Take That Feral Druids

These are some of the new patch notes that are coming with 3.2, we already knew about the changes to our forms with the whole Bedazzled cat, but I figured that while they were at it, they are gonig to take a nerf bat to feral druids to make them pay for doing DPS on fights where the player is simply good and following their rotation. And even though we were technically 8th or so in the actual DPS meters according to most Boss tracking meters [thanks to movement, etc] to many of your fellow DPS was complaining that on fights like XT-002 where we can stand still and get almost our entire rotation out [assuming no light or gravity bombs] and put out close to 6-7k DPS if they are really pushing it. Because of this Blizzard has made it know that almost every single cat ability is being scaled back in damage

Here are the full patch notes:

* Flight Form: Can now be learned at level 60. Flight speed increased to 150%.
* Innervate: Duration reduced to 10 seconds, and cooldown reduced to 3 minutes. This means each use of Innervate will give half as much mana as before, but it will be available twice as often.
* Lifebloom: The final heal that occurs when this spell blooms has been reduced by 20% on the base and on the spell power coefficient.
* Mangle: Ranks 4 and 5 base points reduced by about 11%. Scaling from attack power unchanged.
* Rake: Ranks 6 and 7 base points on initial and periodic damage reduced by about 7%. Scaling from attack power unchanged.
* Rip: Ranks 8 and 9 base points and points per combo point reduced by about 6%. Scaling from attack power unchanged.
* Savage Defense: The animation for gaining this buff will no longer make the bear stand upright
* Shred: Ranks 8 and 9 base points reduced by about 10%. Scaling from attack power unchanged.
* Swipe (Cat): Percent of weapon damage done reduced from 260% to 250%.
* Travel Form: Can now be learned at level 16.
* Talents
o Balance
+ Balance of Power: Now reduces all spell damage taken by 3/6%, rather than reducing the chance to be hit by spells by 2/4%.
+ Eclipse: The Starfire and Wrath buffs from this talent are now on separate 30 second. cooldowns. In addition, it is not possible to have both buffs active simultaneously.
+ Owlkin Frenzy: Now also restores 2% base mana every 2 seconds for the duration (10 seconds) in addition to its current effects.
o Restoration
+ Empowered Touch: Now also increases the amount of bonus healing effects for Nourish by 10/20%.
+ Improved Barkskin: No longer provides dispel resistance to all effects on the druid, but now reduces the chance your Barkskin is dispelled by an additional 35/70%.

As a druid, that is just a bit annoying, you'll also notice that Barksin is no longer keeping us from getting dispelled, apparenlty the Arena QQ was so much with regards to us staying alive [not doing any damage mind you, like ever other healing class can]. I think in that regard that blizzard is afraid of another Arena season 2, where Restoration druids who spec'd deep into balance were simply eating everyone else alive.

So lets try to break down each change.

Flight Form Now at 60: We no longer have a two level advantage on flying that we used to, but Blizzard has reduced all flying to 60. This is perhaps to admit that they will never see any more new players and that they have finally hit the cap for incoming revenue, so its just best to appease those who love their alts, so they can fly the instant that they make it through the dark portal. I assume their cost have been reduced as well, given that flight form was simply an ability purchase, I don't think we'll notice any real difference, other than getting through Hellfire and Zangermarsh a little quicker once we hit outlands. Though that does really kind of destroy that quest in Zangermarsh where you are turned into a bird by a local druid to scout out the area.

Travel Form now at 16: Again to appease those who love their alts, and maybe because they took a note or two from Warhammer online, they have lowered the mounts to 20 for the base mount and 40 for epic ground mount respectivly. As such our travel form has taken a leap from level 30 to level 16, [ignoring the fact that Shaman's had their travel form dropped to 20 when level 30 mounts came out]. The only real affect is 1.) we get it at the same time as aquatic form [now without its quest], and the level 19 twink battlegrounds will I'm sure be crying for weeks

Rip, Mangle, Rake, Shred, and Swipe: All having their base damage reduced for the final two ranks. This is that side effect of other DPS QQ'ing because we can top the meters when we get a chance to sit still. Mind you, I haven't seen what they did to rogues, but if they haven't done anything I'm going to be very dissapointed, because lets face it they were way above on any single target meters and fan of knives is much easier to spam than swipe.

