A Primer on Kitty DPS, Part 1 (Mechanics, Everybody Else, and the Rotation)

Kaethir's back for round 3!

Please see the caveats from the Bear and Tree primers.

Please add to those caveats that at the time I began writing this, I'd only actually had a strict feral DPS spec for essentially one and a half raids, so while I think I know what I'm talking about, I may be off a little bit.

Mechanics

Feral DPS is one of the more difficult rotations to pull off.  To be great it requires keeping track of 3 boss debuffs, 3 player buffs, and timing cooldowns of these with how much energy and combo points you have and can generate.  Our debuffs are two bleed effects and a bleed-damage-increasing effect.  Our non-static buffs increase our physical damage by 30% (finishing move, duration varies), increases damage done by 40 for 6 secs (and returns energy!), and reduces the energy cost of all abilities by 50% for 15 secs.

Due to the nature of the beast, Kitties do best on stationary fights where they can simply lock in to their priority system of a rotation and ignore everything else.  In ICC, fights like Deathbringer Saurfang and Festergut are pretty much the Cat's meow (I'm sorry, sometimes I can't help being punny.)  There is basically no movement and no target switching involved.  We get a lot of our DPS from our two bleed effects - Rake and Rip - and the interactions between those, Mangle, and Shred.  Yet still, the biggest chunk of our DPS comes from pure melee white damage.

Since one of our most important DPS abilities (Rip) really wants to have 5 combo points every time we use it, and our only AOE ability (Swipe) is too energy-intensive to use for more than a brief burst, we don't tend to shine in fights where there are lots of adds we have to deal with, or lots of target switching for one reason or another.

Even more important than that, though, is Savage Roar.  Since it increases the damage done by every attack we do, it is of utmost importance that we keep it up at all times.  As you'll see below, it's the highest priority in our stack.

A side effect of this is that one of the most effective gemming strategies for us CAN be to stack Armor Penetration.  I will explain that emphasis later.

Also, because you are a Feral Druid, much like bears you will talent yourself into Leader of the Pack, increasing physical critical chance across the raid.  Depending on your exact spec, you may or may not provide the random chance of heals that the typical bear talent spec does.

What Everybody Else Needs to Know

What your raid needs to know first and foremost is that if it is possible to assign you a task that lets you rip into a single target (i.e. leave you on Deathwhisper's shield) it will maximize your ability to help the raid.  Not that you're useless otherwise, it's just that those types of tasks are how you can put out the most damage you're going to do, and as a DPS that's almost the most important thing you can do.

Secondly, if your raid is cohesive enough to allow for it, Blood DKs should be targeting you with Hysteria in stationary fights as previously mentioned - you can stack all of your buffs with it and it helps every single one of your attacks rather than just some.

Other than that, it's standard Druid stuff - you have a raid-wide static buff (Leader of the Pack, in this case) and a raid-wide castable buff (Mark/Gift of the Wild), and you can Hibernate, Cyclone, Root, and Battle Rez.

This post seems rather underwhelming after my previous entries - perhaps because there's a little less interaction between other players and DPS than there is in the other direction.

The Rotation

Cats don't exactly have a set rotation.  They have a priority system, one which can be brutal if you miss on a part of it, but it goes like this, quoted from Elitist Jerks:

1. Keep up Savage Roar
2. Keep up Mangle
3. Keep up Rake
4. Use shred for CP regeneration (remember, that points 2 and 3 are more important)
5. When at 5 CP and Rip is not up, use Rip
6. When below 30 Energy, use TF
7. Use Clearcast Proccs for Shred
8. When at 5 CP and Rip and SR are running with 8 seconds (might be longer, depending on your gear) or longer each, use FB
9. When Rip and SR will drop at nearly the same time (with less than 3 seconds difference), try to recognize it early. Then use SR with a small amount of CP to desynchronize both timers.
10. Use Berserk only at high energy, (but not higher than 85) not directly after TF and as often as possible. If you will get Hysteria or some boss mechanics will enhance your damage, save it for these situations.

With the recent changes to Mangle, keeping it up is easy - hit it once a minute.  That's about the only part of this that's really easy.

The post I pulled that from explains a little farther on why some items are further up or down the list.  Basically, the idea is that the abilities that buff more things are more important - Savage Roar buffs everything, Mangle buffs Rake, Rip, and Shred, and Rake and Rip buff Shred (but... Rip is less efficient if it's not at 5 CPs).

