Serious tanking spec discussion thread

[Deleted]

There are a lot of questions and topics going about concerning the perfect tanking specs, so i figure it would be beneficial for the board to make a serious tanking thread. Lets try and keep this constructive and real. Use arguments and consider what other people are posting. Lets be sorta EJ-ish about this, eh?

Id like to start off the debate from my own tanking spec and then go into an analazis of the the talents that people on this board are usually discussing. People should also consider the long term viability of talents and general usefull ness, however id like people to disregard "hybrid specs" that "Can both tank and DPS". It is my honest oppinion that a fully bear specced druid can still do great DPS, just 10-20% lower than cat specced druids, and this topic is made purely for a focus on PvE tanking. Id also like to avoid comments such as "I dont need this talent, cause this class does that". A talent can be disregarded based on its general usefullness, but not if you are relying on another class to furfill your role.

http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=0ZxGGscbzceRcczAo0Eczb

Feral Agression: Rank 8 reduces AP by 408, or 29 DPS per melee attacker. 5 talent points increases the effect to 571,2 AP or 40,8 DPS, meaning you are looking at a protection for 11,8 DPS per melee mob hitting you. While this is still a 40% increase to a great and usefull talent, the skill itself has a problem with scaling. As mobs begin hitting for 5.000 damage after mitigation, the skill itself, and the increase from talents, becomes a minor debuff to use. While still usefull, it is not something i would spec into.

Shredding attacks: Previously, lacerate was a great ability to use for threat generation, but with the LK changes to abilities like maul and swipe, lacerate has lost a bit of its usefullness. In most cases, a swipe is better than a lacerate, as long as you have at least one application of lacerate on your target, to increase your maul damage from Rend & Tear. The talent only reduces the cost of lacerate by 2 rage, down to 13, which means that these two talent points only reduces the cost of lacerate by 14%. That, couped with the fact that our rage generation is quite supreme these days, i find this talent less than usefull for tanking purposes.

Primal Precision: This is a major topic starter, but unfortunately i feel that this talent loses out against other talents. The major concern about expertise for tanks are parries - more parries more damage. A level 83 boss against a level 80 druid has a 16% chance to parry our attacks. PP adds 2,5% chance to not be parried or dodged. After PP is applied, we still need some 443 expertise rating to eliminate the chance to be parried. One of the negative concerns about this instead, is that much gear already has expertise, and that this talent doesn't scale. As your gear gets better, the talent is less and less of a benefit. You can, however, free up points from improved mangle if you wish, and thus this talent is marked as a maybe - although i do not think i will take it these days. Overall it seems a lot more like a cat talent.

Brutal Impact: Even if you spend two talent points on reducing your bash cooldown, it is not at all enough to be considered a permanent mobstopper. I feel that this is a PvP talent.

Improved leader of the Pack: Disregarding that it heals all melee in your group, this ability is amazingly good for healing yourself. 4% of some 30.000 buffed hp is a lot, and at that amount of health, iLotP gives you 200 health per second, assuming you crit every 6 seconds. It also helps you if you regen your mana between fights, and it will allow you to pop out after a fight and top people off, instead of straining your healer.

Primal Tenacity: Stuns isn't a major part of tanking. There might be the issue where your group is feared and the boss keeps hitting you, but this talent is, as others, much more a PvP talent than for PvE.

Infected Wounds: One of the major "A warrior can just TC" arguments, and the reason for me asking you to avoid these above. While the run speed reduction does not work on bosses, the attack speed surely does, and this is a critical talent for tanking druids. Take it.

King of the Jungle: In my book, KOTJ is a rather dangerous talent to take. If we calculate the damage increase, if you use this every minute, you will increase your DPS in bear by 2,5%. However, when it is up, you will take more damage. After the reduction to our armor modifiers and items, our base armor is a larger proportion of our total armor, meaning that a loss in base armor hits us harder than before. Compared to where else we could put these three poitns, to get a bigger increase and one that doesn't make us volunerable, i would never take this for tanking purposes.

Improved Mangle: I personally like the idea of improved mangle. It effectively removes a global cooldown on your mangle, and that opens up for several interesting uses. First, you can use mangle more often, which is good for keeping up the mangle debuff and adding general damage (threat). Second, it allows us to keep mangle up on two targets, and you could even go further and add a lacerate to two targets aswell, and have very powerfull mauls on two tanking targets - perhaps if they have to be nuked down at the same time. I have marked this as yellow though, since some might want to take Primal Precision instead over this. Be mindfull though, that having just one point in this talent is hardly usefull, if you are using your abilities everytime your global cooldown is off.

