When it comes to big ugly lumps of mutated flesh that hit for up to 30k, relying on avoidance stats which ‘make it a little less likely’ that you’ll take a few consecutive hits over any given interval starts to look a little less attractive than stacking ‘Effective Health’ (EH) stats which give you a little more room to survive those consecutive hits which will inevitably land.

There’s not all that much you can do to tweak your EH upward short of upgrading your gear or cramming a few more stamina gems in, but if you don’t usually use two stamina trinkets, now would be a good time to equip that second lump of pure health – or a Glyph of Indomitability (cheap at 50 Triumph Badges).

Consumables and Raid Buffs

The other place to go looking for that little edge, is consumables and raid buffs.

Indestructible Potions are rather amazing, and should be tossed back like candy in any content that’s putting stress on you healers with direct physical damage. Perfect for Festergut, you should be able to keep that bonus 3.5k AC up for the entire time you’re taking hits by simply drinking your first potion a few seconds before the pull.

Drinking your first potion while out of combat might ‘waste’ a few seconds of the two minute buff, but ensures that your potion cooldown will be usable again two minutes into the fight, allowing you to get up to 4 minutes coverage – enough that neither tank should have to take a hit without this buff up on this fight.

The two main raid buffs to triple check before pulling are Devotion Aura, and Stoneskin Totem – preferably with the Protection and Enhancement talents ‘Improved Devotion Aura’ and ‘Guardian Totems’ buffing their effect.

There are plenty of other raid buffs you don’t want to be without – but those two are the most likely to ‘go missing’, and are both very strong buffs when faced with hard hitting melee attacks.

AP Debuff

2/2 Vindication, 5/5 Feral Aggression, 5/5 Improved Demoralising Shout, 2/2 Improved Curse of Weakness

Make sure someone in the raid is keeping up the fully talented version of one of these debuffs with as close to 100% uptime as possible. Your friendly Neighbourhood Prot or Ret Paladin is the most likely suspect, thanks to the relative ease of application – but if you can’t guarantee that someone else will be keeping it up for you (or won’t be running around with a spore for long enough for their debuff to drop off!) then it may be worth considering spec’ing into this yourself where possible.

I find Auracle a very nice little addon for tracking debuffs like this.

Ok, so you’ve Piled on as much mitigation and health as you can, the boss is hitting as softly as he’s likely to – what now?

Well, aside from doing your best to save your cooldowns for your turn at tanking the three-inhale phase (during which you’ll probably want to be chaining your survival tricks together right up until he burps on everyone) the only things left to do is try and kick out as much damage as possible. Try to line up a salvation for the tank swap and do your best to return some of the love. With tanks capable of breaking 5k DPS on this one we suddenly become a realisitic part of the effort to beat the enrage timer

Introducing Katjia this is what he has to say about himself;

I’ve played a Feral Bear from Maraudon through Stratholme, Kara to the Black Temple and onward into Northrend.

I certainly enjoy playing Balance, Restoration and Feral DPS, but Tanking (10% Meticulous attention to gearing, 20% Gleefully ripping the Face/Kneecaps/Toe-Hairs off the big ugly standing in front of you, 65% Finding bloody good healers you trust and 5% not standing in the fire) has been my primary focus since TBC.

I may not be an expert at all things Druid – napkin math is about the limit of my theorycrafting – but if I don’t know something, I’ll probably know where to go to find out more about it.

If you have any questions or topics you would like Katija to cover please post your comment here and we’ll see what he can do for you