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Shifting Perspectives: The 5 top mistakes new ferals make
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! It was finished. I spat, again, attempting to purge the taste of gronn from my mouth. Ugh. My ribs still hurt from the powerful backhand which had struck me unawares and knocked me from the ledge, but it was over. Skullcrusher was dead, his minions scattered--and I was ready to take the fight to Deathwing. My eyes lifted, tracing the path of the gigantic corrupted dragon across the sky... Stones skittered closely behind me, and I whirled to find another druid standing atop a small boulder. His solemn eyes were mesmerizing, but it was the words I heard. "Bah. Ready for Deathwing? More like, ready to be Deathwing's dinner." I snorted. "And what would you know, old-timer? Shouldn't you be getting back to your tree?" The other druid shrugged, and turned away. "As you wish." He abruptly shifted, assuming the form of a great panther, and began to quietly pad away. Suddenly, I noticed that his fur was criscrossed with scars from head to toe, and a nagging feeling arose in the pit of my belly. "Wait," I said abruptly. "Maybe I've misjudged you." The strange druid reassumed his elven form, and turned back, smiling. "Good. We've lost too many of our people fighting the Quiraji, Illidan, Arthas, and now this abomination. I don't want to lose another." With that, we began to speak in earnest.
Shifting Perspectives: A feral guide to the Fall of Deathwing
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! As the portal from the Eye of Eternity shimmered and closed behind me, I continued to curse loudly. "Enough, OK? Enough! I've been slimed, tentacled, and now? Frozen solid. You dragons got your precious iris; send someone else to get the next Magic Battery or whatever else you decide you need!" "Alaron," Tyrygosa began, "perhaps now's not the ..." "No! Maybe I wasn't clear. I AM DONE WITH DRAGONS." All conversation stilled, and heads turned in my direction ... which is how we heard it. Wingbeats. Lots of wingbeats. In the distance, an uncountable horde of twilight drakes came over the horizon, preceded by the largest and ugliest dragon I'd ever seen, and headed straight for the Temple. A soft groan rippled through the room as we prepared yet again for battle. "You may be done with dragons," Tyragosa murmured, "but they do not appear to be done with you." Last week, I covered the first four bosses in Dragon Soul, and this week, we'll finish things up. As before, I'll provide a quick capsule strategy for those attempting the fight in the Raid Finder, then describe the changes to the fight for normal and heroic modes.
Shifting Perspectives: A feral druid guide to the Siege of Wyrmrest Temple
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! I was tired. I'd traveled to the End of Time, participated in one of the biggest moments in the history of Azeroth, and helped the spiritual leader of the Horde kill the spiritual leader of the Alliance (who, admittedly, had tried to kill us first). I'd never felt much of a calling to the Dream, but a few hundred years of meditation sounded great right about now. Peering over the scales of my drake (I'd have flown myself, but they insisted), I gestured to the large dragon in flight beside me. "You know, you dragons are always causing trouble," I shouted as the frigid wind of Northrend whipped by. "Can't you just drop me off at the nearest forest and call it a day?" Nethestrasz chuckled. Through some queer trick of the dragons' magic, they were fully understandable, even in dragon form. "If a forest existed that would be spared from Deathwing's flames, I might join you," he replied. Unfortunately, any further reply was drowned out by a sudden, loud cracking noise as the earth split asunder before us, revealing a gigantic earth elemental. "Well, looks like it's time to be troublesome," I thought. Wordlessly, I nodded to Nethestrasz, and our army turned as one and dove for the surface. This week and next, I'll be covering everything you need to know to DPS your way through the new Dragon Soul raid encounter. I'll provide a quick capsule strategy for those attempting the fight in the Raid Finder, then describe the changes to the fight for normal and heroic modes.
