Feral druid tanking II: tanking skills I

Last time, we looked at some basic tanking concepts, basic numbers, the attributes, spec and stats important to feral druids who choose to tank.

As promised, this blog entry is going to cover some of the abilities that beartanks have and how to use them most effectively in tanking situations. First, lets take a look at the bread-and-butter abilities that come with bear form:

Maul: As the tooltip suggests, this is a next strike ability, much like a warrior's heroic strike. What does this mean to a beartank? Well, two things: first of all, it will generate a lot of threat. A LOT more than its damage would indicate. Remember that bear form grants an inherent 30% increase in threat and, if you are spec'd for it, Feral Instinct will provide an additional 15% for a total of 45% increase in threat. Over and above that, each time Maul lands on a target, a flat 322 threat is applied to that target's threat table, relative to the beartank (threat table is the list in the head of the mob, telling it whom to attack. If a melee attacker passes 110% of the current target's threat the mob will switch to that attacker. If a ranged combatant (healer or ranged dps) passes 130%, the mob will move to them; so you can see, it is advantageous to be at a certain range from the mobs). The second thing to remember about Maul is that it costs more rage than its tooltip would indicate. As a next strike ability, it takes the place of your normal swing (sometimes called "white damage", indicating the color of the scrolling combat text on the screen) and in doing so prevents that swing from generating any rage. In high damage situations (raid bosses, for example) this is fine, since you will be generating a lot of rage from being hit. But you have to take 3 points of damage to generate as much rage as you would by dealing a single point of damage, so it is much less efficient. In other situations (e.g. single elite mobs or a couple of non-elites), the mitigation of a beartank may be so high that you cannot generate enough rage to use enough abilities to keep up enough threat on the mobs you are tanking and so you NEED the white damage to generate more rage. While using Maul depends on the situation you are in at any given time, it remains one of my favorite bear abilities.

Swipe: is what differentiates a druid from a warrior when tanking multiple targets. There are several things to remember about this ability. First of all, it doesn't do a whole lot of damage. Even though it is spammable (i.e. it doesn't have a cooldown other than the global cooldown, so it can be used over and over again in rapid succession) it costs a fair bit of rage and it won't generate enough threat by itself to hold a target that is taking damage from sources other than you. Unlike Maul and it's warrior somewhat-equivalent, Cleave, it is an instant ability (meaning its effects happen as soon as it is used), not a next strike ability. Also unlike Maul, Swipe does not have any inherent increase to the threat it generates (other than the usual 30% or 45%, depending on talents, that bear form applies to all damage done). However, its damage DOES scale with attack power, meaning the more AP a bear has the higher the damage swipe will do, though overall damage is still quite a bit lower than white damage (at level 70, it adds 7% of the bear's AP to damage). The other thing to remember about Swipe is that it is indiscriminate about whom it hits. If you use it while close enough and facing towards a crowd controlled (CC'd) mob (sheep, shackle, sap, freezing trap, etc.), swipe will strike that target and break whatever CC kept it out of combat. This will inevitably make the person who applied the CC yell at you; and with good reason. The best way to use Swipe is to manuever the group you are tanking backwards, making sure you are out of range of CC'd mobs before using it. How do you hold on to the mobs while you are doing that, you say? That is a very good question and one I will go into later on in this article.

Mangle: the flagship of feral druid abilities. Mangle is the reason a beartank needs rage. Although it starts off somewhat expensive at 20 rage, Ferocity, a staple in any feral druid build, reduces that cost to 15, a much more manageable figure. In addition to the considerable immediate damage that it does, mangle also provides three other advantages: first, like Maul, it has a flat threat modifier (the exact amount is somewhat nebulous right now, but it is in the neighborhood of 300-400 just like Maul). Second, it applies a debuff to the mob, that increases bleed damage by 30%. This applies to ALL bleeds on the target, whether caused by you or someone else. So if there is a rogue or a second feral druid in the group, the bleed damage they cause will be augmented by the mangle debuff. Thirdly, it is an instant attack so it can be used in between white damage. Mangle is the beartank's primary threat tool and should be used whenever possible, i.e. whenever its 6 second cooldown allows.

