So i got 2 questions, and if your wondering yes Ive looked through some of the pages but after 20 or so....yah....

!. I've herd rumors that Predatory Instincts Does not work in Bear, is this true? How did you come by this?

2. My second question has to do with the first. whats the best TPS build currently? I'm Full feral ATM but a lot of people are 50/11 apparently, im just curious..

We have no disagreement here. The point I was making is that given equal trust in the druid and the pally, people will pick the pally for the speed and efficiency. I've done four raids since the patch including one pug. I am already hearing comments about letting the pally pull because it will be faster, and it hasn't even been a week yet.

Potential Infected Wound troubles down the line. Doing achievements and the like these past few days, I found that the green dragon bosses in Sunken Temple (Morphaz, Hazzas, Eranikus etc) were all immune to IW. I believe they are nature immune. We'd need to test on stuff like air and rock elementals to see if they are immune to IW, since I think they are also nature immune. This could potentially be a problem in the future if other green dragon bosses are introduced.

Speaking of which, can anyone that has done Hyjal/BT/Sunwell post patch 3.0 emphatically say which bosses (if any) are immune to IW? If TClap was being used, I'm pretty sure the IW won't go up (since 1 stack is weaker than TClap), but if someone has had a chance to confirm either way, that would be fantastic.

edit:
Yes this is true. From earlier in the thread:
http://elitistjerks.com/922584-post2729.html

This is the best threat/Bear DPS build right now, at the expense of things like IW and IlotP. In regards to the 0/61/0 spec, it basically means you're speccing for a bunch of things other classes will most likely bring anyway, while reducing your own damage. Threat is easy with either spec, but with migitation between the two builds being the same, full feral just gives you a few gimmicks, but nothing compared to the extra damage you would get as 51/10.

Yes it is. Not because we need it for aggro, because we don't, but because of the design shift in tanking. Blizzard has stated they want threat to be a non issue, which is interesting because threat has always been the primary thing tanks have been judged on, How is this guy's threat?. With that falling away, the only real thing tanks will be judged on, is probably situational awareness. Moving out of fire, using his migitation cooldowns at the right time, etcetera. However moving past that, a new factor will be DPS. If you're doing Patchwerk, and one tank does 2500 DPS, and another one does 1500. Who are you going to invite the next time? The good one, the one that does more DPS. The days that you can't judge a tank on his damage are over because it's just as much his role now as it is for the rogues.

If the question is, should more damage be more important then more surviveability? No, of course not, but things like Infected Wounds and IlotP are not really surviveability. Infected Wounds is something that will be up regardless, unless you're the only tank and then you're doing content that really does not need it. You can argueably make the case that IlotP is migitation, but it's such trivial and random healing that in raids it's not worth much. In 5mans it's pretty good, but we've been talking about raids.

I'm actually specced 0/61/0 and TPS are ok. Speccing 0/51/10 will give me 10% more dps from naturalist and about 7% more TPS (taking into account flat aggro modifier), I simply don't need them.

This is actually my build: http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?drui...00000000000000

What I must give up?
2/2 ImpLoP (Seing recount It's usually about 2% of total healing in a 25 men and saved my life, randomly, a few times)
3/3 ImpMangle, Just a TPS/DPS boost, it's about 2% boost you should subtract from naturalist with build change, You should also wait less time changing targets and you'll be sure that mangle get refresh.
1 point in Brutal impact, situational but usefull in 5 men.
3/3 King of the Jungle, very usefull for snap-aggro.

So taking all into account and having experimented both spec, I can easly say that going 10 point into resto without taking omen it's useless.

Bear-wise you lose 5-7% dps and 3-4% TPS but for me you will have an easyier life overall and a greater control.
Cat-wise ImpMangle+King of the Jungle using a mangle spam strategy gives far better results than 5 points in naturalist, also consider that you basically can't use shred without OOC or you'll be short on time to use finishers.

