Mysticum

I have another concern. Even if Blizzard are to compensate theese armor changes, I think chances are small they will do it without talent specialization (changing armor contribution to 800% doesn' feel like a change to come). Changing talents also means viable dps/OT will be even harder to spec.

Not that I have a lot of end-game raiding experience, but certainly I feel there are a lot of situations even in 3.0.2 where you can off-tank or tank in heroics with a pure dps spec. Talent specialization will take a step further from this and make it harder to be viable as a tank in heroics with pure dps spec. Even without taking ring, neck, cloak and trinket armor in moderation, it will still be a step down in being viable as dps/OT since we can't quickly swap to a tank weapon anymore. Switching from a pure dps weapon to, let's say Earthwarden, will increase your stats as a tank pretty good for a heroic or off-tank situation.

Or am I way out of line here? Is this not a valid concern as well in your minds?

 

Davaeorn

Dual spec.

 

Merendel

We do not know how far down the road that is. It could be before after or at the same time as the feral changes.

That said the armor change would not be burden to DPS/OT viability if they tacked it onto a talent ferals are going to take anyway. LOTP for example no sane druid is going to skip, if they tacked the extra armor onto that talent it would boost all ferals with no impact on balance or resto.

 

Disargeria

Whoa, let's be reasonable here. Yes, bear form is a powerful tool for restoration druids, but it was hardly the single determining factor. There have been many other changes to PvP balance and we shouldn't jump to conclusions about level 80 arenas.

 

Vaccine

Nevermind, beaten whilst I was sleeping

The protector of the pack change was much needed in my opinion though its intresting to see such drastic u turns on both points (armour too). The armour change I'm in two minds about. I've had a brief scan of rings, trinkets and necklaces and 99% of them I'm not going to change due to either the alternate tanking ones (with no armour) being itemised for shield users or the dps equivalents having anywhere from 50% to 66% of the stamina of a tanking item.

On the armour removal from feral weapons it certainly opens the door in the future to have ferals starting to share maces (and hopefully axes if they let us use them) with other classes removing the need for a feral only weapon sub type.

I guess the rest is just waiting to see what the formula comes in at for our armour and how it scales versus the other tanking classes, in particularly Deathknights.

 

nightcrowler

As I said in a previous post I dislike this change:

Before = Armor trinket were godly.
Now = Armor trinket are trash. Armor actually has less than double the TTL value of stamina or agility, with the change will be more than half = useless.

But if they really want to go that way, it's really better and more balanced to put an AP = 2-3 armor modifier (in full Naxx10 fully raid buffed you will have 6-6.5k ap) than a modifier to armor. With a modifier to armor you will value too much armor on leather, decreasing more than now the scaling choce.

 

Vaccine

Been looking at a few trinket replacements these are the two I'll probably run with after this nerf:
Darkmoon Card: Greatness - Item - World of Warcraft
[Valor Medal of the First War]

I also like the below but I think we'll be swimming in expertise anyway, no need to add more to it.
[Mark of Norgannon]

Its largely dependant on the proc rate/internal cd.
Essence of Gossamer - Item - World of Warcraft


Also got a question. I heard a few weeks ago from beta that parry was getting changed to parry/dodge (if you couldn't parry it was classed as dodge). Did that ever come about?

 

Prinsesa

I believe that was only for a single item, Defender's Code. At one point, the On Use effect was written as something like: "Increases parry dodge by 455".

Not being in the beta, I can't tell what exactly it did, but apparently it increased your parry if you could, or your dodge otherwise.

Of course, it's been converted to just dodge now, making that point moot.

EDIT: Googling "Defender's Code Parry" reveals a forum discussion where all it ever did was to increase your Dodge, ala Moroes' Pocketwatch. Apparently the 'parry' was just a typo, and it still has a typo with the omission of the word 'rating'.

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler

 

◊ Abradix

Having a 2.5 AP -> 1 Armor conversion would "only" get us around 2.5k armor, which is not enough to make up for all the armor lost. Now this is good, because aving a drastic AP -> Armor conversion (Enough to make up for a 30% armor loss) would mean druids will be balanced around having every single AP Buff (Battleshout, UR, SoE, etcetera) and will severely lack surviveability in heroics or even 10mans with non optimal balance. It's not an elegant solution and it's not "better" then raising the modifier on Dire Bear. There might be some merit in combining the two, AP -> Armor conversion making up maybe 10% of our armor (Which your number would support) and the rest coming from a raised dire bear modifier, with hopefully the talents baked into PotP and RnT or something. Just saying that historically, KotJ was an armor modifier, and it might just go back to that, we'll see.

