The druid pvp gear isn't underbudget, it just has some of its budget spent on bonus armor which I enjoy greatly.

I was wondering about. In the push that lowered item budget costs of +Armor the Druid set did not gain any additional stats as they should have. They did however gain additional stats in one of the latest pushs when they buffed ILVLs. Where are the missing stats? Were they included in the +ILVL push as a stealth buff or were just forgotten?

I was hoping you knew Liar, as the link I put in to provide "context" for this thread was largely based on your numbers, right?

People keep saying Armor costs less now, was there a blue post indicating this? It really just seems to me they did fixed the values of Sta on some items, and made other items as good as they're supposed to be (taking t4 up ~10 iLevels iirc)

Effective weapon dps doesnt matter on a druid-YOU ARENT ACTUALLY USING THE WEAPON

We dont use the procs, the speed, the damage, we dont use any of it. The stats are added to our kitty dps formula, which is COMPLETELY DIFFERENT than the way any other class does damage

Comparing weapon dps in caster vs. kitty forms isnt comparing the same thing-its apples to oranges. What matters is the end result on the dps charts. Looking through charts on a boss such a gruul, a fairly basic tank and spank as far as dps goes, i do see feral druids in the top 5 on dps fairly regularly-hell, when i get bored and tank Kara on an offday i keep up with rogues on Aran dps, even with a hobbled together feral set made up of stuff no rogue wants.

What i do understand is a lack of choice and gear in general for a feral druid in 25 man content. In general, there is not a lot of desireable gear for tanking or dps specifically designed for feral druids out there, and that is frustrating.

Alright, was gonna try and keep my snout out of this, but it's beginning to irk me.

To almost every physical DPS class, there exists 2 kinds of gear upgrades; armor, and weapon. The main difference between these 2 (for all but one physical DPS class) is that armor upgrades provide you mainly with statistical increases, be it crit, stam, etc. Armor upgrades are usually the items that are affected by talents the most.

However, weapon DPS upgrades, for every class but one, represent an actual increase in the BASE DPS OF THAT INDIVIDUAL. Because of this, weapons are the single most effective way to 'increase your DPS' through gear progression.

Obviously, this isn't the case for druids, we've been at 55'claw' DPS for quite some time, and, barring some intervention, will remain at 55 base DPS. Blizzard recognized this, and attempted to fix it. Their solution, being FAP, was implemented with 1Hers, and was easy to math out to effectively 'raise' our base 55 DPS up to whatever the ilvl standard was of that particular item.

Unfortunately, the switch to 2Hers did not fare as well, because of Moonkin. This whole problem that Sadris has brought up, is because of some retarded mechanic regarding melee swings and mana regen. It is extremely obvious that they are paying way too much attention to the actual DPS of these 2Hers with Moonkin in mind, and adjusting the FAP from the baseline of a Moonkin's benefit.

The problem is, a portion of the 'weapon DPS', regardless of talents is completely and utterly wasted on a cat/bear, because the weapons themselves are being balanced around actually being swung.

I really don't see how anyone has a problem seeing what Sadris is explaining.

This is completely correct. However since druids do get more per stat point (in terms of AP per Str/Agi, Crit per agi etc) if the rest of the druid's gear were properly itemized (which is a completely different discussion) then what we "lose" in our weapons would be made up for in the other gear, compared to other classes. E.g., Our weapon gives 6% increase in power and our chest piece gives a 4% increase in power, whereas for a Rogue the weapon may give an 8% increase and the chest only a 2% increase (talking all the same ilvl of appropriate gear here).

I don't think anyone has a problem with Sadris's explanation - it's pretty clear, druid weapons scale more slowly than 2Hers. I think the point of contention (or at least, my point of contention) is whether this actually matters in any real way. The weapon damage itself is not the sole determiner of the effectiveness of a class; it's certainly a large contributer, but their are many other factors that come into play; the statistics provided by other gear contribute. The multipliers gained through talents (or not) contribute. The other available roles for the class contribute.

My argument is that, even though druid weapons don't scale as well, their aggro generation in bear and dps in cat may scale just as well, and, moreover, *even if* their damage doesn't scale quite as well as a rogue's, it doesn't really need to; as long as druids do more damage than prot warriors in dps gear, and tank better than fury warriors in tank gear, there will be a spot for them in raids as offtanks.

Long story short? I have no problem with Sadris's conclusions about druid weapons. I simply haven't seen anything that shows that the inferior scaling actually matters.

I honestly don't remember saying that the Gladiator Set was underbudgeted but saying that we got the least Stamina out of it from all classes (Insert reference to HotW).

I am going by the patch notes:

And by the fact that things like Chestguard of the Talon had their stats and armor increased without becoming a higher ILVL item (same applies to the Felsteel Plate Armor set (http://thottbot.com/test/i23517 , http://thottbot.com/test/i23519 , http://thottbot.com/test/i23518).