Among the things I have learned is that one of the quickest ways to get better at Kitty DPS is to understand that while you have to follow this system, you also have to understand the concept of energy efficiency.  In other words, if you already have a Rake up, don't Rake again until it falls off.  And if it will fall off before your GCD, WAIT for it to fall off, then hit Rake.  If you clip the last tick, you have made the energy you spent on your last Rake less efficient.  The same is true for Rip, and Savage Roar, although in a slightly different manner.

Being able to wait for the split second it sometimes takes for things to fall off helps in more ways than is immediately apparent.  In addition to making the energy you spent more efficient, it forces you to give your energy a small amount of time to regenerate, which means that when you do fire off that next ability, you have more energy to go after the next one immediately, if that is so needed (and it often is).

I have often heard that certain DPS classes have a very smooth rotation.  For example, I have some limited exprience with Ret Pallies, and what I have been told bears out my experience - that is, once you start into your rotation, it's fairly smooth - you use whatever ability is off cooldown.  Cat abilities (for the most part) don't have cooldowns, so one of the daunting tasks facing a new Cat is understanding which ability it is most important to use when, and why.  Hopefully, between the explanations above and those coming when I go through Specs and Glyphs will make the whys a little more clear.

Whew.  That was a long time coming!  I (can't) promise the next post will come quicker (but I expect it will)!

Trees Make Good Tank Heals, Too!

I was skimming over some blogs the other day when I stumbled across a post by Vixsin of Life in Group 5, a post in which he discusses shamans and the desire to be a capable tank healer instead of the always-assigned raid healing.  Lo, and verily hath he filled the role of muse, and cometh to deliver unto me the gift of a blog post.

I hope you know what I just said, because I'm not sure I do.

At any rate I was struck by the similarity of some of his thoughts to ones I posted waaaaay back at the beginning of ABITT's life.

I didn't really go into detail, and seeing Vixsin's incredibly well-organized, well-laid-out, and detailed explanations led me to want to do something similar to my original post.  A decent chunk of this will overlap with the mechanics discussion in my first Primer on Tree Healing post, but I think this will be a more understandable method of going about it.

For reference, here are the healing spells available to Resto Druids, in no particular order, with the abbreviations I'll be using for them in parenthesis:

Rejuvenation(R), Regrowth(RG), Lifebloom(LB), Nourish(N), Swiftmend(SM), Healing Touch(HT), Wild Growth(WG), and Tranquility(T).

Here's some more reference material for you, in the form of talents which affect these spells (leaving off talents that affect them all relatively equally):

Empowered Rejuvenation(ER), Empowered Touch(ET), Gift of the Earthmother(GotE), Improved Rejuvenation(IR), Improved Tranquility(IT), Living Seed(LS), Naturalist(Na), Nature's Bounty(NB), Revitalize(Re), Tranquil Spirit(TS), Genesis(G), Moonglow(M), Nature's Splendor(NS), Nature's Majesty(NM).

Whew.  That's a lot of linkage!  You probably didn't bother reading all the popups from that (much less actually clicked the links), but that's ok, I don't think you actually need to know what all of them are.  In a minute or ten I'll try to make it all make sense.

Now, instead of just leaving them all shotgunned at you, I'll try to associate each of these talents with the spells that they improve. To whit, in all my noobish-html-table-skill (if it looks bad, I'm blaming the post editor for removing supposedly unnecessary nbsp's or something):

Spell	Talent
	ER	ET	GotE	IR	IT	LS	Na	NB	Re	TS	G	M	NS	NM
R	x			x					x		x	x	x
RG	x					x		x			x	x	x
LB	x		x								x		x
N		x				x		x		x		x		x
SM						x
HT		x				x	x			x		x		x
WG	x								x		x
T	?				x					x	?

I hope that makes half as much sense to you and/or looks half as good as I had originally intended. If so, I count it a win.

Without going into even more excruciating detail, the point I'm trying to get across is that while you can't really take enough talents to be the best at everything as a Tree (there's too much to spread it all around,) the talents that assist individual spells help enough of a variety that you won't be limiting your abilities in one area to work in another.  If you've focused on one role or the other, you're going to be better at it - but not much!

Note that a lot of the talents that benefit Nourish also benefit Healing Touch.  You take these if you want to pretend that you're a paladin healer - you get to focus on having a fast cast smaller heal and a longer cast big heal.  These Trees tend to be a little better at being tank healers than raid healers.  A lot of times you'll also pick up talents for Lifebloom as a tank healer - that's really where it shines.

