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Shifting Perspectives: Bear weapons, trinkets, and relics
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. This Tuesday, we continue to enjoy getting hit in the face. Greetings, druids. This week, we'll finish up our bear gearing guide with a look at weapons, trinkets, and relics; the first section of the guide covers everything else. If you're on the lookout for a more general-purpose guide to the spec, complete with a list of recommended enchants and glyphs, you'll find that in Feral Druid Tanking 101.
Shifting Perspectives: Gearing a bear druid at 85
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. This week, we prepare to get hit in the face. A lot. All right, folks -- time to gear your tanks! As with our previous series on gearing a restoration druid at level 85, we'll be going slot by slot to show you the best available options and where you can get them. I've listed recommend enchants previously in Feral Druid Tanking 101, but I've listed them here as well for convenience. I received some criticism over the restoration gear posts that they were a bit too thorough, and it was (I think) a correct assessment. I'd been aiming for an Emmerald-like opus, but it wound up being an unwieldy mess in blog format. Here, we'll generally avoid gear below ilevel 333. Why? Because you don't want it. I'm sure it's very nice and it has a great personality, but trust me, I've been down that road. It is the way of pain. I've listed the normal versions of some heroic drops here as a courtesy to anyone who's still leveling up, but items are otherwise ranked according to the desirability of their heroic versions. This week, we'll do the helm through ring slots. Weapons, trinkets, and relics require a bit more discussion, so we'll tackle those next week.
Shifting Perspectives: The druid of 2010
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. This week, Allie chugs cough syrup and hallucinates while sprawled on a bathroom floor. Truly the stuff of great literature, folks. It has long -- or, okay, over two years -- been a tradition at WoW Insider for me to exploit the germs conveyed by my relatives to the domicile in the interests of writing a yearly druid post. How does this work? I get sick, go out and buy cough syrup, get trolleyed on the devil's own brew, and then stagger to a computer with no one on the editorial staff able to stop me from publishing in time. This year, I didn't get sick around Christmas, nor immediately after it. In the interests of not disappointing our readership, which seems to enjoy articles written while under the heady influence of dextromethorphan, I secured lodgings on the floor of a bus station bathroom overnight and came back trying to restrain myself from barfing up a lung. Holding my head above the toilet was a certain semi-but-not-entirely-fictional person by the name of Letitia, whom you will have met earlier in Shifting Perspectives: Fun with race choice. Keep in mind that no small portion of this article was written from that position.
Shifting Perspectives: Feral Druid Tanking 101
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. This week, sum durids is still bare, despite it all. Players who have been around for a while will recognize this as an update on Shifting Perspectives: Bear 101, written in February 2010 after the Icecrown Citadel patch had gone live. The spec feels like it's in a weirder place than it was a year ago, consequence of some early improvements on the beta followed by a few unpopular developer decisions. As far as I'm aware, bears are still the least-played tank, and I'm not really optimistic that our numbers are going to rebound as things stand. As with our earlier 101 guide, I'm addressing this to people with no prior knowledge of the spec who want the tools to become a reasonably competent tank quickly. Readers looking for an extended and mathier version of this article should look for the Feral Bear -- Cataclysm Release guide recently published at Elitist Jerks.
Shifting Perspectives: The unbearable suckhood of pugging
Every week (usually), WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. This Tuesday, we soothe everyone's ego by telling them it's not their fault (while secretly thinking it's everyone's fault). I apologize for the recent absence, guys. While I would like to say it had something to do with battling hordes of evil minions from some morally questionable wizard with an abundant set of apostrophes in his name, the truth of the matter is that I've just been crushed by work. It didn't help that I started a Shifting edition on gearing a restoration druid at level 85 and thought, "Hey! Wouldn't it be nice to include all the gear available to druids from Cataclysm quests on up, à la Emmerald's old gear list, so that people know exactly where they stand in relation to upgrades?" Some 1,600 words later, I am pleased to report that I am almost to the end of the shoulder slot. Yeah. You're gonna have to give me another week or two on that ... unless you're planning to go naked from the shoulders down. If you do, send pics. Anyway, it hasn't escaped my attention that the forums more or less exploded once people started getting into heroics. One contingent claims that Cataclysm heroics are too difficult and need to be nerfed. Another insists that everyone claiming that heroics are too difficult is a bad player with bad gear and bad talent choices and bad glyphs and they should feel bad. Personally, I've seen enough of both the dungeon finder and guild groups as a tank and healer to arrive at my own conclusion: People on both sides of this argument are equally correct. Or, if you're in a judgmental sort of mood today, they're equally full of it.
