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A Sunnier Bear One Year Anniversary

On March 2, 2011, I posted my first blog post. I originally started this blog because I could never find any tank-centric encounter guides. It seemed like every guide I could find on the web was written by a healer and couldn’t tell me where to stand or when to taunt. So I decided to take it upon myself and write some tank-specific guides myself, starting with my very first post, Bear vs. Heroic Magmaw.

A Sunnier Bear was my third attempt at blogging. The very first, Hullo Bear, was mostly an experimental visual documentation of Sunnier’s leveling through Cataclysm.

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Team Wafflecast: Bear Roundtable

I was on the latest Team Wafflecast with several talented bear druids. We answer bear-related questions about the current state of the spec, speculate about bears in Mists of Pandaria, and other things.

I pretty much just sit in a corner and answer questions when Arielle makes me, because I’m very shy. D: There were three hardcore 25man tanks so I felt a little lonely, but I learned that 25 man requires many more tanks than 10 man. Three tanks on heroic Spine?! And other things!

Anyways, enjoy!

CLICK HERE FOR PODCAST

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How Do You Explain WoW to non-WoW players?

When I first started playing World of Warcraft, I remember telling my parents it was simply called The Burning Crusade. Why? Because World of Warcraft sounds like one of those games that’s overflowing with unnecessary violence. As someone who grew up within 5 miles of the Columbine massacre, excessively violent video games were commonly thought to cause excessive violence in the real world. Sprinkle in some religious fundamentalism, a brother fighting in a real life war, and voila! You have a situation where a game with Crusade in the title is preferable to one that implies a world full of war.

Nowadays my parents actually encourage my gaming habits (well, they encourage my blogging habits), and it turns out my fear was a little unnecessary. They actively try to understand what I’m blogging and tweeting about all the time, though in reality they have almost no clue.

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I Had an Idea for MoP

Last night I had trouble sleeping because I thought of a talent I would really love to see in Mists of Pandaria and I got all excited.

Grants the druid the passive benefits of bear form even while out of bear form. While casting, the druid has immunity to spell pushback and takes less damage equal to his dodge chance for X seconds. Y minute cooldown.

So basically bears would have bear-level armor, damage reduction, and uncritability even in caster form (or cat form, or travel form). The “takes less damage equal to his dodge chance” part is the same as a Deathknight’s Army of the Dead ability, where it’s only there to compensate for the lack of avoidance while casting.

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How Active Mitigation Might Work for Bears

At the moment, we don’t have very much concrete information. There is a lot we have to assume by looking at other classes (namely, warriors) and piecing together the little hints Blizzard has dropped us. Keep in mind that the current MoP talent calculators are pre-alpha, and the information will change significantly by launch.

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s take a look at how active mitigation for Guardian druids looks at the moment.

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A Sunnier Bear’s Survival Guide to 4.3

According to MMO-Champion, patch 4.3 is coming this Tuesday. We don’t have any major changes coming our way, but here’s what to look out for.

Changes to Bears

Bear Form now provides a Stamina bonus of 20%, up from 10%.

This is a change to help us remain competitive among block-capping Paladins and Warriors. This increases stamina’s value to bears, though it is still not more valuable than agility for damage mitigation. In most cases, you should still gem agility, though Shifting Demonseyes will be even more attractive for those blue slots.

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Bears: What Exactly Do We Gain or Lose in Mists of Pandaria?

Blizzard released the most up to date talent calculator last night. I plan on writing up a complete analysis later, but for now I wanted to list the spells and passive abilities that we lose or what will be changed. If I missed something, please let me know in the comments. It’s nearly 2am and I went over this pretty quickly.

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A Look at New Talents for Guardian Druids

I’m very excited about the new talent system. Not only will you be able to respec any time you want (as long as you’re out of combat), but most tiers actually do add an element of choice. I especially love the nature vibe emanating from most of these talents, which adds more potential flavor to bears. I believe they still need some polish, and likely many of these talents will change before Mists of Pandaria goes live, but let’s have a look at them before all of that happens.

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The Death of the Bearcat

Hybrid no more.

I’m going to assume everyone is caught up with all of the recent Blizzcon news. If not, read up on it at MMO-Champion.

The biggest event for us bear druids was the separation of the traditional feral spec. Melee dps druids will continue to be called “feral combat,” and tanking druids will become “guardian”. I will miss referring to myself as feral, but guardian has a nice ring to it.

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