The number of tanks basically determines how long the AoE needs to assist. We typically have a dps warrior as an assist train, and have AoE single target assist with the melee for two, three, or (rarely) four targets, depending on how many tanks we have. As a tank, what this lets me do is take my 4-8 mobs a bit away, spam swipe and switch targets with every maul or mangle. After the assist targets are done, the melee finish off any other single target mobs, we pull the AoE packs together, and AoE begins. We usually shackle an Abom or two, and whichever tank ends up with less extra Ghouls/Fiends/Felstalkers grabs them as soon as things settle down a bit.

Actually, as I read it in the powershift-thread, malazaar found that it was a waste of energy to use FB whenever you were over 3500 AP and had more than around 42-44 energy left, so shred would nearly always be better. I may have misunderstood something, though.

ie. If you can shred, then you should shred. I generally consider it a good rule of thumb, although when you look at your standard cycle from a round number.

As for Rae/Mesh7, I believe the best combo is actually to have you in the Enh group instead of one of the rogues, he can safely be in the MT Group (who can at least BS and likely gets GoA/WF anyway if he has a shaman)

I was a little skeptical about taking maul out of my multi mob tanking macro and just using faire fire and swipe, but wow what a difference. You guys were absolutely correct because even though I'd start out with 4-5 non-abomb mobs on me, I was rage starving myself using maul+swipe as the mobs hit for so little and combined with a few lucky (rather unlucky) dodges I'd quickly spiral to near zero rage and i'd lose a mob to aoe.

@Boevis- thats an interesting point, I never considered asking to switch one of the rogues out of the melee group for myself. I think someone posted that a competent rogue in the MT group with WF and GoA totem and myself in the melee group with the enh shaman would increase the total melee dps by almost ~100? (Not sure though) Additionally we've just picked up a good MS warrior and he replaces the the prot (dps) warrior in the melee group, so LotP would benefit him more so.

I really want to get into the melee group more often so I've leveled LW for the drums of battle just for that reason. After using it I noticed the 80haste rating reduced my swing time by 5%. Off the top of my head considering most BT fights are ~6-8 mins long (xcept Illidan and council) thats say four uses per boss fight x30secs.

Considering about 65% of our rogues dps is from melee and 75% of our fury warriors dps is from melee+heroic strike (don't know about the enh shaman), how much would approximately 2mins of a +80 haste rating during a 8mins boss fight increase a rogues or fury warriors dps? Would it simple be 25% (2/8mins) x ~70%= 17.5% approx. increase in the total damage out for the rogues and warrior?

Thx so much in advance, I'm doing anything I can to make a good case for me being in the melee group, as putting me in the melee group and sticking a rogue in the MT group is kind of a big deal drama-wise lol.

you forgot to multiply in the effect of getting approximately 1/20th more weapon swings, which brings the approximation of how much a boon it is to around 1%. Plus extra energy regen/procs for the rogues, minus extra rage regen for the warriors. Think about it-- on average it's about 20 haste rating per person. This narrows the buff gap a little bit, but it doesn't close it.

If you want exact numbers, plug their info into the rogue/warrior spreadsheets.

During raid instances where there are multiple feral druids (either MT, OT, or dps), do all need to apply mangle? Or can one druid be assigned the task to mangle? Will this still help the other rips that occurring?

It may be a rather minor correction, but in the guide you've listed high warlord najentus as having "quite a lot of magic damage". This is completely untrue. The only magic damage he deals is after his bubble is broken, 8500 to the raid. that's a lot of damage to the raid, but very little, to the MT.

For comparison, here's two WWS: Tasonir's me, and Taggz is our warrior class lead and regular MT.

Note that while I took considerably more damage, the fight was also over a minute longer (12000 raid dps vs 15000 raid dps), and I didn't have a helper warrior providing thunder clap. Some of the dps difference I can't explain (aka, the warlock in first did over 100 dps more with a warrior tank, probably in a better group) but some is probably due to the lack of sunder armor, at least for the physical classes. Correcting for these two things makes the damage much more even; but even so, taggz did take a fair amount less than I did. Insert gripe about scaling of gear and lack of tanking items here.

WWS Tasonir

WWS Taggz

I would have provided more direct links but it seems that the WWS load time for unpaid accounts is currently 25 minutes. In any case, 5% of the damage I took was magical, 95% was physical. While warriors take slightly less from the magic, it's also worth noting that he did a fourth frost attack which I got a full resist on due to having the talent to avoid aoe attacks.

Indeed, this is a pretty minimal effect on the *TANK*. Raidwise, its a lot of damage, but as a MT, we haven't really noticed any difference between myself and a warrior.

Because you're likely to have ~8 physical DPS (warriors, rogues, hunters, ret/prot pally, enh shaman, feral druid) it's far easier and beneficial to just have the "MT Group" be "DPS group 2" with a resto shaman in there. You can have it be Hunterx2, Warrior, Druid, Shaman and the Shaman drops GoA/SoE, or if your hunters get put in a Spriests group and you have extra warriors then you put a rogue and something else in the MT group and shaman drops WF/SoE.

