Druid Tanks

**hammett** · 2012-10-31, 03:52 PM

My guild has been progressing at a decent rate in MGV. I'm healing on my monk and noticing it is much harder to keep up our druid tank opposed to our pally tank. Is this just how a druid tank is? I looked at one of the fights Damage taken chart and he was taking 33% more damage than the pally. I feel like that number should be a lot closer because it makes Spirit binder a harder fight when he is taking all this damage and 2 others are getting hit with it as well. Any suggestions or is this just the way it is?

**Dentie** · 2012-10-31, 04:15 PM

It's an issue with Gara'jal in particular. Block tanks are a lot stronger on that fight.

**hammett** · 2012-10-31, 04:20 PM

So there really isn't away around it. Darn. He still does seem to take more damage even on the guards even though he is only tanking 1 dog.

**emoelitistthreadderailer** · 2012-10-31, 04:31 PM

certain bosses require either lots of SD uptime or FR usage and cooldowns such as barkskin, trinks when necessary (also depends what stats youve gone for)..
i think bears are fine atm, dmg wise theyre insane at times.. (cue inc nerfs ;p) having said that i think DKs are by far the best tank again atm...

**Banzhe** · 2012-10-31, 04:35 PM

Originally Posted by hammett

So there really isn't away around it. Darn. He still does seem to take more damage even on the guards even though he is only tanking 1 dog.

The issue could lie with wrong reforging, gems etc. Playing a guardian myself it's the opposite on our 25m where I take less damage then both our warrior and paladin tank.., as in less healing required, even if I am tanking 2 dogs on Stone Guards.
It would help if you could provide an armory to the druid in question.

**magazz** · 2012-10-31, 04:37 PM

if you have logs, see if your bear is spamming FR (Frenzed Regeneration) it does quiet decent heals I am in crap gear and my gs in my os is 463 and it heals me for 40-55k each heal and it has no cd. Also see if he's gemmed with agility. Agility now only increases attack power he should stack mastery/dodge equally

**hammett** · 2012-10-31, 06:20 PM

I don't have any logs and it won't let me post his armory. Names Baiyn on Eredar US if that helps

**Javaru** · 2012-10-31, 06:29 PM

Originally Posted by magazz

if you have logs, see if your bear is spamming FR (Frenzed Regeneration) it does quiet decent heals I am in crap gear and my gs in my os is 463 and it heals me for 40-55k each heal and it has no cd. Also see if he's gemmed with agility. Agility now only increases attack power he should stack mastery/dodge equally

My suggestion for this fight is to avoid FR, since that only heals the tank and does nothing for the 2 voodoo dolls. If you can dodge a swing with Savage Defense then the voodoo dolls take no damage. You should be able to get 100% uptime on SD while tanking if you save incarnation and pool resources while the other tank is up. Also since we know there is a monk healer there, have your druid tank use symbiosis on you for Elusive Brew. Using this ability with SD active will bring dodge to about 70%, pretty powerful. I'm currently reforged and gemmed all the way to crit then hit/exp so I have no trouble keeping SD up.

**rated** · 2012-10-31, 06:39 PM

Druid tanks are in a really good spot right now. It's really silly to judge one tanks effectiveness based on one person cause chances are that person may have no clue what they're doing.

As for the tank in your guild you've given us no logs to look at so its impossible to see what he's doing in raid which is going to be the best way to identify what the problem may be. Just by looking at his armory though I'm a bit confused on what he's doing.

1) He's using a barkskin glyph which is useless for tanking
2) Colossus enchant is inferior to windsong
3) His gems are kind of all over the place geming agility, mastery and stam
4) He's not using the best quality gems available
5) He seems to be going for hit/exp caps but hes neglected to fully cap hit in favor of reforging to dodge instead

Based on these things I think your tank needs to spend more time researching his class, but other than that having some raid logs would be ideal to see if he knows how to play his class correctly.

**Bonsaii** · 2012-10-31, 07:13 PM

It seems like he may need to re-learn his druid tanking.
Someone mentioned using frenzied regeneration which won't help too much on Garajal since the other voodoo dolls will be taking damage.

What he should try and do for Garajal is maintain a 100% uptime for savage defense when he is tanking the boss starting right before the first shadowy attack. He should get aggro with full rage or close to, sit on it for a couple seconds then pop SD, and never let it fall off until he gets banished.

Also he should use barkskin a little ways into his tank phase before the second healer comes up to try and cut damage. The trickiest point on a healer is right before the other healer comes back so that's where reduction CD's should be used.

