Mob Handling Notes from Wailing Caverns

When I was running Wailing Caverns last night I was forced to do a lot of fancy mob handling.  WC is chock full of casters, and they know not to come running when you slap them with a Faerie Fire.

One common method used to force the casters to actually come to you is to use a Line of Sight (LoS) tactic.  Since they can't cast at you if you're not in line of sight, you hit them with a Faerie Fire, then back around a corner and they'll come running over.

But using an LoS is not always in the cards.  Sometimes, as is frequently the case in Wailing Caverns, you have dangerous multi-caster pulls, where you have to keep multiple mobs on you that don't want to move.  If you're fortunate enough to have a patient and cunning party that will back up and let you use an LoS ambush, that's great.  But sometimes you just need to throw caution to the wind and get into the thick of things.

It's during these situations that effective aggression management is so important.  One of the things I always try to do is to use Faerie Fire (Feral) on as many targets as I can, and preferably early in the fight.  FFF actually generates threat, unlike Growl.  Having the Glyph of Maul is useful for building threat against a large number of opponents, if you take the time to frequently change targets to spread the love around a bit, but casters are very problematic because they don't line up in front of you the way you'd like them to, and you can't kite them around by walking backwards.

In 3.1, Swipe was changed to affect all mobs in a 360º area around you, a major improvement from Burning Crusade, in which its area of effect was a frontal cone.  This helps in the beginning of a fight, especially if you have spare rage from an earlier encounter.  However, it costs 15 rage with 5 ranks of Ferocity.  Unless you are literally surrounded by mobs, this is not a very good skill to use in terms of threat-to-rage ratios.  Compared to Maul, which costs 5 less rage and generates far more threat, Swipe becomes, at least at the early levels that we're talking about, an emergency button to be used only in special circumstances.  Not until much later on will it become a mainstay, front line workhorse of an ability.

So, barring the frequent use of Swipe to maintain aggression on multi-caster mobs with meat shields tossed in, and potentially adds or patrols, what I do is keep tabs on my threat meter.  If I have at least 3x as much threat as the next guy, even if I'm dealing with a caster, I just leave them and go to the next caster.  Try to get two mobs in front of you if you can, but focus on the casters because the melee mobs will follow along with you.  If you see a caster going after one of your party members, use FFF to suck them back into your threat well.  And if you really start to lose control in a heavy melee situation, because we're in the level 10-19 bracket here and don't have a cooldown to force every nearby mob to attack us, just punch Demoralizing Roar to at least hamstring the attack power of the nearby mobs.

Two more tips for Wailing Caverns.  First, armor doesn't mitigate magic, so building a massive effective health pool is the best defense against these sorts of encounters.  Eat your buff food.  Second, save your Bash for when the druids try to use their sleep spell--losing your healer or one of your dealers in a big fight could get you squished.

Tanked to the Teeth

Just a few more pieces now, and I can move on to new content.  I saw two of the remaining four pieces tonight in WC, but the party was heavy on leather wearers.  I decided not to "need" the Deep Fathom Ring, because the healer (who did a rock star job) needed it, and I can't wear it until level 20 anyway.

I can still upgrade to the Smelting Pants and Serpent's Shoulders without proceeding to level 20.  At that point, there'll be nothing I can improve on, in terms of tanking gear, for this batch of dungeons.  The biggest improvement, in terms of raw effective health, that I can get at level 20, will be the Black Wolf Bracers from Shadowfang Keep.  At that point, there'll be nothing from WC, SFK, or DM that I need for tanking, and I can change focus to leveling for a while.

I had a fantastic group for WC tonight, which made up for two false starts earlier in the evening.  Looking forward to cross-realm friend lists so I can keep in touch with some of these good healers.

Shout out to Reilynn on the Mannoroth realm.  Fast, clear headed, well geared healer, I never saw her mana bar go down all night.

Effective Health versus Technique

In article after article, and in page after page, guide after guide, and gear list after gear list, the importance of itemization is hawked to us as the ultimate consideration and metric for determination of how "good" a tank is.

But we know it's just not so.