Innervate now cut in half in every way: This seems to be a direct result of arena QQ, and disturbing that the mechanic for this spell has changed so dramtically in WoTLK. It is now only going to restore half of what it was but on a shorter timer. So essintially if you were using it, you'll probably want to look into doing it when you have much more stable mana rather than say when you're approcahing 4,000 - 2,000 as the restore will only get you back to say around 10,000-12,000 at best [if I am understanding the new mechanic correctly]. I'll play around with it on fights like Ignis and Patchwork [the only times I can remember using it] though with patchwork that tends to be more based off how bad the tanks avoidance is, and its been a while since I healed for that fight, it may be much less painful now that I'm actually geared.

Lifebloom: Will no longer be blooming for those nice 19,000-20,000 crits and 10,000 easy, apparenlty they didn't want it blooming for that much. I'm going to pretend that there is some sort of reason for this, as in PvE the only time that even matters is if Lifebloom actually blooms when its supposed to. I'm sure again there is a PvP reason for this and the rest of us are going to be made to suffer because 1500 rated Arena teams don't know how to play, and face rolling DK's are finally dropping from their 2200+ ratings. Luckily of all the changes, this will probably effect us the least because lets face it, most of us aren't using lifebloom any more anyway, Blizzard wants us to go Rejuv > Wild Growth > Nourish, and forget the rest of the spells on our bar [save maybe swiftmend and nature's swiftness.

I dare not speak on Boomkin changes, because I don't know enough about the spec to open my mouth. See if I can't wait until the PTR comes out to see how it will be affecting things, though I imagine we will be seeing a drop across the board of Cat DPS.

Getting Reputaion with the Netherwing

Ever since they were introduced into the Burning Crusade, it was pretty much the one thing that I wanted out of a flying mount, and now even with the Proto Drakes in the WoTLK expansion pack, this drake still has more appeal to me in terms of just looking nifty and being something cool to fly around on. That said, given that lynxchan is a relativly new character, which I created back in October just before the 3.0 patch came out, she never really had a chance to get in on the race for the Netherwing when it was still all the rage in Burning Crusade, and my hunter at the time [who was level 70] was so uninteresting to play that I don't think I'd even looked at him since July, I was just to busy goofing around with the Warhammer Online Beta or various alts to try and find a new class to play. I had a druid around level 35 on Gilneas, but I had always wanted to see what it was like to roll around on a PvP server since folks seemed to talk about the difficulty of it all. I guess given that I showed up during 3.0 rather than say the early stages of the game when everyone and their mother wasn't on a different continent or planet it would have been more competitive. Anyway not to drift off into another topic, the reason Lynxchan didn't have Netherwing rep, or really any outlands rep is because by the time she hit 70, WoTLK had just come out [by a 2-3 week time frame I think, because I was in Winterspring when they were getting all the server first].

So I went off after getting all my Northrend Reps to Exalted and decided it was time to go back to outlands and start getting some of those reputations up. Admittedly it's a bit tough, because for 1, I'm still trying to actively raid and get geared for Uld 10 / 25, so that eats a lot of time and gold I could otherwise sink into Outlands reps. But enough complaining, you're hear because you want to learn something useful about getting reputation with the Netherwing, and I'm here to tell you that it really is just a 3 week process, just like it was back in Burning Crusade, and yes you can beat captain Skyshatter without any speed boost. The big thing to remember is that its really just a matter of time, and while the idea of grabbing eggs from everyone else seems nifty, the fact is that there really aren't that many to begin with, and even on my lucky days, at most I can find 5-6 and that is checking the mines, all the cliffs, and every nook and cranny of the Dragonmaw bases.

