I'm curious to see if this means we are back to getting a multiplicative bonus from Feral Instinct like warriors get from defiance, or if that was simply a error by your friend not knowing we got reduced to *(1.3+.15) instead of the *1.3*1.15.

He tried, but the CD was in a metal case so he broke his teeth biting. Thats why I was in a hurry, I had to take him to the vet.

The dog would have, but god decided that dogs were eating paper too good compared to paper shredders, and he smote the dog down. Balance issues and all, you know.

After giving me that formula he said that was what fitted best each test they did, maybe Blizzard has also taken the opportunity to fix the discrepancy of Feral Instinct and Bear form threat when compared to Defensive stance and Defiance.

I will try and find time with him tonight to test it after the servers go down for maintenance which happens at midnight for those of us on the East coast of Australia.
The test server normally stays up so hopefully this will work.
No promises as I haven't had a chance to talk to him.

I logged on to the test server last night and there were a total of four players on alliance side...

I'll try and pop online on the test server after midnight for testing (fellow Aussie) Char name: Riyuni.

I guess it's impossible to track down at this point but, while testing for the threat formula, was the mage wanding in melee range or outside melee range? Could explain the introduction of the threat coefficient into the function.

He's just being dramatic, take into consideration his theoretical max threat per second is on a single target and, even if the itemisation isn't here right now, it scales well (and hell raid buffs and shit helps too). No Imp LOTP for bonus healing threat either, no idol for bonus threat move damage, he doesn't mention if he's using FF for less target AC or anything.

I can barely put out that much TPS single target and nothing leaves me.

If I were a Druid I'd be more concerned about itemisation and mitigation than threat, druids are still great tanks in my opnion.

Scales well? Correct me if I am wrong, but the only scaling we got left after the Mangle multiplier nerf is the 1.45 modifier on our damage (not even 1.49 like Warriors do). Lacerate still doesn't seem to scale at all and if you want to output more TP/s you have to swap in some DPS gear and then your mitigation suffers. The advantage of static threat (if it is high enough to begin with) most people don't see is that you can wear full resist/mitigation gear and still not worry about not having enough AP to hold aggro.

Well 584 TPS isn't actually that bad, our prot warrior with the un-nerfed TF does about 800ish normally once he has put up full sunders and he's spamming devastate in between his higher aggro cooldown moves. He can do more if he really tries and isn't doing defensive moves (i..e shieldblock) but that's about normal.

True, in live I would expect our druid to hold aggro about as well as him on single target and alot better on multi-target but it really isn't quite the end of the world.

If of course, that's how it really is in practice - remains to be seen.

Doing only 73% of threat of a warrior who doesn't even fully try is not bad?

Sorry to me this looks devastating. A tank which is glaringly inferior at holding aggro, also inferior at mitigation and lacking any useful tricks if things go really bad, why should anyone take that tank over the other one who is clearly better in every regard?

There are enough encounter where the boss enrages after a certain time and you need to deliver a dps race. So druids need not apply there to tank anymore, and that is fine?

You don't need different tanking classes if one is clearly the best in everything. Seems after the patch warriors will be that again, how wonderful.

Not really, that druid may be worse then a fully prot spec warrior with a weapon that is admittedly completely overpowered and getting nerfed next patch. A feral druid doesn't need to take a prot war's primary tanking place to be "viable" he needs to take a fury wars place, i.e. competent offtank that can do very good dps+utility when not tanking. I'm still going to take him on a raid for the exact same reason I'd take a fury warrior, because for some fights I need another tank, and for other fights I need another DPS.

Now if you play in a guild that completely min/maxes for every fight and replaces people based on every encounter then you may well be screwed but in more normal circumstances I don't think so. Unless I'm wrong that:

1) A druid in a dps position provides comparable dps to a warrior along with LOTP (arguably about as good as BS), innervate, and brez.
2) A druid can tank as well, if not better then the DPS warrior.

If both those things hold true, why wouldn't I take a feral druid over a DPS warrior for my offtank? I can certainly understand that you'd rather if 2) was "can tank nearly as well as a prot warrior", but it doesn't make druids worthless if you can only take a fury war's job. Again assuming my assumptions are correct, I don't know that they are and I think it remains to be seen.

Bottom line for me is, the tank's aggro generation and mitigation are the fulcrum around which the fight turns. The tank's aggro generation limits the DPS the raid can put out, and the healing the tank can receive before mobs turn to eat the healers. The tank's mitigation determines how much healing the tank needs.

IMO the warrior changes by themselves were enough, that's a pretty sharp buff to warriors' ability to hold multiple targets and makes them highly desirable again. I don't see that nerfing druid aggro generation and mitigation was necessary.

Forgive me for adding a sense of drama in that post quoted above.

I did post it on the official forum, and a thread without some kind of alarmist or dramatic take to it just gets washed away with all the usual drivel.

I should have made it clearer that in no way is that a reasonable max tps test. It was an attempt to compare the threat change between live and PTR solo, and just the difference in threat generated by physical damage at that.

My damage numbers come from lvl 65 creatures I'm attacking with ~40% DR. There are no misses/parries/blocks accounted for. It's also not an optimal cycle. These are just a few reasons why I'd encourage you to not look at the TPS numbers out of context.

I have made some corrections and additions to my test data, but I don't know if I can be bothered to push a post back up in that cesspool.

Yeah, yer right Calen. The forums are a mess. Sooo...posting it here might be better, it seems a bit more quiet and collected. I am noticing a lot of cancels there, and some very unhappy players. A lot of classes are pretty upset right now.

Doesn't speak volumes about their internal testing then to me. But anyways, thanks for the data at least. I was looking for some math behind it all, and don't get discouraged to post some more. Every bit helps! I'm no bear tank so...yah.

1) Most guilds are not populated with 60 people who are willing to be slotted in and out at the drop of a hat depending on what is needed for each individual encounter. Would you want to be the warrior who only gets to see 1 fight every week?

2) It takes longer to get multiple warriors geared up, shared t4/t5 token drop with druids or not. Most warriors are using other drops to supplement or exceed the existing tiered sets. There's a limit to how quickly those will drop.

3) In a dynamic fight with multiple stages, would you rather have someone who can tank and dps or someone who can tank, dps, buff, and "kinda sorta" heal, battle rez, and innervate? Have you seen what a feral druid + an enhancement shaman do when they're in the same group?

A hybrid warrior offers very little to a raid anymore (MS debuff that gets duplicated by a rogue poison?) If anything, they should be concerned.

You were still capable of scaling much faster than a warrior, that was the heart of the issue. They couldn't itemize for it without completely breaking the balance between the two classes. They screwed up. The majority of the beta testing done was up to Karazhan on the beta server. I don't recall seeing anyone in Serpentshrine Lair or killing Gruul (correct me if I'm wrong there). It's hard to get a sense for the scaling mechanics until you actually see the upper tiers of gear, which they started to see now.

The grand irony here is that instead of replacing prot warriors, you people insist we should replace fury warriors. I'm sure my dps warriors will be thrilled to hear that one. Ironcially, they seemed to be one of the biggest groups calling for druid nerfs. Nerfed to be worse then prot but better then fury at everything. Thats some nice work there. XD.

We're not going to let you mt anymore but, here, be better then fury warriors at everything.

Nerf #2 incoming after fury wars figure this out?

Their tradeoff apparently is that they're not viable at any one thing they do except of course healing. Which brings us back to the last 2 years. It's just sad to see enhancement shamans and shadow priests fully raid viable but not the same love being given to druids and paladins, which look to be best served in 25 mans by healing.

I think the doom-and-gloom about the druid changes is silly. When someone says that feral druids will no longer be viable in raids after the patch, the underlying assumption from many making the claim (especially in regards to threat generation) is that druids in live are at a level that is balanced and should not be altered. That's simply not true.

From my objective observations, experience as a feral tank maintanking most of the currently available encounters, and from the comments others have made while I tank, I've noticed some related things that seem to me the reason for the nerf.

Feral druid tanks in live are preferable to prot warriors in too many situations. While this seems like a broad and subjective statement, it is shared by many I've talked to, especially in regards to 5-mans. In 5-man and heroic content, where class and role selection is extremely limited, a feral druid offers more armor, hit points, faster threat generation, and more damage to the point of nearly competitive dps while tanking. In some heroics, some pulls which a warrior-tanked group would need to CC can simply be tanked all at once by a feral druid. The content is prematurely trivialized-- the druid and party doesn't need to outgear it to trivialize it.

In raid content, the crushing blow factor tips the scales more toward the prot warrior. Please don't misunderstand the purpose of my post-- I'm only summarizing druids vs. warriors here to point out what I'm observing in the tanking game. What I like about the current state is while the warrior might have better mitigation against crushing blows, the druid is equally capable of successfully tanking the same boss encounter-- this is what is most important about feral tanks remaining viable, and not who is better than whom.

Anyway, the imbalance in 25-man raids is still in threat generation. As the off-tank on Gruul soaking his hurtful strikes, I have to hold back significantly to stay 2nd in threat behind a very skilled prot warrior. Using mangle is essentially ruled out-- a crit could generate a massive amount of unwanted threat. On other off-tank encounters like Moroes, I've run into the problem of becoming main tank by default, even if the prot warrior has a 20+ second head start.

Does this mean that warriors need a threat generation buff to solve the problem? I don't think so.

As some have already pointed out in this thread, a great deal of the challenge in the raiding game is in aggro management. There must be some limit on your average encounter that makes a dpser's job more engaging and challenging than simply pushing the optimal sequence of buttons in the correct order. In this sense, feral tanks can trivialize an encounter, in that the dps' need to manage aggro is too low or non-existant compared with what Blizzard may intend to make it remotely challenging.

While I'm all for druids having relative benefits over warriors in certain areas like perhaps quick initial aggro, it seems in my experience that our threat generation capacity currently goes too far beyond that. I want to continue to be viable, and to be interchangeable in many situations with a warrior tank, and from what I've seen so far on the PTR, that will remain the case. It's ironic that 2.0 threat is so high after all the complaining and doom-and-gloom about the removal of the scaling multipliers from maul and swipe. How many "end of druid tanking"s are we going to see? Ha.

I apologize, poor wording on my part fell . I feel for warriors, I have one. Ive tanked on the little man (gnomes ftw!).

I just think its ironic that one set of warriors regains their role as another is pushed out of theirs. I'm just waiting for them to realize it and start complaining that the druid does too much dps and its "DER TAKEIN R JORBS" all over again. I'm willing to bet gold on this

The magic of unforeseen consequences.

Time until the first Fury vs Feral thread anyone? I put the over/under on a week after patch.

Well Zyla, I think it's rather inevitable that Warriors will be touchy about Druids with the current state of things. The issue is, quite simply, that their roles are so similar. Presuming you never heal during a raid, a Druid will perform the functionally equivalent role of a Warrior. When Druids start approaching a very similar effectiveness in any one of those roles--while still having a similar effectiveness in another of those roles--Warriors will naturally find that a bit imbalanced.

If there was a viable Fury/Prot hybrid build that could simulate the balance of a Druid's tanking vs. DPS abilities, I'm pretty sure Warriors would leap on it mighty quickly. But there isn't. There's no way to spec as a Warrior that makes them as good at DPSing and tanking in the same build as Druids can.

Add on heals and you've got a mess, really.

Honestly, I think the only way you will ever see this go away is if Warriors get a viable hybrid DPS/Tanking spec that can compete with Druids. However, I somewhat doubt this will happen. Blizzard seemed to go to great lengths to downplay or weaken the old viable hybrid builds for Warriors (e.g. the old goodie 31/5/15 or the more recent 7/31/13) due to choices in talent placement and other balancing factors.

So, Fury vs. Feral threads? I can see it happening. Nothing new there.

Calen, I would be very interested to see any numbers you have though? As a raid leader I'm quite wanting to hammer down more exactly where Druids will fall after the patch...and all the hype is not making it much easier to find the facts.

And what has been said the in the past couple of posts is exactly something i was thinking a couple months ago. Now this isn't a whine cause recently i have been to busy in real life to really care about WoW too much and i have even specced MS for some good ole' pvp goodness

Blizzard has made it a point that fury warriors should not be outdamaging rogues right? Rogues are having their problems in TBC(most of it is over hyped i believe). But fury is a prime example if things stay on course how they are its a dead spec. Its a build that won't offer anything really to a raid setting. I don't know but i think people once they realize that damage was all a fury warrior had besides a bit of OTing here and there with a gear swap they will probably realize why it was so.

I mean i could argue till i was blue in the face about it on why fury should be near top dps but then again i could still OT effectively. The day when fury warriors can't OT is the day when they will need damage buffs which is a day that is approaching.


But im all for ferals tanking, and with the damage nerf ferals recieved it should be compensated with +threat multipliers if indeed it can't hold off the even most laxed dpser in higher end gear

I'm rather impressed with warrior DPS right now. Our Orc with Gorehowl is the first person in the guild to make me look like a chump when I'm tanking a 5 man in DPS gear, he's easily 100 DPS above me on trash, more on bosses.