I do get where you are coming from though, because the exalted [Edit] Karazhan [/EDIT] tanking ring got 2 buffs in this patch, one from becoming a higher ILVL item and second from having the armor modifier. It probably must have looked like it was only just 1 buff happening (the one from the increase of ILVL) and not 2 which it is in reality.

To say only a Moonkin benefits from weapon DPS is misleading. Powershifting has everything to do with the DPS (or top-end) of the weapon. Swinging a 2H at claw ASpd is a big deal.

Was there not a patch already addressing that very issue?

Bold added for emphasis, but not in agreement. I think that's a mighty big assumption without numbers to back it up. Obviously, druids' AP and crit rate scale better with stats (str and agi) than any other class, but that is not the same thing as dps. If folks are going to rebut Sadris's position with "weapon dps doesn't exist in a vacuum" then the same stance must be applied to the druid crit and ap conversion factors.

Conversely, if the weapons *don't* drop and everyone has to make do with armor upgrades, is it fair that the druid will enjoy weeks of increased damage relative to the rogues? It's true that the rogue may benefit as much from the single upgrade as the druid can get in 2 or 3... but it's also true that there are a lot more armor drops in instances than weapon drops; Gruul's Lair, Magtheridon's Lair, Serpentshrine Cavern and Tempest Keep put together has a total of 3 rogue weapons, but 3 pieces of T4, 5 pieces of T5, 3 trinkets, and half a dozen assorted other armor upgrades; on average, one expects to have access to several of these before you ever see a weapon drop. Hence, the fact that the druid doesn't have to rely on the one drop that singlehandedly boosts him by 50 dps strikes me as highly advantageous. For instance, when the expansion came out, we had 4 rogues with at least 4 pieces of Tier 3, but only 2 of them had Naxx MH weapons (and one who would have still been using Perdition's Blade had Rank14 weapons not been made available)

So, yes, it's true that IF a member of another class gets their weapon drop, they will be at an advantage for a few weeks; however, it's also true that IF they don't they'll be at a disadvantage because armor upgrades come on a much more regular basis than weapon drops.

Wouldn't the druid typically have 2 or 3 random upgrades before the rogues get their weapon? They are waiting on one slot, while the druid can get good dps upgrades from all his armor slots.

As for the op/rest of thread:

I can only reinforce what other posters have said. You are wishing that blizzard would compartmentalize facets of the game and equalize them. You say you want the weapon slot to be equal across classes, but you are implying that you want much more than that. You want one class' talents to give the same %bonus as the other classes. You want one class' abilities to provide the same % yellow damage as the others. You want one class to get the same benefit from raw stats as the others.

Sure, this would make it easy for you to verify that they're all on the level, but this is obviously not what blizzard has done, as much as you wish they would have. Personally I'd argue that so many simplifications would create a more boring game, at least for us theorycrafters.

Personally, I believe the reason FAP doesn't make our paw dps scale linearly isn't a design flaw, it's intended. The basis for this reasoning is that AP scales with Unleashed Rage and our Finishing Moves, while weapon damage simply does not (+5 weapon damage =/= +70 AP anymore) I may be completely off base, so I'll borrow some math from other people to prove or disprove my theory.

I edited this to represent a 33% crit rate actually seen by most druids, feral talents, and the mangle debuff on the shreds. So 231 AP = 47.75 DPS or ~4.8 FAP per DPS for druids, give or take (I really disliked using only 1 crit out of 4 specials with a 33% crit rate, but 2 crits out of 3 is unreasonable ... )

231/14 = 16.5
I'm going to edit both weapons with +16.5 DPS in the rogue dps spreadsheet v2.2.4 (mih) and see the change. MH Gladiator's Slicer, OH Latros.
Starting DPS (unbuffed): 1012.11
+16.5 dps to both weapons: 1074.75 (62.64 gain)
+16.5 dps to MH only: 1056.42 (44.31 gain)
+16.5 dps to OH only: 1030.44 (18.33 gain)
In order to see a 47.75 DPS gain the rogue only needs +12 dps to each weapon, or .25 weapon DPS (on both weapons) per DPS for rogues

Well, for me at least, this says a lot. 231 AP being a nearly equal gain for feral druids as 16.5 DPS on the MH weapon of a rogue is rather pathetic, this indicates three things.
First that Dual Wield once again makes a rather dramatic difference in the DPS gap between rogues and druids.
Second, having diminishing FAP vs weapon DPS values really does mean we aren't scaling well at all, while we may be doing 90% of rogue DPS right now, we won't be doing 80% of rogue DPS as you scale up.
Third, in order to keep up with rogues, druids need 37.5% more FAP: DPS than a 1 hander, in order to stay at 90% of a rogue, druids need 23.75% more FAP: DPS than a 1 hander.

Well, I'm sold. When everyone is running around with Hyjal loot, druids will be doing less DPS in comparison to rogues than they are now. Pillar needs at least 968 FAP (assuming all other itemization is equal, which it won't be from what we've seen thus far) to keep a catform druid scaling at 90% of rogue DPS. It could also use some Defense and Agility, but that's a complaint for another day.

