What/How to gem? FERALTANK

[exochaft]

About Putricide, I've been stuck trying to do as much damage as possible through whatever means possible these days -- our Shadowmourne builder has been trying to figure out the abom driving, which leaves myself and our prot pally on Putricide himself... but I wish there was something reasonable for the third tank to do on that fight.

I was hoping that hardmode Putricide would introduce a new mechanic to make the 2nd tank do more work other than pewpew for two phases. Actually, been kinda hoping that would be the case for most fights that only require 2 tanks while others require 3. Blizz kinda puts guilds/raids in a pinch by having usually one person needing a good tanking and dps set by varying the number of tanks very often (suppose there are healers in this situation, too). My guess is that they revolve DPS requirements for all fights around having 3 tanks, or at least that would seem sensible. I know personally that my DPS set is severely lagging behind every other DPSer in my raids since they get priority on DPS gear, which they should since that's generally their only role. If Blizz expects the 3rd tank to DPS on certain fights, they have to expect him to be DPSing in tanking gear or a very poor DPS set compared to the rest of the raid. RNG is bad enough to gear out one spec, let alone two, for progression.

[axxey]

I know the fight mechanics, yes my dps as a tank matters, but barely. If your going to try and insult me, i'll call you a bad for not realizing that blizzard did not take a bear who could go kitty into consideration for enrage timer + hp + dps.. they even came out in a post saying tank damage should not matter on this fight. if it did, how would a warrior (who has the least dps out of all tank class's i believe) help this fight?

I'm not blindly stacking stamina, I'm doing whats best for my raid. (i have agility gems in my tank gear kthx)

8400dps without full buffs tanking 10man... yea, tank dps hardly matters...
We've twice had screwball festergut pulls that ended right at enrage limit, 1 of them right before enrage, 1 of them proced ardent defender, bubbled, dots killed...

Any sort of dps boost should be optimised on any fight that's remotely close to a dps race.

[klondikebear]

8400dps without full buffs tanking 10man... yea, tank dps hardly matters...
We've twice had screwball festergut pulls that ended right at enrage limit, 1 of them right before enrage, 1 of them proced ardent defender, bubbled, dots killed...

Any sort of dps boost should be optimised on any fight that's remotely close to a dps race.

technically your not at the gear level to down that boss then, yes tank dps can help but its not supposed to matter

[getefix]

8400dps without full buffs tanking 10man... yea, tank dps hardly matters...
We've twice had screwball festergut pulls that ended right at enrage limit, 1 of them right before enrage, 1 of them proced ardent defender, bubbled, dots killed...

Any sort of dps boost should be optimised on any fight that's remotely close to a dps race.

I agree with klondike. The encounter wasn't designed on tanks being able to pull a minimum of of 5k dps.

Wowwiki's Festergut page:

In 10 player, 32,000 raid DPS are needed, which translates to 4,700 per DPS class and 2 tanks doing 2,000 assuming 2 healers. With 3 it's about 5,600 per DPS class.

5.6k on a stationary fight is very very easy. If you're doing 8.4k and the other tank is doing 2k then your dps only need to do 4.3k dps ((32000-8400-2000)/5). You can't rationalize gemming for dps increases in tank gear just because your dps can't hit 4.3k.

[axxey]

zugzug?

sorry, my reply was unrelated to the gemming topic, merely a reply to klondike claiming tank dps barely matters simply because he's too useless to maximise his characters potential.

Our 10man kill this week at 8400dps was 3mins flat with no bloodlust, just about my full avoidance tanking set.

Our 25man as i said were screwball pulls with raid healers dropping the ball early on. However, if i sat there in bear form "duh, me bear, me no do nuthing else good" we would have had to pull both of those close calls again.

[Jax Omen]

Saying "tank dps doesn't matter" is completely stupid. Of course tank dps matters. We add 3k to the overall raid dps on an average fight (assuming 100% uptime on a mob we're actively tanking). That's a non-trivial amount of raid dps, and far more than is needed to make or break dps check encounters.

That being said, as a tank your job is to gear/gem/enchant to stay alive. I honestly cringe at druids who gem 20AGI.

Gemming a druid tank is simple. Assuming an agi or stam socket bonus:

Red: Agi/Stam
Yellow: Hit/stam if below hitcap (8% physical hit, many tanks forgo this stat), otherwise Nightmare Tear or ignore socket bonus and gem Stam
Blue: Stam

This is generally the ideal balance between raw health (something druids are fantastic at), avoidance (which is more valuable in ICC than in previous tiers), and armor/threat (always important unless your dps are horrible, in which case who cares?).




As for the edge case of Festergut, it's one of those rare fights that REALLY justify a bear spec with shredding attacks/KotJ/OOC (fuck glyphing for bearkitty, bear glyphs are too good to pass up). I can pull ~4-5k dps BEFORE the debuff from the boss in my bear spec in bear gear, in cat form. Which means I should realistically be doing "real dpser" dps when not actively tanking Festergut... Being a bear who can effectively go cat means effectively doing the fight with an extra dps. It's like 11 manning a 10 man boss. It's THAT good.

It's still not worth gemming 20agi, or trying to tank that boss in a dps set, or anything silly like that. You HAVE to meet the survival requirement or your dps contribution doesn't matter.

[klondikebear]

THE Alamo? or, (no offense) a fake one?

Saying "tank dps doesn't matter" is completely stupid. Of course tank dps matters. We add 3k to the overall raid dps on an average fight (assuming 100% uptime on a mob we're actively tanking). That's a non-trivial amount of raid dps, and far more than is needed to make or break dps check encounters.

