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Tag: Gear

5.2 Guardian Survival Guide

4
March 5, 2013
by

Hello Guardians!

Welcome to the 5.2 Patch Survival Guide. Below you will find a nice list of all of the things you need to know about 5.2. Obviously a lot of this is repeated on various sites around the interwebs, but here we only care about things that affect Guardians. I’ll take you through talent and spec changes, new factions, gear, and finish up with some…..PvP?

Talent Changes

  • Feline Swiftness will no longer stack wit hthe speed bonus from the PvP set. This doesn’t affect PvE at all, or RBGs (since they have a movement speed cap anyway), but it does affect regular PvP. No more zoom zoom flag caps for you.
  • Displacer Beast has been redesigned. A pretty irrelevant change from a PvE perspective, but could be interesting from a PvP perspective. I don’t know if the jump causes you to drop flags, if it does it’s pretty worthless. If not it could be neat to experiment with in PvP.
  • Cenarion Ward has had its healing done doubled. This is actually pretty incredible for Guardians on fights where you are taking constant damage (Tsulong, Will, Stone Guard, Garalon), or have very predictable burst (Elegon, Lei Shi). I already liked CW a lot, and this will make me love it more. Plus it’s even more incredible for soloing.
  • Faerie Swarm can now affect multiple targets. This seems really strong for Challenge Modes, as it gives you infinte kiting on up to 3 mobs. Doubt it’ll see much use in raids, and ME / Typhoon are much stronger in PvP.
  • Mass Entanglement has had its cooldown reduced to 30 seconds. This makes it a much stronger competitor to Typhoon in almost all situations. As always it will still depend on the encounter/map/etc.
  • Typhoon‘s cooldown is now 30 seconds. Obvious change is obvious so that Mass Entanglement doesn’t always straight up lose.
  • Force of Nature has had a bit of reworking done to it. Unfortunately it’s still awful and you should pretend it doesn’t exist. It might be useful situationally for some encounters, but you should never go out of your way to get it.
  • Soul of the Forest now grants 3 Rage instead of 2 per Mangle. Too bad it’s still completely shit compared to Incarnation. Don’t take. Ever.
  • Nature’s Vigil had its damage increase cut in half, but so did the cooldown. The “hybrid” nature of the talent remains at 25% though, which means it’s a straight buff for Guardians. You’ll still take HotW for DPS or pure off-role purposes, but Nature’s Vigil is definitely the default choice.

 

Ability Updates

  • Frenzied Regeneration now scales at a factor of 2.2*Vengeance. This is a 10% buff from where it was before. I’d definitely hold on to your 4pT14 for an even bigger bonus set just in case another fight like Garalon or Lei Shi pops up. Also makes the 2T15 much better.
  • Tooth and Claw also got a 10% buff to 1.1*Vengeance. There was some confusion earlier since datamining had done the automatic math incorrectly, but Rygarius confirmed earlier today that it is in fact a buff. Should be interesting to see how this shakes out now that we can take full advantage of it.
  • Our Mastery got buffed by 20% as well. It doesn’t really mean anything since RPS builds are generally better anyway, and we don’t have enough base RPS yet to make a Mastery build worth going for. That doesn’t make it “bad” per se, but it’s still not a good idea unless you can put 2 full sets of gear together.
  • Both Rip and Wrath received damage buffs this patch. I haven’t revisited the “I’m not tanking what’s the best DPS” problem yet for this patch, but that will be what I look at this weekend. Cat’s problem was pure combo-point generation and lack of AP, while Wrath spam was ridiculous as fuck in Heart of the Wild. I’ll do some tests and let you know how this shakes out.
  • And in clearly the most important change in this patch both Mark of the Wild and Revive have had their mana costs reduced by 55%. I CAN ACTUALLY REZ MORE THAN ONE PERSON NOW.

 

Factions & Rep

There are two new factions. The Shado-Pan Assault is attached to the new raid instance. Unfortunately none of the gear there is “Best in Slot” but that doesn’t mean you can’t find any upgrades on day 1. For example Flanker’s Battletags are actually not half bad, and you can get them at Neutral.

The Kirin Tor Offensive or Sunreaver Onslaught are the new “story” factions. Unfortunately all of their gear is 496 or lower, which makes it almost completely irrelevant. But it’s another rep to grind, so there’s that.
 

Gear

This is the part you all wanted, I know. I was originally going to put it here, but then I realized that would be a shit-ton of work. On a whim I tested the list on the forums (where the real item links are) and IT OMG WORKED.

