Here’s this week’s pre-5.3 patch roundup. Not really that much to go over but I wanted to cover a few things anyway.
 

5.3 Survival Guide

I wrote a short article to let you know what changes you should be aware of in 5.3. Go ahead and check it out in order to be prepared!
 

Guardian Guide

The Guardian Guide has been updated for 5.3! Go ahead and check it out to make sure you are up to date :)
 

Guardian Resources

I’ve updated the Guardian SS with the changes in 5.3. Not much has changed, but it’s up-to-date now.

I mentioned before that I’m doing QA for Simcraft, helping them get their Guardian module up to snuff. A new version should be out soon with a bunch of bug fixes.
 

Force of Nature

Force of Nature is getting some interesting changes in 5.3 that haven’t yet been documented in the patch notes:

• Health increased to 40% of the Guardian’s Health.
• Armor set to 4x the Guardian’s Armor.
• Stats dynamically update.

This is definitely a welcome change to their ability to stay alive. This will make sure they definitely don’t die in 1 hit anymore. The only problem is their DPS still remains extremely terrible, so it’s not clear if they’re going to be able to hold threat on something after taunting it. In any case, I can certainly see a reason to take these for things like Challenge Mode trash. Whether or not we’ll see them on any boss fights reamins to be seen.
 

Fasc Joins CFT

In case you didn’t catch it before, well-known Guardian theorycrafter Fasc has joined CFT. This means you can tune in to my stream for double-Guardian action in H10 Throne of Thunder!

That’s all for this week. I hope you all have fun killing new things!

5.3 is almost upon us! As with every path I’m here to analyze the upcoming changes so you don’t have to. What should you care about? What should you ignore? Let’s find out!
 

Class Changes

We’ll start out with the class changes in the 5.3 patch which affect Guardians:

Mark of the Wild had its mana cost reduced to 5%, down from 10%.

Slightly easier to buff. Ok.

Tranquility now targets 12 raid members (up from 5) each time it heals when used in a 25-player instance. This change also applies to players using the Symbiosis version of Tranquility.

Great change for 25m Guardians, and all Druids really. Long overdue if you ask me, but definitely glad it’s here now.

Force of Nature is no longer on global cooldown and summons a single Treant. The Treant no longer has a control bar, immediately uses its special abilities on the Druid’s current target, and accumulates 1 charge every 20 seconds up to a maximum of 3 charges.

This is a great design change for FoN, but unfortunately it still remains pretty useless. Having to compete against Incarnation makes it incredibly difficult for anything to be as good. It’s a step in the right direction, but you can still safely ignore it.

Mastery: Nature’s Guardian is now 33% stronger (2% per point instead of 1.5%).

This doesn’t really change anything. All it does is decrease the amount of Mastery you need to meet a given EH threshold. The value of Mastery relative to Stamina for EH is still quite terrible. For more information, check out my previous post about EH.
 

General Changes

There’s a few general changes that are happening as well.

Players can now choose to receive loot for specializations other than the one that’s currently active. This feature can be accessed by right-clicking on the character portrait and selecting the option from the drop-down list. Loot specialization is available for bonus rolls, Raid Finder, and Pandarian quest rewards. Please check out the blog: Patch 5.3 Adds Off-Spec Loot and Rewards for an in-depth explanation of how the Loot Specialization system will work.

This is pretty neat for LFR anyways. Simply pick “Feral” instead of “Guardian” for most bosses, as all “Guardian” does is add a bunch of quasi-useless tank trinkets to the loot table.

Protection for bad luck streaks have been added to bonus rolls. Each bonus roll that does not provide loot has a progressively better chance to award loot to the player.

How many times have you used a bonus coin and not gotten anything? The idea behind this is to make those bonus rolls feel more good, and less like a waste of time.

Items upgradable by Valor now require 250 Valor to upgrade per 4 item levels, for a total of 500 Valor for 8 item levels per item. This is retroactive to all items that use Valor.

Item upgrades are back! The question everyone will promptly ask is “What do I upgrade first?” The answer is as always “Whatever you won’t replace any time soon.” If it’s a tie certain slots like weapons, chest, legs, helm, and trinkets go first. After that you obviously pick thunderforged pieces, and then regular pieces.
 

