Frenzied Regen

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!

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....

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

But wait there's more.

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

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

Growl! I'm not a very happy bear!

Tanking and Guild Questions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, keep it wild and furry!

Bear Tanking

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

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

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

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

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

Keep it wild and furry!