My guild is quite melee heavy though we just lost our Enh shaman to college, our MT group is usually Feral, Warriorx2, Rogue, Shaman with DPS group being Feral, Roguex2, Warrior, Shaman. Yes, we often have 2 ferals, I've broken 1500 on rage when the other one is tanking

The most dps comes from having a feral tank apply the mangle. Cat form dps benefits tremendously by having another feral apply mangle while bear form tanking needs to apply mangle every 6 seconds anyway.

The few times I've gotten to DPS with another Druid tanking, I noticed that Mangle has a tendency to drop off a lot if the tank is the only one applying it, due to the typically low (or, lower at least) Hit Rating and having to contend with the high parry rate. Two missed Mangles in a row will seriously fuck up your rotation if no one else applies Mangle.

Eventually, I got tired of attempting to monitor the tank's Mangle usage, and switched to the normal cycle. Later, I discovered pDebuffList/Demon, which I found immensely useful for stuff like this. At a glance you can tell if Mangle is on or not, and if you're about to cap energy (or if you've just Ripped): use Mangle. From what I understand, a non-Mangle'd Shred is pretty energy inefficient.

But yeh, it's pretty cool when it's all going gravy and you don't have to use Mangle at all =p

edit: Edited brainfart ><

Those WWS links were for the full raids not just that fight. You will need to select the Naj'entus fights.

Ah right, now that makes the post above look stupid. <_<

Ah well, point still stands. There was a Warrior in the raid who didn't sunder? And the fact that you took more overall damage is as you said because the fight took longer but one thing that I found surprising is the fact that your max hit taken is slightly higher than that of the Warrior (6282 vs 6142) even though you'd expect it to be the other way around.

This idea just popped into my head today, and I had to come here and ask you guys who are actually good at this stuff:
Would [Belt of One-Hundred Deaths] be a reasonably good tanking piece for a feral druid?

It's about 620 less bear armor than [Waistguard of the Great Beast], but 25 expertise is a great threat AND mitigation stat. There's equal agi on 100 deaths, with an 8agi and 4agi/6stam gem (for the socket bonus), and it'd be slightly better stam compared to a Great Beast with double 8-agi.

Basically, I'm sure it's better if I'm armor capped without Great Beast (which I'm not quite at, since I've yet to see Hyjal/BT. We just downed Kael for the first time yesterday). But I'm not sure how effective the 25 expertise would be compared to the 620 armor. I'd be around 32.5k with One-Hundred Deaths on instead of Great Beast.

Yeah, sorry about the indirect links. I'd have posted better ones but the load was 25 minutes so I couldn't really reach them.

I suspect the difference on max hits comes down to gear. A warrior who takes a crushing blow on an odd chance should take significantly more than a druid taking one, but things like ironshield potions or 25% armor buffs from priests/shamans could easily cancel that out. Honestly, I don't think druids will have a fair shot until we can get the full benefit from ironshields and other armor buffs, but there's no real room for that in the current system. I'd be in favor of removing the armor cap, but that won't happen.

As for the dps warrior not sundering, I assume he just never thought of it. We generally use warrior tanks, and if not, a prot warrior is probably still sundering. Naj is pretty hard on melee, so the prot warriors sat out for that fight. Only the dps warrior was there, and I don't think he's used to maintaining sunder while dpsing.

For gem cutting I noticed there is no 12 hit gem, but there is a 24 attack power gem.

Hey guys, any suggestions for this tanking set?
bluenote - Character - World of Warcraft - WoWDigger

It's a high HP build with decent amount of dodge and 412 def + 17 resil, which makes the setup crit immune.

A rather interesting topic appeared on the EU druid forums a few days ago, which had me wondering for a while as well.

Basicly it's about the difference in the crit chance on your character chart, and the actual crit chance reported by recount/wws etc. The actual value tends to be lower and I am wondering if this could be a bug, or a mechanic I am unfamiliar with.

First of all we were looking at yellow hits, to avoid any difficulty with glancings (although they should not matter). Also, to work around the effect of a 2-roll system, misses/dodges etc are disregarded. So, we're only looking at the actual hit vs crit %.

Now I can think of one thing that could cause a lower crit chance, and that would be the increased defense of a raidboss vs a player.

My question is the following: Has anybody got any large data samples of fight with the same amount of crit chance (iow, no gearchanges/buff changes/setup changes that would alter your crit chance)

With a large enoug sample size, we can filter out the effects of luck, and perhaps figure out what is causing this consistent lower crit chance.

Well, the character sheet shows for level 70, whereas bosses are level 73. I'm not saying for certain that's why we can observe a lower crit rate than shown, but I'd imagine that'd be a good guess. Feel free to correct this if I'm wrong.

possible indeed. How big of an influence would this have though? And, we could test on a lower level mob (Blasted Lands) and see if this also results in a lower crit chance then expected. I am secretely hoping somebody has already invested the time in testing this, since I don't look forward to standing in front of these mobs mangling for multiple hours :-P

you have a huge crit chance on lower level mobs b/c of their defense levels

Miss, parry and dodge reduce your yellow criticals further.