Rend and Tear: This is a really, really great talent. Since LK came out, maul has gotten to be a substancial part of our threat and damage in bear. A single lacerate and your maul damage is increased by 20%. Add to that the maul glyph and a lacerate (and maybe even a mangle) on two targets, and you are dishing out a lot of damage, even as bear.

Berserk: Are you kidding me? Ofcourse you take berserk

Furor: Pretty much the only talent you could take. Some might want to spend two points in Imp. Mark of the Wild, but that reduces your chance of getting 10 rage when shifting into bear to 60%. If you find yourself without rage at some point, and have to reshift, you may end up in a stream of bad luck and be a liability to the group.

Naturalist: 10% more damage, a lot more threat. There isn't much discussing this one. It surpasses many feral talents just alone, and should be in all feral specs.

Omen of Clarity: Yes.

Natural Shapeshifter and Master Shapeshifter: Another big topic of debates is whether or not MS is worth spending "five points" on. For bear, it gives you an additional 4% damage, which is probably somewhere along the lines of 6% more threat. While the first 3 points spent in NS is rather useless for PvE tanking, 4% damage is quite a substancial buff, even if it is 6% less than what we get from Naturalist (which we are taking anyways). When deciding on these talents, i like to compare them to what i could get instead. 3/3 KOTJ and 2/2 PP? Nah, KOTJ is useless, and while i might spend them on PP, that leaves 3 useless points because we wouldn't take NS. PP and Shredding Attacks? Nah, same as before, SA is not very usefull anymore since our threat is largely from mangle and maul these days, and that means that we are still wasting three talent points. PP and PT? Perhaps, but this goes back to the arguments against PT. I can find nothing else i would use these talent points for in order to get a good benefit from all five talent points. If you are desperately trying to get PP, then take it from Improved Mangle instead, and grab Master Shapeshifter. It gives you another buff aswell, and people like buffs, dont they?

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So, from all these considerations, i am left with the tanking spec linked above.. and here: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=0ZxGGscbzceRcczAo0Eczb

Lets have a constructive debate between those that agree, so we can construct a base for future discussions about tanking specs - or at the very least have a centered topic to link to whenever a random player comes by to ask a question

[frankster]

Feral Agression: Rank 8 reduces AP by 408, or 29 DPS per melee attacker. 5 talent points increases the effect to 571,2 AP or 40,8 DPS, meaning you are looking at a protection for 11,8 DPS per melee mob hitting you. While this is still a 40% increase to a great and usefull talent, the skill itself has a problem with scaling. As mobs begin hitting for 5.000 damage after mitigation, the skill itself, and the increase from talents, becomes a minor debuff to use. While still usefull, it is not something i would spec into.

it's generally understood that boss attack power->dps conversion occurs at a different rate to player attack power->dps conversion. what this means is that a boss doesn't have that high attack power so you are reducing his dps by a relatively high proportion.

[dielle]

Imo drop the 2 points in improved mangle and get 2 points in primal precision. The main thing if you wanna work as a MT is to take as little dmg as posible and do as much tps as posible.
ATM our tps is so high imo that the 1 sec less cd om mangle is wasted, with the 10 expertice, you have a greater chance to get capped(5% if i remember correct) there, so the boss your fighting dosnt parry your swings, and then you dont reset the bosses swing timer = less dmg on you.

[Deleted]

Why so serious?

P.S. Remove the yellow font.

I just want a real discussion, instead of arguments being spred around in topics like "I want to tank and heal in one spec!" threads :P

I changed the yellow to orange, should be a bit easier to see now.

it's generally understood that boss attack power->dps conversion occurs at a different rate to player attack power->dps conversion. what this means is that a boss doesn't have that high attack power so you are reducing his dps by a relatively high proportion.

Do you have any type of source on that? "Just believe" doesn't work for atheists, and neither does "I hear he thinks that" for me

Imo drop the 2 points in improved mangle and get 2 points in primal precision. The main thing if you wanna work as a MT is to take as little dmg as posible and do as much tps as posible.
ATM our tps is so high imo that the 1 sec less cd om mangle is wasted, with the 10 expertice, you have a greater chance to get capped(5% if i remember correct) there, so the boss your fighting dosnt parry your swings, and then you dont reset the bosses swing timer = less dmg on you.

Then you might aswell also drop the last point, because then that talent doesnt do anything for you in bear unless you want to wait 0,5 seconds after your GCD to use mangle.

