Ledneh

Our guild seems to have a chronic shortage of FrR/NR tanks for Hydross, so I was thinking I'd get myself set up if I can. Besides gear there's no real reason a Feral couldn't do it, right? I know most good resist gear (except the badge FiR gear) is plate, but is there anything available for FrR/NR for bears besides level 69-70 "of X Protection" greens?

 

Farstrider

[The Natural Ward]
[The Frozen Eye]
[Pendant of Withering]
[Pendant of Thawing]

Are you talking about tanking Hydross or the adds?

If the adds, that's very easy to do in mixed "of X Protection" greens.

If you mean Hydross, it's better for you to be the NR tank than the FR tank for several reasons.

1. As a Tauren you get a free 10 NR
2. [The Natural Ward] sucks less than [The Frozen Eye]

John O'Groats to Lands End 2009 for Leukaemia Research

 

Inaiwae

It is doable. I have tanked both frost and nature phases (not in one fight, naturally) when our regular plate tanks didnt show up. My unbuffed resistances were around 230-250. With aura and flask of chromatic wonder, you are at 335-355 resist. Or you can use elixir of ironskin to fill crit gap, which may be more important that the 35 resistance.

You want green headpiece with +20 resist enchant, which gives you about 57 resistance. Then jewelry (necklace, ring) crafted by JC. Apart from this, there is only green stuff as far as i recall. You need to enchant it appropriately (stamina, resists, defense - whatever gives the best overall result). +15 resist on back is also good so try to get resist cloak.

 

Ledneh

Talking about Hydross himself; I regularly tank the adds with no resists whatsoever, discounting what I get from MotW and other miscellaneous buffs; sometimes I'm in the Hunter/Paladin resist group with the Hydross tanks, sometimes not, but either way I get along with the adds just fine.

(edit) The vast majority of my anticrit right now comes from my rings and neck, with a little from my bracers, shoulder glyph, various gems, and chest enchant. If I get seven Dragonhawk X of Nature Protection (level 70 leather greens), with a flask and MotW + 10 Tauren resist I end up with 309 NR. And this way I'm still uncrittable (or at least close enough that it's not a real concern--like 0.01% chance or something, I have to check the numbers).

My only concern here is that if I do this, my threat generation goes straight into the shitpile, since a huge amount of my agi just disappears. Do you Hydross tanks find that to actually be a concern?

 

Gbits

I'm curious about the best gear/ability rotation to handle spinning bosses, eg Solarian. When I'm trying, I'm usually top 5 DPS in my (3/4 TK, 5/6 SSC) guild on bleedable bosses, but this encounter proves exceptionally difficult.

After examining the WWS reports, I've come to the following conclusions: because Solarian is constantly spinning to send arcane missiles at people, I'm missing way more than I usually would due to blocks/parries/etc (6-8% with hit-capped gear); and because I'm missing opportunities for shreds, it's taking me a lot longer to get through a cycle, and as a result Rip is not up most of the time (down to 12% of my damage versus its usual 30-35%).

What are cat druids using as a combination for this boss? Should I give up on shred, equip the idol of terror and go for 5 mangle/1 rip combinations? Should I experiment with more Expertise gear? (I'm wearing my only really decent piece, the shoulderpads from Hydross.)

I'm also curious about whether it's worth putting points in improved FB for non-bleedable bosses like VR. I haven't yet due to wanting to keep points in other things, and I've seen the non-improved FB vs. shred graphs, but it's another frustrating fight for me.

 

• Falk

I've MT'ed nature phase a couple of times out of roster necessity, and I look like a complete goon in the set. If I recall correctly (servers are down for maintenance atm) I had 19k-ish raid buffed, uncrittable, with capped NR (this actually is more important than avoidance/that bit of HP - unlucky spikes are more likely to kill you than healers going OOM at this point of TBC's lifespan) Keep in mind this was before the feral staves change which gave another cartload of AP.

Threat on Hydross after the initial grab should not be a problem. People nuke the elementals first, and in modern day raiding DPS who can't keep an eye out on the threat meters should go back to UBRS to learn how not to pull aggro.

What IS touchy is two things: firstly, an abyssmal amount of dodge, due to needing to stack greens, and the actual grabs on transition. With virtually no +hit and no +expertise, there's a tendency for Murphy's Law to take effect and bite you in the rear with a parry/miss string... Your positioning and raid needs to be aware of this; it's much more iffy than warriors/paladins in epic resist gear.

That being said, remember that armor means nothing. Swap in your highest DPS staff (Gladiator/ZA staff/Terestian's is awesome especially the ones with +hit), make sure you grab Hydross's attention, and you can swap back to your highest stam staff when the debuff stacks to 100% if you're really worried about getting spiked.

