cana

I don't really think Blizzard's intention is to fully compensate the mitigation lost.
To some extend they will, but we shouldn't expect our armor to be as high as it could have been with all those
armor pieces equipped pre-nerf.

 

kalbear

The AP to armor (assuming a 2.5 or 3->1 conversion from AP to armor) component has the same design flaw that armor itself had, which is that it requires a druid to stack one stat above all others. One could design it so that it was raid independent (AP on your equipment gives the bonus, for example) but that would still make AP (and strength) hugely sought after.

What they should do is a non-trivial change. Do not change the bearform multiplier to some absurd number; this doesn't help scaling with other stats, will arguably imbalance pvp, and will still overvalue PvP gear. Having a high AP->armor conversion will only encourage stacking that stat above all others. Instead, if they have AP->armor at a rate of 1 to 1, have the bear multiplier go up to something like 700% with a deep talent in feral (preferably something like protector of the pack), and give bears parry, it will solve pretty much all scaling issues, solve the problem with PvP gear being more desirous than PvE gear, and keep mitigation levels on par to what they are now.

This is essentially what Kazanity recommended about 2 months ago, by the way.

 

Maeltne

This line direct from GC's post says that they will - or at least it is the current plan.

 

tlbj6142

This is why I think it will be Str-->Armor and not AP-->Armor. Though how many +str buffs are in the game other than +stats and +stats%? The former we provide to ourselves the later would be a bit of a hit in 5-man content. Though we could make up for it with a scroll, food and/or a potion.

 

Brute

Honestly I hope they just 'keep it simple stupid'. Restore the base bear modifier to 400% (or even bump it a bit) and then have a talent that significantly increases the bonus bear armor. Change Thick Hide to something like 33%/66%/100%. Then either swap Thick Hide positionally with Natural Reaction or drop Thick Hide completely and bake it into some other deep feral talent like Natural Reaction, or King of the Jungle (admittedly im daydreaming on the last point )

 

Belzi.ET

I think they should increase the dire bear armor-multiplier to 450% and make Thick Hide give 20%/40%/60% more armor from leather-items.
Then, I would suggest to switch Thick Hide with Nurturing Instincts.

With those changes Thick Hide becomes a (more or less) deep Feral talent and is out of reach for Arena-Trees.
In addition it would be a small boost for new leveling ferals cause a rejuv and shift into cat would increase the healing a little bit.

Napkin math with the numbers Maeltne posted on the previous page:
Total armor would be:
x = 3'326 * 5.5 (suggested dire bear form) * 1.6 (3/3 suggested Thick Hide) + 3'178 (rings, trinkets, neck et cetera)
x = 32'446,8 armor

As you can see armor would be decreased a bit, but at the same time this would achieve Blizz' goal to "destroy" armor-trinkets as best-in-slot.

If you go away from armor-trinkets, -necks et cetera you would sit at ~29,3k armor. This comes closer to our plate-wearing tanks (too close?).
Question here is if it's possible to gather enough avoidance-stats within those non-armor-slots to be on par with the other tanks?

Edit: Updated the numbers to work as thought (thanks for Maeltne to point out my messed up numbers)

 

Duilliath

Won't happen. It'll leave every druid using tier pieces only and nothing else.
They've stated explicitely (though I'll be damned if I can remember where) that tier items won't have additional armour.

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

 

Neddie

My overall thoughts on this:

Overall it's a good idea. Picking the highest armor ring/trinket for any slot, regardless of other stats was stupid, and made us hang onto blue trinkets over epics.

On the other hand, they need to make some change to compensate. This means that feral tanks have only 2 mitigation stats for rings, trinkets, necks, etc: stamina and agility. Once you get "enough" stamina, it becomes only about agility. Basically it means that after a certain point, there's no difference between our tank gear and our dps gear. Which truly makes us too overpowered.

