Friday, March 12, 2010

Oddities

I attempted to point out in my last post that my guild achieved I've Gone and Made a Mess on our last venture into 25-man ICC, a fact for which I am proud - it was only our second Saurfang kill, and only our second attempt that night.

I informed my raid leader last week that upon the birth of my child (an event which I expect will force me to take a break from raiding for a week or two at the very least, probably more), I will no longer heal on our guild raids - I will either be tanking with another group or I will remove my healing spec for a feral DPS, but until then I would still have the tree stuff and be available for it.

So this week when we hopped in, I didn't ask, I just tree'd up and off we went.

We plowed our way through Marrowgar and the trash before Deathwhisper (picking up the Deprogramming quest), before I looked at recount and realized we had 8 healers on the run.  I pointed this out, but my raid leader already had a plan in mind - I tanked up to hold on to Darnavan.  Unfortunately some pets and a hunter hit him before I could really get him out of the way, and the damage put in before I could get him back under control made him too weak, and he died about halfway through the first phase.  So I switched to cat form and ran around helping out killing wherever I could and we moved on.

He had me stay in cat form for the Gunship Battle, which was odd to me but since it's a ROFLstomp anyway I guessed it didn't matter.

Then Mr. Imma-vampire-really rolled up... and while he initially told me to switch back to tree (which I expected, as my healing is stronger than my DPS due to my DPS being a tank spec and mostly tank gear), some personnel switched out and he told me to switch back to cat form.

He made it very clear to me that I was to keep Mangle up at all times.

I put out what I think is a respectable 4700 DPS on our second (and successful) attempt.  I actually think the raid-wide 5% physical crit increase had more to do with our success than the Mangle debuff, but that's neither really here nor there.  I put out that much DPS while missing key DPS talents (such as King of the Jungle), having tank-based gems and enchants almost across the board, and having all tank-based glyphs.  Yes, I was far short of the raid-leading DPS of one of our rogues, just shy of 9k, but considering the limitations I was working under I don't think I did poorly.

Examining my performance on WorldofLogs, I had 88% uptime on Savage Roar, 83% on Rake, 43% on Rip, and only 4.9% on Mangle.  I'll have to check, I suspect Mangle is getting overwritten/overruled by someone else's buff somehow.  I had 32 hits/crits of Mangle and it only applied the buff 10 times.  Melee was ~39% of my damage, followed by Rake (15%), Rip (~15%), Shred (14%), and Mangle (10%).  Ferocious Bite and Swipe (why did I Swipe?) trailed down at the bottom.

I need to push that Savage Roar uptime closer to 95-100%, and the same with Rake.  I'm not sure what a good target for Rip uptime is but I've got to be better than 43%.

All in all it was a fun experience and I'm actually looking forward to switching.

Thanks for reading!

4 comments:

  1. Do you run with an Arms warrior? The 26 point Arms talent, Trauma (http://www.wowhead.com/?spell=46855) provides the same buff as Mangle and overwrites Mangle. Trauma is applied each time the Warrior crits and will have 100% uptime on a fight like Saurfang after 5 seconds into the fight. So if you have an Arms warrior with the talent don't even bother wasting a GCD on Mangle*.

    *So many caveats about not using Mangle its ridiculous, 2/2 Shredding attacks required to make Shred more DPE than Mangle, Shred-idol instead of mangle idol required, use mangle when target switching (Trauma won't go up straight away)....

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  2. Yep, we realized later that was the issue.

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  3. It's very hard (impossible, really) to maintain savage roar, mangle, rake, AND rip while in bear spec and bear gear. Not only does the lack of agility hurt your ability to crit and thus gain 2 combo points at once, but the lack of Tiger's Fury and Master Shapeshifter also cause difficulty when trying to gain enough combo points to keep all buffs and debuffs fully active.

    Until you try dpsing in cat spec and cat gear, you really can't blame yourself for the lack of rip uptime! :)

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  4. Yeah, I noticed that. The glyphs is where, I think, it hurts the most - rip is shorter naturally, and shred doesn't extend it.

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