Feral Megathread - Page 139

Nathanyel · 02/21/08, 6:46 AM

Originally Posted by raffy

As mentioned before, I think an active method of avoidance and a reactive ability would make great strides in improving feral tanking.

Reactive ability:
-- Frenzy (30 rage, 10 sec cd): After being the victim of a critical strike or a crushing blow, you increase in size and your attack speed increases by 30% for 8 seconds.

Active avoidance: Enrage could be changed to our oh-shit button, and instead of reducing base armor, it could increase our dodge chance for its duration.
-- Enrage (1 min cd): Generates 20 rage over 10 sec and increases your dodge rating by 300.

The Enrage sounds a tad too OP, changing the rage-generator with a drawback (for us it's armor, for warriors it's HP loss) to a 1min CD dodge trinket that also generates rage? (Dodge trinkets usually mean lesser rage generated as we're not hit that often)

Frenzy on the other hand sounds reasonable and "lore-wise" fitting(big bear, many ferocious animal mobs have Frenzy) but either change the CD to 20/30 sec or let it proc only on crushings, else people would whine about it in pvp.
Also the "increases size" part could cause problems when tanking bosses with a knockback and/or against a wall, if you remember the Karazhan tome when tanking Prince or Nightbane, or Bloodlust at any boss. But hey, could be a reason for them to fix the range bug :P

seminarca · 02/21/08, 7:49 AM

People are honestly freaking out a bit too much over this, it's more than likely a rushed change and a simple oversight on Blizzard's part. Here's what you can do:

* On PTR, paste the following 3 lines in game chat:

/script DEFAULT_CHAT_FRAME:AddMessage('Shift-Click to place in chat, Ctrl-Click to view on character:  \124cff8000FF\124Hitem:34556:0:0:0:0:0:0:0\124h[Thunderheart Waistguard]\124h\124r');

/script DEFAULT_CHAT_FRAME:AddMessage('Shift-Click to place in chat, Ctrl-Click to view on character:  \124cff8000FF\124Hitem:34444:0:0:0:0:0:0:0\124h[Thunderheart Wristguards]\124h\124r');

/script DEFAULT_CHAT_FRAME:AddMessage('Shift-Click to place in chat, Ctrl-Click to view on character:  \124cff8000FF\124Hitem:34573:0:0:0:0:0:0:0\124h[Thunderheart Treads]\124h\124r');

This will pull up item links to the T6 belt, boots and bracers. Alt-click each one to lodge a suggestion or bug report stating why you think they should be reverted back to their former stats. You don't even need to have your character copied over if that's still buggy, you can do this on a level 1 alt.

Alternately, make a post in the PTR forums, those are actually monitored and read.

Yaelle · 02/21/08, 8:12 AM

At the moment I consider these changes to be an error. These T6 items introduced into the game would be like reverting the T4-Feral gloves to their first version.

Therefore I'm not getting my knickers in a knot just yet.

ironwolfw · 02/21/08, 8:18 AM

Originally Posted by dukes

?? - are you including the idol or not? It has about 85% chance to proc iirc.

No the proc on [Idol of Terror] is not included so with this set-up there is no downtime in your avoidance.

Originally Posted by Goedel

Again, total avoidance is already possible in 2.3, as noted in my earlier list.)

I have no idea how I missed this... sorry Goedel.

raffy · 02/21/08, 9:58 AM

What would be the problems (if any) with Survival of the Fittest providing 6% anticrit instead of 3.0% (2% per point, instead of 1)?

This would fully remove our dependance on defense and resilience and would allow us to better focus on being a tank/dps hybrid.

Resilience then could be turned off completely in PvE and negative resilience could be added to PvE gear to thwart its use in Arena.

This also solves the problem of itemizing a set of tanking leather resistance gear (something thats never been done anyway) and provides a small feral PvP buff.

That's like 50 birds with 1 stone.

Valerian · 02/21/08, 10:06 AM

Originally Posted by raffy

What would be the problems (if any) with Survival of the Fittest providing 6% anticrit instead of 3.0% (2% per point, instead of 1)?

This would fully remove our dependance on defense and resilience and would allow us to better focus on being a tank/dps hybrid.

Resilience then could be turned off completely in PvE and negative resilience could be added to PvE gear to thwart its use in Arena.

This also solves the problem of itemizing a set of tanking leather resistance gear (something thats never been done anyway) and provides a small feral PvP buff.

That's like 50 birds with 1 stone.

It used to be 5% anti-crit but was reduced when they lightened the talent point cost of it. Presumably if they wanted it kept at 5% they woulda done something with the talent then rather than reduce it to 3%. I think it may have something to do with itemization since a lot of the gear with defense would be suboptimal for ferals in that case (since it only boosts, miss/dodge). Now, another solution is to make defense like agi and vary depending on which class has it. Would make defense rating a bit more valuable for ferals if it increased dodge/miss a bit more than it currently did and also provided more anti-crit.

