What exactly is wrong with T6? It is the best itemized gear in the game for Druids.

Then I think you don't understand the role of a Druid in a raid environment. You aren't in the raid because you can out damage Rogues, you are in there due to your utility. Sometimes (more often than not) you need a large mana pool to perform the operations required for said utility.

Would be nice if there was a couple +bleed mobs out there to make up for the 4? bosses that are bleed immune. Just because "Druids aren't brought to raids for their DPS" doesn't mean there can't be a "OMG Feral DPS" Boss like there is for various types of healers.

Spirit or mana/5 would allow us to be a "utility" more frequently. I have never, ever, ever come close to running out of mana using my rebirth, innervate, and tranquility whenever necessary, keeping myself and those around me alive with some small heals, and so on. Not to mention that the "utility" of LOTP.

A mage's arcane intellect buff gives us more than enough mana than we'd ever need.

Do you prioritize kings over salv/might on DPS fights? Do you ask for wisdom instead of might, for the "utility"? Because I find myself having too much mana to even bother with the shifting talent (I don't powershift). Similarly, I'd rather have a different stat on my feral tier set to help my two primary roles, tanking and DPS, rather than the once-per-fight "utility". It's a wasted stat on 95% of fights.

You started this thread about lack of scaling, Sadris. You're the one who said our staff items weren't giving enough AP to scale. But note that we never had INT, the "utility" stat, on any items before we got to raid-level content, before we stopped "scaling." It's wasted itemization for many, just as much as that base staff DPS is.

Well, that's interesting, and certainly downgrades the importance of strength massively while making agility even more ridiculous to stack.

The gist of the rest of that post is that there's too little attack power on the feral weapons (and other items) when compared to what other classes get, right? (that's the impression the google translation gave me, at least).

According to armour I have 471 strength in caster form in my DPS gear. Add 10% from BoK for 518 strength. This means HoTW would give me ~103 extra strength in a raid environment, or ~210 AP more.

My unbuffed AP is ~3000 (taking off the 200 for hotw=str). In a raid environment fully buffed it's approaching 5000 AP. Even in an unbuffed situation, the gains from that change are around the value of a flask of relentless assault, and with raid buffs it's almost 300 AP gain.

I'm happy with that. The only bastard is that now we need to re-evaluate all the items, and probably find out that all the rogue-based items are better for DPS than our tier sets (although I'm not sure about that when you factor in the bonuses).

It's a double edged sword though. Now this makes itemisation easier for Blizzard to deal with, but it also increases competition on those items (which before we didn't have as much - ancestral ring of conquest and razor scale battlecloak as good examples).

...

That it certainly is. If I'm reading it right, it's going to reduce tier set dps potential due to them being very Strength heavy, as well as the few properly itemized items we've got (Razorscale Battlecloak, Ring of Ancestral Conquest etc). Will probably balance out with the extra AP on weapons, HotW scaling the AP on weapons, and us being able to cannibalize Rogue loot.

All the more likely that they'll at least tweak our tier sets. Otherwise, Blizzard will hear a cacaphony of "they nerfed our tier sets!" posts.

Also, Dukes-- I think the issue was, mainly, that those two items listed were T5 items. They don't have a corresponding item on T6. This change lets them not have to itemize specifically for one half of one form, WITHOUT dethroning strength as the second-best druid stat.

This implies that they are indeed fixing FAP weapons, rather than just adding a constant number to all weapons (so the formula will be changed).

WoW-Europe.com Forums -> HotW change for 2.3

All they would have to do for the tier sets is a straight swap of agility and strength. That in itself would be a huge dodge buff though, so we'll see if they do it.

Edit: NM, 10 replies in time it took me to "break the news"