My Affair with Feral Combat, a Poem:

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Through many a fight I’ve stood in the back,
Furiously fighting to keep tanks alive.
Shedding my bark for the warmth of thick fur,
My time has come to stare at a bear hide.

For all my grumbling and interface tweaking,
Not seeing the fight for monitoring health,
My change of view is beyond imagining,
No longer looking like very old broccoli.

In feline form I leap through the air,
Biting and clawing with shredding attacks.
My how much fun it is to mangle and prowl,
Sad it will be when I have to switch back.

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Background:

With the number of active players <devnull> has had seeming to dwindle as of late, and the loss (whether temporary or not is still uncertain) of one of our two tanks, the need arose for another person to migrate into the off-tank/dps role for our raids. Realistically there were two of us who were close to being ready: a warrior who was a little shy of the defense cap and me with a relatively complete feral set (and I already had the Staff of the Plague Beast).

The night we needed the new tank was on one of our continuation days in Naxx (typically running Wednesday and Sunday each week), and Patchwerk was our first encounter of the night. We tried running with our warrior as OT, and we just could not keep him alive through the fight. It was close, but the spike damage was just too much.

The following couple of days saw me scrambling to gather some other pieces that would allow me to tank in Naxx effectively, and by Wednesday I was more than ready to give it a shot. I went through the respec, as did our warrior back to fury, and we met some success even though we only had eight people.

All of this happened a couple of weeks ago.

Fast forward to this past week. I have upgraded my gear further, tanked a few heroics, and this past Sunday we cleared two and a third (2 and 1/3) wings in Naxx. We had to PUG to fill a couple of spots, since we cannot seem to get a consistent ten on anymore, but we were quite successful nonetheless.

I have to admit, I’m really enjoying playing feral. The last time I tried the spec was pre-BC, so you can imagine the shock I had when things were many times more fun than I remembered. I also have no doubt that, had it not been for the changes to Swipe to hit multiple targets, I probably would not be able to pick up more than two targets at a time. With time and practice, maybe, but I’m not confident I could have jumped in to meet our needs as a guild and been even moderately successful pre-Wrath.