angral

I do not understand the whole 'druids are using a one handed weapon' thing people are going on about all over the shop here. Mangle was supposed to be the talent that would allow druids to scale in dps as cats and bears. By multiplying our weapon damages such that it effectively became normalised for daggers and 2handers in cat and bear respectively. They've since nerfed and then rebuffed (but not quite up to normalised levels) bear mangle, but that was the initial excuse given for the multipliers in mangle. (Ref: Some blue q&a post on the euro boards whose link I have lost)

So a reasonable assumption would be: feral attack power is meant to simulate a single dagger in cat and a 2hander in bear.

Now I just need to find the other classes in the game that use a single dagger for melee dps and a 2hander for tanking to compare what our damage should be. Unforunately I was unable to find any, so druids may be in a bit of a tight spot with one stat trying to simulate two very different weapons.

Even taking into account a 10% buff to attack power from Unleashed Rage, Druids are already losing out at the karazhan level, and it is only getting worse.

Also, just how awesome would cat or bear form look with the Pheonix's Claws for our front 2 paws? :]

*Edit: Grammar fix.

 

Deliverance

A more reasonable assumption: feral attack power is meant to simulate a 1H in cat and in bear, since the other tank classes tank using 1H weapons, not 2H, and bear is primarily the "tank-form". While Blizzard did initially give a bigger coefficient on one single ability, bear Mangle, to give bears an "in your face, bears get an ability with real punch" ability, they didn't do it as a multiplier on bear white damage in general, which they'd have to do if the intention was to make feral attack power simulate a 2 hander in bear.

Druids are only losing out in the table you have copied if they assume that their dps-contribution from the weapon before talents and abilities should scale as a 2H. I have not seen Blizzard state that this should be the case.

The entire design seems based on "druid's melee scaled with level until 60; we realised this was a mistake after more than a year of complaints and let them scale as if they were using one handed weapons starting from a zero-point set at a level 60 entry level blue 1H (iLvl 63)". While I would definitely like my base damage from weapon to scale 2 handed (who wouldn't?), there's no reason to assume that it ought to be the case or that I'm losing out because it is not.

ILvl 103 rare: [Staff of Beasts]: 298 FAP, [Ceremonial Warmaul Blood-blade]: 61.2 dps, which is 21.2 dps or 297 AP more than iLvl 63 rare 1H
iLvl 115 rare: [Dreamer's Dragonstaff] - 423 FAP, [Ced's Carver]: 71.7 dps, which is 30.3 dps or 424 AP more than iLvl 63 rare 1H
ILvl 100 epic: [Earthwarden]: 556 FAP, [Blinkstrike]: 81.2 dps, which is 39.8 dps or 557 AP more than iLvl 63 rare 1H.
ILvl 175 legendary: [Staff of Disintegration]: 1125 FAP, [Infinity Blade]: 122.3 dps, which is 80.9 dps or 1133AP more than iLvl 63 rare 1H
...And so on. The dps/AP equivalents aren't quite precise due to me taking the simple way out and just taking listed dps and subtracting listed dps from an iLvl 63 rare, and we know that the actual factors for FAP and 1H aren't identical but merely very close, but they are close enough for government work.


Since the FAP mechanism works excellently for what it appears to be designed for for both cat and bear, there's no particular reason to assume that the FAP mechanism will be overhauled just because us druids feel that our total damageout does not scale right at high gearlevels once all other talent/ability factors and raidbuffs are added to it. Since it is the latter that is the real problem and not the former, the natural place to look for changes is in talents/abilities/raidbuffs, since they are what modify the base performance.

 

• sadris

I have not heard them state otherwise.

And are you seriously suggesting Druid weapon balance should be based around a Rogue using only one dagger?

'[The main argument against gay-marriage] always revolves around ... "the gay agenda"... Apparently all these gays only want to get married so they can adopt children, turn the children gay (probably using their mystic gay voodoo, passed gayly down from one gay generation to the next), and perpetuate their gayness.'
-- rantingkitten

 

◊ Lord BEEF

What he's suggesting is that druid damage is based around the damage range of a one hander.

