Community Spotlight: Sometimes Warriors know what they are talking about

As many of you know I have a level 80 alt warrior, and as such I read a lot of warrior blogs as well as feral blogs.

My favorite warrior blog is http://www.tankingtips.com/, written by a good friend and my blogging mentor Veneretio (who just happens to be a fellow tankspot author). One nice thing about it is that he also covers a lot of general tanking theory as well, some of which I have been able to apply to my druid.

One example is http://www.tankingtips.com/2009/02/24/the-trash-caps/.

For trash mobs (level 82s), the hit and expertise caps are:

177 Hit Rating (5.4%)
22 Expertise Skill (5.5%)

Thanks to Satrina (tankspot moderator) and Vene for bringing these numbers to light.

Community Spotlight: Kalons reply to GC

You did not honestly expect me to pat blizzard on the back without a rant shortly after did you?

We want to get out of the business of needing to offer 2 types of weapon for a single tree of one class, given that we already have to itemize Balance and Resto druids somewhat differently. It is just not our design to make two-handed tanking weapons, and we have attempted to design DKs and druids so that they don't need them.

The classes and spec have grown so divergent that even with Ulduar offering something like 800 items (which to be fair, counts 10 vs. 25 and normal vs. hard) some players still feel like we aren't filling their niche. We don't want to have to offer 1000 or more PvE items in one patch, so we need to handle things at the class level so that there is less of a need for those items.

If you want to focus on tanking as a Feral instead of dps, you should do that mostly through talents, gems, enchants and the jewelry and cloak pieces. We have fit two fairly different roles into the Feral tree and you can even hybridize them to a degree, but we want to stop short of having to itemize the druid as four classes.

Kalon (of thinktank) said it best in a reply that echoed my thoughts almost exactly:

And that would have been a fine design decision at the start of WotLK.

But then you came out with the Enraged Feral Staff.
And staff of shrouded mysteries.
And Origin of Nightmares.
And if that weren't enough, you came out with a tanking staff with armor from the Argent Crusade vendors.

I understand that your vision is that you don't want DK and druid tanking weapons. What I don't understand is why you keep undercutting your vision. It's this duplicity that is problematic (though hardly surprising). It's that duplicity that causes the quality of life issue that druids aren't happy about.

Simple fact is blizzard you already opened the door, you thought about putting in 2 DK blacksmithing tanking weapons, AND YOU VERY VERY SWIFTLY removed them before they ever went live. If this was truly your design philosophy than none of the current weapons in game would have armor.

If you do not remove the armor from Origin of Nightmares then it will continue to be the best tanking weapon well into the next instance, you simply cannot compare with 700 armor unless you have the levels of agi that exist on the currently bugged pvp weapons.

Also, @ kalon, have you run the numbers on the pvp weapons with their new agi levels? Is the 1850 one still better than OoN ?

Community Spotlight: Tentative Feral Raiding Specs for 3.1

First, I would like to give credit to of Teeth and Claws. Last week, he put up a post about possible specs for 3.1, found here tentative-feral-raiding-specs-for-3.1. A few days before that I posted my own write-up on Tankspot, found here 3-1-bear-specs. While I had already decided to use that post on tankspot for my weekly tip on patch day, I found his post refreshing because it gave me some more things to think about as far as specs, but there are also some things I disagree with (although some of my disagreements are with the comments left by other people not the poster himself).

SPECS

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft is the base spec from which all the templates will work off of.

Survivability build: Slightly different in that you drop imp mangle to pick up Feral Aggression. Threat will be touchy with this spec but it has the advantage of never having mangle and faerie fire overlap.

Max TPS: MSS and partial KOTJ provide the highest sustained TPS with an option for burst threat at the trade off of armor.

Main Tank: Swaps 3 in FA for imp mangle from the survival build. The 2 points left over are throwaways that you can put anywhere (including shredding attacks if you wanted: see below).

MSS/Imp LOTP: This is my favorite spec to tank 25 with because we always have a frost DK dpsing so there is no need to grab IW. It is also the max TPS spec with ILOTP instead of those 2 in KOTJ.

MSS/IW: (that 1 lose point should be in PP) you can drop imp mangle to pick up imp LOTP and finish PP if you want. Remember, because of how the GCD works, 1 or 2 points in imp mangle for tanking is worthless, so drop all 3 or none at all. I put this up to show how gimp a build with both IW and MSS would be. It would be an interesting comparision to see which gives more threat, 4% damage or 5 expertise.

Imp Mark of the Wild

Is now a mandatory talent for all feral druids. If you have not yet done so, look at what it does now.

Imp LOTP
Go back in time to LK beta, I wrote this talent off and pretty much said I would never get it. Well I was wrong. I hate not having it especially for progression content, even if it is usually almost all overheal, it can be a lifesaver at the right times (example: getting hit by a spell for 75% of your life then procing the heal giving you just enough to survive the melee hit after the spell).

Shredding Attacks
Dual spec kills ANY REASON for having shredding attacks in a bear build, as I strongly do not believe in the so called "bearcat" spec. Sure, it works, but if I am going to DPS I do not want to gimp myself. If a boss is at 5% and the main tank dies, healers have more problems on their hands than worrying about the new tank not having defensive stance. Ulduar bosses hit way to hard in 25, so while you may get away with it on 10, in 25 you simply will not have the hp to survive 2 hits while wearing dps gear in that situation.

The lone exception is when you have to offtank the first 10-25% then start dpsing, which does not happen in Ulduar that I have seen.

MSS and KOTJ
As for KOTJ vs MSS for tanking, I did a comparison a while back. Since it is a 5 point investment, MSS gives you .8% damage per point. In Ulduar things hit to hard to be spamming enrage on cooldown but if you did, per point it would give you an increase of .833% per point. To extend that a bit, if use it every 61 seconds it becomes a .819% damage increase per point. Every 62 seconds gives .806% and every 63 seconds .793%. Thus, if you have even 3 seconds of downtime on enrage MSS yields more benefit without the armor reduction.

As always, all the past weekly tips are viewable here and here.

Community Spotlight: jacemora.com

Formerly of http://jacemora.blogspot.com/2009/04/my-last-post.html, has moved to a new host.

The new site can be found here. Keep up the good work.