feral-gear-guide
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Shifting Perspectives: Spending feral VP in 5.3
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. Welcome to our DPS edition, brought to you by Chase Hasbrouck, aka Alaron of The Fluid Druid blog. This week, we spend our Valor Points at the corner store. Patch 5.3 is here, the item upgrade vendors have returned, and it's time to talk about everybody's favorite things; gear. What are the pixels I can pick to push my kitty to the top of the heap? Let's take a look. Weapons and trinkets first As a feral, getting a good weapon is your highest priority. It's the jelly to your peanut butter, the ketchup to your french fries...okay, I may be hungry, but you get the point, it's a necessary complement to ensuring you can be an effective damage dealer. You have four choices for weapons; three drops from Throne of Thunder (Shan-Dun, Breaker of Hope, Jalak's Maelstrom Staff, or the Darkwood Spiritstaff) and the weapon with a legendary socket from 5.0, Gao-Rei. The differences in the ToT weapons are fairly minor, so just get the best you can, and upgrade it ASAP. If you can't get into ToT yet, the +500 agility from the legendary gem on Gao-Rei makes it a worthwhile fill-in. Oh, and if you've completed Chapter II of the legendary quest and received an Eye of the Black Prince, don't forget to buy another one when you get a weapon upgrade.
Shifting Perspectives: The feral gear list to rule them all
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. Welcome to our feral cat edition, brought to you by Chase Hasbrouck, aka Alaron of The Fluid Druid blog. Let the face clawing begin! This is it -- the final feral list of this expansion. By following this, you'll be well prepared to take on anything Deathwing throws your way. Some notes: This list is focused on items suitable for PvE content. You may have some success in PvP with these items ... or not. To compare PvP items with PvE, a good rough estimate is to take five points off the item level for weapons and 20 points off the item level for armor. This accounts for the useless resilience. This list starts at item level 378 (normal Firelands or new 4.3 5-man instances). If you've just hit 85, check the lists for items that can be acquired via the AH or crafting, then take a look at my previous gear list. In general, one point of agility is worth three points of any of the secondary stats, and all secondary stats are roughly equal. Use that as a guide when comparing items. I've grouped all the items into rough tiers. These typically line up with ilevel, but not always (mostly due to gem slots). You will almost always want to gem the best +agility gem you can afford into each socket, ignoring socket bonuses unless they are 20 agility or greater.
Shifting Perspectives: Gearing your Feral (bear) Druid at 80
Every Tuesday, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting Druids and those who group with them. This week, we take a look at gearing your lolbaretank for the rigors of standing in front of raid bosses and screaming, "Is that the best you've got?" EDIT: This article has been updated for patch 3.3 and Icecrown content. Please click here to see a guide to gearing a bear druid as of May 2010. My main spends most of her time tanking, so I have a little more experience with the gear on this list as opposed to others. Dan O'Halloran will be writing a guide to gearing a Cat Druid next week, and with that we'll be rounding up pre-raid gear for all 4 specs. As with our entry on pre-raid Restoration gear at 80 and our entry on pre-raid Balance gear at 80, this guide assumes that you do not presently have access to either 10-man or 25-man raids, and if I miss any piece that you've found helpful, please drop a comment and I'll make sure it gets added. I should also add that this gear set presumes you are gearing your bear tank with an eye toward main-tanking in raids and/or tanking the more difficult heroics. If you're mostly DPSing or off-tanking, please feel free to swap in more DPS-oriented pieces prioritizing +hit and +crit over +expertise, +dodge, and stamina. Before we get any further, some helpful links: Toskk's Bear Tank Time-To-Live Method, allowing you to look at upgrades from the context of your present set of gear and calculate how long you can go without healing assuming different talents and items. ThinkTank on pre-raid gear: While I don't think that Kalon's been able to update this for patch 3.0.8 yet and he weights items a little differently than I do, this is a terrific list. He'll also give you a much better sense of just how good PvP gear is right now (much to my everlasting annoyance concerning arena). Rawr: Use it. Know it. Love it. Big Bear Butt on +hit, +expertise, and +dodge conversion and numbers that you will need at 80.
Shifting Perspectives: Gearing your bear tank from 70 to Karazhan!
Every Tuesday, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting druids and those who group with them. This week John Patricelli, the Big Bear Butt Blogger, comes late to the party with a mammoth of an article that hopes to cover bear tank gear choices from dinging at 70 up to and through running Karazhan with your guild. Gearing up as a bear tank As you approach level 70 as a feral druid, your playstyle to this point has most likely been as a Kitty, focusing on causing lots of damage, very swiftly. Kind of like a stripped down, no frills rogue. But with style. As much as you enjoy being a kitty, however, you just know all your friends want you to tank. With Fury Warriors, Enhancement Shamans, Retribution Paladins and real Rogues floating around, there is no shortage of melee DPS in the game. But a good tank! Well, that's another story.