What you don't get, and haven't been able to grasp from the beginning of the thread is that the feral attack power on a weapon cannot be compared to other classes weapons because that's just one variable. The amount of feral ap on the weapon slot isn't necessarily what needs to be tweaked to make druids scale as quickly as the other classes. There are a billion ways they could do this. They could give us dual weild, they could make strength give 8 attack power, they could make tiger's fury into a finisher that gives armor penetration, they could decrease the flat damage on shred and increase the multiplier.

All that feral attack power really has to do is increase as itemlevel increases to provide some scaling from the weapon slot, and it does so. Yeah I want there to be a high itemlevel pure dps staff and I'm sure they'll add one, but comparing feral ap to weapon dps and complaining does nobody any good whatsoever.

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

 

suicuique

You know .. this argument goes both ways:
I do not see druids complaining at the "casual level".
Why should Blizzard bother to change them then?

 

Vandermonde

Fwiw, maces can be FAP weapons too, which there is of course a profession for. So the lack of woodcarving is not an actual impediment to the existence of a craftable FAP epic, they just arbitrarily didn't put one in.

 

Vaccine

I've always wondered why Druids couldn't DW claws, would be a really nice idea and as you said its also relatively easy to trasnfer them to forms graphics to finally give druids some differentiation between each other whilst in forms.

But alas, I fear its too late in the game for such a massive overhaul to the class.

I'm gonna reserve my final judgement on itemisation till I've seen the goodies 2.3 brings but I'm getting a little down about it now, the lack of upgrades making me less and less motivated to even raid for the upgrades I have left at my level (4/6 ssc, 2/4 tk).

 

• sordee

From Deliverance's post (after numerous pages of back and forth) the math finally shows that FAP is working exactly as intended. (Thus the original basis of this entire thread is wrong)

Druids have a 1-Handed weapon with a 1.0 speed, which gives a cat druid almost the same amount of autoattacks as an unhasted rogue/dw warrior with a 2.6/1.5 wpn combination. (with no off-hand lowered hit chance mind you)

As Lord Beef points out (and the entire proc/WF debate), its the other aspects of Cat Druids that are lacking.

A) No meaningful haste option (Slice and Dice or Flurry)

B) If haste was given, the only meaningful way to take advantage of it would be to always wear 2pT4 to generate more energy. (almost like a ShadowPriest, cat druids get locked into a set for a long time)


It will interesting in seeing the next 10 points in the feral tree for WotLK will be. I.e. since Mangle was to play catchup to Imp Sinister Strike, will the feral tree get Combat Potency or Slice and Dice (or both)?

 

Larisroth

Being firmly in the camp of the its by design stupid on the equivalent of 1H AP, one could still ask the question is how much do we scale with our weapon upgrades on the whole. Will switching from my [Staff of Beasts] to a [Terestian's Stranglestaff] give me approximately the same percentage upgrade on my personal dps as a rogue (or some other melee) upgrading from level 93 Rare weapons to level 115 epic? The calculation for the druid is easier because we can ignore weapon speed. If the advantage of upgrading our weapons is worse than other melee then you could make a case for increasing the FAP multiplier.

A better argument for FAP being wrong would be that it pigeon-holes us into using weapons that are itemised for us alone, Although having the FAP scale implicitly with weapon DPS wouldn't entirely solve the issue as we still need specially itemised tanking weapons.

As it stands, if I can get a good group (not that easy due to the WF issue) then I can do comparable special damage to our rogues, and with 2 piece T4, and power-shifting that's from a comparable energy use.

As other have said the big problem is the white damage is about 1.5-2 times lower. If you fix that then haste becomes more useful. Although increased proc rates provide a more subtle advantage of haste which we largely miss out on.

The feral druid is a different beast altogether.

 

Boevis

One issue I have about the constant statement that "white damage is lower" is quite simply, remove SnD/Flurry from someone else (ie. drop their white by 30%) and you'll see comparable numbers to our white. Higher yes (the benefit of unarguably better itemization) but comparable enough that a flurry effect would do wonders.