BeldDD · 02/21/08, 11:48 AM

Originally Posted by Toskk

I apologize for not adding the feature earlier.. but Socket method and Gem Quality options are now available via popup menus on the Gear List Generator.

You are, as always, the man.

Thanks.

Ledneh · 02/21/08, 12:20 PM

How much powershifting do you folks do in a fight as DPS, and when? Yesterday in my very first Rage Winterchill fight I did a whopping (wait for it) 890 DPS. Terrible. I attribute this to the fact that I wasn't powershifting at all, because I was worried about my mana expense.

Last time I tried it was on a Kael attempt; because neither IceHUD nor Pitbull's druid mana bars deplete accordingly when powershifting, I ran myself dry fairly quickly, which was a major problem when I was called on to battle res someone (I didn't have mana pots on my cat bar, so I had to dig in my bag for them, costing me a lot of time).

Malazaar · 02/21/08, 12:42 PM

I just try to powershift whenever i find myself in a situation with less than 10 energy after a style. Though i don't manage it as often as i liked i'm pretty close to what's efficient i think. I have never ever ran into any mana problems with this. Does anyone know if JoW does work in forms ? It may be the reason i don't have any mana issues.

I use 5 powershifts / minute for my calculations (once every cycle) though i don't think i actually manage that.

Mawi · 02/21/08, 1:08 PM

On my last Rage Winterchill I only had 5 powershifts due to “Death & Decay” but on other fights like Teron Gorefiend I normally powershift 14-16 times.

To keep it simple just powershift whenever you drop to 10 energy or less. Ledneh do you have points in Natural Shapeshifter? I don't think I've ever needed more powershifting than my mana bar can handle.

Valerian · 02/21/08, 1:19 PM

Quartz GCD mod along with an energy tick tracking mod is pretty essential for powershifting ideally. Since the energy tick resets after a shift now you want to shift as soon as you can after using up that last bit of energy.

Ledneh · 02/21/08, 1:46 PM

Originally Posted by Mawi

On my last Rage Winterchill I only had 5 powershifts due to “Death & Decay” but on other fights like Teron Gorefiend I normally powershift 14-16 times.

To keep it simple just powershift whenever you drop to 10 energy or less. Ledneh do you have points in Natural Shapeshifter? I don't think I've ever needed more powershifting than my mana bar can handle.

I used to have Natural Shapeshifter, but my armor is a little short right now so I had to drop it and pick up Thick Hide recently.

Garanthir · 02/21/08, 1:52 PM

Personally before looking at powershifting (not that you shouldn't do it) as the reason why your DPS was a bit low I would examine other aspects of the fight.

What was your group composition? Did you have to do Rebirth, Innervate, or healing? Do you have a WWS some of the Druids here could look at? Lastly examine your gear in something like Rawr to help with optimizing.

Ledneh · 02/21/08, 2:01 PM

Originally Posted by Garanthir

Personally before looking at powershifting (not that you shouldn't do it) as the reason why your DPS was a bit low I would examine other aspects of the fight.

What was your group composition? Did you have to do Rebirth, Innervate, or healing? Do you have a WWS some of the Druids here could look at? Lastly examine your gear in something like Rawr to help with optimizing.

I suppose so. Here's a WWS (ignore the "try 1", we killed him on the first attempt but I guess it mis-parsed slightly):

WWS Parse: Rage Winterchill try 1

(geez, that says I did 810, though my own Violation said 880. Damned math.)

Toskk's sheet says even with zero cycles I should have done around 900 with my stats (raid buffed roughly 3500 AP, 34% crit, 129 hit, 2t4). So if the WWS is more correct than my own Violation guess, then something else is horribly wrong. And I never had to run out for D&D, either, so I had nearly 100% DPS time.

I guess a small part of this is that I had to do one Rebirth, but a guildie suggested that the biggest problem right now is my low (?!) crit percent. Another problem might be that I was in the tank group at the time (so I had Battle Shout and not much else), but I wasn't about to get switched into Melee (which I think was two rogues, an enh shaman, a hunter, and a fury warrior). On the other hand, Toskk's sheet doesn't count that, or I didn't have it set to, anyway.

I guess I just need to get better equipment and powershift more vOv

Astrylian · 02/21/08, 2:13 PM

You and that hunter should have traded spots. Would have given you like 100-200dps more. But yeah, your crit could use some work... I could give you some gear suggestions, but it'd be easier and more accurate if you just used Rawr. Powershifting is not a huge dps increase. It's an increase for sure, but I'd worry more about gear right now.