Druid tanks rejoice!

It's finally here! The preview of the druid class changes in Cataclysm, but of course Blizzard tells us that it's just a preview and anything here are subject to change.

First off, something that blew my mind, THRASH FOR TRASH!

This awesome ability will work in harmony with Swipe, so now instead of just spamming Swipe on everything except bosses, you can work in Thrash to make Swipe even more effective on trash! Get it? Thrash for trash... *eerie silence*... eh.. uhum yeah erh.. Lets move on!

So Thrash gives us a 6 second bleed effect on everything within 10 yards, it will tick once each 2 seconds. And supposedly this will affect Swipe to deal more damage as well. It remains to be seen if you will rotate with Thrash > Swipe > Swipe > Trash, or if (as I hope it will be) the timing will be so you can afford three swipes between each thrash to maximize damage and still not lose threat or damage by letting Thrash deplete it's duration. I know, I know its too early for theorycrafting but I can't stop thinking of how to best use these new skills in my tank rotation.

This is just the beginning, Stampeding Roar, a new shout for both bear and cat form. It increases the movement of all allies within 10 yards by 40% for 8 seconds. It will have a 3 minute cooldown or even lower for bears using talents to reduce it. Stampeding Roar sounds like it will have a lot of usefulness to the entire raid, not the least to melee classes close to the tank. For example, Rotface encounter, unstable explosion, POW Stampeding roar and everyone gets away faster. Putricide, just so many situations when it could be of perfect use, if you have ever done that encounter I think you can imagine the possibilities. But the thing that got me thinking was first of all the use of it right at the pull. Everyone gathers up and just charges in (while bears use charge to the pull, a paladin OT in cases like Marrowgar or Blood Queen have to run, which takes some time) when the druid pops Stampeding Roar and everyone gets to their positions really fast, not the least melee who most often have to wait for the tanks to pull before getting into position. And that is far from all, I mean, there is no end to the possibilities!

I'm a bit jealous that balance druids get Wild Mushroom though, like a time bomb or trigger trap, I mean come on! That is awesome! But we druid tanks get a lot more tools to use, Blizzard are going to give us ferals a reliable interrupt! WITH NO GLOBAL COOLDOWN! Damn, so what our 1 minute cooldown bash in bearform that is affected by global cooldown (written as GCD from now on, for short) was not good enough? Two talent points and it sinks to 30 seconds... but really? The sacrifice is too big. But with a interrupt like the rogues kick that is off the GCD, we can be relied on just as much as warriors or paladins or even dk's to interrupt something. How I have longed for something like this!

Did I mention they are updating the graphics for tree-form? They plan on making it a form in which you can still see the race you play as, and maybe even to show a bit of what gear you have on and not to make you as a plain tree as before. This is exciting but again, jealous :( . I want bear armor, but I understand that it will probably take maybe another five years before that comes up :) .

The feral tank tree will offer us Damage reduction, Vengeance and Savage Defense, now you already know about two of them but what is Vengeance? Simply put, it will give us a kick in tps to lower the chance of dps with awesome gear out-tpsing us. It will be done by giving the tank a stacking attack power buff for each hit he/she takes. That buff will be equal of 5% of the damage done by that hit, up to a maximum of 10% of the characters unbuffed health. This will of course require that we spend 51 talent points in our feral tree. And it only applies in bear form. It seems however that all tanks will have this Vengeance skill and considering Blizzard will continue to give druid tanks gear with more damage dealing stats just as before, this Vengeance thing will probably benefit us the least. But hey, I take that as a compliment, it just means we don't need that extra help.

Hmm, I dont have a nice finish here. What to do...

Hide fast! BLEND IN!

Trolls be flippin' out mon!

Thinking back to my first troll Shaman, I really miss the small things like jokes and their laugh. In Cataclysm I have the option to switch from Tauren to Troll and still be a "Bulldozing Druid Bear" however the racial traits as a troll is really nothing attractive if you are a big bad bear. I can't even use bows dammit. I am however really upset that goblins can't be druids, yes I am serious, I'm really sad that I can't be a goblin druid, it would be so awesome.

Hmm...

On the other hand... maybe thats a really bad idea...

Its crazy to see all the mages and hunters changing their race to troll just because of the racial benefits. And here I am stuck in a Cow form. I'm beginning to think even the Taunka looks better then me.

But QQ, I'm not changing to a troll, even though trolls are awesome. Im a tauren druid tank and I'm damn proud of it. Well... maybe not as proud on trash since all we do is swipe and cast in maul on the next melee swing using a macro. So basically I'm hitting one button anyway.

I heard Blizzard have plans on removing the "on next swing" attacks! This means Maul is going to be instant! I'm excited to be honest, some change in our skill rotation is really needed and many of us, both druids and warriors, have been waiting a looooooong time.

I wonder if the launch of Cataclysm will go as smooth as Wotlk did, nothing but time will tell, but I'm pretty sure they've learned quite a lot since release and have nothing but high expectations.