So what you're left with is you and probably [it seems at least] 7 or 8 80's who are all out there chasing after the flying purple dragon. The nifty thing about going back is that thanks to the fact that all the mobs have around 6k health, a good mangle or two to the face should easily take care of them. This makes that 3 man quest once you get to revered all that much easier to deal with, also thanks to being 80, your aggro range is much smaller, so you don't have to worry about the elites that are stomping about the island. As for captain Skyshatter for druids at least I simply put the flight form button on my casting bar as number 1 so that whenever I did get knocked out of the air I could just hit 1 and try to keep up with him. It still took 4-5 tries to get the right pattern down, but its very doable. There's also some other nifty things to pick up while your back in outlands, including the Skyguard who will fork over an assortment of neatherray's once you are exalted with them, as well as a tiny pet.

If that's not enough it should be easy enough [even with a normal DPS feral spec] to bear tank the Underbog so that you can start gathering those flowers for the Sporregar, on normal mode it shouldn't take that long to clear, and I usually seem to find quite enough flowers to make up for my time in there.

And of course, why would we be in Outlands if we weren't Anzu farming. Once you get epic flying, go ahead and take the druid Epic Flight Form quest, its still a lot of fun, and gets you involved with some nifty Emerald Dream lore, and at the very end of it you'll get a chance to summon Anzu. Once that's done the druids kindly add something to your keyring so that you can continue to summon him as you wish. And if you're really up for it [and hadn't already done it] there are a load of quest chains and reputations to get up along the way, including the Caverns of Time, the Violet Eye [some druids are reporting in a Feral Spec that they can solo a good deal of Karahzan].

So once you're done in northrend, if you're bored and haven't already done everything in Outlands, be sure to hit it up, there are some nifty mini pets [like miniwing - http://www.wowhead.com/?item=31760 ] that are very easy to get a hold of for all you pet collectors.

As a nifty kind of side note, every time I fly in to Netherwing Ledge, I loose my Matron Title, and its replaced with Patron, but as soon as I shift to cat form while still on the ledge, the title reverts back. It doesn't do this for Travel, Bird, or Tree form as far as I can tell. Just an interesting thing to note.

Druid's Revolt

Its time to throw off the shackles of oppression, for to long we have been used by raid groups and guilds as nothing more than cannon fodder whose skill far exceeds those around us. And while everyone else is busy eating void zones, we are happily humping their corpses and still doing more DPS or keeping non void zone loving raid members alive.

For this reason, and for the soul fact that druids are by our very nature bored easily its time to throw a riot. Until further notice, I strongly encourage all druids to go on strike.

Why aren't you people Defense Capped?

A friend of mine once asked why it is that people who play wow are often as bad at the game as they are. I often ponder that question and wonder just how it is that people ca do as badly as they do, that somehow they can't tank, or dps, or even heal [and of all the things that people do, the only way you can really fail at the one is if you just sit there and stare blankly at a wall while your party is dieing. Anyway needless to say, you can find these people if you're just willing to step into say a Heroic Instance.

Now I know, I really shouldn't be going into these things, but I love free badges so that I can start to collect my horrible pvp gear [I suck at pvp, I can't help it]. Oh and its also nifty to make 10 a day so I can turn them into a a delicious frozen orb and sell that for 75 gold, or turn that into an icy prism, and sell whatever is inside [it's a lot like those wonder ball adds you see on TV years ago, just sing the tune whenever you make an Icy Prism]. Also for my kitty DPS set, I'm still looking for some gear from Gundrak, Culling of Strath, and Nexus. And from the looks of things, I will see these items about the same time they actually let me DPS for Ulduar 25.

But today's story is about people who think they can tank. Now druids out there, I don't know what it is that spares you from this, but usually when you insist you can tank, you have also bothered to take the tanking talents and I thank you for this, because lets face it, where others lack in gear we can simply make up for in talents. And usually when you suggest you can tank, you understand that you can swipe spam your way through a heroic and I don't pull aggro while I'm healing or dps'ing.

