Melthu

The problem, as has already been pointed out, is that this does nothing to free us from the death grip that armored jewelery slots currently have on us. Maybe you don't have a problem using a quest blue trinket due entirely to its bonus armor, but it's not really a great way to balance the game.

 

Merple

Blizzard can easily account for this by buffing their armour modifier. Classes don't exist in a vacuum.

I personally find that armour trinkets and rings are more of an issue for us than our weapon. Armour on the weapon gives flexibility. It's one of the more powerful tools that druids can use in PvP to stay flexible - gaining 2500 armour v a rogue or warrior in PvP is no small matter - and contributes to our ability to emergency tank for similar reasons. I'd prefer they waited until they were ready to get rid of FAP before changing this.

Accessory slot armour, on the other hand, not only defies logic in many ways (my ring provides more physical protection than my helmet) but also unfairly weights us toward a single stat. Changing it to an Equip: modifier means that it provides the same value to all classes, and allow us to treat it as a bonus instead of the critical factor.

Consider the 4T4 bonus for bears. It was really nice to have (hell, I still wish I had it), but it wasn't critical to tanking. You could upgrade and move away from that piece as the next piece became available with more alternative stats.

-In our country, any CBC reporter can dream of becoming head of state.

 

Kazanir

I'm currently making a large post summarizing these issues on the beta boards. I made several in a different thread but I'm not sure if it got seen and the thread was started by a warrior (thanks Rioht ) and full of idiotic trolls.

By the way, removing armor from feral staves wouldn't fix the problem in the slightest. Fix 30% of the problem, maybe.

'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.

 

Korhaug

Exactly. Blizzard is well aware of this issue, and have taken some steps to address the situation (Shamans now recieve 1 AP from int, warriors recieve extra AP from armor, etc). In the end it will still come down to itemization. I personally believe that many mail and plate users will still prefer leather pieces for their melee dps gear, simply because they're going to be itemized better for them.

Blizzard are not going implement a different armor multiplier for leather and non-leather pieces. It's a convoluted and non-consistent system, and it's just not going to happen. The solution will either be itemization (itemize certain pieces with less armor, remove armor from certain pieces) or to lower the armor multiplier of bear form.

 

summlan

Ive got a question for the beta-testers about druidtanking.

Could a good druid be able to use more dps-oriented trinkets and jewelry instead of stacking everything with armor by using our cooldowns and consumables at the right time? Or is threat and DPS trivial when it comes to tanking?

I find myself using more and more dps-pieces in sunwell to keep the DPS from being threat-capped.
And now when we finally got cooldowns and consumables to use in bearform it would be awesome if good use of those would do more than just make us take less damage.

When everything comes around it doesn't matter if you take 500.000 damage or 700.000 damage in a fight unless healers cant keep you and everyone else alive because of it.
Ive never heard anyone say "this tank is awesome, he takes so little damage" but ive heard alot of people say "this tank is crap, hes not building enough threat".

If neither threat nor DPS matter at all as a tank, all we need to do is take as little damage as possible.
I would much rather build more threat and DPS than save my MT-healer a couple of heals he could throw at me anyway.
If you take so much less damage that you can switch a healer for another DPS things change, but lets say thats not the case.

(Im not counting with stuff like situational awareness, positioning, quickness etc since i believe every good tank should know those things.)

 

Gruturistic

Tanking Brutallus with a Badge of Tenacity sucks?
Not in my opinion.

What sucks is the lack of an upgrade path for said Badge of Tenacity. I don't have a problem with wearing armor jewelry as long as I can pick up at least 1 upgrade from every tier of progression.

Massive armor has been the bear tank's "flavour" for very long and will still define us, although to a lesser extent, in WotLK. It's one of those very few stats we benefit a lot from, and while I concur it sucks to cap it early, or even get so close that Inspiration/Ancestral Fort becomes pointless, I don't quite agree with all the people so eager to shake even more of it off. It keeps flattening the game.
The tanking classes have already lost too much of their differences out of gameplay mechanic and necessity, let's make it even duller and make 4 exact clones.

Maybe I'm biased, but I tanked as feral since before TBC (crazy, I know) and had to learn to live peacefully with the concept of extra armor gear being our best resource but, at the same time, extremely rare and hard to come by (Mark of Tyranny? Check. Smoking Heart of the Mountain? Check. Ring of Protection? Check. Heavy Dark Iron Ring? never dropped for us. No more upgrades till Twin Emps and Razuvious? Check.)