You do have a point with our threat though. Right now im not struggling at all. Perhaps when we advance into T8 and such, we will have so much expertise that PP is useless, but where our DPS'ers might make so much damage that we need the extra threat from mangle. So yeah, perhaps we should drop a bit from Imp. Mangle and put it into PP.

What would you use the last point on?

[The Cat]

That is the same build that I use right now. But as the above poster mentioned, I was also considering moving points from imp mangle to primal precision. Not sure if I will leave the last point in imp mangle or move it elsewhere, the only really viable options would be imp mark of the wild (which in terms of raiding another druid should have, 2/2 at that) or maybe primal tenacity.

[frankster]

Do you have any type of source on that? "Just believe" doesn't work for atheists, and neither does "I hear he thinks that" for me

Well you clearly believe that boss attack power converts to dps at the 14 attack power = 1 dps rate. I suspect you haven't researched this or tested it.

Its pretty cheeky coming out and asking me to prove something to you when you haven't bothered to do the research yourself. The onus is on you to prove that your unorthodox belief is true, and that the raiding mainstream has got their figures wrong, not the other way round.

Do some research, its out there. For example: http://www.wowwiki.com/Demoralizing_Shout#Notes

[Deleted]

Hey, it got you to link a source

[Viser]

Thanks for this post, I might not agree with some of it, It does provide some intresting counter points to what I thought about bear tanking.. I would like to try out this build.

[arel00]

This is a nicely started discussion, so definetly worth taking some time to discuss.

Personally, I am aiming to this build as pure tank: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=0ZERGscrzceRcczAo0E0z

Let us go over the differences between your build and mine.
First, I'd state that I have seen, as you said you have too, no problems whatsoever in threat generation. At this point, we could say we aim for mitigation (in its widest sense) and damage output, in this order. The reason I'm stating damage comes from the general changes in tanks' dps, Blizzard's posts about "tanks adding to the raid dps at the point that you could avoid or hit a hard enrage timer" and, of course, a little extra threat.

What I didn't take:

- Master Shapeshifter (and of course Natural Shapeshifter aswell)
- 2 points from Feral Instinct

What I did take:

- Primal Precision
- Feral Aggression

On overall, I lost 4% damage and 20% damage on Swipe.
I gained 40% extra effect on Demo Roar, and 10 points of expertise.

Let's see the reasoning: first of all, I'll consider the choice of going for Feral Aggression in place of Master Shapeshifter. The immediate thing to consider is: survivablity versus damage. While I did not math myself on this stuff, I can remember some observations I did while tanking Archimonde back in TBC. He was hitting me for an average of 6,5k damage, during the first hits when I had nothing on him saved for snap aggro. After the coming of Demo Roar the average damage was going down to 5,8k, more or less. I'm kind of sad I don't have combat log screens for that, but I'm not building up stuff, trust me. As you can see, it is no small reduction on the boss damage. Refer to that same link for math and stuff.

After this priority, I would tsake into account the choice behind Primal Precision: to put it simple, expertise is both a threat and a mitigation stat. Due to the boss parry-counterattack model, stripping the boss of his parry chance is effectively reducing the pressure he's putting on you, for you are avoiding more of these counterstrikes. In addition to that, while the threat factor isn't a big problem, expertise also represents more damage output. Consider that at this point, you have already lost that 4% damage from Master Shapeshifter. You can also say that saving a big deal of expertise rating means you can focus on different stats for your tank gear, say strength for damage/threat if you're hit capped, or agility/stamina/defense for avoidance and survivability.

Why picking the points at the cost of Swipe damage? This is a more complicate consideration. I thought about this while looking at Rawr math models. At the moment, Swipe is your 2nd lowest threat generation skill, when it comes to rage/threat conversion, followed only by Lacerate. On a single target threat, that is, boss fight (and the main goal of the Main Tank itself, if I may) this is less affecting your threat generation than stripping off precious seconds on the Mangle cooldown, which is, by the way, the 2nd best skill on rage/threat rate, after Maul. While you will probably have plenty of rage, I would rather drop a Swipe and hit an extra Maul than the opposite, when it comes to chosing.
The main problem arises on AoE tanking, for it means dropping a good deal of aggro. This is up to personal testing I suppose. I find no difficulties on AoE aggro due to a good deal of target rotation and cross-skilling all of them with Mangle Maul and FF (and the occasional Lacerate for the Maul buff), alternating those between Swipes. You could also say that you're focus if you represent THE guild Main Tank is boss fights more than AE trash or adds, which would be covered by the offtanks.

Anyway, I hope I have explained my thoughts and what my choices were. I'm open to discussion of course.

