Mordinm

Your ring argument makes no sense at all. I can come up with a dozen rings that give warrior tanks more then they give druid tanks. Does this mean that warrior mechanics are broken? Of course not. You might as well say spell crit is broken because a fire mage will get more out of it then an affliction lock or AP is broken cause rogues get more out of it then shadow priests do. Druids and Warriors want different stats for tanking. This is not bad nor is it proof that one of their mechanics is broken. The biggest problem I saw with druid armor is that it wasn't too hard to get at or near the cap with one of the armor bonus on heal effects.

 

Etheric

You are saying a factor of 5 better for the same cost in item points is not broken? If we were just talking 10% or 20% fine no problem, even +defense with the lack of block and parry is kind of ok. Personally I think rogues getting +1 AP for str also breaks the system, but that is a different order of magnitude again (and the coincidental rise of +Ap,+agi etc leather which means the +20% str bonus in cat form gets wasted)

Druid tanking upgrades are hard to get because you can only use items with a ton of +armour on them. Look at the supple leather boots. They have about +170 armour on them making them one of the best druid tanking boots pre endgame. Compare them with the heavy clefthoof boots. Heavy clefthoof should be a huge upgrade (higher item level, supple leather has lots of non tanking stats, blue vs green) to the supple leather boots, but the way the armour scaling works they are nowhere near that. I will ahve to work out the extra mitigation you get from going from supple leather to heavy clefthoof. It should be huge, but I bet it is not.

The way the armour works right now breaks the druid gear scaling. The current armour nerf is a reflection of that. Right now we are at the high point of gear. There is a lot of +armour gear around as there is a huge choice of items.but it is not going to scale at all with improved gear. Making it so you get say 6x or 7x or whatever the base armour of the item and 1x the +armour value makes the whole thing scale a lot lot better.

 

• Exewut

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...sid=1&pageNo=2

 

Mordinm

Yes Armor scales a lot better for druids. Shield block scales much better for then armor because it a flat value applied after all other reductions. Take a look at this ring
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=28265
how much more does a warrior get out of that then a druid? Ah yes but I guess that's not fair as block does nothing for druids. My point is this you can't point to a ring or set of ring(ones with armor in this case) and say that because these are better for druids scaling is broken. Take a look at that ring I posted, find an armor ring of the same quality and ilevel then compare what the warrior gets from his ring to what the druid gets from his ring. If it comes out that the druid ring does 5X more then I'll admit you have a point. Untill you do that your comparing apples to sewing machines.

 

Olon97

2nd hand...

*Hotfix 3/06/07

* The Druid ability Lacerate will now land a small amount of instant damage, causing it to generate threat against bleed-immune creatures.
* The Druid ability Mangle (Bear) will now generate 50% bonus threat.

 

Chimp

Awsome news if true. Now some tweaks to t4/5 and things are looking much brighter for Feral Druids

 

◊ Lord BEEF

Additional explanation for these fixes and information on Armor:

We’ve taken a close look at constructive feedback provided on our Druid Bear changes, and are hotfixing the following changes today:

1. Lacerate will now do a small amount of direct damage to the target. This means it will generate threat rather than an immune message when used on bleed-immune creatures. However, bleed-immune creatures will still not receive the debuff from Lacerate. This should address concerns about Druids being able to tank in specific bleed-immune encounters.

2. Mangle (Bear) now generates 50% bonus threat on its damage. We realized that in reducing Mangle damage, we made it less useful as a snap aggro tool. This threat bonus moves it back up to almost where it was before the 2.0.10 changes.

In addition, we examined concerns about the best Feral Druid armor pieces being outdoor world quest rewards, and Druids feeling their tanking ability would not scale with better gear. We are adjusting superior and epic leather pieces designed to be used by Bear Druids and increasing the armor on many of those items, particularly raid sets. These changes, however, will not show up until patch 2.1.0.

Check out my friend's bitchin' Lord of the Rings Art

 

Raejin

Source:
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...=1&pageNo=1#12

Does that mean Lacerate can now crit, and therefore trigger Primal Fury?

 

◊ Lord BEEF

It sounds like it yeah so its effective average rage cost will go down. Dealing direct damage also means it can proc improved leader of the pack which is always nice.

They actually committed to improving tanking itemization which is something they've never done for bears before.

Check out my friend's bitchin' Lord of the Rings Art

 

• Exewut

Yes, it seems like you weren't crazy at all, I'm quite happy to be proven wrong .

 

• Cryect

btw....

Ummm lacerate DOTs can crit now for some strange reason.

Edit: Whoops missed someone said that but yeah it was strange seeing crits on lacerates

 

Kazanir

No kidding. I am happier now than I have been in a while.

[13:07] <Kazanir> Vontre was responsible for Black Mesa
[13:08] <Vontre> Is Black Mesa some Half-Life thing?

 

Kazanir

Nerfed to a more likely formula for calculating the cost of sockets on an item. We're still not sure what formula Blizz uses for sockets but this should be closer to what they are imagining.

