[WOTLK 4.0] Cats - Page 2

• Melthu · 06/14/10, 10:42 PM

I initially considered what it would be like to make Pulverize a defensive ability too, but that has some significant balancing concerns. Do you tune us assuming that Pulverize is up 100%/on cooldown, allowing us to let it drop in certain situations and put out higher threat than other tanks at the expense of (presumably) unneeded survivability? Or do you tune assuming that it's used sparingly, then allowing us to keep it up 100%/on cooldown for better survivability than other tanks can match? Unless you give all the other tanks a similar ability to trade threat for survivability it would probably be unbalanced. Although that's not to say that giving every tank the ability to choose between threat and survivability in combat would be a terrible idea.

Ja7us · 06/15/10, 6:30 PM

Originally Posted by Alarron

Unless I'm misreading Primal Madness, it looks pretty useless for (good) cats, since we're not energy-capping to begin with.

There is a DPS gain involved, albeit a marginal one: with (a single) point in primal madness, you can effectively berserk 10 energy higher without wasting any due to overflow, which means an effective gain of 10 energy every time berserk is used. Note that the second point in the talent does not offer a similar gain.

Of course, that's assuming that the tooltip is correct and it means that it increases maximum energy only, not current AND maximum energy; the latter would be an effective gain of 50 energy per berserk, which is better but still a pretty underwhelming 50 energy / 180 sec, assuming you're able to effectively use all your energy during berserk.

kalbear · 06/15/10, 7:36 PM

Unless you give all the other tanks a similar ability to trade threat for survivability it would probably be unbalanced. Although that's not to say that giving every tank the ability to choose between threat and survivability in combat would be a terrible idea.

Most other tanks have a 1-minute CD of sorts that is a minor survivability gain. Ferals currently don't other than barkskin, and barkskin is the shield wall analogue, not the shield block analogue. I think there's room for both for a feral.

Heck, simply make it +10-15% dodge and it would be decent without being insane.

In any case, bear threat as it stands right now is really, really low. Maul's threat gain hasn't been countered by fury strikes, the loss of armor pen + maul hurts significantly, and pulverize isn't really a great answer. Something's going to have to change, one way or another.

Alarron · 06/15/10, 11:27 PM

Originally Posted by kalbear

Most other tanks have a 1-minute CD of sorts that is a minor survivability gain. Ferals currently don't other than barkskin, and barkskin is the shield wall analogue, not the shield block analogue. I think there's room for both for a feral.

Heck, simply make it +10-15% dodge and it would be decent without being insane.

In any case, bear threat as it stands right now is really, really low. Maul's threat gain hasn't been countered by fury strikes, the loss of armor pen + maul hurts significantly, and pulverize isn't really a great answer. Something's going to have to change, one way or another.

Well, the +10% crit gain will significantly help SD uptime, which is being reworked for Cataclysm to be more effective (will be buffed by our Mastery and Vengeance, for one, and I remember an old blue post talking about reworking SD to be less trivial against raid bosses). It may end up being better for survivability then threat...sort of a Holy Shield analog.

I agree with you on threat, however; we'll have to see how Vengeance works in practice.

Paona · 06/16/10, 1:16 AM

Originally Posted by kalbear

You'd go 5/5 furor. As stupid as that is, that's the natural bonus. That being said, other than perseverance I'm not convinced that you would want to go that much into the resto tree. There are a lot of good threat and utility talents for bears in feral as it is, a lot of simply required talents, and it's tough to cut them. Really, right now cat has almost nothing 'fun' that it must take past the 44/18 points it needs, and bear has far too many good talents + required ones. There should be a rebalancing.

On the bear rotation, I've had the same thoughts as Vaccine. It looks like FF is not going to be a standard threat move and will be an early debuff that then is ignored, but either the case is that pulverize isn't that useful except once in a blue moon and you'll want to do it as little as possible - in which case lacerate and swipe is it for threat - or you'll simply be lacerating x5, pulverize, etc with maul thrown in at high rage. Neither sound like an interesting system. The problem with pulverize is that it works against a lot of the other synergies and abilities a bear has; it removes bleeds, it removes the bonus maul gets from a bleed (potentially), and it discourages rolling a lacerate stack. I'd like it if pulverize was more of a defensive choice and gave a cooldown similar to shield block or something like it, so that the choice would be to keep lacerate rolling and do more threat, or remove the lacerate stack for a defensive CD of sorts.

