What I Miss About the Horde (and what I’m glad to be without)

I spent my first four years in this game as a tauren. Then the world was shattered and I turned to the blue side. While I’m happy to remain with the Alliance for now, there are some things I miss about the Horde.

What I miss about the Horde

Hawkstriders. I love the way they bobble and caw. Luckily, I got the Swift White Hawkstrider on my Alliance character, and that helps ease the sadness from lack of chocobos.

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Bear Feedback

I’ve wanted to do this for a while, but for some reason it has taken forever. Honestly, I think bears are in a pretty good place right now. There’s room for improvement, but with the massive tank changes that were supposed to come in 4.3 (why do you make me sad, Blizz!), it didn’t seem necessary. I never even posted in the official thread! But they are interesting questions with interesting answers.

What type of content/type do you focus on?

Hardmode 10s PvE

What are your biggest quality-of-life issues?

I don’t like that Demoralizing Roar and Faerie Fire (Feral) are on the spell hit table. It’s unreasonable for bears to attain the 17% hit required to guarantee those spells will hit. This is a relic of vanilla WoW that has stayed far longer than necessary.

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More on Active Mitigation

I wrote about interactive tanking a few months ago, but now that it’s becoming a reality, I feel like I should revisit some of those ideas.

First of all, what can we glean from Ghostcrawler’s recent blog posts about the changes? They haven’t said anything specific for bears, but they’ve dropped some hints.

We define [active mitigation] as hitting buttons regularly that have a meaningful impact on your future mitigation.

As an aside, the Feral druid’s mitigation is arguably the most passive right now, and we’d want to change things like Savage Defense to be active buttons under this model.

From these two comments, I expect they plan on making Savage Defense into Blood Shield. They don’t seem to be a huge fan of Death Strike’s heal, so they probably won’t include that in the feral model. My guess is that instead of proccing a small bubble on critical hits, we’ll proc a large bubble on a specific attack. We don’t know much more than that.

Orange paws of defense!

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What Does It Mean to Be in a End-Game Raiding Guild?

Being in an end-game raiding guild means knowing your class and role inside and out. Your rotation is second nature, you fully understand the mechanics, and you know how to apply your class’s individual skill set to each unique encounter. You know the pattern to follow and, most importantly, you know when to break that pattern.

Being in an end-game raiding guild means being familiar the other nine classes. You know their strengths, so that you can use them in the best place, and you know their weaknesses, so that you can help compensate for them.

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