Now armor trinkets are useless, which isn't really our problem. I know I'll be passing all the armor gear to our DK now, it's by far the best for them. As for the concern that any ilevel upgrade is automatically an upgrade - While this is more or less true, it's not a huge factor. If you look at a full tier, we'll be gaining armor at the same rate as warriors and paladins do, because while we will get around 30% more armor increase from a normal item upgrade as them, warriors/paladins will correct that when they upgrade shields. Look at the upgrade from [Heroes' Dreamwalker Shoulderpads] to [Valorous Dreamwalker Shoulderpads] for example, an 11 armor upgrade vs 43 on the warrior version. This'll end up being around 80 vs 50 after modifiers, which is still not too bad considering it'll balance out with a new tier shield which is a 200-250 armor upgrade.

 

sadistic

Is it just me(having missed previous discussion on this) or is the 4piece bonus of the Dreamwalker set very bad?

It can't really be 3sec longer barkskin can it?

 

Disargeria

I'm pretty sure it used to be Berserk. Why does it not have a dps bonus on it?

 

halmmar

Unless they nerf DK modifiers, too.

--

And yes, 4-set bonus is pretty fail for cat dps (I think it changed from berserk to survival instincts to barkskin?). It's still a lot better more useful than T5 for raiding.

 

Grubsnik

Defender's code is still +5.6% TTL from armor, +10% dodge with 1/6 up time, coming out around ~+7.3% TTL. That makes it a very good tanking trinket, but no longer a godly trinket.

Just because they are removing the mod on armor doesn't mean it still won't work for us. Armor will still be usefull, but we now get to make a choice about getting slightly more mitigation, or something else. instead of passing up 50% of our total mitigation.

 

sadistic

(4) Set: Your Shred ability deals an additional 75 damage, and your Lacerate ability does an additional 15 per application.

Not at all for cats, you could argue for it for tanks.

But honestly it just seems like a mistake, all the other feral-set-bonuses from tiered items have had bonuses that help both bear and cat individually. Seems weird that they not only would stray from this setup, but also give something worthless like that.

 

• Diameter

The 4 piece T7 bonus is consistent with the other tank sets in that in increases the duration of your damage reduction ability by 3 seconds. The other tanks get 3 seconds added to Shield Wall, Divine Protection, and Icebound Fortitude. I agree that it's strange that this bonus does not help our dps in cat form. At the same time, the T5 2 piece bonus didn't increase our dps either. Overall, I'm very happy neither of the bonuses is wonderful, as we won't be obligated to keep wearing it for instances 2 tiers above the T7 gear level.

 

Devreser

I was pretty sure that Rip did damage every 2 sec...so why does the bonus say an extra 3 sec to rip...since that would be just one extra tick of the dot not two. Which basically just means in full T7 as a cat you net half the bonus of a major glyph to your dps from the set bonus.

 

halmmar

Meant T5 (2) set. Regrowth is used all the time when we raid, right? So it's not at all the first time one of our set bonuses is gimped.

The feral T7 (4) set is pretty weak even for bears though (compare it to DK (4) set for example - 50% dmg reduction every minute, and also 1 min cooldown).

 

sadistic

True.

 

Pharmacon

I think the suggestion is to go 1 AP > ~2.5 Armor and not how you've stated it. That would net the loss of 15k armor if above values of AP and armor lost are fair. Yes it could influence what bears are assumed to be buffed with but that doesn't mean that we would be nerfed in 10 man content. They're not going to assume that we have the same amount of buffs in a 10 man raid as we do in a 25 man.

That being said, it could lead to Bears being better in one or the other depending on the buffs you receive. If you get talented Might/Shout and Kings vs neither you are suspect to 750 less AP or 1875 less armor. Groundbreaking? Doubtful. Noticeable? Yes. It would be possible that we could receive +AC based solely on Str instead. Being 1 Str > X AC. Where X is greater than 5 so that you gain the missing AP from Agi.