Edit: http://img406.imageshack.us/img406/2858/nrgoonfp6.jpg

 

Yaelle

The adds don't last very long, stun as fall back is also available once every phase.
I use [Earthwarden] in my resist gear, which helps a lot due to expertise (of course also for defense purposes).

Needing resist on an addtank really depends on how you do the boss.
You can have 4 tanks and aoe them, which will probably take all of them down before the mark reaches higher levels.
Resists here are really only mandatory for tanking the adds up to the 100% mark and further, which will depend on your raids performance and strategy.

 

Ledneh

Well hey there, cutie. ;-*

Anyway, thanks for the advice. One last set of questions: if I get all those greens and glyphs and flasks and shit, I'll be at 309 self-buffed, and with the Hunter buff I'm at (I think) 379. This is above cap, correct? What is cap? How far BELOW the cap can I be before it starts getting dangerous?

 

• Falk

Resistance is non-linear, especially towards the end. Think of it the same way as agility stacking where going from 98 to 99% avoidance is a huge boon for just another percent. Although of course, the actual cap for resist mechanics is 75%. The cap is lv*5, or 365 in the case of boss mobs. Always plan with a hunter/totem in mind, so 295 unbuffed.

It doesn't get 'dangerous' unless you get multiple 50% resists in a row, the probability of which increases the further you get from the cap. My point being there's no real cutoff - aim for the cap, or pray to be lucky.

In terms of greens to go for, Elementalist/Dragonhawk are the best (armor doesn't matter!) and I've got a couple of lv117's too - the names elude me right now. You can put a 20NR patch on the headpiece and a 15resi on the chest... those two enchants give the best benefit in their respective slots in this situation. The others are situational and probably depend on what you can actually scrounge up.

Edit: Some final thoughts - don't get any misconceptions here. A warrior or paladin will fare much better in terms of mitigating damage due to the availability of epic resist gear (and class abilities.. boo hoo), so your raid and especially healers need to understand beforehand that this solution is not optimal and is the result of circumstance. Also, be really really sure to have a pot/HS macro for this, if you don't already. IT WILL SAVE YOUR LIFE. MULTIPLE TIMES.

When the Frost tank is pulling Hydross over the line, try to trail behind Hydross, so that your opening Mangle right as he changes color won't be parried. This also sets you up to pull him back over when it's time. If you really want to maximize your chances of survival, go hard at the start of each transition with your highest DPS staff, then switch to your highest stam one at 100% and consider stopping all attacks (except maybe mangle) to lessen the chances of a parry gib.

Lastly, if you have any say in it, go for tanking the NR phases and let a warrior get FrR gear, rather than the other way around.

 

Zeln

If you are lower on resist than the other tank you can cut your phases on your side shorter, even just waiting for the mark to fade from the other tank and then immediately changing back to the other phase.

 

Olon97

I find myself making room for the expertise ring and neck on anything that remotely requires threat generation, and gaining crit immunity by simply wearing 2pc s3 gladiator in slots that don't yet have T6 (when that becomes difficult I'll determine "weakest" T6 slots via Rawr). To me, AP in bear is a tertiary consideration behind expertise & hit, and even hit doesn't feel worth dramatically altering tank gear for.

 

Dalakroth

It's absolutely doable, our guild has never used anything but two druids to tank Hydross, we don't believe in warrior tanks

Our tanks just wear a mixture of green resist gear and enough of their regular tank gear to give them a mixture of 295 unbuffed resistance and remain uncritable. Works fine

 

mesh7

Sorry if my post was confusing, I just wanted to get a ballpark estimate on how often people are getting the double mangle debuff to work. Most of the time? A quarter of the time? Just to gauge how I'm doing. I understand there's latency issues, so people may have varying success rates.

 

Ledneh

On a similar resist note, I know having a melee tank for Leotheras' demon form is sort of , but with the badge FiR gear and anything else required, how feasible is it?

Not counting the fact that all the melee has to back off, of course.

 

mesh7

I understand using toskk's method that this trinket wouldn't be as good as other trinkets if you did the standard mangle, shred, rip combo.

However what about mangling until the trinket would proc, only then start shredding until rip (or just rip). Has anyone tried this and seen there dps go up?

I'm guessing that since your're adding the human factor of only proceeding until the trink procs it would be difficult to evaluate this method mathematically, so any anecdotal observations would be great.

 

dukes

That means you effectively do 2.5 mangles (40% proc chance iirc) for every mangle that you would otherwise do - that's a HUGE loss of energy compared to the damage you gain.

@Ledneh: The melee tank on Leo doesn't have to back off - they changed it in 2.1 so that the splash on fireballs is smaller than his hitbox so you can still melee. Lots of guilds use melee tanks afaik.

