Thrash ALL THE THINGS - Guardian Thrash Build, Gear and Info

Lots of people have been asking me about THRASH ALL THE THINGS build I've been playing recently so I thought I'd throw up my build, gear and info.

Talents:

Notes: This is more for Mythic+. The key talents here are
Incarnation Guardian of Ursoc (Level 75)
Balance Affinity(Level 45)

I personally like Feral Affinity more but the area increase from Balance Affinity will get you more dps through dungeons.

Gear:

The main thing here is getting three thrash relics to increase Jagged Claws trait, here's where to get them.

Fire:

Candle of Flickering Lumens - Coggleston - Lower Return to Karazhan

Stormforged Inferno - Odyn - Halls of Valor





Blood:

Vampiric Fetish - Tichondrius - The Nighthold





Life:

Relinquishing Grip of Helheim - Harbaron - Maw of Souls

Blessing of Cenarius - Cenarius - The Emerald Nightmare

Rotation And Cooldowns:

One quick not here, for DPS, thrashing is higher priority than mangle:

DPS Priority Single Target:
Thrash > Mangle > Swipe - Keep Up Moonfire for Trait Scintillating Moonlight

DPS Priority AOE:
Thrash > Swipe

Tank / Rage Generation:
Mangle > Thrash > Swipe - Keep Up Moonfire for Trait Scintillating Moonlight

For cooldowns, note that Rage of the Sleeper is 1.5 minutes and Incarnation is 3 minutes. Try and make sure you are using Rage of the Sleeper when it comes up to have it for Incarnation.

Mythic Blackhand - Bear PoV

Finally cleared up Mythic Blackrock Foundry. Grats to the new guild Paradise.

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.

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.

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.

Guardian Druid 5.4 Stat Weights

Now that 5.4 is live I thought I would update everyone on my current stat weights and just to repost my working spreadsheet for everyone!

Not much has changed in terms of values of stats but we will start having to work around crit cap! As well, the big dicussion is around how good Dream of Cenarius is and what we should do with our tier 6 talent. I will make a new post on that soon!

Crit	0.0466
Agi	0.0381
Dodge^	0.0319 / 0.0389
Hit*	0.0312 / 0.0328
Exp*	0.0312 / 0.0328
Haste	0.0300
Mastery^	0.0119
Armor^	0.0002

*Before caps, and using TnC see below
^ 100% dodgable or physical damage

Full Google Spreadsheet

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

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.

Guardian Stat Weights - 5.2 Updated

Guardian Stat Weights - 5.2

Crit	0.0472
Agi	0.0389
Dodge^	0.0294 / 0.0422
Hit*	0.0245 / 0.0295
Exp*	0.0245 / 0.0295
Haste	0.0242
Mastery^	0.0125
Armor^	0.0002

*Before caps, and using TnC see below
^ 100% dodgable or physical damage

How to read these stats:

As per any class and post you need to really understand what you're reading to be able to effectively use the information. Here are the key points to consider when using my stats and spreadsheet.

1. Dodge: First off dodge has a highly varying stat weight based on a few things:
- Dodge stat weight with and without Savage Defense up is different! Dodge becomes more valuable the more you have. As you increase in dodge the less and less dodge that is needed to reduce incoming damage by 1%. Refer to the "Reduction" tab in the following spreadsheet
- If you noticed on the spreadsheet, you can alter the percentage damage that is "dodgable". I encourage you to save your own copy of this spreadsheet and play with these to get a fell based on you logs and boss encounters.

2. Hit & Expertise: These stats have two stat weights because it is different based on if you're using Tooth and Claw. With this tier, I thought it best to make these highly evident due to our two piece. There are cases where you may not use your TnC procs. 

Full Google Spreadsheet

Throne of Thunder - Complete Playlist

Here's our first week clear from the fat bear PoV.