Shifting Perspectives: Feral tactics for Well of Eternity and Hour of Twilight
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! As the great dragon crashed down, I turned and began padding toward the entrance to the shrine. The padding quickly became walking as I assumed my elven form, feeling the familiar weight of armor settle around my body. Brushing the sand out of my cloak, I turned to the figure who had silently watched us battle. "Now that we've killed you," I began, "You can help us?" "Yes. The path to the Dragon Soul is open. It must be retrieved if we are to have any chance of stopping Deathwing and saving our world. I will now take you there." He gestured, and a portal coalesced into existence. I couldn't help myself. "Um, I know you're the Aspect of Time and everything, but wouldn't it make a bit more sense to just go warn the other Aspects about Neltharion before he betrays them? This seems rather roundabout." He stared back at me, expressionlessly. "Right. I'll just ... take the portal, and Shred something. Sounds good." The Well of Eternity Well of Eternity is the second of the new 5-man instances released with Patch 4.3, and it is full of Burning Crusade lore. (In my subjective opinion, it's the best of the three, which further proves that Blizzard needs to go ahead and release The Burning Crusade 2: They're Really On Fire Now.) After a quick intro fight with a demon, you'll meet Illidan, who will promptly enlist you, cloak you, and then lead you around as you kill demons and break things. After a short while, you'll meet Peroth'arn.
Shifting Perspectives: 2011 for feral druids
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! Just like last year, this December brings both new beginnings and endings. A new raid, with new toys, but the end of an expansion, with likely no significant changes to mechanics until the release of Mists of Pandaria. As we sit around the fire with mugs of cider, enjoying (or loathing) our new sweaters, let's take a moment to look back at the events of 2011. Those of you who have already set them on fire, feel free to follow along from outside. (Bad cat! Bad cat!) Patch 4.0 blues Let's face it: Life was not so hot in early Cataclysm for us ferals. It's long enough ago that it's hard to remember, but our AoE damage was just pathetic. Swipe hit so weakly that our best AoE strategies revolved around multiDoTing, which was quite difficult and even then wasn't very powerful. Heroic Maloriak really brought this out; feral was consistently the lowest DPS spec, a good 10% below the next spec and almost 50% below our fellow balance druids. While most of the balance issues are typically ironed out quickly, this one persisted for quite a while.Thankfully, our single-target damage was passable, but only just.
Shifting Perspectives: Feral fighting in End Time
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! So there I was, just minding my own business and trying to get the smoke out of my gear (being a flaming kitty is cool and all, but the dry cleaning costs are incredibly expensive), when one of those bronze dragons showed up. She looked human, but I can smell dragon a mile away (which incidentally has not helped much, being as the things seem to be around every corner these days -- I thought dragons were rare, mystical creatures?). "Champion," she said. "My master, Nozdormu, needs your help urgently. The list of heroes powerful enough to assist him in his time of need are few. Please come at once!" I glanced at the list. Apparently, "few" means half the population of Azeroth. Still, I was bored. "So," I said, wearily. "What needs killing now?" "He does," she replied. "We must kill his future self, who is preventing us from going to the past to get the item needed to save the present." "Right. Wait, what?" I answered, confusedly. "If he has a future self, than that means we've already succeeded, and ... fine. Just tell me where to go, before I have to think about it again." End Time, the first of the new 5-man instances, is arguably the easiest. In order to get to not-Nozdormu, you'll have to go through two of four echoes, which are alternate future versions of today's faction leaders. There's a bit of trash, but nothing that can't be AoEed down. As such, we'll jump right to talking about the echoes, which are more interesting.
Shifting Perspectives: Your patch 4.3 feral cheat sheet
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! Patch 4.3 is upon us. It's time to take down Deathwing. Are you prepared? If not, fear not: This handy cheat sheet will sum up all the feral changes you need to know to keep you performing at your best. (As always, thanks to Tangedyn and Yawning for their invaluable analysis; make sure to check out Mew, if you haven't already.) I'm going to put this right up front, since this is easily the most frequent question I receive: What should I reforge to, and what are my stat priorities? Easy -- it doesn't matter. Seriously. All of the secondary stats (mastery, haste, crit, hit, expertise) are roughly equal in value for DPS purposes. This was the case in 4.2, and it remains the case in 4.3. (To put a more exact number on it, it's a roughly 1% DPS difference, which is well within the margin of error for any given fight.) My personal preference remains the same: Cap hit and expertise (960/780 rating, respectively) to reduce rotational unpredictability, which has benefits that aren't captured by computer simulations that play perfectly. By all means, however, reforge to whatever you prefer; just make sure you're still gemming and enchanting your gear, going for agility wherever possible. OK, on to the interesting stuff.