Infected Wounds:

I don't see why many players want to skip IW, It's one of our best mitigation/talent points ability, usually autoattack is more than 50% boss damage and if you think it's 50% those are 10% less damage for 3 points.
Do you think is worthless? I don't.
As for " other tank will take it" well I don't think so. First of all you will usually run with 2 tank or 1 tank + 1off-tank-dps in 10 men, and 3 tanks in 25 men. I usually end-up tanking my target when tanking because there are really few bosses that needs 2 tanks on him (like brutallus) more frequently you will have a) a boss that need 1 tank so you or the other tank go dps, b) a boss with adds or a "multi-boss" fight, where you don't have TC on your target.

Personally If I should give an extimate I had TC on my targets in my tanking life no more than 20% of times.

Put 3 points in Improved Mangle, hit Berserk then Maul, Mangle throught the duration and you'll see what i mean .

An extreme situation for sure ... but ... come WotLK i wouldnt put aside the probability of having a fight where such extreme TPS was needed.

You mean that other tanks have to pay talent points for? Getting that as a glyph is pretty sweet by my standards. I don't get all this glyph of Maul hate, I've been playing with it for a few weeks now and its absolutely fantastic.

On a side note:
Challenging Roar has a 3 min CD (lowered by 30 seconds with the glyph if I remember correctly), I don't think in progress you'll pull a pack of mob with less than 2min and 30 sec time between them and last 6 seconds (exactly the 4 gcd we need for swipe), could it be a viable way of doing it? Using CR at the start of every pull while building aggro with swipe?

No paladin tank or warrior tank is going to skip AS or shockwave now. So no, I don't think it's reasonable for a glyph to be a fill-in for a talent discrepancy, especially one that isn't skippable anyway. I don't hate glyph of maul; I just feel that this should be baked in to talents just like the other tanks have, and that other glyphs for bears should be available.

As to revenge, warriors are still complaining about being rage starved. Don't know how useful value those complaints are, but they're still there.

Nightcrowler, that's a way to get initial aggro, but it's not a way to hold the mobs unless they don't last for more than 6 seconds. And I pull more frequently than every 2 1/2 minutes, personally, especially when doing 5 or 10 mans.

Same as for druids, then. I rage-starve in heroics/ZA all the time (never able to use Berserk to its full potential). It's not a problem - you don't have to out-threat people using haste pots and bloodlust.
On brutallus, I don't see anyone complaining they are rage-starved.

Side-note: Growl costs no rage. Being starved in heroics is now a non-issue for druids with the 20yd range <3

Edit for Merendel: Centarion spotted an extra "now" stuck in my sentence when I refactored it.

Actually Growl never cost any rage.

One thing that I'm really loving is bear FFF. I know it was mentioned a few pages back, but the threat on it has to be excellent just from my personal experience. One of my guilds best hunters(we're 4/6 in SWP) shot a mob(that I hand't touched) 2-3 times and all I had to do was FFF, and it came back to me. I don't have specific numbers on it, but I've found it to be incredibly useful especially combined with the 20 yd taunt. A mob runs off, taunt it from range, and FFF it and thats more than enough threat to keep it on me past the duration of the taunt.

Forgive a stupid question, but I fail at searching, it seems. Since my bear is my alt, I haven't kept up with the changes as well as I should, so I want to confirm:

Does the new version of Survival of the Fittest fully grant crit immunity with no defense or resilience gear whatsoever? I'm looking at whether it's time to promote some cat trinkets to my bear set as well as regemming and so on.

Thanks for the help.

@Nightcrowler

I was running your version of the sim with your gear, and it would take a fair amount of time (usually 3+ minutes) to build up close to 4k dps (and that was with you using Berserk). However, when I run it, trying to keep up rake, mangle, SR, and rip, I can attain 4k dps without using Berserk. Is the difference based upon human discretion on which to use next? I also wait at some times to pool energy if rake is >2 second to falling off (old habit from mutilate...), which is the only thing that I think I am really doing different from your conditionals.

