gained if it feels too low (or reduce it if is too high). We are also implementing the following mechanics, which will still allow rage to improve to some extent as you improve gear:

If the attack is a critical strike, it will generate 200% Rage.
Haste will accelerate swing times to generate Rage faster.

2) Rage from damage taken will no longer be based on a standard creature of the character’s level, but instead will based on the health of the warrior or druid. Again, there is a constant that is multiplied by the rage generated in order to allow for fine-tuning. This calculation ignores all damage reduction from armor, absorption, avoidance, block, or similar mechanics, so improving your gear will not reduce Rage gained.

3) We will provide warriors and druids with more instant sources of rage. For example, the warrior shouts are changing to work more like the death knight ability Horn of Winter. Instead of Battle Shout consuming Rage, it will generate Rage but have a short cooldown. Both classes will have additional methods to generate Rage in an emergency or bleed off Rage when they have too much.

4) All “on next swing” attacks in Cataclysm are being removed. Heroic Strike and Maul will be instant swings that cost a variable amount of Rage. For example, imagine Heroic Strike costs between 10 and 30 Rage. You must have at least 10 Rage to use the attack, but it will consume all available Rage up to a maximum of 30. Any Rage consumed above the minimum will cause the ability to hit harder, and in some cases much harder. We will tune the ability so that it’s generally not a good idea to hit it when you have low Rage (unless everything else is somehow on cooldown) but becomes a more attractive button the higher your Rage.

We understand this change may be scary for many players, but keep in mind that the constants in the formulas for gaining Rage will give us the ability to make quick adjustments if we feel Rage generation is too low. Our goal is for each character's Rage to not be always high or always low, but rather a resource that needs to be managed properly by the player.

So my first thought was gee, could you fix the problems where I can go from 0 rage to 70 rage in a split second first? There are times I'm tanking a boss the rage generation right now should be giving me rage more smoothly. But I can go from having absolutely none to full in a split second. That is a pain. Also, if you are running heroics in higher end gear, I can't seem to get any rage, things die too quickly for me to get enough rage. Not all the time mind you, but often enough I find it irritating

So I'm hoping this new system will help those issues. I don't mind the change as long as I don't end up rage starved all the time

Also, the comment about Haste accelerating swing times. I thought it did that now? So how is that a change?

This is definitely going to be something to watch.

Quick Auctions 3

2010-04-01T09:49:00.003-05:00

On another note, in January, I only had 1000g because I bought a Traveler's Mammoth. I am up to 38,000g and some change this morning. I have found some really nice advice from the guys at Call to Auction podcast . I have been making a great deal of money selling glyphs and arctic fur and gems. Anyway, I just thought I would share that bit of info in case anyone needs a bit more gold. The guys at the Call to Auction never explained how to set up the addons they use, they just mentioned them so I thought I would give a quick rundown.

I have the following professions:

Herbalism

Mining

Skinning

Alchemy

Engineering

Inscription

Jewelcrafting

Leatherworking

Tailoring

And I'm thinking of leveling a blacksmith, I'm just not sure yet! And I don't have enchanting because my wife does.

But all in all, I can make quite a bit of spare change since my alchemist can make gems, my JC can cut them and then I can sell them for about 240 gold. On my glyphs, I typically have 350 of them up on the AH at the same time and the lowest I will price them is 10g and the highest is 60g.

I do this buy using Quick Auctions 3. You can also get it from Curse but I can't link that from work. It is a nice addon that allows you to post bulk items.

Open QA3 by typing /qa config . To use it, you create a group, I am going to use glyphs as an example so I called mine Glyphs. Then under the management tab for Glyphs, you can set up what your threshold is (the least you want to sell it for, I used 10g) and you can set it to fallback to a certain price if there are none up (I used 60g). You can also set the price to undercut by(10s). Now you can go to the Add Items tab and add all the glyphs in your bags to this group. If you accidentally add something you don't want, use the Delete Items tab to remove it.

Now, this by itself is nice, but when you open the auction window, go to the Auctions tab and you can press Post and it will post all your items for you while scanning the AH for each item before it posts.

Once that is done, click Summary at the top. It opens up a separate window. This window allows you to click on a category, I'm going to use glyphs again here. So click Glyphs and then click Get Data! What this now does is scan the AH for every possible glyph and it finds out what it is posted for and lists it by class. And now if you see a glyph you want to make, you can click on it multiple times to set how many you want to make (right click if you add too many to remove). And you can do this for as many glyphs as you want. It lists them in descending order per class, but note, if there are none of that specific glyph listed on the AH, it will be at the bottom of the list for that class with ...... instead of a price. You should make those since there aren't any and you can set your price. If you have any glyphs listed, it will show how many you have listed and if it is green, you are the lowest price, if it is red, you have been undercut.

Now that you have your list of what you want to make, go to your character that makes glyphs. Open up your Inscription window. In the top right corner there is a button that says QA, click it. This now brings up a window with your list of glyphs that you said you wanted to make and at the bottom of this list is the supplies you will need to make all the glyphs. Go get the supplies you need from your bank or mail or wherever and then just click the top glyph and it will make however many you specified. Click the next glyph listed to make the next one when the first is finished and so on. This way you don't have to dig thru your crafting window to make the glyphs you need, you can just click on them in the QA window that opens and when the window is empty, you are done!

Another nice feature that QA has is the ability to open all your mail. Now understand, if I have 350 glyphs posted every 12 hours, I get a lot returned too. But if you open the QA config menu, there is a checkbox that says Auto Refresh Mail, check this. Now when you go to the mail box, there is a "Open All" button at the bottom. If you click it, it will open all 50 mail in your mail box and wait for the countdown timer to count down to 0, refresh your inbox and then continue opening your mail. This way, I can walk up to the mail box, click open all and get up and walk away from the computer for a couple of minutes and come back and all my mail will be in my bags! Very handy feature!

Well, I hope this helps somebody make some extra gold! I know it has helped me. You can use this same method for gems, leather or anything else you want to sell!

And I'm back

2010-04-01T09:34:00.001-05:00

About a month ago, my work instituted a new web filter and therefore I could no longer read any blogs at work or access any WoW related websites. This is my first test at posting to my blog using the email address I recently set up. Hopefully all goes as planned.

On the WoW front.

I am back to raiding 25 mans with Band of the Hawk, which is nice, this is where I want to be. I have gotten a couple of nice drops along the way. The other interesting thing is that I'm in the process of training a couple of new tanks for raiding. They are coming along nicely, one is a DK and one is a warrior. This is good since recently a different warrior tank has stepped down from raiding.

Also last night, my 10 man finally downed Putricide and that was exciting! Of the three 10 mans our guild currently has, ours was the first to bring him down. And he dropped the really nice armor pen head piece that I think I'm going to use for cat!

I still love u

2010-02-05T13:08:00.003-06:00

So I sign onto Ylee last night after my raid to run a quick random heroic, and I get tossed into Old Kingdom. Which is not my favorite by a long shot. But I go in and try to buff people only to realize that my healer is a druid with the improved mark. I'm thinking sweet, this will be cool.

So we all move up and I pull the first two adds and pull them close to the far stairs and pull the other two spiders that also pat across as they come out that way. No big deal right? Well, I hadn't realized that the tree only had like 14K mana so when my health drops kind of low, I pop survival thinking nothing of it other than maybe the tree wasn't paying attention. So after we clear that pull, I looked at the tree's mana pool and then check his gearscore and find out it is 2240. Ouch, I will have to be more careful. No big deal.

So then I pull the next threesome, the one with the spell-finger. I have aggro on all of them but the spell-finger is still casting shadowbolts around and the healer is again having issues healing and I have to use frenzied regen.

Well, we finish that off and go downstairs where I pull the one patting group over to the right, and again I have the spell-finger targeted and am clearly in the lead for threat but shadowbolts go out cause I only have one interrupt and it is on a minute cooldown. Then the shaman somehow pulls the other group as well, so I run around and grab everyone, and I'm low on health again so I pop survival instincts again and of course it takes me a second to get aggro on everything so a few folks get hit with some shadowbolts because apparently the rogue doesn't know to interrupt, but no one dies. But I get aggro rather quickly and we burn everything down. When everything is dead, I look at Recount and I'm top in dps.

At this point, I sit down and eat since the healer has no mana. While I'm sitting there the healer says, "Tank, WTF u suck"

I reply with, "uh, excuse me?" To which he says "but I still love u".

I'm speechless. I suck? I didn't pull the extra group, I ran and got aggro on everything when it was pulled and on every trash pull I have had to use survival instincts, frenzied regen, or lifeblood and barkskin and I suck?

Now keep in mind, I only do 10 mans on my bear, but I have over 30K armor, 46K health and 40%ish dodge in a 5 man. And it was Old Kingdom. And why am I leading dps when there is a boomkin, rogue and enhancment shammy in the group? How exactly is it that I suck?

Normal 10 Man Bear Gear for Patch 3.3.2

2010-02-03T16:27:00.009-06:00

Okay, I'm going to list the gear that is BIS for a bear who isn't doing 25 mans or heroic modes. This is my preliminary list, and there may be things that fall from the Frostwing Halls that I don't have listed.

You are going to want the 4 piece T10 bonus, so I have included those items. DO NOT BUY THE CHEST PIECE WITH EMBLEMS! You won't be able to get the Sanctified sets because you would have to get tokens from 25 mans, but you can get the level 251 set.

Head:

Lasherweave Headguard

Neck:

Marrowgar's Scratching Choker

I know that it has parry on it and it doesn't do us much good, but the stam and dodge are very good.

Shoulders:

Lasherweave Shoulderpads

Back:

Sentinel's Winter Cloak

Chest:

Ikfirus's Sack of Wonder

This is included because it is BOE and it is a damn good item! Buy it!

Wrist:

Bracers of Swift Death

and

Vambraces of the Frost Wyrm Queen

are pretty darn close. The bracers have a bit more stam, but the vambraces have more agility. Since the bracers are crafted and you can get those easier, I would go that direction.

Hands:

Lasherweave Handgrips

Waist:

Vengeful Noose

Legs:

Lasherweave Legguards

Feet:

Footpads of Impending Death

Ring 1:

Ashen Band of Endless Courage

Ring 2:

Clutch of Fortification

Trinket 1:

Unidentifiable Organ

Trinket 2:

Corroded Skeleton Key

Weapon:

Lightborn Spire

This is from the Battered Hilt quest line. Do the ICC 5 mans until you get this drop or buy it but get this weapon.

Idol:

Honestly, this would be the last piece I spend emblems on.

Idol of Mutilation is still a very good idol and it would be better for pulls with multiple mobs because it can proc off of swipe.

Idol of the Crying Moon is much better for single target tanking since you know you will keep your Lacerate up.

This winds up looking like this: Ylee

Shaman Best in Slot (Non Heroic)

2010-02-02T13:35:00.010-06:00

Crafted:

Earthsoul Boots

Reputation:

Ashen Band of Endless Destruction

From Emblems of Frost:

Waistband of Despair

Bizuri's Totem of Shattered Ice

From Emblems of Frost plus a Token:

Sanctified Frost Witch's Helm

Sanctified Frost Witch's Hauberk

Sanctified Frost Witch's Gloves

Sanctified Frost Witch's Shoulderpads

From Lord Marrowgar:

Bulwark of Smouldering Steel

Frozen Bonespike

From Gunship:

Ring of Rapid Ascent

(if you are hit capped)

Amulet of the Silent Eulogy

(if you aren't hit capped)

From Festergut:

Plaguebringer's Stained Pants

(note these are cloth)

From Rotface:

Bloodsunder's Bracers

Dislodged Foreign Object

From Prince Valanar:

Valanar's Other Signet Ring

(if you aren't hit capped)

From Blood-Queen Lana'thel:

Blood Queen's Crimson Choker

(if you are hit capped)

From Valithria:

Frostbinder's Shredded Cape

From Sindragosa:

Phylactery of the Nameless Lich

Which sums up to be:

http://www.wowhead.com/?profile=20772717

Which way did she go?

2010-02-02T11:32:00.003-06:00

So, after a while of looking at things in my guild and us struggling with Marrowgar 25, I decided to switch things up.

My alt Shockylee, 80 Elemental Shaman, joined a more serious 25 man raiding guild and I'm loving it. I don't mind DKP and we are downing bosses. I raid on her on Tuesday/Thursday.

Ylee has stayed put in my guild and I'm still running my 10 mans on Wednesday nights but we are struggling with Saurafang given we don't have decent ranged dps nor a regular disc priest. Argh.

Yleedead, my 80 Disc Priest is now raiding on Sundays with another 10 man ICC.

Now the issue is that this has somewhat put me at odds with some of the other officers in my guild. But the thing is, sometimes you just can't continue to beat your head against the wall and expect different results. We have tried running 25 mans for as long as I have been in guild, and we have never been overly successful. We get good members, the raid for a while, then they leave for greener raiding pastures. It happens. I'm just wanting to see more of the bosses before the next expansion. It will never happen given that all we have allotted per week is 1.5 hours for 25 mans. That is a joke. So, I'm beginning to think it will never happen in BotH.

I'm having a lot of fun on Shockylee. It is nice to be able to just show up and raid. I don't have to worry about anything but being a good raider. Non Entity is the new guild, and while they aren't the best on server, they are much more serious about raiding and I like that. We are set up to raid between 6-9 hours per week for 25 mans and I'm happy about that.

So, as for feral stuff. I'm working on putting together a gear list that is 10 man normal content exclusive. All the lists I see always have 25 man mixed in and heroic mode in there too. I want to know what gear to look for if you aren't in the most cutting edge guild and you are just doing 10 man normals. So look for that in the next few days.