So I was lying in bed last night, staring at the ceiling, and decided to do some talent theorycraft in my head.... and we can't. Yes, the situation really is "there's nothing ELSE better", but I am walking back what I said last night, because until we see the net effect of "making the Cat rotation more forgiving", and "making not being able to Shred such a DPS loss" pans out, we may or may not see "Shredless" builds for Hybrids.

But as regards to Pulverize being a defensive cooldown instead... you guys are speaking that "Hey, let's put a defensive cooldown in Pulverize's place instead of another attack!"?

kalbear · 06/16/10, 6:10 AM

you guys are speaking that "Hey, let's put a defensive cooldown in Pulverize's place instead of another attack!"?

Sure. Or have pulverize be a net threat loss (the cost of building up the lacerate stack + loss of bleeds) but provide something more defensively. I wouldn't even mind if it did a lot of frontloaded threat right away to counterbalance the slow tick of lacerates, in the same way that FB works well at finishing off mobs when you don't want a bleed.

But in general, I think bears have been very much starved for abilities to use that actually affect their defensive damage intake. It's been demo roar, and that's it outside of cooldowns. There's a lot of room to add to this, and pulverize is perfect for that sort of thing. If it isn't pulverize, it should be something like pulverize - something that costs threat but adds defense.

Paona · 06/17/10, 3:46 AM

Hm. Maybe. But with a name like Pulverize? It demands a power with appropriately brutal effects. Instead of +10 to 15% dodge, it'd be nice if it were something like trading all the stacks of Lacerate for -Hit debuff and maybe a Disarm effect. Maybe a +Crit debuff. It'd keep things interesting, to say the least. (I'd suggest a Sunder Armor/FFF effect, but that would be duplicating the effect and thus redundant... unless it's meant to be used that way to quickly apply multiple stacks of Sunder Armor.)

Haloran · 06/17/10, 3:48 AM

Originally Posted by Ja7us

There is a DPS gain involved, albeit a marginal one: with (a single) point in primal madness, you can effectively berserk 10 energy higher without wasting any due to overflow, which means an effective gain of 10 energy every time berserk is used...

The possibility is, that increased maximum energy also increases energy regeneration for the duration. That might make Primal Madness quite a nice talent.

Paona · 06/18/10, 3:16 AM

So, Allison Robert over at Wow.com has a different take on Pulverize... Which pretty much completely changes how we've been looking at it so far. Instead of consuming all the stacks of Lacerate at once... well, I'll let her explain it.

(NEW) Pulverize: Requires Dire Bear Form. Deals 100% weapon damage plus additional 786 damage for each of your Lacerate applications on the target, and increases your melee critical strike chance by 2% for each Lacerate application consumed for 10 seconds.

The wording has been changed a bit from when we first saw it. I'm still not completely clear on what it does, but I think it costs you one Lacerate on your target in return for the instant damage and the 10-second (16 seconds with Endless Carnage) critical strike boost. There's no cooldown and it's an instant attack, but it'll also run you 20 rage each time, so this really isn't a spammable deal unless you're in a high-rage scenario. With a full rage bar and a full stack of 5 Lacerates, you could theoretically spam Pulverize, obliterate your stack (and your rage bar in the process), and get a huge threat boost in return.

It's not quite the threat vs. survival ability we were hoping for, but this makes things just a *wee* bit more interesting. Now, I don't know *what* is supposed to stop you from just continually eating a charge of Lacerate every sixteen seconds, then re-applying the next GCD... but I have to say, that *does* seem like it would change our current low-threat problem, and it feels like it would fit in just fine as part of our tanking rotation. Heck, I can see us seeing us... well. Basically what she said. We see our threat getting a little dicey, popping Enrage, then mashing Pulverize out five times to pad our threat lead back out.

