I usually don’t engage in mass blogosphere questionaires because normally they’re boring and irrelevant, but this time it’s tank specific so that at least makes it relevant! There’s also an acute shortage of non-paladin answers.
Rawr!
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.
How to Make Tanking More Interactive
The Problem with Passive Tanks
One of the questions I saw popping up a few times in the Ask a Dev: Tanking thread concerned the lack of active defenses for tanks. That is, tanks rely on passive stats like dodge, parry, block/Savage Defense, and base damage reduction to survive. Death Knights, with Death Strike, Blood Shield, and a handful of minor cooldowns actually have a healthy amount of active control over their defenses, so this question doesn’t apply to them as much as it does Druids, Warriors, and Paladins.
Heroic Omnotron 25 Tanking Guide
In this video and our first kill, I was brought as cat dps. My kitty gear is primarily bear gear, so my dps was pretty low. The fact that I was in on our first kill should indicate that this is not a dps fight; it’s a control fight.
What Everyone Else Should Know about Bears
Bears are pretty special. They’re so different than the shield tanks that it’s hard to understand just how special. Here’s my list of things other people should know about bears so that they will know how to use them well or help their raid’s bears improve. This list gets more and more detailed and complicated the further you read, so if you feel like you understand “enough”, you don’t need to read the whole thing.
Continue reading “What Everyone Else Should Know about Bears”
Heroic Conclave of Wind 25 Tanking Guide
Here are the things I’ve learned from this fight.