 

seminarca

I'd been researching and preparing to take over as Leo FR tank due to dodgy Warlock attendance, and as dukes said, they changed the splash range on fireballs so that if you and the melee stand as far apart as possible in front and behind him (respectively), then the melee won't eat the splash. However, some things you need to be aware of:

a) As with all magical damage fights, we'd take more damage than a Warrior (Def Stance / Imp Def Stance) and a Demo Warlock (Soul Link). So healers need to be aware of that.

b) I read from some people that had tried this, that threat is a concern with Rage based tanks because you resist a lot of the damage. Less of a concern with Druids naturally, since we can do more with less Rage, but you still may want to consider higher threat pieces in slots you aren't using for FR. Also, you don't need crit immunity for this, as npc casted spells don't crit.

c) Since you can't reposition demon phase Leo, the 15% split is clutch. If he's sitting plunk in the middle of everything, the other tank(s) plus melee that are killing humanoid Leo will have to tread very carefully around you so they don't eat the splash. Secondly, if Leo decides to whirlwind across where you are tanking demon Leo, then you are likely to eat the high damage DoT. What you might consider doing is building a 20-30k threat lead (to cover healer aggro from 15% to 0%) or so and then backing to a safe spot where you can be healed and not get other people hit with the fireball splash.

Of course, I never actually managed to try this, but I'd be very interested in hearing from you how it went.

Re: Hydross. I tanked nature phase a couple times when the Warrior was missing. Threat isn't that much of an issue, even looking like a Barrens reject (i.e. with tons of nature protection greens). If you can, try to have Misdirects saved for you, even 1 Hunter should cover it on every cycle (I think?). Since we normally used two DPS Warriors to tank Hydross, people were very aware of threat and we had the whole raid switch sides in case someone did pull aggro. So applying that same caution when I tanked meant we didn't have any aggro shenanigans.

 

Karmen

Trying out the Rawr's cat calculations, has anybody else noticed that if you give yourself the 2pc T4 bonus that it shows it as extremely better than 4pc T6 almost regardless of slot where you are wearing the 2pc T4? In looking at Tossk's source material that doesn't seem to be the case with them both being relatively equal. Is there something I'm missing here?

Late Night Raiding www.skeletoncrew.org

 

Akhtal

I first tanked Leo (demon phase of course) last week...

I'm not sure how much resist I had, but I wasn't capped... I ended up dying 2 times near the end of the phases, but I had terrible luck with debuffs... We are going in again tonight, I'll try to post how it went after the raid/tomorrow... Aggro was good as long as I had good rage before the switch (like "DPS" a bit in bear form before the WW)

Good luck.

 

Joy

If you aren't FR capped then it's not terrible luck. Cap your FR.

 

Akhtal

I capped it, it's a set I put together because our warlock tank ended up quitting because of school and it wasn't complete yet.

 

Melthar

I've tanked demon on every one of our Leo kills for many months now (after the changes to fireball size) and there's been no drama. Badge gear, blue cloak with enchant, Ony trinket (not one that many druids would have, but I was our original rag tank way back when) and a couple of pieces of pvp gear for anti-crit (I often help pickup the human phase as well in the first 85%)

Even with no special threat gear, as long as people don't start DPSing until at least something has landed, we tend to be ok threatwise.

 

• Cluey

For mobs like Solarian you just have to move behind her, if you can't strafe around while still attacking practice until you can.
Personally I don't think the Feral Aggression talent is worth it, Ferocious Bite is a horrible finisher because it drains all of your energy.
I only use it if I am low on energy and the mob is about to die, normally I will just Shred again.
I have never been DPS on Void Reaver as I tank him most weeks in a very high threat set, best I have managed so far is 75% of melee attacks made against me.

You ask about "cat druids" but I don't think you will find many here, Feral druids are very useful to a raid because they can be bears or cats, being only one means you chose the wrong class.
I get to be a cat a lot of the time as our other feral druid likes to tank, I am happy to do either and will do what is best for the raid.
I prefer fights where both roles are needed as I really feel useful then, Hydross and Lurker stand out so far. We are only 5/6 SSC and 2/4 TK.

This is our second Solarian kill, we had a few friends in as we had a few people missing due to real life getting in the way. I don't expect the report to be up much longer.


ps. Being a new person who just signed up the forum rules should be fresh in your mind, I guess you missed the "Do not sign your posts" bit.

 

Inaiwae

edit: deleted (covered in earlier posts)

 

Inaiwae

Dukes, why do you use /cancelform in the macro for powershifting in the Cat post? For me it seems that the only effect it has is that it will throw you to caster form regardles of GCD or mana, which i find negative.