 

Larisroth

Yeah but the difference is often quite a bit more than a mere factor of 1.3. Thinking about it a bit more, a source of a lot of the difference becomes fairly clear. We're the only melee that tries to do dps with a 1H and the equivalent of a stats offhand. Looking at highend items we see that 2H do a listed dps of about 130% of that of a 1H. Dual wield probably has a similiar boost over the 1H and offhand arrangement. Giving us the 2H AP boost would clearly overpower specials in cat form (although you could rebalance them), so perhaps the solution is for white damage in cat form to in effect be dual wielding our claws

The feral druid is a different beast altogether.

 

LokE

Ive semi read through this thread and i realy dont see that the big deal is, i mean your a diferent class, if you wanted your 2hander's ilevel to be exponential to your dps then you should have been a warrior, you cant compare the 2, it doesn't work that way, different classes scale differently to stats and gain ap differently from stats,
all in all i dont realy feel druids aren't compareable dps, my guild currently only has 1 feral druid that raids regulary, when he's not tanking he's very competetive on damage done, sure you could complain about it, but its not realy going to get you that much,
look at hunters were down to getting 1 ap per agi and nothing from str, you could think we would want 2ap over 1agi, but mostly we still dont, and what about our weapons? sure we've complained some that we "waste" ilevel points on the weapon dps instead of getting "caster" type weapons with more stats,
i dont think it'll ever happen though, and to be honest im not realy that bothered about it, i mean i cant complain about my dps in tier5 zones, i do quite well,
so your weapon doesn't scale aswell as other classes, maybe its not intended to ?
maybe you scale better in other areas ?
i dont realy think these kinds or disscussions lead anywhere, you can rant all you want but in the end you have to make the best of what you have got.

 

dukes

I love it when people use zero full stops, then have an edit line that has "grammar" in it (I understand english may not be your first language, but that post is horrible).

The entirety of the issue being discussed (at least at the beginning) is that feral attack power doesn't scale as other weapons scale. Coming into the thread as a different class and saying "LOL IF YOU WANT TO SCALE BE A WARRIOR" doesn't exactly add anything to the discussion, especially when it comes from a hunter which is the only class that actually has a chance of competing with rogue damage right now.

If everyone accepted everything in the game at face value and no-one questioned anything, we'd be sitting with the original talent trees, feral druids would be neglected beyond belief, there would be no viable off-specs for any of the hybrid classes, and shamans would be dropping GoA instead of WF for their groups (I would put in a comment about using a 1.5 speed offhand with frostbrand, but they aren't enhancement, right?).

Equating a hunters 2h weapon to a druids is madness - a hunters weapon is closer to using a ranged weapon on a rogue/warrior - it's a boost to stats, not a major piece of your gear. You may not use it much, but it is still of use to you, and hunters do have melee abilities, even if little used. A feral druid has zero use of anything but the stats on the weapon, which is exactly what feral AP is supposed to be making up for. The basis is that a druid in cat form has a 55 DPS base weapon, and the feral AP is supposed to boost that to the point which it compares to a equal ilvl weapon of that the feral weapon is (i.e. [Pillar of Ferocity] adding 826 AP = 59 DPS, giving a total DPS of 55+59 = 114, compared to 1h weapons this is very high, compared to 2h weapons this is very low ([Stormherald] for example is slightly lower in ilvl)). The confusion comes from not being a dual wield class, but not seeming to count for having the same total DPS as a 2h weapon. Where did the extra 13 DPS go? Why is this not scaling correctly, and should it scale in a 2h'er fashion or a 1h'er fashion? These are the kind of questions that sum up this thread, or where this thread should have gone if it didn't go slightly off the tracks (and seems to have been at least partially answered in Deliverances thread a few posts back).