The builds I've seen for bear are mastery, dodge, and hit/exp/crit. Personally, I feel that dodge and mastery are decent builds depending on the fight and that hit/exp/crit are kind of trashy right now. I like mastery on fights where there is consistent damage smacking me in the face because it just reduces my damage taken from physical attacks overall, I've heard of some bears getting to 75% reduction through armor. I like dodge on fights where I would tank something that I can roll savage defense on because more dodge with savage defense bears can supposedly hit around 65-70% dodge with Savage Defense up.

Note: I am not a bear tank as my MS anymore, I'm a boomkin. The reports I listed above of numbers are from friends and guildies I've talked with, they may or may not be accurate. A confirmation would be good.

EDIT: Also here's a link to his armory for lazies.
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...r/Baiyn/simple

I looked at his wow-heroes too and it couldn't discover any recent logs, you should probably start running those if you aren't.

**Arielle** · 2012-11-01, 12:26 AM

I'm suspicious that his SD uptime is atrocious if you're having problems keeping him alive on Gara'jal.

**dennisdkramer** · 2012-11-01, 01:04 AM

hi I'm MS feral that has tanked N gara'jal

- you say he's taking 33% more damage than the pally, but logs on that fight are not accurate so that may not be relevant data
- how much healing is he doing

last but ultra-importantly - the difficulty of healing this fight comes almost entirely from the efficacy of your dps killing adds in the spirit realm. too tired to give specifics but your druid could literally afk and it would be healable if your spirit realm dps was doing a good job.

edited out somewhat subjective and not particularly helpful opinions

**hexaq** · 2012-11-01, 07:55 AM

dunno bout him, but my bear (exp/hit/crit) co-tanks with a pally and is ok...

On that fight I usually do take more damage overall than our pally, since I get to tank first, I have a full 50? secs more time for the boss to smash my face and also it usually happens I tank last phase as well. But incoming DPS is about the same, within 1k dps variance.
Heck, on some wipes I had 50% more damage taken than our pally, but that doesn't really count when you wipe after 60 secs in the fight ...

That being said, I do tend to have a look at 'healing taken - HPS' and I do seem to take a few % more healing compared to our pally on most fights, probably that's one of the reasons we get the maul-boss-damage-reduce buff thingy next patch

**Bloodrayne of Lothar** · 2012-11-01, 08:28 AM

Druids are awesome for Gara the passive spell dmg reduction helps with all the random dmg Shadow Bolts, Grasp, and Shadow Attacks that land.

SD is awesome on Gara, i take less dmg when its my turn vs the pally tank i ran with.

The key is to time your SD so its all ways up when he does his Shadow Attacks, which you should be able to do np. When he hits ~25% stop using SD and use FR to let your charges come back so as soon as he hits his frenzy at 20% You can maintain a higher up time on SD.

**exochaft** · 2012-11-01, 08:50 AM

Originally Posted by dennisdkramer

hi I'm MS feral that has tanked N gara'jal

- bears arent very good for this fight
- neither savage defense nor frenzied regen are very good for this fight
- maul buff in 5.1 will not help that much, this is just a bad fight for bears
- you say he's taking 33% more damage than the pally, but logs on that fight are not accurate so that may not be relevant data
- how much healing is he doing

last but ultra-importantly - the difficulty of healing this fight comes almost entirely from the efficacy of your dps killing adds in the spirit realm. too tired to give specifics but your druid could literally afk and it would be healable if your spirit realm dps was doing a good job.

I'll agree with you on everyone's logs being different since people phase in and out quite a bit, and that the fight is more about killing adds to reduce raid/spike damage.

However, I will have to disagree about bears not being good for the fight. While tanking Gara'jal, his special attacks cannot be absorbed, but they can be completely avoided (something Guardians can do quite well with our model of tanking and the window of time we'd be tanking). Sure, we can't get 100% uptime on SD since the time one actively tanks is roughly a minute, but we can get pretty close to it. I tank with a prot warrior, and when we compare our own personal logs (only after the first banish and before the boss enrage), I tend to take less damage and have much less friendly fire than he does, mainly since I avoid most of the attacks. Only real downside to SD is that it does involve some RNG to avoid particular attacks on the fight, but over the duration of the fight things tend to work out for me. However, even on our heroic Gara'jal kills, I've been finding myself rage-capped with full HP and SD on cooldown for a while, so I'll happily take the Maul change in 5.1.

Regardless, whoever ends up tanking the enrage will likely take the most damage, so you have to be very careful when comparing how much more damage a person takes than another.

