Mastering tanks, one boss at a time.
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.
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.
Continue reading “What I Miss About the Horde (and what I’m glad to be without)”
So far my procrastination has served me well. Instead of posting my thoughts on Tier 13 bonuses immediately after they were released, now I can have a post dedicated to the updated Tier 13 bonuses.
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.
We haven’t downed him yet, as we’re still trying to figure out the OMGWHATISGOINGON that is phase 4. But I’ve learned some things and drawn some pictures that might aid others.
In most cases, it’s not worth going into cat form when you’re not tanking. You lose your vengeance, the DoT does more damage, and all you can do is mangle-spam.
Here we are, ladies and gentlemen. The outfit I will wear once tranmogrification is released!
Wait, you’re saying that everyone will be wearing the Thunderheart set? I won’t be a unique and special snowflake like I imagined? How can I fix this?
I have to find something that elegant, but also druidic. It needs to be relatively easy to obtain, but not dull. It cannot, by any means, interact with my worgen’s muzzle, because that makes her look horrible. Worse than wearing white after labor day (is that right? I don’t actually understand fashion).
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.
I have this thing for looking at recruitment posts, and this was especially relevant when I was looking for new guilds a few weeks ago. After a while you start to notice patterns and develop pet peeves. If you are in charge of the recruitment post for your guild, here are somethings you should or should not do (according to me).
Feral staves used to have a reputation of being awesome. We had ugly cat and bear forms, so they had to give us something pretty to look at, right? Even if it was just for running around Shattrath.
Then we started sharing staves with hunters, and our options were suddenly less cool. Well, now that the ability to change the appearance of your gear is coming in 4.3, we can go back to the way things were!
Here are, in my opinion, the best options to pick from.
I want to point out that after a tiny bit of googling, I found that “Threat Level Midnight” is an episode of The Office (US version).
Blizzard, specifically Ghostcrawler, decided to talk about threat and tanking abilities. In a dramatic departure from previous Dev Watercoolers, they actually mentioned changes that will be coming instead of things they might think about later.