 

angral

Recapping for my own enlightenment:

FAP manages to scales as a 1h when compared to the actuall weapon we use. FAP also manages to quite nicely add up to the difference in 2h dps when expressed as AP. Ok, let's assume Blizzard did this deliberatley in an attempt to throw us off. Like say; God putting all those dinosaur bones in the rocks to make us think the planet is millions of years old.

Why then is our 1h weapon scaling going onto 2h weapons? All other classes in the game get's the benefit of 2 weapon slots. As a caster with staves / 1h+shield / 1h+offhand. As melee, with a 2h / dual wield.

And then there are druids: Using a 2h weapon for a 1h benefit?

Whether we are or not, or whether that is relevant or not, I agree that FAP is a bad design idea. Mostly because of the previously, and often, mentioned issue of only 'one weapon' per raid tier that is for 'feral druids'. That the weapons in question are for one role, and largely unsuited to the other, is merely the icing on the QQ cake.

I am content to leave the missing 13 dps as one of lifes great unsolved mysteries. Where is the thread where I can make suggestions and theorycraft solutions to the druid scaling problem?

While we're at it, we should sort out World Peace.

 

• sordee

(complete conjecture here)

My guess here is to make it easier for the item designers. Seeing how in pre-BC there was only one marginally good feral offhand (a blue drop from Strat), I don't thin they wanted to have to add a few more items littered throughout to game make up good off-hand pieces just for Feral Druids.

Other theory here is that Caster staves usually give higher base stats, while 1H+offhand generally give better non-base stats (+healing/+crit/+dmg&healing). So since Feral druids scale with base stats so well, might as well stick with all base stats on staves(and the occasional mace)

And yes world peace would be good too.

 

Dalamar

Because adding items to the game is *so* hard. Give me a friggen break dude.

This is 100% pure laziness, same garbage I(and the half dozen other raiding ferals) had to deal with throughout all 2 feral(rogue offset) drops from the 16 bosses in Naxx. Same trash as Stratholme book being my endgame offhand throughout WoW vanilla.

 

• sordee

Not disagreeing with the laziness angle there, but...

Think of it this way as a BC designer:

I go out and create ~20 2H-staves/maces, plus 20-30 one-hand maces plus another 10 off-hand frills that only one class spec of of class will use(also to balance all the combinations). And the corresponding artwork to go with it.

or...

I go out and create only ~30 2H-staves/maces, and spent a fair amount of time making them really balanced and useful (especially for the undisputed tanking aspect) also have time to make the artwork look really nice. (So nice that one weapon is the best looking signature weapon this side of Thunderfury before BT)

 

Deliverance

Because, for the purposes of loot tables, it is better for both designers, druids, and other classes that way.

Consider the alternatives:

1) +FAP weapons are made 1 handed using the 1H item budget for either offensive or defensive stats. Feral offhand items are created with stats like STR/AGI/STA or +armour, perhaps some +hit rating using the offhand item budget. You now have TWO classes of items that are both needed by druids, and which you want new of in every new tier and preferably different ones for cats and bears, and useless for everybody else to fill your loottables with. Likewise, for every RepGrindX for FeralWeaponY you'll want a RepGrindZ for FeralOffhandW. (Alternatively one could choose to mostly ignore the feral offhands leading to the pre-TBC situation)

2) +FAP weapons are made 2 handed and use the 2H item budget for either offensive or defensive stats. There are no need for any feral offhands.

In addition, at high levels the item budget of a 2H is better than the combined item budget of a 1H and offhand, so it isn't as if druids are losing much budgetwise by the 2H decision - they lose a bit in "potential ideal item design" since splitting stats over two items done in an ideal matter does cost less points than having them on one item, but, on the other hand, offhand items cannot be enchanted and 2 Handers can take bigger enchants than 1 Handers (case in point: +35 agility) and most items are deliberately not designed with ideal stat allocations anyhow.

The biggest loss is the loss of choice - do I use WeaponX with OffhandY or OffhandZ? - but given the low number of items of either type that would be available, for let's face it, any type of item that isn't desirable for 2+ classes is going to be very, very, rare in any well designed loot system, and nobody else wants a feral offhand, so you'd probably end up choosing WeaponX and OffhandY every single time until you got "the next tier upgrades of both items" anyway.

