TLTR: I've basically main healed my entire wow experience. My guild needed a tank so I xferred my Druid over to fill the role. My parses are not very good at all for DPS. Healing is usually OK. Please give me some constructive criticism. What can I do better? Are my stats wrong is vers/mas more important than ilvl? Am I using too much rage on mitigation? Is DPS parse something I shouldn't worry about?
LOGS: it won't let me link logs cuz I'm new here I'm baloou-laughingskull...
Long version: I used to be our holy priest but healing seems to be popular this expac and we needed a tank. I thought "variety is the spice of life, let's try it." I'm used to parsing in purple and blue on my priest but on my tank I'm getting grey and green parses on heroic... what am I doing poorly? What can I do differently? Is crit really useless? If I wear my highest ilvl (929) I have 29% crit and vers and mas are 15%. If I wear my mas/vers gear I'm ilvl 925 and both mastery and versatility are at around 19-20% with haste st like 12% and crit at like 17%. My mas/vers set forces me to use the legendary helm and trinket (which forces me to put my 920 tier helm in my bags and I happen to have like every TOS tank trinket too so I only get to use one with archimonds bubble). I have the belt and dual determination too but they both have a lot of crit which I was told is my worst stat... should I embrace crit and learn to cat weave? Should I change my stats and stay regular bear? Which of these 4 trinkets is best? I really enjoy the trinket from KJ with dual determination but that crit ... I used wow analyzer and I see I could do better at using my attacks on CD so I'm going to adjust my WeakAuras so I can keep better track. Any and all advice is welcome.
If you go for pulverize, you should actually use it. Rend and Tear is better for dps.
You have 0 thrash damage relics, get 3. Doesn't matter whether your weapon is ilvl 952 without them, you really need those relics.
You want to use thrash during incarnation, not mangle. Probably should spec GG though, that'll help with your moonfire uptime, and you don't have a single thrash legendary or relic either.
Your rage of the sleeper will only deal damage if you use it while actually tanking something.
Change your neck enchant to hidden satyr for single target dps. Also get a 200 agi gem.
Don't use a stamina flask, agi all the way.
Don't use mastery food. 500 agi feast (spec feral while eating, as guardian you get stamina instead) is the best.
Use mangle and thrash whenever possible, you sometimes miss out the entire duration of gore procs outside of incarnation.
Use potion of prolonged power on pre-pull and then once again later in the fight when your cooldowns are up (RotS and Incarn if you skill that).
Skill balance affinity so you can still hit enemies when you have to move out for a second.
Get some dps trinkets, and well, ilvl in general, that helps.
Use every global, you don't want to melee the boss for 4 seconds without casting any ability.
What is that raid setup? 13 people, 4 healers (of which 2 are afk, which is why your healing numbers appear to be decent)? You take ages to kill the boss!
Your whole raid is struggling (lots of people dying early to avoidable damage); obviously you can double your own damage (or more), but that alone won't help you out much.
Well, dps as a tank is moderately important, maybe even really important on tight dps fights, but its definitely your secondary job. First priority is not dying, positioning the boss correctly ect, and not taking so much damage that your healers are going to fall behind or let ppl die elsewhere while tunneling heals into you. Once you accomplish that, then damage is the next logical goal.
Unlike playing a dps, or healer, the stats you go for to be good at actually tanking are almost certainly not the best stats for doing damage, so you are basically in the completely wrong itemization for dps if you are prioritizing tanking. Assuming you are playing decently the #1 effect on tank dps is what gear you are wearing. If you switched from a heavy vers/mastery setup with defensive leggos, to a haste/vers/crit build with no mastery and double offensive legendaries, your damage would literally double. As in 2x. On the majority of fights with like, significant boss autoattack damage I generally have a parse in the 30s on my first kill. Weeks later when we feel better with the fight/healers have more throughput from gear upgrades, I'll do the fight in a different gearset and parse in the 90s. Its very different than playing a dps class where you just wouldn't do a fight wearing badly itemized stats. Basically I'm trying to say don't stress your damage, focus on doing the fight well/survivability for now.
You're going to want a Haste > Vers > crit set with minimal mastery for later when you want to care about damage. Bear is, unfortunately, very legendary defendant for damage and you have none of the better ones. In addition (actually this is definitely the biggest factor) thrash relics are so absurdly significant for damage I can't even begin to stress how important they are. Like even for people who prioritize survivability, the damage you get from 3x thrash relics is so huge compared to the tiny contribution defensive relics. Here's a list of were to find relics (thrash is jagged wounds) https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...uGs/edit#gid=0 You can get all 3 in ToS which is amazing and unusual btw.
I looked at your parse for goroth since its a simple single target fight. Biggest take away is that you had 48% uptime on moonfire. This is a huge loss in damage. It needs to be more or less 100%. If you don't feel like tracking a moonfire dot timer, you will certainly do more damage with galactic guardian (which will certainly give you 100% uptime on MF with out even paying attention to it) than you will with incarn and only 50% moonfire uptime. (at least for single target fights). If you ARE going to run incarn, pop it on pull with bloodlust prepot and rage of the sleeper. That way you'll get a 2nd use out of it at 3min compared to the single use you got.
It also seems like you just aren't pressing buttons a lot of the time. My last kill was 2:43 long so I compared my casts to yours in the 1st 2:43 of your log. I used 143 global consuming attacks that fight. You used 78. To be fair, I'm wearing 11k haste, but that number discrepancy is a lot larger than the haste difference would account for. Don't ever spend time not pressing buttons. Rotation is Thrash > Mangle > GG Moonfire Proc > Swipe. Replace swipes with Maul when ever possible if you feel comfortable sacrificing ironfur stacks. It's definately not worth using maul if you are remotely concerned about the damage you are taking. Swipe is pretty shit but its a lot better than an empty global. Make sure you can see the CD on your thrash and mangle clearly (preferably some what central on your screen so you see it with out having to look away from the fight).
To be completely fair, having to choose between different secondary stats for Guardian is very minor from a DPS or survival perspective. I alter my sims for my gear for varying scenarios and raid difficulties, and the secondary weightings are almost completely the same for DPS when I simulate focusing on damage and focusing on rage generation and/or survival. On the defensive side... there are several metrics, but in general all the secondary stats are similar (in my case, haste/versa is generally ahead even for heavier magic encounters). However, the big takeaway is that the ilvl almost always determines if a piece of gear is a DPS/survival gain outside of tier/legendaries. Trinkets are a case-by-case basis.
I'd also say the primary difference between a good DPS rotation and a survival rotation is the use of Maul instead of Ironfur/FR. Sure, maximum rage generation rotation certainly isn't max DPS rotation, but it's pretty close outside of spamming Thrash during Incarnation. However, as Patrins stated, the basics apply for either rotation: maintain Moonfire, keep Mangle/Thrash on CD, use GG procs in place of Swipe, use Swipe when there's nothing else to do but always make sure you're doing something. If you maintain a solid non-Maul DPS rotation, your survival should increase due to more rage generation and more Ironfur/FR usage available.
I know I'm generalizing with the following statement, but almost all Guardian issues I've seen stem from a poor offensive ability rotation, not gearing issues. I've rarely seen a Guardian with a good offensive rotation have threat issues or survival issues. A good offensive rotation enables more active mitigation when it's needed and generates proper threat. Therefore, my advice to Baloou is to sit in front of a target dummy until your offensive ability rotation with Maul is correct. Next, remove Maul from the rotation and add in Pulverize (if you want to use that talent, Rend and Tear might be easier for now) and Ironfur until you can at least maintain those buffs constantly. This should fix your baseline threat and any survival issues you may have. Afterwards, if just comes down to learning when you you should use Maul and when you should use Ironfur instead. Worst case, always choose Ironfur over Maul if you aren't sure, your threat will be fine.
Few general (and some more specific) pointers:
- Reach a point where you feel comfortable defensively (i.e. not dieing, which as a bear tbh you shouldn't ever) and push for more offensive stats, i.e. mainly versa->haste->agi/crit (the more you wanna push for damage, the more down that line of stats you go). Mastery is your worst offensive stat so if you are fine surviving, cut it back.
- Gem and enchant offensively (i.e. no mastery enchants, go Versa all the way)
- Enchant Mark of the Claw on neck.
- Balance affinity (you'll never want to go back, makes lots of things so much easier and gives you great leeway with your positioning. It also rocks in m+)
- Since you're inexperienced go Rend and Tear instead of Pulve. Easier to handle since it's passive and gets more out of certain Leggos (Luffa, which is your best one offensively). If you go Pulve you need to time when you're gonna use it. Reach 3 stacks and right before Thrash is off cd use Pulve (going down to 1 stack) and insta-Thrash, going back up to 2 and having the highest possible uptime on max Thrash stacks. That's the ideal scenario and not very hard to get used to with some dummy training but still it's more complicated than RnT. TLDR at this point just go Rend and Tear.
- Go GG instead of Incarn, especially if you're having trouble having max uptime on Moonfire. Secures your Moonfire uptime and you have one less big cd to manage (by big I mean that it's high risk/high reward, if you miss-use it because of lack of experience e.g. not lining it up with hero, pots, trinkets, transition phases, during AOE moments etc, it will result in a dps loss, regardless of normally being higher than GG). In any case, if you miss the correct legendaries (Luffa/Pants) and have no thrash relics, like in your case, the difference in damage wouldn't be that much anyway, if any, so prefer the more easily manageable GG.
-Get thrash relics (x3 if possible), even downgrading in ilvl. They buff your damage hugely, it's not even funny.
-Agility flask and offensive food (agility from feast, versa or even haste from personal food).
-Don't go full defensive trinkets, you can get some feral or boomy ones and combo them appropriately depending on each fight.
-I see ppl talking about Maul, I'll avoid that cause at this point you have way more things to concern yourself about. Only after you have your rotation set and feel comfortable with it, using your main dps abilities properly with max uptime, then and only then you should start worrying about Maul, which should be used as a rage dump and possible mangle reset when you're offtanking.
-Use weakauras or some other addon of that use to set properly your offensive abilities, especially since your rotation has a couple of important procs you need to monitor efficiently (Gore, GG). Have one for mangle, so you can track it easily through Gore procs, thrash so you can use it on cd and Moonfire to have it up 100%. Your ST rotation should be Mangle->Thrash->Moonfire (one initial and then on GG procs) ->Maul (if you have enough rage and not tanking) ->Swipe. Mangle should be used first in the normal rotation (not during Incarn where you just spam Thrash) and always before the other spells so you have more chances to proc Gore. Go train at a dummy until you're used to it, I guess when you have to worry about surviving, proper positioning, taunt swaps etc, in addition to your inexperience it can seem complicated and overwhelming and just end up mashing everything.
-If you have threat issues, you're not doing your rotation correctly. Proper rotation will deal enough dmg for you to be just fine threat-wise.
After taking the advice I got here my parses have improved. I appreciate all the help! Still need thrash relics and better Legendaries but I'm working on that
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... I used wow analyzer and I see I could do better at using my attacks on CD so I'm going to adjust my WeakAuras so I can keep better track. Any and all advice is welcome.
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