Ah thank you for that catch, I completely forgot to account for the GCD of FFF itself.
The reset on target change is because I would only use this on single target tanking. The castsequence doesn't include maul because I manually manage that ability based on if I'm running out of rage or not.
I am strugling with threat on Vezax (normal mode) and Hodir (hard mode) kills.
For Hodir hard mode:
1. If you have a Warrior in the raid, get him to do Thunderclap. Respec to drop IW and Brutal Impact (not needed for PvE ) and then take Master Shapeshifter for 4% more damage (threat).
2. Beserk at start of fight and at every cooldown. Make sure that any melee who get Storm stand on top of you.
3. Stand in a column of light for the haste buff if you need threat - even if that means melee have to hit boss from the front too. Usually though there are tow columns close enough for you to position the boss so that both you and melee have a buff.
4. This fight requires that you reposition the boss regularly to keep the melee in a haste buff light column - it's one of the prime cases where a castsequence macro will probably improve your threat immensely - Loryli's macro will do fine. Spam the macro, jump a lot to dispel biting cold. Make sure you have taunt handy so that when the ranged dps pull aggro you can taunt back and tell them to soulshatter/invis/FD afterwards (if it's a Moonkin get a Salvation on them).
1. If you have a Warrior in the raid, get him to do Thunderclap. Respec to drop IW and Brutal Impact (not needed for PvE ) and then take Master Shapeshifter for 4% more damage (threat).
2. Beserk at start of fight and at every cooldown. Make sure that any melee who get Storm stand on top of you.
3. Stand in a column of light for the haste buff if you need threat - even if that means melee have to hit boss from the front too. Usually though there are tow columns close enough for you to position the boss so that both you and melee have a buff.
4. This fight requires that you reposition the boss regularly to keep the melee in a haste buff light column - it's one of the prime cases where a castsequence macro will probably improve your threat immensely - Loryli's macro will do fine. Spam the macro, jump a lot to dispel biting cold. Make sure you have taunt handy so that when the ranged dps pull aggro you can taunt back and tell them to soulshatter/invis/FD afterwards (if it's a Moonkin get a Salvation on them).
Using the tanking suggestions above what are you guys using for gear sets on Hodir hard mode? I've been juggling between no Frost Resist, 1pc, then 2 pc in slots that do not affect Expertise too much.
Using the tanking suggestions above what are you guys using for gear sets on Hodir hard mode? I've been juggling between no Frost Resist, 1pc, then 2 pc in slots that do not affect Expertise too much.
As a feral, wearing frost resist on Hodir is a no-brainer. You definitely should. When Hodir gains Frozen Blows, the entire raid is taking a ton of damage. You need to run with a few healers as possible to kill him in 3 minutes, therefore your healers are going to be very busy at this time. You don't want to be getting hit for 25-35k frozen blow smashes while the healers are already trying to keep the raid alive. Wear the frost resist and it will make tank healing a non-issue when the raid needs the heals.
For the rest of the gear I would maximize threat (expertise/hit) over avoidance.
1. If you have a Warrior in the raid, get him to do Thunderclap. Respec to drop IW and Brutal Impact (not needed for PvE ) and then take Master Shapeshifter for 4% more damage (threat).
2. Beserk at start of fight and at every cooldown. Make sure that any melee who get Storm stand on top of you.
3. Stand in a column of light for the haste buff if you need threat - even if that means melee have to hit boss from the front too. Usually though there are tow columns close enough for you to position the boss so that both you and melee have a buff.
4. This fight requires that you reposition the boss regularly to keep the melee in a haste buff light column - it's one of the prime cases where a castsequence macro will probably improve your threat immensely - Loryli's macro will do fine. Spam the macro, jump a lot to dispel biting cold. Make sure you have taunt handy so that when the ranged dps pull aggro you can taunt back and tell them to soulshatter/invis/FD afterwards (if it's a Moonkin get a Salvation on them).
