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Worgen Bear and Cat Colors

Worgen are special. All the other druidic races have logical coloration of their feral forms. White hair? Well you sir get to be a white bear! Brown fur, here’s your brown lion. Green mohawk, green kitty. Logical.

But for worgen…

Black fur? It doesn’t do anything to indicate what color bear you’re going to turn into. Red hair in your human form? What shade of red? Because there are four shades, and sometimes it will make you a gray bear and sometimes it will make you a white bear.

As someone who spends an average of 70 gold a month at the barber shop, I am in an excellent position to document the various natural Gilnean hair colors and how they correspond to the unnatural feral forms. The colors are listed in the order that they appear on the character creator and hair stylist, starting from black.

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On WoW Conversations with Strangers

Last night I went to dinner with some of my boyfriend’s coworkers. I’m a quiet type, so when meeting new people like this I usually sit back and observe how everyone else acts. They were all fun people, though not the normal type of folk that I’m used to hanging out with. Eventually one of the girls piped up and admitted to playing Magic (the card game) last week. She had borrowed a deck from one of her friends and actually won once!

This led to the accusation that she had done another unbelievable nerdy thing in the past, playing World of Warcraft. She confessed that yes, she played up to level 35. At that point, she said, the game took too much of her time, so she quit.

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Frenzied Regeneration Glyph Analysis

Last week I gave some advice to the author of a 4.2 bear post: “The Frenzied Regeneration Glyph is absolutely necessary for raiding bears”.

A few days later, another commenter contested that statement. His argument was that, at more than 3k at tick, an unglyphed Frenzied Regeneration contributes more to your survival than the glyphed version, especially given how much healers have to move or stop casting. While 3000 health per second is not enough classify as impressive healing in my book, it made me think. Is unglyphed Frenzied Regen actually better?

How much healing do our healers need to do to justify the loss of healing 30% of your health over 20 seconds?

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The First Week of Firelands

I like my balloon.

My guild downed Shannox, Beth’tilac, and Lord Rhyolith in the last two days. We’ve made some progress on Alysrazor as well, and will hopefully down her tonight. I gotta say, this instance is awesome. I wasn’t particularly burned out on Bastion of Twilight or Blackwing Descent, but Firelands took me by surprise.

I was concerned that the raid would be too dark. Screenshots and videos are pretty dark, but the raid is bright enough with plenty of contrast. I love the huge, outdoor zone, and the endless horizon. There are fireballs flying everywhere, armies of elementals, and tiny little lavaworms. As much as I hate trash, it feels somehow fitting that you zone into a foreign plane of existence and cower at the vast volcanic plain that is simply dripping with hellhounds and fire elementals. I wonder if this is how walking into Mordor would feel. And there’s music!

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Bears and Other Tanking Changes in 4.2

The Firelands are coming! A little too soon for me, since my guild is still one boss away from fully completing all the content, but I’ll welcome a change in environment. Even though the change is from one fire-covered city and shadowy tower with a fire-covered basement to an entire fire-covered realm

For the full list of changes, go here.

As always, my Bear Guide and Gear List have been updated to reflect 4.2 changes.

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How to Apply to Raiding Guilds: The Feral Flavored Version

I was inspired by WoW Insider’s recent Encrypted Text and Spiritual Guidance articles on how to apply to a guild as a rogue and priest, respectively. Both are excellent articles with advice that applies to everyone, not just those classes. I recommend anyone who’s looking for a new raiding guild to read them.

Here are my own recommendations for guild applications, from general use to bears and cats.

Your guild application is your first and likely your only chance to make a good impression. Do not waste the opportunity. With the right application, you can get a main tanking spot in a guild with heroic raid progression when you’ve done nothing more than five man dungeons (well, at least I did). With the wrong app, you can get ignored or silently ridiculed behind your back.

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Feral Macros

Macros are necessary for simplifying many aspects of the game, so even though they make for very boring blog posts, I’ll suck it up and write one like a good bear. I use macros for condensing multiple similar spells into one button and for removing the less-interesting decisions from my to-do list. I don’t approve of complex cast sequence macros for ferals because they can easily mess up and they can never replace your own brain power. They’re both lazy and inefficient, and never even work well with bears or cats.

Also, never, EVER macro all of your cooldowns together. Each cooldown has a use, and blowing multiple or even all of your cooldowns at once, without thought, is a bad habit to get into.

With that in mind, here are the macros I do use, for both bear and cat.

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Bear Repsonse to Ask the Devs # 9: Tanking

Today’s Ask the Devs answers were exactly as I predicted. Blizzard never announces anything new or super insightful in this series (that’s what their official blogs and Dev Watercolers are for), and they often answer questions that pop up a lot with newbies but make veterans cringe. I don’t really mind the newbie questions; I think too many people forget how difficult it can be for a brand new or returning player to jump into the information ocean that is World of Warcraft, and that they have the same right to answers as us more seasoned players do.

Anyway, on to the things that might interest bears!

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