Also, you may notice a few more shaman related posts soon. I have noticed there are relatively few shaman blogs out there so I will be doing my research and seeing what I can find.

In the meantime, keep it furry!

WoW Jackasses Beware!

2010-01-15T14:52:00.002-06:00

So, I don't know if most people have heard so I'm hoping to spread the news....

There is a new site to submit players that pull Jackass/Ninja moves while in a PUG.

http://wowjackass.com/

Check it out!

Submit one if you know one, or check out your Battlegroup so you have an idea of who might be an ass!

The more you know......

The Bear and the Lock....

2009-12-18T11:23:00.004-06:00

Once upon a time in a universe far away, there was a handsome bear who liked to help rid the world of evil and would get right up in their face doing it. Well, Ylee was really a druid who shapeshifts, but really, he thought of himself mainly as a bear. And on this day, he choose to go to free slaves and kill evil undead in a place called Pit of Saron......

He chose some of his best friends who had seen him through many dark and dangerous places.

Two warriors, Gargle and Vagrant; his wife who is also a druid in the form of a tree, Splinter; and a warlock, Zanex.

So the group meets up at the opening of the cave to defeat this new evil. Ylee checks to make sure that everyone is ready and they proceed in.

"Wow there are a lot of undead here" Ylee mutters. "I guess it is a good thing they are all mindless or we could be in trouble".

Gargle and Vagrant are looking the undead over and discussing how to kill them the best. Splinter is making sure her leaves are in place so her healing spells are most powerful in case they need them. Zanex is cackling quietly to his imp minion while straightening his robes.

The group starts forward to the first group of undead and Ylee says "Well, you all know the drill, give me a couple of seconds to round them all up so they don't hurt you guys." Ylee prides himself on keeping his friends safe from harm while they do most of the damage and kill the undead minions of the Lich King. And so Ylee roars and charges ahead to get the monsters in the first pack to attack him so his friends would be safe when they started damaging the undead. All goes as planned and the first group dies quickly.

The next group is tricky because if Ylee and his friends aren't careful, they could accidentlly attract the attention of another two groups of nearby undead and drakes and their riders.

"Let me try and grab these guys and bring them back to y'all" Ylee says. Gargle and Vagrant think that this sounds like the best idea. So Ylee runs up and attacks the main guy on the drake and begins to run back to the group but somehow, the rider starts running directly for Zanex. Ylee notices this and starts running toward the rider with all the other evils trailing behind him but before he can growl menacingly at the rider, Zanex gives a howl of fear and creatures start running around in different directions.

Ylee angrily growls and then the worst thing happens, several of the scattering creatures run into the other two groups, so now instead of 2 creatures to try and kill, the group has over 10. Ylee frantically runs around trying to gather up the evil creatures to save his friends. Splinter is casting healing spells so fast you can barely see her branches move and Gargle and Vagrant are running behind Ylee trying to kill the creatures as quick as they can. During this time Zanex recovers and is also casting spells killing things.

Miraculously, the group survives but none quite know how.

As soon as all the creatures are dead again, Ylee runs over to Zanex and pushes him over and stands on top of him pinning him to the ground.

"I told you never to cast that spell in a place like this" Ylee yells at Zanex with saliva dripping onto Zanex's face. "You almost killed us! If you have a death wish, let us know now cause Splinter and I don't want to die and I don't want to have to tell Moppy that Gargle died or Mayhem that you died. You can just go home if that is the case!"

Ylee is continuing to stand over Zanex huffing into his face when Zanex whines "But it was coming after me!"

Angrily Ylee responds, "That is because you didn't wait for me to get them into position and truly command their attention. I know you like to brag about your number of kills after a run like this, but I've told you before if you get any of us killed, what good is your number of kills?"

Ylee steps off of Zanex and allows him to stand while saying "The most important thing is that we do our part to rid the world of these undead minions. The number of kills we each get is meaningless if we die in the process only to be resurrected by the Lich King. We work as a team, remember! Try to remember that next time instead of worrying about how many you kill."

Both Gargle and Vagrant stare angrily at Zanex while Splinter is tending to Ylee's wounds.

"Sorry" says Zanex, "I will wait longer next time. I don't want us all to die."

And with this the group continues to kill the undead minions in this place so that hopefully soon, they can make their way to the Lich King and kill him once and for all.

Lord Marrowgar and Lady Deathwhisper

2009-12-17T15:57:00.004-06:00

Lord Marrowgar went down in one shot last night. I have heard thru the grapevine that he was dealing 25 man damage in 10 man mode. That would sort of explain why he was hitting so damn hard.

We also made a couple of attempts at Lady Deathwhisper (LD) but since it was late and none of us had actually read up on the fight too much in advance, it didn't go that smoothly. We only got to phase 2 once out of like 3 tries.

But I have since researched it and I'm going to put down what I know and what we found out in easy terms that I hope I can remember and might help someone else. Everything is for 10 man normal mode. Note: LD has a 10 minute hard enrage timer.

Phase 1

LD has a mana shield up with 3.3 million mana. You have to burn thru that to get to the point where you can damage her. She has no aggro table at this phase so no tank needed. She does cast shadowbolts and death and decay. Everyone should know the main rule of raiding by this point, which is "Don't Stand in Shit" so when you see the green area on the ground, run out of it.

First adds spawn at 15 seconds into the fight and every 40 seconds thereafter from either the right or the left side of the room. Right side group will have 2 adherents and 1 fanatic. Left side group will have 1 adherent and 2 fanatics. Adherents are casters and fanatics are melee. Only one side pops at at time so tanks pick up and melee burn them down. Sometimes LD will reanimate the adds and then they do a lot more damage.

Adherents are casters and when LD reanimates them, they become immune to magical damage, so make sure to have your physical damage tank (bears, warriors, blood DKs) pick them up and kite them around. Melee burn them down.

Fanatics are melee and when LD reanimates them, they become immune to physical damage, so make sure to have your spell damage tank (pallys, Frost DKs, Undead DKs) pick them up and kite them around. Ranged burn them down.

During most of phase 1, have your ranged dps wail on LD and only dps on the adds if you have a reanimated fanatic. Another job that needs to be done during this phase is when LD empowers the adds, someone needs to dispel it.

An adherent that is empowered will cast Shroud of the Occult so melee needs to burn that as quickly as possible to get the shroud down. Run away from everyone if you get the deathchill blast or you damage everyone around you.

A fanatic that is empowered will get Vampiric Might which will heal them to full and he will do more damage. Kite him around if you can't CC him while you wait for the debuff to go away. Tanks can taunt him back and forth while melee kills him. But remember to beware of his cleave as it really hurts.

If you have time between when you take down the groups of adds and the next wave, everyone should be on the boss doing as much dps as you can. Hopefully you will have her mana shield down in at most 6 minutes, to do this, you need at least 9,167 dps on her shield to get it done.

Phase 2

No more adds will spawn during this phase but she will keep casting her D&D. At the beginning of this phase is an aggro wipe so make sure someone announces she is about to start phase 2.

Have your MT pick her up and keep her until the MT gets 2-3 stacks of Touch of Insignificance then have the OT taunt her. Rinse repeat. Also you need to make sure that you have several people who can interrupt her Frostbolts cause they hit like a mac truck.

LD will also raise ghosts during this phase, and the shades will pick a random target and move towards them. If they get in melee range of the target KABOOM. So make sure to keep an eye out for the shades and move away from them until they despawn in a few seconds. Wowhead says that it is melee range of its target, but I can't confirm yet if it is any target in melee range or just the one it has targeted.

Well I hope this guide is helpful and helps you keep your fur clean and shiny!

OMG this rocks

2009-12-16T16:31:00.002-06:00

So, I was reading BBB today and saw this

It was apparently done by Tesh and I must say he freaking rocks!

And while it is a NE druid in the picture, it totally captures the attitude correctly of what I have been thinking.

I love the fact I don't wear plate with all the other guys. I love tanking in the buff so to speak!

However, it is sort of tough in a raid environment because if you are a plate tank, you might have to roll against 1-2 other guys for plate gear. Me, I have to roll against the 5-6 rogues we currently are running with and the 5-6 people who want my weapons. That is the only thing I really hate about the new loot system. Plate tanks still don't have as much competition as us bears for gear. Plate tanks only roll against other plate tanks. Bears roll against rogues and cats. So I'm just saying it can be tough.....

Anyway, I just had to share the picture because it is too awesome!

Working Life....

2009-12-15T14:13:00.003-06:00

Oh, and I found out yesterday morning that my company is going to be bought out by ExxonMobil.

Article

Ugh, I liked my smallish company. So who knows what will happen. I expect to have a job, but will I like it in the long run?

Sigh

Happy Holidays everyone.

ICC

2009-12-15T13:56:00.003-06:00

So the patch has hit and everyone is excited. After my group cleared ToC10 last week, we went and tried ICC10.

Woah! Things didn't go all that well. Our best shot on Marrowgar was 54%. However, I think our biggest issue was we only have 1 ranged person. And for whatever reason, I can't seem to buy a ranged person. When we first walked in, my OT was right next to me and I was still getting 1 shot. Holy cow. I have 32K armor with 25% dodge (after the chill) with 50K health. I don't think that is chump change.

I wasn't expecting to just waltz in there and down him, but I sure wasn't expecting what I got.

And now, every blog I read and most sites talk about clearing the first 4 bosses. And all I can wonder is what have we done wrong that they did right?

Then, I went back on Sunday with my "Alt" group. Me on my Elemental Shammy for dps. And this time we had 3 ranged dps, 2 melee dps, 3 healers and 2 tanks. We ended up moving one of the melee to make a third tank and still the best we got was 38%.

I'm just frustrated. So, instead of running ToC10 this week, I have scheduled ToGC10. Just to try to push the limits of my raiders. But I wonder how much difference that will make. I have pretty decent gear and there aren't any upgrades from ToGC10 for me really. I could upgrade my staff one notch, but otherwise, there isn't much. Same for most of my group. So I know the gear is slightly better, but will it give us the edge to kill Marrowgar?

Anyone have any better suggestions?

T9 set

2009-11-25T14:41:00.002-06:00

So I have now gotten my 4 piece set of T9 and my question is, where is the damn armor pen? The set is pretty good for bear and I'm happy about that, but I was hoping to use it for cat as well. The whole set only has 59 armor pen. What the heck?

I know to get some really great damage out of cat that is the stat I need the most. So I guess I have to turn to non-set pieces to get it. And yes, I know there are quite a few leather items out there with armor pen, I just am getting pissy about not having very much on the T9 set. I was running around as kitty in ToC25 the other night and was only pulling around 6K dps, but I also only had 20% armor pen. And hit rating....I can't seem to figure out how to get rid of it. Yesh.... I'm almost 100 points over cap and I'm not gemming for it. I'm wearing gear based on the other stats.

So my quandary is, why does our gear seem to have so much hit but not near enough armor pen?

Bearcat wanderings

2009-11-20T10:48:00.002-06:00

So as I have mentioned before, I am an officer in my guild and I like my guild. But lately I'm feeling a bit caged. I feel like a tiger pacing in my enclosure.

My guild has been clearing ToC10, Ony10 and Ony25 for several weeks now but last night we finally made progress on ToC25 and downed 3/5. And hopefully we will go back tonight and finish it up!

Now here is the thing, we have some really good players, and then we have some really not so good players. Being a casual guild, it is hard to get all really good players when we don't require attendance. I'm happy we are downing ToC25 but I want more.

I want to try heroic modes, I want challenges but I just don't know that there are enough people in my guild that are up to it. I don't even have to do ToGC25 at this point. I would settle with ToGC10. But I don't want to /gquit either.

So I plan to try and put together a group soon. Til then, I pace restlessly.

Question for the interwebs....

2009-11-04T16:27:00.003-06:00

I have a non-WoW related post for y'all that maybe ya'll can help me with.

I created my dad's website for him and I have submitted the url to the different search engines. I started the website back in July and that is when I submitted to Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. And I can see that Google has never seached his site.

Also even when I search for specific keywords that are listed, he doesn't show up in the first several pages. Does anyone have any suggestions to help with showing up higher in the search list? Especially on Google?

In case anyone is interested, the address is http://www.catfishgarysguideservice.com/

He is starting the guide service to help pay my mother's medical bills so I would appreciate any help I can get!

Thanks in advance for any help.

Work....

2009-10-27T15:40:00.003-05:00

So I'm back at work again and I have realized that not much has changed up here and that a trained monkey can still do my job. Ugh. When you spend your day going Click, Click, Click it is boring as hell.

On the raiding front, it seems my guild is doing a few interesting things. We are running 25 man ToC, but several of the people in my guild can't seem to find their keys to save their life. When we have hunters who can't out damage me as a bear, or my Pally offtank, what the heck is going on. Now understand, they are in purples, but wow.

Then we are running 10 man ToC weekly as well, and clearing it but not a single useful thing for me has dropped. Sad....

Now on to the interesting thing. We have tried ToGC10, and while we aren't getting very far, we have a couple of people in the run who after a couple wipes starts saying they want to do something else cause this isn't fun. No, wiping isn't fun, however, you do have to do some of it to attempt new methods and such. I don't understand what the heck they are thinking. If you sign up for a progression raid, be prepared to wipe and try again.

There seems to be this attitude in my guild recently that I don't understand. I don't know why people want to just blow thru kills quickly with the experienced and geared people and not take the people that need the gear and experience. It is basically badge farming. And while I like my badges, there needs to be balance to get new folks in and still get badges.

