1. Hey man,
    This guide has been like a bible to me since i started playing a bear. Thanks for taking your time to put it together and sharing your knowledge with us. It's a great guide even in it's current shape and i'm glad you'll be doing some rework on it. Keep up the good work :)

  2. Mega Late reply, but as I've just returned to Warmane recently you'll have to forgive me.

    The BiS list in the guide needs to be revised, as there has been multiple changes to the realms since Ragnaros and Deathwing; Notably the fact that Parry-Haste is now properly implemented, meaning that Haste is now detrimental, and Expertise above the soft cap is that much more valuable.

    Threat has also been reworked with the absense of taunt-swapping. Back when these BiS lists were compiled, for some random reason threat generation from taunts was insanely high and after a few taunt swaps the MT would have enough threat to go afk for half an hour without losing aggro. (Hence the value of WGG instead of hit rating)

    In fact, there's just been way too many changes. I'll basically need to proof read the whole guide and rewrite entire sections from scratch. Talents, BiS List, redo all the Links that point at OpenWoW.

    It's a huge undertaking as this guide is almost 20,000 words long. For now take the BiS list with a bit of salt, I'll revise it when i get to that part
    Only one thing here is that parry-haste is only active on 2 ICC bosses (LDW and Sindragosa). Of those two only on Sindy could it possibly be a problem, but even then it's not a big one. With that in mind, haste is still a fairly desirable stat.

  3. Hello,

    I wanted to thank you for your guide. I started using it about a year ago, and returned recently these past couple months and this has been my go to guide for learning the way of the bear.

    I noticed you said some things were outdated/changed, but still it was a nice base line to get me going, and I have added in some self-adjustments for my play style anyway, but if you do update this, I will definitely look it over again. I recognize your name easily now because I've had this guide bookmarked so long, I hope to run into you in game sometime!

  4. Only one thing here is that parry-haste is only active on 2 ICC bosses (LDW and Sindragosa). Of those two only on Sindy could it possibly be a problem, but even then it's not a big one. With that in mind, haste is still a fairly desirable stat.
    Yeah, Parry-Hasting isn't too much of an issue inside ICC, but don't forget that Halion in RS hits fairly hard and definitely does parry-haste as well.

    I should mention that when this guide was written, bosses on Warmane didn't parry at all (Yeah, it's been THAT long lol). I made a few janky edits when this fix was initially implemented and I'm just not too happy with alot of the sections in general.
    It just so happens that the new addition of parry-hasting as well compounds this outdated-ness even further, so it just feels like I've been leaving it off for too long >.>


    I wanted to thank you for your guide. I started using it about a year ago, and returned recently these past couple months and this has been my go to guide for learning the way of the bear.
    This guide has been like a bible to me since i started playing a bear. Thanks for taking your time to put it together and sharing your knowledge with us.
    I'm really glad you guys found the guide helpful!


    I always try to do a little bit of research when I come back after long breaks like this, it gives me a bit of time to see what people's opinions are in the top raiding guilds, and also experience some of the changes first hand which gives me a little time to do my own testing.

  5. I feel like reading this guide makes me a better tank than 99% of the server. Srsly man THANK YOU so much for making this guide.

    Also lol I can See you editting the Items section right now. You broke the color and spoiler links btw

  6. It's been a pretty productive Christmas Break for this guide as I've managed to revise the entire guide to my liking, and only have the BiS section left to go.

    Unforunately I'm away visiting family and am not at home to conduct my own testing and even if I were, I don't think i have the resources to properly test a couple of things for myself;

    If someone else in the community is able to help me out with verifying the following 2 segments and let me know their results I'd be hugely grateful;

    A quick note on Parry Hasting;
    Whenever a Boss or Player successfully Parries an attack, their next Auto-Attack will gain UP TO 40% Haste. However, Bears are unable to ever parry, so bears will never gain this haste rating.
    In addition, most bosses in ICC do NOT benefit from Parry-Haste. The only end-game bosses capable of Parry-Haste are Lady Deathwhisper, Sindragosa, and Halion.

