Ulduar = Fun

Tonight group 2 ulduar continued from tuesday night, and it was very a successful run. We went in and killed Ignus since we had skipped him on tuesday, not sure why though. After downing him I finally got the achievement for killing Ignus, Razorscale and Leviathan. Moving on we went into Hodirs room, this was the first time that i’d been in there so it was all new to me. After a very brief explanation of the fight we move in and free the mage from his flash freeze then proceed to free the others. During the explanation of the snow falling down on circles ability, sorry I don’t remember what it’s called, nobody really mentioned how fast they fall. I was hit by a few of them not realizing that there wasn’t a very big window of GTFO time. When he started casting the flash freeze I ran as fast as possible to get to the mound of snow, sadly the ice got me first . Understandably the first attempt was pretty choppy since we had a few new people to the fight, myself included, but we regrouped and downed him the second time.

Moving on to Freya. Now just to get this out of the way, last week when group 2 was formed for one of the first times I wasn’t home when it started, I was too busy playing drinking games with some friends of mine. When I came home, pretty drunk, I went to my computer and logged on. About 30 minutes after logging in one of the people in group 2 has to leave so they invite me in. Getting summoned and walking into the trash for freya being cleared I’m told that my hibernate ability is going to be needed. What I didn’t know is that it was going to be needed, as in not needed right this very second. So I put the dragon to sleep, not noticing that we had a tank AFK and a few other people not paying attention, needless to say we wiped. After we got all that stuff figured out and everyone was done yelling at me, we continued on to kill 2 of the three elders and start clearing to the last one. At this point the alcohol is starting to wear off and drowsiness is setting in. We pull the second to last trash pack before the last elder, kill it, and I alt+f4 close vent and head to bed. Without telling anyone. /embarrassed. I’ll never live this down, my guildmates still mock me. Anyways back to tonight’s run.

We clear trash and kill the Elders. Another brief fight explanation goes by, and healing assignments and targets get called out. I get the snaplasher. Nobody told me that this thing could 2 shot me, two hits later and there’s a dead cat on the ground. . The group overall dies from the exploding little flowers of death. At least that’s what I call them. Another quick regroup and some target switching comes by. Now I’m on the stormlasher. Much easier to handle. For the record Freya is, in my opinion, one of the most chaotic fights I’ve seen. So many waves of adds, a giant tree that you have to kill, and a big giant. Other than the experience and knowledge of how-to, this fight sucked but we still got her down. Master looter goes to the box to start handing out loot and badges. He links the gear, and with a happy grin on my face my roll for tier 8 gloves goes into chat “Revix rolls 100 (1-100)” to nobodies surprise, I was very happy.

Mimiron’s hallway is by far my favorite area of Ulduar so far. All the mechanical surroundings just look really cool. The trash is a challenge as well, especially those spider things. Thankfully once you get one to a certain amount of health, the driver falls out dead and you can ride them. Let’s give Revix a robot tank that shoots flames! These were a lot of fun to ride around in and shoot things with, sadly they didn’t last forever. None of our healers healed any of them up so we lost them pretty quick. After the trash pulls, we get to the tram. The tram ride in ulduar is nothing like stormwind to ironforge it’s way cooler. Somebody had a question of whether or not you could fall off the sides of it, might have been me, yea it was me. I jumped and died. Laughter was heard over vent along with people calling me dumb. Tram ride #2 comes and goes and a scene so awesome a guildmate described it as something out of final fantasy 7. I have to admit, Mimirons room does look a lot like the Midgard city from ff7. Looking down the stairs to what seems like a bunch of bombs running back and forth I walk down knowing that it’s frogger part 2. My friend Topher steps on a bomb, it explodes and doesn’t touch him, but it kills me. After getting ressed back up I decide to have some fun with the bombs. So what if there was a res timer, it was awesome. Group 2 put in a few attempts on mimiron and almost made it to phase 2, I think we got phase 1 to 15% or so. I love ulduar, it’s a great instance and a very welcome challenge. Makes the game seem like it’s not as much of a cakewalk as BC and most of WotLK made it look like.

