I’d say keep a bear offspec for when you run into the group quests in outland and northrend – you should be able to solo most of those as a bear. Cat is the only druid spec I’ve never fooled around with though (bear is my current OS), so I’m not sure how well they fare on those elite-level quests. You can also just skip them without too much consequence. Plus, bear and cat use the same exact gear up until 85, where the reforging, gemming, and enchanting diverge.
I barely quested at all on my druid – I mostly leveled as resto through BGs and RDFs. The small handful of quests I did were as balance while waiting for queues to pop.
Re: Threat - Is Hand of Salvation still underpowered? I’ve been getting Salves on my Frost DK but it still can get dicey at the start of a fight (especially when the Misdirection wears off).
Well, not exactly. I do keep slightly different sets, with a heavier emphasis on Stam plus occasionally stats like Dodge (e.g., on a trinket) for my Bear offset, with the pieces with more Agi/Crit/etc. being part of the Cat set. But there are only a handful of pieces that I swap out, I only do it because I’m anal, and it’s certainly not a hard-and-fast requirement.
You should *not *be blowing Salv at the start of a fight. You should be holding back on DPS until your tank has a chance to get their Vengeance stacks up. With the current paradigm, it’s especially important for DPS to not immediately frontload all their high-threat abilities, or even to push their DPS that hard at all. You will lose a minimal amount of total damage by taking it easy in the beginning (sticking to auto-attacking if you have to).
Here’s the reason why you don’t want to use Salv at the beginning:
Tanks’ threat is currently balanced under the assumption that they will have a certain amount of Vengeance during a fight. This means that our threat is pretty drastically underpowered at the moment of a pull, while the DPS are all still doing full damage. If you get a Salv in the first few seconds, the total amount of threat it removes from you will be negligible, and you will quickly burst past the tank again. Where Salv really shines is later in a fight, where pulling 20% of the threat off someone’s total will leave them with a gap that they *cannot *make back up again.
Mhm, as a primary tank now, don’t I know it. Don’t even get me started on missing my first three attacks when tanking… how does that even happen?
As a Frost DK (and I think warriors are similar) it’s somewhat hard to do anything without just auto-attacking at the start. I only really have two attacks, and it’s pretty likely that they’ll be guaranteed crits. It doesn’t take very many Obliterate crits for it to get tight.
As to the question, assuming it’s not used until, say 30 secs in (or when Misdirection falls off), can Salve be useful at reducing DPS threat? I’m a bit confused by the tool-tip - it says it reduces threat by 2% every 1 second for 10 seconds. So I’m guess you say to wait until later because then each tick will shave off more threat?
The reason I ask is that I think we’ll be possibly be pulling Baleroc (who, yes, seems to have wings) this week and the DPS requirements seem pretty high (basically 20k per person with two tanks and three healers). Since we’ll likely have a number of DPS riding the tanks ass I’d like to have all tools available.
ETA: Crap, you already answered that question. Thanks.
Haha, yes. Salv is great once the DPS has built up enough threat to make 20% of the total a worthwhile chunk. And while DPS requirements may be tight, I assure you that the total amout of damage lost by letting the tank establish threat is minimal.
Let’s say a DPS does 20k average over the course of a typical fight.
Five-minute fight entirely at 20k DPS: 6,000,000 damage
Five-minute fight with the first 15 seconds at 10k: 5,850,000
Five-minute fight with the first 15 seconds at 0k: 5,700,000
In the worst-case scenario, where the DPS can’t do *any *damage at all and it takes the tank a ridiculous *10 GCDs *to establish threat, you lose 300k in damage off those first 15 seconds. That’s a tiny amount of damage in the grand sceme of things and very easy to make up later.
I wish WoW tanks had something like Pally tanks had in EQ2—a buff that transfers 20% of the threat generated by the target to the tank. I could slap that buff on whoever was doing the most dps, go through my normal taunts/abilities and nothing short of divine intervention was gonna rip aggro off me.
For awhile Warriors had Vigilance (well, they still do, but it doesn’t work the same anymore). It provided 10% threat from the receiver of the buff, IIRC.
Yeah Vig, Tricks of the Trade, and Misdirection were all severely changed with the new expansion, because the developers felt that the challenge and/or fun had been pulled out of the threat management game. To which they had a point: Vig the mage, pull with ToT and MD, and you never have to worry about threat again. If that’s the case, why have threat at all?
In my experience, there aren’t really any other times where salv is necessary except at the beginning. Once the tanks gets vengeance up its pretty much impossible for dps to pull off them. There are very few instances where salvs actually need to be reserved. Front loading damage, with MDs and tricks on the tanks, then salving the dps without a threat drop when those wear off, is what we usually do, at any rate.
Well, Darkmoon Faire is back. What of the vendor-offered herbs are worth buying, either for resale or use? Obviously, I buy anything I can pick myself, as of level 330 Herbalism, because the vendors sell them for a few silver apiece, and I easily AH for more than a gold apiece. And the various leathers. But what about this stuff I am unfamiliar with? Some are up at the AH, most are not…
Ancient Lichen
Talandra’s Rose
Nightmare Vine
Ragveil
Netherbloom
Mana Thistle
Terocone
Lichbloom
Deadnettle
Fel Lotus
Tiger Lily
Adder’s Tongue
Icethorn
Seriously, Blizzard. I’m accessing my WoW account from the same damned computer. I have an authenticator. You just prompted to input an authenticator code. You don’t have to lock me out EVERY other week for “unusual access patterns”.
Bonus, the account maintenance website says the log-in feature is temporarily unavailable, so I can’t even reset my password like your email wants me to.
Anyone else have this problem? I’ve scanned for viruses/trojans and MS Security Essentials deems my system free of them, I just access the game at all hours on my days off.
That happened to me once a few weeks ago when I logged in from a laptop I don’t normally use while tethered to a cellphone for connectivity.
It’s nice that they’re monitoring access patterns for increased security, but the lockout really annoyed me. I have an authenticator. Why the fuck did I bother with an authenticator if they’re going to lock me out regardless?
Exactly. I didn’t even change computer hardware so that it looked like I was accessing from elsewhere. Same MAC address, IP address, configuration, etc.
Wow… i took a little over a month off from the game and came back with a flourish this week! Had some guild attrition while i was gone so i was a little nervious about raiding but…
Tuesday we rock through BoT and i get my Tier shoulders from Cho’gal (woohoo 4 piece bonus - 18 second survial instincts). Wednesday we did BWD and rocked and rolled until we got to Nef. Put in some solid attempts but ultimately didn’t get him… still it was fun. Then thursday night we go to Firelands to attempt Shannox. After about 5 or 6 wipes (each attempt getting progressively better) we got him!!! Great fun, and awesome to get a progression kill for the guild even though we still haven’t downed Nef. Maybe next week we’ll try the spider boss.
Hope everyone is having as much fun as me some times some time away from the game does wonders!
We got one new kill this week (Beth’litac, after getting Shannox last week) but DC issues (me and a few others got booted at about 1am this time), Rhyolith issues (what a buggy-ass fight), and gear issues (I’m just not geared enough to tank Baleroc right now I think, at least until our healers really master getting the spark count high) kept us from getting any farther.
It doesn’t help that I basically have no time to play outside of raid nights so picking up the missed JP items (and tier from T11) is pretty difficult.
Still need to get in there and check out the new BH boss…