More in line with the OP and the extra damage their Guardian takes on Stone Guard, it has everything to do with a tank's passive melee damage reduction and how they can deal with a physical DoT. The largest individual source of damage a tank will likely be taking on Stone Guard is the bleed, and only passive damage reduction will negate this (leaving Blood DK's out of this, for obvious reasons). Guardian tanks have 12% passive melee damage reduction, other tanks can have more (paladins, in this case, have 15% passive damage reduction). This is why Guardian tanks tend to be looked down upon for tanking this fight, because our design makes us innately take more damage on this fight. However, this damage is offset by our ability to use FR, and despite how much scorn some people may give about using SD on this fight, I'd rather use SD while rage-capped and full health than waste rage... there's still a decent amount of melee attack damage to be avoided.

Overall, Guardians really aren't in a bad place. Despite how much things change, some thing always remain the same: each fight favors certain tanks while others do not.

**Sonnillon** · 2012-11-01, 08:56 AM

I mainly run with hit/exp/crit expertise but for this fight gave try with mastery/dodge/hit/exp (and am asking advice on how to in another thread in this forum)
We had pally and I (guardian) tanking: http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/a...ses&boss=60143 <- this is the damage taken. In comparison I take less damage then the paladin does.

But what the others say is correct. SD with dodge is very decent. With just SD up and my passive dodge I had avoidance of 66%, with SD and my click from dodge trinket I was close to 67% avoidance.

As for the dogs with I did with hit/exped capped - http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/a.../?s=712&e=1138 this is the damage I took. I used FR to heal myself and used less SD. I could have had more damage at some point since the paladin went down and I had to tank all 3 dogs for a while until he was CR'd.

me - http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/characte...keket/advanced

**Williee** · 2012-11-01, 09:25 AM

Garajal is very dependent on who parsed the fight since there is a lot of phasing. So the info might not be as accurate as it should be unless you have both tanks parsing themselves.
The damage you take while tanking 3 dogs isn't too different since they can only apply one rend flesh. However, im impressed you didnt get a failed explosion or something in the time it took to rez your other tank.

If you find out more about mastery/dodge vs crit, I wish to know as I am considering both reforges and gemming possibilities.

**Sonnillon** · 2012-11-01, 09:36 AM

However, im impressed you didnt get a failed explosion or something in the time it took to rez your other tank.

We did. First overload was the correct guardian, few seconds after the wrong overload followed, but there was a shout in Mumble about the wrong overload and we were stacked so all was fine. The good point was, that it equaled the dogs out again

And Will - go read this - http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...ty-Please-help there is an extensive discussion on the topic.

**dennisdkramer** · 2012-11-01, 10:19 AM

Originally Posted by Williee

Garajal is very dependent on who parsed the fight since there is a lot of phasing. So the info might not be as accurate as it should be unless you have both tanks parsing themselves.
The damage you take while tanking 3 dogs isn't too different since they can only apply one rend flesh. However, im impressed you didnt get a failed explosion or something in the time it took to rez your other tank.

If you find out more about mastery/dodge vs crit, I wish to know as I am considering both reforges and gemming possibilities.

Originally Posted by Williee

Garajal is very dependent on who parsed the fight since there is a lot of phasing. So the info might not be as accurate as it should be unless you have both tanks parsing themselves.
The damage you take while tanking 3 dogs isn't too different since they can only apply one rend flesh. However, im impressed you didnt get a failed explosion or something in the time it took to rez your other tank.

If you find out more about mastery/dodge vs crit, I wish to know as I am considering both reforges and gemming possibilities.

there is an excellent thread about this here on the forums but I'll sum it up real quick:

crit will always give more average dodge than dodge does via increased SD uptime
mastery provides less average 'mitigation' than crit, hit, exp, but smooths incoming physical damage so is not definitively unuseful
crit gives more average rage per second than hit,exp, but hit,exp smooths rage per second which can help significantly

I believe haste was confirmed to generate less rage than hit/exp but I can't remember.. in any case its still a relatively good stat, increasing rage generation without the RNG of crit.

I tanked with my feral reforges of hit/exp (7.5) cap, mastery> crit >> haste and found it pretty smooth. Switching mastery and crit would probably be ideal though, and not change dps significantly in feral.

**nerfmagesffs** · 2012-11-01, 11:14 PM

Tell him to get hit/exp cap, reforge and gem for crit for yellow, and crit/exp in red gems, and stam/crit for blue, do not go for avoidance at all, and mastery is not good, untill you get decent gear, because in his gear, his armor mitigation is pretty low, so no point. Crit and exp/hit will allow max uptime on SD (i.e. 66%) on gara jal

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