Whether one item or talent or profession gives you 20% more effective health than another item or talent or profession assumes that your character is a complete system independent of additional input.  I get the distinct impression that consideration of the effect of end-game professions for bear tanks assumes that all the other variables are perfect, which we know is far from the case.  What use, for example, is another 1030 health if your healer is running out of mana because you can't keep aggro off of that Fury warrior?  What benefit does additional crit confer if your hit rating is laughably poor?

But I would like to believe that how a person plays their character distinguishes them as "good" as much as, if not more than the cumulative item level of their gear, or the purely numeric effect their gear has on their effective health calculations.  Experience (being the cumulative mistakes I've made) tells me that this is the case.

For example, what is the effective health contribution to a well-timed use of Nature's Grasp or Bash to slow down a fight?

Or, more to the point, what effect does rage augmentation through powershifting confer on us at early levels?  Is it worth the tradeoff between Mangle at level 50 and level 55?  Is the choice to take one over the other purely personal and entirely dependent on play style, or does it actually have an impact on our effective health, and can this impact be measured?

I've made the decision for now to keep five points in Furor, because it gives me an additional weapon to use in a fight, at a time when I am having difficulty keeping my rage bar full.  On paper, it does not confer as much effective health to me as the second tier feral talents, but if I have the rage to keep mobs off of my DPS for a much higher percentage of each encounter, then hopefully it keeps my healer from going OOM as often and in a roundabout way that improves my effective health.

Not through the numbers, but through technique.  And, in my mind, technique is what the game is really about.

How +hit can affect your chance to crit in a single-roll system

+Hit does affect Crit in the single roll system. You can have 50% chance to crit, but if the total block + dodge + parry + miss chance on your attack table versus a given mob is 55%, then 5% of your crit chance is wasted.

Fun Fact: I also play a level 80 Fury warrior.

Consider the following completely imaginary attack table for a dual-wielding L80 warrior fighting a raid boss, with 50% crit chance and 0 expertise or hit. Assume the target mob is wearing a shield and has a 12.5% chance to parry and a 6.5% chance to dodge.

Hit:     n/a
Crit:    01-36
Block:   36-55
Dodge:   56-62
Parry:   62-73
Miss:    73-100

The warrior will damage the enemy 36% of the time he attempts to attack it, and 100% of that damage will be from crits. 14% of his chance to crit is completely and utterly wasted.
Crit fills up your chance to hit, but does not itself push block, dodge, miss or parry off of your attack table. So, without adequate +hit and expertise, your crit chance can actually suffer.

Let me repeat that: in a single roll combat system, you need +expertise and +hit in order to maximize your chance to crit. A 4 cup can of whoop-ass can't fit into a 2 cup Mug O'Hurt.

Now, let's put this into perspective for bear tanks. We automatically hit much more often than a dual wielding melee class would. We don't dual wield, so spare ourselves an additional +19% chance to miss. Awesome. We also talent into our first 10 expertise rating. Expertise pushes both parry and dodge off of the attack table, so is twice as valuable for threat generation (per 1% of effect) as hit rating, up until we hit the "soft cap" for expertise and completely push the 6.5% dodge chance off of our attack table. After that, expertise is exactly as valuable as +hit in terms of increasing the size of our crit envelope. However, it's still more valuable for tanks than hit, because it also improves our Effective Health.

Expertise contributes to our effective health? Yes.

Reaching the hard-cap for expertise so that your attacks can also not be parried by raid bosses is important for a tank, because when a mob parries a frontal melee attack, it gets a speed buff, reducing the time to its next white damage attack.

This is sometimes called the "Tank Jib". Think of it like a backdoor crit.

Even if you never suffer a critical strike, this speed buff can give the mob a big DPS increase and tax your healer, particularly if the mob is the slow swinging, big damage type. This is also a major reason why your melee DPS should never ever ever stand shoulder to shoulder with you unless they are hard-capped for expertise, meaning none of their attacks on raid bosses can be dodged or parried. They should stand behind the mob, because attacks from behind cannot be parried.

The bottom line for feral tanks is this: If you haven't pushed parries completely off of your attack table, you can benefit from more expertise. Unless 100% of your white damage attacks are critical strikes, and you are hard-capped for expertise, you don't need more +hit. Hitting hard cap on expertise will help your threat generation and, especially in 3.1 (if Savage Defense goes live), will also contribute to your mitigation. If you overemphasize crit and ignore the rest of your attack table, you can undermine your threat generation and survivability. In 3.1, if you overemphasize the rest of your attack table and ignore crit, you do the same.

