Posted on by Sunnier

4.1 To-Do List and Tanking Changes

To-Do List for Feral Druids

Lots of good things are happening for ferals. I already wrote up an in-depth summary for changes to bears. All my guides and tank comparisons have been updated for 4.1 as well. Here’s a nice little list for all types of ferals (bear, kitty, pvp) so that you won’t forget to do some important things now that the patch has dropped.

  1. Remind your raid leaders that bears can now tank adds.
  2. Think about picking up King of the Jungle in your bear spec. My recommended bear specs are (I care about raid dps) and (I care about interrupts).
  3. Delete your macro that cancels the Enrage buff, replace with just normal enrage or, if you’re an engineer (like me), think about macroing your gloves to Enrage. Get used to spamming Enrage on cooldown!
  4. Delete your macro that combines Thrash and Swipe. Put them on separate key bindings. Your >3 target threat rotation should look something like this: Thrash, Swipe, Mangle, Swipe, repeat.
  5. Delete your macro that combines Dash and Darkflight (this probably only applies to me). Learn to save Dash for situations that call for a root break in PvP.
  6. Stampeding Roar will now be super awesome for rated battlegrounds, learn to use to free your team from a Frost Nova.
  7. Prioritize Thrash in your single target threat rotation. It generates more threat than Maul now.
  8. No more wasting precious seconds to the gcd after using Berserk! You can push it as soon as you start hitting the boss now, instead of a few seconds before pulling.
  9. Learn how to tank the new Zul’Gurub and Zul’Aman 5 mans. And do the quest chain goddammit, lore is important. Baby raptors must be rescued!
  10. Get used to Prowl’s new icon (and cry a little, because only rogue stealth got its cooldown and movement speed penalty removed). It looks like this: Edit: Actually, it looks like Prowl got changed a little bit: the cooldown now starts once you enter prowl, not when you leave it (which is how it used to be).
  11. Put kitty Swipe back on your cat bars! It’s like way overpowered now!
  12. Think about picking up the Glyph of Pounce for PvP.
  13. Stop worrying about hit in PvE, your interrupts will not need it any more.
  14. Put a Delicate Inferno Ruby into your crafted leather items, such as Belt of Nefarious Whispers. They now have extra sockets (wowhead might not be updated yet).
  15. Look into your ingame internet options. I don’t know where it’s located, but (if I remember correctly), 4.1 is also introducing a toggle that reduces most people’s latency.
  16. And finally, go fix your addons. They’re probably all sorts of broken now.

Tanking Changes

Originally, I hadn’t though to talk about changes to other tanks, but these look kind of important if you ever play with people who don’t like druids the most. Druids got the most significant changes, though all the other tanks got a strong helping of patchnotes, too. These aren’t all the changes, just the ones that are important to people who play alongside these flavors of tanks.

Druids

I wrote a whole blog post about this! The most important thing is that bears have AoE mitigation and threat comparable to other tanks now.

Warriors

  • New ability: Rallying Cry. Shares a cooldown with Last Stand, so a protection warrior has to sacrifice his personal cooldown to use it.
  • Shield Mastery no longer affects the cooldown of Spell Reflection, however, it now allows Shield Block to proc a second aura that reduces magic damage by 7/14/20% for 6 seconds.
    • This means warriors now have a magic reduction cooldown available. They are going to be even more awesome at heroic Nefarian.
  • Spell Reflection cooldown has been increased to 25 seconds, up from 10.
  • Shield Bash removed, Pummel now usable in all stances.
    • This means that protection warriors will now have an interrupt that locks out spells for 4 seconds and has a 10 second cooldown, like all other tanks.
  • Heroic Throw is now available from trainers at level 20.
    • Love for low level warriors. Because they totally had a bunch of holes in their skill set that needed filling. Maybe in a few months we can see some hole-filling for baby druids, hmmm Blizzard? (Bitter bear tank thinks not.)

Paladins

  • Word of Glory now has a 20-second cooldown.
    • I’ve read that this is the end of the world for paladins, that they should all just give up and reroll Warriors. (Actually, I dunno what paladins threaten to reroll. I know warriors threaten to reroll paladins, but does that go both ways?) Really, it’s just a nerf to paladin self-healing. They did a lot more self-healing than Blizzard expected and originally balanced them around, so it had to be nerfed (I wonder how hard my guild’s paladins will slap me for saying that).
  • Divine Guardian cooldown is now 3 minutes, up from 2.
    • I’m not sure why this was nerfed, probably to put it in line with Rallying Cry. My bitter bear tank instinct says it was because Divine Guardian was so good that other tanks got sat for every single fight because there’s always some raid-wide damage to reduce (not like I have experience with this or anything <.<…). But a longer cooldown won’t really change how vital that skill is.
  • Righteous Fury now persists through death.
    • Because tanking without out this used to happen way too much.

Death Knights

  • Raise Ally has been redesigned to be a battle resurrection, analogous to Rebirth. It is instant cast, but costs 50 Runic Power to use, and has a 10-minute cooldown. It shares the same global battle resurrection cap with Rebirth and Soulstone.
    • Now you can bother the death knight to resurrect people because you’re too busy doing bear stuff! If there is no opportunity for a druid to leave its tanking form, it is easier for a Death Knight to battle rez than for a bear. However, druids can glyph to resurrect players at 100% life, so it’s better in the long run to use a druid’s battle rez.