    Alot of people are under an illusion that Parry-Hasting causes extra Melee Attacks to appear out of nowhere. This is not true. For Example, if a Boss normally attacks every 2 seconds, upon successfully Parrying an attack, his next Melee will only take 1.2 seconds to strike, aka 40% faster.

    A Few examples might be the best way to show how Parry Haste works;

    Example 1
    (0 seconds) Boss swings for 20k
    (2 seconds) Boss swings for 20k
    (2.01 seconds) Boss Parries an Attack, triggers Parry-Haste
    (3.2 seconds) Boss swings for 20k (This attack took 1.2 seconds due to 40% haste)
    Next Boss attacks would occur at 5.2 seconds, and 7.2 seconds, given no more parries occur

    Example 2
    (0 seconds) Boss swings for 20k
    (2 seconds) Boss swings for 20k
    (3.19 seconds) Boss Parries an Attack, triggers Parry-Haste
    (3.2 seconds) Boss swings for 20k (This attack took 1.2 seconds due to 40% haste, but counts from the time of the last attack, not the time of parry)
    Next Boss attacks would occur at 5.2 seconds, and 7.2 seconds, given no more parries occur

    Example 3
    (0 seconds) Boss swings for 20k
    (2 seconds) Boss swings for 20k
    (3.21 seconds) Boss Parries an Attack, triggers Parry-Haste
    (3.21 seconds) Boss swings for 20k (More than 1.2 seconds have passed, so attack occurs instantly at the time of Parry. Note that LESS than 40% haste is gained in this example)
    Next Boss attacks would occur at 5.21 seconds, and 7.21 seconds, given no more parries occur

    Example 4
    (0 seconds) Boss swings for 20k
    (2 seconds) Boss swings for 20k
    (2.1 seconds) Boss Parries an Attack, triggers Parry-Haste
    (2.2 seconds) Boss Parries an Attack, triggers Parry-Haste AGAIN
    (2.72 seconds) Boss swings for 20k (Parry haste stacks. 40% haste of 2 seconds = 1.2 seconds. Another 40% Haste to 1.2 seconds = 0.72 seconds)
    Next Boss attacks would occur at 4.72 seconds, and 6.72 seconds, given no more parries occur

    TL;DR, note that decreasing your chance to be parried against Lady Deathwhisper, Sindragosa, and Halion will slightly decrease your damage taken.
    Can anyone test that Parry-Hasting is correctly working ingame as it is on retail? I know alot of Private Servers have been failing to properly implement this mechanic, which is why Warmane spent so many years with Parrying completely DISABLED, as when they tried to enable Parry-Hasting bosses basically just became impossible to kill.

    The information above is only accurate if Warmane properly managed to script things retail-like, and it'd be good if someone can confirm whether this is the case or not.

    And lastly
    Feral Aggression
    <snip>
    Demoralizing Roar usually decreases Attack Power by 410. With this talent at 5/5, this number becomes a total of 574 Attack Power.
    As bosses have a bare minimum of Attack Power, and their Melee Attacks scales heavily with the their Attack Power, this Attack Power decrease does indeed become a pretty noticeable difference, perhaps somewhere in the range of ~5-6% at a rough guesstimate.
    By this guesstimate, the additional ~164 Attack power decrease (from 410 -> 574) would correlate to about ~1.5% damage decrease, for a total investment of 5 talent points. (If anyone has access to in-depth World of Logs reports and can find out exactly what the difference is, I'd greatly appreciate it if you let me know somehow!)

    This is something I've been trying to test for AGES, and due to the high amount of variance it has always been a complete NIGHTMARE to get results for. If anyone is actively parsing Logs and submitting World of Logs reports, it'd be nice if we can come to some kind of result about this.

    Even if a rough estimate based on the full effect of Demoralizing Roar's 410 attack power debuff can be figured out, we can extrapolate the information to gain a good idea of about the Improved Roar's performance will do at 574.