Thus #2 is the obvious choice - it gives better loot tables for people in general, it is as powerful or more powerful for the druid than #1, and it requires less effort from a design perspective (which boss do we put the item on? how many different do they really need? how do we avoid pissing off the other customers with too much "not-my-class" loot?) - it really is a win-win scenario for all concerned. Nobody really loses out and much is gained.

I am really, really, happy that Blizzard chose the sensible approach for TBC of putting it all on a 2H weapon, FAP, stats, and all, in one nice bundle ready for the application of +35 agility. There's every reason to believe that current issues due to the dearth of highlevel FAP weapons in general would be multiplied in an environment where we'd need both FAP weapon and feral offhand.

 

seminarca

I don't think the 2h vs 1h/offhand argument carries much relevance aside from a slight stat disparity, or aesthetics/preference .. your paw will still be 1h, it will still have 1.0 speed, it will still be 55 base dps regardless of the actual weapon combination you are wielding. Deliverance's post and angral's summary pretty much have it spot on right now. We are given 1h scaling, but we don't have an offhand that hits for damage (and no, increasing speed to simulate more hits in the same time period doesn't count).

dukes has posted a couple of his high end raid DPS parses, and it has been my intent for the longest time to go through them, and figure out a way to nominally increase our white damage to make us gimpedly competetive (i.e. satiate the "lol u cant dps like rouge cos u can tank and innervate/bres" crowd) but also keeping us in line with other "offspec" melee dps.

The options I want to try out are:
1) WF for Cat in its current form (white hits only)
2) Tacking on a haste/frenzy effect to Rip (I think Boevis calculated that adding a new haste/dmg finisher to be used in lieu of Rip doesn't result in much of an increase at all)
3) A passive Flurry-like proc
4) Increasing the proc rate of OoC (would have strong PvP ramifications)

 

dukes

The more practice I get at high end DPS, and the better gear I get, the less I think we need anything but better itemisation.

Case in point, todays Rage Winterchill and Najentus (ignore Kazrogal, 3 cripples screwed me over horribly): Winterchill // Najentus

I worked out that with a bit of "napkinmath" in one of the druid threads (possibly the feral DPS one? can't remember) that windfury would be approximately 175 dps for me at the current level, which I think tips it over into the "unbalanced" side of being a hybrid.

 

Kaber

I think one of the issues you are missing here is we were nerfed based on essentially blue/5man gear comparisons. We were destroying warriors and rogues in PvP, DPS, and tanking. The problem came as you moved into T4 things began shifting the other way, precisely because druids do not scale up as well with our gear. This leaves us with a bit of an issue when it comes to itemization. So, we essentially took a nerf based on pre-raid performance (which was partially removed - armor was somewhat of a wash with us getting more armor on our gear, but less from Bear form). It balanced things for that level of gear, but the problem we faced was a larger increase in other classes from similar upgrades which leaves the druid a fair bit behind the curve as guilds progress further into the end-game from a DPS standpoint.

Something druids have always known is that we perform better than other classes in poor gear, and then we steadily decline as gear gets better. That is the reason so many druids kept trying to get warriors/rogues to be patient.

I would like to know precisely which area we scale better in? If you are going to present it as a reason for druids not scaling well in terms of DPS, at least provide an example.

 

Larisroth

1) I think they need to give us procs and I hope that's part of the reason for the WF nerf. It's pretty hard to argue that the new WF totem is going to be over powered in bear form. Having a melee class that can't use it is quite limited for designing an optimal melee dps group.

2) Additionally I think they need to give us a raid wide melee dps buff or debuff, Stealing Imp. FF from the balance tree would probably do (and mean they don't waste points in it).

3) Buff cat form white dps. The more I think about it, the more I like the idea off giving us an off hand claw attack. It moves us closes to rogues (more white damage, dual-wield) and means that a cat attacking doesn't loot so gimped Some sort of passive haste would be an alternative.

