[WOTLK 4.0] Cats - Page 3

Rainman5419 · 06/21/10, 11:26 AM

Originally Posted by Paona

So, Allison Robert over at Wow.com has a different take on Pulverize
...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.

Arawethion is right here. This interpretation ignores the "for each Lacerate application" part of the ability and makes it sound like a rage dump, which Blizz seems to be making Maul/Heroic Strike territory. If it worked as this person described I'd expect wording much more similar to Conflag or Swiftmend.

I see Pulverize as a dual function ability as Glandur says, which plays into Blizzard's intent with Savage Defense turning DPS stats into tanking stats. That said, I'm sure I'll miss the 4pc t10 bonus if our tank CDs stay as is.

Hinalover · 06/21/10, 12:26 PM

I am not sure if anyone has realized this, since it wasn't mentioned in the OP, but apparently they are taking out Feral Attack Power stat altogether. Instead of having the Feral Attack Power formula

We are basing our attacks solely on our Weapon Damage. Hence the reason why we are seeing all of these "Deals 120% Weapon Damage". Granted this was mentioned in the Stats Changes thread linked in the OP, but as stated, it was not specifically mentioned by the OP.

World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> Cataclysm Stat & System Changes

Originally Posted by Eyonix

Feral attack power will be gone. The damage of the weapon affects cat and bear attacks like other melee classes.

Paona · 07/01/10, 4:44 AM

Excerpted from the new ability tooltips released in today shift from Closed Alpha to Closed Beta, posted on MMO-Champion:

Lacerate: Lacerates the enemy target, dealing 31 damage and making them bleed for 155 damage over 15 sec and causing a high amount of threat. Damage increased by attack power. This effect stacks up to 5 times on the same target. 15 Rage, 5 yd range, Instant

Well, there's your threat right there. I note that neither Swipe nor Thrash have this "high amount of threat" text in them, which leads me to believe that our AoE threat will not be as strong as it once was. I feel like Blizzard wants to move us away from our Swipe-swipe-swipe method of AoE tanking, more towards the Warrior school of tab-targetting around hitting things.

Another thing of note: Mangle's energy cost is unchanged, but the damage is changed from 200% weapon damage + 198 to 230% + 228 at level 50. (Using the level 50 numbers, because MMO-champion doesn't have the level 85 numbers on Mangle posted.) Obviously, a move on Blizzard's part to make Mangle scale better. I'm still hopeful that Shredless hybrid builds will be viable for tanking/swing DPS. Now, I know that they were going to buff Mangle, but that's... kind of hefty, isn't it?

Glandur · 07/01/10, 4:56 AM

Bear changes that I picked up:

Faerie Fire (Bear) now costs 15 rage:

Originally Posted by Tooltip

Faerie Fire (Bear)
30 yd range
15 Rage
6 sec cooldown
Instant cast
Decrease the armor of the target by 4% for 30 sec. While affected, the target cannot stealth or turn invisible. Stacks up to 3 times. Deals [AP*0.15+1] damage and additional threat.

So, spammable with 5/5 Feral aggression, pending rage.
Needs to be refreshed every 30 seconds - but still has additional threat and packs a decent punch.

Loosing a rage-free pulling tool will take some minor adjustment. It's too bad that the rage cost is above the rage gained from furor.

Vengeance
Vengeance bonus at 51 talent points in the tanking tree is set to 5% for all tanks.

The mastery tooltip for the different tank specs all indicate that
"Each time you take damage, you gain a percentage of the damage taken as attack power, up to a maximum of twice your Vengeance percentage of your health.".
There is no different wording for druids, giving us a potential massive AP buff. We'll see if it makes it to live in this unmodified state.

Feral interrupt
Skull bash requires two talent points in brutal impact to reduce it to a 10 second cooldown, untalented cooldown is one minute:

Originally Posted by Skull bash, cat and bear version

Skull Bash
18 yd range
25 Energy
1 min cooldown
Instant
You charge and skull bash the target, interrupting spellcasting and preventing any spell in that school from being cast for 5 sec.

Skull Bash
18 yd range
1 Rage
1 min cooldown
Instant
You charge and skull bash the target, interrupting spellcasting and preventing any spell in that school from being cast for 5 sec.