Other Changes

The only thing that I can think of that isn’t covered in the patch notes is that the bug where Rune of Re-Origination wouldn’t give Guardians the correct amount of stats when in Bear form will now be fixed. This doesn’t change anything in terms of what items you want, but it’s still a bug fix.

Thanks everyone! Enjoy patch 5.3!

I’m sorry I haven’t done these in a while. I’ve been busy doing things that I …. well …. can’t talk about. In any case it’s time again for anothe roundup.
 

5.3 PTR

There’s been a few changes on the 5.3 PTR.

Mastery: Nature’s Guardian now increases your armor by 16%, up from 12%.

This buff is almost explicitly targetted at 25h where the damage intake is much, much higher. I’ve mentioned here and other places that it won’t really change anything for 10m or normals. However it’s worth noting that depending on itemization it will probably be worth pursuing Mastery at some point in T16.

Tranquility now heals 12 players in in 25 player instances.

This is a welcome change for 25m Guardians. I don’t know if it’s enough in terms of utility, but only time will tell that.
 

Hotfixes

There’s been a simple hotfix in the last few days.

Growl should now properly transfer Vengeance to the casting Druid when taunting off of another tank character.

I didn’t even know this was a problem. Slash mentioned that this was a recent bug they just fixed. It’s good that it was quashed in any case.
 

Working with SimC

I wanted to let you all know that I’ve started working with SimC to finish up their Guardian module. It might take some time but I plan to help them get it in working order as soon as possible.

That’s all for this week. I hope you all have fun killing new things!

One of the things that has intrigued me for some time is the concept of Haste as a TDR stat. Ever since the introduction of the Indomitable Primal Diamond there’s been some interesting questions surrounding the concept of Haste as a TDR Stat. But it hasn’t really been determined exactly how it compares with simply going for Mastery. Well, I have the answer :)
 

RPPM – A Recap

The legendary meta gems all function on the RPPM – or “Real Procs Per Minute” – system. Hamlet does a much better job describing the math behind RPPM than I ever would. In any case it’s enough to say that anything on the RPPM system is improved by how much Haste Rating you have on your gear. Guardians of course are better off than most because of our passive bonus from Bear Form.

The question then becomes is it more effective to add more Haste to increase the effectiveness of the new meta, or add more Mastery for passive damage reduction? Turns out it’s not quite that simple.
 

A Tale of Two RPPMs

You might recall that something called “Bad Luck Protection” was added to RPPM trinkets recently. Well as of yet we have no confirmation whether or not this was actually added to the legendary metas or not. However that doesn’t mean we can’t compare the two and see what happens!

The graph plots total damage reduction on the Y axis, and the amount of stats gained on the X Axis.

Before I go any further I should note that these numbers were generated using my own stats. Now you could replicate the calculations for yourself, but the relative results will be identical to what you see above, until Armor is capped. Hopefully now you understand why I made the point about “Bad Luck Protection”. Unsurprisingly – at least to me – Mastery still comes out on top in terms of overall damage reduction.

That doesn’t mean this added side benefit of Haste might not make it substantially more valuable to some. It’s worth noting as well that this doesn’t count T&C, since I can’t really come up with an effective way of modelling that. It pretty much requires a sim, something that I don’t have the expertise to build….unfortunately.

As always, it’ll be up to you to weigh the pros and cons of each stat and determine what you want for yourself and your raid.

Over the last week or so there’s been some discussion both here and on MMO-Champ about the current state of Guardians in PvE. Some of it is just baseless fear-mongering, but there are actually quite a few very good points to be made. The question I’m trying to figure out is if this is a result of our own inflexibility in how we think about gearing for an encounter (which I will assume a lot of the responsibility for), or an actual problem. My personal belief is that it is more of the former than the latter.

Even so the points made about raid utility are completely valid. Of course the recently announced changes to both Tranquility and Battle Healer were a long time coming, even though they are very welcome. Guardian still suffers from changes made because of Feral DPS over the past two expansions. Should they be reversed? I don’t know. I’ve certainly advocated for some of them to be reversed, and in the end they may very well be.

Only time will tell.
 

Toto! Can You Take the Hit?

I’ll be the first to admit that I wasn’t initially thrilled at the idea of stacking Stamina again for heroic raiding. I managed to make it through 10/16 Heroic T14 just fine with a full RPS build and simply playing correctly. Out of the bosses we didn’t kill, only Empress and Sha would have made me think twice about my gear choices. This feeling continued on through all of T15 normals although – admittedly – I was probably overgeared for most of them. We killed everything pre-nerf and I never felt I was in significant danger as a result of my health pool.

