How are the three bear glyphs that currently exist very nice? The best one basically makes frenzied regeneration close to as good as the warrior version. Okay, that one is nice, but they really should fix frenzied regen so that it's a comparable ohshit button to the warrior baseline. Compare this to what warriors get in their revenge glyph in terms of power and you can see the imbalance. Growl is the same across all tanking classes - except no other tank will take it except on special fights where a taunt resist might really matter. And Maul is great for soloing and farming, but has issues with CC and at best gives bears something close to the shockwave/avenger's shield-hammer of the righteous ability the other tanks possess innately.

I don't mind that there isn't any kind of variety in what glyphs will be taken at 80; there are three, and three is it. Fine. But why is there such a difference in the quality of the glyphs relative to other classes? Why are the druid glyphs the ones that are situational or otherwise not always desirable? Put it this way: if you saw the frenzied regeneration glyph on a set bonus, would you want that set bonus?

Well there is always the fact that hopefully they balance druids around their shitty glyphs verse other classes with their super, awesome ones. Granted some other classes/specs have glyphs that are just as bland as ours.

not realy needed IMO. were just swimming in rage most of the time that the cost of maul is a non issue. if you've got 3+ targets on you you cant burn rage fast enough no mater what you do. if you have only 1 or 2 targets on you and are not swimming in rage they are not hiting hard enough and you should probably be tanking a couple more anyway. Current glyph for maul changes maul from heroic strike to cleave if you go with the warrior analogs.

They are also going to add more glyphs later they just havent goten around to it yet.

I also wouldnt worry too much about dodge and parry either. LK gear has a ton of expertiese on it. between gear and the talent it is very easy to push dodges off the combat table and make a sizeable dent in the number of parries you'll recieve while tanking. a reduced cost after a dodge/parry wont be that good if the target cant dodge and only has 2-3% chance to parry left after expertiese.


as someone else sugested though I wouldnt mind a glyph for barkskin that turned it into a full shield wall (increased effect and CD to match) as nice as the reduction is right now it is somewhat weaker as an oh$#!+ button, more comparable to the new shield block although it works for magic as well in our case.

The point is that druids don't exactly need help with "Normal tank viability in raids". While MTing, druids do more then enough single target threat, with good overall migitation. Frenzied regeneration is not a very good "oh shit button", it doesnt heal enough in a shot period of time for that, and the warrior version doesn't change that - The lower rage cost only means its a better soloing ability. Our glyph actually improves the oh shit functionality of frenzied regen, something druids have been asking for. The only questionable glyph is Growl, because we might be hit capped from gear and thus not need it.

As it stands our glyphs improve our weak areas, why would you want it to just make our (already excellent) single target threat better?

Neither do warriors. Glyphs shouldn't be designed so that they're mandatory for viability; they should be designed to either improve an aspect of a class or modify the way a class plays in some essential way.

Right now the druid weaknesses are AoE tanking, avoidance, good ohshit buttons relative to other tanks and magic damage. The only glyph that addresses this is Frenzied Regeneration, which (with glyph) becomes vaguely nice. Maul doesn't help with AoE threat and causes problems with CC. Growl doesn't do any of this. And that's it. So of the three glyphs that bears have, only one is actually helping any weak area, and only barely.

As to 'improve their single target threat' - I never said that. I don't want to improve a druid's single target threat. That's not necessary. What I'd like to see is more variety combined with more power. No other tank will take their version of the taunt glyph because they have far better things to take. Maul is actually going to be a liability in some circumstances depending on the fight, and against single targets (the majority of boss fights) does nothing. Pointing out that glyph of revenge is great isn't saying that druids should have a glyph of revenge, as it wouldn't do much of anything. However, druids should have something on par with the power level of glyph of revenge, or the power level of heroic strike, etc. Right now, they really don't. So have more glyphs in general, and especially have more that do more to deal with the weaknesses.

Done quite a bit of searching for this but couldn't find anything definate for the current patch. I was wondering for, both lvl 70 and 80, what are the weightings of the stats in terms of cat dps?

As i understand it, its expertise and hit until capped as the best stats, but after that i couldn't say whether agi, str or crit rating is the best stat to go for.

At Blizzcon it was stated that the (current) thinking with regard to the two-spec switches, would set up glyphs and hotbars to automatically shift back and forth as well with the talent changes. They really want it to be so that you can press the button to switch your spec, maybe change your gear, and be ready for a different role in a raid.

As such, we will likely be choosing full sets of cat glyphs and bear glyphs to go along with our specs.

Of course, that won't happen until patch 3.1, so there will be some time at level 80 where we will have to think about which glyphs to use all together, for the time being.

From what I have seen, the initial damage of Rake, while ignoring armor, is not increased by Mangle/Trauma, so it's probably similar to Lacerate.

Using this method i was thinking about going with a spec 50/11 with Kotj. Now assuming you macro some of your abilities like rake,mangle and shred to hit TF first for extra energy does this now mean that powershifting isnt needed? Or is it still worth using, i was just wondering if with shifting we ll get to a point where we are just bleeding energy which goes to waste

Powershift no longer exists in the game; furor merely acts as a energy storage now.

Powershifting doesn't exist anymore, thank god. It was a makeshift gimmick at best and a terrible dps loss at worst. Good riddance.

Also, for Felhoof: I don't really see how our mitigation is any worse than a warriors. And the AOE tanking? Atleast in current endgame, Shockwave can't hold a candle to Swipe spam.

I'm not doing to disagree with you that more choice would be better, that's obviously a given. Glyph of Maul is very good for multi mob tanking, when there's not really enough mobs to qualify as "AoE". It helps you get 4k+ TPS on two targets at the same time without any real difficulty, keeping the warriors and rogues from dying with their Blade Flurry/Sweeping Strikes. Is it situational? Yes, very, there are tons of times where Glyph of maul does absolutely nothing for you. But it's a very good Glyph for tanking anything less then 6+ mobs, and even in those cases it's a major damage increase.

