• Astrylian

Aye, it's not really that attractive. But it at least isn't a bad thing, if you do happen to have the crit rate to support it. It's the same rotation as normal, just time the mangles correctly (alternating exact and slightly late). If you do have a 12s cycle normally, it won't increase your cycle time.

 

Valynon

What I meant by increased cycle (and I should have included this) was you have to wait for 100 energy as opposed to the 80+ with the traditional cycle, so you have to wait for an additional 2 seconds, not a big deal by any means, just a place to waste energy.

With the 4 piece Tier 6, this becomes slightly more attractive at around 5.25% ((1.15 + 1.15x1.3x1.3)/2-(1.15x1.3)) increase to rip dps totalling 1.25% total dps increase. So not bad, though I don't know how annoying it will be, and missing just one double mangle will put you behind.

 

Schnigges

Anyone ever tanked Teron? I just did that today and it went so amazingly well! We were missing both our DPS warriors and enhancement shamans so I thought if I can't DPS with full potential I might just tank him for fun. Result: Schnigges - WWS With just an agi totem I managed to out-avoid all our best equiped Warriors on previous runs and got average 35% less incoming dmg than them, all that while holding 1300 TPS average at the end of the fight, our hunter was hyped up because he didn't have to feign death once.

I didn't think much about druids as full blown MTs until today because I thought the gear difference between bears and warriors was too big, now I think different. Crushing blows weren't that much of a problem as I thought they would be, peak damage was still way unter that of the warriors. Both I and the warrior tanks have full T6 with pretty much everything except the way too rare Shadowmoon Insigna. If it weren't for encounters like Illidan or Kael would druid MTs be more common?

 

seminarca

Done: [Melee] Optimal Group Makeup (this time with sims)

Made a new thread because it's a more general topic, so we can discuss it with other melee there. Results are contrary to what I was expecting.

 

CD

That's some amazing avoidance but it seems the max ilotp heal is 762, which means your max hp was 19050 and your highest hit taken was 10006. From a healing point of view I really wouldn't want my main tank to be someone capable to dying in 2 swings from max hp.
I haven't tanked Teron myself and I'd be interested to see how things would go, but in general I feel warriors have scaled up a lot better than feral druids as gear has improved. We mostly used 4 tanks for t5 content and 3 for t6 and it seems that in losing a tank spot we lost a feral druid raidspot but I really find it hard to make a case for running with 2 ferals/ 1 prot rather than the opposite.

 

Nightmayrz

Sounds great,
But according to Blizzard..
Druids need 0 hit rating... Hit rating is for a weapon, since they use none, they added in Feral Combat Rating..
At least thats what I read.. Don't Have a druid so who knows..

 

Schnigges

Even with 19k, you can't die of 2 consecutive 10k hits because of hots and incoming heals between the 2 hits. Warrior's max hits are around 13.3k.. now warriors don't run around with 27k hp either. Healers said it was a joy to heal me.

 

Nathariel

Please try and know what you are talking about.

Hit rating is important to druids, with the standard (non dual-wielding) miss rate that can be removed by getting Hit Rating (142 or 143 cap)

Feral combat rating was the feral equivalent to Weapon skill and has been replaced since 2.3 with Expertise. This is also useful to druids.

 

seminarca

I'd wager so. My previous raid guild didn't have any Protection Warriors, so we had a Druid maintank (me) all the way from Karazhan to 5/6 and 3/4, as well as for Vashj attempts. I (or one of our other Druids) tanked guild first kills for everything minus Nightbane, Gruul (this was more a matter of petulance though) and Hydross. From what I'm told about MH/BT, the only encounters we can't tank there are RoS (Spell Reflect) and Illidan (Shear, SBlock). I doubt it's possible to be a cutting edge world first guild with a Druid MT, but you can be somewhat competetive. I think WotLK will result in many mechanic changes, including Crushing Blows (Deathknights don't wear shields!) that might put us on a more even level.

 

xyruul

You can MT RoS, I just did it an hour ago when our MT warrior was 1hr late for the first time in a year. Same for Kael if you aren't dumb with barkskin, you actually take less damage then a warrior for pyros with more health.
Anyway I used to MT a lot until we geared up our only prot warrior, now it just makes more sense for him to MT since I do 2k dps and he does 1k with the same spec. Should we have not had an amazing, dedicated warrior MT I think we would have been just as successful with a druid, until Illidan anyway. ^^

 

seminarca

Wow, that's cool. You're in quite a unique position having successfully tanked 2 so called impossible fights, I wish to leech info from you. Please indulge me. Before we begin, bear in mind I've only done the Kael encounter once for about 90 minutes of learning (up to Ph3 only), and haven't seen RoS or Illidan at all.

k, from my understanding of the Kael fight, you need a Warrior wearing the legendary shield to absorb the first of 3 pyroblasts he casts. He casts a magical shield on himself which must be burned down asap (80k hp?). He can't be interrupted while the magical shield is active.

