Deathwing

You should really preface everytime you say that with "if you have 2T6", otherwise it is quite misleading.

Why even talk about this though? People with 2T6 aren't going to keep it for that long.

 

halmmar

2 pieces of sunwell T6 might well be worth holding on to. That way you won't lose any T7 set bonus.

 

• Falk

15% Mangle threat is a shit ton, especially with Berserk. Not that threat matters at all at the moment, but if things ever scale to a point where DPS is threat capped, I'd drop 1k hp and misc other stats just to get that boost.

Knowing Blizzard's (justified) record of adjusting bonuses so that people aren't forced to do obsolete content for an edge, I wouldn't be surprised if set bonuses were adjusted for many classes.

 

slant

If it is, the developers will nerf the set bonus. I can't imagine that they want players wearing TBC items on WOTLK raids.

 

• moz

What, like 2pc T4?

 

kalbear

I don't even think that's true. If you have 2pT6 mangle is hands down a winner over shred. If you don't, it's less damage per energy point but more CP per energy point. As the table before shows, Mangle is only behind Shred by 6 damage per energy point at 9k AP but gives 20% more CP. That's a close enough value to make me think Mangle will be better if only for smoother, more reliable cycles and more adaptability; mangle does not require mangle to be up for max effectiveness, for instance.

.5% crit to the entire raid is probably a large enough boost compared to 203 damage per shred. With a standard melee and hunter group (which I realize is not exactly applicable any more, but I digress) you're looking at 8 spots + a tank or three that will get the crit bonus. Is 10 people getting .5% crit better than 203 damage? Depends on their crit rate, I suppose. In the best case (which isn't realistic) you're looking at 10 people getting a .5% DPS boost compared to adding 133 DPS via the idol. Which is basically having those 10 people do 2.7k DPS, roughly. That's the best case though; the worst case is them having a very high crit rate, in which case they'd need to be closer to 5k DPS.

It will clearly depend a lot on your raid makeup and your raid performance, but at the very least it should be considered.

 

tlbj6142

The 2T4 proc rate diminishes each level past 70. At lvl 80 it no longer procs at all. There was a blue post on it 6+ weeks ago.

 

slant

2pt4 was already nerfed, FYI. It scales down to a 0% proc chance at level 80.

I'm not sure why the devs preferred to obsolete shred rather than simply removing its positional requirements. It's not the choice I would have made.

 

Deathwing

You are comparing Imp Mangle to just Shred. Please see the "Shred RnT" column to see the much bigger DPE difference between mangle and shred.

 

Promethius

What if instead of nerfing the base armor of bear form they just removed points from thick hide? A 400% armor increase and the first point in thick hide is a 5.2 multiplier. Or they could just remove thick hide completely and put natural reaction into that spot, so if they're nerfing druid bear form armor, we may as well get some freed up talent points to deal with the bloat of the feral tree. If removing thick hide completely is too much, adding a 1/2/3% armor bonus on one of the tanking talents: Protector of the Pack, Survival of the Fittest, or Natural Reaction would end up putting the multiplier at 5.15.

The solution of reitemizing feral weapons to not have armor to reduce loot table bloat would work better than a base armor nerf as well. Neck, ring and trinket armor has to remain due to sharing with death knights.

Perhaps Blizzard intended to nerf the armor as a way to hurt resto pvp as well, though I don't think it's the most elegant solution. Has moonkin armor also received a similar armor nerf? It would seem strange if a pvp geared feral had less armor in bear than a pvp geared moonkin.

 

kalbear

Ah, sorry. You're right. In that case I'm not sure what's a reasonable modeling; what's the value of a CP? Is 20% more damage as good as 20% more CP? I'm not sure how to even start modeling that.

A very simple solution would be to remove the bear multiplier from all non-leather pieces save perhaps the feral weapon. (or they could easily remove it from all non-leather pieces and just pile it on the weapon and make armor cheap for itemization on staves). In this way armor would be more in line with other tanking classes and the non-leather slots would be not so much required to have armor on them as they do now.

One way or another, they need to stop nerfing ferals by nerfing base abilities. Either nerf feral talents or nerf feral itemization.

 

Cuer

Both Moonkins and Bears have had their bonus armor reduced, according to reports from the beta.

 

Gingershnaps

Promethius, have you posted any of those suggestions on the PTR or beta boards?

 

TheNameLessOne

It's those +armor trinkets that are the cause of "too much" mitigation. Since druids have such bad scalability with just about everything other than armor and stamina, those trinkets are god. Nothing else even holds a candle to those two things.

 

Sproutie

Did some quick testing on my druid on the PTR, at level 70.

With raid-buffs (shaman, warrior, no blessings unfortunaly) I was able to reach ~5700 AP, 47% crit and 130 hit-rating (Tier6 gear pretty much, Twins-staff).

I specced 0/50/11 full focussed on DPS (cat-talents). With just spamming mangle (no shred), Rake and Ferocious Bite (had 5/5 Feroc. Aggression and 5/5 Rend & Tear and 4x T6 set-bonus equipped) I was able to reach 2.2k DPS sustained (I could keep this number up for 5 mins while testing). I only had 1/3 KoTJ (20 energy on Tigers Fury).

It seems viable that with the buffed mangle, you can do good DPS without positional requirements, atleast I rate 2200 DPS as very nice, eventho its on lvl 70 dummy which (I presume) has 0 armour on PTR.

Unfortunaly I lacked the time to do better testing with Mangle, Rake, Shred, FB rotation, but I don't think the DPS would be much better, as Mangle only costs 29 energy (with 4x T6 bonus, Improv. Mangle 3/3). Also this 'mangle ftw'-playstyle allows you to drop Shredding Attacks and obv. has no positional requirements.

