M'partner wondered this aloud. I spent 76 levels as a bear, and found it miserable. The toolset was tiny, the gear confusing, and the bear model still eats up way too much screen area. I respec'ed tree, and didn't look back... for several weeks.
Then I took some carefully hoarded pennies and my long-unused flight form*, walked up to the annoying elf with a dragonhawk who loiters on Krasus' Landing spamming emotes... then ended up in Thunder Bluff, in front of a druid trainer, considerably lighter of pocket and spending a second set of talent points in a disturbingly bearlike fashion.
Why?
Mostly, I think it was this superb look at the 'feel' of druid tanking. After playing a warrior, the way a bear's tools fall short felt absolutely stifling. But the above post kind of turned that on its head - bears don't feel like prot warriors (despite having mostly reskinned prot skills), and that is entirely OK. They have a simple priority system for single-target threat, a couple of debuffs and a DoT to track, wear a lot of kitty-gear... they really do feel more like a DPS that wants aggro.
Bears, on single targets and rage allowing, keep Faerie Fire and Mangle on cooldown, keep Lacerate up, keep Maulin' every attack ('tis on my mousewheel down, sharing a bind with Heroic Strike, and drives my partner nuts with the incessant whirring) and... um, fill in with Swipe. With a glyphed Maul, this also covers two targets. On three or more, I try to Lacerate/FF/Mangle the first kill target just in case the planets align and the DPS elect to follow the kill order, and then just Swipe+Maul my way to the bank. It's all very simple, although as with DPS classes getting used to the timing so you don't over-refresh Lacerate or let it fall off takes practise. I'm guilty of both, as well as not applying Demo. Roar most of the time - but hey, I do that on the warrior as well. At least I consistently fail at AP-debuffs**.
It's so very simple. No procs to worry about, Infected Wounds is self-applying, and with Mangle/FF sharing a cooldown duration (I don't spec Imp. Mangle at the moment) it practically falls into a rotation. Combined with the crazy crit rates bears get (40% odd, unbuffed, with terrible gear!), it really does feel like DPS. Once I'd reconciled this with the fact that it was still tanking, I've felt a lot more friendly towards the bear's smaller toolbox.
* I did hoard some more pennies and get cold weather flying shortly afterwards, so the poor thing can - at last - flap slowly around Northrend.
** I think the general reason for this is I'm really, really paranoid about getting a solid aggro lead - especially on AoE pulls - that I feel I can't afford the GCD to slip it in at the start of a fight. By the time I actually feel secure in the threat tables, trash is nearly dead anyway. This behaviour reinforces itself, and Demo. Roar/Shout slowly falls down my internal priority list until I forget about it. Bad Bear!
Thursday 11 March 2010
Tankin' HoR - It's Hard
My poor little undergeared bear has been thrown into Halls of Reflection twice, now. I suspect this is the fault of my (considerably nicer) healing gear, but I've made a stab at it.
First time went without a hitch. The priest healer kept one of the ranged spirits shackled at all times, and the DPS paid attention to Omen (I make a point of mentioning my new-ness and generally low threat output on joining an instance, but people listening is still a rarity).
Second time, we had no priest, and no other useful CC either. The DPS had better gear, and were veritable aggromonkeys. We wiped twice on the last wave of spirits before the very first boss, before deciding it wasn't happening. I couldn't control all the mobs without the help of some CC, and I was too squishy to let the healer focus on keeping DPS alive when they did pull aggro. It ended politely, but still. Bit of a sad ending to an otherwise productive night of bearing.
From the perspective of a noob-bear, the instance is a real pain. I had to use growl and FFF on cooldown to try to keep the riflemen and magi focused on me, and swipe-spam in the alcove to keep the melee mobs semi-controlled. If any of them got loose, it was painful to reacquire threat given that growl was generally on cooldown. Charging one of the ranged mobs after getting concrete threat on the melee did help, but was risky. And if I hate that alcove for giving me viewing problems on my shaman, it's ten times worse with a giant bear arse obscuring the screen!
I'm not sure what to do about that place, except get a better weapon and try to sharpen my focus. The emphasis is there because my druid still hasn't seen the polearm from HoR. Nor the one from ToC. Nor even the staff from VH - she's stuck with the drudgery of the tournament dailies to pick up the Staff of Feral Furies at some point in the distant future, because precious little else is dropping for her. /grump
Speaking of focus, I managed to fail utterly and repeatedly in Old Kingdom. Never tank whilst tired and using a new UI mod that wrecks your frame rate - the combination is not shiny. I guess I had become blasé about tanking the 'normal' heroics to even consider this, and ate a mounded helping of humble pie as a result.
Tanking takes concentration and sensible reflexes to do well. Who'd have thought?
First time went without a hitch. The priest healer kept one of the ranged spirits shackled at all times, and the DPS paid attention to Omen (I make a point of mentioning my new-ness and generally low threat output on joining an instance, but people listening is still a rarity).
Second time, we had no priest, and no other useful CC either. The DPS had better gear, and were veritable aggromonkeys. We wiped twice on the last wave of spirits before the very first boss, before deciding it wasn't happening. I couldn't control all the mobs without the help of some CC, and I was too squishy to let the healer focus on keeping DPS alive when they did pull aggro. It ended politely, but still. Bit of a sad ending to an otherwise productive night of bearing.
From the perspective of a noob-bear, the instance is a real pain. I had to use growl and FFF on cooldown to try to keep the riflemen and magi focused on me, and swipe-spam in the alcove to keep the melee mobs semi-controlled. If any of them got loose, it was painful to reacquire threat given that growl was generally on cooldown. Charging one of the ranged mobs after getting concrete threat on the melee did help, but was risky. And if I hate that alcove for giving me viewing problems on my shaman, it's ten times worse with a giant bear arse obscuring the screen!