However from observing people doing 10m heroic on streams – like Mowse and Danishpsycho – and talking to others – like Ahanss and Buraan – it’s become pretty clear that we need to re-orient how we think about gear. At least for heroic raiding. This also applies to 25m heroic raiding, since generally the only difference is that the melee hits from the boss are higher rather than the actual abilities used (except for things like Talon Rake). All of the other tank classes have ways to mitigate the special ability part a “tank combo” – a combination of abilities and/or melee hits which has the potential to instantly kill the tank – and sometimes the melee swing that follows. Since we do not have a way of doing that, we have to go back to the old “Wrath” method of handling such combos: Soak the hit. But what’s the best way of doing that?

1. Make sure you have enough Effective Health to survive the full combo if it comes to that.
2. Make sure you apply a Tooth and Claw to the boss just prior to the combo. If this means you have to hold a proc that occurs 10 or more seconds before the combo itself, do so.
3. Have Savage Defense up for the combo to help prevent even more melee damage.
4. Have enough Rage available to Frenzied Regeneration after the combo occurs when you’re at low health. 2t15 makes this even better.
5. Use a cooldown – yours or an external – if necessary.

That may seem like a lot at first glance, but 2 -> 5 have pretty much been standard practice the entire expansion thus far. Only #1 is something that we haven’t been very concerned with since Wrath. Up until now the Stamina we get on our gear has mostly (except in a few extreme cases like Impale, at least early on) been sufficient, even for heroic raiding content. But we’re starting to see a shift back to needing more Stamina to survive these “tank combos”.
 

Toto! You Need more Effective Health!

So we’ve established that as more and more people get into heroic raiding in Throne of Thunder, many are going to run smack into a very different reality from what they have been used to. But what is “Effective Health” anyway? In the simplest terms it’s an expression of how much health you have against unmitigated attacks. EH is calculated using this simple equation:

EH = Health / Total Damage Reduction

The most immediate thing you will notice is that this number will change based on the kind of damage you are receiving. EH-Magic will be different from EH-Physical which will again be different from EH-ArmorPen. The second thing that will become immediately apparent is that Stamina is the only way to increase all 3 types of EH. That’s fine, but the combos from some bosses – specifically Horridon, Ji-Kun, and Durumu – are mitigated by Armor. So what is better? I’ll direct your attention to the graph below:

You can clearly see that for a Guardian in ~522 gear (this graph was generated using my stats) Stamina beats Mastery by nearly a 3:1 margin. This shouldn’t really surprise anyone, especially after Theck’s work with damage smoothness. Even though his information is only directly applicable to Paladins (Guardians’ “smoothness” mechanics are purely Rage driven), the numbers are a strong indicator of the results you see above. So what does that mean?

There is effectively no situation where Mastery is a better option than Stamina.

Or more simply:

Whatever gives you the most Stamina gives you the most EH.

But how do you know whether you have enough? I can help with that too. I’ve added a new page to my spreadsheet which allows you to calculate the amount of Stamina you need to add in order to meet your defined EH target. Of course, that means you need to know what your target actually is. However that’s easy enough to determine simply by looking at the Dungeon Journal and/or your Combat Log. Once you have that just follow these simple steps:

1. Enter your stats as they appear on your self-buffed character sheet in-game.
2. Select whether or not you want to use Heart of the Wild on the Options sheet.
3. Enter your Effective Health target(s).
4. The result will be how much additional Stamina you need to meet your defined target.

But Toto, Can You Help the Raid?

This is still a bit of a bone of contention between Guardians and Blizzard. While today’s buff to Tranquility is certainly a welcome change to 25m Guardians, there are still some other Guardian “utility” spells that are just screaming for changes. Most of these were originally nerfed in either Cataclysm or Wrath because of Feral DPS stacking, and simply never had their nerfs reverted for Guardians.

• Innervate: I don’t even know why we still have this to be honest. We rarely have the opportunity to use it and when we do 6k mana is a complete joke. Either buff it or get rid of it.
• Leader of the Pack: This just screams that it desperately needs to be changed. A perfect analogue to this would be Black Ox Statue from a Brewmaster. Just make it a smart heal for a comparable amount. No Guardian is going to miss something that boasts an overheal of > 50% or more.
• Rebirth: Let Guardians cast this in-form. That’s just common sense.

