Uh 3008 DPS in cat vs 2535 DPS in bear? That doesn't look right. Not sure on the exact numbers but currently in bear form I do less than half the damage I do in cat. Either they still need to buff cat form somewhat or they overbuffed bear form, assuming your numbers are correct.

Staying a little bit over on armor isn't going to be that great, given the huge amount of block value that warriors/paladins are going to have. That's going to make up for armor on almost every boss save some fictional one that hits for 50k a swing. And that doesn't include the lack of miss/parry/dodge that bears will have.

But yes, bears should have slightly more armor in all arena gear.

I wouldn't mind it if tanks were doing more damage, as long as threat was adjusted accordingly. It's not like you'd take nothing but tanks on your run then, since usually prot specced classes don't have aggro dumps, and you don't want to be playing musical tanks every 2 minutes when someone surpasses you in threat.

Edit: Now that I think about it though, this would make tanking classes OP'ed for solo'ing and pvp in comparison to pure dps classes....so nm...

Thanks.

Well, first of all bear is near to cat dps under the double assumption of:
- Infinite rage (so you can spam maul every swing)
- You wear DPS gear.

In a normal tanking scenario it will be surerly lower, also it comes to my mind that blizzard aim is to have tank doing about 70% dps of a dps but I don't remember who said that (Have I dreamed?).

Others note and info needed:

- Can someone in beta test flat threat for maul and lacerate?
- Is the rage generation formula changed in wotlk?
- I've assumed 1.5 sec GCD going from cat to bear and a 1.5 sec gcd going from bear to cat, is it right?
- I didn't reset the swing timer uppon shifting. Basically shifting from cat to bear the swing timer is:
cat_swing_timer* (bear_speed/cat_speed)
is it right?


For a previous poster:
Yes I should implement swipe/lacerate switch for Bear only simulation. For Cat/Bear simulation is better to always use lacerate, because you can only do 2 x mangle + 2 x lacerate/swipe in a bear cycle time so the only other option will be to do 1 lacerate and 1 swipe but it increase the chance to lose the lacerate stack & bleed debuff so in the end I think it will not be so good (but I'll try it).

Do those outcomes change based on armor penetration? The 25% number is more accurate for a high armor boss. A low armor boss would be closer to 17%. This would decrease the value of bleeds, but I could see the relative value of bear go up or down.

My bear model gets similar numbers in full dps gear. It will most likely be lower with full tank gear. However, this is a shift in the ratio of bear to cat damage. A current build in full dps gear cat will do around 2k dps in end-game gear, in bear would do 1400 dps (about 70%). It seems LK bear is closer to 85%.

No. All shifts are 1.5sec GCDs.

Nitpick that KoJ is 60 energy per TF (unless they nerfed it), but otherwise what you said looks correct. When I said it "didn't look right" I didn't really mean he had messed up numbers or anything. Was more a point that it seems strange bear form is doing so much damage compared to Cat form. Even with infinite rage, unless other tanks are doing similar damage (and those damage results scale similarly along with gear) it seems a good selling point of a feral tank is having your tank deal nearly as much DPS as any other hybrid dpser. That in and of itself seems like an odd "niche" for a druid tank to fill.

Then again they have said there are still scaling issues with Cat form that will be addressed so I'll reserve judgement for the moment. But with numbers like that we're looking at early BC level druid tanks again which I can't imagine is what they want (I remember swipe tanking instances and coming out as top damage which just didn't sit right with the group :P)

Ah, I was assuming Tiger's Fury still cost 30 energy, but they must've removed that when they added the cooldown. That means it's 2energy/sec equivalent, or an increase of 20% energy regen. With OoC being 4procs/min (iirc) that would be approximately 168 energy/min regen if used on Shred, or another ~3energy/sec, giving a total of 150% energy regen.

The Tiger's Fury energy not only increases the energy when you have the damage buff from the ability, but also gives it when you need it so that it isn't wasted (and controllable = useable with trinkets/short term buffs). With Berserk active, it'll really increase the burst damage potential of a Feral. With both more expertise base (talent) and 80% refund on missed finishers, energy should be a lot easier to control, although we lose the gain of approx 30 energy when required due to losing Powershifting.

During Berserk, you gain 150 energy over the period, up to 210 with Tiger's Fury used. That's doubled, however, because of the Berserk effect, which is 420 energy equivalent. That's a pretty ridiculous amount of energy to spend in a 15 second period.

Toskk has put up a very thorough analysis of comparing druids to warriors in terms of the items available and the druid's time to live vs. the warriors. They appear to be roughly equivalent. Some quibbles on this, however:

The warrior is not uncrittable. This kind of throws the whole thing out of wack at the onset, to be honest. At the very least it dismisses the gear choices completely as being unacceptable for the warrior, and I'm not sure that it can be reasonably said that this is dismissable. Yes, Toskk admits this, but I think it bears mentioning.
The item levels aren't the same. That makes it tough to evaluate based on armor.
No raid buffs of any sort. Kings now significantly helps warriors more than druids, for instance.

It's also interesting to note that while a warrior no longer gets a ton of shield block %, a paladin does. In this example the mitigation from a warrior's block was 23.12%*856 BV = 197 blocked damage per hit, or roughly 100 blocked damage per second (the attack swing was set to 2.0). By comparison, a paladin will have around 50-60% block rating, bringing this up to around 250 blocked damage per second. This would make a paladin quite a bit better in that regard, though their lack of defensive stance hurts more here.

It's a promising example that things will be okay when Wrath starts. What's troubling is Toskk's analysis of all the other stats that improve warrior's mitigation/TtL which have no effect or a reduced effect on druids. Unless an item is perfectly itemized for a druid (which means the 5 stats on it are armor, stam, agi, defense, dodge, and/or expertise) the item will be inferior, point for point, than any piece a warrior is likely to pick up. It very much depends on what the item has in terms of armor and stamina (and to a lesser extent, agility) which scale better than a warrior by a significant margin, but the fact remains that due to the item budget being able to provide more value over multiple stats than one, it is likely warrior itemization will improve faster than druid itemization, at least as it stands.

In addition to that, besides juwelry/cloak, we will share our others slots with rogues. New talents/mechanics pending, the gain from those pieces in regards to tanking is still way smaller.

Not necessarily in theory, but in practice rogue leather will only have at best agility, stam and expertise. As an example, currently there are 4 items in the beta that are leather gear and fit this at all. There are no items a druid can use outside of the weapon slot that have more than 3 of any of the stats. Except for jewelry, that is, which can in theory have armor, stam, def and dodge.

Right, but that means he's not comparing gemming, enchanting, or buffing when comparing the two classes. I don't think that's a reasonable position to take. I'm not saying a warrior can't become uncrittable with the gear currently existing + enchants; I'm saying that those should be taken into account for purposes of comparing, because what use is comparing a crittable warrior to anything? Especially when they gain so much from defense in terms of mitigation and avoidance, whereas druids do not. It's another place where a warrior's advantage in itemization improves.

Another thing not taken into account is the gun slot. He doesn't even use the current guns available. I agree with him that taking trinkets out of the equation is not so bad, but taking the gun slot out without commenting on it seems a bit shortsighted. At the very least, using the Engineering one as an example would be a good idea, given that it gives over 70 stamina, hit rating and defense in a slot where a druid gets nothing like it.