    And lastly, I'm thinking to redo the BiS section completely, with just listing out a bunch of items for people to choose from. I don't want the section to be too overly complicated or wordy, but I'm unsure on how to best approach it.
    I think if i just list all the BiS items, it lets people know which items to roll for/ collect, and then lets them pick which ones to equipp based on the fights that they'll be facing.
    Let me know what you guys think though.
    Edited: December 27, 2017

  7. Hello again!
    I have something to ask you :) I'm using tosk's bear ttl calculator, to decide which item i use in which situation. Specially talking, for trinkets. But somehow, Darkmoon Card: Greatness (Agility) is always the 2nd to best trinket. The list goes like this : 1st pphc trink, 2nd darkmoon card, 3rd corroded skeleton, 4th eof trink, 5th rshc trinket... I dont understand why agility is valued that much over all the other ehp trinkets. Also heroic jug is generally worse than black heart. I checked the values, its using ;
    +1 Stam = +1 Stamina
    +1 Agility = +1.7939176381057043 Stamina
    +1 Dodge Rating = +1.1752527005878193 Stamina
    +1 Base Armor = +0.7421562368208082 Stamina
    I dont understand why agility and dodge rated more than stamina. Isnt stamina and armor the base stats for EHP? I know tosk is a good theory crafter, he even got his name on an item (some wrists that never drops for me on icc25 :D) but this calculation seems really bad for ICC tanking, where ehp is the way to go. I'll leave a link for the calculator, the wiki it was on is closed now so i'm using web archive to reach it. And the images of the calculations i'm running. Links:
    https://web.archive.org/web/20100925...rTTLCalculator
    https://ibb.co/j7y0pw
    https://ibb.co/eDz6Uw
    https://ibb.co/eHraNG
    https://ibb.co/jTo0pw
    I made the attacks for LK, 40k on melee, 50k soul reaper every 45 seconds. Thanks for taking your time to read :)

  8. Hello again!
    I have something to ask you :) I'm using tosk's bear ttl calculator, to decide which item i use in which situation. Specially talking, for trinkets. But somehow, Darkmoon Card: Greatness (Agility) is always the 2nd to best trinket. The list goes like this : 1st pphc trink, 2nd darkmoon card, 3rd corroded skeleton, 4th eof trink, 5th rshc trinket... I dont understand why agility is valued that much over all the other ehp trinkets. Also heroic jug is generally worse than black heart. I checked the values, its using ;
    +1 Stam = +1 Stamina
    +1 Agility = +1.7939176381057043 Stamina
    +1 Dodge Rating = +1.1752527005878193 Stamina
    +1 Base Armor = +0.7421562368208082 Stamina
    I dont understand why agility and dodge rated more than stamina. Isnt stamina and armor the base stats for EHP? I know tosk is a good theory crafter, he even got his name on an item (some wrists that never drops for me on icc25 :D) but this calculation seems really bad for ICC tanking, where ehp is the way to go. I'll leave a link for the calculator, the wiki it was on is closed now so i'm using web archive to reach it. And the images of the calculations i'm running. Links:
    https://web.archive.org/web/20100925...rTTLCalculator
    https://ibb.co/j7y0pw
    https://ibb.co/eDz6Uw
    https://ibb.co/eHraNG
    https://ibb.co/jTo0pw
    I made the attacks for LK, 40k on melee, 50k soul reaper every 45 seconds. Thanks for taking your time to read :)
    The stat-weights seem rediculously off to me. I've never heard of Tosk's TTL calculator in all my days including retails and Warmane, and it seems like for good reason too.

    Agility weighted at 1.79+ stamina each? That would mean a 20 agility gem would be worth almost ~36 Stamina's worth of stat-weighting, which if correct you'd be seeing all bears wearing 20 agil gems instead of 30 stam. Clearly, this is incorrect, as 30 stamina is definitely better.

    Dodge rating weighted at 1.75? What a joke, Agility provides higher dodge-chance per point, and also high crit chance and 2 armor per point, yet agility is only 2% more stat weighting? Hah.

