◊ Kaubel

You didn't apply any thought to this, did you?

 

slitz

Different people have different ways of playing. There is no right or wrong when deciding between a revenge or a shield slam, some use revenge over shield slam because it's not always up, some use revenge instead of shield slam since it cost less rage but some use shield slam to get more threat and more damage.
All in all it depends on the people playing, the mob you're fighting, the rage income and the position you're in.
I prefer to use revenge over shield slam in a normal 5-man (since rage is a huge issue) but I would always use shield slam over revenge on raids and in heroics.

 

Mordinm

I for one am pleased with the changes overall. I tanked a heroic hillsbrad last night and while I definately felt the loss of 2.5k armor or so it wasn't game breaking and I don't feel like an undergeared prot warrior can come in and do a better job then me dispite the work I put into my tanking set and that is what I feared the nerf would do. Threat has been nerfed as well and we did have one wipe on the first boss after the first fear when the mages didn't stop dps as I was feared and he didn't come back to me after the fear but all in all I think I am still an option to tank when it counts.

The news that they are looking at bear leather is good news and very unexpected. As close as I can tell they tend to put dodge rating on bear items and it sounds like they are just looking at upping the armor so it will probably be far from optimal gear but the important thing is that we have a real upgrade path. Sub-optimal stat distrubution just puts us in the same boat as every other class in wow and I can deal with that.

As for mangle it is still our highest threat move as far as I can tell. Mine was hitting for in the neighborhood of 400 so provided the multiplies stack in the way they used to it's
400*1.45*1.5=870 theat
and it can crit for a little more then twice that in theat so for me it's still going to be used on every cooldown. Lacerate that fully ticks out on a full stack might do about the same threat per rage but it's a bit of a moot point as I can't think of a time tanking when I can't get at least 45 rage every 15 seconds.

All in all I find the changes reasonable.

 

• Nite_Moogle

Regardless of the content of this thread which I am not reading right now, this is exactly the sort of sensationalism that prevents Blizzard from posting anything useful. "We are adjusting" immediately translates to "we're going to get buffs" and if that doesn't happen the way the player perceives it should then they go completely nuts. If the gear ends up with superior tanking abilities but suddenly lacks any enough strength to do insane PVP damage then someone who thought that's how it was going to go gets bent out of shape. There wouldn't have been anything wrong with titling this thread "Druid updates", or posting it in the druid thread that's already going (where it was posted several hours before this post).

 

oldmandennis

Maybe you should actually read the thread and the quote? It directly says "increase the armor".

For giggles I went to the item calculator and looked at the T4 legs. If they were given equal armor to the Ashtempered ones, they would still have room for 10agi and 7str more then them, while keeping the 17int 16spi. And that's without fixing the fact that T4 uses old world sta.

 

CasT

The new itemization will do wonders for tanking druids. But i don't know if I agree it should be a seperate Tier set. IMO a feralset should be good for boths feral forms and not one.

Why? Well back in MC days the best gear wasn't all pieces of Tier 1. far from it. And the can't really make one tier for speccs. But throw in some random epic tanking pieces would be great.

 

oldmandennis

I don't really agree. The thing is, armor is pretty cheap in the formula. If you actually have an epic bear only item, it's going to be stupid good, and we are back to needing to nerf the class as a whole.

For example, if your Tier 4 pants (or equivalent nonset epic) were

Malorne's Pants of Rawr
525 Armor
45 stam
25 str
30 agi

it would probably be imbalanced. The other thing is my impression is that most feral druids are being brought to tank, with cat form as filler. If that is true, then most guilds would restrict the tokens from being used for the cat item, at least until everybody had one. As is, you can take a token (well, a head or shoulder token) saying its for tanking, but you get the substantial benefit of having a good piece for grinding cash.

 

• Playered

I offtanked some of Karazhan last night with my 27/0/34 spec, provided things wern't nuked on instantly things were generally ok, just throwing that in the mix.

 

Brute

You dont need a single point in feral to make a decent meatshield as long as you have good gear and your dps/raid is smart. As one example, as a balance druid I offtank Moroes adds quite often in my bear gear. By the time dps has killed one dd, they can move onto mine without any real risk of me losing aggro. The only downside to this is once my add is dead im pretty useless in my tank gear with 4500 mana and no +dmg or + healing.

 

Larisroth

Even if you took out the over powered armour items the feral t4 is a bit of a sad joke. It's too balanced around being a hybrid set (so you're healing will still be okay in it). However if that's what we needed to do then we could easily mix and match. Because feral druids get so much out of stats, they need to be pretty careful when designing our items that we aren't totally over-powered, and I can accept that. However that's actually more of an issue with the non-armour slots than anything else.

However, there should be room in the item budget to make items that actually work for both the cat and bear form rolls, start with a decent agi/str/sta mix (like the of beasts suffix), charge us for some extra armour if you want, add on some extra %hit and feral weapon skill and you're more or less done.

What they're trying to do with the feral sets and the dragonhide gear is make gear that can be useful in the healing role as well, which is a decent aim I suppose. There are a lot of fights where I shift form several times during the fight for one reason or another. However there aren't many where I'll want to tank/dps at some points and heal at others in a balanced sort of way (usually the fight is a mostly a feral fight or a mostly healing fight). Because the stats for healing are almost completely useless for the feral rolls and vica-versa you find that using that gear is inferior to using other non-druid gear even for those fights.

Ironically the extra armour thing actually makes this worse, if that extra armour only appears on the dragonhide style pieces. If there were no extra armour pieces (and the bear armour formula still allowed us to get decent armour) then the base rogue stat pieces with sta/agi and AP would be a reasonable base for tanking gear. What they'll prolly do is just add more armour to the set pieces and the very few agi/sta/str pieces or that drop. Now that should be a bit of a buff for sure, but I suspect we'll still be struggling with mixing and matching pieces including a fair bit of our current tanking items when the warriors are running around in T6.

You need your extra armour gear to be mostly agi and sta to get decent maybe even superior avoidance and hp. Of course it's highly likely that warriors will still tank the majority of physical fights purely because they have defensive stance, shield block, the ability to spam potions and the like. There maybe a few bosses that hit sufficently fast or have another mechanic that favours druid tanking but don't count on it. When it comes to magical damage the only thing we have going for us is the ae avoidance.