I’ll leave you with this, I really did have some fun with the bombs.

Thoughts on upcoming 3.2

With the release of the 3.2 patch notes comes a feeling of sadness. Now I knew that feral druids were over powered, but it’s a pretty hard class to play and the rotation takes a lot of effort to keep up with. Blizzard has seen fit to lower the amount of damage that ALL of the feral dps attacks by a certain percentage, each ability lowered by a different amount. With every nerf comes more challenges though, I’ll just have to push through it and keep the rotation mastered so that my dps doesn’t drop to the ground. Not all the changes in 3.2 are bad though, some of the new stuff coming in is pretty good. One of them being the new druid bear and cat form designs. I personally will be a white cat, though I’m sure that I’ll be bouncing between them every so often.

Lots of people seem to be pretty bummed out with the way the new badge system is going to work. No more valorous or heroism badges will drop, only conquest and triumph. Personally it doesn’t really bother me all that much, I think the hardcore raiders will be bothered the most, they’ll see all the casual people running around with conquest badge gear and some of the tier 8 you can buy with it. Some people claim that it makes it too easy to get gear and there isn’t much of a challenge to go along with it since you’ll be getting conquest badges out of heroic 5-mans. In my opinion, the game hasn’t really been hard since BC was released, if you look back at the raids in pre BC, you’ll notice that the debuffs are devastating. Remember shadow flame out of BWL? Or any of the curses from the MC bosses? those were ridiculous at level 60, and they’re still not all that fun now.

Pvp. Hopefully some of the class changes (pally and DK mainly) will help balance it all a little bit, part of me is getting tired of hearing about ret pally this or DK that. Some day when the gear comes along my resto dual spec will be able to see some action in pvp. The new battleground looks really cool, kinda like a mix between wintergrasp and AV. One thing that is interesting when it comes to pvp in 3.2 is the ability to get experience. Only being able to get it from doing objective work, capping a flag or something of the sort, seems pretty cool. With the option to not get xp, twinks will still be able to go out and fight in their desired brackets and not getting any of the xp, although I think the requirement to spend gold on the option is kinda dumb.

The new profession changes are pretty cool, my favorite is the Blacksmithing changes. Nothing. It was pretty funny to see that on the list. Now that potions will be able to stack to 20 instead of 5 it’ll conserve bag space, that’s always a good thing. Engineering is getting a really nice buff to most of it’s enchants as well and it’s about time the mote extractor can track motes. Seemed pretty lame that it couldn’t in the first place. Most of the professions are just getting stats buffed such as enchanters ring enchants and the leatherworking fur linings.

After I read all the notes, the only major thing that was exciting to me were the new druid forms and the new pets. Yea pets. I enjoy collecting them, so far there are 81 of them in my collection. I’m hoping for a 100 pet achievement some day that gives an awesome pet, I wasn’t all that impressed with the deer pet, it doesn’t really do anything. At least the skunk chased a couple other cats around.

A New Milestone for Me

Tonight BoS did 2 Ulduar groups, I am part of the second group since it runs after work. The raid as a whole was very good, a couple wipes here and there due to miscommunication, but still very smooth. We down Flame Leviathan with ease and Razorscale doesn’t put up much of a fight either. Then comes XT. Now I’m usually not one to brag about doing something amazing, well maybe a little, but a couple other people in the group I was in are some of our top dpsers. After have a near perfect rotation and amazingly often omen procs the boss dies. I look at the damage meters and not only am I number 1, but I’m number 1 by a long shot. I did a total of 24% of the overall damage and had 6.4k dps.

I hope that the picture doesn’t come up all fuzzy or anything, but here’s a screenshot of the damage report.

DPS Rotation

Before I get started on the feral rotation, I’d like to talk about the rotation that was used during BC. It was a very simple rotation that really didn’t require much attention to detail. The rotation used in BC is as follows:

Mangle > Shred to 5 combo points > Rip

The only thing necessary was keep the mangle and rip debuffs on the target and maintaining feral faerie fire to lower the targets armor. Pretty easy right?