If you've gone the other route, Wild Growth, Rejuvenation, and Regrowth, you'll tend to be a better raid healer.

You don't have to skip more than 1 or 2 of these talents, but you DO have to make cuts somewhere.  There's even another talent (Nature's Grace) that I didn't mention, which would benefit Regrowth, Nourish, and Healing Touch (and maybe even Lifebloom too!), and I have all of these talents except for Nature's Grace, Tranquil Spirit, and Naturalist.  So, I've currently got a small advantage for raid healing over tank healing.

Note that I said small - I could honestly find 3 points (probably from IT and/or Re) to take Nature's Grace, or maybe all 5 from those two spots to take Tranquil Spirit, and even without those you're talking about a difference of 10% mana cost of HT and N, or 20% casting speed increase for 3 seconds on crits.  Those are nice bonuses but the majority of my heals would remain the same.  Lifebloom, pretty much the quintessential tank-healing HoT, wouldn't change at all.

Gear and glyphs, of course, also figure in, but much like the last few talent points, you're talking about small shifts rather than big ones - if you focus all the way one way or another it can make a somewhat significant difference, but if you don't want to pigeonhole yourself, it won't hurt you either!

These last three points mean that, barring strange itemization or off-the-wall talent specs, Trees don't have to change specs to focus on tank or raid healing!  They're not going to be bad at either no matter what spec they have!

How so, you ask?  Well let me tell you.

They change the spells that they are using.  That's why we have so many!

Assigned as a tank healer, my spells of choice are going to be Lifebloom, Rejuvenation, Regrowth, Nourish, Wild Growth, Swiftmend, and Healing Touch, in... roughly... that order.

Assigned as a raid healer, my spells of choice are going to be Rejuvenation, Wild Growth, Swiftmend, Nourish, and Regrowth, and again, in more or less that order.

Notice the major differences - as a tank healer, spells that have a casting time are added (as in HT), or moved closer to the top of the priority list (a la Nourish and Regrowth), where as in my raid healing I focus more on spells that are instant cast (to allow me to heal more players in shorter time).

Just as with all aspects of being a druid, we are VERSATILE - perhaps moreso than a lot of folks realize - and our only true limitations as a healer are that we don't have a way to shield another player, and we can only remove curses and poisons.

Don't be afraid, as a Tree, to tell your raid leader that yes, you CAN tank heal, or that you're more comfortable with it than raid healing, because you're perfectly capable of that role!

... and I'm still unhappy with this post, but I'm gonna put it up anyway, 'cuz that's how I roll... for today, at least.

A Primer on Tree Healing (Part 1, Mechanics and Everybody Else)

It's time to start another primer, this one all about how to be a tree.  Not the kind of tree that stands around and looks pretty all day, though, I'm talking how to be the kind of tree that helps all the rest of your buddies kill things by keeping them alive.  Since I just finished a primer on bear tanking, you can probably guess that I'll use a similar structure to attack the complexities of being a tree druid.  I might cover it a little quicker, perhaps one post shorter, but the general idea is the same.

Or not, since I'm covering healing this time, instead of tanking.  Since there's a lot less interaction from other roles to healers, there's a lot less that really needs to be talked about, so we can condense a good chunk of the discussion.

The Mechanics

Much like how bear tanks are a little different than other tanks, tree healers are a little different than other healers.


I'll get to the part that most people talk about, but start with the other part.  I don't know much about shaman healers, but unlike priests and paladins, trees have no shields with which to absorb damage on their healing targets.  As a tree, this means that you have to use your instant-cast heals appropriately, and make sure they are off cooldown when you need them.

I said instant-cast heals, not HoTs.  Healing over Time spells are not for what I am talking about.

With rare exceptions due to set bonuses, glyphs, etc, none of the druid's instant-cast HoTs cause a heal when the HoT is placed on the target.  This means that your instant-cast heals are your only real way to try to pull out emergency healing, with the quick-cast Nourish a close second.

Speaking of HoTs, that's the second difference between druids and other healers.  We have 8 total healing spells, over half of which are pure HoTs or cause HoT effects.  We have only 1 spell that is always an instant heal, and unless we're using the associated glyph it costs us a HoT on the target to use it.  We have 1 way to turn any spell into an instant spell, but it's on a cooldown.  We have only 2 spells that can heal more than one target at once, but they're both range-limited and one is both channeled and has a long cooldown, which means in most situations it's reserved for emergency use only.

