Hot on last night%26#39;s 25 man foray into Naxxramas, we took a 10 man group from our guild in to the floating Scourge Hotel. First time there for about half of us, the other half had done parts of it last week or in beta. Went very well: in 2.5 hours we got through Spiders, Plague, and Patchwerk. Grobbulus was new to us and that%26#39;s a tricky positioning fight, after a couple of wipes I had to log off.
Naxx/10 is very nicely tuned, it feels a lot like Karazhan. We continued to muscle through it, lots of AoE tanking and brute force with a very melee heavy group. But some care required and some dancing through trash kept it fun. 2 epics / boss for 10 people is a lot nicer drop rate than 3 / boss for 25, too. It%26#39;s clear that for raiding guilds Naxx/10 is going to be the path to a lot of quick upgrades.
Some things I%26#39;ve learned about bear tanking:
- It%26#39;s all about Swipe. You want the Swipe talent and the T6 set bonus is a help.
- Given all the AoE tanking I recommend bears learn to play with Glyph of Maul. It%26#39;s a bit dangerous around crowd control but it literally doubles your Maul attack at no extra cost. Maul is 50% of my DPS now.
- Bear DPS is quite good, particularly with all the AoE. In the Burning Crusade I%26#39;d often be tempted to push things, go to cat form in a quiet moment to goose my DPS. I%26#39;m sure my cat DPS is still higher but the bear DPS is good enough against groups of 3 or more I often prefer bear.
- Bear HP is ridiculous. Unbuffed I%26#39;m at 28k, I%26#39;m regularly around 38k in a raid and at peak moments I%26#39;m close to 50k. It feels like I%26#39;m the right choice of tank for very hard hitting bosses. For now, at least.
- Bear armor is overpowered, particularly if you have fancy armor trinkets and weapons. I%26#39;m taking a lot less damage than my shield blocking warrior friends and I have 20% more HP, too. The nerf will fix that soon.
- 20 yard taunt is very convenient.
I did a full gear audit today and vendored / deleted about 80 items. I found that even as a new level 80 there are precious few upgrades for me from quest rewards or reputation. There%26#39;s some good stuff at Exalted with some factions and some good upgrades at the Auction House. But in general the real upgrades from T6 are coming from Heroics, Naxx, and badges. I was particularly lucky to get the feral stick on my first run in Heroic Utgarde Keep.