Mjoedgaard · 07/01/10, 5:50 AM

Originally Posted by Paona

Excerpted from the new ability tooltips released in today shift from Closed Alpha to Closed Beta, posted on MMO-Champion:

Lacerate: Lacerates the enemy target, dealing 31 damage and making them bleed for 155 damage over 15 sec and causing a high amount of threat. Damage increased by attack power. This effect stacks up to 5 times on the same target. 15 Rage, 5 yd range, Instant

Well, there's your threat right there. I note that neither Swipe nor Thrash have this "high amount of threat" text in them, which leads me to believe that our AoE threat will not be as strong as it once was. I feel like Blizzard wants to move us away from our Swipe-swipe-swipe method of AoE tanking, more towards the Warrior school of tab-targetting around hitting things.

Another thing of note: Mangle's energy cost is unchanged, but the damage is changed from 200% weapon damage + 198 to 230% + 228 at level 50. (Using the level 50 numbers, because MMO-champion doesn't have the level 85 numbers on Mangle posted.) Obviously, a move on Blizzard's part to make Mangle scale better. I'm still hopeful that Shredless hybrid builds will be viable for tanking/swing DPS. Now, I know that they were going to buff Mangle, but that's... kind of hefty, isn't it?

Shred will still be supirior to mangle, because of glyph of rip, shredding attacks and mangle debuff, but if forced too mangle is no longer a huge dps lose.

Hoofhearted · 07/01/10, 6:02 AM

Originally Posted by Paona

Lacerate: Lacerates the enemy target, dealing 31 damage and making them bleed for 155 damage over 15 sec and causing a high amount of threat. Damage increased by attack power. This effect stacks up to 5 times on the same target. 15 Rage, 5 yd range, Instant

Well, there's your threat right there.

Lacerate - Spell - World of Warcraft It is like this on live.

Paona · 07/01/10, 1:05 PM

Originally Posted by Hoofhearted

Lacerate - Spell - World of Warcraft It is like this on live.

I know it's like that on live, but my point being that Lacerate now looks to be definitively the focus point around which our ST tanking rotation revolves around, with all of its Pulverize interactions, instead of sharing spots with Mangle/Maul. Should have made that more clear, sorry.

Also: Something Glandur posted caught my eye:

Skull Bash
18 yd range
1 Rage
1 min cooldown
Instant
You charge and skull bash the target, interrupting spellcasting and preventing any spell in that school from being cast for 5 sec.

....One rage? That's a bit odd. Tooltip typo, maybe? Then I did some digging and found this:

Feral Charge
8-25 yd range
5 Rage
15 sec cooldown
Instant
Causes you to charge an enemy, immobilizing them for 4 sec.

So instead of giving us a new interrupt, basically all they did was unlink our current interrupt from our Feral Charge. Slightly disappointing, but reasonable. What annoys me, though, is that we have to talent into Brutal Impact in order to bring Skull Bash into the role of Shield Bash-analogue that we were promised.

Originally Posted by Mjoedgaard

Shred will still be superior to mangle, because of glyph of rip, shredding attacks and mangle debuff, but if forced to mangle is no longer a huge dps loss.

Fixed your spelling for you. And yes, Shred has always been superior to Mangle. Now the question remains is, "How good are the numbers that a mangle-based scrub Feral puts up relative to a Feral that does the full rotation?"

Paona · 07/01/10, 1:24 PM

whoops, DP.

blacksuit · 07/01/10, 3:42 PM

On my first try it seemed easy to pick up all of the cat dps talents needed for single target dps, but on further reflection some choices will have to be made. I can see uses for Imp Feral Charge, Feral Instinct, Imp Mangle, Brutal Impact, even Survival of the Fittest has some situational uses.

The content will dictate which talents are most useful. Brutal Impact seems too good to pass up. It's kind of disappointing that naturalist was moved further down the tree. Nom Nom Nom is nice but it seems to mandate taking Feral Aggression. The 5 extra talent points we have get used up pretty quickly with those changes.

kalbear · 07/01/10, 6:15 PM

Imp mangle has almost no situational use. Survival of the Fittest is only useful in hybrid builds. I was able to take virtually every optional talent that would have any reasonable use for cats - and point of fact, with the tree the way it is currently you have to take non-cat talents early on to get anywhere. And that's at level 80.

