Panzerkin
I've been sorta working on a concept of a Panzerkin. I've decided that it might be interesting to do a large part of my brainstorming and planning for this here on LJ rather than offline. This, and perhaps some other early planning posts, will be somewhat rambling as I'm just spitting stuff out off the top of my head.
A Panzerkin is World of Warcraft druid, who is speced and equipped to tank with a Balance spec rather than the usual feral spec.
I'm not after a special purpose setup for the handful of fights calling for a ranged tank. Encounters requiring such a thing are tuned such that standard DPS specs and gearing will be enough, though tweaking both to suit the encounter can help. What I'm after is a general purpose tank.
The first glaring issue is uncritability. Feral druids get this through talents, and there is not enough defense available on offset pieces for a balance druid to achieve it through Defense gear. I haven't calculated it but defense gems and enchants all around might put you over, but that would gimp you in other important ways. You can't parry or block ever as a druid, and all the stuff that won't destroy your mana instantly has a cast time so for practical purposes, a Panzerkin cannot dodge.
That lack of avoidance means that for Panzerkin, Resilience is very nearly equivalent to Defense for a given amount of crit chance reduction. It also vastly increases the importance of Stamina, since that and armor are all you've got for survival- and hey, Resilience gear tends to be pretty damn heavy on Stamina.
So I'm thinking PvP gear to 5.6% crit chance reduction. There are other gear concerns...
Mana is a big one. YOu can't afford to go OOM. You'll be wanting at least some of the mana savings/regen talents- which all work off your spirit based regen. So you'll want some spirit, which is found in the largest quantities for DPS gear at least, on PvE gear. So after uncrittable, I'm thinking pve gear with more focus on stam than as DPS.
Rotation. Insect Swarm unglyphed and kept up at all times no matter what. 1% avoidance is 1% avoidance, a good thing. Wrath main nuke- Starfires cast time leaves it too wide open to pushback without disgusting amounts of haste stacking. Perhaps skip Eclipse? You might be moving the boss too much to take advantage of it, and if I'm right about Wrath being the way to go, you'll never use your Lunar Eclipses and never proc a Solar, so why waste the talent point? Starfall of course whenver.
I'm getting too tired to focus so I'll come back to this later.
A Panzerkin is World of Warcraft druid, who is speced and equipped to tank with a Balance spec rather than the usual feral spec.
I'm not after a special purpose setup for the handful of fights calling for a ranged tank. Encounters requiring such a thing are tuned such that standard DPS specs and gearing will be enough, though tweaking both to suit the encounter can help. What I'm after is a general purpose tank.
The first glaring issue is uncritability. Feral druids get this through talents, and there is not enough defense available on offset pieces for a balance druid to achieve it through Defense gear. I haven't calculated it but defense gems and enchants all around might put you over, but that would gimp you in other important ways. You can't parry or block ever as a druid, and all the stuff that won't destroy your mana instantly has a cast time so for practical purposes, a Panzerkin cannot dodge.
That lack of avoidance means that for Panzerkin, Resilience is very nearly equivalent to Defense for a given amount of crit chance reduction. It also vastly increases the importance of Stamina, since that and armor are all you've got for survival- and hey, Resilience gear tends to be pretty damn heavy on Stamina.
So I'm thinking PvP gear to 5.6% crit chance reduction. There are other gear concerns...
Mana is a big one. YOu can't afford to go OOM. You'll be wanting at least some of the mana savings/regen talents- which all work off your spirit based regen. So you'll want some spirit, which is found in the largest quantities for DPS gear at least, on PvE gear. So after uncrittable, I'm thinking pve gear with more focus on stam than as DPS.
Rotation. Insect Swarm unglyphed and kept up at all times no matter what. 1% avoidance is 1% avoidance, a good thing. Wrath main nuke- Starfires cast time leaves it too wide open to pushback without disgusting amounts of haste stacking. Perhaps skip Eclipse? You might be moving the boss too much to take advantage of it, and if I'm right about Wrath being the way to go, you'll never use your Lunar Eclipses and never proc a Solar, so why waste the talent point? Starfall of course whenver.
I'm getting too tired to focus so I'll come back to this later.