No, instead I'm looking at you Warriors, Death Knights, and Paladins. Less so on the Paladins and more so on the Warriors and Death Knights, especially the ones who are running Prot / [unholy / frost] as their off spec. Listen to me please, because I don't like dieing, and I like being blamed for your death even less so. If you aren't at the minimum of 535 defense rating [As I understand this is across the board], you need to do some normal instances, get some rep, and spend some money on gemming and enchants. But please stop blaming those around you for your failure.

The reason that there is a "Soft Defense Cap" is to give people an idea [and by idea I mean minimum] to shoot for when they are going to be getting beaten in the face by a mob. As you may have noticed that is the actual rating [see diagram 1] Where you see that "400" that needs to be "535" in order to tank a heroic, this scales with I think "540" for Naxx 10 and 25. Now there are also some health requirements and preferably some armor, but most people don't seem to understand the concept of defense so I'd like to focus on that first.

Druids, you have another method of making sure that you can actually tank something with your face, and that comes in the form of Survival of the Fittest. Pictured to your left. Once you have that as a druid, you meet the same 540 defense as the rest of your tanking classes. Now to make up for this, Blizzard thought it would be funny if they instead took things away from us. In recent patches our health has been cut down, as has our armor, and don't you dare stack Stamina as a bear or I will reroll the opposite faction and come to your server and beat your bear face in until you learn. Well that seems a bit extreme, but the point is that you need to learn to tank. Bears have really one thing going for them [dodge], and you dodge chance should be close to 40% once you're gemmed, enchanted, and maybe in a bit of heroic gear. I think I had 42% dodge and 29k armor with 28k health unbuffed. This might be a bit steep to get as a bear not having stepped into heroics, but we can help you out there too

First, make sure to do your Argent Crusade Dailies to, this will get you either the Staff of Feral Furies or the Silvery Sylvan Staff depending on Faction. These come with nifty bear stats and it will make a great weapon to start tanking heroics in. Also be sure to get at least honored with the Sons of Hodir. It doesn't seem like a lot, but their shoulder enchant can really help any druid. If you're not sure how simply follow the guide here to start your chain. It may take a bit, but it will prove handy later.

Even if you aren't an insanely rich druid, you could also use the money from the Argent Crusade Dailies in order to get some Trollwoven gear [or make it yourself if you went leather working]. It provides Expertise, Stam, and Agility which are the stats we're looking for when you want to tank.

Now that we have a shoulder enchant available to us, a staff, a decent belt and a decent pair of shoulders we can start looking at other things [this is all about not jumping in before you are ready]. First go ahead and put a belt slot on that belt [with the eternal belt buckle]. You can really never have enough gem slots. If you aren't insanely rich than simply slap a green +agi gem in there, if you can drop the gold go ahead and put +16 gems in there, by now someone on your server almost has to make them.

This will also give you some money to pick up a Durable Nerubhide Cloak, they go for cheaper [it seems] than their Ice Striker Cousin [I don't know why, they really are better] and they can give starting bears a lot of useful stats including dodge. Also just slap the +22agi enchant Or +16agi if you are penny pinching. The +16 only cost 9 infinite dust and its part of the training that most enchanters get so ask around as infinite dust is usually 35-50ish gold / half stack [10]. You'll notice a lot of this pre bear tanking stuff is really dependent on doing a few dailies, saving up, and spending the money on gear.

Once you've done that, you should be start at least running some heroics [as a tank]. The rest of your gear hopefully consist of some quest blues / greens [There is a quest for Normal Utgarde Pinnacle that drops a nifty helm for druids]. Don't use the Eviscerator stuff, its for the most part PvP centric and won't help you out a lot in an instance. What you can do however is go after the BoE drops from heroics, as they usually sit at a low price in the Auction House. These include things like the "King's Square Bracers", "Leggings of Violet Exstanguination", etc. Look for high stam, expertise, and dodge.

But seriously folks, I'm glad you're reading this because it means you've taken the time to research what it is that you need to tank heroics. Please don't walk into a heroic under the defense cap or wearing DPS gear.