TankPoints Addon v2.8.2 - Helpful Hints for Feral Druids

I nearly had a heart attack on Sunday when I got the Hungering Greatstaff from a quest in Taunka'le village in Borean Tundra.

My TankPoints Addon suggested that I'd be getting an additional 4798 tank points from it, mostly stemming from the nearly 5191 armor. /boggle. Here's the screenshot:



The prospect of 5191 more armor from a weapon was, needless to say, mind boggling, and I beckoned Miss Direction over to have a look at it. She did so, and with a pat on the shoulder, kindly reminded me that the 370% additional armor contribution from items that Druids in v3.0.9 gain from Survival of the Fittest doesn't count if the armor is on your weapon. Only from cloth and leather items.

Just exactly like it says on the talent text.

Head firmly reattached to my neck, I decided just then to make a short post about this minor TankPoints bug, along with another tip that I hope will save my fellow Feral Tanks some headaches later on:

Tip for TankPoints and RatingBuster users:

When you're using TankPoints to evaluate Bear gear, remember to switch into Bear or Dire Bear form. The addon calculates the effective health values based on your current form, so you might miss out on a good piece of tanking gear if you evaluate it while in Cat or Caster form. The same rule applies if you're shopping for gear at the auction house.

Here are a couple more screenshots evaluating the exact same staff while in cat and caster forms, to illustrate the point:








The moral of the story is to know your addons and keep alert--they're a useful and helpful metric, but are not infallible. Don't follow any metric off of a cliff. All of that aside, I absolutely love both TankPoints and RatingBuster, and use them every day.

To make myself feel better after this, I slunk over to Zul'Drak and, with the help of a guildmate, retrieved the Staff of the Sorrowful Chieftain.

Bear Market for Druids in 3.1 PTR

I've been coming to terms with the changes coming up for druid tanks in 3.1. If the changes in the 3.1 PTR go live, it will be the most significant change for Druid tanking since WotLK came out.

The four primary changes to bear tanking can be summarized as follows:

1. Survival of the Fittest armor gain cut in half.
   
2. Heart of the Wild stamina gain cut in half.
   
3. Primal Gore talent gives Lacerate ticks a chance to crit.
4. Melee crits reduce next physical attack by 25% of your AP.
   

If these changes go live, it will seriously shake up feral tanking. Blizzard seems determined to blur or remove the distinction between bears and cats. Strength will now partially substitute for stamina in contributing to our Effective Health, as our hit pools are reduced and attack power grows in importance. Critical strikes become more important than ever in this new paradigm.

Ostensibly these changes are to help our healers from having to fill our oversized health pools in light of the upcoming nerfs to mana regeneration, but my guess is that reduction in mana waste from overhealing made up much of the difference.

Some folks have helpfully suggested to me that it'll be a great change because feral druids won't have to keep more than one set of gear. That doesn't make much sense, however, because 3.1 will also include a gear rack feature.

Other helpful folks reassure me that it's necessary to maintain balance for Ulduar. I'm not convinced that a single endgame dungeon should cast a shadow on druids tanking at all levels throughout the game, though.

My most helpful friend, Miss Direction, reassured me that a simple change of gems would probably make up the difference once I get my Tier 7 set. I have my doubts about that, but will try to keep an optimistic outlook on the matter. I don't like the idea of my treasured Leatherbelliness™ going away.

Whatever the ultimate reason, the PTR changes are only proposals at the moment.

Leatherbelliness™ is a Whole Lot of Bull

The first time I asked my guildies about how to gear my feral tank they gave me some straightforward advice. Just stack agility and the rest will take care of itself.

Not bad advice, but sub-optimal.

In 2009, feral tanks need more than avoidance to perform at the top of their game. Especially since diminishing returns on avoidance were confirmed in Wrath of the Lich King. I have since spent a lot of time crawling through posts by Ciderhelm and Corbusier on TankSpot & Elitist Jerks, and have come to trust their wisdom regarding Effective Health.