My guild is kind of stuck in the middle. We have quite a few very good raiding people in the guild, who do the research and work on their toons. But we are also a casual guild, so sometimes we have people along on raids who don't put in the same kind of work. And while I would prefer not to take the people who haven't put in the work to at least research the fights and gotten the gear from badges and heroics to upgrade their gear, it isn't possible to fill a 25 man if we don't take some of them. And I want to do 25 mans and I want to do the heroic 10 mans. I want to put in the work but I don't know that we even have 10 that are willing to put in the work for 10 man heroic. So while I'm an officer in my guild, I'm beginning to wonder if I wouldn't prefer to raid in another guild. So my question is, at what point do you consider moving your main to another guild to raid in, but keeping my other toons in my current guild?

Wow.....

2009-10-06T16:05:00.003-05:00

Okay, well, sorry for the long long delay, life has been entertaining, but not really in a good way. I'm doing better and should be back at work in the next few weeks. I didn't end up mending quite as quickly has planned, but then nothing ever goes according to plan. However, I am becoming quite fond of gaming on the laptop while in bed. Got a nice little tableish thing to put it on and a lapboard with the mouse on the right side and my G13 on the left. Quite comfy!

Wow-wise, been raiding TC10, I haven't seen any good upgrades drop for me yet, but hopefully soon. We have TC25 scheduled for this week, and I can't wait.

I have also been leveling a shaman. I have to say, I'm quite surprised by how fun Elemental is. She is currently 78 so she should hit 80 soon.

I am still working on the article for the 10 man only gear. Should be soon.

Ugh . . . I'm going to be Bald Bear Belly soon.....

2009-08-20T16:58:00.004-05:00

So in the past couple of weeks since 3.2 hit, I haven't been able to run much at all. I have passed a kidney stone (ouch) and had the stomach flu. And when I'm that sick, I just don't like to sit at the computer for very long.

Now, on Monday, I am having a total hysterectomy. So I will be in the hospital for 3-5 days and won't be feeling up to tanking for a while. Damn. Well, at least I should have time to do dailies during my 6-8 weeks at home. Gold for the win!

I have been trying to compile a list of gear from 10 mans that would be upgrades and I hope to have that posted up here soon. If not before Monday, then probably the next week.

Patch 3.2

2009-08-05T12:43:00.004-05:00

So the patch hit last night and I got to play around with it a bit. We went and ran the new 5 man dungeon on normal 4 times and heroic once. I am shocked that my dodge went down quite as much as it did, but that could also be because I replaced my Alchemist's Stone that had stam and dodge for the The Black Heart which has 126 stam and a chance to grant 7056 armor for 10 seconds. I don't know what the internal proc rate is for the armor bonus, but I will say I saw it quite a few times last night. Of course, the first time it happened my whole group was a bit confused. It gives an animation of wings above my character, and since we didn't have a pally in the group, we really didn't know what was going on.

I don't know how much cat dps has really gone down yet. I will have to wait and see. I tanked last night or did shadow dps on my priest so maybe this weekend I will have time to find out.

Not much changed on my Disc priest. I know Penance got a longer cooldown, which sucks, and Prayer of Healing got nerfed. But as far as actual changes, not much happened to change my rotation.

I played around on my 56 shaman a bit with the totem bars. I think that is just sweet!! I love that feature! I have been leveling her in my spare time and I fully intend for her to be my next 80.

I am hoping to get some more play time this evening, but with real life stuff going on too, I don't know that I will.

Wait, what happened here?

2009-07-24T15:34:00.002-05:00

So I have been getting some drops out of 10 man Ulduar lately and they appear at first glance to be nice upgrades for bear. However, while my attack power, haste, crit, and dodge go up, my health goes down. I have gotten the Valorous Nightsong head and shoulder pieces. And it kills me that it actually lowered my health approximately 2000 over what I was currently wearing. (I think I switched out my hands too, but since I can't seem to remember what the drop was that I switched the T7.5 hands for, ...)

So now the question becomes, should I sacrifice health for the other stats? Now, understand the following, I am not an enchanter, or a blacksmith, or a jewelcrafter so I don't have a huge health pool to start with. I only have about 32.5K unbuffed these days so when I switched those couple of pieces out and dropped below 30K, I nearly had a heart attack. I am not happy with my health pool being at 32.5K to start with, let alone falling below that. However, I do have about 42% dodge and 40% crit with around 6ooo AP.

But still, if your armor, dodge, AP, crit and haste all went up, would you sacrifice health?

It's Hammertime!!!

2009-07-15T12:22:00.002-05:00

I don't know exactly what the title has to do with the post, but I found it funny. Okay, so I read the Q&A about druids.

And I have to agree with GC right now, I think bears are in a pretty good place. I haven't run across anything that I just couldn't tank, not that I'm always the best tank for the job, but I don't just suck ass. Which is nice. Savage Defense is working pretty well for me, don't really have any complaints.

I can regularly pull 5-6K dps in 10 man Ulduar while in catform depending on the movement involved. While the rotation is quite complicated, I find that it makes me happy that I can kick ass and be #1 in dps. And I still do Battle Rezes and Innervates. I like being very good at my spec, I'm not the best Feral out there, but I am still quite good. And I work very hard not to be a "low contributor".

And I find it interesting that in the next patch they are moving the mana reducing talents to King of the Jungle. I find this interesting because in my feral cat spec, I have both King of the Jungle and Primal Tenacity, however in my feral bear spec, I have neither. So moving the mana reduction does not help me in the slightest. It does however make me rethink my talents for bear. So now with GC talking about wanting to make it even cheaper to switch forms, that makes me very happy. I would love for it to be less costly seeing as I only have 5500 mana typically.

And as far as the Boomkin changes, I think it would be great for them to be more viable in PVP, but I have never actually played that spec, so I don't have a lot to comment on.

As for Resto, that is my wife's department and I sure know I don't have even half the knowledge she does concerning healing as a Tree so I'm not even going to try and comment. However, I do have to say, I love to arena with her on my Disc Priest. We make a damn good healing team! And if they changed it so that Restos spent less time in Tree of Life form, I think I would totally miss seeing the Tree more!

Now, other stuff going on. Well, I raid Ulduar on weekends with my feral druid, but I have now started raiding Ulduar with my Disc Priest during the week. It is a totally different perspective. And it is one I'm enjoying. Not that I would ever change my main, but it is nice to play around with healing some. And I like the Disc Priest mechanics better than healing on my Druid.

Anyway, back to work for now. Rawr!

Rawrcast

2009-07-14T14:02:00.002-05:00

So, I listen to podcasts at work to make the time go by quicker. And I just have to say, if you don't listen to Rawrcast with Stompalina and Hafrot, you should. The are funny funny stuff. But it is not for little kids! Give them a listen if you get a chance!!

http://rawrbitchrawr.blogspot.com/

I'm back.....

2009-07-06T13:44:00.002-05:00

So after driving 3600 miles in 11 days, I am back home. And I had a great time, but I am extremely happy to be home and in my own bed! Some things I have to say. The Denver Zoo is quite nice. It was cool to see Grizzly Bears, Polar Bears, Arctic Foxes, Arctic Wolves and such. We don't exactly have those in zoos in Texas.... A little too hot for them. Dickinson, ND was very nice. Not too hot, not too cold. And the family reunion was a lot of fun. I really like my wife's side of the family there! We then drove to Little Chute, WI. And let me say, nothing but farmland for 800 miles from Dickinson to Little Chute. We met up with some guildies in Little Chute and had a great time! Even got to go see Lambeau Field in Green Bay. Plus got a lot of cheese. I love cheese!! Overall, it was a great vacation, but now I need to rest up!

We ran into Ulduar on Saturday and Sunday and got all the way to Yogg-Saron, and that was a lot of fun. We didn't get Yogg down but then, we really only tried twice because we were running out of time. I think we will get to Yogg quicker next week. I am still trying to catch up on all my reading about patch 3.2 so I will let you know if I have anything to say about it soon!

Vacation Time

2009-06-22T13:06:00.004-05:00

Well, we cleared Mimiron yesterday, and that was a lot of fun. We worked on General Vezax for a bit, but just didn't have the dps and he was healing too much. I think we might have it next time, but starting tomorrow and for the next 2 weeks, Steaky and I are on vacation.

Traveling to Denver, CO to visit my brother and a couple of friends, then off to Dickinson, ND for a family reunion, and then we will be heading to Appleton, WI to meet/visit with some of the other officers in our guild. I can't wait to meet them! We have been chatting for over a year now, but none of us have met in person, so this should be fun!

Anyway, I figure by the time I get back, we should have some more news on the state of bear tanking. Ya'll keep it furry!!

A Bearable Situation

2009-06-16T12:43:00.003-05:00

So, like many of you, I do try to keep up on my daily blog reading. I find it interesting lately though that most of the feral bloggers haven't much to say. While the Resto bloggers are still chatting it up and disscussing different things, not much has changed for a while for Bears. And that is a good thing and a bad thing.

It is great that things aren't changing and that means that we aren't too messed up right now. But it also means that nothing real exciting is happening either.

My guild has been running 25 Man Ulduar during the week and my 10 Man Ulduar runs on the weekend. Our 25 man has been plagued by many difficulties. First it is summer, hence fewer online players. So we matched up with a similar guild to run 25 mans. And while this is nice so we have enough players, when our top ret pally can out heal 3 of their healers using only his Judgement of Light, something is mighty wrong. I saw this on the WWS (Eff. Heals) for defeated bosses. He was 4th on heals and also 3rd on damage done and 4th on DPS. I was kind of shocked. Then take into account that their GL is their MT, and while he is okay, he isn't what I would consider a great tank. He dies every fight at least once, and isn't that great at holding aggro. I mean, come on!

However, my 10 man is going well. We had missed several weeks due to people being out of town, so we finally got down Hodir, Freya, and Thorim on Sunday. Only took us 2 attempts each which isn't bad since we had never seen the fights before. We would have taken down Mimiron, but we only had 1 ranged dps, a Boomkin, and 4 warriors, so that kind of hurt us. Hopefully this weekend we will have our Lock. But then we go on break again for 2 weeks, but I can't complain too much since it is actually Steaky's and my vacation that is messing stuff up there.

Anyway, not too much exciting happening for us.....

Just a little fun!

2009-06-05T11:27:00.001-05:00

New forms

2009-06-04T13:28:00.003-05:00

As I'm sure you all have seen by now, there are new forms for cat and bear. I have seen them all and they are definately different. And above all else, I am soooo glad I'm a Tauren!! I really like their forms better.

I think it is funny that the Tauren cat forms look male and the Night Elf cat forms look female. If you have the designs in game, why can't males have the Tauren manes and females have the NE cat design? I mean, come on, why would a male NE druid want to look like a female cat? But seriously, why do the Taurens look like male lions and NEs look like female lions? I admit the colors on the NE forms don't scream female lion, but the look of the cat does. And what is the deal with the jewerly?

Anyway, just a thought for the day. I can't wait to play around with the different colors and decide which one looks best on Ylee!

Where's the Cloth??? And Leather???

2009-05-20T16:36:00.003-05:00

So my guild ran Nazz 10 last night for a few of us that have alts that are Naxx ready. We did Spider, Plague and Military and the ONLY cloth drop happened on the 4 Horsemen. Gown of Blaumeux dropped which is nice for my Shadow set, but dang, not a single healing upgrade. And I can't even wear it yet because I'm not hit capped and it lowers my hit from what I have now.

And on my Bear, I haven't seen a single leather drop in Ulduar yet. Dang it!

Anyway, I'm going to be tanking Ulduar tonight on my Bear and finishing up Naxx tomorrow night. So I'm hoping for some upgrades!!

Tanking stuffs

2009-05-19T15:53:00.004-05:00

So I have been working with a couple of new tanks recently, mainly because I'm playing my priest in heroics but I have a few things I would like to mention.

Make sure your party knows the kill order and that it takes a few seconds for a warrior or a druid to get AOE threat on all the targets. And if you are the tank, make sure you move and really piss off the ranged casters or rangers (think Nexus). There is nothing worse than having those guys shoot the crap out of your healers in the back cause you didn't grab them well enough.

If a target starts running toward someone else, use your taunt button, that is what it is there for. Don't rely on running after the target, if it gets to your clothie before you get to it, you might be down one clothie.

If a pull or two goes haywire and you struggle to get control of everyone, understand Sh!t happens and learn from it. Don't throw in the towel on tanking just because of a bad pull or two. Understand, WE HAVE ALL HAD THEM.

I know some people don't understand that tanking is more than just running in there and grabbing aggro, but it is. You have to learn the ins and outs of all the instances better than anyone else in the group. You have to know what mobs to kill first, what mobs to CC, and where to stand and where to move if you have to move.

Tanking is about being prepared ahead of time and putting in the time to learn stuff to do it right. My friends say I make it look easy, well, that is because I do the research and put in the time so that I know what to expect. Plus I have tanked every single heroic in both WotLK and BC as well as raids and nothing prepares you better than practice!!

Ramblins

2009-05-19T14:46:00.004-05:00

So things on my druid are going pretty well these days. I am pretty happy with the state of bear tanking and cat dps. I have now specced feral/feral and love it. My wife however feels that I should keep all this tree gear in case I ever need to heal. I'm a BEARCAT not a tree, I keep telling her. I have run quite a few heroics lately on my Disc Priest alt and love it. I even have been doing some shadow which is different.

Things have been sort of slow on the raiding front, but that is to be expected this time of year. Everyone wants to go on vacation, or at least spend more time outside. I can't blame them, I do too!! We are even taking my mother to Scarborough Faire this weekend as a belated Mother's Day gift. And of course that is the day my guild chooses to go into Ulduar 25 for the first time. We have all been on 10 man, but this is the first 25 man we are trying and I'm not going to be there. /cry

Ah, well, real life and mothers first! And Lord knows, if Mother ain't happy, ain't nobody happy!!

