Is anyone else concerned that we are the only tank without a shield wall type effect?

Block, Parry rating should be converted for druids straight across into dodge rating.
Defense skill should grant Druids druid .07% dodge and miss per level (up from .04 dodge, miss, block, parry)
There should be some sort of AP->mitigation/avoidance effect.

What are the opinions on the coming racial changes for WotLK? Night Elf druids have always had a 1% extra dodge chance from Quickness but that's changing in the expansion to:

Quickness: reduces the chance to be hit by melee or ranged attacks by 2%

I'm not good with numbers so I have to ask which is better: the dodge chance or the reduction in hit vs. elite raid bosses?


The Tauren change seems like it will reduce the effectiveness of health scaling for Tauren druids as their gear improves:

Endurance: now scales based on base health, to be tuned to approximately a 5% heath increase if the player were wearing green quality gear

Dodge and chance to be missed are both avoidance and pretty equivalent for tanking but the new one is 2% instead of 1%, so twice as good. You also can't dodge ranged attacks, but it is included in the new racial.

This pvp vs. pve gear comparison worries me a bit.

Lvl 200 honor bracers:
247 armor, 51 stam, 50 agility, 33 crit, 66 AP, 32 resilience
Lvl 200 bracers from 10-man Naxx (Cuffs of Dark Shadows):
247 armor, 49 stam, 38 agility, 32 crit, 100 AP, 175 haste

Lvl 200 honor belt:
Blue socket, 317 armor, 66 stam, 58 agility, 36 crit, 88 AP, 44 resilience
Naxx 10 belt (Blistered Belt of Decay):
no socket, 317 armor, 57 stam, 66 agility, 0 crit, 102 AP, 231 ArPen, 48 haste

Lvl 200 honor boots:
Yellow socket, 388 armor, 66 stam, 58 agility, 36 crit, 88 AP, 44 resilience (yes, I realize that this is the same as the belt, pretty much)
Naxx 10 boots (Boots of the worshipper):
388 armor, 49 stam, 66 agi, 38 crit, 96 AP, 51 haste

Now it's absolutely clear that the drops from Naxx are better for DPS. But in each case, the pvp equivalent is better than the PvE equivalent in some way for mitigation for a bear. In the bracer case, it has more stamina and more agility. In the belt case it can either have far more stamina (thanks to the socket) or more stamina and more agility. This is the case for the boots as well. The resilience that is taking up wasted itemization on the PvP gear doesn't make up for the wasted itemization of extra AP, crit, haste and armor penetration, and at least resilience provides some small amount of mitigation to DoT effects.

This is a bit alarming, as it means that the PvP gear, at least for these slots, is better for bears than cats. Not even just 'useful', but actually better, itemization wise.

I don't think it's so easy because the equations aren't linear. For DPS classes even a 5-10% deviation can dictate who gets a raid spot - for tanks much smaller things can sometimes mean huge differences for raid success.

Each point of parry makes dodge more efficient for warriors (and vica versa). If we were to make druid agility scaling equal to warrior's scaling at lower gearing levels, that doesn't mean those same formulas will hold up when the base values are bigger.

If parry makes dodge stronger and dodge makes parry stronger, then for druid which only has dodge there needs to be some sort of formula where dodge makes dodge stronger (or something to the same effect).

This is something that's generally more evident with DPS classes. Hit and crit increase the value of spell power while spell power increases the value of hit and crit (thus forcing players to balance stats for optimal effect). A class which scales properly only with spell power (let's call this "shadow priest") instead of hit and crit must then be able to have a feedback mechanic where spell power increases the effect of spell power because otherwise the scalings just can not be equal at all gear levels. You could make shadow priests scale similar to other classes at hitcapped and 10% crit from gear but without giving them some form of exponential scaling, things just won't be the same accross multiple tiers.

WoW Forums -> WoTLK Tauren Racial Health Estimation
I guesstimated the HP increase to be worth about 60 STA, or about 40 item points

2% miss is worth about 80* item points of dodge (as someone mentioned earlier, miss is better than dodge for various reasons, but since there isn't any direct way to get +miss chance only, I used dodge instead).

In other words, taurens get half as much benefit as NE do from theirs. If NE had continued to only gain 1% miss, they'd be about equal.
Not sure what you're trying to get at.

I think you're trying to imply that combat avoidance is on a multiple roll system, when it isn't. Even if it was, it would actually make other stats less efficient.

If a warrior gets 20% parry and 20% dodge from his items, he's getting 40% avoidance total. Each 1% parry is not going to change how well dodge does. Vice versa for dodge. The only problem currently is that for each 1% dodge we get, they're getting 1.33% split across dodge/parry, or 1.58% split across dodge/parry/defense (non-adjusted for the various rating ratios). We can adjust our agi scaling such that we will always get an equal amount of dodge which compensates for the increased statpoints other tanks get.

He might be talking about the diminishing returns on dodge and parry rating (see back a few pages)? Dodge from Agi is unaffected by that.

New patch notes are up, only changes I can see is that Berserk's CD was lowered to 3 minutes.

Berserk now only makes you immune to fear. All other types of CC are open game.

Ugh.

On one hand, we have a stronger AR on a shorter cooldown.
On the other, we really don't have TBW anymore.

That's a horrid change, makes the skill pretty lackluster in PvP now. You lose the buff if you shift out to drop a root/snare, so it's going to be trivially counterable by many classes simply by rooting/snaring at the right time.

edit: The cooldown reduction is fantastic for PvE, no doubt, but it didn't need to be balanced by killing its PvP use =/

edit2: It now also explicitly states "You cannot use Tiger's Fury while Berserk is active." on the tooltip, so that was intentional and not a bug.

edit3: Mother Bear got renamed to Protector of the Pack (sadface) though nothing else about it seems to have changed. I'd assume it's finally been implemented though.

As of last week's build they didn't. I've tested personally with Dash and Berserk.