I don’t know if we’ll get all – let alone any – of these changes. However I think they are perfectly reasonable requests. We must be patient. Blizzard doesn’t typically make wholesale changes when there isn’t a reason to do so, and from their perspective – remember they have more data than we do – perhaps the difference isn’t as large as we deem it to be. Remember the goal is to be equitable with everyone, not overpowered.

Welcome to the weekly roundup for April 15th, 2013. We’ve got a few things that have happened in the past week.
 

5.3 PTR

There have been a few changes on the 5.3 PTR.

Healing abilities and spells which automatically pick targets now follow consistent rules for targeting logic. Targets with lower % health will be preferred, and players are weighted more heavily than pets

This is awesome. I (and many others, mostly healers) complained about this recently. It should be a great buff to Nature’s Vigil. No more healing Fire Elementals!

Players can now choose to receive loot for specializations other than the one that’s currently active. This feature can be accessed by right-clicking on the character portrait and selecting the option from the drop-down list. Loot specialization is available for bonus rolls, Raid Finder, and Pandarian quest rewards.

I may have mentioned this before, but it’s now in the officlal notes. No more getting crappy tank trinkets in LFR!

Picking up the Alliance or Horde flag while in a Rated Battleground now increases damage taken by 50% for characters in a tanking specialization, and increases damage taken by 20% for characters in a non-tanking specialization.

Probably partially done because of the base Resilience change to PvP. Definitely done to prevent tanks from just never dying.
 

Legendary Metas

People have just started receiving their legednary meta gems during this reset. As expected both of the meta gems are incredibly good. There are reports of the DPS meta giving up to a 15% DPS increase. Not only that, but the Tank meta also has a really great uptime. This weekend I’m definitely going to do some modeling to show how much better the Tank meta becomes as you gain more Haste.
 

Constructing a UI

I wrote a new post this weekend talking about how to make yourself a UI. I encourage you to check it out, and maybe you’ll get some inspiration for some UI changes of your own.
 

Team Waffle Podcast: Resto Roundtable

While not specifically Guardian related, I wanted to let you know that we had the Resto Druid Roundtable this past weekend. If you know any Resto Druids I definitely recommend that you have them listen :)
 
That’s all for this week. I hope you all have fun killing new things!

This is one of those posts that just sort of happened. I had originally planned to do some Haste vs Mastery TDR stuff, but that hasn’t happened yet because I redid my UI. Why did I do that? I’m going to blame DanishPsycho. Why you ask? Because she’s been harassing me about my – admittedly – shitty UI for the better part of a week. I’ve been wanting to hack it to pieces for a while now, but hadn’t really had the incentive. There was a bunch of things I wasn’t happy with when it came to my existing setup, so I sat down for probably 4-5 hours and fixed it all.

Then Andanas asked me to post my new UI. I figured that wasn’t such a bad idea. That then morphed into me deciding that I should explain what I did, and provide the strings/scripts/profiles so people could take it for themselves if they wanted. And here we are. Also Monster is delicious.
 

Before – The Old “Shitty” UI

Before we go any further I should elaborate on what exactly I didn’t like about my old UI. Unfortunately I don’t have a screenshot to show you, so I’ll do my best to describe it with words.

• Looking at the Actionbar: Humans have great side-to-side (or “peripheral”) vision, but mostly terrible up-and-down vision thanks to the shape of our eyes. You want to minimize the amount of time you’re focusing on the very bottom of your screen because it severely limits the amount of in-combat information you are able to obtain.
• Cooldown Information: I was previously using Forte Exorcist’s cooldown timer. It worked pretty well back when we didn’t have that many cooldowns, can you could easily tell the difference between what was up and what was not. Now we have tons of buttons all on short-to-medium cooldowns. This clutters up Forte’s cooldown bar a ton.
• Buffs: I didn’t have any short-term buff information readily available. I had to go sifting through the giant list of Blizzard Buffs to see what was going on. That list obviously contains a ton of shit I really do not give a fuck about. I wanted to know when specific things I cared about were up, and when they faded.
• Target Debuffs: Tidyplates has pretty neat debuff frames, but they’re always out of your vision unless you zoom way, way out. So I wanted to be able to very easily tell when my debuffs (Lacerate, Thrash, Weakened Blows, Weakened Armor) are active on a target.
• Real Raid Frame: I had recently ditched XPerl due to performance concerns and went back to the Blizzard raid frames for a while. But they’re ugly and provide limited functionality. I wanted something new and “modern”.
• Better Combat Text: I’ve been using the Blizzard Combat Text for a very long time, ever since it was baked in to the base UI. I hadn’t really done any research on new ones in a very long time, but I was “convinced” to get a new one.