4) Give us some more useful abilities and fix some of the ones we have. Everyone agrees that tiger's fury and frenzied regeneration are largely useless. Bear form is a particular concern here, as we can't realistically shift out to use pots for most fights.

5) Fix HotW in cat. Due to itemisation issues it's hard to find strength in a lot of slots.

6) Nerf power-shifting, and give us some alternative way of speccing to get more energy.

ETA: Yeah a lot of these problems could instead be addressed by better itemisation, but I don't really see that happening any-time soon. Furthermore the unique ways we interact with stats means that well itemised feral gear is only really good for feral druids (which is one of 3 specs for one of the least played classes), and so we're unlikely to get much more loot placement. I'd much rather they dealt with it by bringing our mechanics closer to the other melee classes.

The feral druid is a different beast altogether.

 

seminarca

Come on, let's not get carried away here. What exactly was nerfed?

* Bear form armor multiplier reduced
* Bear form increasing sta instead of hp (effectively reducing our hp pool)
* Bear Maul/Swipe/Mangle removed from the 20% talent
* Bear Mangle's multiplier removed (then later reinstated at a lower value)

The defensive nerfs were more than compensated for by the 2.1 gear fixes, specifically the ones to our tier gear. It's not a stretch by any means to assume that the defensive nerfs were made with the upcoming gear buffs in mind. The offensive nerfs can be attributed to PvP (the immediate threat hotfix further attests this notion).

Not a thing was done to nerf Cat form damage, it didn't need nerfing.

edit: Going back and reading the patch notes, PI was lowered from 15% to 10%, but that in itself isn't/wasn't devastating and, again, seemed more slanted to reduce Bear's offensive abilities than Cat dps.

dukes certainly has a valid point about itemization. When Cats first prowled into Kara, they were mainly geared from quest rewards, many of them tailor made for us. Heavy Str/Agi stuff, the Aldor quest shoulders from Netherstorm, the green bracers which are better than the Maiden ones, Talon chestguard etc etc.

But throughout Kara, you get much "Rogue" gear, and not a lot of "Druid" gear. So once you're at the SSC/TK level, you've outgrown your tailor made quest rewards, and begun to wear the Rogue gear .. it doesn't quite fit, it's uncomfortable in places (crotch area is too tight?), but it's better than what you had before, so you make do. And you're still making do in Hyjal/BT.

But it's apparent Blizzard doesn't want to pollute loot tables too much with Feral gear.

 

• sadris

Yet polluting it with dozens of loot options for a "less useful offspec" (DPS warriors and their ilk) is perfectly fine.

There are a lot of options, but only if you take all of the burning crusade as a whole. If you only look at possible upgrades, it is quite slim (only 141 piece of gear is the boots from BT trash), not counting tier 6, which all classes have. I think fixing itemization is a better solution, which was the whole point of this thread.

'[The main argument against gay-marriage] always revolves around ... "the gay agenda"... Apparently all these gays only want to get married so they can adopt children, turn the children gay (probably using their mystic gay voodoo, passed gayly down from one gay generation to the next), and perpetuate their gayness.'
-- rantingkitten

 

seminarca

Firstly, no one suggested it's fine that there's no proper Druid DPS gear. You're being needlessly hostile and defensive for some reason.

Secondly, DPS Warriors have been a mainstay since forever and it's only recently that Ferals have begun to enjoy the same attention. Less useful offspec would probably be something like Retribution Paladins, which (surprise surprise), are just as poorly itemized, if not worse. While Blizzard is making changes to Paladins to make Warrior DPS gear useful for them (lowering/removing the dependancy on spell dmg), they obviously feel Rogue gear is "good enough" for Cats.

Again, I'm not stating that this is ok, I'm just stating that this is the situation now as it stands.

Add to the problems yet another dimension: the fact that there's no distinction between Cat and Bear gear, and you have the situation we're in now. The Rogue in Edgewalker is thrilled and the Cat in Zierhut's is cursing the abnormally high armor.