If they really want cat-druids to do roughly the same DPS as rogues, mages, warlocks, hunters, warriors, etc. it means a druid can be top 5 on the damage charts when the tank goes down. The hunters FD, the warlocks shatter, the mages inviz, the rogues vanish, and soon the feral druid has threat. Swap to bear form and the druid is tanking as well as the warrior, wearing essentially the same gear he'd be wearing while tanking... no chance of taking a crit, the same armor as he'd have in tanking gear, just probably a bit higher threat and avoidance, and a bit less stamina.

Honestly, I think they need all tanks to care about defense. Make SotF give us a 4% reduction in crits, not 6% and have us make up the rest in defense gear, but at the same time, make it so that defense gives more dodge if your class can't block or parry, and more parry if your class can't block. That way defense is a pretty good stat for druid tanks, and no tank can wear the exact same gear to do super high raid DPS as they do when they're the main tank.

 

Maeltne

You made at least 3 mistakes.
1) * 1.5 is only a 50% increase, for 150% increase you need 2.5
2) You added the weapon armor, which was stated quite clearly as removed
3) Poorly thought out wish lists don't belong here

The actual armor from your method would be: 48910.5

 

ajthebest

I can't say I completely agree with you. DPS specs and Tanking specs differ enough that you can't do both to your best. Also we are not meant to have the same DPS as rogues, mages, locks, and hunters. Those four classes are supposedly "pure classes" and according to GC they will always be the best unless a hybrid with exponential skill comes along and takes over.

As far as the two stat thing goes, I agree (sort of). This won't be overpowered for us, but in fact would kill us in the future content patches. Once we have the <threshold> hp then we would only stack agility which has wicked diminishing returns. At one point we might consider gemming for defense, but that just proves how bad we will have it. Agility / dodge would be so bad that we would have to resort to gemming defense.

I honestly believe that we need to keep the multiplier the same, or change it in a deep feral talent to stop resto ownage in pvp. I also feel that if we were given parry, it would help feral druids look to the future and actually want upgrades. I would like to think believe that str -> armor conversion would be a good thing, but the reality is the only place we get str now is from jewellery, which wouldn't be enough unless we have huge conversion numbers, which might be too OP later in the game and pigeon holes us into making str the new "thing" (like armor was).

 

hlidskialf

I also am looking forward to not being shackled to one specific trinket/ring with armour. As for compensation, it's been mentioned to have AP/Str with some modifier being converted to an armour value. Seeing as one of our problems is too few stats to focus on, why not give us an armour value based on ALL our stats? Add it to a deep feral talent like Heart of the Wild if there's concerns re: restos and arena.

Granted, we'd still run into the situation were buffs make a significant difference, but without a modifier, you'd not notice a large change in mitigation if you lose a single stat buff during a fight. It'd also have the side effect of sparking some further interest in a broader range of item drops.

 

Pharmacon

We won't get parry. At least I would kind of hope we didn't. That's a very boring solution to our problems right now. Give us parry and we're a Death Knight with different threat building attacks. I never understood the fact that mobs that aren't wielding some sort of weapon could parry anyways (and being in form should negate that we carry a weapon as it isn't visible).

I do agree with some of the points that Str or AP -> Armor would be an awkward fix though. But we already get some armor from Agi and allowing it to do more would be too much from one attribute, so something like AP -> Armor makes at least some sense as we are tanking in DPS gear with tank gems/enchants.

Baking in another armor modifier into PotP or even KoJ won't happen either unless it is at the expense of something else as then those talent points become to over budget. If it goes into PotP it would need to replace the AP modifier, but would still be over budget as that is more of an addon to the % damage reduction. If added to KoJ it would need to replace the % damage increase, but that would make it just another mandatory talent to take which we already have a fair number of.

We made it through BC on green armor. That screws up item budget so I'm glad that won't be coming back. We need some sort of PvE stat that will increase our mitigation so we are not relying on PvP items for PvE.

