I'm perfectly happy with demanding a change to t6's armor values, even switching to rings/cloaks with no armor, druids will be at the 75% cap without inspiration, that's just silly if there's not going to be a change to the cap and/or armor calculations. "This set is designed for offtanking and DPS, here's a bunch of useless armor" is just as retarded as "here's 100 spirit on your tanking set" was.

In my opinion, fire damage should be capped at 1000. You can say it's too harsh, or cripples fire mages' competition with frost--whatever; none of that matters, because you're missing the simple fact that it's possible, and if it's possible, people will do it. If you disagree with this simple, unrelated fact then I [assume a dismissive and flippant attitude toward you.] If it's possible, players will do it. I was a mage since I got my first alpha email in December 2003, including a dwarf mage, so I don't need a lecture. Little side story, my friend is mage class leader, and he does some DPS in raids. He doesn't always do as much as rogues, but with invisibility there are basically no limits now. Fortunately his AE and sheep abilities warrant bringing him along most of the time. But if he couldn't DPS well or AE or sheep I just wouldn't find it worth bringing him along. But over all I am not concerned about fire mages overtaking frost mages or vice versa. These are completely true stories by the way. The moral of the story is that I don't even know why mages would argue with this, because a 1000 cap on fire damage simply allows them the opportunity-solution to work on their other stats such as stam, spell crit, and agility, so really it's helping mages.

This is basically a summary of what Jayde has posted in his last ~3 replies on this thread. He's a class balance troll who has single-handedly ruined this thread with defensive-class-balance-posturing and pure sophistry (If it's possible, people will do it, you cannot dispute this, therefore the other unrelated thing I said is true-- sophistry 101). How is he not banned? If I had an obnoxious sig, could I troll all I wanted too?

I was going to do a post about body armour itemisation, but I've been a bit lazy. Playing around with wowhead searches returns some interesting results.

1) There's only 1 epic with strength without bonus armour, and that's the windslayer wraps. So bonus armour seems to be a good way to find feral specific itemisation these days. The only one that doesn't have agility as well is the T4 gloves. The gear seems to be itemised pretty well for a feral druid doing some tanking and some dps. Although I wouldn't mind less strength and more agility.

2) Because rogue gear lacks bonus armour, strength, and often has crit rating rather than agility, it is markedly inferior compared to the feral gear for a druid for either tanking or dps. The difference is probably about a tiers worth of levels in general.

3) There is very little T5 level and beyond feral armour. A crafted belt, self crafted boots and those BT boots. Nothing at all in the bracer slot, and certainly no alternatives for any of the slots. Admittedly there isn't a lot of tanking plate, available either, but there is still some, as well as dps gear for most specs and off specs.

4) Crafted gear for feral druids sucks. The 3 piece BoP set, is both rogue gear, and seems under itemised compared to other classes. We have one blue set which is okay for tanking the early content. The crafted belt is good, but it seems a lot of work to pick up leatherworking for the crafted boots.

5) Other hybrids can typically use gear designed for other classes, without too much of a problem. A tankadin can use warrior protection gear (and often should). Enhancement shaman can use rogue or hunter gear without it being too suboptimal. Moonkin can run around in cloth unless they're tanking a physical mob.

I'm not sure what the solution is really, the way it is designed currently feral gear is just too different from any other gear in the game that most of it is only really suitable for feral druids, which I guess means our drops will always be patchy. It's pretty sad that the crafted stuff is so inferior, I would've thought it would be a good way of providing us with more gear, without running into yet another feral drop syndrome again.

My point is that making current awesome gear worse in order to make the crap in the future look better is a terrible answer, as is compensating by giving us a crap version of defensive stance. There's no need to completely rework the game mechanics for part of a class (that's already had their mechanics jerked around long enough imo) when it's a simply itemization issue.

Problem: Itemizing feral druid gear in a manner that allows us to perform our intended role (OT/DPS) results in the gear quickly becoming obsolete because of the armor cap. Lets face it, so long as warriors are MT every priest/shaman/paladin will be taking the +%armor talents.
Solution 1. Remove armor cap. Just like level 55 stuff was trivial at level 60, and MC was trivial with Nef gear, so should Gruul/Mag be trivial for Vashj gear.

Solution 2. Reduce armor values on some items to increase useful stats. When Blizzard removed the Spirit, increased iValue, and reduced the cost of +armor, druids gained several hundred armor but only ~10 stats per item. Armor is neat, but when you're bumping that armor cap, they could have paid a little bit more attention to the other stats.

Solution 3. Both. Less armor so t6 with all the fixins is just barely above 75% DR means Inspiration and LoH would still have some effect, but definitely wouldn't magically trivialize the game.

Solution 4. ?? Always some other solution I'd never think of.