Tanking is all about having as much information as possible at your fingertips to make the correct decision. That decision could be what AM ability to use at any given time, do you need to burn a cooldown, do you need an external, etc. If your UI has all of this information scattered all over the place you can quite easily die before you have all of the information required to make the correct choice, let alone communicate that to anybody that needs to know. Similar to deciding how to gear yourself, building a UI is a very personal process. You have to take into account your habits, style of play, and even how you react to certain information or where you want it to be. As a result building a UI can be a very long process, but very rewarding once it’s all done.
 

After – The New “Awesome” UI

Before we get started here’s a screenshot of my whole UI as it stands now. Some of the pieces (like the DBM bars) aren’t showing up because I hadn’t thought to add some test bars, but everything else is there.

So lets break down each little bit.

1: Vuhdo Raidframes

I don’t really have a good reason for choosing Vuhdo other than “I like the way it looks”. The one-click heal functionality is really nice for those times when I actually need it, but otherwise it’s a small and very unobtrusive raid frame. I guess my point here is that you should figure out which one you like the most. The standard Blizzard raid frames are okay but there are still lots of better options.

2: WeakAuras Cooldown Bar

This little gem is based on something Danish’s guildmate Shifts (a Resto Druid) made for her. I took the original Weak Auras string and removed all of the Resto stuff, then split it into two separate bars. One to house what I would consider strictly “tanking” cooldowns, and the other for “utility” cooldowns. All of the talents you see there will swap out depending on what talents you are currently using. This greatly reduces “button bloat” and removes things you really don’t give a shit about from your field of view. I’ve provided each set for download below if you want to import them to use yourself (for reference these will also be posted in the “WeakAuras” thread on the forums).

• Tank Cooldowns Bar
• Utility Cooldowns Bar

3: Prat

Prat isn’t strictly a “tanking UI addon”, it’s just something that’s incredibly useful. I definitely recommend having at least some sort of chat addon, regardless of what you pick. Being able to copy&paste things from inside the game is pretty important :\

4: XCT+ – Scrolling Combat Text

xCT+ is the scrolling combat text addon I mentioned during the intro. I love it. It organizes events into several distinct sections, allowing you to very easily tell what exactly is going on. All events come with an attached icon, and are colour coded by type and/or school of magic.

• 4.1: Incoming Heals
• 4.2: Incoming Damage
• 4.3: Outgoing Criticals (Heal/Damage)
• 4.4: Outgoing Normals (Heal/Damage)
• 4.5: Misc. Events

It’s possible that I may just end up removing 4.5 in the future, and I’ll explain why a little later on. Overall I’m really happy with this combat text addon, and even if you don’t choose this specific one I definitely recommend something. As usual Blizzard’s base combat text is just merely “okay”. You can get a lot of additional functionality by going with an addon of some kind.

5: DBM

DBM. Not really much else to say. However a lot of you may not actually be aware of what version of DBM you should be using. On one of my Twitter LFR outings a few weeks ago Omegal let me know about the DBM Alpha Version. This version is typically updated several times a day, and during cutting edge progression sometimes many more. Like DBM you can simply maintain it through the Curse Client, but you have to install the alpha first. I heartily recommend everyone get the alpha version, I haven’t looked back since.

6: DroodFocus

I had DroodFocus before, and ended up coming to the conclusion that it couldn’t do anything for me that I couldn’t get better versions of. I came back to it on a whim since it has been receiving regular updates, and actually is the 5th most downloaded “HUD” addon on Curse. Turns out there have been some amazing enhancements made to Droodfocus over the past several months, and it now has some great functionality. It’s worth noting that none of this isn’t something that couldn’t be replicated with some other addon, but this one is specifically developed for Feral and Guardian Druids in mind. That makes a lot of it very easy to use.