The combination of wit, mitigation, avoidance, and a nigh-insurmountable hit point total is something I call Leatherbelliness™. This is just a playful term I use to describe a large Effective Health combined with a smart play style and good technique.

I won't get into the nitty gritty just yet, but Effective Health works out like this: If you have 10k health but only get hit 65% of the time, you effectively have 15,385 health. If you can reduce 10% of the damage you do take after avoidance, this number becomes 17,094 effective health.

All tanking classes have effective health--death knights and paladins can self-heal, warriors can mitigate damage through massive absorption. Since WotLK does away with crushing blow mechanics, it might seem like having big EH isn't quite as important as it used to be.

Don't be fooled. At the end of the day you get to dine on knuckle sandwiches. Twitchy melee DPS who don't grok the parry mechanics and haven't capped their expertise can still put you on the wrong end of a haste debuff with a boss through bad placement, and when you're riding on 30 or 40,000 hit points your healer will appreciate the depth of that health pool, will perform fewer overheals, and your blood pressure will remain at optimal levels as a result.

Now, that said, Leatherbelliness™ is not a slave to statistical averages. From time to time, people will ask me whether a given piece of gear is "better" than another piece of gear for tanking. You've seen it in guild chat. You know what I'm talking about. My answer is consistent, one learned from my time as a software engineer.

It depends.

What's the situation? Every engineer knows that there's a tool for every job. Different jobs call for different tools. Is there one single set of gear that's going to be "best" for feral tanking?

Nope.

With that in mind, I go for maximal Effective Health on average, but I keep an arsenal of specialty options at my fingertips. Knowing when to ditch some health for dodge or increased threat generation, and being able to do so with one click because you came prepared, is Leatherbelliness™ at its best.

I learned to play WoW on a warrior, which taught me all about the importance of knowing what gear to use in which situation. For about six months I maintained custom gear swapping macros that were tuned to the stance I was in as a warrior. When I flipped into defensive stance, out came the shield, defense, and expertise gear. Those lessons carried over seamlessly when I started playing my feral druid (and started using Outfitter, thank the skies). To this day, when I switch into caster form, my mana pool explodes, cat form drops me into my strength, crit and AP gear, and when I go from either to Dire Bear form, it sets off alarms on my MikScrollingBattleText, because my max health in Cat Form is about 25% of my total when wearing my tanking kit in Dire Bear form.

This continues to freak out my healer, by the way.

In WoW, as much as anywhere, the clothes make the (man|bear|tank). So, my first piece of advice is to get big bags and the Outfitter addon. Especially while you're questing and leveling, you're going to need utility in cat and caster form. Having the flexibility to quickly swap gear will allow you to truly specialize for tanking while you are in Bear and Dire Bear form, instead of trying to find the one-size-fits-all gear set that just does not exist.

By Way of Introduction

Hello and welcome to Khorium Powered Tank Engine. My name is Etaiu, and I will be your host. I started this site in order to provide a much-needed resources for feral tanks. I've read other feral tank blogs (they know who they are) and found them wanting in focus. By too-often straying from its core competency, a blog can quickly devolve into a personal soap box.

So, in keeping with my real-life and in-game engineering tendencies, I will keep the feature-creep out of this blog, and maintain a surgical focus on Engineering-augmented Feral Tanking. This is not my only blog, so you the reader can expect an optimal amount of (zero) spillover from unrelated subjects. Some of the information I provide will be my own findings, and some will be received knowledge that I will try to independently verify or debunk.

The main purpose of this site will be twofold.

1. To develop a more comprehensive understanding of Effective Health through Mitigation, Avoidance and sheer Leatherbelliness™. Gear analysis and comparisons will play a role in this.
   
2. To illustrate sound feral tanking technique, augmented by engineering, to maximize your control in dungeon situations. Tricks of the trade, including (but not limited to) dungeon strategies, macros, and gadgetry will factor into this analysis.
   

The first duty of a tank is not to stay alive, but to keep their party alive and buy them time to bring down the quarry. Staying alive is merely a habit in keeping with that primary goal. Threat generation, agg management, communication, mob handling, situational awareness, and wipe recovery are all equally important components of a tank's arsenal.