I'm not sure what to do about that place, except get a better weapon and try to sharpen my focus. The emphasis is there because my druid still hasn't seen the polearm from HoR. Nor the one from ToC. Nor even the staff from VH - she's stuck with the drudgery of the tournament dailies to pick up the Staff of Feral Furies at some point in the distant future, because precious little else is dropping for her. /grump
Speaking of focus, I managed to fail utterly and repeatedly in Old Kingdom. Never tank whilst tired and using a new UI mod that wrecks your frame rate - the combination is not shiny. I guess I had become blasé about tanking the 'normal' heroics to even consider this, and ate a mounded helping of humble pie as a result.
Tanking takes concentration and sensible reflexes to do well. Who'd have thought?
Thursday 4 March 2010
Slowly It Grows
Whee! This is going to be a scatterbrained post, even more so than usual.
Darkmoon Faire is still a slightly odd place to me, but I took the plunge and transferred a load of alts over. All my significantly levelled characters are now on one realm again, which is nice.
Now I just have to decide what to do with the bleedin' things. I sorta-decided to farm Frost emblems on as many as I could be bothered, and focus on gearing up one at a time. As the mage and enhancement shaman are adequately geared in their main specs, the druid seemed a logical place to put some effort in!
I'm really enjoying my tree, but in a moment of complete insanity I decided to buy dual spec and cobble together a tanking build. Argh! I really didn't enjoy bear-tanking up to level 75, so who knows what possessed me. I'm hoping that it will provide a valuable contrast to the warrior, who is currently hoarding Rested XP in the Thrallmar inn, and that the rage-management experience from there will help me enjoy the big bear butt a little more. It'll be a while before I'm willing to actually tank, though - she currently only hits 28k health in bear form. More than enough to tank your average heroic, but pugs these days positively sneer at any tank who's not rocking up to the plate with at least 35k. I suppose there's no reason not to, as that's easily achieved with emblem gear.
So, tree is running out of things to spend emblems on now and can start collecting bear gear. Hopefully I can snag some tasty bits of offset gear from ToC and the ICC dungeons on the way, too.
Some notes on druid specs: There seems to be a lot of wibble going on about how useful Living Spirit is to raiding trees compared to spending points in Empowered Touch, and how it might be more useful to an undergeared druid. I'm honestly confused by this. It's a percentage increase to spirit. It scales near-perfectly with gear (things like Solace aside, MP5 isn't common in tree gearing), and that cuts both ways. A newly dinged tree might indeed want extra regen with a small lump of throughput, but they'll also have a low amount of spirit. Per talent point, 5% of a small number is a smaller number.
So basically, if you're on the low end of the gear scale LS might be tempting, but it's also a relatively low absolute boost to regen and spellpower. Granted, points spent in Empowered Touch are also weaker because it affects only the spellpower portion of the healing done by those spells, and with lower spellpower the base amount unaffected by the talent will be a larger chunk of the total.
I don't think it's a bad talent by any stretch, but I don't really see the logic in saying it's significantly better for those with lesser gear.
For reference, I've been running with 1/3 LS, 2/2 ET basically since dinging 80 in blues and greens. I wish I had talent points to pick up Living Seed as well, but hey ho.
Darkmoon Faire is still a slightly odd place to me, but I took the plunge and transferred a load of alts over. All my significantly levelled characters are now on one realm again, which is nice.
Now I just have to decide what to do with the bleedin' things. I sorta-decided to farm Frost emblems on as many as I could be bothered, and focus on gearing up one at a time. As the mage and enhancement shaman are adequately geared in their main specs, the druid seemed a logical place to put some effort in!
I'm really enjoying my tree, but in a moment of complete insanity I decided to buy dual spec and cobble together a tanking build. Argh! I really didn't enjoy bear-tanking up to level 75, so who knows what possessed me. I'm hoping that it will provide a valuable contrast to the warrior, who is currently hoarding Rested XP in the Thrallmar inn, and that the rage-management experience from there will help me enjoy the big bear butt a little more. It'll be a while before I'm willing to actually tank, though - she currently only hits 28k health in bear form. More than enough to tank your average heroic, but pugs these days positively sneer at any tank who's not rocking up to the plate with at least 35k. I suppose there's no reason not to, as that's easily achieved with emblem gear.
So, tree is running out of things to spend emblems on now and can start collecting bear gear. Hopefully I can snag some tasty bits of offset gear from ToC and the ICC dungeons on the way, too.
Some notes on druid specs: There seems to be a lot of wibble going on about how useful Living Spirit is to raiding trees compared to spending points in Empowered Touch, and how it might be more useful to an undergeared druid. I'm honestly confused by this. It's a percentage increase to spirit. It scales near-perfectly with gear (things like Solace aside, MP5 isn't common in tree gearing), and that cuts both ways. A newly dinged tree might indeed want extra regen with a small lump of throughput, but they'll also have a low amount of spirit. Per talent point, 5% of a small number is a smaller number.
So basically, if you're on the low end of the gear scale LS might be tempting, but it's also a relatively low absolute boost to regen and spellpower. Granted, points spent in Empowered Touch are also weaker because it affects only the spellpower portion of the healing done by those spells, and with lower spellpower the base amount unaffected by the talent will be a larger chunk of the total.
I don't think it's a bad talent by any stretch, but I don't really see the logic in saying it's significantly better for those with lesser gear.
For reference, I've been running with 1/3 LS, 2/2 ET basically since dinging 80 in blues and greens. I wish I had talent points to pick up Living Seed as well, but hey ho.
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