• 6.1: Savage Defense Tracker, Health Bar, Power (Rage Bar), and temporary buff tracker.
• 6.2: Target Health and temporary debuff tracker.

A neat little enhancement that I discovered while configuring DroodFocus is the ability to colour-code the power bar based on a value. I set mine for 30, 60, 90, and 100. That way I can easily tell what I have enough Rage for without even looking at the number. The buff tracker has to be manually populated with the spellIDs you want to track. I assigned a specific colour scheme to my buffs so I would know what is happening.

• Procs: Blue
• Rage Cooldowns: Red
• Defensive Cooldowns: Green

The Savage Defense tracker at the top is also colour coded. It will be grey if the charge isn’t available, red if it is and you don’t have enough Rage, and green for available charges you can use. DroodFocus has really come a long way and I definitely recommend it as a great “bundle” addon for Guardians.

7: Auras

These are just the standard Blizzard Mangle and Tooth and Claw Auras. They’re actually quite pretty and well positioned on the UI so I saw no reason to get rid of them.

8: TidyPlates

I honestly don’t know how any tank can live without TidyPlates. I don’t know how I did tbh. It’s worth noting that as of the time of this writing Omegal is working with the author to resolve a performance issue that may affect some people with lower spec computers. Expect a fix soon.

9: Bartender

This is another “personal choice” thing. I definitely recommend at least some sort of action-bar addon. I use Bartender personally, and it has served me very well.

10: Raid Mob Marker

RMM is just a dinky addon to make marking targets easier. I’ve had it since basically forever, and it rarely requires updates.

11: Default Blizzard Buffs

Since I’ve now added a temporary buff tracker thanks to DroodFocus, I now basically just ignore these. I suppose if I was smart I’d find a way to hide them completely. I still want to be able to see the long-term buffs up there though, so /shrug.

12: Vengeance and 2t15 WAs

Something that I forgot initially are a couple of neat little WeakAuras that Shifts made for me. The first is just a basic Vengeance tracker, and the 2nd is a WA to track the stacks and duration of our 2t15 bonus. Both are available below for download.

• Vengeance
• 2t15 Bonus

Final Thoughts

Constructing a UI (and this subsequent blog post) takes a lot of time, thought, and energy. It’s definitely not something I recommend you do right before a raid. Try and do it over a weekend if at all possible, or at least a day you have completely off. You might be surprised how much time you can spend tweaking every little bit :)

What about you? Do you have an addon you especially love? Let me know!

My guild has finally killed Lei-Shen on normal. So now I’m able to post some notes on the last 6 encounters in Throne of Thunder.

Durumu the Forgotten

The Rundown:

• Trash: Trash is kinda meh. Make sure you taunt swap on the first set of trash or you will die. Just charge if you get knocked back on the second set.
• Talents: FS, Incarnation, NV/HotW.
• Glyphs: Stampeding Roar.
• Gear: Consistent RPS (Hit/Exp > Crit > Haste).

Encounter Notes:

• Swap at 5 stacks of the healing debuff.
• Don’t be afraid to use a Frenzied Regen if your healers are having trouble getting Arterial Cut off you.
• Obviously use Savage Defense. He melees pretty damn hard.
• I always stood in the yellow light, but I think this varies from raid to raid how this is handled.
• Be very, very patient with the maze. There was a recent nerf today to make it easier (apparently). Prefer to stand in melee (obviously), but you can go to ranged if you have to.
• If you get the puddle debuff – Lingering Gaze – try and drop it as far out as you can. Makes the maze less of a pain in the ass.
• If you get Life Drain, yell at the top of your lungs until someone takes it off you. You will get fucked up if you are stunned and the boss is still smacking you.

Primordius

The Rundown:

• Trash: It’s a gauntlet. Stop at each big ooze to kill whatever you have. The little oozes explode, so don’t AoE a bunch of them at the same time or you will wipe. Repeat until they’re all dead.
• Talents: FS, Incarnation, NV
• Glyphs: Stampeding Roar
• Gear: Consistent RPS (Hit/Exp > Crit > Haste).

Encounter Notes:

• We have do the first swap whenever the 2nd tank gets transformed, and then whenever we need to after that.
• DO NOT LET THE BOSS TOUCH A PURPLE SLIME EVER.
• Start with the boss in the middle to make it easier for everyone else to get slimes.
• Start kiting when you need to in order to avoid purple slimes.
• Avoid burning Incarnation until you are tanking while transformed.
• Remember to call for dispels if you get a debuff.