You may want to take a look into pooling energy (if you haven't already). For Mutilate we used to Mut>SnD>Mutx2>Rupture>Mut>pool energy to 80ish>SnD. Obviously this was pre patch, but that is just to give you an idea.

Edit: Upon further Simulation runnings, it appears you were either running into a horrible streak of no crits and very little OoC procs. You're currently showing up as 4.8k dps this simulation.

@Nyrri
Into my "personal" simulator I have obtained 5030 dps on average on a 10 minute fight. In the simulator you are talking about you should have 4.8k on average because he didn't use CD like heroism, drums, haste potions and so on, it also use a static strategy (for example it didn't change when you use berserk) while in my simul I use a dynamical approch.

Doing it by hand after a bit of exercise I was able to do 4.8k easly with 5.3k spike under 3 min and reacheing 8-9k during berserk.

My strategy use energy pooling, you can see it going down in the page, the times it didn't use it is because is better to don't use it.


@Merendel
I didn't think it was so quick the trash clearing inside naxx, well we will have an hard work.

What I really hate about swipe is not the absence of an initial aggro snap, but the absence of free CD, basically when you'll tank more than 4-5 mobs you will do only swipe... boring.

I find it's fun / effective when tanking lots of mobs (since you have unlimited rage) to maul tab maul tab between the swipes, since they're on different cooldowns. This is combined with the maul glyph.

The only thing I dislike is when classes such as boomkins and ele shamans use abilities which knock mobs back :/

Indeed. This is becoming a big hate thing for me. Here I have gone through the effort of positioning myself and all the mobs, then someone comes along and knocks them all back and I have to reposition again. Not counting the actual threat loss, it's damn annoying.

2 Points:

Knockback ... It is very frustrating, especially with casters. I can see it being "banned" from instances in much the same way fear was. The other tanks i've run with find it just as annoying. Only the water elementals ranged frost nova spam comes close in terms of making the tanks job harder.

DPS ... Would it be possible to code Nightcrowlers optimal cycle rules from his simulation into an Addon - or does it require information not available to LUA? A simple prompt box with "Mangle", "Rip", "Bite" etc would take a lot of the strain out of the cycle even if it would turn Cat dps into a Guitar Hero like mini-game.

I like your comparison with Guitar Hero

I thought of an Addon like this before and I'm pretty sure it is possible, all the informations you need (current Energy, check if a Buff/Debuff is up and its duration, spell cooldowns) are available through the API.

I'm not that experienced with coding in general, but if somebody tries to code something like that, I'd love to contribute.

Do you have an optimum time to use Berserk? I would think it would be right after using TF, or if you knew TF wouldnt come available during the berserk period.

And when you say doing it by hand, is that on your personal simulator, or the one posted? Trying again, I was able to maintain 4.8k sustained over 5 minutes, with that number achieved within the first 20 secs or so. Again this is without berserk. Part of this my be do to keybinds. Its going to be a right pain to try and do this on movement intensive fights, or where we have to pay close attention to anything going on.

This is incredibly effective for solo grinding too.

My (then 63) bear was sitting in telhamat when the patch hit. Recalling the swipe change, and fond memories of killing 10-12 mobs at once when I leveled my main frost mage, I gleefully rounded up a few buzzards and swiped away. Rage Heaven! Mauled every hit. Ground 1/3 of a level in less than half an hour killing packs of 6-8. While I hit the trainer for 64, I stopped by the auction house to grab a glyph of maul. After loading it up, I went back to my friends the buzzards and starting clearing them even faster (also equipped braxxis for some extra mitigation). Now I didn't even need a potion or a heal to take down as many as I could round up without starting to reset some. I think my biggest pack was around 14. The second time I was grinding, there was some poor nub mage killing buzzards one at a time, and then watching me. I laughed when I realized he was frost.

I'm thinking that it's going to become much easier to find tanks from now on.

EDIT misread.

I usually try to use Berserk when I have a large amount of energy to burn through.