So what a Warrior does is: click his legendary shield, absorbing the first pyroblast, by the time the 2nd is due, Kael's magical shield has been burned through, and then the next 2 pyroblasts are interrupted through standard interrupt mechanisms. Is this accurate?

And so what you're describing for a Druid is: Barkskin when he starts casting, and eat the first pyroblast outright, reduced to 20k from the normal 25k, then when Kael's shield is burned through, the next 2 pyroblasts are interrupted as normal. Is this accurate?

If so, the Druid is taking a 20k pyroblast, whilst the Warrior is absorbing it via the shield, taking no damage (I presume). Does the shield absorb the entire spell? Isn't that basically an extra 20k damage the Druid is taking? Help me understand what I'm missing here >< (re: the less damage part).

For RoS, Warriors need to Spell Reflect Deaden, which makes RoS take double damage. So if I understand you right, if you don't reflect it, then it must be interrupted (or else you'll take double damage, is that accurate?). So if the raid is successfully able to interrupt all the other spells, plus the Deaden, then the only drawback to using a Druid is not having Deaden on RoS for the extra damage. Is that the case? Is it a fatal blow to raid dps by not having Deaden reflected, any enrage timer or something that won't be met?

Thanks =D

 

david0925

Barkskin will last through 2 Pyroblasts, 3 if you're REALLY good with the timing (barkskin at Second 2 on first pyro, go bear RIGHT away, failure to do so will kill you)

For RoS, you don't need deaden to kill him. However, you need REALLY good dps to burn through Essence of Desire without deaden since you're on a 140 second(confirm?) countdown to zero mana.

 

seminarca

Is Kael's magic shield usually down by the 2nd pyroblast? The 3rd? Do Warriors routinely eat a pyroblast? Also keep in mind the 15.6% or whatever reduction from Imp Defensive Stance. The RoS thing kind of makes me think it's not the kind of thing you want to be doing on progression (i.e. your rDPS may not be enough) but a 4 month BT farming guild would be able to pull it off.

 

Tasonir

I believe ROS phase 2 is 3 minutes until zero mana, but the difference isn't that important. Missing deadens will force your DPS to work that much harder. It's certainly possible, but doing that for a first kill as opposed to having farmed t6 for a few weeks would be an impressive feat. If you reflect every deaden perfectly you will increase raid DPS roughly 25%. It's not a trivial buff.

I've picked up kael in phase 5 after the warrior MT died and that's about as close as I want to get to tanking him I would like if my guild was a bit more open minded about letting me do bosses like Archimonde (I've tanked the other 4 in hyjal at least once) but a lot of people still have the idea that fear immediately disqualifies a feral tank, which is a shame.

As for crushing blows, a lot of high end bosses don't crush anymore. Azalgor, Archimonde can't. I don't think mother Shaz can either. I may be missing a few others, but it's fairly arbitrary. Illidan can crush, though. I would be interested in seeing what they will do about it with death knights coming into the picture. I was considering making one, but in the end I'm afraid they're going to end up just like feral druids: always second choice.

 

◊ Ulfgar

Warriors routinely eat a pyroblast that they take no damage from thanks to the legendary shield's use effect.

Back before they nerfed the HP of the shock barrier, taking a second pyro was not uncommon, and survivable due to Improved Defensive Stance plus stuff like Nightmare Seeds/Fire Prot pots/Last Stand plus PW:S. These days you should only take a pyroblast if you've got bad things going on (e.g. bad phoenix timing, mind control, advisors up, or dead raiders leading to reduced DPS). But bad things do happen.

While you should be able to heal your tank up to full between pyroblasts, PW:S and fire prot will only take the edge off one of the two pyroblasts you could potentially take, and Nightmare Seed has a 3 minute cooldown. Barkskin will help obviously but it will be close if you take a pyroblast at the upper end of the damage range.

If you can guarantee interrupting before the second pyroblast then tanking Kael is very doable but it's really suboptimal unless Kael's legitimately on farm.

[NB: If you're taking a third Pyro then your interrupters suck because the shock barrier only lasts for 10 seconds, and pyroblast has a 4 second cast time.]

