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Savage Defense

Savage Defense
60 Rage

Instant cast	12 sec recharge

2 Charges
Requires Druid (Guardian)
Requires level 10

Requires Bear Form
Increases chance to dodge by 45% for 6 sec.

Maximum 2 charges.

Spell Details

Duration

n/a

School

Nature

Mechanic

n/a

Dispel type

n/a

GCD category

n/a

Cost

60 Rage

Range

0 yards (Self)

Cast time

Instant

Cooldown

1.5 seconds

GCD

0 seconds

Forms

Bear Form

Effect

Dummy
Value: 45
Server-side script

Flags

Generates no threat

Guides

Guardian Druid Guide

Overview of
Tanking and
All Tank Specs

Warlords of Draenor
Druid Changes

[L90 / MoP]
Guardian Druid Tanking
Guide (Update Pending)

Comments

Comment by iamleejn

How is dodge chance active mitigation?
There's a guaranteed damage reduction for warriors , paladins , monks , and death knights . There's no definite damage reduction from avoidance, just hope for good luck.

EDIT:
The unpredictable nature of avoidance is off-put somewhat by Tooth and Claw when tanking one mob. However, Tooth and Claw will have much less benefit when AoE tanking.

Comment by friedchicken17

Savage Defense uses a new mechanic - Recharge time. The 1.5 cooldown displayed here is accurate (though it seems confusing with the Omni CC add-on that seems to show a 9 second cooldown).

You have up to 3 charges stored at a time.
You gain 1 charge every 9 seconds (the fake cooldown)
You can press Savage Defense even when you still have the 6 second buff on you, and it will simply add 6 seconds to your buff.

With enough rage (60 rage a pop), the 1.5 second cooldown and a 6 second duration you could've kept this 45% dodge buff up indefinately, making it just a boring buff you have to keep active or you fail. The 9 second Recharge timer simply serves to prevent that. You can keep the buff active 2/3 of the time, the nice thing is you get to choose when that is. 6 on 3 off, or 12 on 6 off, or 12 on 1 off 6 on....
It's a new way of thinking about cooldowns, and I personally am excited to see what else could use it.

Comment by Tielyn

One of two Active Defense abilities for druids (the other being Frenzied Regeneration), this buffs your Dodge ability likely higher than it used to be passively pre-5.04 patch, for 6 seconds at a fixed cost of 60 Rage.

It is a significant change from the passive Savage Defense Mastery that absorbed incoming damage as a damage bubble, and should not be confused with it -- the new Savage Defense is a spell that should live on your action bar and be used frequently, if judiciously.

The more you level, the more the inherent Dodge level scaling will eat your passive Dodge until you will be hit frequently without Savage Defense up. And with the changes to Rage generation (being hit does not generate Rage; only autoattacks and Mangle do), it is up to you to rework your rotation to build Rage as fast as possible to survive. It is rather hard to consistently generate enough Rage for 100% uptime, since the gating factor is Mangle's 6 second cooldown (modified by free Mangle procs and Berserk), so there will be some spots of increased vulnerability.

It is going to be interesting times ahead for bears... I miss my damage bubble already, but I remember a time when we didn't have it at all, back in the Wrath days, and we wound up having to stack Stam for when we did get hit with an attack...especially when the Chill of the Throne debuff was active in ICC.

Comment by GaidinBDJ

Since I found it handy to pretty much run SD whenever it's up, here's a macro to build in SD spam for your tanky buttons. Change "Mangle" (both places) to Lacerate, Thrash, FF, whatever else you want to build it into (you will need one macro for every ability you want to roll SD into). Current behavior is to fire SD every time it's up unless a modifier button (alt, shift, ctrl) is pressed, you can reverse this by changing to . The SD will fire even if the ability linked doesn't (still on CD, whatever). The UIErrors are to suppress the "not enough rage" error message, although the voice prompt will still go off (that can be disabled in your settings).

#showtooltip Mangle
/script UIErrorsFrame:Hide()
/cast Savage Defense
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()
/script UIErrorsFrame:Show()
/cast Mangle

Comment by sylancer

i think the machanism of

DK runes,
Roll,
Shield Block, Double Time,
Savage Defense,
Conflagrate, Hand of Gul'dan(Chaos Wave), Demonic Slash, Demonic Gateway,
Angelic Feather and
Clemency

(or is there any others?) are similar.
so can anyone explain what's the cd of these "2/3 charges" system spells? (the cd of Angelic Feather, Demonic Gateway, Double Time and Clemency are clear)

Comment by 2picnic

Savage defense does have a niche on top of being luck-based mitigation. Frost King Malakk is the first example who comes to mind - he'll intermittently cast a buff to himself which causes his melee attacks to apply a debuff to you. If the debuff reaches 15 stacks it'll stun you for 15 sec, maybe causing your death.

It has a low duration and you'll see him re-cast it several times in the fight. Using savage defense druids can avoid more than half of his swings on average. Druid can tank him and dodge enough hits that the buff will fall off before he's able to freeze you. In turn, the debuff will expire before he buffs himself and starts applying it again. This allows druid to solo tank bosses which others prefer to tank swap on.

Comment by 1stmetalknight

wat will hapen to it in wod?..i'm going for avoidance atm..and i'm a bit confused...

Comment by arnoldc6

I will be honest. I actually like this as a paper more than the old one. When being fc and having to deal with multiple melee i am pretty much invincible.
Pop berserk, mangles all the way though for rage than pop this.
Of course, this is useless for casters but thats when survival instinct and bearskin kicks in.

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