 

Sadirin

Thank you for your work. However I have some questions / do not understand something.

1) DPS/TPS-Values
Did you use different equipment (juwels, enchants can and will be different for tanking and DPS) for bear and cat? Or did they use one equipment?

2)
Cat-Spec + cat form + cat equipment = 5090 DPS, while bearspec + bear form = 3000 DPS
What is with bear-spec + cat form + cat equipment?

3)
What about mangle-spam (with the new 200% scaling) vs mangle/shred, especially concering shredding attacks (2 talentpoints are an interesting reason not to take shredding attacks if mangle and shred are comparable in total dps)?

What would be the best DPS-cycle with the new mangle and rake? I think something around "mangle / rake / SR /mangle to 5 cp / rip" wwith an occasional bite if rip is still ticking and you already have 5 cp.

Would that be an option for serious DPS, compared to "mangle / rake / SR / shred to 4+ / rip (or bite)"?

4)
What kind of juwels did you use? I assume Agilty, because at T7-10 level, at least to toskks calculation, agility seems to be on par with strenght, with added boni of dodge and higher burst damage.

5) Ideally you could just write down the DPS/TPS-Values (for the new and the conventional dps cycle). *g*

bear spec + cat form + cat equipment
bear spec + cat form + bear equipment
bear spec + bear form + cat equipment
bear spec + bear form + bear equipment

cat spec + cat form + cat equipment
cat spec + cat form + bear equipment
cat spec + bear form + cat equipment
cat spec + bear form + bear equipment

5) I do not understand the data about the scaling between rip and bite. What is better now for Naxx-level? And by what difference/margin/scaling?

6) Would the DPS decrease be inacceptable if you would just use mangle/rake/SR/rip(bite) spam and so freeing up 10 talentpoints in feral agression and rend & tear? Or is the crit chance increase in rend & tear even with rip as the finisher so important?

 

Gruturistic

Definitely true and I should have been clearer than my "pushes the armor cap 1-2 tiers farther".
The amount of AC on some cloaks, neckpieces and trinkets is scary.
Halving it (and ensuring sensible upgrades exist much farther down the progression path) would feel more appropriate.
I still stand by my suggestion of removing all of it from weapons, though. The current WotLK feral staves bloat (at least on the known loot tables) is quite unreasonable, esp. given the effort in streamlining itemization to reduce loot rot.

 

Kazanir

Wrong. No matter how much is on them, it'll still be pretty overpowered. Maybe if they had so little as to only be useful to bears. But regardless, the whole issue is just vastly dumb.

My new thread on the beta forums is here: WotLK Beta (US-English) Forums -> How to fix Bear Armor/HP scaling

Please don't be idiots in that thread. I want it to be seen and hopefully responded to and not have a lot of garbage for Ghostcrawler (or whoever) to wade through.

'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.

 

Sadirin

Interesting to read, but I am not quite sure if the need for even more talent points is really that helpful.

 

Korhaug

Kazanir - I am concenred about your suggestion to replace mitigation with self-healing. While lowering mitigation is apparently neccesary and reducing the effectiveness of armor jewellery is a valid (though unlikely) solution, self-healing is considerably less reliable in tight situations then regular mitigation. It offers much less protection against burst damage, and over time I suspect will lead to large amounts of overhealing (either of itself or of the tank healers).

Moreover, you completely flipped the functionality of lotp and ilotp, effectively forcing all feral druids to spec 3 points into it. I suspect the designers will find the latter undesirable, and the former unacceptable.

 

Yaelle

It does not matter really how items are distributed.
Fact is, we're moving from a balanced supply and demand market to a market with high demand.
As an example, take the Felmyst trousers, which are a sunmote turn-in from DPS-Leather, which is quite similar.
Here you have an extreme high demand with a very low supply and I don't think I would want that for every slot on my tanking gear, including rings, amulets and cloaks.

 

Kazanir

How can I put this nicely? I can't. REPLACING MITIGATION WITH SOMETHING THAT ISN'T MITIGATION IS THE ENTIRE FUCKING POINT.

Bear mitigation right now is much too high and needs a capital-N-nerf or bears will be the only acceptable choice for end-game content with bosses that can one-round a tank. I know that self-healing, like avoidance, isn't mitigation. After the changes I propose, we'd have the same mitigation as plate tanks, while compensating for their higher avoidance with our higher self-healing, both of which serve the same purpose.

'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.

