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 Helya - Pie Chart - Bear PoV

A little overdue but here is Helya.

6.2 Savage Defense Changes

Increases chance to dodge by 45% and reduces Physical damage taken by 20% for 6 sec.


  At first look the 20% decrease physical damage taken look awesome and don't get me wrong, it is nice but after further thought I think it's more of a quality of life change than a huge buff.

  First of all a vast majority of damage we take as tanks that is physical is dodgable. That being said, on average, this 20% buff only applies to 55% of the damage we take while we have Savage Defense up. Therefore on average when we hit Savage Defense we will only take 11% less physical damage (55% change to be hit * 20% reduction). Therefore in my mind Savage defense is now 56% physical damage reduction.

  Further to my comment about a quality of life change, say we have a bad Savage Defense and dodge zero attacks. So now instead of our rng dodge we will always take at least 20% less damage. This help with the "getting gib'd" that avoidance tanking can lead to.  Here is a chart for an example of a 1.5 melee swing timer mob for one Savage Defense.

Total Damage Reduction During A Savage Defense.

# of Hits	Old SD	New SD
0	100%	100%
1	80%	84%
2	60%	68%
3	40%	52%
4	20%	36%
5	0%	20%

  As we can see this just brings up the bottom end of Savage Defense which was really needed to make bears a more stable tank.

PTR Hellfire Cidadel - Heroic Kormrok & Shadow-Lord Iskar

Heroic Kormrok

  Overview: Kormrok periodically jumps to the nearest pool of energy, with each pool empowering one of his abilities for a short duration.

Heroic Shadow-Lord Iskar

  Overview: Shadow-Lord Iskar alternates between a down phase with an up phase. Through out the fight players will have to manage Eye of Anzu buff to interact with various encounter mechanics.

Note for the Shadow-Lord Iskar encounter, it will be essential for players to be able to interact with other players with the use of the Extra Action Button. For example, the following macro was very useful.

Macro

   /target mouseover

   /use ExtraActionButton1

   /targetlasttarget

Mythic Blackhand - Bear PoV

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

6.0 Level 90 Armor Values and Equation

While working though my spreadsheet for my guardian druid for 6.0 I had to work through armor values and physical reduction associated with it. Here's my findings!

The actual equation actually works out close to the same format as the current one:

Current

6.0

Where R: Reduction, A: Armor and L: Level

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

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!

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!

5.2 Guardian Changes - Part 1

I thought I'd start keeping track of the 5.2 Guardian changes. There are currently two changes I would like to highlight:

1. Mangle

When looking at the WoWHead tooltip, we can see that the rage variable of the string changes from

$?s114107&s62606[7][5]

To

$?s114107&s62606[7.5][5]

Does this mean we're going to get 7.5 rage for Mangle Crits?! I thought I'd highlight this one first because it's not noted anywhere I've seen.

2. Tooth and Claw

The most recent post on MMOChampion states that there is about a 12% reduction. The MMOChamp tool tips shows

[ 88% of AP - 176% of Agility or Stamina ] less damage

But again on WoWHead we're seeing

(max((AP * $AGI) * 2.2, $STA * 250 / 100) * 0.4) less damage

Note the 12% is from the 2.2 being reduced from the old 250/100 (2.2/2.5 = 12%)

If you notice though the common for the MAX equation is before the stam and still has the 250/100 modifier. If this is the case, we're only seeing a 12% reduction in Tooth and Claw when we don't have any vengeance  Really there is no nerf then. Personally I think this is just a typo on WoWHead