Yesterdays raid went really well, and this week it will be even better, new content on farm means more time to spend on new heroic bosses! Time to get some well earned sleep.

Raid well done, or should I say, medium rare?

Yesterday me and my girlfriend, together with our guild of course, raided Icecrown 25 for some heroic mode bosses. We've used the in-game calendar this week for signups and well, it worked pretty good. Fun fact though, one raid member and our guild leader didn't show up for invites. Not that I complain, even our guild leader has other things to do sometimes. That's what we officers are there for, to grab the ball he sent running and guide it to the right place.

I must admit though, it was kind of fun to give the guild leader a dkp penalty for not showing up or posting a afk post on the forums, haha.

The raid went smooth however, we decided to go for Festergut hc and Blood Queen Lana'Thel hc.

We had already cleared everything except the plague wing and BQL just for that reason earlier that week. Festergut went down after four tries, right at the second on his enrage, I think there was like 3-4 left alive at that moment :) (something we call "a clean kill" or a "Bollklubben kill" kind of as a inside joke). We proceeded with downing Rotface on heroic (yeah no one shot this time, and I take blame for that) and after that we downed BQL after just one wipe. We had quite some time to practice last week and this time it was a walk in the park.

Putricide proved to be a challenge however, me being the abomination, have a pretty easy job considering the amount of focus you have to have in this fight. Adds keep spawning in phase three and on transition phases two adds spawns instantly, although you don't have to endure his silly tear gas stun anymore. This means, having one add up during the transition phase is lethal, three adds total to burn down? Not exactly helpful.

We had already given out a dkp bonus for the first BK kill on two new heroic mode bosses in one night. But somehow one member got connection problems and claimed his internet was down. Thats the silly thing really, whenever something like this happens you can never be sure if that person is speaking the truth or if it's just a lie to get away from a wipe-night trying to learn a new encounter. But it doesn't really matter which, because either way we stood there 24 players, on halt because no one else was online to take his place. Fortunately we could (as we all live in Sweden) just call someone online and continue. However the raid time was nearing its end so me and the other officer had a little talk about how to proceed.

Killing Professor Putricide on normal mode seemed like the best thing to do at the time, so we could get a Lich King kill this week too. We did alright on Lich King but our dps was a bit low, considering the 10% buff now being active. But we could've got a better raid setup as well, the stuns were hassle and made it a bit harder for us then usual. But we managed to get him to phase three anyway, today we will kill him for sure.

All this talk about raids got me thinking about Naxxramas, but Naxxramas is boring so I'll just skip to something that happened after one of our raids.

When jumping down the well to enter the Dalaran Sewers...

Hmm this doesn't look right... where.. *guttural growl*

O_o ?

O shi....

Getting started

So here I am, and what a long, strange trip it's been.

Flying over Dragonblight from Dalaran towards Kaluak Harbor, I feel the winds under my wings and look down, by doing so I suddenly recall the times I ran back and forth in Mulgore. Travelling by foot from Bloodhoof village and up to Thunder Bluff, then back to Bloodhoof again. If I earned one gold for each minute I've spent running by foot in this game... well I guess you can imagine.

I started my adventures with my druid a long time ago, with two of my best friends. I've played many classes and with different races, but nothing stuck to me like the druid class did. I guess I like the versatility, the beauty of the hybrid.

So what classes did I play before? Well, in the open beta I played a rogue and got it up to around 16. Me and my friends spent most our time fishing in Goldshire, we thought it to be fun and why not enjoy the games lesser sides when you have the time. Our characters would die and disappear with the beta version of the game anyway. At least that was our reasoning, and we had lots of fun.

The first character however was a troll shaman, it was quite fun. Until I realized that using ankh would give me resurrection sickness for ten minutes. After that I tried the rogue again, it worked well on the beta. The thing was, in vanilla, our server had a pretty high percentage of rogues. Our Molten Core raids were filled with at least ten rogues. I was'nt bothered at first but I'll admit that it did contribute to the reason why I quit playing with my rogue.

I tried priest, warlock, hunter, shaman (again, yes, but not until after tbc).

After that I rolled a druid. It was like a whole new game for me then, I could tank, dps, save some healing gear and spec resto. It was breathtaking, the number of choices I had. And from all those different types of game-play, tanking stuck with me. It simply never got boring, with different groups came different challenges. Sometimes they used crowd control, sometimes you had to tank it all, no room for mistakes. And wow did I make mistakes, but with each mistake I learned something new.

After Wrath of the Lich King and dinging 80, I must've learned just as much, if not more, then I learned at level 70. New skills, new patches, swipe no longer restricted to three targets! Crazy!

And then, swipe hits everything in 360 degrees!

It's been a lot of changes and more to come with Cataclysm for sure. Thats all the time I have right now, have to get going to Kaluak Harbor and get my Dragonfin Anglefish! Just going to alt-tab back and start my fishing!

Oh shi.......

Testrun

This is a test, bears that use their claws must first sharpen them to the point of legendary perfection.