Blood Draining vs. Mongoose vs. ???

So many options...

There is (was) a pretty good discussion about Blood Draining and Mongoose in the Feral Tanking thread on EJ a couple days ago, and I'm kind of on the fence now about switching from Mongoose to Blood Draining.

If you don't know here's the tooltip from each weapon enchant:

Mongoose
Blood Draining

The main difference is one gives you avoidance, a small amount of mitigation and a decent amount of threat while the other gives you survivability when you need it most.

To the new to tanking Mongoose may seem like a no brainer - why wouldn't you take extra agility, some armor and a small threat boost over a bit of health when you dip low. And honestly if you are new to tanking you probably aren't jumping right into heroic 25 man ICC. So in that case (and I'm speaking strictly for the bears) I'd say Mongoose is the way to go.

I think to accurately figure out how "good" blood draining is you have to consider how hard a boss hits you on average compared to how much health you have at 35%. Let's do this with something easy like Sindragosa.

Edit: I say edit because I added this little edit after I did the sad excuse for math below but before I published this post, and I'm beginning to doubt my assumptions about how good Blood Draining is, hopefully someone can point out my flaws in logic, but after writing up this post, Blood Draining seems kind of lackluster, or at the very least not THAT much better than mongoose given the avoidance/threat/mitigation that mongoose does offer.

 World of Logs - Heroic Sindragosa

Firstly, let's assume from the data and otherwise:

• Average melee hit = 25,939
• Blood Reserve is at 5 in each scenario
• The Blood Draining proc heals for 2,000 - mid way between the amount possible at 5 stacks (1800-2200) in each scenario
• My buffed health when tanking is 85,500 (which is actually right around what it is, not sure of exact number)
• Let's ignore Frost Breaths because:
• They hit for roughly a bit less than a melee hit so they can even be considered the next melee hit
• I'm bad at math

Health at 35% = Total Health * 0.35
29925 = 85,500 * 0.35

Scenario #1 (aka the least effective use of Blood Draining):
I take enough damage to take me a little below the amount required for Blood Draining to proc. Meaning I get hit and it's to the effect that after the hit I am left with 34.9% of my total health. Meaning Blood Draining procs and the heal is negligible.

Health at 34.9% = Total Health * 0.349
29840 = 85500 * 0.349

Blood Draining would proc (remember assume 5 stack and average heal)
29840 + 2000 = 31840

The next hit coming in
31840 - 25939 = 5901

So as a recap - I have 55,779hp get hit for 25939hp, Blood Draining procs, I have 31840hp health, then another melee hit hits me for 25939hp leaving me with 5,901hp, then I receive a heal that takes me out of risk of dieing. Without the Blood Draining heal I would be left with the following:

29840 - 25939 = 3901

Remember this is the worst possible scenario for Blood Draining. A hit that barely takes me below 35%, still leaves me comfortably above 0hp, noticeable at 5901 which is plenty even if Frost Aura ticked for it's average amount of 3166.

Scenario #2 (aka Blood Draining prevents tank death):
I start with enough health that I get hit, blood draining procs, I get hit again and live with 1hp of close to it.

Starting HP - Avg. Melee Hit + 2000 = HP after first hit
49879 - 25939 + 2000 = 25940

Next hit before an incoming heal leaves me at 1hp
25940 - 25939 = 1

Margin for Blood Draining:
In terms of effectiveness the worst case for Blood Draining is a starting HP of 55,779 and the best case is 49878. That's a health range of 5901hp between the best Blood Draining has to offer and the worst it has to offer.

Including an unfortunate tick from Frost Aura (3166 damage) any health range from 49879 to 53045 is a great scenario for Blood Draining. What are the chances at any given time during the fight would I be in that range and not receive a heal for roughly 2 - 2.5 seconds. I'm assuming the chances aren't that high and practically any heal I would get would be more than 2,000 which would limit the usefulness of Blood Draining by quite a bit more. Even LotP heals for more than 2,000, quite a bit more actually.

Sadly my math skills dwindle greatly from here. I'm not sure how to even start approaching figuring out my average health during a given fight and comparing that to Mongoose's effect.

Someone rescue me..?

I could potentially be a Robot

Berserk fell apart, like a tripping and falling flat on your face kind of falling apart. Long story short, because of attendance (heard that story a million times) and a greedy GM that made a silly decision the guild fell apart rather rapidly and had almost zero chance to pick itself back up and remain together.

When a guild is clearing 11/12 consistently every week, but then not having enough people show up for Lich King attempts people naturally want to recruit more and try to get a serious Monday progression night in. Well obviously only being a couple weeks new in the guild I don't know exactly what happened, but the GM decided instead of telling everyone he didn't want to make any kind of effort into fixing the guilds problems he would rather just disband and move on. Obviously some people were against that, so he ranted one night in gchat that the guild was dead, caused a whole load of people to jump ship, then proceeding to leave himself while taking most everything valuable in the guild bank.

Regardless it doesn't much matter. The people that were left over were only interested in 10 man progression and from a recent past experience, I was sure that wouldn't work out well for me.

So back to the drawing board. Time to hop back into the happiness that is searching/applying for guilds. This far into an expansion it's probably both good and bad to be a tank looking for a decent established guild. It's good for only one reason: people are bored and take breaks/quit. It's bad because most guilds are either further progressed than you and are settled in with the consistent people, or they are like the Berserks of the world that need people and openly recruit, but don't really end up sticking around for very long.

Luckily enough I come to find out GCR (Giant Communist Robots) is looking for a feral druid of the tanking variety, but requires they have a relatively decent off spec kitty gear set. I apply anyway knowing full well that my kitty set was somewhat lacking; however, they agreed to trial me a few weeks ago! I immediately dropped a ton of gold buying BoEs, enchanting, gemming my kitty gear and get it to a respectable level for ICC 25.

Overall my trial experience so far has been great. I've now done every fight (except LK) on heroic in 25 man ICC, and this is definitely a serious guild with skilled people that know how to progress. I've been tanking pretty much non-stop since I joined and haven't even needed to switch to Kitty for anything other than certain phases of fights, in which case I have to stay in tank gear and spec to do some tanking later on. I'm definitely not complaining about that though, I'm loving the challenge of tanking heroic fights with DPS that keeps me competitive and on my toes.

I'm still a trial by the way, so I'm not really a giant robot (at least yet); however, I think I'm doing relatively well in this new environment that I haven't really experienced since pre-nerf Sunwell days in Burning Crusade so hopefully I pass. Time will tell...

Trying again..

A lot has happened since the last time I actually posted anything.

My raiding situation has changed significantly for the better and I'm happy to say I'm finally in a solid guild with a lot of background/history that probably isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

I'm going to give this blogging "thing" another shot, and I think it will be easier now what with the NDA gone, and progression raiding actually existing for me, so on...

I'm not dead, and if anyone out there is reading - I appreciate it greatly!