The Siege of the Antechamber....

2009-05-04T16:18:00.004-05:00

So this past week saw my 10 man group take down the first 4 bosses on Thursday night and then we took down Iron Council, Kologarn and Auriaya yesterday.

Can I just say wow, they nerfed the crap out of the first 4 bosses. We one shot Ignis and XT and didn't really have much issue with people going down. I was cat the whole night since my buddy Gurggy the Mighty Warrior was there to tank. We downed the first 4 bosses in less than 2 hours and called it a night. It was a lot of fun! And I am still running top on damage and still helping with innervates and rezzes. But Sunday I get to tank again!!

Now on Iron Council, at first we had me on the middle and small guys but I just couldn't get the little guy to move so we switched it up. We had the DK tank (Eximius) on those two while I took Steelbreaker. He was a lot of fun to tank. Just remember to call out those Fusion Punches and keep an eye on the ground below him. I will also mention that if you position your camera correctly, you can see is animation for the Fusion Punch and it is easier to call out so you aren't just watching his cast bar. Steelbreaker will raise his arm above his head and it gets this bright white glowing spark and that is when he is casting the Fusion Punch.

Once he was down, I grabbed Molgeim and tanked him. Make sure someone is dispelling his Shield of Runes and that you move him forward just enough to get him out of the Rune of Power he puts on the ground but stay close enough your melee can stand in it. Also, when you see the Rune of Death, run! Don't pass go, don't collect 200 dollars, just get out of there!! Those hurt if they somehow get combined with him standing on his Rune of Power and hitting you!! I was made into a bear rug. /shiver

Then we moved on and wiped out Brundir, and he is pretty easy as long as you run from his Overload and when he hovers in the air, stay away from him while he wanders around the room. He was really easy to kill if you watched those things!

After this we went to fight Kologarn. Now, let me pass on something we didn't know ahead of time. YOU CAN RUN OFF THE EDGE OF THE PLATFORM. So if you are tanking him, don't run too close and fall off! ;) I'm not the one who discovered this but I was laughing way too hard when he said it in vent. Other than that this guy is a pansy. His adds he calls are a joke and easy to take down all by my bear self. Just keep an eye out for his evil eye (laser beams!)

Now we moved on to Auriaya, who really wasn't bad either. We cleared some trash and got her set up and Eximius pulled for me and I tanked her. We just kept moving her around the corners so that when her Sentry respawned Eximius could take care of it quickly. It went quite smoothly.

We then moved onto Hodir but we really didn't have time to try more than like 3 times since some folks needed to get going. But I think that was a pretty good week!

Four down... 9 More to go.

2009-04-28T08:49:00.004-05:00

So my 19 man downed the first 4 bosses in Ulduar last weekend. It was a lot of fun! And we got two of the three bosses down for the Iron Council so I know we will get it down this weekend.

We got Flame Leviathan, Razorscale and XT down on Thursday. Then Sunday we came back and got Ignis and worked on the Iron Council.

One little hint that may be helpful for Razor is that there are two types of balls of fire that fall from the sky. Blue balls and Orange/Blue balls. Now, we all know there are certain things in life you don't want, and this continues to be true. IF YOU SEE THE BLUE BALLS COMING YOUR WAY, MOVE! The Blue balls put the blue flame on the ground and kill you if you stand in it. The Orange/Blue Balls are the fireballs and while they deal damage, they aren't as big a deal. So, please notice Blue balls = bad, not that you probably didn't already know that! ;)

What I did learn on XT was that every little bit helps. I used my Tranquility during the second Tympanic Tantrum and that really helped with the healing for my group. And I was still top DPS with 5100 so I was happy I could help heal the group and put out the dps. Also, if you don't know, there is now trash in XT's room that you can pull before you engage XT. This helps a lot!

And on Ignis, when you are in the pot, use your healthstones, potions, and lifeblood if you have them. This will make things much easier on your healers.

Currently I am full cat spec and running with Glyph of Rip, Glyph of Shred and Glyph of Savage Roar. I am really enjoying cat right now but I also enjoy tanking. I'm not so fond of healing, but I know that my guild runs short of healers occassionally so I can't just make my two specs bear/cat but I think it would be lots of fun.

Ulduar

2009-04-22T12:27:00.005-05:00

So my guild normally runs 25 man raids, but before we do that, most of us like to run the 10 man versions to get an idea of how things work. We do this because we are a casual guild and we don't just invite the best of the best for raids. That being said, we have composed 2 10 man raids and are giving it one heck of a go.

My groups name is Short Bus All-Stars (SBAS) and we have been running 10 man Naxx together for months now. The other group is He-Man Woman Haters (HMWH). Yes, we are odd with our names.

Last Thursday, SBAS went into Ulduar for the first time missing a few of our regulars so we picked up a couple of other folks. Well, Flame Leviathan is a lot of fun and we downed him pretty quickly. We then moved on to the trash outside Ignis and I got 1 shot. Needless to say, I was a bit shocked but we tried a couple of times, but we just didn't have the dps. So we decided to give Razorscale a go. That fight is pretty simple and fun also but again, we didn't have the dps for it and a couple of people had to go so we called it a night.

We went back in on Sunday and started with Razorscale. That was a lot of fun and we were able to get it pretty quickly and he went down! Yeah! Then we cleared all the trash in front of Ignis and gave him a go several times, but we had trouble coordinating the iron constructs, we would get them molten and I would take them into the water, but then couldn't get the damage needed to for them to explode. So the trash ended up respawning before we got him so we moved on to XT. Now this was an interesting fight since we only had 1 ranged dps. So to compensate, Steaky respecced to Boomkin and our Pally started healing. Still, I think this fight would have gone much better had we had more ranged dps to get the adds down quickly. That was our biggest problem. On one of our attempts we got him down to 40% with 3 minutes and 40 seconds left, but then the adds just got too much. Hopefully our ranged dps folks can make it this week.

Overall, some things I learned were:

1. On Razorscale, keep moving, don't stop. I seemed to die every time I stopped moving for some reason and it wasn't just the blue flames on the ground.

2. On the trash outside Ignis, the flame tornado mobs need to be tanked on either side of the wall and be prepared to move away from the tornados they spawn.

3. Scorch hurts. Don't stand in it longer than you have to.

4. Kitty dps on the heart of XT rocks, but keep a lookout for pummelers.

and most of all,

5. Get a motorcycle for FL, that is way too much fun!!!

P.S. Got my Glyph of Savage Roar. Ouch! But my priest finally got a Book of Glyph Mastery and learned Glyph of Penance. Now if only she was 80.

It's Hereeeeeee........

2009-04-14T15:39:00.003-05:00

Well, Patch 3.1 is here and I'm happy about that.

However, I'm pissed as hell at Curse and Wow Interface. I don't ever click on the damn ads, I never even look at them. All I want is a nice easy way to update my addons regularly. And when I tried the Curse one, all it did was not update things and give me errors. I DON'T want that damn thing. So now I'm back to manually doing it.

Growl, I am not a happy bear.

Glyphs

2009-04-09T12:45:00.002-05:00

From the 3.1 Official Patchnotes :

Applying a glyph no longer requires a Lexicon of Power. The same rules for switching between dual talent specializations now apply to switching glyphs and cannot be performed while in combat, Battlegrounds (except when Preparation is up), or Arenas (no exceptions).

This change is a wonderful thing for Bearcats everywhere. This means that if you truly need to be one or the other for a fight, you can swap glyphs in Ulduar and give that much more help to your raid.

Therefore, in my case, I can carry stacks of different glyphs:

Glyph of Frenzied Regeneration

Glyph of Rip

Glyph of Mangle (situational, but I like it)

Most of the time I will choose glyphs so that I don't have to switch, but if my raid wipes a few times, it might be nice to give them a little extra help on my part. Whether that be as bear or as cat, I want to do my best to kill that boss.

I will probably run with Glyph of Maul, Glyph of Savage Roar, and probably Glyph of Shred most of the time, but having the option to switch them out is very nice.

I personally have an Inscriptionist so I can make these much cheaper than you can buy them. I know that it will take me a while to learn all the new ones, but I will get them. So ya'll should find yourself a nice Inscriptionist and see if you can trade them something worthwhile so they will hook you up!!

Am I ready?

2009-04-08T10:46:00.006-05:00

So I have been reading stuff on Ulduar as I'm sure most folks have at this point. And I'm beginning to wonder if I'm all that ready or not. Currently I usually have about 43K health with 34K - 36K armor and almost 50% dodge buffed. Now, I know that I could have way more HP if I gemmed for stamina, and while a large health pool is nice, I still prefer to dodge when I can.

So with the changes that they are making to bears, my armor and health will go down considerably, but I will have Savage Defense. Well, normally my AP is close to 6K and I have almost 50% crit so it should be up quite a bit.

I have most of the gear I could want for bear other than a drop or two from Sarth 2D but that is because of all the guild changes lately that we just haven't gotten everyone back up to that same skill level we had in January.

And I'm actually considering stocking materials to make Flask of Stoneblood after the patch hits. Especially since it has now been buffed and my HP will be taking a hit. I think this may be more useful than the Flask of Endless Rage since it would only add 45 to my shield.

I also have about 25 Fish Feast to share and I have mats to make another 20. I also have 18 Blackened Dragonfin and I'm going to go fishing to get the mats for more. So I'm hoping to be ready to hit Ulduar when the patch hits.

I am going to make a bunch of the other foods too and put them in the guild bank. Plus I regularly put all sorts of elixirs in there. Since raiding is definately not a one person thing, I try to do what I can so my guildies can be ready also.

Overall, I think I have a few more things to get before Ulduar, but I think I'm close to ready.

Are You?

You want me to do what?

2009-04-01T11:09:00.004-05:00

So last night it was time for 25 man Naxx again.... And I have convinced a friend to come back and play on our server and he was specced tank. So I was going to roll Kitty. But then the unspeakable happened.... We Were Short Healers.... dun dun dun......

So I specced tree and tried to figure out what the hell was mapped where and who I was supposed to be healing. As I have said before, this is normally my wife's job. But I thought I would give it a shot since I have been collecting all of this gear for healing.

So 2 Trees, 2 Priests and a Pally walk into Naxx for some healing action......

So the Spider wing goes fine, no issues there.

On to the Plague wing, starting Noth and people get cursed and I'm told to Remove Curse..... Shit I don't have that set up in Healbot or on my bar..... And neither do the two mages...Wipe. So we rez and go back and now I have Healbot set up and the mages have Decursive going...... and Noth goes down...Yeah! However, I got Healbot set up for Remove Curse but forgot to check to make sure that my CTL button was mapped correctly on my speedpad. Had to map that in the middle of the Noth fight..... thank goodness that the G13 let me do that!

Okay, onto Heigan and the dance. I learned a VERY important lesson. Screw everyone else, don't heal them, just dance. Needless to say I was trying to heal and dance at the same time and I died, and I never die on the dance when I'm melee or tanking. So, no healing while dancing...got it.

Moving on to Loethab. We are all still buffing and getting ready and a couple of us were still in the hall when someone pulled. So a hunter, mage and myself get locked out of the fight. And I thought surely I could keep the three of us alive. WRONG. Damn it I suck. I hate the friggin' 3 second healing window! All three of us died. Argh. Well at least the rest of the group got him down.

So on to Patchwerk and I'm assigned to the MT, which is good since he will need less healing. Yeah!! But one of our priest healers and his mage wife had to go to bed, so we are down to 4 healers. Yeah, we just didn't quite have the healing to get it done, but I don't think I sucked that bad!! I was able to keep my tank up so I am happy about that.

Overall I think it was a good run, we went and did VoA pretty quick after we left Naxx. Several times I had to ask her, "Honey, how exactly am I supposed to heal this?" or "What the hell am I supposed to do?" Don't get me wrong, I'm really not one of those bears..... but I just don't have her knowledge of the best way to heal a tank on Patchwerk or really anything else. And I keep forgetting to use Lifebloom. oops, maybe I really should stick to Bear!

BRK

2009-03-30T14:25:00.003-05:00

My first was a female dwarf hunter, and the first WoW blog I ever read was Big Red Kitty years ago. To him, I give the Feral salute

/ROAR

Branching Out

2009-03-25T09:31:00.002-05:00

So last night a few of us in guild decided to do some BGs and we were going to do arenas, but we never quite made it to that. It was a lot of fun. However, I have a confession to make.....

When we PVP I respec to Tree. I know, I know, I should be ashamed..... I swear I miss my fur the WHOLE time. That bark is just itchy.

However, I have to say that I'm really beginning to get the hang of it I think. I was able to heal myself through a rogue attack until help could get there and kill him. That is making progress. You see, I have never had to heal in all of my 80 levels. Only in the last few weeks have I been trying to heal as a Tree in PVP. I have always carried a Tree with me. AKA, my resto druid wife, so this is all new to me.

We won every BG we entered and even got a Prot Warrior friend the Ironman achievement so he was happy. I got about 12,000 honor for the night so I'm working my way up to another PVP piece. I'm thinking maybe cloak. Our goal is to get me used to healing so that our arena team would have 2 healers. So I'm trying and slowly getting better.

But I do have to say that it is depressing that she can out heal me twice over. And I'm doing everything I think I can do, so back to the ole drawing board. But then, she is an old Sequoia Redwood and I'm just a little sprout of a Tree.

Glyphs and the Bearcat . . .

2009-03-24T13:45:00.000-05:00

With the new glyphs that are coming our way, the question becomes, but be a good Bearcat, which ones should we chose? I want to be a good tank, but I also want to do respectable damage when I'm a cat and since my 2nd spec will be Tree, I only have 3 major and 3 minor glyphs for Bearcat.