    Armor weighted at 0.75 also seems a bit far fetched, but I assume that probably means pre-bear-form multiplier, which is a useless and wrong indicator as bear-form only multiplies Leather-gear Base-Armor, which is directly tied to the item level of the armor, and therefore practically a useless indicator. Anyone knows that higher item level gear has higher armor. We're interested in the >>ADDITIONAL<< armor stat, which is not multiplied by bear form, and only found on rings/necks and trinkets.

    The calculator has really bad formulas for trinkets from what i can see. Not only are the stat weights wrong, it has very limited understanding of proc uptimes or internal cooldowns.

    Heroic Unidentifiable organ always appears much more overpowered than on calculators than ingame, as it gives passive Armor and a Stamina Proc. Calculators just assume it gives maximum stamina at all times, which if you try the trinket out in game, really is never the case as the proc usually fades without stacking to maximum.
    Agility is far too overweighted on that calculator, and doesn't account for the fact Darkmoon cards and Blackheart have an Internal CoolDown, and instead count the procs as close to 100% uptime which is not the case ingame.

    Darkmoon Card:Agility and Black heart have always been the best starter trinkets for new bear-tanks who just hit 80, but glyph of indomitability wins out over Darkmoon Card once you farm the EoTs for it. Again, the calculator is just being stupid, and assumes 100% uptime on procs that ingame actually have Internal Cooldowns and unreliable uptime procs.

    BiS for Trinkets remains as said in the BiS list section, the top 4 trinkets should be interchangeable depending on the fight. On fights where rapid melee strikes are received, then Heroic Organ is the best, but on other fights where magical damage is predominant, you can't beat Sindy's fang.

    TL;DR; Really bad calculator if ever I've seen one. Use the downloadable program Rawr instead.
    Rawr is a trusted calculator used by most people in the all good guilds back on retail, including the rank 1 guild Paragon who achieved World-First Sindragosa and Lich King 25heroic. I believe the latest version released for 3.3.5a before cataclysm came out is 2.3.22
    http://rawr.codeplex.com/releases/view/51100
    Edited: January 7, 2018

  9. If you want to know my 2 cents on Trinkets, it'd go like this


    1st to 4th(roughly equal): Sindy's fang / JV / Organ / Corroded key
    5th place: PTS
    6th Place Glyph of Indomitability (from EoTs)
    7th Black Heart (From ToC 5 man normal)
    8th Darkmoon Card Greatness:Agility (BoE from AH)
    9th Heart of Iron (Ulduar 25 man Ignis drop)
    10th Corpse tongue Coin
    11th Ick Rotting Thumb

    If you're new to 80, usually you can just farm Trial of the Champions 5 normal repeatedly until you get your Black Heart Trinket, and use Emblems of triumph for the Indomitable trinket. Pre-Indomitable trinket, you can just easily pickup an Ick Rotting thumb as you should be running FoS/PoS heroic daily and no one rolls on this trinket, plus it drops like all the time.
    From there, you'll usually replace Black Heart with a Corroded Key after you buy your 4 piece T10, and then replace the Indomitable Trinket with either Organ/PTS/Sindy's or JV

    TLDR> Ding 80 = Farm toc5, get Blackheart > optional, Buy Darkmoon agility > run PoS hc for Ick Thumb > Save up EoTs for Indomitable trinket, replace Icks Thumb > After 4 piece T10, use EoFs to get Corroded Key, replace Black Heart.
    Use Corroded key+ Indomitable trinket to keep raiding raiding, aiming to get all the top 5 trinkets listed in the BiS section. Swapping trinkets to suit the fight as necessary.
    Edited: January 7, 2018

  10. Thanks for your reply!
    I'm not new to 80, i actually got kingslayer on lordaeron 1 week ago with my bear tank, but i'm sure new bears that just hit 80 will find it really helpful :) I have all the trinkets except sindi and jv, switching them as needed for the fights. I also have rawr, but rawr seems off too... It shows me eot trinket is better than sindi. I think you can edit rawr's stat weights, but i dont have the knowledge for values or know how to do so. It says mitigation + survival stats for eot, is better than just survival stats on sindi. Here is a link for what rawr shows me for trinkets https://ibb.co/n03Ujw
    And thanks again for your quick and detailed reply.