Dark Animus

The Rundown:

• Trash: Fuck this trash. There will be 3 with glowing hands, and 3 without. Split them up into groups ~40 yards apart. Interrupt spell casts. You will need Misdirects / Tricks.
• Talents: FS, Incarnation, NV.
• Glyphs: Stampeding Roar.
• Gear: Consistent RPS (Hit/Exp > Crit > Haste).

Encounter Notes:

• There are many ways to approach this, I’ll detail how we do ours.
• Dump 3 sets of 2 little golems each into the 3 electrified medium golems.
• Dump the rest of the active little golems into a huge one. Then a couple more of the inactive ones.
• Dump one of the remaining little golems into the boss.
• Swap whenever the large golem tank feels it’s necessary.
• Someone else needs to soak Anima Ring for you, or you will probably die.
• You can kite the large golem around using Matter Swap if you want. Not really required though.
• Use cooldowns on Interrupting Jolt.

Iron Qon

The Rundown:

• Trash: Mostly harmless. Pull groups of shit and kill it.
• Talents: WC/DB, Incarnation, NV/HotW
• Glyphs: Stampeding Roar
• Gear: Consistent RPS (Hit/Exp > Crit > Haste).

Encounter Notes:

• Swap at 2 stacks.
• Make sure you have a /range 10 going so you can spread out for Fire phase.
• I’d recommend Wild Charge or Displacer Beast to get out of the windstorm during Air phase.
• Tank him at the back of the room during Air, Ice, and final phase.
• Ice phase is really annoying because of his shields. Melee like stack and make you take lots of AoE Frost Damage.
• Definitely Tranq during one of the smashes in phase 4.

Twin Consorts

The Rundown:

• Trash: Meh. Kill it all.
• Talents: WC, Incarnation, NV
• Glyphs: Stampeding Roar
• Gear: Consistent RPS (Hit/Exp > Crit > Haste).

Encounter Notes:

• Swap when the beast spawns during Night phase.
• Beast is pretty harmless, just kill it and go back to the boss..
• Try and land a Thrash on the Fire lady when she pops up next to you.
• Swap on 2-3 stacks during Day phase.
• Use charge to get to the next Ice Comet when it falls.
• I stay on Fire lady during Dusk, continue to using charge to get to Ice Comets.
• Once the first lady dies, the 2nd one will start using swap mechanics again. Act accordingly

Lei-Shen

The Rundown:

• Trash: Trash has reflective shields that come up. Really irritating, especially if DPS keep going during the shield.
• Talents: DB, CW, Incarnation, NV/HotW
• Glyphs: Survival Instincts, Stampeding Roar
• Gear: Consistent RPS (Hit/Exp > Crit > Haste).

Encounter Notes:

• As a tank you are responsible for moving the boss. When/where you move him generally depends on how good your DPS is. It’ll take you a few tries to get a handle on when exactly to move him.
• Use Displacer Beast to run away from Decapitate.
• During the first transition you will be put in a group with 1 other person. If it’s not a healer you’ll be responsible for healing them – hopefully it’s a Rogue and it’ll be super easy.
• Soak puddles, and stack for the explodey things (Overcharge and Static Shock). You will need to use a cooldown for Static Shock.
• Use Roar on the intermissions.
• Face the boss away from the pillar you are currently tanking in phase 2. Use Skull Bash to instantly charge back after Fusion Slash.
• You’ll have a 3rd person during 2nd intermission. Communicate accordingly for handling the remaining mechanics.
• Swap when necessary during the 3rd phase. We did somewhere between 12 and 15 stacks.
• Remember to AoE for Ball Lightning in the 2nd and 3rd phases.

Throne of Thunder Discussion Threads

If you have questions about something that isn’t covered here, please check out our Throne of Thunder Discussion threads over in the forums.

Happy nomming!

Here’s the roundup for the week ending April 8th! I know I didn’t have one last week, but nothing much really happened….so I skipped it. Sorry :(
 

5.3 PTR

There was one change to Force of Nature on the PTR:

Force of Nature is no longer on global cooldown and summons a single Treant. The Treant no longer has a control bar, immediately uses its special abilities on the Druid’s current target, and accumulates 1 charge every 20 seconds up to a maximum of 3 charges.

