Originally Posted by tetracycloide
It's really easy to look at this issue and wax eloquent with QQs about druid weapon scaling.
It's just as easy to look at this issue and assume that since, in the end, after all upgrades have been made accross every single slot for a given tier that druids scale just as well as every other class and therefor it doesn't matter that their weapons are quirky.
There's another way to look at it, however. Tier upgrades do not happen all at once, they happen in descret amounts spread accross months and months of end game raiding. Is it really fair for druids to expect to see such small DPS upgrades from the weapon slot while every single other class enjoys considerably larger gains from the same slot?
Take, for example, a raid group working on farming an instance while progressing in another, not a big strech I don't think. Let's say the kitty puts out competative DPS vs the other DPS classes in the raid. Several get the weapon upgrade they were looking for from the farming instance and their DPS jumps dramatically. Suddenly the kitty can no longer compete and will be stuck that way until it makes two or three more upgrades where as the other DPS classes only had to make one.
Sure, you can argue that 'in the end' every gets all the gear they need and they're all back on equal footing, but for a period of posssibly weeks and weeks there's no reason to gimp raid DPS by brining the feral along because they don't have enough drops yet to keep up with the other classes new weapon upgrades. Eventually doesn't cut it when you're dealing with situations on the margin. The fact that it takes longer (read: more pieces) for the druid to realize the same gains is unfair in and of itself even if they all end up in the same place DPS wise after all the upgrades are made.
|
Conversely, if the weapons *don't* drop and everyone has to make do with armor upgrades, is it fair that the druid will enjoy weeks of increased damage relative to the rogues? It's true that the rogue may benefit as much from the single upgrade as the druid can get in 2 or 3... but it's also true that there are a lot more armor drops in instances than weapon drops; Gruul's Lair, Magtheridon's Lair, Serpentshrine Cavern and Tempest Keep put together has a total of 3 rogue weapons, but 3 pieces of T4, 5 pieces of T5, 3 trinkets, and half a dozen assorted other armor upgrades; on average, one expects to have access to several of these before you ever see a weapon drop. Hence, the fact that the druid doesn't have to rely on the one drop that singlehandedly boosts him by 50 dps strikes me as highly advantageous. For instance, when the expansion came out, we had 4 rogues with at least 4 pieces of Tier 3, but only 2 of them had Naxx MH weapons (and one who would have still been using Perdition's Blade had Rank14 weapons not been made available)
So, yes, it's true that IF a member of another class gets their weapon drop, they will be at an advantage for a few weeks; however, it's also true that IF they don't they'll be at a disadvantage because armor upgrades come on a much more regular basis than weapon drops.