  11. If someone else in the community is able to help me out with verifying the following 2 segments and let me know their results I'd be hugely grateful;
    The principle you outlined is incomplete, so examples 2,3 & 4 are incorrect. According to TankSpot:

    "After a successful parry, the defender's "swing timer" is reduced by 40% of their weapon speed, unless this would result in a reduction to less than 20% of their swing time remaining."

    This means that it works like this, for a 1 second swing timer, for three subsequent parries:
    1.00 seconds left:
    Parry occurs, timer readjusts to 0.60 seconds, because it's above 20% of the remaining timer (0.60 > 0.20 seconds)
    0.60 seconds left:
    Parry occurs again, timer readjusts to 0.20 seconds, because it's above 20% of the remaining timer (0.20 > 0.12 seconds)
    0.20 seconds left:
    Another parry, but the timer doesn't get readjusted, because it's below 20% of the remaining timer (-0.20 < 0.04 seconds)

    That is, the attack happened 0.2s after the last one.

    Can anyone test that Parry-Hasting is correctly working ingame as it is on retail?
    Parry haste works well, as you'll easily notice on Halion or Sindy, and Shaos said in a stream an QA person said that this "diminishing return" measure works the same way on Icecrown and to date I've seen no evidence to the contrary.

    Even if a rough estimate based on the full effect of Demoralizing Roar's 410 attack power debuff can be figured out, we can extrapolate the information to gain a good idea of about the Improved Roar's performance will do at 574.
    Although the AP reduction is flat, all bosses have their attack tables set up in such a way that a 574 AP debuff multiplies their damage by 6/7 (~14% decrease) and that this is precisely 40% stronger than the unimproved version (~10% decrease untalented).

    You should keep in mind though, that 574 is the maximum AP any mob actually has, precisely so that an improved AP debuff talent would be the maximum AP reduction you can do. This AP then gets added to a base value and runs through a (rather high) multiplier, so you can't think of it as "X amount of AP = Y% of attack value", because that X value is capped.
    Edited: January 7, 2018

  12. For the AP reduction part. What eva said is true, but to give you a better idea on how much effect does this extra 5% have.

    LK HC has around 210k raw dmg. The AP debuff comes 1st before all else(armor, other DR)..

    210k - 10% vs 210k - ~15% ...... 21k vs 31.5k less raw LK dmg, might mean between 1 KO or 2 hits

    p.s I'd suggest adding a 2nd set in your gear list. One that gets you expertise capped (56) as getting parry hasted on halion or sindy sucks badly atm.
    Edited: January 7, 2018

  13. The principle you outlined is incomplete, so examples 2,3 & 4 are incorrect. According to TankSpot:

    "After a successful parry, the defender's "swing timer" is reduced by 40% of their weapon speed, unless this would result in a reduction to less than 20% of their swing time remaining."

    This means that it works like this, for a 1 second swing timer, for three subsequent parries:
    1.00 seconds left:
    Parry occurs, timer readjusts to 0.60 seconds, because it's above 20% of the remaining timer (0.60 > 0.20 seconds)
    0.60 seconds left:
    Parry occurs again, timer readjusts to 0.20 seconds, because it's above 20% of the remaining timer (0.20 > 0.12 seconds)
    0.20 seconds left:
    Another parry, but the timer doesn't get readjusted, because it's below 20% of the remaining timer (-0.20 < 0.04 seconds)

    That is, the attack happened 0.2s after the last one.


    Parry haste works well, as you'll easily notice on Halion or Sindy, and Shaos said in a stream an QA person said that this "diminishing return" measure works the same way on Icecrown and to date I've seen no evidence to the contrary.


    Although the AP reduction is flat, all bosses have their attack tables set up in such a way that a 574 AP debuff multiplies their damage by 6/7 (~14% decrease) and that this is precisely 40% stronger than the unimproved version (~10% decrease untalented).