/pray

[13:07] <Kazanir> Vontre was responsible for Black Mesa
[13:08] <Vontre> Is Black Mesa some Half-Life thing?

 

Mu

I discovered the Lacerate thing in Karazhan today while tanking Midnight, I remember seeing in patch notes they made him immune to bleeds so I found it odd that I could still hit him with the ability. Of course, nobody else in the raid appreciated my ranting about how lacerate being able to crit and proc primal fury was a substantial boost to the ability's utility but I'm used to that by now.

Other than that I did find my aggro a lot more robust than I expected it to be and the 50% change explains that. Just wish we had a bit more of a heads-up on these changes.

 

Etheric

Ok I have to do some more armour theorycrafting.

But lets think of this one.

Eth's Turtle Helm
668 Armour No stats.
Green, item level 100.

Green lvl 99 leather seems to have 188 armour from thott, +480 armour gives an ilevel of 100.

Gives post nerf 3473 armour in bear form. It should be a piece of junk, blown away by any end game helm for tanking. I need to get some numbers to back it up, but my gut feeling is this thing should be comparable with anything in the game right now for bear tanking (ignoring the 75% limit). In which case something is broken.

I can't see how it can be any other way to be honest. If we have for warriors from the wowwiki item values page

15 stamina=15 block value = 10 defense/block rating = 100 armour

How can

15 stamina = 500 armour = 10 defense rating

be balanced?

RIght now leather items with huge amounts of +armour are overpowered for druids, and without +armour they are underpowered as the warrior/druid balance is based on a certain amount of +armour.

With regard to the changes above it seems nice, but to be able to tank a boss a druid needs to have some way to mitegate crushing blows to be balanced with a warrior. Otherwise druids are going to be taking slightly more damage when tanking 5 man bosses and huge amounts more when tanking raid bosses.

 

Melthar

"High King Maulgar hits you for 8746 crushing".. Certainly feeling the armour changes.

 

Kink

Well, I don't wanna say I told you so but...

No hang on, I DO want to say it =).


And the armour nerf coupled with a promise for more bear oriented armour cancel eachother out really.

Lets be honest, before we got told we would for sure get bear tanking upgrades, it removed a large incentive to raiding for us bears! Gearing up! Now we know that our DKP earned will be useful to actually allow us to acquire gear for what we wish to do. I was looking forward to being a beast of a tank at 70 in my blues and greens, now I can look forward to being a beast of a tank in my epics and just a good tank now. Say what you will, but scaling makes it more fun.

All in all I am very happy with the hotfix changes, just such a shame they did not add these to the patch notes instead of needing to hotfix them.

There is light at the end of the tunnel.
The only problem is, it's often an incoming train.

 

◊ blindworld

Anyone know how the new hotfixed lacerate works on bleed immune mobs with regards to threat? I didn't actually see the hot fix post until after I had seen the change first hand, and tried to test it out a bit in karazhan on the performers before the opera. The initial damage is far inferior to swipe (I was getting 33-34 initial, I think a 74 crit) so to balance it out I figured there had to be a modifier of some sort. Some pulls I'd do nothing but maul + swipe spam, others maul + lacerate spam. Being the only one in the raid running KTM, I had no way of seeing how the dps was doing when they pulled aggro off me, only my threat which I'm sure is off after today's changes quite considerably. I don't want to say this is the case yet, as there were way too many factors in play to really tell, and it wasn't long enough of a test, and may just be preconcieved expectations, but swipe spam still seems to generate more aggro on bleed immune mobs than lacerate spam. Anyone else try testing this at all?

 

Monique

quoting from my guild forums.

 

Kink

I would really like to see some tests though.

Is it a fixed amount? If lacerate crits does it double the threat? Does the DoT portion now not generate as much threat to balance this change?

The first two I can try to test myself, should be easy enough as I just need to find some ghosts and a bored person. Problem is I am at work and it will be a while till I can log in and patch.

There is light at the end of the tunnel.
The only problem is, it's often an incoming train.

 

Olon97

One limited test posted on the blue forums:
https://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/t...81958462&sid=1

 

• Falk

We let our best geared warrior take on Maulgar today. After about 4-5 bad attempts, all of which wasn't the warrior's fault:

1) Lightning spam from Shaman + crushing, druid couldn't get aggro
2) Blastwave from Mage, cuz mage tank couldn't get proper aggro
3) Healer getting tossed by shaman right into Maulgar, healer went splat, tank went splat after that
4) Mighty Blow + Arcing Smash combo, 16.5k spike

I decided to go back to Ironforge, rape the AH for a Titans (thats all there was) grab whatever consumables I had left in my bank, and we proceeded to 1-shot Maulgar with me tanking.

Granted, warrior probably would have worked if the above mishaps hadn't happened, but it was pretty funny in hindsight after all the doom and gloom about the bear nerfs. But yes, it hurted much more.

Overall, I guess I'm pretty glad that we're getting a proper (yes, I'm counting them chickens... oo look, what a shiny egg) line of gear progression to look forward to, rather than being automatically able to outtank warriors in full lv115 blues/Karazhan epics with my lovely quest greens.

 

• Zyla