Lets look at the choices that I would actually consider. These are the major glyphs as the minor glyphs aren't changing.

Glyph of Barkskin - reduces the chance you will be critically hit by 25% while you have Barkskin up.

Glyph of Berserk - increases the duration of Berserk by 5 seconds.

Glyph of Growl - increases the chance for Growl to work by 8%.

Glyph of Mangle - increases the duration of Mangle by 6 seconds.

Glyph of Maul - Maul now hits 1 additional target.

Glyph of Savage Roar - Savage Roar gives 6% bonus damage

Glyph of Shred - Each time you Shred, the duration of your Rip is extended by 2 seconds, up to a max of 6 seconds.

Well, in my personal opinion, I have to have Mangle and Maul glyphs because they do a lot for me by working together since Mangle increases Maul's damage. Currently I have these two with the Glyph of Growl so I don't have to worry about my Growl missing.

However, with the upcoming new Glyphs, I am debating between Berserk, Savage Roar, and Shred. Since I do both Bear and Cat fairly often, I am thinking the Glyph of Mangle works for both, Glyph of Maul for Bear and then the last glyph is for Cat. But which would be better?

Since the whole goal is to keep Savage Roar going at all times, I would think 6% damage would win almost every time especially since it will have a 100% uptime to get an extra 6% damage. Berserk would only add 5 seconds onto my time, which works out to be 3 extra global cooldowns which toward the end of Berserk I am sometimes out of Energy anyway so I don't know that I would gain that much. And extending my Rip 6 seconds total is nice, but really, there is no way it will do more damage in those 6 seconds every 30 seconds than increasing my total damage by 6% will.

So, I think I'm going to go with Mangle, Maul and Savage Roar.

What are ya'll planning on glyphing?

Tanking Shrinkage....

2009-03-23T16:04:00.003-05:00

So, a few months ago, my guild had more tanks than we knew what do to with. 4 Warriors, 1 Pally, 2 DK and 2 Druid tanks. Now however, we seem to have had a few leave for different reasons and we seem to be short. We are down to 1 Warrior, 1 DK and 1 Druid with a couple of warriors that are willing to respec.

And so, things in guild have changed yet again. The old guild leader has taken the reins back over since he is now finished closing his Circuit City store and has less stress and more time again. And now, some of the officers are considering breaking into two guilds. One purely for social and one for more hard core raiding. My question is, what exactly does this buy us?

There would be 2 different GLs, 2 different sets of rules and 2 different banks. The reasons behind this is so that those who aren't ready to raid or do not want to raid could have a more social guild but those that are more hard core could work on achievements and get ready for Ulduar. I am okay with this occurring IF there is a process in place for people who weren't ready to raid but wanted to.

If the people got a trial period. Say they ran several heroics with a couple of officers and did what we expected of their class. They could then "try out" at the 10 man raid level. If they have a couple of successful raids there, they could then move on to the "raider" level of the guild. To me, all of this could be done within one guild with a ranking system and achieve both goals.

We present ourselves as a casual raiding guild, then to me, that is what we are. While we definitely want competent people, we don't want to be so hard core that we don't help others become better players. My cousin is a prime example. I gave him my old computer, showed him a few things, and I had his class leader speak to him. He has taken his damage from 1400 to 2700 in a week and is continuing to get better and once he gets more drops it will be even better. But we never would have known he could do it if we hadn't given him a chance and worked with him.

Right now the decision has been made to just try and work on 10 mans. So each of our groups gets used to running together so we are ready to attempt 10 man Ulduar when it comes out. Which brings us back to that tanking shortage and that not everyone fits into the 10 man groups. However, I am hoping with dual speccing, we might can solve that problem since quite a few folks have a tanking set. But I guess we shall just have to see how things expand....

Round and Round we go.....

2009-03-18T09:31:00.004-05:00

So, I have read the new changes to Swipe and while I am excite about the no target change, I'm a little iffy about the 360 degree thing. Yes, I am well aware it will be quite nice especially with an 8 yard range, but how exactly does a bear swipe BEHIND himself? Are we going to do a jump and spin while all 4 paws are extended? I think that would make a great annimation, however I know it won't happen.

I love Swipe because it generates a great deal of threat and this will make it much more useful on certain fights where you have multiple mobs running at you and you have to try and position yourself to grab them all. (I'm thinking Gothic at the moment, but there are others.) However, I wonder if a cooldown is in our future.

If they change Swipe by removing target requirement and make it 360 degrees with an 8 yard range, I would expect it to be given a cooldown similar to Thunder Clap (6 seconds). However, the difference lies in that TC increases time between attacks by 10% for 30 seconds while Swipe does not and TC does 300 base damage while Swipe does 108, and both damages scale with attack power. So, TC really does a lot more than Swipe does and therefore we might not end up with a cooldown after all.

I am not going to compare it to Concecration or Death and Decay since both are area spells that remain for 8 seconds and 10 seconds respectively. These are a different kind of spell since any mob who goes into those areas will get hit with them while Swipe is an instant cast.

Overall, I'm not going to get my hopes up yet, but I can't wait to see what makes it to the live realms.

Greatness!

2009-03-11T10:11:00.003-05:00

So I went ahead and got the greatness agility card. I think it will be more helpful in the long run. And I did see it proc several times last night in Naxx. I forgot to post the WWS or I could tell you how many times. It was a shock to see my HP drop when I replaced my Alchemist stone for the Greatness card, but I will get used to it. I was surprised fully buffed I was only at 42K last night.

And I'm working on a comparison of glyphs for 3.1 but I'm waiting a little longer before I debate those just in case they change.

Nobles Deck

2009-03-05T11:56:00.004-06:00

So, I finally got my Nobles Deck put together the other night. Yeah! I am so sick of grinding herbs and begging from my friends for theirs just so I could make those cards. I just couldn't bring myself to pay over 1000 gold per card but I have at least repaid my friends with a other decks and cards.

Anyway, my point is: Which greatness card do I want?

Strength

Agility

Now, the reason that I ponder this is that since Savage Defense is coming, I may really want that strength. And if I get the strength card, that will give me 90 strength (210 AP) but when it procs I will get an additional 300 agility because that is my highest stat out of strength, agility, intellect and spirit.

I have approximately 113 strength and 979 agility in my cat set, but that won't change much with my bear set at the moment. So even if I choose the strength card, I would still be getting the proc for agility. To me this is a win win situation. I could get both stats bumped up, even if one is only when it procs.

What are ya'll thinking of doing?

AP and Crit

2009-03-03T09:31:00.004-06:00

So I have been thinking about the upcoming changes in 3.1. I currently sit at about 35K armor, 43K health, 45% dodge, 40% crit and close to 6K AP raid buffed. I know that my armor and health will go down but that my crit and AP will become a lot more important.

So if I am tanking multiple mobs, I know that I will crit enough to keep Savage Defense (SD) up most of the time, and that it would be a 1500 HP shield so that is nice. However, on a single target boss, will 1500 be enough?

If I change out my agility gems for strength gems, am I gaining or losing? My SD shield would be bigger, but my chance to crit would be smaller. So my question becomes, do I want a smaller more frequent shield, or a larger less often shield?

My personal thoughts on this is smaller more frequent. Since the SD shield goes away as soon as you take damage, you want to make sure you have one up as often as possible, therefore, you want it as frequent as you can.

If for instance you have 6000 AP and 40% crit, if a single Boss hits for 5000 per attack (100 attacks per fight, no dodges or misses), and assuming 40% crit means you will have a shield 40% of the time, your damage taken is

5000 x 60 = 300,000 (non shielded)

3500 x 40 = 140,000 (shielded)

for 440, 000 total damage taken

If for instance you have 8000 AP and 25% crit, if a single Boss hits for 5000 per attack (100 attacks per fight, no dodges or misses), and assuming 25% crit means you will have a shield 25% of the time, your damage taken is

5000 x 75 = 375,000 (non shielded)

3000 x 25 = 75,000 (shielded)

for 450, 000 total damage taken

However, from a very generalized look, it doesn't seem to matter much whether you have a large shield with smaller crit or a small shield with larger crit. It seems to average out in the long run. It will be interesting to test this theory and if I have time, I will go to the PTR and play around with different amounts of AP/Crit and see what I get.

Guild changes abound!

2009-02-23T14:39:00.003-06:00

So, my guild has had some tough decisions lately. We had some issues with a couple of folks concerning gear and had to let them go. We don't run with DKP so we expect people to only roll on stuff for their spec/class and not guilt folks into giving them gear. It has been a royal pain and we have been dealing with it for several weeks now, but at least we can move on as a guild now.

And after we got all of that taken care of, our guild leader decides to step down and quit playing due to stress of game and stress of RL. I will truly miss him! I think his replacement will do a fine job and we should still be a damn fine guild.

On a positive note, we won't be raiding 5 - 6 nights a week anymore which will make my home life much better. This bear needs more tree time!!

Rage against the Machine...I mean Shield

2009-02-11T12:55:00.003-06:00

So after reading the 3.1 class changes that have been posted. One of them has me wondering what is up with bear rage generation. In the warrior changes it stated

You now gain rage when damage done to you is absorbed, such as through a Power Word: Shield.

So my question becomes, will bear druids get the same change? It was not stated in our class changes that we will, but I would really love to see this change occur for Bear. There are many times that I end up rage starved when I get shielded.

During a 10 man run in Naxx, I was tanking Loatheb and the priest shielded me 6 times during the fight and I got rage starved very quickly and had to quit using my special attacks for several seconds. And since Loatheb is a DPS race, I really wanted to be giving it all I had DPS-wise, but I only did 1270. This is just an example I had WWS numbers on back before I got some decent gear.

I know that I generate a great deal of rage via Primal Fury and from Natural Reaction, however, we also still generate rage by taking damage.

The equation is

Rage = [2.5*(Damage Taken)] / (Rage Conversion at Your Level)

which at level 80 the conversion factor is 320.6 according to WoW Wiki

So the equation is Rage = [2.5*(Damage Taken)] / 320.6

Now the combat log I was looking at doesn't say how much damage was absorbed, but an average hit was between 1700 and 2300, so looking at those two values

Minimum rage generated = [2.5*(1700)]/320.6 = 13.2564

Maximum rage generated = [2.5*(2300)]/320.6 = 17.9351

So if the PW:S is buffed, it can absorb over 5000 damage. So, since I was shielded 6 times, that would be 30000 damage absorbed or 233.9364 rage that I missed out on. Just for reference, my Primal Fury generated 450 rage and my Natural Reaction generated 261 rage during the Loatheb fight. So that 234 rage during the fight is almost the same amount as was generated by a Tier 6, 3 point talent (Natural Reaction) and we are missing out on it!

Therefore, I would love to see Bears get something similar to what the warriors are getting. This would make Disc Priests a lot more viable when your tank is a druid. And I love Disc Priests, I think there should be more of them. Mine is 67!

Growl Update

2009-02-09T13:02:00.003-06:00

Okay, so like a bad bear, I didn't actually look up Growl to see it was a spell and so subject to the spell hit cap. Therefore, go get your Glyph of Growl and then still get melee hit capped and you should be fine!

I also forgot to mention that Signet of the Impregnable Fortress is a great bear ring! So add that to my list!

And I am on my way back to training for work on software I already know how to use.

/sigh

What to wear?

2009-02-06T12:47:00.000-06:00

Here you go!

Bear

So I updated my bear list given that I need more +hit than other things. My growl has missed several times in the last couple of nights and my hit rating wasn't that low I didn't think. It was right around 180 which I know isn't capped, but since I had not gotten the drops with +hit, I wasn't that stressed about it. Then I missed my growl twice in a row on Gluth. It ended up being okay, but it could have been very bad and I wipe the raid.

So I am now going to make it a priority to run heroics so I can get exalted with the Argent Crusade so I can get those feet.

One thing that I have noticed is that two stats are quite useful for tanking/dps for a feral are expertise (131 cap with PP) and hit rating (263 cap). However our T7 or T7.5 only has 82 expertise and no hit on all 5 pieces. This means that we need to gather these stats on other pieces such as our feet, waist, wrists, cloak and jewerly/trinkets.

Now for tanking, we have a pretty good idea of what should be our trinkets. Darkmoon Card Greatness, Essence of the Gossamer, Indestructible Alchemists stone, and a few others are good. But the point is we won't have hit or expertise on any of these.

So there are only 4 sets of boots that have either of those stats. And none that have both of those stats. Hmmm, that doesn't seem quite right. I guess that would be why Footwraps of Vile Deceit came out on top. You can at least gem them for hit.

So, on to the waist. So here we have 5 choices that have either expertise or hit on them. And considering them I think I would choose the Belt of the Tortured so that I could get that +hit.

Wrists have one lovely, lovely piece that has both hit and expertise on it. The Thrusting Bands. Get them if at all possible!

Cloaks don't have a lot of choices on this topic. I personally recommend the Platinum Mesh Cloak that you buy with 25 Emblems of Valor since you have the same stamina as the Cloak of the Shattered Sun and you gain 32 hit and only lose some strength and 1 dodge. Seems like a really nice trade off to me.

For your neck, I recommend getting Heritage since it had hit on it as well as defense and dodge. You can get quite a few that have dodge rating on them, and that is nice, but if you are having problems hitting or being dodged/parried, Heritage has both hit and the defensive stats.

So that leaves us with rings. I think a must have is the Gatekeeper. It has armor which is still nice but not have to have like it used to be, but it also has dodge and hit rating! Next up I would recommend the Strong-Handed Ring since it has 28 hit on it and the other stats on the ring would help your threat generation. (plus when 3.1 comes out, you will want that crit)

Which actually gives you at the end, 150 resilience and 202 hit rating. Which means, you might want to keep those Boots of Neverending Path for those fights you really need to make sure you don't miss on. You can always also use Extreme Snapper and Elixir of Accuracy but you have other foods and elixirs you should be using!