Overall I'm happy with the changes. I'd rather not be pigeonholed into another Badge of Tenacity situation where something low level is the best you can get. However, I said this a long while ago but I would like to see us scale off of either AP or Str so that we do scale from tier to tier and it adds some variability to our item desires.

On Feral weapons: does the feral AP on weapons count towards our item budget? From my understanding it doesn't. This would need to be the case to have a trainable skill let us convert weapon damage into AP otherwise we would be double dipping. This along with an AP/Str > AC would allow the removal of feral only weapons and let us take other weapons; possibly even 1 handers with an off-hand.

 

• sadris

They don't want to have another T4 fiasco where the first-gained set is used all the way into the last raid instance for the expansion. T7 is the first-gained set for WLK and it needs to be bad.

 

Thessaly

I was actually more concerned about the 2 piece bonus relative to the other tank bonuses. Warrior is 10% Shield Slam damage, Paladin gets 10% more Hand of the Righteous damage, and we get 5% Lacerate damage (not sure about DK). Based on the numbers Astrylian posted a few pages back, for the damage bonus to be equivalent, Shield Slam only needs to hit for 1k or so for the Warrior bonus to be better. Does Shield Slam have a threat multiplier or a static component like Lacerate? Either way, the Lacerate bonus seems paltry at best. While I appreciate not having bonuses that we end up keeping for 3+ tiers, it'd be nice to have a little parity. Hopefully it'll change, given that a 3 second Rip bonus doesn't make a lot of sense either.

 

◊ Abradix

The difference between a normal heroic run without any real melee buffs, versus raid buffed, is well over 1500 AP for me on Beta (Kings, SoE, BS, UR), you are saying there should be a 4k armor difference depending on class specific buffs, which is a 10-15% migitation difference. Groundbreaking? No, but it is extremely bad design for one tank to rely on every single class specific offensive buff there is in order to have a compareable migitation to all other tanks. If druids end up like that, and thus take 10-15% more damage in heroics with a caster composition, do you really think that people who struggled with heroics in TBC, will be able to do well with that druid tank? A 5% difference is small, a 15% difference is something that should raise some eyebrows. I'm fairly confident it will be a mix of both AP -> Armor and an increased armor talent in deep feral, but we will see.

 

Duilliath

The downsides of working... I see Abradix make the same point I was going to make.

To reiterate - I am really not interested in seeing my armour fluctuate by 2k just because the Enhancement shaman didn't show up for the evening and I have no Unleashed Rage going.

Tying Armour to AP is a recipe for disaster. Last 2 minutes of the Boss Fight, the boss Frenzies (or enrages or whatever it's called) and your Enhancement Shaman bit the dust 30 seconds ago, the DPS warrior goes down just before he can refresh Battle Shout and your mitigation drops to an all-time low...
No thanks.

Similarly, unless Feral Attack Power is specifically discounted (reducing the scaling effect), it'll tie us much more closely to those weapons unless they want to rebuild the entire system by the next expansion or whenever they're aiming to get rid of that FAP thing.

An thenn tehy wuz al ded. Srsly. (Exodus 1)

 

Coldturkey

If they were to do ap -> armor it could count only ap gained from items (like dire bear form only counts armor from items and not buffs ie motw and devo aura) to keep it from drastically changing with raid buffs.

 

Maeltne

So I decided to check out some armor values, and what the new bear form multiplier would have to be for this not to be a nerf.

Assumptions:
-Max armor for every slot using ilvl213 or lower gear
-Desired criteria is no armor change while wearing the same gear

Armor from the 8 leather slots: 3326
Armor from rings/trinkets/neck/cloak: 3178
Armor from weapon: 714

Total armor as it would stand, from items: 37317

Total bear multiplier to get the same armor wearing the same gear without the bear form multiplier an anything except leather.

3326*X + 3178 = 37317
X = 10.26

So everything else being left as is the bear form armor bonus multiplier will have to increase to ~926%. It should in fact probably be slightly higher to account for the fact that we would be wearing some lower ilvl items simple because they have bonus armor (hi Offering of Sacrifice).

I would expect crying of epic proportions if blizzard announced that the bear form multiplier was being increased from 370% to 926%, regardless of what was said around it.

Another option would be to introduce bonus armor on leather items again, however this would counteract the exact reasoning behind the change in the first place (gear homogenization, ease of gearing). I suppose another decent option would be to introduce bonus armor on the druid feral tier pieces only.