Bored Druid ThreadFollow

I take red and blue socket bonuses. Yellow, not so much.

I think our guild finally found a replacement holy pally, albeit a reluctant ret. convert. Our main Pally heals got moved to the evening shift at work and can only come a couple of times a week. Now we just have to find a good DPS to take the ret pally's spot. Good news is one of our tanks wants to switch to DPS for a bit; of course then we need a new tank. However I'm about ready to take over tanking on my druid, so I can fill that gap; but first we'll need another healer to take my place. It just goes on and on.... :p

In unrelated news VoA runs make my bear happy.

Write everything down and make a story out of it to entertain me please.





Also, feral dps is ****** up.
I'll stick to being a bear and roflstomping my way through instances. (<3 seriously.. tanking kicks ***)

We gone done got some more raiders.

This makes me happy.

Granted we didn't kill bosses outside of the first 4 but having a more stable group makes killing new guys in the near future a certainty.

This is good as the first four guys don't drop **** for a feral tank.

Since there were questions about the UO proc and uptime and such, I'll clarify a few things after using it for a week.

It only procs on melee strikes. Eating magic damage doesn't work. I forgot to look at Marrowgar and see if I was getting procs from eating Saber Lashes or not.

The proc lasts 10 sec, and has no ICD on re-procs. Long enough that as long as the boss doesn't stop swinging at you, it stays up, but I was losing it on BQ and princes because they turn and fire attacks at other people. Trash packs stack it very quickly for obvious reasons (but loltrash).

All in all it's still really nice for tanking in general and will be helpful on LK. The armor on it makes for a good fulltime EH buff (to the tune of ~2200 EH given my current stats), and if you're taking hits, you get a nice chunk of extra breathing room on top of that. If you're only really taking magic damage though (BQ mirror tank, maybe Sindragosa though I won't be swapping it out on that personally since Frost Breath is predictable and it's her melee damage I want to get down as far as possible) then you're better off with a CSK.

Thinking in terms of EH I'm not sure whether Black Heart or a CSK would be better alongside it. Black Heart wins hands down with the proc up but when you average that proc out (45 sec ICD), one has to wonder. Rawr is still telling me Black Heart though, and I'm inclined to trust it; it favors SMZ gems on all my gear so I'd expect it to put CSK up there with the higher base stamina if it didn't like the armor proc anymore.

I'm pretty sure Glyph is retired, it's not as good as either of them. It was good when T9 was king but CSK gives you a usable oh sh*t button and is better base EH.

Edited, Feb 26th 2010 10:08am by Norellicus

Why is cower so useless. I could really use a threat reduction tool that works. Tanks seem to have a lot of trouble holding threat off of me. I don't link having to back off of the mob because it seems even just white hitting I am still taking loads of threat. It's not like the tanks are not geared either. Unless its a warrior with vigilance on me then I pull threat.

Druids don't get innate threat reduction, do they? It's really odd. There's no threat modifier tied to Bear form, is there? We rely on out-damaging our opponents with Maul and Lacerate doing extra threat, but it's not like we do increased threat by switching into Bear form, do we?

Edit: Thanks for the links, Horse. Is the Skeleton Key really worth much? I believe I saw some stuff about it bringing basically nothing to the table, except additional health. "Great for showing off in heroics" or something like that, I think they said.

Edited, Feb 27th 2010 9:43pm by Mazra

I see. Odd that it's not mentioned in the tooltips.

Double post, but editing my original several hours later is counterproductive for new thoughts.

Maz, the dodge nerf hit everyone equally. Nobody lost more than anybody else. Your total avoidance dropped by 20% is all, and boss damage was brought down accordingly. I hate tanking ToC/GC now because it's seriously scary to watch how fast my health fluctuates. ICC is a lot better for having the debuff and allowing easier incoming damage.

We also have block though. Savage Defense is, for all intents and purposes, a shield block, and given our crit rates will be going off about as often. It's obviously not the same mechanic because you can't be unhittable with it like you can with BV on anub adds, but for boss tanking it's the same effect.

Your health is definitely low though if you're walking in with 35k unbuffed (I'm assuming that's bear form). Look at getting more stamina gems in there if you need to, you really want to reach 50k buffed even in 10 man.

Speaking from pure speculation, healers aren't going to have a much easier time keeping you up when you take a string of hits from Rotface and can't dodge them because you're running away from the Unstable Ooze Explosion (which comes down too fast to backpedal out of).

Festergut with 3 inhaled blight can be pretty scary damage output too. BQ hits for 10k average. Both of these are dodgeable of course, just trying to reiterate that icecrown radiance didn't somehow make dodge more important than it was before; you still should be getting your health up first and foremost, and let the dodge carry along with it. You don't have to go overboard, I still have a lot of Shifting Dreadstones on my gear to match socket bonuses for a little extra agility, but I'm still putting Zircons in yellow and blue sockets.

Edited, Feb 28th 2010 1:57am by Norellicus

That explains why Warriors and Paladins alike are running around with pure stamina in their gem sockets.

Guess I'll have to regem. Anyone got a spare 2k gold?

What is it with Shadow Priests? Seriously, what?

Either they're gearing up and performing sub-par to everything else or they're decked in full T10 and overaggroing everything with their Mind Sear spam crap.

It's such an off class specialization, really.

Kalon has ceased his blog, it is a great loss to the feral community. His insight will be missed.

As a side not I actually logged in tank gear and got to see what my wow-heroes score was for the first time in months.

I really should move more yellow sockets to blue gems but am lazy and waiting for new gear. ;)