Abbichum · 06/18/10, 3:24 AM

I dont quite understand why some of you would want to trade Pulverize(an addition to our otherwise boring threat rotation) for a defensive cooldown of sorts, thus making a scenario where we sacrifice threat for survivability. We should be able to get both an addition to our threat arsenal(tuning the diff abilities are easy so it wont get over the top) and have a medium cooldown addition to our defensive capabilities to make us feel more tanky, and less dps-from-the-front.

• Hamlet · 06/18/10, 3:25 AM

I don't really see why you would read it that way. It would also be very strange for the damage to be proportional to the stacks on the target if it only consumed one stack.

Vaccine · 06/18/10, 3:42 AM

That's a completely retarded way to read what is a pretty self-explanatory ability. How on earth do you read "for each stack consumed" as "consumes one stack"?

The obvious intent is for it to be an ability you use to keep the crit buff up for your other attacks. I don't know why people are pining for it to become a defensive cooldown when it makes our rotation more interesting, if you feel we need another defensive cooldown why try to cannibalise an existing ability? Why not ask for the 4pT10 baseline on Berserk or a new CD?

Paona · 06/18/10, 5:57 AM

Originally Posted by Vaccine

That's a completely retarded way to read what is a pretty self-explanatory ability. How on earth do you read "for each stack consumed" as "consumes one stack"?

The obvious intent is for it to be an ability you use to keep the crit buff up for your other attacks. I don't know why people are pining for it to become a defensive cooldown when it makes our rotation more interesting, if you feel we need another defensive cooldown why try to cannibalise an existing ability? Why not ask for the 4pT10 baseline on Berserk or a new CD?

Because we all know that Blizzard's tooltips are always absolutely precise and completely free of ambiguity, right? (See: Survival of the Fittest, and where it's easily misconstrued that you only get all three benefits when in Bear form.)

Honestly, now. I'm not the one who misread it (if it is misread at all), but I saw how it could be interesting if it functioned that way, and thought I'd call some attention to it.

It could also be argued that how on earth do you read "for each stack consumed" as "consumes all stacks?"

Pulverize: Deals 120% weapon damage plus additional 943 damage for each of your Lacerate applications on the target, and increases your melee critical strike chance by 2% for each Lacerate application consumed for 10 seconds.

I shall defer answering the question to the need of another defensive cooldown to Kalbear or Alarron to answer that, they know why they want one, I don't.

Originally Posted by Arawethion

I don't really see why you would read it that way. It would also be very strange for the damage to be proportional to the stacks on the target if it only consumed one stack.

My feeling is that Blizzard likes the ramp-up mechanic that they added into many of the ICC items. I would not be surprised if Blizzard wants us to ramp-up five-stack of Pulverize +crit buff and juggle that with a five-stack of Lacerate. Now, since Druids are the only tank class that have been released so far, we can't really tell whether or not this is how tanking will work in the new expansion, but I think it's significant enough to keep in mind until we either see more previews, or are able to actually test what the power does exactly.

Previous contents below,

Not really. I see it as incentivizing using Pulverize at a full stack of Lacerate, as well as an additional reward for rolling a full stack of Lacerate and not letting it drop off. I can also see an argument for encouraging it to not use as an opener, so you don't wind up with wacky interactions with the Bear effect of Improved Feral Charge.

kalbear · 06/18/10, 2:11 PM

I don't want a specifically large cooldown on defense; I want tanks to have more control about the damage they take and use that as a skill separator. Having just things that do more damage isn't as interesting to me, as that's not a tank's primary job.

I think things like shield block are interesting abilities. I think that with overall damage being important due to mana consumption, things like avoidance cooldowns can be useful.

Also, pulverize doesn't work like Allison Robert says.

Glandur · 06/18/10, 4:31 PM

Since we haven't seen the crit values for Cataclysm yet, the 10% crit from Pulverize may turn out to be a bigger part of our Savage Defense uptime than it is now.
Blizzard has stated many times that they want to make it harder to reach very high crit values - I see Pulverize as a mixture between an offensive and a defensive ability, with more emphasis on offense.