And just because people say we scale on other stats faster ... using the same 231 AP, lets call it from Str so we get 20% more than a rogue, who would get 192 AP. Adding 192 AP to the same rogue gives +54.28 DPS, 13.67% more than the druid got from 20% more AP ...

The marginal difference with a single armor upgrade is much smaller though. Assuming everyone scales the same after every upgrade is made the significant extra overall DPS boost realized by standard DPS classes from weapon upgrades is spread across several slots for a feral druid. The fact that drops happen in descret incriments and that the feral's inherint armor upgrade advantage is spread across a lot more slots means that the issue is far far less significant in reverse.

The argument is not that we get better DPS returns from the stats on the weapon slot, but that we get better returns on the stats from all slots. You need to compare full tier 4 + a tier 4 level weapon vs tier5 and a tier 5 level weapon to see if we are scaling properly. I promise you in terms of raw stats, we get more AP and crit% than a rogue does from just those 5 item slots. This may or may not bridge the gap.

QFT, just look at warriors. Warriors scale better than any other class due to the rage mechanic. Damage increases hit them twice, once in damage and once in rage generation. Blizzard has never really corrected this basic feature, prefering to nerf them every patch as gear improves.

As for the upgrades question, remember that druids wear almost pure tier gear plus random drops present every other raid instance. There is no raiding bracer known that isn't in heroics. The belt and boots are in karazhan. It's not, "Hey, feral gear dropped. Guess you rogues are out of luck as the feral loots 2-3 items while you all save for a weapon bidding war." It's, " Hmm, can we really afford to give that tier token to a feral instead of a warrior or priest? Oh, and all the rogues bid on that other token. And the non-set drops. And the weapons."

When I first started reading this thread, this was my initial thought as well. I'm not entirely sold that there's a huge inequality, but it wouldn't be the first time Blizzard needed to adjust something. A warrior or rogue will not see a 10% weapon damage increase from Unleashed Rage, but a druid will.

You also would need to factor in:
• Glancing blow differences from each class - Base "white" weapon damage is impacted by glancing blows whereas special attacks and finishers are not. Less of your dps comes from auto-attacks compared to warriors or rogues. (Admittedly, this is not as big a deal as it was pre-2.1.)

• Armor piercing finishers that scale with AP and any other talents (like mangle debuffs and naturalist for example). Is Rip armor-piercing like Rupture for Rogues? Does it share a similar AP scaling coefficient? Rupture scales very well with AP, but rupture won't scale with base weapon damage. Slice 'n Dice will scale with weapons, but it's subject to armor and glancing blows.

• Existing talent scaling - sorry, but I don't think you can look at just the base weapon and not look at the % modifiers that you're going to get from talents.

I think there's a couple moving pieces here, so it's not easy to just say, "gee our weapons don't scale as well for base dps".

Edit:
Actually they did fix this. Rage normalization is the average of what they want you to generate per swing and what you'd actually get in wow 1.0 from your attack. Because they're taking an average, Warriors only get about half the benefit of dps increases compared to what you would have gotten in the old world. The slope of the line for rage generation is nowhere near what it was pre-TBC.

That fixed it for 2.0.

New nerfs in 2.1.

Since when has armor accounted for item budget or any significatant part of it? Since when have 2H weapons been itemised around how valuable they are for each class?

This argument would make a lot more sense to me if Druids were the only class with scaling talents and if the gear wasn't itemised so a piece with 10 str for the Warriors or Druids doesn't generally have a counterpart with the equivelant amount of AP for the Rogues. Are you guys suggesting all Rogue itemisation is based around Deadliness and Sinister Calling?

Even if I'm horribly mistaken and Druids do gain hugely more than other classes from this equipment there's still the issue that a lot of it is somewhat lacking at times in the distribution of these stats, Pillar of ferocity springs to mind as a good illustration (and Malorne gloves as my own personal frustration).

I don't think its actually unreasonable to take into account the class using the weapon when it is only being used by a single class, you mention a rogue's weapons but those can be equally used by a warrior or maybe even a hunter, whereas only a druid can benefit from feral ap.

You didn't read my post at all did you.

I'm factoring in Glancing for the rogue, and not the druid, and still rogue is greater than 30% more DPS from AP/weapon damage.

I'm factoring in mangle, naturalist, and rip scaling for the druid. The rogue spreadsheet factors their talents and abilities.

Things I am not factoring: Ideal itemization that provides a feral druid exactly what they want. Lets face it, Tiered gear doesn't provide anywhere the dps for druids as it does for rogues, excessive +armor and a complete lack of +hit ensures this. As you hit 25 man raids, Rogues scale better than druids because "Catform only" gear doesn't exist, in fact the "Feral Gear" is nearly always worse than non-set Agi/AP gear designed for Rogues. As I've said in many other threads, I would gain several hundred AP if the AP on my gear was switched with pure Str.

And really, sword spec change is such an amazing buff for warriors, I'm having MS warriors complain about too much rage, and they're able to pull aggro rather easily. I'd say there was no nerf but that's a different discussion.