I would suggest against #2. The person with storm cloud might be a ranged. They need that 130% agro threshold to keep from pulling off you(more easily). Also, the storm cloud buff is limited to 4 people, 6 heroic. "Wasting" one of the buffs on a tank is going to hamper your dps considerably.
I somewhat agree about standing in moon beams. BUT it can increase spike damage during frozen blows. Might want to avoid it then.
I would suggest against #2. The person with storm cloud might be a ranged.
That's why I said melee....
I actually wear zero resist gear, just plenty of HP and threat. We do this fight exactly as I described and finished with 25secs to spare.
We have Paladins using Divine Sacrifice (40% less damage) during Frozen Blows, which also enables you to cut healer numbers on this fight. I wouldnt recommend not wearing resist gear if you don't do it this way.
I actually wear zero resist gear, just plenty of HP and threat. We do this fight exactly as I described and finished with 25secs to spare.
We have Paladins using Divine Sacrifice (40% less damage) during Frozen Blows, which also enables you to cut healer numbers on this fight. I wouldnt recommend not wearing resist gear if you don't do it this way.
I'd be very wary of relying on Divine Sacrifice. Because it's limited to 150% of the Paladin's health, it's only absorbing <40k health and will likely get mostly absorbed by AoE damage, especially in Heroics, which is primarily what we use it for. Hand of Sacrifice is a much better "tank" cooldown, while it doesn't absorb as much, it's restricted to the person it's cast on and won't get wasted by a single bad icicle/frostbolt volley/static chage.
I'd be very wary of relying on Divine Sacrifice. Because it's limited to 150% of the Paladin's health, it's only absorbing <40k health and will likely get mostly absorbed by AoE damage, especially in Heroics, which is primarily what we use it for. Hand of Sacrifice is a much better "tank" cooldown, while it doesn't absorb as much, it's restricted to the person it's cast on and won't get wasted by a single bad icicle/frostbolt volley/static chage.
Currently, if you stack paladin bubble with Divine Sacrifice, the divine sacrifice does not go away after the health limit, so it lasts the full duration of the buff. This is probably unintended.
Currently, if you stack paladin bubble with Divine Sacrifice, the divine sacrifice does not go away after the health limit, so it lasts the full duration of the buff. This is probably unintended.
This. But as a well-known MMO dev once said: "exploit early, exploit often"
Alright, I've searched the last 3-4 pages of this thread and cannot find a definitive answer.
Since Ulduar came out, and the advent of cat dps being really good, thats all I've done. However, I am starting to miss tanking again, and looking to start doing that again. How has the gemming/enchanting changed in 3.1? Before in 3.0 I used a 60/40% Stam:Agi ratio to build a balanced tanking set (As in, if I had 10 sockets - 6 gems would be stam, 4 would be agi). Obviously the best answer would be to build seperate tanking sets (one for Threat, one for survival) but gear isn't raining from the sky.
Has this changed at all in the last patch? Right now I'm using BiS naxx 25 gear (Not including Darkmoon Card, Greatness) and haven't gotten any Ulduar pieces. With threat becoming a bigger issue in Ulduar on fights such as Hodir/Vezax, how important is Expertise/Hit? Is it worth it to gem those as well? I've already started building a BiS gear list on Rawr, but I'm just not sure about the gemming anymore.
Dispelling fusion punch on the iron council - more importantly dispel failing to dispel.
I have noticed a few times recently that my combat log is showing "XXX's dispell magic fails to dispell fusion punch" this has happened with each of a ret paladin, holy paladin and a priest being on dispell duty over the course of the last couple of weeks in both 10 and 25man.
Does anyone know of the mechanic behind this? It's probably worth noting that the priest was shadow, thus had some spellhit from gear if that effects it, as would the ret pali, although I was wondering if the hit needed would then be based of my level (80), or the lvl of the mob casting the debuff (83).
Would it be worth putting 2 people on dispell duty to cut down on the chances of this happening? As we are working on 25man hardmode atm (have completed it in 10man) and 1 failed dispell when he has the damage buff from 1 mob being dead already can easily result in a wipe when couples with the AE tick and a melee hit.