 

xyruul

I meant you would take less damage per pyro that hits you, not less damage overall. Easier to survive the burst+something else random happening. The pyro will hit you for 20% less damage vs a warriors 15.5% and you will have 2-3k more hp at that gear level. I don't remember the last time I actually tanked Kael, but it was probably last summer sometime and we have gone back once since. It's extremely easy for a couple paladins to time 2 heals to land between pyros. At the time I just ate both pyros since we never broke it before the 2nd one and it was smooth unless I didn't hit barkskin and then bear form ^^.
As for RoS, one of the first Asian kills I believe had them blowing lusts and whatnot for p2 instead of p3 and they interrupted all deadens. It's definitely possible for a progression guild, though of course it's not optimal. We had a good 20s left on the p2 timer tonight without CoR, vs our normal 60s+ left, so about a 40s loss.

Anyway the point wasn't to discuss what is optimal, just what is possible. In our specific case I don't think we gained much by having a warrior vs druid MT the last year until Illidan.

 

CD

The problem is 2 hits can land instantly as a result of the ridiculous parry system. If there's a reasonable chance of an instagib- which there will be on an encounter where the tank has 79% total avoidance but can be two shot- then that's really not a good situation. It worked once and your healers were happy enough but why would you choose to repeat that over an extended period of time, knowing each time as you prepare to pull the tank can just fall over dead regardless of anything healers do?

For a druid to reach really high avoidance levels we have to sacrafice huge levels of hp as well as some armour; itemisation for us really hasn't let us scale very well at all from t4 level to t6 level. Warrior itemisation is so good they can maintain massive avoidance levels and still have lots of hp, defensive stance, block value, the ability to stop crushes and decently itemised expertise to really cut into boss parries. They also have reactive abilities which will give them over 27k hp.

 

Berak

I know this question has been asked a lot on the WoW forums, but I've searched here and I didn't find anything definitive, but at what point is it safe to stop stacking agility?

Once your dodge gets to a certain point will you start getting starved for rage? The furthest content that I've main tanked is Void Reaver, although we're working our way through ZA right now as well (not sure how you'd compare the two).

I currently have 4 pieces of T4, the S3 chest, most of the new badge gear, the Wildfury Greatstaff, badge, pocket watch, etc. All of that gives me (self-buffed):

15.3k health
40.8% dodge
32.5k armor

Last night in ZA with standard raid buffs (GoA, Kings, agi pot, agi food) I had 55% dodge, plus a bit more whenever my idol procced (which is a lot). How does this compare with tanking for T5 content, and will I run into problems with rage due to avoidance? Obviously, I need to bring my armor up more as well, but what I really want to know is if there is an established "dodge cap" that Druids should aim for.

 

• Daboran

Against boss-level and most raid trash 50-55% dodge will not starve you greatly

I only really notice starvation if I'm tanking stuff far below my gear level. For instance we ran Gruul last night for comedy relief and I had serious issues with Rage on the Priest at HKM. I was saved by my relatively high crit rate and some lucky crits.

Unless you specifically gem your equipment for it, your dodge won't increase as fast as mitigation via sta/armor so it all tends to balance out as long as you are taking on stuff suitable for your general equipment level.

Keep your gear balanced and not too biased towards dodge at the expense of stamina/armor and you shouldnt have many issues. The only fight where I really gear for dodge specifically is tanking the rogue at Illidari Council.

 

Schnigges

If the warriors have THAT reaction time to activate that last stand or shield wall then HoTs will too. I didn't even go even near full avoidance, I didn't have HP elexir, Imp or Sta food. Those 3 put me already at 20.5k without even switchting trinkets or belt (I tanked with thousand deaths because of expertise). HP isn't an issue I needed it. I'd lose maybe 2% dodge for another additional 1500 hp.For bosses, it's not a problem as long as you got 1) good AP 2) good crit rate. ZA bosses hit hard enough that you shouldn't have any problem with holding aggro. Normally the more dodge you get it through getting more agility which automatically gives you higher crit rate and more rage. If you are rage starved then stop mauling and don't miss any white hits. Normally if I go under 50 rage I will just swipe/mangle spam because its so rage cheap when having a good crit rate, then maul again if I have enough. Then again ZA mobs hit hard enough that you shouldn't ever have a problem. There's no dodge cap as long as you feel comfortable with your rage generation.

 

raffy

As mentioned above a few times, avoidance sucks mainly because of chained crushing blows + parry mechanic.

