Switched helms so I am now tanking with Vengeful Gladiator's Dragonhide Helm and going Kitty with Stag-Helm of Malorne. I did this for 2 reasons.
A. Improve my tanking gear for tanking Azgalor
B. Improve my arena gear for more survivability
I wanted to gem and enchant my PVP helm for arena survivability instead of DPS. So I went with the SSO helm enchant of 18 stamina and 20 resilience. This in turn helped me stay uncritable while upgrading to Ring of the Stalwart Protector and allowed me to shift back to Agility enchant on my cloak and Stamina enchant on my bracers. I also socketed the helm with a Powerful Earthstorm Diamond so now with talents I have 20% to avoid a stun attack... I love the look on Tauren faces when they stomp and I keep ripping thier face.
Since adding T5 gear to my tanking mix I no longer was using the 4T4 bonus for tanking so it just made more sense to shift to helm and shoulders for the 2T4 bonus in Kitty. I am now using Gloves of Dexterous Manipulation in my DPS set. I am pretty sure this did cause a little drop in DPS which I could most likely make up by spending some badges on Nyn'jah's Tabi Boots and Handwraps of the Aggressor but my goal really is to sacrifice a smidge of PVE DPS in hopes of getting my arena ranking high enough to grab Brutal Gladiator's Dragonhide Helm and Brutal Gladiator's Dragonhide Tunic as well as Guardian's Dragonhide Bracers and save my badges incase I need more tanking upgrades such as Embrace of Everlasting Prowess and Tameless Breeches.
Even with gimping my DPS a little by the gear switch I still managed to come in 3rd in TD on our Naj kill last night. Unfortunately I was also in the tank group with no shammy totems or other DPS buffs.
Healing myself after every shield break definately took a pretty big toll on my damage output since I lose energy by not staying in Cat form but you have to do what you have to do to stay alive and beat a boss. FYI for feral druids, pop barkskin before the shield burst and then cast a full rank Healing Touch followed with 1 instant cast full rank Rejuv and your mana should hold up for the whole fight while giving the healers time to catch up.
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4 comments:
Grats on your Naj kill :)
The VG gear is really stellar for tanking. It's light on armor but man, is it good for stam. Especially the helm. It's also not bad for dps, so when you have to dps in bear gear it doesn't suck.
Do you powershift? On Naj I tend to eschew healing myself and just powershift instead. I barkskin and then switch to bear right before the pop then mangle and switch to cat afterwards. I take about 30% of the damage others do and powershifting takes care of energy deficits for the most part, and mana tends to be given back via JoW. Then again, our healers rock and accept they'll be healing up the melee, so it's fine in that respect.
I think once we get more kills under our belt we might have to do our own healing less but I guess for now it is a good saftey net.
Fortunate for me I was able to get T4 chest so really the only VG item I am using now is the helm.
I really didn't think about going bear, does it actually mitigate more of the damage?
Bear doesn't mitigate any more of the damage than cat does - but because you gain 40% HP, you effectively gain 30ish% mitigation. If you take 8500 damage in bear and switch back, you switch back as a ratio of 1/1.4, or 71%. So it's like taking only 6000 damage. If you throw in a barkskin before going bear, you take even less.
I think i used to do this in the Gruul fight... barkskin/bear charge back in... will try it out next BT run.
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