Talanik, the primary way things have changed is that because of how hard things hit in Ulduar, stamina is much more important than agility most of the time. Threat is an issue on Hodir/Vezax, but it's not as crucial as survivability in both cases. And Hodir is tauntable, so that makes it even less important.
Expertise and hit are nice things to have, but they're hardly crucial.
The only pieces in bear that I gem for agility are ones that I share with cats. Otherwise it's pure stamina whenever I can.
Talanik, the primary way things have changed is that because of how hard things hit in Ulduar, stamina is much more important than agility most of the time. Threat is an issue on Hodir/Vezax, but it's not as crucial as survivability in both cases. And Hodir is tauntable, so that makes it even less important.
Expertise and hit are nice things to have, but they're hardly crucial.
The only pieces in bear that I gem for agility are ones that I share with cats. Otherwise it's pure stamina whenever I can.
So, would you go 100% stamina then for all bear pieces? No mix at all?
Agility seems like it would be more important this patch with higher crit = higher savage defense uptime, as well as Threat, Dodge, and armor. Wouldn't more stamina just make you a mana sponge?
Agility seems like it would be more important this patch with higher crit = higher savage defense uptime, as well as Threat, Dodge, and armor. Wouldn't more stamina just make you a mana sponge?
Savage defense uptime is already plenty high, and crit makes almost no difference in its uptime unless you get a huge amount. Dodge is better, but for almost all fights healers must heal you as if you did not avoid a single thing. It is largely irrelevant.
Threat is still not hugely important.
The best thing that you get at this point from agility is armor.
You may be a mana sponge, but the thing is healers can't care about that right now. There's one exception to this - Vezax likes having some avoidance so that you can minimize the amount of mana spent on healing. But that's about it. Everything else really lends itself to something that can soak a huge amount of damage.
Savage defense uptime is already plenty high, and crit makes almost no difference in its uptime unless you get a huge amount. Dodge is better, but for almost all fights healers must heal you as if you did not avoid a single thing. It is largely irrelevant.
Threat is still not hugely important.
The best thing that you get at this point from agility is armor.
You may be a mana sponge, but the thing is healers can't care about that right now. There's one exception to this - Vezax likes having some avoidance so that you can minimize the amount of mana spent on healing. But that's about it. Everything else really lends itself to something that can soak a huge amount of damage.
Agreed - with the current state of Ulduar healers aren't running out of mana - they are just failing to get heals off in time (Latency, bad luck, bad heals, or burst dmg). Granted that 1-5% more dodge may save you, but I find stam more efficient atm when you get deep into diminishing returns. After 50% dodge stam becomes more vital in the important fights (hardmodes, vezax, yogg P3, etc) so you can soak that extra hit b/c your Going to get a heal regardless in most cases - only with the higher dodge it ends up over heal.
Later if blizzard makes healers focus more on 'smart heals' like they keep talking about avoidance will probably come out on top (again once your deep into diminishing return, until 50% keep going agi). Currently I am gemmed agi with about 54% dodge raid buffed, but finding higher survivability when I lean to stam gear. I run 47k hp Raid buffed and hope by the time I get full Ulduar it will be 50k with a tad bit more dodge (55%ish?)
1. If you have a Warrior in the raid, get him to do Thunderclap. Respec to drop IW and Brutal Impact (not needed for PvE ) and then take Master Shapeshifter for 4% more damage (threat).
I find having a 30 second interrupt pretty valuable to be honest. Was experimenting with it when we were trying Council and its not left my spec. Very handy on 40-50% of the fights in Ulduar.
I honestly don't. Tanking Stormcaller's damage is trivial during p1 with the random feral charge and shock from a resto shaman, I spend half of phase 1 in catform (building 5cp, Savage Roar, 5 CP again, and Rip) so I have bleeds and insane threat (11k TPS) in phase 2 (we kill him 2nd). If you are killing him last, you'll want something more reliable (and off the GCD) for hitting the whirl anyway in p2, and when killing him there's significantly more people able to interrupt. I can kinda see the use on Ignis with add tanking, but alternating NG and Bash has always worked for me. Leviathan, XT-002, Razorscale, Kologarn, Thorim, and Hodir no. On Freya, Auriaya, Mimiron, and Yogg it would be an added convenience, but you're not going to prevent a wipe by having it. The only fight where a Tank Interrupt is going to help a lot is Vezax, and no offense to the druids that do it, but that's not a fight I'd bring a Druid MT for, and interrupting is so important that unless you're hit and expertise capped, you can't rely on bash anyway.