The new tanking threat paradigm and you
If you're wondering what all the fuss about Ghostcrawler's latest dev watercooler post is about, well, you should probably go read it. Some of these changes have already gone live on the realms, while others won't until the next patch. The basic gist is as follows: Threat generated by tanks has been increased from 300% of damage dealt to 500%. What this means in practice is if your tank is doing 5k DPS, you'd need to do over 25k DPS to pull threat off of him or her. (You need to do roughly 110% of tank threat to pull once he or she has aggro, so you'd actually need to do 27.5k DPS to pull off of a tank doing 5k DPS.) This change was hotfixed in, so if you're noticing your tank is suddenly doing a lot more threat per second, that's why. The way Vengeance stacks is going to be streamlined. Vengeance currently ramps up somewhat slowly. In the current model, every time you take damage as a tank, you gain 5% of the damage you take as attack power. So if you're hit for 20,000 damage, you gain 1,000 attack power. As you take more and more damage, this stacks up to a maximum of 10% of your health, so for a tank with 165,000 health, this caps at 16,500 attack power. In the new version, when a tank takes that 20,000 damage, he or she will gain one-third of the damage of the attack as attack power immediately, or 6,600 AP. This is more than six times as much attack power gained as in the current model. Vengeance will otherwise work the way it does now. These two things combined by themselves mean that, except in cases where the DPS simply blows all their cooldowns immediately upon seeing the trash coming or as soon as they see the boss while the tank is sitting down to eat, threat will be almost trivial for a tank to gain and maintain. In addition to this revelation (which we are already starting to play with right now, as I experienced in a recent pickup Zul'Gurub instance), Ghostcrawler talks about how tanking will be redesigned to remain active with this new design philosophy. This is really groundbreaking stuff, and it means that patch 4.3 will see the complete dismantling of the legacy of vanilla WoW tanking design. Once, gaining and keeping threat was the most important role of the tank, more important even that survival, and many endgame tanks were warriors 31/5/15 specced into Defiance in the protection tree to ensure threat. These changes can be seen as driving a final nail into that kind of tanking's coffin.
Shifting Perspectives: The druid personality test
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. This Tuesday, we are impressed by the scientific rigor of human interest publications. So I was in line at the grocery store the other day when the array of magazines at the checkout stand caught my eye. Useless People Weekly was running a quiz that promised to tell you things you already knew about yourself if you would consent to answer several questions and tally the results. "Huh," said I. "What a marvelously scientific approach." But it gave me, as they say, ideas. If you've never played a druid before, are you interested in knowing which spec best suits your personality? If you play a druid, are you interested in being told things you already know about yourself?
Shifting Perspectives: Guide to patch 4.2 for bear and tree druids
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. This Tuesday, we've returned from the Angry Dome. Well, after pissing off Blizzard for the millionth week in a row, today we're going to turn our attention to slightly less explosive concerns. By the way, "Tank Q&A sucks" is a top search phrase for last week's Shifting. Just thought I'd mention. As long as we're on the subject of the developer Q&As, I might as well make an uncomfortable segue to observing that Blizzard's now taking queries for the Q&A on healers. Go ask questions! Personally I am very interested in hearing if they're going to update Tree of Life form, or make Innervate a baseline ability rather than the 31-point talent in the restoration tree. Ha ha! I kid because I love. On the off chance that patch 4.2 hits today (which it probably won't, but eh), this is a quick and dirty guide to the patch notes that'll concern you if you play a bear or tree druid. If the patch hits next week, we'll keep ourselves occupied making daisy chains or something. Or, if the healer Q&A gets published sooner than expected, I'll write another enraged diatribe for everyone to enjoy.