So yeah you can get your BiS lists here.
 

PeeVeePee

In addition to all of the above, there have been a couple of changes that are straight buffs to Guardians in PvP. Since we’re already one of only two top-tier RBG tank specs, this just makes us even better.

  • Thick Hide now reduces the critical strike chance of all attacks, not just melee. This is an obvious PvP buff since we were weakest against spellcasters already.
  • We also received Guardian-specific bonuses on the PvP set. The glove bonus now increases the duration of Bear Hug by 1 second, which is an extra 10% of your HP in damage. That’s pretty big. Not to mention a longer stun. The 2pc bonus now increases the Crit reduction of Thick Hide to 20%, which is amazing. And finally the cooldown of Enrage resets on a successful interrupt.

That might just get even me into PvP.

And there you have it! I wish you much fun in the next patch :)

Nomnomnom.

: Gearing, Guardian, Mists of Pandaria, Raiding
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Monday Roundup – February 19th, 2013

20
February 20, 2013
by

Monday Roundup – February 19th, 2013

Hello Guardians!

Here’s your news and updates for the last week.
 

T15 RPS Trinket Analysis

I’ve promised this for a few days, but I’ve been waiting to confirm the math before posting any sort of results. As you know most of the new trinkets have been moved over to the new RPPM format. You’ll probably remember the RPPM idea from the weapon enchants. Both Hamlet and Theck have previously done work in this area, but there are two new things to consider:

  • Stacking buffs that refresh uptime.
  • Stacking buffs that refresh uptime and modify the proc rate with each stack.

Now, one thing you have to understand is that my area of expertise is limited to two (2) things: Practical Experience/Analysis (actual gameplay) and Basic Algebra (BEDMAS stuff). I’m absolute shit when it comes to calculus level math. This kind of thing is definitely in the calculus level math arena.

Thankfully I happen to be on good terms with two of the best math people available – the aforementioned Theck and Hamlet (that 2nd link is actually Hamlet & Perculia’s personal blog) – so I asked for some help. Both were more than happy to oblige, and I am very thankful for it. I’m not going to go into detail with the math here, but if you’re interested Theck made a nice PDF which explains the proofs I use in this analysis. You can get it under the “Maths” menu above, or just here.

Just like any other kind of evaluation you need a set of gear to generate the values required to determine what is “best”. I used what I’m tentatively naming my Normal T15 BiS list, which you can find below:

You’ll notice that I overwhelmingly favour RPS pieces. RPS is the best way to “handle” incoming damage, provided you are skilled enough to do so. Not only that, but Hit=Exp>Crit>Haste is the best DPS build, which as we progress through content is going to become more and more important. That’s not to say Mastery and Dodge are “bad” or anything, they’re actually quite good at what they do. I just like RPS better because it encourages the player to aim for a higher level of play.

That all being said, this is what the trinket results look like:

There’s two things you’ll notice immediately. The first is just how overwhelmingly fucking good Gaze of Twins is. What amounts to 8% passive Crit from a trinket?!? Are you kidding? That’s just plain fucking insanity. Obviously that makes the first trinket slot without even looking at anything else.

The second thing is that Rune of Re-Origination is missing from this list. There’s a good reason for that. When using a core RPS build, your stats are going to overwhelmingly be Haste and Crit. Both of these provide (relatively) equal amounts of RPS. Changing from one to the other is at best an RPS neutral change, which makes the proc effectively useless for RPS.

Ghostcrawler recently gave us an update about Gaze of Twins. Apparently it will not actually proc for Agility users:

Gaze of the Twins will only proc for Str users.

Which brings us to our second change:

We’re going to make some changes to this trinket based on testing and feedback. Our goal was to make it decent if you didn’t game it at all but offer some opportunities for enhanced benefits if you did. We’re going to try to meet that goal better with these changes:

- 10 sec duration (down from 20 sec) but with double the proc rate.
- Increase your highest secondary stat by 200% of the sum of your two lowest secondary stats. For example: you have 3500 mastery, 5000 crit, 7000 haste. Rune procs, and you get [-3500 mastery, -5000 crit, +17000 haste]. Same logic as before, just double the size of the buff to your highest stat.

Orly? As you can see above that makes Rune of Re-Origination an incredible DPS/RPS trinket. One thing to remember is that you can choose whether to have it proc Haste or Crit. The question is, which one is better?