 

Mezoth

The only reason the felmyst trousers are so in demand today is that they are better for several classes (enh shm, hunters, dps warriors) then the plate gear. Blizzard seems to be trying to rectify the fact that mail and plate wearers want the dps leather, which should lessen the demand down to just the leather wearers for the majority of the gear.

 

Korhaug

You're right, and I was wrong. Lowering mitigation was the entire point, and I missed it.

I still think your solution, while elegant for druids, is too elaborate to be implemented at this point. It will require re-itemizing all the tank jewellery (and skewing DK itemization in the process so DKs will have to be rebalanced as well), flipping lotp and ilotp, and inserting an icd change into a talent.

It would actually be easier to insert the self-healing into Natural Reaction and have it proc from dodge (though yes, I would prefer that it scales with crit).

 

Merple

Having a self-heal proc on a dodge is totally backwards. You just _dodged_. Barring complete healer failure or a AoE pull situation, you've got no damage to be healed.

-In our country, any CBC reporter can dream of becoming head of state.

 

Janraea

If that was the entire point of your post, it would help to state said point clearly - preferably near the beginning of the post. That said, I think your idea is pretty excellent, and solves multiple problems with a single solution.

On the other hand, I believe they were including blocks when they said druid mitigation was significantly higher than warrior mitigation, so to implement something like this, they'd need to drop our armor down closer to warrior armor (moreso than they would if they did not).

The tank jewelry wouldn't need re-itemization. You don't see rings with armor, agility, and ap on them, so we'd just end up having to choose between armor/defense and ap/agil - that seems like an excellent situation to me, especially if we're left able to hit the cap.

 

Korhaug

Oh, it's even worse then that. Even given steady damage (so the heal isn't wasted), it would lump our avoidance with our self-heal, which is significantly inferior to spacing them out because it would make damage more spiky. Furthermore, scaling this ability off dodge is much worse then scaling it off crit. Even if you compensate for the rates themselves by altering the size of the heal, scaling it off crit gives us another mitigation stat, and again more steady damage intake (since crit rate is higher, there will be more procs for a lower amount).

Out of all the permutations for the self-heal ability, Kazanir's version is actually the best - a proc off crit that scales by AP.

The problem remains that I believe Blizzard will not implement it. You'll notice that I haven't dissented in the Beta forum, because I figure it's worth a try (and it is a nice solution). I'm quite sure that Blizzard are going to keep us chained to the armor gear, and simply adjust our modifiers to bring our mitigation down to the same area as the other tanks. Again, I don't think this is the best solution, simply the most likely one.

Edit to add: this is basically a rehash of the "we can write better druid mechanics" debate. Yes, we can, but GC has specifically noted that they're satisfied (I wouldn't go as far as happy) with current druid mechanics, and that they are not going to rewrite them at this point. I think scrapping extra armor from jewelery (and making it an equip bonus counts) and inserting a self-heal element to compensate for avoidance counts as changing the base mechanics, and is too fundamental a change for them to start playing with it two weeks before 3.0.

 

Mijae

The only way to make mangle-spam even close to shred is using both the 2t6 bonus and Imp Mangle. This is valid at entry level with blues, but the stats on new gear will pass it up in epics and even more so as gear progresses. If the goal is to reduce talents to optimize cat DPS while in a bear spec, it might work.

It would free up Shredding Attacks for a slight dps loss. It would also free up a glyph slot. However, it requires you to take Imp Mangle, which is one of the weakest bear TPS talents. RnT is now one of the best TPS talents for bear, so you wouldn't want to give that up. Even using FB every ~30 second cycle, FA not really a big boost even in a full cat spec. There's really not a whole lot you can do with those 2 points. You could take iLotP or Brutall Impact, or drop FI and max FA.

A max hybrid build might look like this, with 4 points spare to shift around: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

All this really does is move the Shredding Attacks requirement to an Imp Mangle requirement (which might not have been taken otherwise). Taking SA instead would give 5 spare points to shift around. I'd prefer to use those points in utility talents.

With any full bear spec including Imp Mangle and NOT Shredding Attacks, it would only be a marginal DPS loss to use 2t6 and remove Shred from cycles. Looking at available gear, I'd say waist and wrist have the lowest loss.