In practice I think you can pump out even more DPS, as I couldn't see my combo-points properly on the PTR I most likely didn't use FB always directly after reaching 5 combo-points and a lack of a decent DoT-timer my Rake probably fell off quite a few times (not used to using Rake yet)

Playing feral-druid and hunter in Sunwell-guild on Tarren Mill (EU)

 

david0925

Scaling too well with one attribute and poorly with others isn't an issue as long as
-Stacking such stat doesn't cause a large discrepancy between tanking classes
and
-Such stat does not cap out in any phases of the current expansion.

The armor nerf is justified as long as our mitigation and survivability are still as good as the three other tanks. I do hope they re-tune (or rather, "buff") agility to have more avoidance (not to the extreme that 2.0-TBC had), as agility is a unique attribute that is only present in large quantity on Druid tanking gear.

I'm not the one who's blindly going around saying "omg please nerf my class", but realistically if we are too far ahead, we should be nerfed. And if we are behind, we should be buffed. Defense can still use a bit of tweaking on druid, but that's really it, as tanking gear will be separated into two streams: One with dodge/parry rating and armor for Druids and DKs, and one with Block for Paladins and Warriors. As a result, Block oriented jewelry, unless having a ton of armor on them, shouldn't be a big concern.

Maniq is my hero

 

Malazaar

Sure, if we too good a tank in comparison, we need a nerf. But our scaling seems to be on par (if not worse) than other tanks. Thus, not our scaling should be nerfed (as that will create problems in the future) but our starting point.

We gain high benefits early on, because we have very good jewelry with armor available early on and because we don't have to spend itembudget on crit immunity.

I don't expect our armor on jewelry to scale the way other equipment does (i can be wrong though but it has always been that way). In BC, almost all jewelry with bonus armor was from entry level content and after that we never got any upgrades in that category.

Nerfing the armor on early jewelry pieces or weapon would be a far better solution to the problem.

 

david0925

The limitation of nerfing jewlry armor component is that you're hurting DK mitigation. As a result you need to modify their armor benefit, which will create another problem in the DK area similar to what druids have been experiencing.

I still think the most reasonable thing to do right now is adjust agi-dodge ratio since that's the area we are currently the weakest in, and the advantage of having a better hp modifier is actually so you don't need to stack 2 billion stamina gems to get to the line of "safe health"

Maniq is my hero

 

kalbear

Or you could just limit the benefit that druids get from the non-leather pieces, which fixes druids while keeping DKs fine.

 

Malazaar

If, contrary to the content before, they introduce proper scaling on armor jewelry in LK, i'm with you. However, if i'm still wearing those armor jewelry pieces i had when i fought Kel'thuzad when i face Arthas, something is wrong.

 

david0925

So what you're suggesting is creating two modifier, as in , 400% bonus for armor and weapon, and 200% (arbitrary number) from jewelry, correct? That is still axing scalability, and depending on the numbers you throw around in your proposal and in the way blizzard adjusted, can be compromised. So I don't really think the two ideas are even that different. What you said is definitely a valid proposal, but I don't know if that's even that different from what blizzard did aside from number tweaking.

Edit: Let's say armor contribution from leather armors is X, everywhere else is Y

Your proposal is: bear armor = 5.5X + 2.2Y, assuming non leather pieces are 200% contribution
Blizzard's proposal: bear armor= 5.06(X+Y), which is assuming bear gives 360% armor contribution right now

Malazaar: Since DK is in the game, I'm fairly confident we'll get new armory jewelries to play with.

Maniq is my hero

 

Kazanir

They need to junk armor on jewelry entirely, or make it into an equip bonus. It would bring bears in-line with the other plate-wearing classes and save us the headache of being fucking chained to blue trinkets that have no upgrades in later tiers. See my post here: WotLK Beta (US-English) Forums -> GC: Bear Form HP Scaling Too High?

'War' is too small a word for what I'm fighting. Like a candle in front of the whole burning Sun. I told you. This is bigger than a war. Now, I am not going to die today. I have other projects, and other options.

You can come with me. I can protect you.

 

kalbear

Actually, it'd be 400% bonus for armor, 0 bonus for jewelry, 0 bonus from weapon but make weapons have a ton of armor on them. Scalability is still a problem but it is at least dealt with somewhat, as the importance of armor is limited but is still there. Feral weapons which are sadly here to stay for a while become really feral, on the order of importance of a warrior's shield. It reduces dependence on specific slots so that they must have armor no matter what, brings druid armor on base with warrior/pally/DK armor, and allows for a higher limit on scaling.

This would of course require some changing of talents/skills to allow higher mitigation/avoidance with that gear, but that would be a win as well, allowing for potentially more scaling.

 

Malazaar

Are we even sure DKs want armor jewelry ? AFAIK they only gain 167% from Armor while we gain 517%. There is a _minor_ difference there. While DKs may desire armor to some extent, they are nowhere near as dependent on it as we are.

It might also be very hard to balance items with that thought in mind - giving DKs armor is practically the same as giving us defense (in therms of asymetric returns).

 

david0925

For now, it's either armor (limited returns for DK), or Block (no returns), unless they are better off with DPS jewelries. In this case i'll probably have to check the DK TC forums.

Kalbear: using your latest case, of no additional return on jewelry and weapon(this one doesn't matter since it's unique to feral 5 time 500 is the same as 2500). That'll create another formula that favors our leather pieces. I don't see how this addresses scaling any better or worse than what blizzard did, aside from maybe number tweaking, so if you can explain to me a bit so I can understand more, I'd greatly appreciate it.

Maniq is my hero