Predatory instincts AOE avoidance on melee

Athinira · 04/16/07, 10:20 AM

Predatory Instincts - Rank 5/5
Requires Cat Form, Bear Form, Dire Bear Form
While in Cat Form, Bear Form, or Dire Bear Form, increases your damage from melee critical strikes by 10% and your chance to avoid area effect attacks by 15%.

Im clearly feeling the effect of this talent as a feral druid whenever im encountering AOE spells. I see AOE resist after AOE resist in Black Morass then the Rift Keepers use Blast Wave, i keep seing resists in many other places as well.

Now of course some AOE abilities, particularly boss AOE specials can't be avoided.

However, i have lately startet to question the Melee AOE Avoidance of this talent. It is, however, not something which is easy to test.

There are practically 2 questions in this regard:
1) Does Predatory Instincts work on normal AOE melee attacks like Whirlwind (Warriors, Maulgar etc.).
2) Does Cleave attacks, where the druid is the primary target, count as AOE attacks as well.

Has anyone been able to test this out yet? The best bet would of course be to get a warrior with 5% hit beat a bit on you with Cleave and WW, sadly i don't have a warrior friend able to perform this kind of testing with me. So its either PTR on EU servers, horde side, or someone else has to do it.

I personally believe this is important when comparing tanking stats for druids, warriors and paladins, this talent is important to take into account. The only bad thing is that a warrior test won't necessarily be the same mechanics as when bosses cleave, though we can of course see to that later (combat log parsing from druids tanking AOE meleeing cleave bosses), however this would do for a start.

Immortal · 04/16/07, 10:39 AM

I have not done any special tests, but just after 2.0.1 when i took this talent, i've noticed unusually high amount of misses from AV mobs' WW (general's adds, Galvangar). So it seems to affect at least whirlwind, i will try to do some testing with cleave.