Feral DruidStats spreadsheet
v3.2.0.0.xls - updated 8/4/2009

 

Animalfury

I will, probably, get a call from moderators for this but there is a sugestion:

Glyph of Dire Bear Form
Reduces your armor by 10% but gives you 5% more chance to be missed while in Dire Bear Form

With something like this we could choose when to reduce mitigation in favor of avoidance.
This moment would be when armor cap, when a boss use an important long cd/stacking debuff hit or after 50% medium avoidance(feel free to correct me if i am wrong).

As we would be trading armor and use a glyph slot, i think it is balanced (or could be by changing the numbers).

 

Vaccine

This and the whole bear self healing as a serious mechanic is one of the worst ideas I've seen.

- Overheal is collosal. You're health is full, heal goes wasted. You dodge an attack, heal goes wasted.
- Timing is a huge issue. On your suggeseted 3 second cd you could quite easily get into a chain where every 3 seconds it procs but its coming in between heals and boss attacks. More overheal/waste.
- It scales negatively with avoidance, the more you get the less effective this is as it causes a higher % to be lost on overheal because it procs after a dodge.
- You gut LotP turning a 1 point talent with options into a 3 point talent for cats.
- You have huge knock on potential for PvP/Arena.


The bottom line of these suggestions is that you gain practically nothing. You can't ditch a healer if you've got a Druid tank over another. You can't have healers relax on you more because the unpredictable nature of it. The sole idea behind this seems to be that vs an extremely hard hitting boss once in a blue moon you'll get a proc at the right time and possibly save your life. Healers as you well know aim to time their heals on such fights to land after hits like these, and in succession. 99% of the time though its going to be covered by healers or just line up completely wrong wtih the hit taken.

 

Merple

This is close to what I'm planning on running in the expansion. I was actually looking at Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft
instead, as 1 point in FI doesn't do much for me.

I'm trying to find the maximum DPS spec with 5 points available between Shredding Attacks and Feral Aggression. I do not have access to 2T6. As such, I'm thinking that shred will be my go-to, meaning that I've only got 3 points for FA

Still, it should accomplish everything I want to do with my druid this expansion.

-In our country, any CBC reporter can dream of becoming head of state.

 

Janraea

1) Overheal on normal LotP is pretty huge as well. Overheal on Vampiric Embrace is large as well. This is a non-argument, unless you think the numbers are balanced around matching blocking numbers. The overheal of keeping a lifebloom ticking on the tank is pretty crazy, but regular additional heals even out damage spikes. Sure they're overheals most of the time, but the times that they're not, they really help.

2) All heal over times scale negatively with avoidance. If you think you'll be spending 95% of a fight at full health in a raid you don't overgear in WotLK, you haven't been following the mana/hp changes. Healers will have mana problems in fights now, and spamming overheals at you is a horible waste.

3) I.. I'm not grasping your point. The 5% crit is no longer required for a cat, since we can get it from other sources now. It's a raid buff, you know. Most of those cost more than one talent point - there's no reason ours should be nearly free.

4)Do you use 'knock' to mean bonus here? Cause I can't see how gaining health we didn't gain before can be a *bad* thing.. I don't think ferals need to worry about becoming overpowered in arenas.

The bottom line is that you don't really have a grasp on the impact of this mechanic on raiding. It's not huge - that's kind of the point. It's just a way to let them nerf our mitigation while giving us a nice mechanic to let us scale in a useful way with some of the pointless rogue stats we'll be swimming in. 99% of the time, eh? I'd be curious to see the simulation on that one.

 

Malazaar

That is like saying you don't need to spec mangle in a dps spec because, well ... there are arms warriors that can provide for it. If you only raid and you have a fury warrior with you at all times, your argument might be acceptable but that is certainly not the case for everyone.

Most Buffs comparable to LotP are actually 1 point as well (or even buyable) - Rampage, Trueshot Aura to name a few. This just further bloats up our tree and takes away choices.

Also, a fully talented LotP still takes 3 not 1 talent point. However, many druids choose not to take iLotP (which will affect the entire raid) because they feel their point are best spend somewhere else.

 

• sadris

Just completed my analysis of Swipe+Thorns vs Consecration+Retribution Aura: WotLK Beta (US-English) Forums -> Swipe: You're not done yet.

I understand that 1734 spell power on the paladin is a generous amount, but note that only 4% of spell power goes into Consecration per tick.

'[The main argument against gay-marriage] always revolves around ... "the gay agenda"... Apparently all these gays only want to get married so they can adopt children, turn the children gay (probably using their mystic gay voodoo, passed gayly down from one gay generation to the next), and perpetuate their gayness.'
-- rantingkitten