The Warcraft Guild Formerly Known as Bears

Boss down! /cheer! And he dropped loot that I can use! Or can I? Do I need Mastery? What's expertise? I lose a lot crit if I use it but get haste and hit. Is it better? Who knows. Trying to figure out what gear is for you can be as strenuous as taking down the boss itself. Below is a list of the secondary stats (the green text on items) and a basic overview of what they do. Also, there are links to some of the class forum threads that tell you what stats you should be getting and why.

Spirit - Spirit affects your mana regeneration in and out of combat. In special cases (shadow priests) spirit can be talented for conversion into hit rating. Spirit is generally only useful for healers (or shadow priests) where mana regeneration becomes very important for long fights. The more spirit you have the higher your mana regeneration is while casting spells.

Hit - Hit is the most important stat for DPS who are getting geared for heroics and raids. Hit rating decreases the chance to miss an enemy, based on what level that enemy is. The higher the level enemy, the more likely you are to miss it. The enemy level is important for determining how much hit rating you need to be 'capped'. Being capped means that you won't see that dreadful 'miss' graphic when you use a spell or attack. Luckily, for heroic bosses you only need to have a hit rating that correlates to 6 percent. For raid bosses it's much harder to be capped (17%). Remember, if you have talents that increase hit by x%, you only need hit rating from gear equal to 6-x%. If you're curious what your hit is, go to your character sheet by pressing 'c'. If you scroll over 'hit' it will display a tooltip with your chance to miss against level 85-88 enemies. All gearing priorities should be based on getting 6% hit. Once you hit that (if you don't plan on raiding), you can aim towards increasing another secondary stat. Also, if you're healing you should never have hit on your gear unless you are upgrading from a very low ilvl and waiting for something to drop.

Mastery - Mastery is the new mechanic in Cataclysm. Mastery gives you a unique passive bonus depending on your class and what spec you choose within that class. Once you reach level 80 and purchase Mastery from your trainer, it will be active at all times. Your best bet is to look up how your Mastery works and whether or not it should be a high priority on gear or not (Resto Shaman do not stack Mastery for example).

Critical Strike - Critical strike improves your chances of doing additional damage or healing. Critical strike additional damage can be anywhere between 100%-200%. The amount of damage you do depends on your class, talents, and meta gem. Depending on your class or play style stacking crit may be to you're liking. It's important to note that crit can be unreliable when healing or DPS'ing where you may string a bunch of spells that don't crit. From a mathematical point of view however, if you cast a large amount of spells, you will always converge on your critical strike chance.

Haste - Haste is my favorite stat in the game. It increases attack/casting speed of your abilities and melee attack and how fast your damage over time spells 'tick' for damage. For classes that use lots of DoTs or HoTs there is usually a haste soft cap to reach to get one extra tick out of your spell. It's not always an ideal stat to have however. For arcane mages, haste is very low on gearing priority mainly because it will make you lose mana too fast to last on boss fights. In other cases, haste doesn't compare to other secondary stats in terms of raw dps numbers or damage mitigation. Haste is tricky like that, so it's best to check your class forums for the answer on how awesome or unawesome it is.

Expertise - Expertise reduces the chance for an enemy to dodge or parry any melee attack. This can be important especially for some tanks because when a boss parries an attack, it gets a free swing that's off of the swing timer. For example, if a boss attacks once every second and parries an attack, it will swing twice in that one second time frame. That means more damage to the tank. Expertise is only useful for melee classes.

Dodge/Parry/Block - I'm lumping these into one to consolidate the list a bit. All of these are damage mitigation stats and should only be used tanks. Parry gives you a chance to deflect a melee attack as long as you are facing the enemy. If you're getting attacked from behind, you can't parry (this is why all melee DPS attack from behind enemies). Unlike parry, dodging doesn't depend on where the enemy is attacking you from (front or back). Also, parried and dodged attacks result in no damage done. Blocking attacks will reduce incoming damage by a base 30%, which can be increased through talents such as Holy Shield or Critical Block. Blocking can only occur if a shield is equipped and block rating increases your chance to block, not how much damage is blocked.