This is really too bad since it eliminates one of the reasons you would take FoN in the first place: Soaking. It now requires a target, and you can’t tell it to stay in one spot since the control bar is gone. It’s going to be great for stopping node captures in PvP, but that’s really about it. Which is kind of sad when you think about it.
 

PTR Feedback Thread

I started a PTR Feedback thread for Guardians on the US forums. I know many of you are European readers so it won’t help you much, but maybe you can create something similar over there too?
 

Haste vs Mastery: TDR

Now this isn’t really what you think. Fasc posted a neat question on the forums about how Haste and Mastery compare for pure TDR when you have the Legendary meta gem. I don’t know the answer off the top of my head as it requires a little spread-sheeting, but it is definitely something I’m interested in looking at. We’ll see what happens, but even a tiny amount of TDR gain from Haste will just make it even better than it already is :)

Gear List Updated

I’ve updated the Gear List with a relatively minor change that was pointed out by one of the intrepid forum goers. The Ji-Kun cloak belt is actually BiS, not the random trash drop one I had listed before. I swear it must have gained a socket somewhere because it only had one when I was looking at it originally :(

Throne of Thunder: Last 6 Encounters

Tomorrow I’ll be writing up a look at the last 6 encounters of normal Throne of Thunder from a Guardian’s perspective. We killed Lei Shen today (yay!) so I now have everything I need to complete it. Hopefully it’ll help those of you still progressing through ToT :)

Icy-Veins Arielle Approved (TM)

Vlad from Icy-Veins recently engaged me to review and submit updates to their existing Guardian guide. I am happy to say it is now “Arielle Approved”! From now on all of the info you find there should be pretty-much as up-to-date as possible.

Talents

Strangely enough most of our talents actually function decently well. However there are a few outliers that would benefit from some attention.

• Soul of the Forest: This one should be painfully obvious for most. The amount of Rage generated pales in comparison to Incarnation. Further than that it has no DPS increase, whereas Incarnation obviously does. So then how to fix it? Generate additional Rage based on Crit (a bonus to Primal Fury), and add a passive damage bonus to Mangle.
• Force of Nature: Another obvious one. The functionality is there, but what it does isn’t particularly helpful. Having it scale with Weapon Damage and generate Rage would make this much more attractive.
• Incarnation: Obviously I love Incarnation. There’s just one teeeeeeeny thing I’d like to see changed. It would be nice if there was no GCD for using it. I’m reasonably certain this is entirely because it was coded as a “shapeshift” rather than a simple spell. I don’t know if it’s possible to fix this, but it’d be nice if it could be.
• Dream of Cenarius: Another one under the “obvious” header. I’ve harped on this talent before (since it’s only used by 1 spec), and to be honest I’d like to see it completely redesigned or entirely replaced. It’s just entirely not useful for Guardians at all.
• Nature’s Vigil: Please stop making it target temporary pets. I don’t care if a temporary pet’s HP is below 100%.

Glyphs

Druids of all specs have a number of glyphs which aren’t particuarly useful. Thankfully Guardians are lucky enough to only have one that falls into this category.

• Frenzied Regeneration: This has been largely useless since the start of the expansion. With the 2pc T15 bonus it got even worse, since it does not benefit at all from the bonus. It would be neat if the glyph reduced the cost and amount healed. It doesn’t even have to be an even reduction to be useful.

Abilities

Most of our abilities are just fine, which is pretty cool. I only really have a gripe with two of our abilities.

• Swipe: The big problem here is that Swipe’s impact damage is less than the impact damage of Thrash. The total damage of Thrash is probably where it should be, but it shouldn’t do more damage than Swipe on hit. It’s pretty easy to fix too, just redistribute some of the damage back to the DoT.
• Tranquility: I like Tranquility, I really do. It’s a great raid cooldown. I just wish there was some way we could use it in form. Having to sacrifice all of our Vengeance (something other tanks do not have to do) in order to use a raid cooldown. (Derp >.< - I should really stop posting things without doublechecking first. Thanks everyone.)
• Tooth and Claw: Please please please please please add T&C numbers to the combat log. Pleeeeeaaassseeeeeeeee. I would love to have at least something resembling empirical evidence to tell me how good it really is.

What about you? Is there anything that would make your life easier?