PvP gear for druid tanking

For fast gearing up to get into heroics, these crafted PvP items are better than quest rewards. They are very cheap to make, and often sell for less than 200 gold on my server.

• Contender’s Leather Helm
• Contender’s Leather Shoulders (better than the quest reward because of the crit and mastery)
• Contender’s Leather Chestguard
• Contender’s Leather Bracers (better than the instance drop because of the crit and mastery)
• Contender’s Leather Gloves
• Contender’s Leather Belt is identical to Ghost Fox Belt (from the Corruption Runs Deep quest)
• Contender’s Leather Leggings
• Contender’s Leather Boots

Other than the belt, there are no quest rewards that can match these items for use in PvE. You will need to be careful with the itemization of your other gear, since all the Contender’s set only contains Critical Strike Rating and Mastery. Guardians also need Hit Rating and Expertise.

This gear would get quickly replaced at level 90, with Justice Point gear (ilevel 458) and gear from heroics (ilevel 463). However, this will give you a good set that can be confidently used to start tanking heroic instances immediately.

 

 

 

Guardian performance and tracking Savage Defense uptime

Hi Folks,

With the recent Guardian druid changes I’ve been looking at ways to track my performance as a tank. Savage Defense uptime will be a key metric, but there are also several other concerns.

Druid tanking is now much more like Death Knight tanking than it was in the previous expansion, specifically with the active mitigation changes of Savage Defense and Frenzied Regeneration and the addition of more damage reducing cool-downs.

Those cool-downs are:

• Nature’s Swiftness (if used for a self heal), Renewal or Cenarion Ward
• Barkskin
• Incarnation or Force of Nature
• Might of Ursoc
• Berserk
• Survival Instincts
• Enrage
• Symbiosis (when we get it at 87) can grant additional tanking cool-downs.

Just maintaining a high Savage Defense uptime is not going to be good enough for Guardians. I had an unpleasant experience tanking Arcurion the other night because I was worrying about Savage Defense, and almost all the damage this boss does is magical – Savage Defense did nothing. I should have been using my rage on Frenzied Regeneration instead. A quick Renewal got me out of trouble, but it was a lesson that I won’t forget in a hurry.

I’ve run some more heroics since then and not had magic damage be such a significant issue, but it pays to watch in case you are taking more damage than expected. Switching to Frenzied Regeneration at that point should make a difference.

This morning I was looking for addons to track the uptime of my buffs and debuffs on a target. Not while I’m in a fight (I use NeedToKnow for that), but afterwards so I can look to see if there are things I can improve about my game. I ended up installing Skada, which has some neat features that gave me exactly what I was looking for.

A quick test on the target dummy shows all my tanking cool-down use and how long I maintained debuffs on a target. I couldn’t easily get this information from Recount, so I’ll be making the switch for a while and see how I go.

Updated druid changes in Mists of Pandaria

I completely rewrote my previous post: https://eaoexcursions.wordpress.com/2011/11/14/druid-changes-in-mists-of-pandaria/ so now it highlights the changes for each specialization and lists all the spells for each specialization.

Adding Wowhead tooltips to any website

Hi Folks,

I use Google Reader for most of the blogs I follow, which has a side effect of removing all the javascript that allows Wowhead tooltips. I find this a bit annoying, so I added scripting support to my browser to work around it.

While I was at it, I added my own blog URL so that I get tooltips here as well, without having to leave the default WordPress  site 🙂

Here’s how I did it.

Since I’m using Google Chrome as my browser, I used the addon called Tampermonkey to allow the injection of scripts into sites I specify. If you use Firefox, then GreaseMonkey is the addon of choice for this.

Once I installed the addon, I added the following script. The only editing I did was to add the URLs in the comments at the top. This makes the script run on those sites.
You can find new scripts on userscripts.org (read them carefully) – here’s the location of Wowhead Google Reader.

 

and here’s the results of looking at it in my blog and in Google Reader:

 

 

I hope some people find this useful!

 

Guardian and feral druid gearing strategy for Mists of Pandaria

I’ve levelled my druid up to 90 on the beta, and found that there is a very straightforward way to quest up to the item level required for heroic instances. This post shows how to obtain gear for entry into heroics, and includes the item levels for heroics and raids.

Here’s a post with a full list of the gear that is referred to below: https://eaoexcursions.wordpress.com/2012/03/23/gearing-your-druid-tank-in-mists-of-pandaria/

State of tanking in the beta

Things have changed a lot for druid tanking.

A few weeks ago I had been tanking some instances in the beta and it was mostly ok. The new Savage Defense combined with abilities costing rage was a little tricky, but it mostly worked.

I logged in after the most recent beta patch this week and found tanking completely different. Here’s the highlights:

1. The most important thing I hadn’t noticed was the change to Frenzied Regeneration – it’s now an instant heal!
2. Savage Defense also changed (a little while ago) to be a dodge bonus, so you have to actively make a choice whether to heal yourself or to add mitigation.
3. Offensive abilities no longer cost rage (with the exception of Maul).
   This is huge, since there is no conflict between generating threat and mitigation for our use of rage. This was a problem earlier in the beta.
4. Rip is back! Guardians get Rip when in cat form.

Guardian druid tanking in the beta, first impressions

I copied my druid across to the beta today, and ran the Temple of the Jade Serpent instance twice. Here’s a brief summary of how druid tanking is working.

It’s worth a quick note that druid damage got buffed today, so that will explain some of the differences from other testers.

Overall, tanking as a Guardian was fine. There were a few key items worthy of mention:

1. It is possible to activate Savage Defense while it is still up, so be careful.
2. It is possible to keep very high uptimes of Savage Defense while tanking and holding threat on both bosses and trash.
3. As other bloggers have mentioned, there is some downtime in the rotation.
4. Chaining Berserk and Incarnation allows for high damage and constant uptime of Savage defense.
5. The new talent cooldowns are awesome, druids feel like they have more control over their fate now, with some extra self-healing. Incarnation combined with Frenzied Regeneration causes large heals, and Renewal is great.
6. Bear hug doesn’t work on bosses and felt like a waste of time.
7. It is frustrating trying to click Lacerate two times in a row, the 3 second cooldown really threw me.
8. AoE is easy enough, but use Thrash immediately after activating Savage Defense. Otherwise it can take a few seconds to generate the required rage.

I’ll do a more detailed analysis soon!

Beta invite has arrived

My beta invite has arrived in the latest batch of 250,000 sent out by Blizzard.

I plan on having a look at druid tanking, death knight tanking and monk tanking so hopefully I have something interesting to show for that over the long weekend.
I’ll admit to being a little concerned about the current state of guardian druids at the moment, but there seems to be some pretty active discussion on the forums about that, so I’m hoping for changes before the game goes live.

New druid graphics in Mists of Pandaria

Lissana over at Restokin has been posting the new graphics for druid forms and spells. Check out her two posts:

• MoP Beta Screenshots: New forms
• More MoP druid graphics

My personal favourite is the orca swim form.

Gearing your guardian druid in Mists of Pandaria

This post will be updated with gear for Guardian druids in Mists of Pandaria as the beta progresses and moves into the released product. Expect a lot of updates and changes during this time.

I have made some significant updates to this recently, and it now includes gear for all slots, including the location of the items in most cases.

For a guide on how to obtain gear while levelling up, please refer to my post on gearing strategies.

The ilevels of items in this expansion are:

• Questing gear ranges from ilvl 364 to ilvl 450
• Normal instance gear ranges from ilvl 425 to 450
• Heroic instance gear is ilvl 463
• Epic gear is ilvl 476+