The other important thing to note about trees is that they generate the Tree of Life aura buff, which increases healing received on all targets in its range by 6%.  That's right, the first tree druid you add to a raid means every other healer in the raid just got 6% better.  It's really hard to judge just how effective healers are in comparison to each other because how do you account for something like this?  You can't.

So we come down to healing rotations.  Frankly, I've never focused on specific healing rotations, especially when healing raid-wide.  However, it's important to understand how different spells interact.

Even after it's been nerfed a couple of times, the spell you have to "manage" more than any other is Lifebloom.  This instant cast HoT has a short tick down in which it heals every second, then when it either falls off or is removed it "blooms" for a large single-hit heal and returns half of the mana cost to you (of 1, 2, or 3 casts depending on how many stacks are on the target.)  One of the nerfs it got was to nearly double the mana cost of it, which makes dropping 3 stacks on a target an expensive proposition.  It also means that maintaining (or, "rolling") 3 stacks on more than 1 target (which you used to be able to do on 2 tanks at the same time) nearly impossible.

So we have 3 basic schools of thought on how best to manage Lifebloom.  I've used each at different points depending on length of fight, tank healing needs, healing role I'm performing, and the angle of moon from the equator at 3:14 AM that day.  Which is to say at random.  Anyway, here they are.

Fast cast and roll... cast 3 stacks quickly and recast 1 stack before the bloom to keep the HoT portion rolling.  Costly from a mana perspective - three times the base cost to set up and one times every so often to maintain the stacks without getting the big bloom, but an excellent method during high-damage periods on tanks as it keeps our fastest HoT rolling, and we need it at max strength asap when these high-damage periods come.

"Slow roll"...  similar to the first method, but do not cast the 3 stacks immediately at the beginning.  My preferred method, when I can control my OCD and leave a tank without 3 stacks for a bit.  Gets the benefits needed for high-damage periods with a slower mana output at the start.

"Slow no-roll!"  Similar to the second method, but rather than continually rolling the 3rd stack in, let the stacks bloom after you get to 3 stacks on the target.  Reduces the mana load on the tree and gets the best healing-per-mana ratio, but requires even more attention to the lifebloom stacks and doesn't provide the best HPS.

Outside of Lifebloom, we have Rejuvenation, which is one of our go-to spells as it is instant-cast, heals for a reasonably large amount per mana, and lasts for a fairly long time.  The only downside is that there is no instant heal (at least not normally), and it only ticks every 3 seconds.  Our other long-running HoT is Regrowth, which applies a decent heal when cast and an 18-second HoT effect.  Our two group HoTs are Wild Growth (which I will bow down at the altar of in a moment) and Tranquility.  Tranquility is an emergency-use only type ability, but it is a very strong medium-length AOE HoT, although it has a long cooldown and is channeled.  I should note that technically Tranquility is not a HoT, it will not get any benefit from bonuses to "Healing Over Time" spells, but it might as well be one.

Wild Growth is the single most amazingly awesome healing spell I have ever seen.  The limited 15-yard range on the splash heal is the only thing that keeps it from complete brokenness.  It's pretty strong, it ticks quickly, it has a relatively short cooldown, it hits 5 (6 with the glyph) targets, and it's instant cast.  It's a smart heal - you get to pick 1 target, and the other 4 or 5 are chosen according to who needs the most healing in range of the spell, and that's raid-wide, not just party-wide.  When assigned to raid healing (and even when not) it's an awesome tool, especially when groups that have to be close together (hello, melee!) are going to be getting a fairly large chunk of damage.  It's almost always among the top 2-3 spells for the heals I generate, and on fights with a lot of raid-wide damage it's number 1.

Healing Touch is our long-cast big single-target heal.  I use it most often in 2 situations: first, in situations such as Lord Jaraxxus' Incinerate Flesh, where you need to fulfill a large healing requirement, and two, when I need big heals fast and Nature's Swiftness is up.  A lot of folks Macro NS and HT together so that they don't use HT without NS unless they absolutely have to.

Swiftmend is our instant cast heal.  Even glyphed, it requires a Regrowth or Rejuvenation stack on the target, and if not glyphed it eats that HoT off the target.  If it didn't have a cooldown it would be one of my most-used abilities.  As it is, it is an excellent spell for emergency situations, allowing you to pull a tank or dps out of danger quickly.