I won't go through Resilience since it's a PvP stat and no one likes PvP. It's important to remember that regardless of your class, Hit is the #1 stat you should be stacking until you reach 6%. After that, you either want to get Mastery, Haste, Expertise, or Crit. To figure out what's best, I've provided links to class guides on the forums. The section you want is usually labeled stats and reforging:

All Mage Specs: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/1648728060

Shadow Priest: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/1764409092

Fury Warrior: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/978197846

Boomkin: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/2721372177

Don't forget, if a piece of gear isn't optimal for your build you can always reforge it!

Down the macro rabbit hole.

by dave

When you can't power through a group of baddies, crowd control (CC) is called for.  Crowd control can get messy however.  Often someone tabs to the wrong target and breaks it, unleashing holy hell in the process.  The prudent thing is to reapply CC and quick, but targeting that 1 particular bad guy in a rave of pain can be time consuming.  The game will not allow you to target a raid icon (moon, circle, star...), but you can save a target for later reference.  

If you make a target your focus, it stays on your screen if you need to go back to it quickly.  

Type into the chat window

/focus

to mark a target as your focus.

A second target window appears under the first.  This is the focus window and it stays there until the target is dead (or you clear focus).  It remains your focus when you target something else.

This is already pretty useful, but we can make it better.  WITH MACROS!  Since I'm a druid mildly familiar with mage and priest spells, I'll use these classes as examples.

To make a 1 click button that will automatically use a crowd control spell on a target you are not actively attacking follow this format.

/cast [@focus] Spell Name

Save that macro and place it on your action bar.  In this example it will allow you to reapply a stun on the cow while you continue to rain pain down on Mr. Chilly.

Pressing the button in the bottom left automatically casts Entangling Roots on the target with focus without changing who you are currently attacking.

Here are some specific examples.  Spelling and capitalization matter.  Don't spend anytime choosing a spell icon, as the game will automatically assign the correct one once the macro is saved.  To clear focus, right click on the focus portrait and choose clear.

Druid cast Entangling Roots on focus, use this:

/cast [@focus] Entangling Roots

Druid cast Hibernate:

/cast [@focus] Hibernate

Mage cast Polymorph

/cast [@focus] Polymorph 

Priest cast Shackle Undead

/cast [@focus] Shackle Undead

Priest cast Mind Control

/cast [@focus] Mind Control

The mind control macro is especially useful.  When MC breaks it can be extremely disorienting and this macro can save a few seconds if you need to reapply.

by dave

By now we of the guild formerly known as bears all have the minimum gear to do heroics.  If there is a Faction Quartermaster you are on good terms with, check in with them to see if they have anything new for you.  Often they sell enchants at dirt cheap prices (compared to the Auction House).  Here is breakdown of the who and the what.

Guardians of Hyjal Quartermaster - located in Hyjal near the portal from Stormwind sells Arcanum of Hyjal to those revered and above.

Earthen Ring Quartermaster - located in the most inconvenient place ever, Silver Tide Hollow in Vashj'ir sells Arcanum of the Earthen Ring among other things.  

Ramkahen Quartermaster - is located near the portal from SW.  He carries Arcanum of the Ramkahen.

Therazane carries shoulder enchants for everyone.  Basic enchants available at Honored, top tier at Exalted.  These people will not even give you the time of day until you finish Deepholm.

The Wildhammer also require some work before you can talk to them.  They carry Arcanum of the Wildhammer sold at Thundermar in Twilight Highlands.

So if you have the rep with these people, that's a pretty easy way to upgrade gear.  If not, then some grinding may be in order.  Look at the rewards first so you know who you should be grinding.  Getting exalted with all factions may look cool, but it is a massive waste of time.  

Every tank and healer has it's own niche within the game.  Paladin and Death Knight tanks excel at AOE threat while Druid and Priest healers excel at AOE healing.  Understanding how the tank and healer function can help dungeon runs and raids go much smoother.  Today, we're talkin' about Feral Druids and how they keep enemies from turning everyone into pie (or cake).

The bear tank, for me, has been the most difficult but most fun tank to play. I played a Pally tank for the majority of WoTLK and a bit in Cata but it was never very interesting.  It had a set rotation (called 9 6 9 which was based off using alternating 9 and 6 second CDs) and it could easily control large groups. Pallies, among other tanks, have a pretty definitive gearing priority that makes switching/upgrading gear an easy decision (Dodge, Parry, Block, Mastery).