[Barney]

Feral Aggression - 5 points that get overwritten if there is a warrior in your raid. 25 mans will most likely have a warrior in your raid. 10 mans, maybe. 5 mans, my gear will outweigh.

I went with KotJ instead and Primal Precision. KotJ... Barkskin, Enrage, Berserk. Fun having some options to do a damage trinket like effect without dropping my defensive trinkets. The cat effect is pretty good as well for grinding and dailies.

I've been 2nd in damage in almost everything I have ran... its been nice.

I can't justify the points to get 4% damage and shapeshifting which I never do inside an instance... it just screams out pvp to me. When Blizzard fixes our mana concerns for shapeshifting this is gonna be even more worthless.

[Nepenthes]

(Disclaimer: I'm currently level 78 using a mostly-bear/little cat spec, but I like tanking a lot more than DPS so I'm plannig to respecc if/when this stops being good enough)


Natural Shapeshifter and Master Shapeshifter:

This is a nice threat boost, but is threat an issue at all? I've tanked all pre-80 instances and found that threat is so easy to generate I'd never consider spending 5 talent points to get more of it. Does this not hold true when doing 80 intances/heroics/raids? I find I only have issues holding mobs when I haven't built any threat up (ranged attackers, adds, not facing correctly when swiping, screwing up and being rage starved at the start and not having swipe, etc) and those are all player skill problems that can't be fixed with a +X% threat boost.


Infected Wounds:
Does anyone have some numbers on how much boss damage comes from autoattacks, and how much from specials that aren't affected by this? I know this will vary from boss to boss but havinga general idea would help evaluate this.

[Blitzzkriegg]

http://www.wowarmory.com/character-t...litzkr%C3%ACeg



that's my current spec, the 3/3 in primal tenacity for our first maexxna runs and very useful for anything that stuns.

feral aggression is a pretty much worthless expenditure of 5 points imo, the -5 rage on swipe maul and mangle is pretty sweet.

primal precision is awesome ESPECIALLY when used with expertise gear because it gives you a 10 flat exp rating, and parry haste is always bad.

infected wounds seems like a duh to me, 20% slower auto attacks from a boss. think patchwerk... incredibly useful for any boss


and the kicker, rend and tear is pretty much useless if and only if you take 5/5 naturalist and 2/2 master shapeshifter. what would you rather have, 14% increased damage on ALL ABILITIES, including white hits, or 20% increased damage from one move thats on a 2.5 swing timer?

[Ishir]

and the kicker, rend and tear is pretty much useless if and only if you take 5/5 naturalist and 2/2 master shapeshifter. what would you rather have, 14% increased damage on ALL ABILITIES, including white hits, or 20% increased damage from one move thats on a 2.5 swing timer?

I think you're nuts - you're comparing 10 talent points (5 for naturalist, 5 for natural/master shapeshifter) vs. 5 for Rend & Tear.

Personally, I'd give up the 5 for natural/master shapeshifter for Rend & Tear. Maul easily accounts for 50% (if not more) of damage on boss fights, which means you get a 10% (or more) gain in overall dps vs. the 4% you get from master shapeshifter.

[Deleted]

arel00 > Not ignoring your post, but ill get around to it later

Feral Aggression - 5 points that get overwritten if there is a warrior in your raid. 25 mans will most likely have a warrior in your raid. 10 mans, maybe. 5 mans, my gear will outweigh.

I went with KotJ instead and Primal Precision. KotJ... Barkskin, Enrage, Berserk. Fun having some options to do a damage trinket like effect without dropping my defensive trinkets. The cat effect is pretty good as well for grinding and dailies.

I've been 2nd in damage in almost everything I have ran... its been nice.

I can't justify the points to get 4% damage and shapeshifting which I never do inside an instance... it just screams out pvp to me. When Blizzard fixes our mana concerns for shapeshifting this is gonna be even more worthless.

Wow, you both went for the "Somebody else will probably do it" and the "If i take this, i can also grind well". I spent quite a while making it clear that this is a PvE tanking thread.

and the kicker, rend and tear is pretty much useless if and only if you take 5/5 naturalist and 2/2 master shapeshifter. what would you rather have, 14% increased damage on ALL ABILITIES, including white hits, or 20% increased damage from one move thats on a 2.5 swing timer?

Theres nothing stopping you from getting both. Rend And Tear is a godlike talent, and as you can see, im quite capable of getting all three that you list here. Even without the others, its still quite potent.