Nom Nom Nom requires no feral aggression; you use FB instead of rip when your target is at 25% or less. It's a huge win of DPS at that point regardless; essentially it makes rip do 20-25k damage on initial application.

blacksuit · 07/01/10, 7:11 PM

Originally Posted by kalbear

Imp mangle has almost no situational use. Survival of the Fittest is only useful in hybrid builds. I was able to take virtually every optional talent that would have any reasonable use for cats - and point of fact, with the tree the way it is currently you have to take non-cat talents early on to get anywhere. And that's at level 80.

Nom Nom Nom requires no feral aggression; you use FB instead of rip when your target is at 25% or less. It's a huge win of DPS at that point regardless; essentially it makes rip do 20-25k damage on initial application.

I can't determine what you're referring to when you say "you have to take non-cat talents... to get anywhere."

I think you took me too literally when you say that FA isn't required for NNN. To clarify, I was pointing out that with NNN, we will be using FB quite a bit more, hence FA becomes more valuable. However, this point is probably moot because there seems to be no reason not to take FA in the new talent trees. FA is a no brainer.

One preliminary question I have is to what extent Ravage, with Imp Feral Charge (IFC), will be useful in raids. When movement is required, it might be optimal to charge either out or back in, and use 2-4 ravages rather than the normal rotation.

The second question, as I noted, is to weed out which utility talents are best. Imp Mangle will really only be useful if they throw another meaningful Kologarn fight at us, which seems unlikely. We skip it now, and it seems safe to continue doing that in Cataclysm. Brutal Impact is probably the most important utility talent for cat. Other than that, we have some options, which I believe was the stated design goal. I'm thinking something like this at the present time:

WoW Talent Calculator - Sigrie

Wickedgirl · 07/01/10, 8:30 PM

One thing that struck me as important from the list of items of ILvl 270+, posted on MMO-C - seems they went ahead with making idols "pure stats" items:

Fetish of Azrajar - Items - Sigrie

Paona · 07/02/10, 1:45 AM

Originally Posted by blacksuit

I can't determine what you're referring to when you say "you have to take non-cat talents... to get anywhere."

I think you took me too literally when you say that FA isn't required for NNN. To clarify, I was pointing out that with NNN, we will be using FB quite a bit more, hence FA becomes more valuable. However, this point is probably moot because there seems to be no reason not to take FA in the new talent trees. FA is a no brainer.

One preliminary question I have is to what extent Ravage, with Imp Feral Charge (IFC), will be useful in raids. When movement is required, it might be optimal to charge either out or back in, and use 2-4 ravages rather than the normal rotation.

The second question, as I noted, is to weed out which utility talents are best. Imp Mangle will really only be useful if they throw another meaningful Kologarn fight at us, which seems unlikely. We skip it now, and it seems safe to continue doing that in Cataclysm. Brutal Impact is probably the most important utility talent for cat. Other than that, we have some options, which I believe was the stated design goal. I'm thinking something like this at the present time:

WoW Talent Calculator - Sigrie

Two at most, I think. Three, if Blizzard somehow takes leave of their senses with the Haste-to-Energy regeneration formula. Four is downright unlikely. I foresee Cats grounding out their energy very quickly with Ravage. The energy cost of Feral Charge usually regenerates completely during travel time, (May as well refresh FFF while travelling. Hey, wait! They didn't remove FFF for Cats! Yay! Wait. That means now Cats are going to be eligible for Sunder Armory duty. Boooooo.) the energy cost of Ravage is still 50 after Shredding Attacks. Assuming that two shots of that will ground your Energy, and I doubt that energy will regenerate fast enough during those two GCDs to enable a 3rd Ravage, which means you'll want to pop Tiger's Fury, and then resume your standard rotation from there.

nightcrowler · 07/02/10, 5:21 AM

Hi everybody, I was (and still) inactive for a while but I think I'll go back playing for cataclysm.

------Shred vs. Mangle ---------------

Looking at the new talents and ability revamp in mmo-champions, I'm a bit worried about shred.

It seems that the dps incresase of shred usage over mangle spam is "only" around 6%

Actually a mangle build (with mangle glyph) will have:
2.3*1.2*1.1*1.3*1.03*1.1/ 34 = 0.1315 AP/Energy scaling,
while shred will have: 2.25*1.2*1.3*1.03*1.1*1.3*1.04/40 = 0.1344 AP/Energy scaling.

So actually mangle will have a better scaling than shred. Shred wins giving a +6 seconds on rip due to the glyph. But I don't know if it really will make the difference considering the better mangle scaling and faster combo points generation.

