I get this question pretty often. It’s true that for survival alone, dodge is the best reforging option for bears. But sometimes, you need to do more than survive.
My Thoughts on Druid Tier 13 Bonuses
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.
My boyfriend saw me making this picture and he was like “OMG IS THAT ACTUALLY WHAT YOU’LL LOOK LIKE THAT’S AWESOME!”
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.
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!
My User Interface: Auras
This is the first in a series on my UI. At a later time I’ll talk
about my combat addons, unit frames, keybindings, and more at a later
time. Today I am focusing on auras.
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.
Firelands Trinkets for Bears
What are the best trinkets for bear tanks in Firelands?
The short answer:
[Matrix Restabilizer] and [Ancient Petrified Seed]
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?
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.
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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