Guardian PoV - Heroic Sha of Fear 10 Man

Memoirs' the Fearless

Great end to the tiers with our Sha of Fear kill. Congrats to everyone on cleaning up the tier before Throne of Thunder. Look forward to our on going success.

Guardian Warlord! Clutch Temple of Kotmogu

Thought I would highlight out my 2200 game. Finally pugged my way to 2200 this season. Quite exciting game even though I'm running around. I did play feral for this game, hope to start putting out some more guardian pvp stuff in the future!

Heroic Shek'zeer

Here's a decent point of view of Shek'zeer heroic 10. In this fight the big thing to take away from a guardian bear tank is 1. Lots to dodge and 2. having a juicy Frenzied Regen for explosions.

Hope you enjoy.

Heroic Lei Shi

Tooth And Claw

With 5.1 guardian druids now have the Tooth and Claw ability.

Tooth and Claw Requires Druid (Guardian) Requires level 32

Requires Bear Form Your autoattacks in Bear Form have a 40% chance to empower your next Maul for 10 sec.  Empowered Maul causes its victim's next autoattack within 15 sec to deal (max((AP * $AGI) * 250 / 100, $STA * 250 / 100) * 0.4) less damage.

So here are the assumptions:

1. The cooldown of Maul is less than the melee attack speed of the boss.
2. Tooth and Claw does NOT proc from melee misses, dodges or parries.
3. In this math I use 40% melee damage which was about the total melee damage I take over the course of a raid night. You can save this spreadsheet and adjust the green fields as you wish to get a more accurate number for you.

The results:

Tooth and Claw will increase the stat weights of Haste and Hit/Expertise due to faster attacks to proc more and increasing the amount you do proc from melee attacks connecting.

Haste 0.00004

Hit/Expertise 0.0052

---

Tips And Tricks

1. Track your Tooth and Claw Buff on you and the Debuff on your target. Do NOT spend rage on maul unless these two conditions are true, the rage is otherwise wasted on just damage.

---

More Math:

- Boss DPS: 80000 

- Average Vengeance: ~71000 AP

- Average Tooth and Claw Melee Reduction: ~178000

- Boss DPS redution: ~ 5000 DPS

- % Boss DPS reduction: 6.5%

This just shows how much damage is being mitigated with Tooth and Claw on a single hit and the average percentage DPS being mitigated. Please view the TnC tab on the spreadsheet for more extensive math if you wish. Feedback always needed.

Full Google Doc Spreadsheet

Guardian Druid BiS Items Breakdown

I've finally spent the time to add an items tab to our spreadsheet! What I've done is broken down each of the slots with the best in slot item where 5 piece. If you scroll down there is an Alternatives section that has the alternative to that slot and on the far right the stat weight difference from the set item with our current stat weights.

WoWHead Profile

Results:

Head Eternal Blossom Headguard
Neck   Choker of the Unleashed Storm
Shoulder Shadow Heart Spaulders
Cloak Legbreaker Greatcloak
Chest Eternal Blossom Tunic
Bracers Bracers of Unseen Strikes
Gloves Eternal Blossom Handguards
Belt    Stalker's Cord of Eternal Autumn
Legs  Eternal Blossom Breeches
Boots Boots of the Still Breath
Ring 1 Feng's Seal of Binding
Ring 2 Regail's Band of the Endless
Trinket 1 Terror in the Mists
Trinket 2 Arrowflight Medallion
Weapon Gao-Rei, Staff of the Legendary Protector

Very close alternative is

Head Crown of Opportunistic Strikes

with set shoulders

Couple quick points:

• This is based on stat weights calculated on my spreadsheet and stat should be considered to your "enough".
• Reforging is in the spreadsheet under notes on the right.
• This is without valour upgrades and non elite mode. The elite mode versions are direct upgrades.

Please feel free to save your own version of my spreadsheet to modify as you wish. 

Embedded Spreadsheet:

Memoirs - Heroic Spirit Kings 10 Man