To me, it comes down to opportunity cost. We lose 2 talent points, a Global Cooldown, 10 Rage, and it's not even on a decent cooldown (prot pallies get HoJ on what, 20 seconds, it's Ranged so it can't be dodged/parried and it lasts longer?) DK's lose 20 RP, Rogues lose 25 energy, Warriors lose 10 rage, Mages lose some amount of mana, Warlocks lose the difference of pets using a felhunter. These are all untalented class skills with shorter (or equal in the case of locks) cooldowns that aren't blocked by the GCD.
When it comes to abilities that can be interrupted, they fall into the categories of 1 person can do it, 2 people can alternate, or it's not important enough to care that much. Only one fight falls into the 2 alternating +1, and that's Stormcaller Brundir P2-3, and as I mentioned above, the chain lightning is really just trivial and only the whirl needs interrupted.
Agreed - with the current state of Ulduar healers aren't running out of mana - they are just failing to get heals off in time (Latency, bad luck, bad heals, or burst dmg). Granted that 1-5% more dodge may save you, but I find stam more efficient atm when you get deep into diminishing returns. After 50% dodge stam becomes more vital in the important fights (hardmodes, vezax, yogg P3, etc) so you can soak that extra hit b/c your Going to get a heal regardless in most cases - only with the higher dodge it ends up over heal.
Later if blizzard makes healers focus more on 'smart heals' like they keep talking about avoidance will probably come out on top (again once your deep into diminishing return, until 50% keep going agi). Currently I am gemmed agi with about 54% dodge raid buffed, but finding higher survivability when I lean to stam gear. I run 47k hp Raid buffed and hope by the time I get full Ulduar it will be 50k with a tad bit more dodge (55%ish?)
The point of diminishing returns is to make each point of dodge/agi/parry/whatever equal. So there's no reason for you to stop at 50%. Stack stam to survive X hits, then go dodge. And find a blood dk for vezax!
For Thorim Hard-Mode what tanking arrangement, how many healers have people been doing it with? My experience is 1-tank hallway, 1-tank arena, 6 healers. I have been tanking Thorim is pvp core pieces, PvE accessories but I am wondering... what can be considered enough hp for this - how much avoidance should be sacced for stam - should frost resist be used coupled with PvP accessories or additional resil/defense gems or enchants?
The normal solution is to rotate tanks and cooldowns (hello OS25-3D) but a druid can collect a resil set to solo-tank this until dead leaving 1-2 tanks with their cooldowns.
Thorim's unbalancing strike removes 200 defense rating gaining 8% critical change. Feral base is 6 from talents - 5.6%/ 7.6% chance to be crit. Rawr shows 4.4% miss chance for a naked specced tauren druid so I assume 2.2% miss is lost before DR during unbalancing strike.
At 12 debuffs Thorim is nearly untankable. Here's an example death from 12 stacks: source
At 0.13 seconds between 40k hatefuls and 20k melee stamina cannot be stacked to a point to absorb everything. A tank receives ~15,000 damage per second after ~10 stacks. Fast attack speed favors avoidance but this is too much too fast. At the same time full stam requires more healing and stacks go higher with additional healers.
The point of diminishing returns is to make each point of dodge/agi/parry/whatever equal. So there's no reason for you to stop at 50%. Stack stam to survive X hits, then go dodge. And find a blood dk for vezax!
I don't think I get your meaning here. Obviously parry is never going to be equal to dodge in a Feral tanking thread. And dodge (assuming full raid buffed) will always lag behind agility (in terms of both dodge, armor mitigation, and threat). It takes ~2500 agility before defense becomes equal. I don't know about you, but I have a ton of agility and no where near that number.