Ask the Devs Round 9 mitigates your tanking questions
Ask the Devs is back for Round 9, which deals with the most awesome role in WoW ever -- tanking. Of course, coming from a tank, that might be a bit biased -- but deal with it, healers and DPSers. I've got creatures to keep from punching you in your squishy little faces. Of note this time around is Blizzard's tough time dealing with tanks wanting threat stats (hit and expertise) and the current struggle with making it work. Currently, in cutting-edge content, threat stats are pretty good for initial aggro, but over time, Vengeance does its job admirably and keeps bosses on tanks with relative ease. I think that design decision is hitting the sweet spot, but it begs the question of why even have the threat stats in the first place? Blizzard also discussed the mastery bonuses for each tank. The devs feel that death knights and druids are doing pretty well, all things considered, and that paladins and warriors have a similar problem in "capping" mastery, but that paladins are more susceptible to problems. There is still the sentiment in the community that Blizzard needs to add its own visual threat meters or some type of aggro status, but there is a reluctance on Blizzard's part to clutter up its own default UI -- understandable, but this may potentially be a part of Blizzard's forthcoming (but not discussed) "how to tank" solution. Buried in this discussion, however, was a little tidbit about patch 4.3. Blizzard states that the design for the patch 4.2 legendary, Dragonwrath, has wide appeal to a number of staff-wielding ranged DPS classes. However, it then mentions the "patch 4.3 legendary" and its more narrow appeal. Will we be seeing a tanking legendary in the near future, or potentially another healer item? We do know for sure that it will not be as widespread, class-wise, as Dragonwrath, so we can only sit back and assume. What is interesting, though, is that patch 4.3 also looks to be a raid tier and not a patch 4.1-style dungeon content update. Could patch 4.3 be bringing us the War of the Ancients raid that we have been eagerly anticipating, especially with the return of Nozdormu and his crazy time antics? Only time (heh) will tell. Also, don't expect a new tanking class any time soon. Hit the jump for the full question and answer session.
Blizzard responds to feral druid Savage Defense concerns
Savage Defense, the tanking feral druid's absorption mechanic, is undergoing some changes in patch 4.1 to ramp up its effectiveness to be on par with the mitigation mechanics of other tanks. Forum blue Daxxarri responded to one player's concern that the new implementation of Savage Defense isn't working out so hot. The response discusses client latency, the appearance of shields working or not, and how the combat log displays certain types of information.
Shifting Perspectives: A history of feral weapons
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. This week, we visit a now-vanished world. Once upon a time, feral druids had their own specialized set of weapons. This was very good, because it meant that you weren't rolling against half the raid when an upgrade dropped. This was also very bad, because it meant that 98% of the game's weapons were completely useless for us. This was before the dark times. Before gear consolidation. Before every two-bit jackass with a hard-on for agility thought himself entitled to the armory of the game's noblest class. They were elegant weapons for a more civilized age.
Shifting Perspectives: Amazing addons for feral cat DPS
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat , bear , restoration and balance druids. Welcome to our weekly feral cat edition, brought to you by Chase Hasbrouck, aka Alaron of The Fluid Druid blog. Let the face clawing begin! Over the last few weeks, we've covered how to properly gear your cat for raiding in a Cataclysmic world. Unfortunately, all the gear in the world won't help you if you can't establish a good rotation. Today's column looks at some addons that will help you maximize your performance. Custom buff/debuff trackers Let's face it: The default UI is pretty horrible for tracking buffs and debuffs. The interface has vastly improved over time, but it still uses an icon-based scheme, and it appears in the top corner of your display, drawing your attention away from the action. As the feral rotation is very dependent on maintaining a self-buff and enemy debuffs, having a good way to track this information is important.
Shifting Perspectives: Gearing your feral cat for raiding, part 3
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat , bear, restoration and balance druids. Welcome to our weekly feral cat edition, brought to you by Chase Hasbrouck, aka Alaron of The Fluid Druid blog. Let the face clawing begin! In this final installment to our feral cat gearing series, let's take a look at augmentation. No, not that kind of augmentation, silly -- the ones that make your character better at laying down the smack, DPS-wise. A word to the thrifty: A character with no enchants versus a character with full enchants loses about 10% DPS potential. If you don't use consumables, that knocks off another 10%. A 10-20% shortfall is certainly significant but not critical. I wouldn't worry about enchanting gear for tackling solo content or normal-mode dungeons. Once you get into heroic dungeons and raids, though, you're doing your fellow group or raidmates a disservice by not putting forth the best effort possible, and that effort includes fully maximizing your potential.