The crush mechanic is really poorly developed and really hurts our end-game performance. Fights we should be good at tanking, heavy physical damage, like Teron, we instead suck at due to burst damage potential.

Even with the best gear possible in game, I prefer a Warrior tank over myself on every single fight. A smart Warrior with significant expertise and windfury is a much easier to heal and higher threat tank while providing max avoidance and acceptable stamina.

 

dukes

I didn't conclude that it swung either way; my intention was to point out that there are a lot more factors to take into account and you can easily bias it the other way by only looking at one other aspect (although re-reading it, it isn't clear, I admit).

MTing RoS isn't really a problem once you get geared up, but learning the fight without deaden must be painful in the extreme. I would also say that a good warrior > good druid, mainly because of cooldowns rather than straight damage taken, although when you're on 'deep farm' content they should be pretty much equal.

 

Carlos

Even on early TK progression you run into starvation on VR, but this is part of the encounter mechanic to have more tank exchanges. I need to hold enrage on CD to stay close to the other tanks, even when I have aggro.

 

• Falk

By the way, something a lot of people don't realize the significance of (feral, warrior, and otherwise) is that the better the gear level, the worse crushing blows are for druids. And yeah, it's been mentioned a few times in passing earlier in the thread.

Consider, at 0 avoidance, druids will take less damage 85% of the time, and noticably more damage 15% of the time on crushings. At reasonable gear levels (say, 50% miss/dodge on a feral vs 50% miss/parry/dodge on a warrior) of all blows that land, druids take less damage 70% of the time and noticably more damage 30% of a time.

Now lets scale that all the way up to 85% avoidance (More or less theoretical at this point, I know). Every single blow that lands will be a crushing, hence you'll always be taking more damage than a warrior, despite having higher armor. This isn't even touching yet on how druids hit the armor cap right after T4 level whereas warriors can get up to ~22k armor raid buffed, up from ~17k across the three major tiers ingame at the moment.

My point is, the difference between a boss that can and cannot crush is a very significant factor, at high gear levels, in which tank takes less damage overall. It's not just as simple as taking a little more spike damage 15% of the time.

 

Ronfar

We've been running short on Protection Warriors lately (MT having computer issues), so I MT'd the bulk of our Hyjal/BT bosses this week. My guild is up to Shahraz in BT and has cleared Hyjal, so we are not completely decked out in T6, but our regular MT is fairly well geared.

Like Shiggles, I'd always believed that an equally geared Prot Warrior would take less damage overall on a typical fight where the boss is capable of crushing blows. I've always been used to MT Azgalor, but other encounters normally been tanked by our first string Prot Warrior. After reading Shiggles' post, I decided to compare myself to our MT on the Teron Gorefiend, Naj'entus, and Archimonde fights. I expected I would be taking slightly more damage on Gorefiend/Naj'entus (with smaller spikes on Gorefiend), with less overall damage on Archimonde. Note that on all three fights I had a warrior present to keep up Improved TC, but did not have Grace of Air.

On Naj'entus, my average hit was 3027, with a max hit of 6005. I avoided 51.2% of attacks. I took an average 965 DPS during the fight. Our regular Prot War MT's average hit was 3236, with a max hit of 7687. He took an average of 1031 DPS during the fight. Note that the Naj'entus calculations include tidal shield damage in overall incoming DPS, but not max hit.

On Gorefiend, my average hit was 6509, with a max of 9870. I took an average of 1442 incoming DPS. Our regular Prot War MT's average hit was 6979, with a max hit of 12422. His average incoming DPS was 1477.

On Archimonde (note that soul charge/doomfire damage is not included - I did not take any DF when tanking anyway), my average hit was 5078, with a max of 7005. I took an average of 838 incoming DPS. Prot Warrior MT took an average hit of 6534, with a max of 8617. His average incoming DPS was 1225. I expected to take less damage than a Prot Warrior on this fight, but not quite this much. Note that the average DPS values here are somewhat skewed (though skewed equally) as the time spent for the wisps to blow up Archimonde is included in the calculation.

Overall, I am surprised and happy that the results show that if you have a warrior to keep debuffs up, a similarly geared Feral Druid is on a level playing field with a Protection Warrior on typical fights that don't require Spell Reflect. Of course, this is not nearly enough data to say anything definitive. I'd certainly not be afraid to use a Feral tank to MT a fight like Gorefiend however, and would certainly recommend using a Feral MT for Archimonde if you have the Fear Wards available.

You can find my armory here: The World of Warcraft Armory
While our Prot War MT's armor is here: The World of Warcraft Armory
We may or may not be logged out in tanking gear.