Bad Kitty

2009-02-05T16:17:00.004-06:00

So I came across a wonderful new mod called Bad Kitty (BK) that is totally set up for feral forms, both of them. However, it also works with other druids.

So last night during Naxx, one of my feathered kin put Faerie Fire up and it automatically acknowledged it on BK. Worked the same for mangle when another druid put it up so I am really impressed. I had been trying to find a mod that would do this for both forms and I tried Need to Know and while it was nice, it wouldn't work for other druids' spells. You can also customize the spells you want shown and the size of the rows. I also like that it shows a cooldown for Berserk, Savage Roar, and Tiger's Fury in terms of when the cooldown is over so you know when you can use them again without missing a beat. Go download it and play with it!

So I just wanted to say

Bad Kitty is the cat's meow!!!!

Gear and Loot ramblings

2009-01-28T12:26:00.005-06:00

Okay, so we cleared Heroic Naxx last week for the first time, we were excited.

The Betrayer of Humanity dropped. Now we are a melee heavy guild and have been for quite some time. Now our Raid Leader/Loot Master decides that this is a hunter weapon and therefore the only hunter in the raid should get it. Understand, we have a lot of people in the raid for which this is a very big upgrade. Lots of melee still using blue weapons. But the RL says this in vent and argues with others who try to explain that LOTS of classes consider this an upgrade for them. But he gives it to the hunter instead of having a roll off like we do for everything else.

Now, last night, we cleared 3 wings of Heroic Naxx; military, construct and spider in that order. In he spider wing, we were trying to beat the timer, so we were hurrying and apparently the RL (same guy) decided to take his headset off. So he never heard the MT warrior say, "hey man, I need those gloves" while he and I were still pulling trash to the last boss. And so he let people roll for off set and gave it away before the MT warrior realized what happened. The MT Warrior is pissed but as luck would have it, the guy (another warrior) who won the gloves doesn't mind giving them to the MT warrior, so we have to open a ticket and get that taken care of. Okay...done.

And then the RL was too far away when Inevitable Defeat drops and the GL repeatedly says to pass so we can discuss and roll. However, this one warrior who always gets the high rolls and NEVER passes to someone else even if it is only a minor upgrade for him and a major upgrade for someone else rolls need and gets the item. (he has the full T7.5 and epics and others who have been on the same raids don't have a single piece from Heroic Naxx, LT Share!)

Well, so now we have to deal with this. We have another roll off and as luck would have it, the mace goes to the warrior who gave up the gloves to the MT Warrior and he was replacing a blue (Runeblade of Demonstrable Power). So hopefully that balances out some Karma!

Now, the other issue is we have a group of people in the guild who want loot to be awarded first to those who regularly attend raids. WTF? Have they missed the fact we are a casual guild? Its sign up if you can make it to a raid, not required. Our loot rules have never said, "those who show up the most get to roll first". Real life always comes first to us. This is a game, and yes, while it is nice to have the same people there raid after raid, what if they can only make it twice a week? Does that mean we shouldn't help gear them up until after everyone else? And if you show up regularly, you will have more chances to roll on stuff anyway. And it isn't as though they aren't some of the best geared people in the guild anyway. They haven't exactly missed out on loot.

And then last night, Origin of Nightmares dropped. And a hunter wanted it. And I wanted it for tanking given it is better than my Staff of the Plague Beast. However, I had said to give it to the hunter but I wanted it next time it dropped since the hunter had a blue. But it was given to me since it has armor on it and so I have mixed emotions. I am happy I was given the staff, but I feel bad for the hunter. I really hope he gets Journey's End tonight! I got it last week for cat when we downed Kel'Thuzad and he wasn't in the raid and the other hunter had gotten the Betrayer of Humanity so no one else rolled against me.

All in all, Loot is such a head ache.

And in other news, I went as cat last night for the first 2 wings. I got up to 3600 DPS on Razuvious but the fights where I have to move a lot or have a lot of adds I can't do quite as well as the ranged with the massive AOE. Overall for the night, on boss fights I was in the top 10 every time on DPS so that makes me happy. I didn't do quite as well on the trash pulls but once I get the hang of cat, I might can do better!

Twilight Assist

2009-01-23T09:15:00.003-06:00

So we downed Sartherion last night with 1 drake still up. We initially tried it with all three up just to see, but after 8 attempts the masses were getting restless so we killed 2 of the drakes. It was quite interesting to see how it all worked together.

I will say, if you have a choice and you are a bear, don't be put on portal duty or elemental duty. Too many of the spawn at a time and they get out of swipe range very quickly. So then you spend your time running around trying to pull them off casters. Not a good scenerio.

Post Patch 3.0.8

2009-01-21T10:36:00.003-06:00

Ugh, what a mess last night. Northrend kept going offline....Kicking people off and causing all sorts of issues. But that is to be expected with a large patch changing as much stuff as they did.

I did get to log in and found that unbuffed my armor is now up to 32,400 so that is a big jump for me. I had not been able to get the armor trinkets yet, so the change was a very good thing for me. I have the Essence of Gossamer and the Indestructible Alchemist's Stone as my trinkets. The Gossamer procced 10 times during our 25 Man Naxx the other night. I am actually surprised that it didn't proc more often. However, between the two, that is 186 stamina and that is a nice chunk of HP.

I actually saw a feral in bear form the other day in Dalaran, he had 37K hit points unbuffed but every single gem socket had a +24 stamina gem in it. So he had great hit points, but not much mitigation. He was even wearing the Polar set gemmed with stamina gems. While I know having a large hit pool is great, it is better if you don't get hit. Balancing HP and dodge is a good thing, it makes your healers happy if you can dodge 50% or more of the attacks. Especially on Heroic Patchwerk.

Patch 3.0.8

2009-01-20T15:46:00.002-06:00

So the patch is going live today......I can't wait to find out what my armor changes to. I haven't been able to get the armor pieces for rings and trinkets, so this should actually increase my armor by about 4k. That is nice. Prior to the patch, I was sitting at 26.5K armor with 33.5 HP, so I will post tomorrow about the change.

We cleared all 4 quarters in Naxx 25 this week. I got a new Tunic of Indulgence, and I am quite happy! I had been running with he Polar Vest, so this is a nice upgrade.

Also, at what point do guilds itemize for tanks. I mean, it is getting quite close to where the DPS folks can outpace my threat generation even in my threat gear because I am just not getting drops. Oh well, I guess I will get drops sooner or later.

Bear DPS and Ramblings

2009-01-14T09:08:00.003-06:00

So during our 25 man Naxx last night, the best boss dps I was able to put out was about 1750. Now I am fairly happy with that but the DK tanks can do approx 2600 DPS. Now seriously, what is up with that. I realize that my guild is not that well geared yet, but our DK tank was in the top 10 DPS, as a tank. Top DPS was about 4100, but still, it is somewhat frustrating that I can't do more damage.

And I am well aware that I'm a tank, not a DPSer and that I was still doing about 300 or so DPS more than the pally tank, so I'm good with that. Plus I have way more armor than the DK but really, only about 4000 HP more. I really need to start getting some drops on gear! I keep running heroics for the couple of things that I need, but so far, no luck on the drops.

I have evaluated my gear, and with no buffs at all, I stand at 26.5k armor in bearform with 30k HP. So with patch 3.0.8 my armor should actually increase to over 30k, maybe 31k. That will be nice!

25 Mans and Arenas

2009-01-06T17:02:00.003-06:00

So, tonight we will be running Heroic Naxx for the first time as a guild. I will be main tanking with two OTs that are death knights. They are a couple of really good tanks so I have no worries there. When we ran Heroic Vault of Archavon last night with a PUG, raid buffed I was up to 34K armor, 40K health and 42% dodge. So I feel pretty good about that and my gear upgrades pretty much come from 25 mans now.

I will buy the legs to the Savage Gladiator's set tonight and that is the last of the 5 main pieces that I need. Woo Hoo, now to just farm honor for the Hateful accessories. I'm at 342 resilience before the legs, so I know those will help. Our 5v5 team is actually ranked this week, I'm in shock. The ranking on my armory profile says 155th, but if you click on the team and follow it, we are 468th. Not sure of the difference yet. Oh well, I guess I will figure it out.

Gear Link Updates

2009-01-06T09:15:00.003-06:00

Since we are now doing 25 mans in our guild, I got to thinking I needed to update my gear sheets to include them. This is using Loot Rank.

Bear

Cat

Naxx

2008-12-23T10:09:00.003-06:00

So, once again, I have created my Raiding group, only this time it is with a group of 5 friends that have been playing together for a while. The good news is that they are all extremely well geared and know how to play their classes. However, the rest of us kind of feel like outsiders to the group. I guess with more runs, we will all get to know each other better.

We were able to down the 3/3 Arachnid, 3/3 Plague, 2/3 Military and 1/4 Construct. And we got Grobbulus down to 28,697. Argh. But given that this was the first time that 6 of the people had been in Naxx, I think we did pretty well.

Our guild is up to 39 level 80s, which is nice, but also means that people are feeling left out of stuff. We had two people quit the guild because they didn't feel needed. Not quite sure why, they had been going on dungeon runs and hit 80 last Friday, so they would have been invited on this weeks Naxx runs. I don't quite understand it all, but maybe I'm not supposed to.

A friend of mine has been pretty good DPS out of going cat. He went complete cat since at the time we had quite a few tanks. He seems to be really liking the cat dps.

Personally, I'm up to 28,000 armor, 33,000 health and 35% dodge unbuffed, so I'm getting there. I hope to buy another new piece soon. I'm getting the Savage Gladiator's Sanctuary set. I think it is better for bear than the T7. I have the chest and should be able to buy the hands this week with honor/arena points. That will be nice at least for arenas.

Of course, I will be out of town for the next two weeks, so no real play time. Kind of hard to play at the lake!

Have a Happy Holiday!

Gear and Naxx

2008-12-16T10:40:00.003-06:00

So we have now cleared the Arachnid, Plague and 2/3 of the Military quarters. We would have finished the Military Quarter, but 2 of the guys had to go to bed. I mean, it was only 2:30 in the morning there and they had to work today. I just don't see the problem. I'm kidding.

Overall, I think we are doing pretty well. We now have enough people that we should start 2 10 man Naxx runs. I will be in charge of the second one again. I kind of wish we had gotten further with the "core" group before the split but we just have so many people ready to go.

I also got my first upgrades from Naxx. Staff of the Plague Beast and I also got Cloak of Armed Strife so I am pretty pumped. I am now 6 emblems away from my new chest! So I'm getting some nice upgrades.

Ding!

2008-12-09T09:39:00.003-06:00

Well, we hit 80 on Saturday December 6, 2008 at 6pm. We were 78 on Friday, but I dual boxed while she worked on Saturday so that we would be 80 for Naxx. And then Naxx got moved to Sunday, which is fine, we ran 5 Heroics instead. Violet Hold, Utgarde Keep, The Culling of Stratholme, Drak'tharon, The Occulus I am now up to 30 emblems so I'm making my move.

When we hit Naxx up on Sunday, I only had 25,500 armor; 32,000 HP; and about 35.6% dodge. However, we were able to do the Arachnid Quarter and get down Patchwerk. Man those Hateful Strikes hurt! Steaky got three leather healing drops, she was excited! I think it was pretty damn good for our first attempt!

I got the Handwraps of Preserved History on Saturday and Shroud of Darkness yesterday. Yeah! Now I'm sitting at about 26,000 armor, with 26,207 health and 32.16% dodge self buffed. So yeah, need some work there to really tank but I'm getting there.

Speaking of, I'm also now Tanking Lead for the guild as well as Recruitment Officer. Now the only thing that sucks about that is that I can no longer get to the Tanking Forums from work. It is now blocked, however, I can get to the European Tanking Forums. Go Figure!

Stats and Conversions

2008-12-04T09:08:00.005-06:00

All of these assume you are level 80

Agility = 0.0254% dodge. 1% dodge needs ~39.31 agility. 2.12 armor per point of agility
Dodge Rating = ~0.025% dodge. 39.35 dodge rating per % dodge.
Stamina = 15.9 health
Defense = ~4.92 rating per skill, 1 skill = 0.04% dodge, miss, anti-crit. 25 defense skill,
or ~122.96 defense rating, for 1% less crit/more dodge/more miss.
Armor = 5.17 armor in bearform if the armor comes from items. 1 armor if it comes from buffs/enchants. (for now, after patch 3.0.8 it will be 8.5822 for the 8 slot armor times)

Strength = 2.2472 AP per point
Agility = 1% crit per ~78.62 agility
Critical Strike Rating = 1% per 45.91
Hit Rating = 1% hit per ~32.79 hit rating (264 to be capped)
Attack Power = 1.06 AP per point.
Expertise Rating = 1% reduced parry/dodge chance per ~32.79 rating. (131 to be capped)

Feral Faction Info

2008-12-02T14:15:00.002-06:00

Factions are a great/horrible thing to have to grind. So I'm making a list and checking it twice.

Knights of the Ebon Blade

Darkheart Chestguard - (Exalted) Cat chestpiece

Wyrmrest Accord

Dragonfriend Bracers - (Exalted) Cat and Bear

Oracles

Glitterscale Wrap - (Revered) Bear

Kirin Tor

Mind-expanding Leggings - (Revered) Cat and Bear

Stave of Shrouded Mysteries - (Revered) Cat

Argent Crusade

Boots of the Neverending Path - (Exalted) Cat

Cloak of Holy Extermination - (Honored) Cat

Frenzyheart Tribe

Azure Strappy Pants - (Revered) Cat (but I wouldn't, go Oracles)

Sons of Hodir

Spaulders of Frozen Knives - (Honored) Cat

So I plan to grind for the Oracle belt and Kirin Tor legs. Not quite sure what else yet, but I know those two. And of course, I'm grind for my fishing pole!