Nourish provides the tree with a fairly large medium length cast time direct heal.  Without the glyphs and talents to properly support it, it is a solid but not amazing spell.  Many trees that focus on tank healing glyph and spec to make this as powerful as possible, as it quickly becomes a very strong spell for its mana cost and casting time.

Move along, nothing (more) to see here...

How to Deal with a Tree

Anyway, since most dps and tanks don't have major interactions with healers during fights (it's almost all the other way around, healers acting on other raid members), this doesn't alter much with the way other raid roles work with healers.  For most folks, the healers are just there to keep us alive, and maybe sometimes we need to distract/kill something that's trying to eat them.  What I've laid out here is good information to know, but really doesn't affect much in your raiding.

For raid leaders, however, it's important to understand how healers do things so that you can make healing assignments with respect to each of your healer's strengths.  So what do you need to know?

Properly talented, glyphed, and geared, trees can be excellent at either major raid healing role, be they tank healing or raid healing.  Even if you assign them to the role that they are not properly set up for, they're still fairly powerful healers, but you won't be getting the most out of them.  Trees that have focused on lifebloom or nourish tend to be better at tank healing, and trees that put emphasis on rejuvenation and/or wild growth tend to make better raid healers.  More than any other class, though, I see trees as hybrid healers - they keep HoTs up on one tank and spread around Rejuvenations and Wild Growths on everybody else.  Still, though, you need to find out how your tree is set up and what they, as a healer, are comfortable doing.

You'll also need to be able to judge how well geared a tree druid is.  Spellpower and Spirit, followed by Intellect, Stamina, and Crit Rating, are our key stats.  We need a little less stat sheet spellpower than healers of other classes because our Spirit provides us with bonus spellpower, but we should be within a couple hundred points or so.  Trees that forfeit spirit for intellect are hurting themselves for long fights, although they have larger mana pools they won't be regenerating mana as quickly, and it costs them spellpower.  The rest should be mostly self-explanatory.

Thanks once again for reading, I hope you've found this useful.  Tune in soon for a look at the tree spec I run as well as a look at the T10 set bonuses from a tree perspective!

A Primer on Bear Tanking (Part 2, the Mechanics)

I previously went over how to play with a bear. The next logical step in this crazy little path I've laid out in my head is to cover how to play AS a bear. We'll divide it up to try to make it sane, and looking at the length of this it'll take more than one or two posts. I'll try to split it at spots that make sense.

The Mechanics

In order to understand why we'll make certain decisions in the spec and gear we choose, you need to understand the mechanics that make a bear, a bear.  I'll try to cycle through each of the major categories.  For tanks, this means, in no particular order, threat generation, damage mitigation, damage avoidance, and what to do in an emergency.

Step 1: Threat.

A tank's number one job is to hold aggro on the mobs that are going to try to do bad things to your party or raid.  As such, the number one thing a tank should be worried about (almost) all the time is threat.  How to maximize it in different situations is therefore very important.

Every class of tank generates threat a little differently.  Bears have a set of abilities for single-target threat, and couple to generate AOE threat.  I highly recommend marking targets as a bear, even when not needed, since your single-target threat generation is much stronger than your AOE threat generation, and if your DPS stays on YOUR target, it's much less likely that anything's going to get loose.  If your DPS complains that this means they can't max their DPS, tell your healer to let them die when they pull mobs off you.  What follows is how I work on generating threat, not necessarily the best method, but it works for me.

Once I have my first target (and more, if it's necessary) marked, I try to start my pulls with a feral faerie fire (FFF) on my main target.  It's ranged, it does a small amount of damage, and generates a reasonable amount of threat.  If I'm not corner-pulling, I follow that up with a charge to put myself either right on the single target, or right in the middle of a group.  If it's a group, SWIPE, if not, Maul and Mangle.  Once that's accomplished, I follow these simple rules to keep enough threat on target.

Maul is an "on-next-attack" ability and doesn't use the GCD.  Use it every single attack.
If FFF is off cooldown, use it.

If you are focusing on a single target:
If Mangle is off cooldown and you either have 5 stacks of Lacerate on your single target, or the Mangle debuff is about to fall off the single target, use it.
If Lacerate is off cooldown and either not at 5 stacks or the debuff is about to fall off, use it.
Even if you are focusing on a single target, if there are multiple mobs toss an occasional swipe out there to keep up the group aggro, especially if a DPS or two is going to AOE.

If your DPS crew is going to go nuts with AOE:
Swipe.  Much and often.  You don't have much other choice.

