Guardian Druid 6.0 - Mastery: Primal Tenacity First Look

Guardian Druids' Mastery (Nature's Guardian) has been replaced with a new Mastery: Primal Tenacity. 

Mastery: Primal Tenacity causes the Druid to gain a Physical absorb shield equal to 16% of the attack's damage when they are hit by a Physical attack. Attacks which this effect fully or partially absorbs cannot trigger Primal Tenacity.

First I would like to say I'm glad they are changing the mastery. Just a static armor increase was lazy and incredibly weak compared to other secondary stats.

That being said, I have a strong feeling Primal Tenacity will not stay in it's first pass. Yes the absorb is great and I like the whole idea behind the new mastery, but let me give you an example to explain how it doesn't work well with the druid kit.

I'm tanking one mob, say Garrosh phase 2. Just the boss's melee attacks as incoming physical damage.

Sequence of events goes as follows:

Garrosh melee's Tova for 200 000
Tova gains Primal Tenacity (50000 absorb)
Tova gains Tooth and Claw
Tova casts Maul
Garrosh receives Tooth and Claw debuff (reduces next melee attack by 160 000)
Garrosh melees Tova for 40 000 (Not enough to break my Primal Tenacity shield 5000 left)

In this event I have not broken my Primal Tenacity shield and therefore do not get a new one. Next melee is going to hit me almost full and I will not gain a new shield.

My first dreadful feeling from this is, I'm going to have to have a weakaura tracking my Primal Tenacity shield strength and a Primal Tenacity cancelaura macro in order to min/max...

Let's just hope some fine tuning comes to this.

Heart Strike vs Blood Boil *UPDATED*

With some more info put forward to me Zachary here on blogger there needs to be a big update.

tldr: 

Blood Boil is only better than Heart Strike depending on AP, Weapon Damage and the number of targets:

Here is an example with a 31,170 average Weapon Damage weapon.

The Math:

The big there here is that Weapon Damage is also modified by AP. (4.24 AP = 1 Weap Dam)

So the question now: How many targets do I need to have before Blood Boil will do more damage than a Heart Strike?

Heart Strike Damage on Three Targets = Blood Boil Damage x Number of Mobs required.

((545 + Weap Dam x 1.05) x 1.3) x 1.75 = ((3859 + AP x 0.11) x 1.5) x M

M = ((545 + Weap Dam x 1.05) x 1.3) x 1.75 / ((3859 + AP x 0.11) x 1.5)

As a result depending on Weapon Damage and AP (base and from Vengeance) we can find the number of mobs required.

Here is a spreadsheet I've made up with the basics:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AqL7oR0xP-VAdFV2eTlya01FQlZRU1U5blhjLXhEY0E&usp=drive_web#gid=1

SoO - Heroic 10 - Garrosh Hellscream

<Memoirs> - Heroic 10 - Garrosh Hellscream

Done and done with Siege of Orgrimmar. Great finish from my guys!

As well Memoirs is recruiting as we look forward to Warlords of Draenor. Check us out at:

www.MoagBDF.com

Heart Strike vs Blood Boil

THIS HAS BEEN UPDATED, PLEASE VIEW

http://theetova.blogspot.ca/2014/02/heart-strike-vs-blood-boil-updated.html

______________________________________________________________________________

So I've been spending a bit more time with the death night recently so I started getting carried away with the numbers. Without getting deep into some of the stuff I've been doing, I thought I'd share some high level Heart Strike vs Blood Boil comparison.

The basics of this is, Blood Boil scales with AP (and therefore Vengeance) and Heart Strike is not. Plus Blood Boil does equal damage to all targets while Heart Strike does 50% less for each target. Therefore, there are magic points where one is better than the other. Here are the numbers.

My Average Weapon Damage: 31170

Targets BB AP Required

1. 214,794
2. 152,325
3. 110,679
4. 82,047

Essentially what it comes down to is how many targets are going to hit, how much AP do you have and what is the average damage on your weapon.

To see a more in depth spreadsheet of the basic, take a look at this spreadsheet:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AqL7oR0xP-VAdFV2eTlya01FQlZRU1U5blhjLXhEY0E#gid=1

SoO - Heroic 10 - Paragon of the Klaxxi

<Memoirs> - Heroic 10 - Paragons of Klaxxi

I have really been looking forward to everyday of progression on this fight and from the video, bear + scorpion is pewpew fun. Essentially what make this extremely powerful is the scorpions abilities are based off ap (vengeance) plus the combo with Nature's Vigil buff to damage and the healing from damage. 

Enjoy, I did!

Solo Bear Adventures - Spreadsheet

Solo Bear Adventures - Part I - Hagara N25 + Ragnaros H10

The other day, it came to my attention that there exists a spreadsheet of what warlocks can solo... so begins Solo Bear Adventures.

Yes, I know that bears aren't the best for soloing. We're no warlocks or blood dks, but none the less let the adventure begin.

Solo Bear Spreadsheet

I've basically set everything to red and am turning them green as I do them. Note that just because they're red doesn't mean it's not possible, just haven't done it yet.