Shifting Perspectives: Patch 4.0.3a and the road to 85
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. This week, we write ourselves a cheat sheet to haul ass to level 85. Last week, I promised I'd take a look at individual articles' popularity after the "Why (or why not) to play a druid" series finished, and here it is. In order of most to least popular: Shifting Perspectives: Why (or why not) to play a worgen druid Shifting Perspectives: Why (or why not) to play a night elf druid Shifting Perspectives: Why (or why not) to play a tauren druid Shifting Perspectives: Why (or why not) to play a troll druid I'll look at the numbers again a few months to see if they steady a bit; the troll article hasn't been up for as long as its night elf counterpart, so I wouldn't have expected it to be competitive regardless. I will say that the Alliance druids enjoy a significant pageview advantage over their Horde counterparts, and that doesn't give me hope that future population numbers will equalize. I wrote a lot of today's article because I'm lazy as sin and wanted a quick reference guide available. Past the cut you'll find information for bear and cat druids on hit caps, reputation grinds, the numbers you should have before stepping into heroics, reforging, and a host of other things that would otherwise have required me to get off my butt and Google something. Resto players, I haven't forgotten about you! Your version will go live later this week. By the way, the above video is a quick look at healing one of the earliest pulls in heroic Grim Batol. I was sorting through my beta videos and realized I'd forgotten to upload it for the worgen lore article.
Shifting Perspectives: Predictions for Cataclysm druids
Every Tuesday, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting feral/restoration druids and those who group with them. This week, Allison hauls out the crystal ball again. I enjoy the business of prognostication. Nobody remembers the crap you'll get wrong -- and if you get anything even vaguely right, you'll be considered a visionary, thanks to a wonderful little thing called confirmation bias. Personally, I've had it up to here with beta dungeon groups. I'm sick of idiots who start to AoE off the pull while I'm tanking and tanks who say, "Give me 10 minutes to fix my bars" while I'm healing. I've had quite enough of titchy little numbers that insist on changing from patch to patch. It's time to return the Tuesday portion of this column to form -- hog-wild speculation and completely baseless conjecture!
Shifting Perspectives: Bear druids in patch 4.0.1
Every Tuesday, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting feral/restoration druids and those who group with them. This week, sum durids is bare. Unannounced changes on the most recent beta build: Female worgen have been redesigned and now bear a startling resemblance to Rachel Dratch. Nourish has a 50/100 percent chance to refresh the duration of Lifebloom on your target and causes Allison Robert to use the f-word six times in one sentence on the WoW Insider team line. Dave Kosak's stoner troll Gravy from Flintlocke vs. The Horde is now a bartender in Orgrimmar. Actually, that last part's a little misleading; I think our pal Gravy's been tending bar since the alpha. I found out about him a few builds ago and have been trying to sneak him into an article ever since. As a general note concerning tanking once patch 4.0.1 and then Cataclysm itself hit, I think we are very likely to see an instancing model reminiscent of the pre-3.0.2 world. I got my start as a 5-man tank in the dungeons and heroics of The Burning Crusade and was known as one of the few people on my server willing to tank Shattered Halls, Shadow Lab and Magisters' Terrace PUGs. As a result, I got very familiar with the need to mark mob packs, assign crowd controllers, use line of sight and tab targeting, and maintain situational awareness. I was equally familiar with the effect that an inexperienced or incompetent player could have on a group under those circumstances (particularly when said inexperienced or incompetent player was me). This is not an indictment of the more difficult instancing model to which Blizzard seems to be returning, because I've genuinely missed tough heroics. However, the dungeon finder is perhaps more suited to a world with greater margin for group error. Tanks are generally unwilling to confront instances requiring heavy crowd control when they don't know what kind of group they're going to get. Guild achievements and reputation are also oriented around guildies' instancing together. I wouldn't go so far as to say that the dungeon finder will become obsolete, but I'm reasonably certain that the wait for a tank is going to get longer. When CC is more of a concern, a tank's control over the dungeon's outcome is necessarily limited, and there are increasingly few incentives to ply your trade for a random group.
Shifting Perspectives: Notes from bizarro world
Every Tuesday, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting druids and those who group with them. This week, we squint at a series of notes scattered around our computer. So there's a weird new bug on the beta causing people to disconnect whenever they hit a 5-man. I first realized this was happening around the time I finished a laborious sketch of what to expect in Stonecore to a group that hadn't yet seen the dungeon. I assigned group marks, went over mob abilities and gave a detailed explanation of how to handle the first boss. Around the time I finished this triumph of 5-man leadership, I noticed that everyone in the group had gone eerily silent. Moments later, they were -- to a man -- revealed to be offline. Readers, I cried. Crazy. But the disconnect bug is pretty common right now. As a reflection of the disjointed and surreal experience that is dungeoneering on the beta, you will find a collection of notes below that I've scribbled over the last week. I'm still not having a great time healing, but tanking's gotten better, and there's a wonderful bug with Ravage that I have thus far managed to avoid reporting in the forlorn hopes that it will stick around.
Shifting Perspectives: Beta build 12803
Every Tuesday, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting feral/restoration druids and those who group with them. This week, we ponder change. Beta build 12803 dropped late Friday, and with it a number of changes to the feral and restoration specs. Some are what you'd expect after some recent forum conversations with Ghostcrawler (lead systems designer), and others came out of left field. We'll take a look past the cut.