When Wrath came out, things got a bit more intricate. The new rotation, that I find to be very fun, requires a handful of effects to be active at all times. Now there are many ways that this rotation can be started,  but I use the following to keep my dps up:

Mangle > Savage Roar > Rake > Shred to 5 combo points > Rip > Shred back to 5 Combo Points > Savage Roar

Just a little more complex I think. The goal for t his rotation to work is to maintain the following debuffs: mangle, rake, and rip. Faerie Fire isn’t as troublesome anymore now that they’ve increased it’s time to 5 minutes from 45 seconds. After you have a 5 point rip and a 5 point savage roar up, shred until low on energy, then pop Tiger’s Fury and hit berserk. While the Tiger’s Fury buff is up the attacks will be doing a little more damage, but the real joy from this is the energy that comes from it. That tied with berserk should refill the energy bar by a good amount and now the attacks will cost half the normal amount of energy. During the Berserk duration I like to use shred until the buff goes away and refresh rake whenever necessary.

Depending on the Glyphs used, this rotation is fairly easy to perform, I personally use Shred, Rip and Mangle for my major glyphs.

• Shred – Every time you use shred while Rip is active on the target, it adds another 2 seconds to the duration remaining. This will occur up to 3 times, 6 seconds extra.
• Rip – Increases the base time of the Rip debuff by 4 seconds. This along with the shred glyph work very well together.
• Mangle – Increases the duration of the Mangle debuff by 6 seconds.

Feral DPS Spec

Now before I begin with this I just want to throw this out there. I’m not one of those players that’s super hardcore or has to have/be the best at everything. WoW to me is a way to play with friends and have good times messing around. In the World of Warcraft, I play a feral dps druid. I’m very good at what I do, but I’m not claiming to be the  best. Here’s a link to my character:

Revix

I’m in the guild  Bucklers of Swash, which is basically a second family for me. Lots of good memories have come from the people in this guild. Also if anyone ever reads the blog Slice and Dice, it’s written by my good friend and guild leader Samuel Tempus.

The spec I use is a raiding spec that’s focused on cat dps. Some of the talents aren’t up to date as some of the points have been moved around a bit to help out the raiding aspect. I’ll break down some of the talents and what not and why I use them. This spec isn’t all that uncommon, so here we go.

— Resto Tree —

2 points in Imp MoTW.

This helps out the Party/Raid in case there isn’t a Tree in the raid, not to mention the increased stats are nice when playing solo.

3 points into Furor.

This talent to me is just a stepping stone to get to the more useful feral talents in this tree. Not to mention having 60 energy when you go into cat form is nice

5 points into Naturalist.

10% more damage from physical attacks. Need I say more.

3 points into Natural Shapeshifter

Being feral leaves you with little mana, having reduced mana costs on your different forms is helpful if you have to shift into and out of forms to cast heals or OT or whatever.

1 point in Omen of Clarity

This talent is extremely helpful for cats, with a base attack speed of 1 second, this will proc very often and make your next attack/spell free of charge. On a side note, it also procs when landing from flight paths, don’t ask me why.

2 points in Master Shapeshifter

Increases different stats depending on what form you’re in.

• Bear – Increases Damage done by 4% — useful for threat gain while tanking or off tanking
• Cat – Increases Crit chance by 4% — this is what I use this talent for, since i’m mainly in cat form. Having the increased crit chance is important for a few of my feral talents, but i’ll get to those later.
• Moonkin – Spell damage increased by 4% — I don’t play moonkin at all but just like bear form, increased damage is never a bad thing.
• Tree – Healing increased by 4% — I don’t play tree either, but more healing is more people alive.

That does it for the resto tree. Next I’ll move on to my feral tree and explain why I like the talents I chose.

— Feral Tree —

5 points into Ferocity

Reducing Energy/Rage cost by 5 on your Maul,Swipe, Claw, Rake and Mangle. Since I use most of these abilities very often, this is a must have talent.

3 points into Feral Instinct

This talent is very good for both bear and cat form. the increased damge to swipe will help threat gain on multiple targets in bear form. Now that they’ve added a swipe to cat form, this talent gives feral dps an aoe to use on trash pulls. And boy is it effective.