In truth, the procs themselves provide relatively the same amount of RPS. The difference is whether you want more mitgation (via T&C) or more DPS. A Haste proc could take you down below 1 proc per 5 seconds. Whereas a Crit proc is a huge DPS increase. I suspect the overwhelming majority of people will take the DPS increase over the mitigation increase. In either case it’s still incredibly good.

But what about Mastery?

You need ~32000 Mastery to cap in 522 gear (when using the Legendary meta). Of that, you can get north of 12000 just from gear. With that big of a difference you should be able to arrange it so that you don’t go over the Mastery cap if the trinket procs by gemming and/or reforging for Hit or Expertise. However once we get up to 535 gear (or even 541) it becomes much more of a possibility that you will cap if using it as a Mastery proc.

That brings our second trinket slot to either Renataki’s Soul Charm or Talisman of Bloodlust. It’s not exactly clear which is “technically” the better choice, as there is some pretty significant variance in the stacking self-increasing proc rate model as the change increases. Theck was running some basic simulations earlier today which peg the model as under-estimating the actual benefit of changing its own proc rate by up to 20% at high deltas.

However since nobody else has even attempted this yet (as far as I can tell) I have nothing to compare to. For now, you can’t really go wrong with either trinket.

The one thing that remains to be seen is whether or not Gaze of Twins will be available to Guardians for Coin/LFR. I haven’t heard 100% from GC on this yet, but I’ll keep trying. I’ll definitely let you know when I do.
 

A look at “Defensive” Trinkets

Most of the stereotypical “tank” trinkets are pretty underwhelming compared to the RPS options. But here’s a quick glance at them anyway:

  • Steadfast Talsiman of the Shado-Pan Assault: Pretty decent as far as on-use trinkets go. Ideal for a huge hit that you really need to dodge. I’d definitely pick this up just to have it on you.
  • Ji-Kun’s Rising Winds: For Guardians this is completely terrible. Just use an FR, it’s not like we’re starved for Rage or anything.
  • Soul Barrier: I like this one, very useful for a Stamina trinket. Definitely grab it.
  • Fortitude of the Zandalari: This one could have its uses, especially as a supplement to Might of Ursoc when needed. I’d grab it just for the sake of having it.
  • Delicate Vial of the Sanguinaire: On paper this trinket looks cool, but in practice it would only be good for fights where there’s a high number of incoming attacks (ex. Windlord). Otherwise it’ll hardly ever actually proc. Pick it up to play with if nothing else (because nobody else will want it), but that’s all.

    • So what do you think? are you exicted about the new trinkets? Let me know!

: Gearing, Guardian, Mists of Pandaria
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Off Topic – January 30: 10 Man Raiding – Why the Ulduar Model Worked

10
February 1, 2013
by

The addition of the “Thunderforged” items in 5.2 has sparked a lot of discussions on 10m vs 25m raiding. Large scale raiding as we know it is dying off. The number of 25m raiding guilds in the world is shrinking due to one simple reason: The onerous task of organizing a 25m raiding guild doesn’t come with enough rewards to make it worthwhile for most people. Having managed a 10m raid team for almost 3 years and having to deal with how unbelievably stressful that was, I can only imagine how bad it is for 25m raid leaders.

I don’t think this is really news to most people. Given two choices that yield identical rewards and the only difference being scale of the encounters, players will overwhlemingly gravitate towards the option that requires the least investment. Those two choices we have right now are 10m and 25m and unsurprisingly players are choosing the option that requires the least administrative commitment. People want to spend their time playing the game, not sitting around waiting for the last 2-3 people to show up.

In order to get people to participate in the larger raid sizes, Blizzard has historically gone with one of two methods:

  • Make it the only raid size available.
  • Offer substantially better rewards.

Neither of those are the case now. With 10m and 25m offering the same rewards, there’s nothing left to entice players into 25m raiding beyond simply wanting a bigger experience. Blizzard has come out and said that their ideal solution would be to simply convert to one universal raid size (15m has been thrown around a lot) – but that isn’t something practical for the players. So the question is how to get 25m groups into stable condition without destroying one raid size or the other.

Enter “Thunderforged” items.