Shifting Perspectives: Gearing your feral cat for raiding, part 2
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat , bear , restoration and balance druids. Welcome to our weekly feral cat edition, brought to you by Chase Hasbrouck, aka Alaron of The Fluid Druid blog. Let the face clawing begin! In this continuation of my previous article, I'll look specifically at the items that drop from the various tier 11 raids. Your first priority is getting two pieces of tier 11 gear, as the two-piece set bonus is a nice DPS increase. The four-piece set bonus isn't quite as good and complicates your rotation a bit, but it's still better than just stacking off-set pieces. For normal mode gear, your best off-set slot is the head, specifically, Tsanga's; for heroic modes, the best off-set slot is shoulders. I won't be including any epic PvP items here, with a couple of exceptions. With the patch nerf to the four-piece PvP bonus, wearing PvP gear is generally suboptimal. An epic PvP item is usually roughly equal to a rare PvE item. I'm also not listing the few 379 items; chances are good that if you can beat Sinestra, you probably don't need to use a gear list for help. Finally, the items from Throne of the Four Winds are randomly enchanted, with four possible combinations: Stormblast (crit/hit), Windflurry (crit/haste), Windstorm (crit/mastery), and Zephyr (haste/mastery). This makes them tough to rate. Your best choices are the pieces with mastery, but any epic will be better than a rare.
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.
Cataclysm tanking changes expanded
If you read Fox's post yesterday, well, I hope you braced yourself for more changes. Because here they are. When the devs said more specifics were coming soon, they were not kidding us. Also, Fox is mean to tanks, but he's a DPS player; we're used to their silly little ways. Anyway, let's take a look at the newly announced changes, shall we? Zarhym - Re: Upcoming Tanking Changes Here are a few additional changes we are making which will be applied in patch 4.0.3a: Guardian of Ancient Kings -- Damage reduction changed from 60% to 50%. Cooldown still 2 minutes (talented). Duration still 12 seconds. Icebound Fortitude -- Damage reduction changed from 30% to 20% (or 60% to 50% talented). Cooldown still 2 minutes. Duration still 12 seconds. Shield Wall -- Damage reduction changed from 40% to 50%. Cooldown still 2 minutes (talented). Duration still 12 seconds. Glyph of Shield Wall -- Now buffs damage reduction by 10% (to 60%), but only adds 1 minute of cooldown. Survival Instincts -- Damage reduction changed from 60% to 50%. Cooldown reduced from 5 minutes to 2 minutes. Duration still 12 seconds. Bear Form -- Stamina bonus lowered from 20% to 10% and Heart of the Wild health bonus from 10% to 6%. Bear health should be close to plate tank health with this change. Vigilance -- No longer reduces damage by 3%, but will still reset Taunt cooldown and provide Vengeance for the warrior. source In addition to these changes, there was much expounding on the tanking design philosophy, which we will cover after that jump I hear so much about. Being a tank (and thus kind of slow mentally, according to Fox ... man, see if anyone taunts for him in Cataclysm dungeons), I need to go over these things in detail.
Cataclysm Beta: Feral druid specialization and talents
Cataclysm information is currently all the rage in the World of Warcraft community, where it seems as though players certainly can't get enough. Who can blame them, though? Just recently, Blizzard announced that it was hacking all of the talent trees down to 31 points, similar to their state when WoW was first released, and that players would now choose a talent tree to specialize in upon hitting level 10. It's a massive change to the game that's come just after Blizzard released the new talent trees that had previously held 51 points. Without a doubt, this is exciting stuff, people. Normally, I would say that feral isn't my cup of tea, but I must admit that how Blizzard intended to pull off the seemingly impossible has me more than a little intrigued. Feral is perhaps the most unique talent tree in the entire game as it currently stands -- or at least, it will be now that death knights are having their tanking tree shifted to blood, where it's the only tree that is capable of having two separate specs for two wildly different purposes. To make the tree diverse enough within the limited confines of 41 talent points (the total number of talent points that a level 85 player will have) is a serious task -- more so when you add in attempting to create non-mandatory talents that offer a player, say, utility instead of a raw damage or mitigation increases. Things are certainly going to get interesting for feral druids as beta progresses, and I'm surprisingly excited to see how it all pans out. With this latest beta push, though, Blizzard finally released the initial preview of the new specialization system and a chance to look over the new 31-point talent trees. Before you get too thrilled about this bit of news, let me be the first to tell you that the druid class as a whole is probably one of the least developed talent trees and specializations at this point. Blizzard has already openly stated this within the beta patch notes; we aren't the only class in such a state, but we're certainly pretty bad at this point. Don't be alarmed if things seem excessively sloppy at the moment.