The point of diminishing returns may be to make avoidance stats equal for Other tanks, but it obviously does nothing of the sort of us. We have dodge and the source of the dodge it is irrelevant relative to diminishing returns.
Blizzards intentions with Diminishing returns actually WAS so tanks would stop stacking so much avoidance. They learned that mistake with sunwell geared warriors, and have admitted it. Sometimes they do have accountability .
I think I may understand what you are trying to say tho - and with the little bit of napkin math incoming I think I might agree with you after all. Starting from scratch it takes 35ish Agi to get 1 dodge? Once your far into diminishing it takes more, but has more reward. For instance: You now have 50% dodge (using my numbers, 1770 agi, 155 dodge rating, 35 def rating). It would at this point take 67 agility to achieve that same +1 dodge. The 1 dodge on a naked druid (17% dodge) and on a geared druid (50% dodge) are not equivalent tho.
Out of 100 attacks the naked druid will eat 83 of them. With 1 more dodge he will avoid 1 more out of the 83
Out of 100 attacks the geared druid will eat 50 of them. With 1 more dodge he will avoid 1 more out of the 50.
So while naked druid only adds 35 agility, the dodge reduces the dmg he takes by ~1.2% (not 1). And the geared druid has to add 67 agi for the same 1 dodge, but that 1 dodge reduces the incoming dmg he currently takes by 2%. These numbers actually should be a tad higher as I didn't include other factors such as chance to be missed (With those stats as a NE druid its at 7.28%).
Of course - this brings us right back to square one in terms of Tank survival. What kills tanks? Burst damage - we aren't nickled and dimed. I am a big fan of the "Time to Live" simulations. So what is going to help us more? The ability do dodge more hits or soak more hits. Dodging will reduces strings of big hits more. HP will cause us to eat more strings of hits, but give us a better chance to walk away when they do occur. I guess that's a matter of preference, play style, and of course what Ugo is pounding on our face today.
You took my words a bit too literally. I meant just any avoidance, the reward(average damage reduced) is basically linear per stat input.
As for which is better for TTL...that conversation goes round and round and round. Agility and sta both help, but I think after you reach a "plateau" of X hits to live, agility serves you better.
On Thorim the "crit immune with pvp gear" concept is nice. However, on hard mode, you need to use tank cooldowns to survive and you will have a 2nd tank in the arena anyway, so there is no reason not to use two tanks and alternate cooldowns as his buff stacks high.
Towards the end of the fight (10+ charges) your healers will essentially be spamming nonstop heals into you as Thorim's damage increases. Avoidance isn't going to save your healers any mana and it's only going to help you survive through RNG. I strongly favor HP stacking on Thorim for this reason.
Also, if you have 4-pc T8, the survival instincts glyph, and the barkskin glyph, you can tank for a continuous 30 seconds no-problem towards the end of the fight if you use barkskin during unbalancing strike. After that, have the next tank taunt and blow all of his cooldowns. If you setup a good rotation you can reliably live up to 12 stacks or more.
We've done Harde mode every week for the past month now, and all our wipes are caused by too many deaths by people being stupid/unlucky early on (don't tell anyone, but I wipe on purpose if he's not at 50% by 9 stacks). The other side of that, is that I've always died, and this was the first week that our 2nd Tank didn't die (Prot warrior, he tanks Hallway and Thorim until 1st Unbalancing to give me threat) We have no 3rd tank, a DK in frost presence handles the Warbringers in the Arena with me on the Champions, and well ... AoE. External Cooldowns are 2 Pain Suppression, 1 Divine Sacrifice, 2 Lay on Hands, 2 Hand of Sacrifice (I'm pretty sure both Holy Paladins use Aura Mastery - Frost Aura), 1 Divine Guardian. I also get Vigilance from the Prot Warrior and a constant supply of Shields.
06/09/09, 9:36 PM
) and then take Master Shapeshifter for 4% more damage (threat).
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