 

◊ Abradix

This actually fixed the PvP gear problem, because just as cloaks, the way our armor will be calculated is (ilevel armor value * Bear_Modifier)+extra bonus armor, meaning that the large armor gain from PvP gear will be gone and that pretty much removes the desire to use the PvP gear for PvE. Regarding strength -> Armor instead of AP -> Armor, keep in mind we barely get strength on our gear, our tiered gear has no strength, the rogue leather doesn't, the only pieces with strength are tanking jewelry.

 

TheNameLessOne

The new PVP gear at 80 doesn't have bonus armor. The reason the new PVP gear is better or equal to the PVE gear is it has more stam and generally equal agility. All you lose is generally some crit rating and attack power. Adding a AP -> Something conversion would solve this problem since it would make the PVP gear worse for both threat and mitigation.

 

ajthebest

I can't remember which forum I read this one, but someone suggested that armor gained from agility should be affected by the bear modifier. This would help us bare taking the dps gear we are being forced to take. The only problem I saw with this suggestion was that we are pretty much replacing bonus armor with agility. We would start drooling over agility rather than armor.

 

◊ Abradix

We've been drooling all over Agility for a long time, so it wouldn't really be a big change, I'd actually be more in favour of an agility -> Armor conversion then raw AP. We'd have very little stats that affect our migitation, but that's really a hard thing to avoid if they do not change parry/block/blockvalue to benefit us in some way, we simply have less ways to increase our TTL, resulting in a smaller number of effective stats.

In this regard, the "best" way to give us more stats that affect our migitation as well as encourage us to pick up PvE gear (I stand correct on my previous PvP gear statement), would be with crit rating and AP. This however has the downside I was talking about before, a large difference between our raid buffed and unbuffed migitation. Not so much if they make it off our crit rating (as opposed to crit chance), but I'm sceptical of an AP -> Armor conversion where AP from buffs is not counted.

 

Neddie

I'm pretty sure that the difference between the DPS done by a pure DPS class and the DPS done by a DPS specced hybrid is supposed to be fairly close, like 5% difference or something -- something that gear and skill can overcome. In the past it has been a 10-20% difference or more.

There are really 4 scenarios to consider for a player taking over when a tank dies. Tank specced player in tank gear, tank specced player in dps gear, dps specced player in tank gear, and dps specced player in dps gear.

Where I see this making druids too powerful is in a single tank fight where everybody else is in DPS or healing gear. Normally in that sort of situation, if the tank goes down it's a wipe. A warrior or paladin can throw on a shield and sword, but there's a vast difference between the stats on DPS plate and tanking plate. A death knight could change presences, but they'd still be wearing DPS plate, not tanking plate. Even if the warrior/paladin were prot specced but wearing DPS gear the lack of tanking gear would make them really hard to keep up. With this change, a druid can go to bear form and be crit immune, have the same armor they would have in tanking gear, and have the same or better avoidance. The one stat they might be lacking is stamina. If they were cat-specced they might be missing some survival talents, but they would still be far better off than a dps warrior. If they were bear-specced they would easily be able to take over tanking.

I don't want them to compensate by saying "ok, well since you're going to be so useful, and amazing at taking over if a tank dies, we're going to have to lower your DPS significantly" I'd much rather they force us to wear tanking rings, necks, and trinkets when tanking.

 

Rhaegal

The counterargument here is that if you're a tank specced feral druid, you will be falling more in the 10-20% difference range, well below other classes without aggro dumps (which was the basis for your original argument), like enhancement/elem shaman, boomkin, ret paladins, etc. If you're actual a DPS specced feral druid, and you're only 5% behind the pure DPS classes and in a position to be highest non-tank threat, then you're missing some extremely key bear talents, notably Protector of the Pack, Thick Hide, and to a lesser extent, Natural Reaction. Those three talents together are a huge survivability boost, and even if 75% of your gear is the same between full tank full dps sets, you're in no way in a condition to survive tanking a raid boss on progression content.