Consider around 50% crit.

with mangle you can have a 15 sec cycle (12+4=16 sec rip, 15 sec rake, 9+6=15 sec SR) so a 30 seconds for a double cycle with TF.

you need around 3.5 attack for a 5 point rip so 7 attacks for a double cycle and 1*2 = 2 attacks for 1 point SR = 9 total attacks. 2 of them are rake so 5 will be mangle (without counting in ooc proc).

So you spend (34*7+35*2+25*2+30*2-60)/30 = 11.9 energy / second

A shreding cycle will be different. You still have 15 sec rake, rip will be on a 12+4+6=22 sec cycle.
The easier way to see it is as a 90 sec cycle. We will do 4 rip, 6 rake, 3 (3 points) SR, 3 TF. 4 RIPs need 3.5*4=14 cp generating ability, 3 SR (3 points) need 2.5*3 = 7.5 cp generating abilities so we need 14+7.5= 21.5 abilities. So, approximating we need 6 rake and 15 shred.

So you spend (40*15+35*6+25*3+4*30-60*3)/90 = 9.2 energy / second

Shred cycle seems around 20% more efficient.

Considering rake, rip and SR always up the DPS difference (not considering energy difference) is due to the different numbers of mangle/shred made in that time spam.

In 90 seconds we will do 15 shreds (for shred cycle) or 7*3=21 mangles (for mangle cycle)

MAngle scaling is 4.47
While shred scaling is 5.38

In order to make the shred cycle reach the same efficiency of mangle cycle you can thrown in 6 extra shreds (so you can probably do also something like 3-4 shred and a FB) but considering for simplicity 6 extra shred we will have 5.38/4.47 = 22% more damage for shred or (given around 40% if yellow damage due to shred) around 9% more yellow damage using a shred cycle or, considering that yellow damage are around 65% of total damage, around 6% more dps.

Obviously for a better estimate we should do a better map or a simulation.

------- Ravage y/n? ----------

Due to talents, I suppose that if you talent for ravage you are using the "shred cycle".

I'll not take into account the "always crit" for >90% health, it will probably add up something at the begining but we don't know how will be threat management.

Still we will have 6 ravaging seconds every 30 seconds (feral charge). So let's suppose that every 30 seconds you go back a little, feral charge and then ravage. You can link feral charge and tiger's fury (same CD). So for a 90 second cycle you will do that 3 times. Now. The melee range is 5 yard, while you need 8 yard for FC. We can suppose that you can do that in a pair of seconds, losing around 3 auto-attacks. Actually if everything is fine you will have 120+60 = 180 energy during those 6 seconds allowing for 3 ravage. So actually in 90 seconds you will have +9 ravage -9 shred -9 autoattack.

Ravage multiplier is 5.5*1.1*1.3*1.03= 8.1
While shred is 5.38

Energy wise is: Ravage 8.1/50 = 0.162
Shred is 5.38/40 = 0.1344

So ravage is 20.5% more efficient than shred

Overi 21 shred we are now using 12 shred and 9 ravage. So around 43% of our previous shreds are now ravages. If as before we suppose around 40% of yellow damage coming from shreds and around 65% of total damage as yellow, we have a dps increse of around 0.43*0.4*0.65*0.205= 2.3%

If we think that we will lose around 9 auto attacks over 90 seconds (so around 10% of auto attacks) and that white damage will be around 35% of total, we will lose around 3.5% (without counting ooc) of total damage.

So basically the 2 seems to average out, until simulations and real-raid pratice will be difficult to tell the real margin, but it seems pretty low.

For the moment it seems that ravaging vs. not ravaging will average out considering pros and cons.

Cluey · 07/02/10, 8:57 AM

Originally Posted by Paona

Also, just to point out: TF is on a 30 second cooldown now, not 20.

Tigers Fury is currently a 30 second cool down. No idea what you were thinking of.

It's probably worthwhile posting a Ghostcaller post from the beta forums regarding glyphs, seeing as a few posts have been using current glyphs as a basis for one thing being better than another.

Originally Posted by Ghostcaller

We haven't updated glyphs yet to reflect the new spell and talent changes. We are going to change glyphs though -- in some cases dramatically.

In general, I suggest not approaching Cataclysm class feedback with statements such as "But this won't work well with the glyph," or "We already have a glyph for that," or "Because of the glyph, we already prioritize spell A over spell B."

Pretend for the time being that glyphs don't exist. Maybe we should have just wiped them all.