Garrosh Hellscream - 25 Man Normal - Alt Blood DK

After having to clean up Bad Habit's (my alt dk's guild) on ten man for a couple weeks we finally got a 25 Garrosh kill.

Great work everyone, definitely making some progress as a guild over there!

Bear Proving Grounds - Endless Tank Wave 34

Finally got around to putting in a couple hours to do a 30 wave of the Endless Tank Proving Grounds. Not overly difficult and definitely a little gimmicky but fun.

I did actually enjoy these, the only down fall, 30 min attempts. You can see how this becomes an afternoon project when you doing a half dozen attempts.

SoO - Heroic 10 - Thok the Bloodthirsty

Big dinos are not match for Memoirs and fat bears.

Thok - Max 99 Stacks No Phase 2

Last week I posted a video of 65 stacks, this week we didn't quite manage to get Thok heroic so we did this instead!

 BTW, Thok only goes to 99 stacks! Enjoy

Sorry my cam wasn't available for this stream : ( No bear hat.

Thok - 65 Stacks of Acceleration!

Just thought I'd share this!

Heroic Immerseus & Fallen Protectors

We managed to squeeze in an early raiding day this week now that heroics are available. Had a couple sub 5% wipes on Norushen with our most geared dps away : ( Either way, here are the first two boss kill videos!

Siege Of Orgrimmar - 10 Man Normal - Garrosh Hellscream

So now that week one has come to an end, Garrosh has been defeated! All in all normal Siege of Orgrimmar turned out to be exciting and I've been nothing but impressed.

Thought I would share our Garrosh Hellscream kill, well not exactly kill but defeat. Check out the cinematic at the end as well!

Heroic Lei Shen - Prot Pally PoV?!

Thought I would share our Lei Shen kill on 10 heroic, again from the Prot Pally PoV.

Hope you enjoy.

One Button Priority Macro!?

So there's been some recent buzz going around with a certain warrior last week and a one button macro that plays their warrior (minus major cd of course) so I spent a bit of time looking into what I could do with the information that this is possible.

Just as a start, I don't know what the warrior macro looks like but essential what was happening was the one thing we haven't been able to do with macros, a priority system.

The Problem: (simple examples)

I want to push one button that does the following in order depending on what is not on cd:

Single Target:
Mangle
Lacerate
Thrash
Faerie Fire

AoE:
Thrash
Swipe
Mangle

The Solution:

After some searching and a bit of testing I've made:


#showtooltip
/startattack
/castsequence reset=0.3 0,0,0,0,Faerie Fire
/castsequence reset=0.3 0,0,0,Thrash
/castsequence reset=0.3 0,0,Lacerate
/castsequence reset=0.2 0,Mangle


#showtooltip
/startattack
/castsequence reset=0.3 0,0,0,Mangle
/castsequence reset=0.3 0,0,Swipe
/castsequence reset=0.2 0,Thrash

(Still playing with the resets, more info to come)

How I've Been Using This:

Essentially, for the single target macro, I've just replaced my Mangle button with this. I've kept my normal keybinds of the three other abilities for a couple reasons.

1. Keeping up lacerate. There is definitely times where I need to lacerate to catch a stack of the debuff over a Mangle. Especially when keeping up multiple stack on say Council.

2. Thrash timing. Going back to the example of multiple targets on Council, there are time I Thrash when I'm in range of Kazra'jin as he rolls by to get that extra Thrash ticking.

3. Faerie Fire is our only range threat builder. Keeping with the Council fight, I'm usually the one that keeps agro on High Priestess Mar'li and I do this with Faerie Fire and especially for the first few seconds of the fight I have to use it on cooldown. (Just a note, if you don't already have abilities like Faerie Fire and Growl on mouseover macros, it is extremely helpful for this kind of situation.)

Note: The other great thing about this macro is that if you can't use an ability for whatever reason (resources, out of range, ect) it will still try and use all the abilities. So for example if I'm run up to a mob and I'm out of melee range, even though Mangle is not on CD it will still Faerie Fire.

Conclusions:

In no way do I intent to use something like this to play the game for me but it's nice to have those extra cycles to watch other things rather than what you single target abilities are on cooldown or when you get free Mangle procs. Well that and it reduces the gamer's carpal tunnel :p

Heroic Dark Animus - Prot Pally PoV?!

What is this world coming to when a bear has to make a decent living riding a glowy warhorse to make ends meet!

Just an update, I haven't been posting much for two reasons. 1. I recently switched to a prot pally due to ours leaving wow and 2. we've been recruiting and not progressing as much. We have recently been apping a monk (another reason for switch from the leather wearing bear) and we're getting back on track.

Thought I'd share our Dark Animus kill even though it's from a yucking prot pally pov.

Throne Of Thunder Heroic - Horridon, Tortus, Ji-Kun

Some more Tova PoVs

Heroic Ji-Kun

Heroic Tortus - Kitty PoV

Heroic Horridon

Heroic Jin-rokh the Breaker

Here's our kill video of Heroic Jin-rokh the Breaker from my point of view, enjoy.