    You should keep in mind though, that 574 is the maximum AP any mob actually has, precisely so that an improved AP debuff talent would be the maximum AP reduction you can do. This AP then gets added to a base value and runs through a (rather high) multiplier, so you can't think of it as "X amount of AP = Y% of attack value", because that X value is capped.
    Thanks, the Parry Hasting information was really useful and I've adjusted the following section accordingly. *thumbsup* I was able to track down the original articles and verify the information I was after. And I'll have to trust Shaos's word regarding the QA devs, but from what I can see from Logs Warmane seems to have done a good job regarding the current scripts.

    Is there a source for the Attack Power information? The fractions seem somewhat familiar to me, and I'm almost certain they're correct. I vaguely remember some fractions that were thrown around during Retail-WoW but much of the documentation on those little details have been lost of buried over the years since WotLK.

    For the AP reduction part. What eva said is true, but to give you a better idea on how much effect does this extra 5% have.

    LK HC has around 210k raw dmg. The AP debuff comes 1st before all else(armor, other DR)..

    210k - 10% vs 210k - ~15% ...... 21k vs 31.5k less raw LK dmg, might mean between 1 KO or 2 hits

    p.s I'd suggest adding a 2nd set in your gear list. One that gets you expertise capped (56) as getting parry hasted on halion or sindy sucks badly atm.
    Yeah, the AP reduction is first in line to reduce raw damage, which is handy.

    I've added a section regarding an Expertise Capped setup in the BiS list as well. I kinda hinted at the possibility of such a setup but I just compiled all the numbers together in another little section.

  14. Is there a source for the Attack Power information?
    It can be reverse-engineered from the table in section 2.2.13 in this EJ archive link. The original work this table references (and gets its data from) is lost.

  15. You can work around sindi and halion so many ways .Two simple examples:
    1.Crafted boots and weapon swap when you know that spike damage is about to come to be exp cap
    2.You are using normal tanking gear, but just dont target and/or attack the boss when spike damage incoming or healers are moving and you are not getting normal heals. aka blistering, meteor etc.
    Even with 1milion exp pets and other meles easy trigger parry haste.

    I dont believe that anyone with tanking experience have any problem with parry haste not exp cap and not BIS gear tanking 25m HC.

    According EJ parry haste was working like this on retail even there was really hard to understand how was it:

    "When a parry occurs, the target that parried the attack has a chance of having the current swing hasted, as follows:
    * If the next attack would normally occur within 20% of your weapon speed after the parry, there is no effect.
    * If the next attack would normally occur between 20% and 60% of your weapon speed later, it happens 20% of your weapon speed later instead.
    * If the next attack would normally occur more than 60% of your weapon speed later, the time until your next attack is reduced by 40% of your weapon speed.

    the parry haste is actually about 24%, not 30%.
    40% of the time, it's 40% haste
    40% of the time, it ranges from 40% to 0% (20% average)
    20% of the time, it's 0% haste
    So 80% of the time it has a 30% haste, and 20% of the time, no haste at all. Result is 24% haste.
    "

    On Warmane who knows how exactly is working, at the begging when they enable the parry haste, it was after parry he instant attack you [most heroic guilds experience from first hand how you can get hit 3 times in a row for over 110k total damage under 1 sec;]/], after a bit they change that.


    ps. last 3 halion and sindi kills when i was tanking with normal gear on my bear i had only 1 time 2 parry`s rest of the time i had just 1 for the whole fight with 35 exp. None of this parry`s happens on spike damage because the reason n2 above.
    ps2. another thing i dont understand is this when you are playing tank class you want to maximize all little things that can reduce damage taken, or increase your survivability. On most of the tanking guides for warr/dudu/dk/pala swimming in the Warmane forum you`ll see trading damage reduction, more HP, slowing attack speed, decreasing AP etc points for damage increasing ?! If you have aggro problems the problem is the way you build and keep your aggro.
    Edited: January 8, 2018

First 12345 ... Last

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •