75% reduction versus 62% reduction means you're taking 35% less damage. It's not insignificant. Although with the current trend of mobs having elemental damage and/or killing tanks with crits rather than sustained damage, it doesn't matter. An encounter could easily be designed to favor druid tanking though, as mentioned above. Frequent low damage physical hits adding up to high dps would accomplish that.

And correct me if I'm wrong here, but when sporting flasks, doesn't a tauren warrior have equal/more hp than an alliance warrior with BoK? (I guess this has changed a lot since when we started clearing BWL though, since flask and similar buffs is a relatively smaller decrease compared to stamina now)

(Oh, how does the hp increase from Bear Form/HotW work alongside the tauren racial? If the tauren racial is applied after the BF hp boost, it could possibly work out to be more than an alliance druid with BoK, at least if using flasks.)

You missed the point of that statement. Blizzard has stated they never intend to design encounters around 1 particular talent spec, and never intend to force a talent spec on people.

To have an encounter where you are basically forced to have a druid tank it would either be impossible for a horde tank without HotW, or incredibly easy for an alliance tank with HotW.

I disagree, Xi, and it's for two reasons.

1) Druids are a 2/3s specialist class, not a hybrid class. Druids can be a 60/40 or 70/30 split amongst any two of the three trees, depending on gearing. I think the talent design makes that rather obvious, especially Nature's Swiftness at 21. Blizzard doesn't intend the class to be a hybrid like Shamans or Paladins, nor do they intend all functional talent specs to be at least X percent of basic class utility. The obviously intended nature of the 15/31/5 (14/32/5) PvP/Solo spec supports this.

The Druid class is supposed to either pick two things (and be really good/good or VERY good/ok at them) or be a silly cat DPS machine (presumably for solo use).

2) Blizzard has said they want both specs and encounters to lend credibility to a mix of Druid builds. The way we've been highly succesful with 0/30/21 and 24/0/27 and even 15/32/5 build druids in EJ means that the specs work. Now it remains for Blizzard to give us encounters where druid utility DPS is useful for more than trash.


Edit: Fixed for Romper

I still feel you're overestimating HotW, and that a Druid would be capable of tanking without it. My initial point regarding HotW was that comparing a Druid with HotW to a Druid without HotW would be like comparing an Alliance Warrior with a Horde Warrior only with an obvious percentage difference. The Horde has always managed without BoK, why would a Druid not be able to manage without HotW? You may have to make up for it via buffs but in my opinion it would be viable.

Edit: Which is not to say that I don't see your point regarding HP being such a variable factor when you consider Druid tanks, I think it would be possible to design an encounter that takes into account the variable highly HP of a Druid tank.

I think people are kind of talking past each other here. Xi isn't arguing what he personally thinks the outcome should be so much as he is articulating what Blizzard has said/done in the past, in justifying why the holy tree didn't make priests godly healers, or why prot didn't make warriors amazing tanks, etc.

I think most of us disagree with a lot of that philosophy.

Edit: Personally, I'd like to see more diversity. You don't force people into a single spec, but rather you reward various spec choices at various points throughout a zone. Have one fight where Blast Wave really, really helps, followed by one where Ice Block removes a huge threat. Have fights where the more warriors you have with Shield Slam, the easier it'll be, and then have fights where MS is key. And so forth. It's balance, but achieved in a different way than just homogenous encounters that assume no talents at all. Save that level of design for 5-man and 10-man zones where, yes, I agree, you shouldn't be forced to bring a particular spec along.

Well it certainly wouldn't be the first time I've missed the gist of what someone was saying at 2:30am.

You hit that nail on the head that was exactly what I was trying to get across. What's funny is if we went with the holy tree makes priests excellant healers, you need protection tanks, there are no "DPS" warriors because they're significantly outclassed by rogues, it would run directly counter to your opinions ;). You wouldn't be bringing a hybrid to tank, or DPS, since they'd just be blown away by the pure classes.

On your second point, how do you then get away from the Ragnaros 2.0/Vael debacles of "lol i stacked my raid with 20 of X class, this encounter is so easy".

Hmm, good point. I do think there's a middle ground though, where you are really, really served by having 1-2 people of a given talent spec in a given fight, and having zero hurts you, but having 5+ won't really make much of a difference versus just a couple.

I guess I can actually see a little bit of this in some of the AQ40 fights I've seen on the PTR (argh, seeing screenshots and news updates from Medivh for the next two weeks is going to be frustrating), which is a good thing I think.

How do you reward spec diversity when there's only one job for the class(ie rogues?). As it stands the only difference in spec is based purely on whether or not the rogue is using swords or daggers, and it's a 10 point difference in allocation. Mages are in a similar boat - Raiding mages after their AQ20 frostbolt are all still going to be frost-spec anyways, since it's still going to be the best balance of debuff sensitivity, efficiency, and DPS thanks to the retardedly large upgrade to frostbolt.

Unless you make the mobs specifically gimmicked to a single ability like the hunter demons, there's not really much you can do to reward specs of pure classes.

Sartura?

Also, clearly, a mob with a 35 yard PBAoE that you can only outrange with Throwing Weapon Spec.

:laugh:

I didn't fight sartura on the later iterations of the test server, but if she's afflicted by the same things as the earlier versions were all I can say is LOLHOJLOL.

Yeah, no shit -- we killed her earlier forms on Test before they gave her the three mini-Sartura instagib adds, but it pissed me off to no end reading Alliance guilds talk about Sartura was no harder than Sulfuron. I'm curious to see how she's changed. Note that Fury conspicuously did not post a Sartura screenshot last night. They must have trained/rezzed past her.

I believe they did neither, actually. It sounded from hardcore_cracka's post on the FoH boards that they just skirted the edge of her room and moved fast.

300 Sword Resistance

Edit: Or they could make things like Improved Sap and, what's the other odd talent? Haemorrage? Useful in certain fights.

Hemo is a very useful debuff.

First they'd have to make the subtlety tree not suck so much that your character would be better if you randomly clicked talents.

Premeditation!

No it isn't.

Edit: To elaborate, in a raid setting, pretend it isn't a debuff really. It may as well just be a 3-second DoT, practically an instant. Just treat every Hemorrhage as Weapon Damage + 210 from the rogue, since all the charges will be consumed very quickly. The DPS increase you get from being able to use Hemo instead of SS does not justify the other talents you give up by getting Hemo.

¿Por que no?

Oh god so many things to reply to.

Back on druids:

There may not be a 75% reduction cap for armor. There was a screenshot of an alliance druid on test that had inspiration and improved lay on hands during the brief period where it gave a 50% armor boost. The druid had 23,000 armor, and the character screen displayed something like 86.9% reduction. This means that either there is no 75% reduction cap like there is for resistances, or the character screen is lying. It's hard to say which is more likely.

If you really wanted to make a boss fight gimmick that favors druids, you just need to give it a knockback that it uses every 16 seconds. Make it immune to all immobolizing effects except for feral charge.

With warrior tanking you'd have to use two tanks, with one taunting as soon as it knocks the other back, otherwise it'd run loose and bitchslap your healers/dps. With druid tanking you could just feral charge every knockback. Both would be doable, but warrior tanking would be a bit tougher.

Another example of how you could do this is already in the game in the form of the zg spider boss. Alliance can just cheese it with blessing of freedom, but horde has to two tank it, or they can single tank it with a druid, using shapeshifting to remove the roots and feral charge to catch up with her.

~~~~

As for hemmorage, it's actually one of the few attacks that hasn't been normalized. If you use a slow weapon like an empyrean demolisher, wouldn't it theoretically be able to do quite good damage if you have enough attack power? Weapon damage + 210 plus your attack power calculated on a 2.8 basis for 35 energy sounds pretty damn good.

The drawback is that you miss out on a lot of combat/assassination talents. What talents do you end up having to give up in order to spec hemmorage?

You miss out on Seal Fate and above in the Assassination tree and Adrenaline Rush in the Combat tree. Hemorrhage requires 26 points in Sublety (which I don't think is as bad a talent tree as XI makes it out to be).

However, you can still get Cold Blood or Blade Flurry.