Gear Updates

2008-11-26T10:59:00.006-06:00

So I have been watching and reading all the links about gear upgrades for bears. And it looks like a lot of Utgarde Keep heroic runs for me. But just so I can keep track of everything, here are a couple of links for gear.

Think Tank

Feral Druid Thread at EJ

Using Rawr, and doing some of my own calcualtions, if I get most of the good pieces I need to drop, I will be sitting around 30,000 armor and hit points with 34% dodge and 80% mitigation. I wish my dodge was higher, but I can work on that. I'm hoping that will be enough to start running Naxx in a few weeks.

We hit 75 last night, and since once we get home on Thursday from eating with relatives, we can just play until Monday, I'm hoping to be really really close to 80 by Monday.

Here is hoping!

Dual Specs

2008-11-07T09:08:00.004-06:00

Since in WotLK we are supposed to be able to have a main spec and an alt spec, I have been thinking about this. If I had to choose one spec, I think it would end up looking like this. But since I can have two specs, I think I will pick one for cat and one for bear.

Therefore, I think my bear would look like this. Not a lot of changes, but the big one is the fear reduction. I hate being the tank and getting feared, if you are tanking a boss, it really screws everything up, and the whole raid is counting on you. So while it doesn't help my resistance, at least if I get feared, it won't last as long.

And my cat would look like this. I would have liked to have gotten Master Shapeshifter, but I couldn't afford the 5 points it would have taken to get it. So, overall, I'm pretty happy with it since I really only lose a few bear abilities, but since the point is I should be able to switch specs quickly in a dungeon, I think it should work for decent damage.

Mongoose, the confusion

2008-11-06T15:10:00.005-06:00

Okay, so we know what EJ said, but some friends and I weren't really happy with their explanation or their forumla. So we played around a little on our own.

BEAR:

Since what we want to know is "How many times do I have to do this task with a %p success rate in order to get %r successes, we can use a negative binomial distribution with r=1 since we only care about the first success. And we know that p=0.0417 for bear

Therefore, we get (1-0.0417)/(0.0417) = 22.9808

So this tells us that on average it takes 23 attacks for mongoose to proc the first time.

So it takes 21.5625 seconds for 23 attacks to occur.

So since mongoose lasts 15 seconds, the total time for 1 occurance of mongoose is 36.56 which means that mongoose was active 41.03% of the time, which gives an average of 49.23 agility.

And since once mongoose is over, we start back again at the "state" we started in, the same equation holds for the next proc.

CAT:

For catform, we know that p=0.0167 so plugging in we get (1-0.0167)/(0.0167) = 58.8802

So this tells us that it takes 59 attacks for mongoose to proc the first time, which means it takes 47.104 seconds for 59 attacks to occur.

Since mongoose lasts 15 seconds, the total time for 1 occurance of mongoose is 62.1 which means that mongoose was active 24.15% of the time, which gives an average of 28.9855 agility.

Which means that mongoose is much better for bear, but really sucks for cat.

And I would like to give special thanks to Gurggy, he did the real work and Rusted for keeping on my ass with questions so we got them answered.

Enchants - Mongoose

2008-11-03T10:46:00.006-06:00

From Elitist Jerks:

(1-0.75^ppm should be correct if I'm thinking clearly - 15/60 sec uptime is 45/60 downtime on a 1ppm mongoose proc)

You get 1.25 ppm in cat form (15 specials, 1/60 chance to proc each).
That should mean 1-0.75^1.25 = 30% uptime for 120 agi -> 36 agi avg (+some haste).

As far as I know, you only get one try to proc mongoose per swipe, right?
You get 2.67 ppm in bear form (40 specials, 2.5/60 chance to proc each).
1-0.75^2.67 = 46% uptime -> 55 agi avg (+some haste)

Me:

Okay, so using a little math and explaining where it came from, we start with the equation

1-(a)^b where

a is the percent of downtime you have in a minute and

b is the number of chances to proc in a minute.

And from Wowwiki: Proc per minute

And for catform, since energy regens at 20 energy per two seconds, you can only get 15 special attacks in a minute using all the tools in your toolbox. So that is where you get 15 specials in 1 minute or 15 in 60 seconds so 15/60 so that is 60+15 = 75 hits per minute. And Procs per hit = Weapon speed * Procs per minute / 60 which is 1.67% for catform. So 75*0.0167 = 1.2525 = 1.25

So now you plug that into the formula and get 1-(.75)^1.25 = .302 or 30% of the time (18 seconds out of every minute), you will have the mongoose bonus. So we know that mongoose grants 120 agility, so that is approximately 2 agility per second, so you would get a bonus average of +36 agility plus some haste, which is slightly better than the +35 agility.

Now we can do the same math for bear. But here you can get in a lot more specials in a minute since you are really only limited by the global cooldown. (I assume you have enough rage) So since the global cooldown is 1.5 seconds 60/1.5 = 40. And Procs per hit = Weapon speed * Procs per minute / 60 which is 4.17% for bearform. So you get 40 specials + 24 normals attacks in a minute which is 64 and 64*4.17% = 2.67 and so 1-(.75)^2.67 = 54% uptime. And if it is up 54% of the time, that is 32.4 seconds and so at an average of 2 agility per second, gives 65 agility average. Can this be right?

In short, mongoose is good for bear, about equal for kitty.

Ren Fair Time!

2008-11-03T10:08:00.007-06:00

What a bear does on weekends when not playing WOW.

My mother is on the left, I'm in the middle and my resto wife Steaky is on the right!

We went to the Texas Renaissance Festival. It was a lot of fun, if you live anywhere close, you should run by if you can!

Argh....Sick Bear and Patch Ramblings

2008-10-23T09:30:00.005-05:00

I don't know what is worse, being sick, or being sick. I hate pneumonia. At least I think I'm starting to get over it.

Anyway, I think that I like the new bear abilities. I miss my armor, but I haven't found that to be a problem with tanking heroics or raiding. What I do love is my new bear form DPS. I was able to sustain almost 600 dps in bear form. I'm sure others out there can do better, but wow, on our raids, none of the other tanks were able to come close. Even a prot warrior in his dps gear only did a little over 400. So far, I'm loving the damage I can deal in bear form.

And I love the new feral charge for cats. I love that it works from prowling and that you jump right behind your target. This has been wonderful to produce almost 700 dps on the HH. Don't know what it would do to an actual raid boss where I can truly unleash. But wow, loving some of the cat changes. Now all I really need are more keys on my speedpad. Oh wait, that is a keyboard isn't it.

And I love the inscriptions. I took it on my priest alt who is now 42. Almost up to 300 inscription. Now the interesting thing is that in the 8 days since the patch, Yleedead has made a little over 1500 gold just selling glyphs. Wow. I can't believe that. It is just amazing. And I am lower than everyone else. I can't believe some of the prices. Of course, where you really make your money is with the minor glyphs since you can only discover one every 20 hours. I now have 6 and try to keep them up on the AH.

WotLK Talents

2008-10-10T09:39:00.003-05:00

So I have been reading and studying the talent changes coming with Lich King. I think I have decided on the following build.

http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?talent=0ZxGGsfbzceocGuAo0E0z

However, I still am not happy. I would like to put one more point in Infected Wounds so that if it stacks twice, that is a 50% movement reduction, but really, that is a grinding talent, not a raiding one, so I can live with a 34% movement reduction.

I have tried to make my choices so that I am a viable tank, but so that I can do very decent damage if given the opportunity. One thing I miss currently is being able to cat DPS more. When I first started tanking Kara, I got to go cat a lot more. Now since I'm the main tank in the guild, I don't get to go cat that often. But in choosing my talents, I am hoping with the expansion, I might get to cat around again for a little bit.

I hate not being able to take Primal Tenacity, but I just can't afford the points for the fear duration reduction. I might have sacrificed something else for it if it was a 15% chance to resist fear, but since it is just a reduction in duration, I am not going to waste my points.

The only other thing that I am missing that I have now is Brutal Impact. Well, it only adds 1 second to my stuns in either cat or bear form. Again, I just don't think it is worth sacrificing something else for those 2 points. I am still going to be able to stun them, it is just not going to last quite as long. Not a deal breaker.

Well, these are my thoughts at the moment. They might change in the next month. Heck, who knows, I might not be the main tank of the guild and can be more catty, but I just don't see that happening any time soon.

What the hell were they thinking?

2008-10-03T16:07:00.002-05:00

Okay, so I have been running heroics with some guildies of mine. We have quite a few new faces lately, and so I have been running with them to get to know them. This is sad. We have a mage, who doesn't know when to sheep because he sheeps too close to a patrol instead of waiting until I pull the group back around a corner. And then he goes to refresh his sheep with the Boss standing there, and wouldn't you know it, he pulls the boss. This was in Ramps with the first boss. Argh. What amazes me is that he is supposed to be a great tank on his paladin, so what gives?

Next up we have the dps warrior that refuses to quit using whirlwind "because my dps would be too low" even when he is next to a sheep or a trap. I typically run with my wife (resto druid), BM hunter and a frost mage. So we have lots of sheeps or traps on most pulls, and if the warrior got remotely close he didn't care. His dps was more important to him than a smooth run. What the hell?

I am really starting to think that I want to go back to the rule of no one under 18 in the guild. Both of the people in the above statements are teenage boys. WTB maturity. And I am one of the more patient people in the guild. I would just like everyone out there to remember, a smooth run is the most important thing, IT DOESN'T MATTER WHAT YOUR DPS IS if everyone wipes because you broke CC.

Bear Stats and Conversions

2008-09-22T09:29:00.002-05:00

What is the armor cap? The armor cap is the point at which you hit the maximum damage reduction from armor (75.00%). The cap depends on the level of mob you’re fighting:

For a level 70 mob, the armor cap is 31,673
For a level 71 mob, the armor cap is 33,075
For a level 72 mob, the armor cap is 34,478
For a level 73 mob, the armor cap is 35,880

What are my stat conversions?

1 strength = 2 AP in all forms
1 agility = 1 AP in cat form only
1 agility = 2 armor in all forms
14.73 agility = 1.0% dodge in all forms
25 agility = 1.0% crit in all forms
1 stamina = 10 HP in all forms
1 int = 15 mana in all forms
79.97 int = 1.0% spell crit in all forms
1.8 spi = 1mp5 not casting
6 spi = 1mp5 casting with 3/3 Intensity

What are the Combat Ratings conversions?

15.76 Expertise Rating = 4 Expertise (-1.00% dodge and -1.00% parry)
15.76 Hit Rating = -1.0% miss chance
12.62 Spell Hit Rating = -1.0% spell miss chance
22.08 Crit Rating = +1.0% crit chance
22.08 Spell Crit Rating = +1.0% spell crit chance
15.76 Haste Rating = +1.0% haste
15.76 Spell Haste Rating = +1.0% spell haste
18.9 Dodge Rating = +1.0% dodge chance
2.4 Defense Rating = 1 defense skill
1 Defense Skill = +0.04% chance to be missed, +0.04% chance to dodge*
25 Defense Skill/60 Defense Rating = +1.00% chance to be missed, +1.00% chance to dodge
39.4 Resilience = -1.0% crit chance, -2.0% crit damage, -1.0% DoT damage

* 1 defense skill also grants +0.04% chance to parry and +0.04% chance to block, but bears can't parry or block, so we don't receive these bonuses. Growl!

Hard Core Raiding Guild?

2008-09-15T16:00:00.003-05:00

I met some guys on the elevator at work the other day, I overheard them speaking about The Hinderlands. So obviously, I had to ask what classes they had, what server they were on and so forth. I said I had a 70 Tauren Druid. They mentioned I should roll a toon on their server and I responded that I couldn't really do that since I was an officer and a raid leader in my guild. Then they mentioned that they don't even have enough 70s in their family/friends guild to do Kara. They asked if I was in a hard core raiding guild. My answer was "No, we are a friendly, familyish guild."

Now, while I still agree with this assessment, I have started thinking about this more and more. Last week, I lead the 2nd Kara group, and we did ZA and Gruul's. This week we have Kara, Gruul's, ZA and Mags on the schedule. That is really a lot of raiding in one week. But we are still friendly to people, and we are accepting new members all the time. It has gotten to the point recently that I am not quite sure who all the new members are. And I try to make sure that I know all the new members since I am an officer. So my question is, are we a hard core raiding guild? How do you make that determination?

Gruul is down!

2008-09-12T09:32:00.002-05:00

So, Band of the Hawk goes into Gruul's for the first time last night. We had to pug about 5 people to make it, but we got enough people to go! We had done our research, knew how it was supposed to go, and went in.

3 tanks - Bear and 2 warriors

6 healers - 2 trees, 2 pallies, 2 priests

Assorted DPS

We start deciding the job roles, and low and behold, I am main tank! Woot! I start working my way through the trash pulls, no problem!

We get to the first boss. The High King. We make the assignments, and we have me on the HK, a warrior on Olm and a warrior on Blindeye, and then a frost mage on Krosh and two hunters on Kiggler.

On the first try, Olm gets loose and we wipe.

On the second try, mage misses spell steal, we wipe.

On the thrid try, Olm gets loose and we wipe.

Here we decide to let the dps warrior tank Blindeye and put two tanks on Olm. This method works and we down the group on try four. Woo hoo. It was tons of fun.

On to more trash pulls. And then to Gruul.