For bears, it’s quite different. There is no tanking leather gear, so they use DPS gear with heavy stat conversion from agility to produce viable tanking stats. This, coupled with certain talents, makes the bear an avoidance tank where damage mitigation is mostly managed through a high amount of stamina and dodge and Savage Defense procs (Savage Defense makes a shield that absorbs X% of your attack power as physical damage). There’s also a myriad of ways to gear a bear tank which can leave a muddled line when you’re upgrading gear. There’s no real rotation (both bear and cat) and instead works based on a priority system and procs (it’s kind of like an algorithm only fun).  Druids have their own advantages, mainly that they have the highest spell damage reduction and dodge in the game.  Their survivability is also very good during high damage phases, with 3 different CD spells which either reduce all damage by 50%, regenerate health rapidly/increase max health, and another that reduces all damage by 20%.  When you're grouped with a Feral tank, there's a few things to keep in mind to help them out:

Wait until the tank has gotten everyone together 

Wait about three seconds for application of thrash and swipe

Stay with kill order 

Don't focus cast

If you've gone through that checklist, feel free to move to step 2:

Melt face

Druid AOE is limited.  They have two abilities thrash and swipe; both of which are on cooldowns (6 and 3 seconds).  Because of this, they will be tabbing through targets constantly, applying DoTs and mangles.   This is why focus casting doesn't work well because the focus will change every couple of seconds.  Lastly, bears have no ranged silence.  If there are a few casters one of them will probably be marked for CC or a silence.

That's about it.  Of course, I have to end with this obligatory link. 

by dave

Based on some one feedback, I think it best to start from the beginning of macroland.

Q: Why use a macro over an addon dave? 

A macro is actually very simple to use once setup.  They do not require to updated after every patch.  Most importantly they do not use system resources by running in the background.  

Q: Macros look complicated.  Why is that?

Because anything worth doing is hard.  Maybe the crazy ones are complicated, but worry about that later.  Enough effing questions.

Press ESC and click the giant Macro button staring you in the face.

Your window may be empty, but not for long.

Click New at the bottom, then give your macro a name.  You will also be asked to choose an icon.  This is by far the most daunting part of the process.  You can edit the icon anytime so you don't spend all day on it right now.  

In this example we are going to make a button to summon a random companion.  If you are like me, some little critters get ignored because they are too hard to find.  With this all your pets have a equal chance to be ignored.  In the Enter Macro Commands window, type or copy / paste:

/run SummonRandomCritter();

Press save.  Now comes the fun part.  As if you didn't have button overload on your bars already, we need to find a new home for this command.  

Drag that macro onto your bar exactly as you would a spell and you have just saved yourself a ton of time.  No more clicking spellbook -> companions tab.  No more agonizing decisions about what too cute critter to spend the day with.  

Another super simple one I have is clickable yell.  If I'm healing and the tank comes down with a case of tunnel vision, I can click a macro in attempt to get his/her attention.  

/y Help the Healer!  He is soft and squishy.

by dave

Via popular demand (1 person), we are going to look at installing mods. Mods in Warcraft add additional functionality to the game, but often threaten to bury the player in extraneous information. When you start at level 1, the game already throws way too much information at the player, just ask my Mother-in-law. By the time a player reaches end game, the user interface errs on the spartan side. There are things the game just isn’t telling you.  Here are 3 of my favorite mods, and how to install / uninstall them.

Deadly Boss Mods - Often in a boss fight, a boss will perform an animation before a devastating attack, or say a specific phrase. If that isn’t enough and you’d rather someone hit you over the head with a warning, Deadly Boss Mods is for you. 

Auctioneer - This mod installs a lot of additional files. It takes over the auction interface. 90% of what Auctioneer does is a mystery to me, but I find it useful to automate auctions and find deals.

Recount - The most dangerous of all mods, it can turn the game from cooperative to competitive. Recount is useful to see how much damage one does compared to others, see real dps, check uptime of Damage over Time spells, etc. It can help you see which of your spells is doing the most damage over a fight, and which is doing the worst.

Installation

To install any of these, click the bright orange download button at the top of the page, then select manual install. They should automatically go to your download folder as zip files.

If your computer cannot open zip files, download StuffIt Expander from the Mac App Store. Once the file is uncompressed, time to move it to the addon folder. Depending on how the addon was made, you may have to move all the subfolders instead of the main folder. 

Warcraft'n at 80 pt1 of ∞ - The Focus Edition

dave