I don’t think it’s enough to attract the large “swing vote” in the player base that simply goes where the item levels are. We don’t know what the exact drop rates are yet, but they’d have to almost be a guaranteed drop in 25m for it to be worth it. And if you go that far, why not just do it properly? Consider:

  1. Split Lockouts: Split the Normal and Heroic lockouts for both 10m and 25m.
  2. Change Item Levels: Make 10N drop loot at X item level. 10H and 25N would drop loot at X+13. 25H would be X+26.
  3. Identical Loot Tables: 10m and 25m must have the same loot tables. Just different power levels of the same items.
  4. Legendaries in Both: Legendary items must still be available in both raid sizes. I cannot tell you how unbelievably pissed I was when Val’anyr wasn’t available for 10H groups in Ulduar.
  5. Keep 10m Challenging: 10m raids must still be challenging for groups using the loot intended for them. 10N would be the same difficulty relative to items dropped as 25N.
  6. Exclusive Achievements: You can’t get 10M achievements – including meta – wearing 25M gear. Can be implemented using the item tag system.

Some of you may notice that this bears a lot of similarity to the design used in Ulduar. There’s a reason for that. It was a great system. The only problem with it was the different loot tables between 10m and 25m. That meant 25m raiders were forced to do 10m for their best items in some slots. That should never happen.

It also retains the illusion of separate progression paths. Those players who play 10m purely for the more intimate experience retain their progression path. While this may not be as difficult as 25m in absolute terms, in relative terms it will still be a challenge. This would essentially be Blizzard implementing what the players called “10-Strict” in Wrath.

Unfortunately there’s one underlying reason why Blizzard won’t do this: Resources. It would require a lot of additional testing resources to implement the model I’m suggesting. Obviously Blizzard doesn’t want 25m raiding to completely die (at least not yet), but I don’t think they’re willing to go as far as to make it the only source for the best gear.

We’ll see what happens, but I’m not holding my breath.

: Mists of Pandaria, Raiding
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Blizzcon! – Part 2

1
October 22, 2011
by

This morning made me remember why I don’t drink that much anymore.  I feel like “bleh” in the morning.

So after staying up until 2:30am putting together yesterday’s blogpost, I rolled out of bed at around 9.  Went and met Lissanna for breakfast and started our day quite late actually, we didn’t make it to the con until 11 or so.

We wandered around for a bit, and met up with Hamlet.  We had a great chat with him about Druids, raid design, game design, mechanics, and various things.  It was a great time.  He even sat with us during the Diablo Q&A panel before leaving to go do his own thing before the WoW Class/Talent/Profession Q&A panel began.

Lissanna and I got into line pretty easily.  We ended up behind another reader of TiB (<3 fans!).  I made sure his question wouldn’t overlap with mine.  Unfortunately the answer given by the devs was pretty terribly worded.  I wanted to follow-up on it and provide a chance for them to dig themselves out of their hole but I was scared I wouldn’t be able to ask my question.

So Lissanna went up and asked her question and I could tell she was very excited when they announced healing mushrooms for MoP.

I walk up and I’m super nervous.  I unfortunately forgot to mention Reesi (:() but I did remember to say who I was, and I asked my question.  It was heavily paraphrased on MMO, but WoWHead got a more complete version of it.  I did tell them that the existing restriction on the 4pc bonus won’t prevent Cats from using it, but we’ll see what they do with that information.

Afterwards I watched the rest of the panel and /facepalmed at a lot of the questions.  Sigh.

Got lunch, bought stuff (yay Griffin Hatchling plushie!), and headed back to the hotel.  Right now I’m trolling the Druid forums and putting this blogpost together.

I’ll have a talent breakdown post up either later tonight or more likely, sometime tomorrow.

: Feral - Bear, Feral - General, Feral Changes, Mists of Pandaria
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Threat, Active Mitigation, and the Future

6
August 24, 2011
by

I’ve been saying that I wanted to discuss this for a while now, but I haven’t actually sat down and done it.  I had intended to talk about it with the Team Waffle crew, but due to logistical reasons we didn’t record last week.  And since I am out of town this weekend, that means I need to get this out there now-ish.  Or something.

GC’s latest blogpost stirred up a bunch of controversy in the tanking community.  Some of the references made were a little oddball, and I wanted to have to some to reflect on the general message before putting my thoughts on the page.  A lot of people are concerned about a lot of things, but I’m only going to focus on how these change(s) relate to Bears specifcally.  Mainly because I don’t particularly care about the other tanking classes insofar as they do not have a huge advantage over another (hi full CTC).

So GC starts by talking about where Threat initially came from as a concept.  He’s right that WoW is a much different game than it was 6 years ago.  6 years ago Threat was a fun concept.  It was how you distinguished a good tank from a bad tank.  Great tanks could hold multiple mobs at once while only using single target attacks.  Tanks had mostly similar threat generation despite large (at the time) differentials in gear.  Today’s (well, pre 4.2.2) problems of fresh tanks not being able to hold aggro vs raid geared DPS didn’t exist.