As for Growl, you have to keep in mind two things. 1) While our gear is shit, Glyph of Growl is good. 2) Blizzard intends to make more Glyphs as the game progresses. Any serious tank will have Glyph of Growl for Gluth and 4H, not because a taunt resist in the new naxx is devestating or anything, but it'll just make it a bit more smooth. Once we get to the point where we're almost hit capped from just gear, which will be somewhere well after Naxx, it'll be during or after Ulduar, there should be some new glyph releases.

If we'll make it all the way to 9% hit in normal tanking gear and we still dont have a new tanking glyph, yes Growl will be useless. But at the moment I don't see me using any other glyphs unless they're just a stronger version of the same role. Such as barkskin damage reduction being increased - That would be an upgraded version of an oh shit glyph, etcetera.

Assuming your taunt works like warrior taunt, it plays by spellhit rules. You need 17% to remove all resists. The +8% from the glyph serves to counteract the additional 8% hit you need over the white/special hitcap.

Both taunt and growl have been changed in 2.3 to melee hit, not spell hit anymore.

It's affected by melee hit, but it still retains the 17% spellhit miss rate. Penguin tested this very extensively post-2.3. >link to his results<.

even prior to that I dont think I ever recall geting resists on anywhere near the scale I do if I take off all of one of my caster's +hit gear. but reguardless this info is corect, melee hit does reduce resists on growl since 2.3. Not sure what the actual resist chance is though as even with rather low +hit in tank gear resists are quite rare on tauntable bosses. I can think of only 2 times out of maybe 40 or so that I got a taunt resist on the bear boss in ZA and I normaly have 40 +hit or so in tank gear.

After just repeating the same tests he did on Venoxis, it seems that this is still the case. 4H and Gluth in WotLK Naxxramas might have a lowered resist rate (yet higher then 1%) then. Having done them over a dozen times, I haven't gotten a single taunt resist since the Glyphs went in, yet before the glyphs I have encountered resists with more then 1% hit from gear.

Regardless, I stand corrected and in that case Glyph of Growl is arguably more useful then I had thought, only not if they're just reducing the taunt resist of any boss that needs to be taunted.

With shield block now providing a barkskin of sorts, warriors having shield wall, warriors scaling better with block and bears having high mitigation only when using very specific trinkets and being in a party I think warriors have a slight edge. But I didn't mention mitigation being a weakness of a bear (at least I don't think I did) - I mentioned avoidance being a weakness. Which it absolutely is, especially compared to other tanks.

While swipe is acceptable to deal with keeping aggro from healers, it is in no way able to keep aggro off of AoE casters at your level of gear. It simply doesn't put out the threat. And because you must spam it every GCD to keep threat, it means any problems (loose mobs, oh shit buttons, whatever) reduce your AoE threat. Warriors don't have this problem, they don't have the situational requirements, and their AoE damaging ability either stuns mobs or slows them. Furthermore, while shockwave can rage starve in general rage is not an issue.

My experience has been that druids do by far the most AoE damage when AoE tanking, but warriors and paladins both put out quite a bit more AoE threat.

I had no problems keeping aggro off of T6 casters and hunters on the trash in Hyjal. I mean, sure, Swipe can't snap a whole pack of a warlock with a few preemptive seeds under his belt, but give me four global cooldowns and you won't see me losing threat to any kind of non-tank AoE except possibly a bladestorming warrior with sweeping strikes and recklessness. Warriors, not having a situational requirement, also doesn't build AoE threat nearly as well as a Swiping bear does. Consecrate is still king when considering threat and ease-of-use, but that's kind of the paladin niche, and they can't build threat as fast as a druid can when the number of targets is more limited.

Avoidance doesn't look too bad compared to other tanks. Raid buffed with the Idol of Terror, dodge is closing in on 45%. Warriors on this level of gear doesn't have a significantly higher number when combining parry and dodge. And no, shield blocking isn't avoidance. It's tuned up RNG mitigation.

About the glyph discussion: i really dont see what is so good on the revenge glyph. On bosses you are not rage starved. You also dont tank 2 bosses together. Both glyphs bring you nothing on single target bosses. But Maul glyph helps a lot with trash and 5man tanking.

If they changed maul glyph to give rage-free maul after a mangle for example, i'd be pretty pissed off.

Yes, Maul on 2 targets is a lot stronger than that. Personally, I found myself rage-starved in only very few situations.
Done Sunwell and several heroics (most of them together with a ProtWarr and BladestormWarr, I can only recommend this, real fun!) so far, and even in the rarely occassions where I was low on rage, threat never was a problem even if this happend while tanking the focus target that got killed first.

Hey Guys (and girls):

Hey still trying to adapt to the new talent trees. Did black temple last night and my swipe was hitting 89 mobs at a time (exageration). But hitting a lot. The tanking thus far I have seen tremendous upgrades in aggro generation and maintaining threat so no probs there. The issue Im seeing is the DPS DPS DPS.

Here is my current talent tree (mind you hybrid for effective dps / tanking). Here is my current talent distribution on the Armory Web Site: The World of Warcraft Armory

Why is my DPS literally the same? I have hunter friends that were doing 700-800 dps pre patch and now are doubled. Also other classes, ret pallies same = doubled DPS. I heard all this hub bub that our DPS was gonna be on par with rogues. I am in 50/50 sunwell crafted, badge gear and gemmed with strength / agility.

Anyone can anyone take the time to give me some feedback plz? I am willing to bet others are having the same curiousity that our DPS has not changed. What are we doing wrong? Thanks in advance for the help!!!!!

Purewood the Druid