On the first attempt, I'm tanking, doing my thing, and half of the dps dies on one of his Shatters. Ouch, not fun.

On the second attempt, a Ret pally joins the group to replace a shaman that has to go to bed. And the ret pally rushes in before I do and grabs aggro and starts running around so I can't catch up and get aggro. Argh!

On the third attempt, everything goes as planned. I'm tanking him in the center, except when I have to move him because of a cave in, but I respond pretty quickly since I'm running Deadly Boss Mobs. I feral charge after he tosses me, and we work together as a group to get him down. It was a beautiful thing to see 25 people come together and succeed.

I didn't get any loot, but my off tank for Kara got two T4 upgrades so that is nice. He was very excited and I'm happy for him.

All in all, it was a great night. I got to MT, and Steaky (my wife) was first in healing. She was also very excited about that.

Zul'Aman and Guild stuffs

2008-09-11T08:58:00.004-05:00

So, I have been to ZA a few times, but last night was the first time we got the first two bosses within the timer. Woo Hoo. I didn't get any good loot, but that is fine, others in the guild did. We attempted the Dragonhawk boss for the first time. And we wiped twice and weren't able to try again as it was getting late and people had to go to bed for work. Things are really coming together for our guild.

We have gotten several new members recently that seem to be really good additions, and we almost need 3 Kara groups now. Almost, we are short on healers and tanks for that, but have ample DPS.

To night we are scheduled to attempt Gruul's for the first time. I have been there before with a PUG, but others in my guild have not even set foot in there. I can't wait to give it a try with the guild, I know it will be better than the PUG was.

On a sad note, we are losing one of my good friends in guild. She has scheduling issues and is changing guilds to one that has more people online during the day since she is now going to be working in the evenings. It is sad to see her go, but I understand that it is for the best.

Gear upgrades

2008-09-09T13:53:00.003-05:00

Yesterday was very fruitful for me. I got two very nice upgrades on my gear. Merciless Gladiator's Dragonhide Helm and I got my Darkmoon Fair card, Vengence! Now while I really needed the new helm, I am most excited by my Vengence card. I love the extra stamina it gives. It should really make it a lot easier on my healers!

And I think the Badge of Tenecity is a joke. I have farmed for hours for the depleted badge, and I have yet to get it. I haven't found it on the AH either. Oh well, at least I have my new Darkmoon Card!

Now, all I need to do is work on getting my Lunacy Deck together for my next card!

Bad Kara Runs

2008-09-09T10:06:00.005-05:00

So, my wife and I are leading our guild's second Kara runs last week, and they were driving me crazy. Let me break who we had down for you.

1. Me - Feral druid
2. Prot Warrior
3. Wife - Resto Druid
4. Holy Priest
5. Rogue
6. Warlock
7. Mage #1
8. Mage #2
9. Shaman #1
10. Shaman #2

Night 1.
Okay, so we are kind of slow the first night, as there are too many brbs, but we finish maiden. This took way too long, but we had a couple of new people, so we had to explain things more.

Night 2:
Romulus and Julianne. Never done it before, we had to learn as we went. Once we understood what to do, it was going smoother. What kills me is we had to keep telling shaman #2 he was attacking the wrong target and to switch targets. Argh.

Okay, so we move on to curator, no problem, one shot. Then Illhoof, we wipe once when warlock goes down even though it was the priests only job to keep her up. Then we move onto Shade. Here is where I want to kill people, the holy priest isn't dispelling the slow, and to top it off, Shaman #2 moves EVERY single time we have a flame wreath. We finally give up and go to bed. If I hadn't, I would have killed someone.

My wife found a website that everyone doing shade needs to have playing during the fight!
http://shadeofaranchant.ytmnd.com/
But this is hard to understand over the mic, I played it for the group on night 3.

Night 3: Shaman #2 is replace by Hunter #1 and Rogue is replaced by dps Warrior #2. And Shaman #1 is replaced by Priest #2. Priest #2 is in charge of dispelling slow, and after 2 attempts to down Shade, we get Priest #2 on voice, and we down Shade. We do Chess and we attempt Prince. Notice I said attempt Prince.

First attempt, bad infernals.
Second attempt, Priest #1 is replaced by Hunter #2. Bear tank dies in Phase 2.
Third attempt, Bear tank dies in Phase 2.

Now the thing is, the resto druid has over 50% of the healing for these fights. I reset between each fight. And the priest is down at 25-30% healing. And as a bear, there is no way for me to take a potion and not take massive damage. As a bear, I have over 20,000 HP, over 25,000 armor and dodge at 36%. I should be able to tank Prince and not die. I don't know what the heck keeps happening. We finally quit last night, but damn, I am frustrated.

Okay, this should not take 3 nights. I know this, you know this, but what the hell went wrong. I am now checking and double checking to make sure that people are Kara ready. And being Kara ready, does not mean you are Kara able. See shaman #2. His gear is Kara ready, but I was out damaging him on fights, even when I was tanking. That should not happen with an enhancement shaman.

Long story to say, make sure your people are Kara ready and Kara able, as these are two different things. Some people will never be raid ready, they just don't have the skills to raid. But if you are going to take them, you better make sure that everyone else is on the A game to compensate!

Anyone have any suggestions or comments?

What You Wearing?

2008-09-05T10:46:00.004-05:00

There are tons of places that you can find gear lists for starting druid tanks. Emmerald's , Adventures in Azeroth and Big Bear Butt. Let me just say this, the heavy clefthoof set is going to be your best friend to start out. Get it and get it early. And gem it!

I had mine ready and waiting for me when I hit 70. I had also done quite a few BGs so I had the merciless gladiator shoulders and hands waiting for me. My wife and I were able to hit 70 on a Tuesday night, and run Kara on Thursday with our guild. I was off tank (OT) and she was off healer (OH). Were we just a little low, maybe, but we did it.

The point is, plan ahead and get the gear before you turn 70. Don't wait until you hit 70 to decide, "hey, maybe I need good gear to run Kara or heroics".

Now, keep in mind that there aren't that many Bear Kara drops as far as leather goes. You will have to get badge gear or 25 man raid drops. So you will be keeping some of your gear for a long time. Keep a list of what would actually be an upgrade for you. You don't want to take something someone else could use if it really isn't an upgrade. I recommend getting the Rating Buster Addon. It is quite useful to evaluate quickly whether or not something is better for you.

Also, use Rawr to plan ahead. You can get a lot of information for both your cat and bear forms using this tool.

As far as cat gear goes, speak with your guild about the Kara drops. My guild has the rule that you only roll for your main spec and if no one wants an item, then people can roll for an off spec. This has caused some issue since I say my spec is feral and should then roll on both cat and bear items, since I do both in the runs. However, my guild disagrees and I had to pick what I wanted to roll on, Cat or Bear. I chose Bear because I want to tank, but it is a discussion you need to have with your guild leaders and raid leaders. Don't let it become an issue, find out what the rules are before you go.

Overall, for a feral, gear is important, and you will be spending a lot of time getting it. But if you plan ahead, you can be ready to roll when you hit 70.

Do Over!

2008-09-04T13:15:00.005-05:00

Okay, now that I have mentioned a few things you should do, let me tell you a few things not to do.

Never start a pull with no rage. Duh, right? Well, I can't tell you how many times I have pulled and forgotten to generate rage first. I normally start off with a mangle or a swipe, and guess what, you can't do that with no rage. LOL, so just fair warning, try to remember to use Enrage before you start.
Never get too close while marking. You can mark your targets from surprisingly far back. You don't need to get close. The first time I tanked Kara, I kept getting too close and accidentally pulling the group before it got it marked. Ouch. Remember, you can always mark in stealthed cat form!
Always ask if everyone has done the instance and if not explain how it works. Don't assume and have someone in the wrong place because they don't know.
Don't accidentally hit your button to switch in and out of bear form right as you start tanking Nalorakk, the bear boss in Zul'Aman. And hope like hell that you don't cause a wipe. If you are lucky as I was, your wife will battle rez you and you can tank his bear form (instead of his normal form) and no one yelled too much. I did have to do alot of bark kissing to the wife after the battle rez though! ;P I just felt like a bear ass noob!

I know I have done a lot more stupid things, but I just can't think of them at the moment. All in all, remember it is a game, and that you can always get a do over!

Marking

2008-09-04T09:16:00.004-05:00

Now becoming a good tank takes practice. And it takes research. Because while other members of your group can go into the instance knowing what they can and can't do with their class, you will be in charge of pulls. This means that you should have researched ahead of time to find out which mobs (i.e. bad guys) can be crowd controlled (CC) and which ones can't.

This is very important as you don't want to ask your mage to sheep a target that can't be sheeped only to then have the mob attacking your cloth wearing friend. This can spell disaster because now you have a loose mob running around. Therefore, it is your job as tank, since you should be marking, to know which mobs are in the instance and how to mark them.

I recommend setting your marks up on your number pad. This way they are easy access and you can mark during battle. You can set this up in the keybindings menu. Mine look like

Numpad 1 - Skull
Numpad 2 - Red X
Numpad 3 - Green Triangle
Numpad 4 - Purple Diamond
Numpad 5 - Yellow Star
Numpad 6 - Moon (used for sheep)
etc.

Now the interesting thing to note is this is also the kill order that I use. I also use this to make a macro with kill order on it. This way I can quickly explain the kill order if I am grouping with new people. It looks like this:

/party Skull - kill first
/party Red X - kill second
/party Green Triangle - kill third
/party Purple diamond - kill fourth
/party Moon - sheep (if we have a mage)
/party Blue Square - trap (if we have a hunter)
/party Yellow Star - sap (if we have a rogue)
/party Orange Circle - shackle or mind control (if we have a priest)

This will cover most of your situations.

If the pull doesn't go according to plan, or if it is one of those pulls where you can only mark one or two of the mobs beforehand, be prepared to mark on the move. Always let your group know which mob you have targeted so they can be targeting the same one and not pull a secondary target off of you.

Also, research and understand how to do line of sight pulls. These can be very useful when you have a caster in the group you are pulling. You can pull around a corner and make that caster come to you. This way you are less likely to get adds (additional mobs) with your pull. And if you get feared, you should have pulled back to a place that you have already cleared so you don't have to worry about getting feared into an different group of mobs.

Overall, tanking is a lot of work. And there are a lot of people out there who don't do the research or put in the effort to learn the pulls, and it shows. If people find a good and competent tank, they will regularly invite you to run things and want to group with you. And this is the best compliment a tank can get. (Although sometimes, I would love time to do my dailies! :D)

Kara Feral Drops

2008-09-03T15:18:00.004-05:00

I have labeled items as Bear or Cat depending on which form the item should be used for. Keep in mind that if you are MT/OT you should give first dibs on cat leather items to rogues, as they can't tank. (or shouldn't I should say)

Trash Mobs
Zierhut's Lost Treads - Bear

Attumen the Huntsman
Gloves of Dexterous Manipulation - Cat
Worgen Claw Necklace - Cat

Moroes
Edgewalker Longboots - Cat
Lucky Pocket Watch - Bear
Royal Cloak of Arathi Kings - Cat

Maiden
Barbed Choker of Discipline - Bear
Bracers of Maliciousness - Cat

Opera Event
Romulo's Poison Vial - Cat

Curator
Garona's Signet Ring - Cat
Gloves of the Fallen Defender - Both

Illhoof
Terestian's Stranglestaff - Cat

Shade of Aran
Drape of the Dark Reavers - Cat
Rapscallion Boots - Cat
Saberclaw Talisman - Both
Shermanar Great-Ring - Bear

Chess Event
Bladed Shoulderpads of the Merciless - Both
Girdle of Treachery - Cat
Mithril Chain of Heroism - Cat

Netherspite
Cowl of Defiance - Cat
Mithril Band of the Unscarred - Cat
Skulker's Greaves - Cat

Prince Malchezaar
Farstrider Wildercloak - Cat (but if someone else wants it, give it to them, you need agility more)
Ring of a Thousand Marks - Both
Helm of the Fallen Defender - Both

Nightbane
Chestguard of the Conniver - Cat

Defense, Hit Rating and Expertise

2008-09-03T14:52:00.003-05:00

Defense

So the optimal defense rating is 415 assuming that you have Survial of the Fittest. However, if you have resilience, you can get it at 103. Now the question becomes if you have a combination of the two. There are formulas out there that will calculate it, and I have played with them, since I am a mathematician, but the easiest way to determine if you have the 2.6% reduction to be crit is to open your character profile and go to the defense tab. Hover over defense and it will tell you that you have A% reduction and then hover over the resilience and it will tell you that you have B% reduction. So if A% + B% > 2.6% then you are uncrittable. Easy as killing a gnome.

Hit Rating

The goal for a feral is to get your hit rating to 142. This is the magic number. If you are catting around, you need to make sure you are at 142, otherwise, you are losing dps. Don't bother stacking tons of it as there are many other useful things to stack. Agility for instance. I use +hit rating and + agility gems until I get to 142, then I stack all agility for better crits.

Expertise

The goal here is to reduce the number of your attacks that are dodged or parried. The optimal number is 92 for expertise. Now what I find most interesting is the lack of gear for ferals that has expertise on it. There are only 13 leather items with expertise on them. You can get it on Earthwarden, but finding a leather piece that has expertise on it that isn't a step down or available to a starting Feral is quite difficult.

Howdy

2008-09-03T14:10:00.001-05:00

Just playing around and contemplating starting a blog. I'm a feral druid on Terokkar that has started raiding Kara, Gruul's and Zul'Aman. I am also an officer in my guild. And this is going to be a spot where I discuss Feral and guild officer stuff. My personal goal is to put all of the important feral information on this site for my personal use, and if someone reads it and finds it useful, so be it.