All of that changed in Wrath.  With the introduction of multiple levels of gear per tier, hugely inflated character stats, and the change to have most tank abilities scale off of either weapon DPS and/or AP (and/or SP) a newly minted tank had huge problems holding aggro off of raid-geared DPS.  Tanking 5mans becomes a thankless job as a result of the anonymity of the Dungeon Finder tool, and desire to tank 5mans plummets.  This sends DPS queues through the roof.

What they are aiming to fix (and by all accounts they seem to have done so) is that problem that started in Wrath.  So since tank rotations are extremely easy now, how does tank A differentiate themselves from tank B?  Through their ability to stay alive.  But more on that later.

GC is right when he says throttling your DPS is not fun.  I used to have to do it constantly during TBC when raiding on my Fire Mage.  Even after Mages were given a threat dump (Invis) I would still quite often have to spend several seconds at a time standing around doing nothing.  That is boring.  Incredibly boring.

Tanks are incredibly busy compared to the days of Molten Core and BWL where we had virtually nothing to do other than stand in the right spot.  Back then tanking was made fun by generating threat, and staying ahead of the DPS.  Nowadays you have tanks kiting dogs around, watching debuffs, dodging meteors, and timing cooldowns.  We, as a specific role, have a lot more to pay attention to now.  Not nearly as much as healers mind you, but far, far, far, far more than DPS.  It’s almost fair to say that DPS have become the new “tank” role in that their main focus is producing big numbers.

He’s also right with respect to secondary stats and gearing your tank.  As a Feral Bear, I don’t particularly give a damn about Hit or Haste.  Since Dodge doesn’t show up on my gear, I’m left with 3 secondary stats to choose from: Crit, Expertise, and Mastery.  Of those Expertise has a cap after which its value declines dramatically.  This leaves us with “Does it have Crit/Exp and Mastery?  Wear it.”  On top of this we’re being given less choice among our gearing options than ever before.  With 2 options available per tier, and one being dramatically terrible, it’s extremely obvious which pieces you want to be wearing.  This makes obtaining gear incredibly boring, instead of something that should be fun and exciting.

GC mentions that DKs are an exception to the “threat stat” rule.  I know he didn’t mention Druids, but that’s because we have very limited control over how Savage Defense actually works.  DKs know that if their Death Strike lands, they will get healed and get a bubble.  We don’t.  All we can do is keep Pulverize up and press as many buttons as humanly possible and hope that we get a bubble.  There’s a significant difference there.

Threat stats are largely a trap.  I’m glad he acknowledges this.

He goes on to make a (important) distinction between the idea of who a mob is attacking, versus who the mob may attack within the next 5 – 10 seconds.  This means that tanking as a concept of a beefy person standing between the bad guy and the squishies isn’t going away.  I didn’t think it was at any point, but it’s nice to be sure.

Now on to the nitty gritty.

Vengeance will be changed (I don’t think it has been yet) to have a minimum of one third of the damage taken in the last two seconds.  This means we will effectively always be Vengeance capped.  The caveats to this are the obvious ones:  Dodge streaks, or bosses with huge swing timers.

Next we get into this concept of active mitigation and a lot of hand waving.  There are no specifics yet, so I hope nobody jumps to any conclusions.  What we do know is that Blizzard wants to replace “threat” as what a tank does, with staying alive.  I like this.  I tanked as a DK back in Wrath before the 4.1.2 (or something) nerf to the ground.  It was a really fun experience.  You could easily distinguish the good DK tanks from the bad ones by looking at how much overall damage they were taking.  I really look forward to that concept returning to all tanking classes.  The caveat behind this is that the different implementations of it will need to be fun and balanced.

GC goes on to make some examples of how this could be done, but we’ll have to wait and see.  I can promise you that myself, Reesi, and the entire team here at TiB will do our utmost to MAKE DAMN FUCKING SURE that it works.  However we can’t do everything alone.  When the 4.3 PTR finally goes up, expect us to make a thread on the forums for you, our readers, to post feedback on how you feel about the changes.

I’ll be honest.  I don’t exactly trust the CMs to commmunicate our feedback correctly.  We have our ways of contacting people inside Blizzard directly, and we will use them to make sure that our concerns (or praise as the case may be) are heard.

: Cataclysm, Feral - Bear, Mathiness, Raiding
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