2 points into Savage Fury

Yet another increase damage talent that useful for tanking and dpsing. You can never have enough damage.

2 points into  Feral Swiftness

Not really a talent to help damage so much as to help mobility and survivability. Increased movement speed will help you run away from boss mechanics (enfeeble for example) and the increase to dodge is always a plus.

3 points into Sharpened Claws

6% more crit chance and opens up 2 more talents.

2 points into Shredding Attacks

Shred is one of your best attacks in cat form. This talent reduces the energy cost for that ability. You’ll be using this attack for building combo points and also adding time on your Rip if you’ve got the glyph for it. The rage reduction for lacerate is good for tanking/off tanking is a nice added bonus.

3 points into Predatory Strikes

This talent is useful for the attack power increase and it unlocks one of the best talents in this tree.

2 points into Primal Fury

Again, this talent is useful for both tanking and dpsing. 100% chance to gain 5 rage or an extra combo point on a critical hit.

2 points into Primal Precision

Maxing this talent out gives you 10 expertise, which is helpful to make sure your attacks hit their mark.

1 point into Feral Charge

Feral charge is nice to have mainly for bear form. I have this talent mainly to get to the action fast or if I need to be an emergency tank

2 points into Nurturing Instinct

I got this talent mainly to help out the healers since it increases the healing done to me by 20%. It’s also nice if you have to pop an emergency heal on yourself or someone else since it increases your healing by 70% of your agility.

5 points into Heart of the Wild

For an overall talent, this is in my opinion the best one in the tree. Increased Intellect will help out your shapeshifting and emergency heals. Increased Stamina in bear form is very nice for tanking, increased attack power is great for cat dps.

3 points into Survival of the Fittest

This, like heart of the wild, is another one of the must haves in the tree. If you’re a tanking sort of druid you are automatically uncrittable and you have an increase to your armor contribution from gear by 33%. Increases attributes by 6% is great no matter which feral form you’re using.

1 point into Leader of the Pack

This talent gives you and all your  melee raid/party members within 45  yards an increased crit chance by 5%, who doesn’t like having more crit.

2 points into Imp Leader of the Pack

As an added bonus to your crit aura, any melee party/raid member with the buff heals 4% of their total health when they crit. You also receive 8% of your total mana when you benefit from this heal. Now the heal may only  be able to occur once every 6 seconds,  but it’s better than not having a little bit of a boost every 6 seconds now isn’t it?

3 points into King of the Jungle

This is a useful talent for both cat and bear form. The benefit for bear form is increased damage while the Enrage effect is active, so not only are you getting rage from the effect you’re also doing more damage. In cat form this talent will restore 60 energy when you use Tiger’s Fury.

1 point into Mangle

This is a very key talent to have, it gives you an ability that puts a debuff on your target making them take additional damage from bleed effects and your shred attack. keeping this debuff active is a must at all times.

3 points into Imp Mangle

Reduces energy cost of your mangle by 6 in cat form, and reduces the cooldown by 1.5 seconds in bear form. Having this talent will help you keep the effect on your target.

5 points into Rend and Tear

Yet another talent that is great for both bear and cat form. This talent will increase damage on bleeding targets from your Maul and Shred attacks. Shred is the most important attack in the dps rotation, why not inrease it’s damage? also adds a 25% crit chance for Ferocious Bite, I personally don’t use this attack unless I’m running around solo, but it’s still a nice added bonus.

1 point into Primal Gore

Primal Gore will give your Rip and Lacerate bleed effects a chance to crit. I’ve had my Rip bleeds crit just under 7k, this talent serves it’s purpose very well.

1 point into Berserk

The final talent in the feral tree is a great talent indeed. When berserk is activated in bear form, your mangle ability will hit up to 3 targets and have no cooldown. For cat form it reduces the energy cost of all your abilities by 50%. This tied with all the damage buffs to your shred ability will make spamming shred very fun.

If you have any comments or questions about the spec I use please feel free to post them, I’d like to hear what you have to say about it.