Stand back! I'm going to try SCIENCE!

 

Belzi.ET

You're right, I totally messed up the numbers (shouldn't try to calculate after a day long full of excel-sheets). Sorry, about that.

The idea itself isn't as bad I think. Increase the armor-modifier from Thick Hide and switch it with a deeper feral-talent (for example Nurturing Instincts as stated) makes it a needed tank-talent, but through the deeper position won't be interesting for arena-restos.

Another idea to give us another stat (this time I don't even try to guesstimate numbers =)).
Reduce SotF to just make us 1/2/3% crit-immune, but broaden a talent to increase mitigation based on defense rating.
As someone pointed out, there should be a difference between kitty and bear. Now, when bears need some additional defense rating to become crit-immune there won't be just a form-shift infight and become tank.
With such a change the tank-rings for Warriors/Paladins/DeathKnight? (don't know anything about them) would be useful for us too, or at least a some of them as some have parry rating.

 

Druidiful

A problem I see with this is that it would be very hard to get 3% crit reduction from defense only using non-leather gear. Since we would still need more defense we would have to turn to other gear, but the is no more leather gear with defense. This would put us back into what we had in TBC and force us to use resilience from pvp gear, which Ghostcrawler has said they don't want.

 

Cynrh

Current armor trinkets/rings/etc might become trash, but since they'd no longer have to balance them around druids, they're free to create new ones with a lot more armor on them.

 

savernon

While this is true, it would be silly, because the whole point behind this fiasco, in their eyes, is so we don't overvalue armor trinkets to the point of wearing trinkets that are well behind the progression level. You could say they could make increasingly better armor trinkets, but again, since armor is that good, we would still use JUST those trinkets till it capped.

 

Incadelico

Hey there, long-time reader, first-time poster here.

The recent Bluepost made me register here so i can contribute my ideas concerning feral armor. I agree that simply increasing the bear-modifier to balance the armor "loss" wouldn't work as it required an absurdly high percentage.

My suggestion would be to return the bear-modifier back to 400% and make agility based armor be affected by it.
I haven't played the beta but im assuming a raidbuffed bear should have somewhere ~1k-1.2k agility (correct me if I'm wrong here) which would result in ~12k armor thus bringing us back (along with the increased modifier) to approximately the same armor as pre-"nerf".

Using agi instead of AP does have some advantages im my opinion;
- it makes us less dependant on "temporary" buffs like Battle Shout and Unleashed Rage (I assume every 25-man raid will have BoK and Str-Totem can be put down by about any shaman).
- as far as I know gemming for Sta is more efficient than Agi because of the Agi:Dodge nerf and DR, this would raise the value of Agi gems again (oh, and by the way, reducing SotF to 3% again would force us to more or less only socket Defense gems and this shouldn't be Blizzard's intention).
- the 3 other tanking classes fully benefit from Defense rating, they all need Dodge/Block(except for DK's?)/Parry and being uncrittable while we just need Dodge out of these four, so choosing DPS necks and rings would generate less competition between tanks and satisfy the needs of a feral tank even more.

Well, I might have forgotten something, but my main thoughts should be covered, hope I could explain myself well enough.

And one quick question about Kitty DPS (can't remember if this has already been answered): should I always build up 5 CP's and risk loosing one because of a crit at 4 CP's or just finish with four? (Rip/FB)

 

unitsinc

If the talent gave 3% crit reduction, we'd only need 2.6 just like it was last patch and all of TBC. I'm also pretty sure almost every feral druid gained crit immunity from non-leather items, or maybe used PVP bracers(or some other PVP leather) in combination with rings/neck/cloak/trinket, which still seems viable come wrath, so that isn't really a valid concern.

 

Brute

Having to scramble and being forced to wear a mishmash of resilience and defense gear was*not* a good thing for ferals in TBC, I have no idea why people are advocating a return to that.