I try to find time to use Demoralizing Roar, especially against large groups of mobs.  The attack power reduction isn't huge, but every little bit helps.

You don't want to have to use your taunts, but when things go a little awry, don't forget that you can Growl or use Challenging Roar to try to reestablish your aggro.

I don't have the link handy, but some folks have gone into exquisite mathematical detail of the optimum rotations for threat generation depending on whether you have the Improved Mangle talent or not.  I prefer a more fluid approach such as this.

Also note that using Berserk and Mangle-spam is a very effective method against small groups, and should be used against single-target once the 5-stack of Lacerate is up and rolling, barring the need to save it to stop a fear-related wipe.

Tied in to threat generation as a bear is rage generation.  We need rage to use most of our threat-related abilities (FFF is cool, we don't need to be angry to light you up), and we need things swinging at us to generate rage.  We have talents that allow us to generate rage when we crit, and when we dodge.  Since we're not limited by our attack speed in dodging, AND we get rage for being hit anyway, it becomes very important for us to keep things mad at us instead of everybody else.  Just in case you didn't already have enough reasons to believe this is your number one job.*

Step 2: Damage Mitigation.

I'm going to group a couple of couple of different items in here that probably aren't technically damage mitigation, but given the nature of tanking they might as well be.

The first and biggest piece of damage mitigation is armor.  As druids, we can't wear plate or mail and we can't use a shield to block parts of incoming attacks.  So we have to rely on our leather armor affected by our dire bear form and talents to boost our armor to respectable levels.  Fully talented, we get a nearly 400% increase (I can't quote you the exact number off the top of my head, I believe it's 380%) to our stat sheet armor when we shift into bear form.  I sit around 6500 armor pre-bear form, and nearly 30k after the shift, currently.  We'll typically have the highest base armor of any similarly geared tank, but again, we have no shield to help further mitigate attacks.

We do have a faux shield, however.  The trained ability savage defense gives us a shield-like damage reduction based on our attack power any time we deal a critical strike.  This turns two stats that would otherwise only relate to threat generation for us (namely attack power and critical strike chance) into mitigation stats.  This makes it important for us to have every chance we can to crit, and makes talents such as Primal Gore key to our survivability.

We also get Improved Leader of the Pack, which further increases the importance of critical strike chance with a bear.  Bears already get more HP than anybody else, and thus we get a bigger boost than any other class.  While not directly mitigating damage, this acts much like Savage Defense, extending our survivability by giving us small boosts at periodic intervals.

Speaking of HP, you may have heard, bears get ridiculously large HP pools.  Stamina is very important to us, but once we have enough HP to survive burst damage (51k fully raid buffed is a good target at the moment) it becomes important to focus on the stats that provide other avenues to suvivability - agility, dodge, crit, etc.

Finally, we have Barkskin, which reduces damage taken by 20% for 12 seconds when used.  Depending on the fight, use this as often as possible to reduce load on your healers, or save it for emergencies if you think you have to.

Step 3: Damage avoidance.

There's not a whole lot to talk about here.  Dodge is the only avoidance stat bears get, and so we get more dodge per point of agility than anybody else.  Stack agility and/or dodge rating until you get to about 50% dodge, then feel free to use defense rating.  Agility provides ancillary benefits vs. dodge rating (higher crit chance, armor, kitty attack power), so that's the route I've gone, but either way works.

Step 4:  Emergency Situations

Bears don't have a whole lot of emergency options.  We have a mass taunt for losing aggro on a group, and we have SI + FR to save ourselves.  While it can be useful to use each of your various cooldowns individually, I have a macro built to use my entire arsenal at once, for when I need to buckle down, reduce load on healers, and save myself.  It performs all of these abilities at the same time, since none of them use the GCD: Barkskin, Survival Instincts, Frenzied Regeneration, Fel Healthstone, and Runic Healing Potion.  With the glyphs for SI and FR, this is a ridiculously powerful button for keeping me alive.  Fully raid buffed, I exceed 75k HP while SI is up.

Keep in mind that the multi-use Berserk is also an emergency button - when the emergency is fear.

*I think some folks would probably say that your number one job is staying alive.  That's job 1b.  You have healers whose sole purpose in life (or at least WoW) is to make sure you stay alive.  While you should be doing what you can to help them, it frees you up to worry about what's most important.

Stay tuned for Part 3, where I'll go in-depth into the talent choices for a bear.  Also coming soon, Kae's monday night raid report.