Gearing Up a Feral Druid: From Rawr to Raiding (May 27th, 2008 // 1:55pm)

Continuing from the last segment, where we covering gearing a Feral Druid from a new 70 up through instances and heroics, we’re going to continue and gear your Druid up through T4 instances. This will include Karazhan, Gruul’s, and Mag’s. By this point I’m going to assume you’re able to run these raids enough times that you can get enough badges to get all the badge gear, although you won’t be able to do so immediately. It will all come in time, however. I will also include higher-end crafted items that you should now start being able to afford.

For clarification, each level of gear described below is not absolute. What I mean by that is that just because I show a row of items doesn’t mean you have to get all those items before the gear becomes viable. Go and download Rawr, install it, play around with it, and learn to use it. When you obtain a new item, let Rawr now, and then re-optimize. Rawr isn’t perfect, but it can be a tremendous help for you, and save you a LOT of time. Again, remember to tell it to keep “% Chance to be Crit” at “<= 0″ when optimizing.

Well, let’s not waste any more time, and get to it!

Gear Level 3: Tier 4 (Download Rawr .xml)

Okay, so you’re starting to find heroics getting easier and easier. You’ve got more than enough health and armor for any situation, and your healers love you. You’re also starting to run out of gear you can get without raiding. So you look to your guild and at other with similar interests to yourself, and you all head into Karazhan. After running that for a while, you generate enough interest for a larger group and run both Gruul’s and Mag’s. You start to see a fairly steady stream of [Badge of Justice] flowing in, and with your good gear money is starting to be less and less of an issue. This is where the game really starts to shine and you start to have your most fun tanking the huge guys with millions of health.

You’ll notice that even though we break through the T4 barrier, a few items are still from the last gear level. Another thing you’ll notice is we broke through the 30% barrier. If possible, try to have above 30% dodge (buffed) before you go into Karazhan. Just add this as another parameter to Rawr and it should do the rest, ;)

Again, keep in mind this is an optimized solution created by Rawr. In most cases (including the case where you don’t have EXACTLY the setup below), there will be items better than the ones listed below. For example, [Slikk's Cloak of Placation] is a much better cape overall, but turns out to be worse in the one instance below. Again, use Rawr yourself for your best outcome, ;)

(Note: [Idol of Terror] makes an excellent alternative for the idol below. See the comments for discussion about this trinket vs. [Idol of Ursoc])

Let’s go ahead and gear up as follows:

Head

Neck

Shldrs

Back

Chest

Wrists

Hands

Waist

Legs

Feet

Finger

Finger

Trinket

Trinket

Wep

Idol

The biggest difference you’ll notice is that our health, armor, and dodge are a LOT higher. In fact, you should hit the armor cap once you’re all raid buffed up, which along with the dodge will result in you receiving a lot less damage. Your healers will love you for this! =D

If you have all of the above gear, you will find yourself with the following statistics (self-buffed with MotW):

Next Up: T5 Raiding

I had finished writing up the whole T5 raid section and had picked out most of the gear we’d be using, and even built a pretty little table for it all, when Rawr crashed out when I tried Optimizing. After numerous restarts and trying a few more computers, it seems Rawr crashes if you have too many items picked out as “available.” I’ve been talking with the developer for the past two days, and hopefully will have a copy that works soon. This post was originally going to cover T4 and T5, but due to the freeze up I’ve temporarily forgone the T5, but didn’t want to just leave the T4 information sitting in my box as a draft, so here it is.

Next time, we’ll venture into SSC, TK, and ZA!