[Blitzzkriegg]

Theres nothing stopping you from getting both. Rend And Tear is a godlike talent, and as you can see, im quite capable of getting all three that you list here. Even without the others, its still quite potent.

true, but at the cost of primal precision, which is great for threat AND mitigation. i could justify taking 3 points out of primal tenacity as my gear has shot up since i specced a couple weeks ago for maexxna, but i still wouldn't lose pp for 5/5 rend and tear

[Shifthappend]

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?drui...h=000000000000

is what I use ...

Note that I use this for Kitty dps too ... end up pulling an average 2.4k dps straight with a Rake / SR / rip / mangle rotation ( Refreshing everything).

the Imp. Mark of the wild is a increase of about 20 stam 20 agi and 30 all resist ... Pretty useful and maxed furor is kinda pointless ... Charge require 5 rage

Primal tenacity is a must ... Stun is every tanks nightmare, 30% less dmg is 30% more chance to win.

Primal Precision ... 10 expertise is like 3% less chance to be parried ... Parried reset the attack timer ... I'm at 10% unparried expertise now ... All tanks need cap

I dont use Rend And Tear ... extra Dps is useless for bear ... No one can steal aggro from tank now with the reccent changes ... And I dont use shred for cat ... Its pointless ... (Unless you have a arm warrior putting things up for you but even there I find having an average of 100 dps increase ... not worth putting 5 point in it)

Same with Master Shapeshifter ... 4% increase dmg not worth 5 talent ... You dont need additionnal aggro

Infected wound... Good talent, I like it. Work on most boss.

I've been tanking 25 Naxx with my guild on my druid... We cleared Spider and Plague wings. We hit a wall at Patchwrek. Bear seems to be the best tank so far.

my char name is Raphi on Cenarius server.

[arel00]

Feral Aggression - 5 points that get overwritten if there is a warrior in your raid.

No it doesn't. Since 3.0, they are perfectly equal. I know the tooltip makes you think it's slightly less AP, but that is currently a tooltip error. Besides, most warrior don't spec into it (only some prot guys, and if you take for granted that one of the tanks will be a prot warrior then you've fallen into the "vanilla trap"). Serious discussions require careful consideration.

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?drui...h=000000000000

is what I use ...

Note that I use this for Kitty dps too ... end up pulling an average 2.4k dps straight with a Rake / SR / rip / mangle rotation ( Refreshing everything).

May I ask what's the reasoning behind Predatory Instincts? You said that you're using the build for cat dps too, but in that case Shredding Attacks would benefit your dps way more. My doubt comes from the fact that PI is not a tank talent at all. The aoe damage reduction effect has been restricted to cat form aswell.

[Shifthappend]

May I ask what's the reasoning behind Predatory Instincts? You said that you're using the build for cat dps too, but in that case Shredding Attacks would benefit your dps way more. My doubt comes from the fact that PI is not a tank talent at all. The aoe damage reduction effect has been restricted to cat form aswell.

I Don't use shred ... After 2 hours of math on a dummy, I found that keeping bleed 100% of the time deal more dmg than trying to shred once in a while with all the buff. Bleed doesnt take armor in consideration, shred does ... All boss armor got buffed by 30% ... Rake scale more with AP... The rotation is WAY easier than a shred rotation, removing the human factor to screw up ...

I simply put those last point there because I had nothing else to take ... I was thinking about Nuturistic Instinct or Brutal Impact ... But thinking about it ... 6% more dmg on crits is a flat 3% increase for 2 point if you have 50% crits :P ... why waste 5 point for a small 4% ???

[Ishir]

I Don't use shred ... After 2 hours of math on a dummy, I found that keeping bleed 100% of the time deal more dmg than trying to shred once in a while with all the buff. Bleed doesnt take armor in consideration, shred does ... All boss armor got buffed by 30% ... Rake scale more with AP... The rotation is WAY easier than a shred rotation, removing the human factor to screw up ...

I simply put those last point there because I had nothing else to take ... I was thinking about Nuturistic Instinct or Brutal Impact ... But thinking about it ... 6% more dmg on crits is a flat 3% increase for 2 point if you have 50% crits :P ... why waste 5 point for a small 4% ???

This is why (if you're serious about offtanking) you should ignore Shredding Attacks over (for example) Predatory Instincts. I was incredibly surprised fiddling around with some gearchecks on Rawr when it kept recommending that my optimal attack rotation should ignore Shred - and that's even with the Shredding Attacks and Rend and Tear bonus. Assuming the Rawr calculations were accurate (and I haven't rechecked with the latest version), there are limited circumstances where you get a boost in DPS from a Shred rotation.

If you're thinking of a hybrid bear/cat build for an offtank role you should probably just ignore Shred altogether.

[cyzzie]

what is your rotation then ishir?