When ready for heroics?Follow

30/30/30 for bears seems ok. That's unbuffed 30k health, 30% dodge, 30% crit. But we're now more than ever before dependent on the rest of the group. Less health and armor leaves a lot less room for slacking. Group composition itself has become rather significant. I almost feel like I NEED priest, pally, and DK in the group for their buffs...

Cats, like every other dps, should be doing 1200-1500 overall as an absolute minimum.


Not claiming for those numbers to be entirely accurate. Just observations I made since patch day.

Unless you're talking about 25k health in caster form (which honestly wouldn't make a lot of sense) you're way too optimistic really. But you have to be, else I don't see how you would have trouble making 30k at your gear level.

I was somewhere in the middle with my gear when the patch hit, and I'm now at about

25/32k health (caster/bear)
35% dodge
32,5% crit
4500 AP
26.5k armor (about 63.5% reduction)

It is just now that I feel comfortable PUGing really all heroics because you never know what kind of healer you end up with and how skilled (in terms of dealing and avoiding damage) your dps might be. Even with my current gear I'm now having serious issues with some pulls unless I have a good (geared) healer.

I started tanking heroics with my DK when I had about 25k health, and i guess it's just about the same number for pallies and warriors. A bear with 25k wouldn't live long though unless the healer is plain excellent, and with CC no longer being an option, especially in PuGs, going in there with that little health would be like suicide.

This very issue has been my major concern with 3.1. I just don't think that druids are viable anymore to tank heroics unless they significantly improve their gear through crafting and whatnot to meet those higher standards. Quest blues and level 78 instance drops alone just isn't enough anymore unless you run with patient friends and CC a lot.

Just a confimation of what I said above. Plenty of cash needed to make it happen. Gets worse even if you consider that it's not exactly feasible to gain reputation by other means than championing heroics and the polar stuff doesn't do anything for threat or avoidance.

Probably just an oversight, but Mark of the War Prisoner is a heroic drop :)

Quite nice though is how Savage Defense has made PvP gear interesting yet again. Like the Wintergrasp helmet is the best thing you can possibly get before getting a roll on KT, and while you're gathering the 40 tokens you'll most likely end up with enough honor to buy some of the other great pieces, like the amazing bracers or whatever. That's besides having a shot at T7 or now even T8 once a week in VoA.

While ratings don't scale with BoK, there is now plenty of stamina and agility on the pvp gear. And even though resilience is useless in PvE, it's not like defense rating does a whole lot more for us besides a tiny little bit of dodge and miss.

It's just really sad that now you need to more or less gear up outside instances rather than just growing into it like it used to be.

Now what really strikes me as odd is that once you made it past that initial hurdle, upgrades really aren't that significant anymore, and the majority of the best bear gear (or damn close to that) can be had without ever setting foot into a 10 or 25 man T7 raid besides VoA.

Thanks for the responses, I really appreciate it. :)

I managed to upgrade my eq a bit through pvp and some long overdue enchantments, so I'll probably start with some heroics this weekend, just the easy ones to see how it goes.

All in all I now have around 27k HP, 26k AC, 34% dodge, 33% crit and 4,5k AP. I'm still using the wrong kind of gem on my helmet, but am hoping to get enough wintergrasp marks this weekend to get another one for my tanking set, so that should help as well as replacing the LW AP enchantment with the LW stamina enchantment for the wrist. Finally got a decent amount of hit rating as well, which was one of my biggest problems before.

Either way, thanks a lot for the replies and numbers. They really helped. :)

No need to reach it cap.

If can be done easily then go for it. But I would recommend gemming for hit beyond a combo hit/agility gem if needed for a meta.

Same goes for reaching a 6.5% reduction from expertise.

Really nice but not required.

How ever much is on the gear you are wearing.

Beyond using a hit combo gem to activate a meta don't gem or gear for hit. You get enough on your gear.

We are very lucky in that the craftable Trollwoven & Polar sets give you an almost instant tanking set. Between those and the quest rewards you pick up leveling, you should be pretty good to go with some of the easier heroics, particularly if you are with others who are better geared (particularly heals).

I first entered heroics as kitty dps. As long as you have a decent rotation you should fairly easily pull around 1500 dps in the better questing blues/craftable epics. My first heroic run was Nexus followed by Violet Hold. After running both I ended up with two very nice blue pieces: chest and helm. Both with gem slots, tons of stam, and plenty of agil. They have both lasted me up to Naxx 25. Also if you dont have a decent staff, there are three really good ones that I know of. The best is Staff of Trickery off Cynagosa in Violet Hold. I ran this every day for nearly a month before I got it to drop though. The second best is the staff off the last boss in H UK. It is not epic but is definitely the best blue staff available. Another good one, though the worst of these three, is the staff off the first boss in REGULAR Gun'drak. 103 stam on an item from a regular instance is pretty rare. After grinding WG and getting most factions to exalted, I finally entered heroics to tank at 30/30/30 which did not take long at all for me too reach, surprisingly. The key thing is enchants. Gold should not be a problem as it is readily available in Wrath, especially now with the Argent Tourny. After 3.1 I would imagine these numbers would be a little lower because of the nerfs, but Savage Defense is a very nice addition especially since bears crit a lot.

As far as hit/expertise goes, I don't aim for the cap, but I try to stay around 150 hit and just grab whatever expertise happens to be on my gear. I try to stay away from gemming for either. I find that with 16 agil gems and +8 dodge +12 stam I am around 39% dodge in bear now.

So far the best experience for me as a bear was my first time tanking Emalon (not the adds) where I pulled 2.7k dps. It was a great moment when I linked recount at the end to show me as 5th on the dps charts.

Astarin!! I had wondered where you'd disappeared off too. :3
Welcome back. ^^

Same soul-sucking job, but now that I'm a little higher on the food chain, I have a little more free time.

This is what I am loving at the moment... on our server I rarely come across levelling druids or rogues, so I can almost guarantee I will score all the leather that drops.

I feel sorry for the warriors/DKs/pally's all competing for the plate though. :(