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plonqIn my spare time I have been slowly gearing up my tauren druid. I initially started gearing her up as a feral ball of feline fury, but I just can't seem to master the attack rotation for cat form. In my defence, I have her talents set up for bear form rather than cat form, but I can't see that a few talent points here or there would make that big a difference in her damage output.
For her off-spec, I set up a moonkin form and cobbled together a melange of gear from ToC and the auction house. Even in this half-assed set, I can still put out almost 800 dps more in moonkin form than I can in cat form. Very frustrating, seeing as my cat is considerably better geared.
I largely gave up on gearing up the cat, and decided to centre my efforts on gearing her up for bear tanking. Again, I ran into a wall of frustration. My bear is actually fairly well geared, but even after making a significant upgrade on Saturday, I was still having trouble tanking. I just couldn't seem to generate enough threat to be useful. If I was tanking a single target, I could just stay ahead of the dps if they gave me a good lead. Same with multiple targets. As soon as I had a situation where one or two people were attacking a single target, and somebody was doing area-of-effect attacks, chaos ensued.
I was grumping to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kamiten about it yesterday, and he couldn't understand why I was having so much trouble holding threat. He asked me my attack rotation. "Well, on single target I tend to spam Lacerate, and hit Mangle when it comes off cooldown. I will also try to keep Demoralizing Roar up, and toss out Faerie Fire once in awhile. On groups of mobs I tend to spam Swipe and..."
"Well that's your problem. You need to work Maul into your routine. No wonder you can't hold threat."
I thought about that, and immediately mapped my Swipe and Lacerate keys to a macro that would always cast a Maul before each ability. Night and day. I wish I had known about this trick a long time ago.
As an amusing "druids are totally OP" side note, when I got some new cat gear tonight I zapped myself back to Dalaran before I thought to try it out on the target dummies in Org. I didn't feel like heading back there, so I flew up to Icecrown where there are a bunch of level 80 elites milling about for no good reason. I figured, "One of these should last long enough to serve as a target dummy, and I can see how much damage I do before I die."
I pulled one, and killed it without dying. I pulled another, and another and managed to kill each of them without dying myself. Not bad. Alas, I was hovering at about 2k of dps - pretty uninspired for somebody in the kind of gear I had. Finally I decided to switch over to my bear set, and see how my big-ass bear fared against them. Not surprisingly it took me a lot longer to kill them, but the striking thing was that they didn't seem to be hurting me at all. Where my cat was ending the fights at anywhere from 1/2 to 3/4 health, my bear's health bar was not even moving.
I tried pulling two of them. Health bar did not move. I tried three... then four. Finally I just charged in and AoE pulled a group of 8 of them. They finally managed to knock my health down by about 1/8 before they all died, and in fact it was going back up faster than it was going down after the first four of them were down. Ya, druid tanks aren't hurting too bad just now.
For her off-spec, I set up a moonkin form and cobbled together a melange of gear from ToC and the auction house. Even in this half-assed set, I can still put out almost 800 dps more in moonkin form than I can in cat form. Very frustrating, seeing as my cat is considerably better geared.
I largely gave up on gearing up the cat, and decided to centre my efforts on gearing her up for bear tanking. Again, I ran into a wall of frustration. My bear is actually fairly well geared, but even after making a significant upgrade on Saturday, I was still having trouble tanking. I just couldn't seem to generate enough threat to be useful. If I was tanking a single target, I could just stay ahead of the dps if they gave me a good lead. Same with multiple targets. As soon as I had a situation where one or two people were attacking a single target, and somebody was doing area-of-effect attacks, chaos ensued.
I was grumping to
kamiten about it yesterday, and he couldn't understand why I was having so much trouble holding threat. He asked me my attack rotation. "Well, on single target I tend to spam Lacerate, and hit Mangle when it comes off cooldown. I will also try to keep Demoralizing Roar up, and toss out Faerie Fire once in awhile. On groups of mobs I tend to spam Swipe and...""Well that's your problem. You need to work Maul into your routine. No wonder you can't hold threat."
I thought about that, and immediately mapped my Swipe and Lacerate keys to a macro that would always cast a Maul before each ability. Night and day. I wish I had known about this trick a long time ago.
As an amusing "druids are totally OP" side note, when I got some new cat gear tonight I zapped myself back to Dalaran before I thought to try it out on the target dummies in Org. I didn't feel like heading back there, so I flew up to Icecrown where there are a bunch of level 80 elites milling about for no good reason. I figured, "One of these should last long enough to serve as a target dummy, and I can see how much damage I do before I die."
I pulled one, and killed it without dying. I pulled another, and another and managed to kill each of them without dying myself. Not bad. Alas, I was hovering at about 2k of dps - pretty uninspired for somebody in the kind of gear I had. Finally I decided to switch over to my bear set, and see how my big-ass bear fared against them. Not surprisingly it took me a lot longer to kill them, but the striking thing was that they didn't seem to be hurting me at all. Where my cat was ending the fights at anywhere from 1/2 to 3/4 health, my bear's health bar was not even moving.
I tried pulling two of them. Health bar did not move. I tried three... then four. Finally I just charged in and AoE pulled a group of 8 of them. They finally managed to knock my health down by about 1/8 before they all died, and in fact it was going back up faster than it was going down after the first four of them were down. Ya, druid tanks aren't hurting too bad just now.