I'm not saying tank dps doesn't matter, that once we have enough threat we should stop attacking and make dps do the rest. I'm saying that Blizzard did not make the enrage timers + boss HP around the fact that tanks can do "X" amount of damage. If your guild is going to progress in ICC fast (esp putricide as you need 3 tanks) then your going to have enough dps to kill festergut whether your tanks pull 2k or 10k, it simply doesn't matter. If you're carrying that friend that just came back to the game and can only pull 4-5k, but 2 of your dps can't pull more than the necessary amount than sure, work around it and up your tanks dps. From a progression stand point, tank dps simply does not matter.

edit: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...eNo=2&sid=1#35
a blue post saying that if you can't work around the putricide enrage timer with 3 tanks, but downed festergut there is something wrong. someone is going to say this has nothing to do with it but it does, blizzard knows someone's going to pull 2k on an endwing boss and has factored numbers around it.

[Selverein]

I can pull ~4-5k dps BEFORE the debuff from the boss in my bear spec in bear gear, in cat form. Which means I should realistically be doing "real dpser" dps when not actively tanking Festergut... Being a bear who can effectively go cat means effectively doing the fight with an extra dps. It's like 11 manning a 10 man boss. It's THAT good.

"Real DPSers" should be pulling more than 5k. You'll never ever do as much DPS as a real DPSer while in bear gear and spec. The Festergut debuff will close that gap, but still.

THE Alamo? or, (no offense) a fake one?

Fake. The real one plays on Thunderhorn.

[Jax Omen]

I'm a copycat, yes.

I was just amazed that the name wasn't taken last year when I created my druid.

"Real DPSers" should be pulling more than 5k. You'll never ever do as much DPS as a real DPSer while in bear gear and spec. The Festergut debuff will close that gap, but still.

The debuff is 80-90% increased damage.

Real DPSers DO indeed pull 8-10k.

Being a bear druid who can effectively cat on that fight is a huge, huge boon. Our prot pally maxes out at 5.5k on that fight and our warriors cap at about 4k.

[klondikebear]

Incidentally, at least with the gear I have in my secondary set (tanking - and not what you see in the armory atm), Enduring Eye of Zul IS better than a Nightmare Tear (even if marginally). Why? Well, that's simple and two fold: I'm already well over the DR for Dodge. So, defense adds one avoidance factor outside of dodge: +miss. It also adds more stamina than a nightmare tear.

I gain not only avoidance that isn't on DR, I gain more stamina -- and I gain slightly more crit and a very tiny amount more armor.

Everyone is over the DR for Dodge, Diminishing returns on dodge starts as soon as you have 2 agility. The only time defense is better than agility is at 60% + dodge. defense might give more avoidance than agility before than, but the armor makes up for it. (it's why you shouldn't gem D till 60% dodge, which we wont see in ICC)

Agility provides more than just dodge. It provides crit. More crit = more savage defense. This translates to the non-druid person as 'block'. The more we 'block' damage that we can't dodge/avoid, the better. If you ignore your own innate defenses (be it dodge, missed, or via mitigation - Savage Defense/Armor), you cripple yourself as a tank.

Yes agility gives crit, but at our gear level it doesn't matter. If you stack agility and have 60% crit and i stack stamina and have 50% crit, savage defense will have virtually the same uptime (i'm thinking like 88% vs 86% respectively).

[Auroro]

Well, I do hate generalizing because it's bad most of the time (generalizing about generalizing ftw).

The answer about gemming is entirely dependent on your gear combination. This is why I like things like Toskk's Bear Time to Live Calculator.

http://druid.wikispaces.com/ToskksBearTTLCalculator

Inputting your raid stats while buffed, talent points, etc, clicking on Gems from the drag down list, and clicking Generate. It will tell you which stat would best fit a socket of a particular color. Incidentally, at least with the gear I have in my secondary set (tanking - and not what you see in the armory atm), Enduring Eye of Zul IS better than a Nightmare Tear (even if marginally). Why? Well, that's simple and two fold: I'm already well over the DR for Dodge. So, defense adds one avoidance factor outside of dodge: +miss. It also adds more stamina than a nightmare tear.

So, if I am attempting to gain a socket bonus (with a yellow gem) like agility... then, actually, the Enduring Eye of Zul DOES make sense. I gain not only avoidance that isn't on DR, I gain more stamina -- and I gain slightly more crit and a very tiny amount more armor. The tradeoff is a very small loss in HP. The variance, however, is not huge enough either way to say it's a "bad" idea. In fact, markedly so, the two are so close in TTL that it's really a question of preference at that point OR the fight mechanics of specific fights. One or the other will be favorable in cases where the other is not.

In blue sockets, yes, stamina makes the perfect choice. In red, yep, agi/stam. In yellow, "that depends". And that depends on gear, stats, talents, preference, and specific fight mechanics. I don't think most feral druids these days are gemming entirely AGI gems in red sockets outside of DPS. If they are, I'd say L2P.

Agility provides more than just dodge. It provides crit. More crit = more savage defense. This translates to the non-druid person as 'block'. The more we 'block' damage that we can't dodge/avoid, the better. If you ignore your own innate defenses (be it dodge, missed, or via mitigation - Savage Defense/Armor), you cripple yourself as a tank.

Just because we can gem entirely as stam doesn't mean we should or that it's a good idea.

Edit for some phrasing clarity.

Your link is old link, the gear it tell me is TOGC and there is no ICC gear.

[arel00]

The answer about gemming is entirely dependent on your gear combination.

This. I may add "and on your guild's content".

Everything else is bullshit.