This is turning into a huge post, so I am going to break it up. We'll cover Lacerate, Faerie Fire, Demoralizing roar, Challenging roar, Growl and Enrage next time. I'll also go over some techniques that can be used in tanking and practicing. Peace out...

Feral druid tanking

I am not currently a feral druid, but I levelled Elk as feral (60-70) and subsequently built a reputation as a half-way decent tank and pretty good cat DPSer. This blog article is going to contain some of my thoughts concerning the strengths and weaknesses of the feral druid, a single feral talent build that will serve both a cat and bear druid, some discussion of the attributes and stats most important to ferals; so be prepared for a relatively lengthy read.

Feral druids are comfortable in cat form or (dire) bear form. The former, acquired at level 20, will be the major DPS form the druid will find himself in while levelling all the way until he (or she) gets to the level cap. It has an incredibly fast attack speed, 1.0 sec, faster than any weapon available in game, and is limited only by the regeneration speed of his energy (20 energy every 2 seconds), much like a rogue. Bear and dire bear forms increase the armor and stamina (and hence the health) of the druid by a fixed percentage modifier. One thing not reflected in the tooltip is a 30% inherent increase in the threat generated by the bear's attacks (this means that every 100 points of damage a bear does will be perceived as 130 by mobs). These changes make the bear a very capable tank.

Threat is a very important concept to understand as a tank (or as a DPSer or healer, for that matter). Any action taken by any character in game generates threat. How much threat a character has determines whether or not a mob will attack him. A tank's job is to build threat on one or more mobs, so that they will continue attacking him while ignoring the rest of the members of his group. There are excellent write-ups on the subject elsewhere on the web (Wowwiki), so I won't go into it any more than I already have.

Tank tools are split into two categories: threat and mitigation. We have already discussed a bit about what threat is. Mitigation is equally (if not more) important to the tank. The more damage you mitigate, the less damage you take and the easier it is for your healer to keep you alive. Conversely, as you take less damage, you generate less rage and so are unable to generate as much threat since most abilities that build threat use up rage. So it's a delicate balance. When compared to warriors, beartanks have some advantages and disadvantages. Bears have higher armor and more health than equivalently geared warriors, but the warriors can parry and block so they have slightly higher overall mitigation. This, of course, is a gross oversimplification, and I may go into it in more depth in the future, but is enough for this current project.

Concepts a beartank should become comfortable with include threat and mitigation, discussed above, but one should also be aware of the numbers that feed into those concepts: attack power and crit % for threat and armor, defense/resilience and dodge for mitigation. Balancing these numbers on the character info pane is a delicate process. Here are how the numbers stack up:

2.36 defense rating = 1 defense

25 defense = -1% chance to be crit by level 70 opponent,

25 defense = +1% dodge

39.4 resilience = -1% chance to be crit by level 70 opponent,

39.4 resilience = -2% damage from crits

39.4 resilience = -1% damage from DoTs

1 agility = 2 armor

14.7 agility = 1% dodge

1 agility = 0.1% chance to crit

1 strength = 2 attack power

14 attack power = 1 dps

So what are good numbers to shoot for? 11,000-13,000 health unbuffed is not an unreasonable starting point. 24-26,000 armor is also relatively easily doable. The only magic number for a feral druid is, in my opinion, the most important one: 415 defense. Mark that one down. 415 defense. At that point, in conjunction with the talent "Survival of the Fittest", a druid tank becomes uncrittable. And because beartanks can neither block nor parry, being uncrittable becomes the single most important milestone for a newly minted 70 beartank.

The typical talent spec for beartanks is a 0/47/14. This contains all the talents necessary to tank well and many that cross over to make cat form a powerful dpser. Some time in the future, we'll talk about how to use all the tools at the disposal of the bear to grab and hold aggro.