Rather simple, I would think. Making anti-crit (a.k.a. Resilience/Defense to uncrittable cap vs. +3lvl) not nearly totally worthless as a stat spreads the priorities around for someone who's looking to puzzle together a tanking set.

As is, you run a raid instance and some trinket with armour and Defense drops. The feral tank goes "Meh - give it to the warrior" unless he or she is within range of making stacking agility less appetizing than adding dodge from Defense(?).

If you retuned the anti-crit talent to 4% anti-crit, that trinket would all of a sudden have value. Not all that much with the recent mad nerf to armour trinkets, but nonetheless.

Making defense matter more than it does currently in Wrath for feral tanks, but less than it did before, gives us a larger pool of components to pull from, and makes it less of a hassle for the devs to itemize the raids, since it spreads points around for all classes. Granted, this would homogenize us to some extent, but not very much if we just had to make up 1.6% anti-crit. It would be borderline trivial, but still mean that gear with Defense or PVP gear wouldn't be as undervalued as it is now relative to the other tanking classes.

In other news I think the nerf to armour on trinkets was a little harsh. They should still be good, just not THAT good.

I'm absolutely delighted by the armor-change news. I was advocating it on beta because I did not want to be pigeonholed into a badge of tenacity situation again, or worse - a mark of tyranny situation.

This will only be beneficial though, if they come up with a good counter-balance / solution. Some here have mentioned talents, and x -> y conversions, but no one so far has mentioned Bear - Form in itself. Surely they could bake something into the shapeshift itself, such as 'double effectiveness from defense', or 'x -> armor conversion'.

What I'd like to see, personally, is agility and enchants (such as armor to cloak, or that LW armor to gloves) benefit from the bear armor adjustment.

You realise theres absolutely zero benefit of doing this? At best it will mean we're already crit capped from the jewelery we wear and at worse it will force us to once more bring dire PvP items into the mix for their resilience. There is no positive in doing that.

I agree with Vaccine, the problem is the trinket wouldn't simply "have value". If you are critable you would *need* to wear the trinket in order to become crit immune. So instead of being able to wear gear that is useful like a stamina/dodge trinket you would be forced to wear that otherwise crappy piece.

I am a supporter of parry. Sure we would be DKv2, but it would solve so many problems:
With armor giving the same (TTL) benefit to all tanks, the only stat we scale better with than other tanks is stamina (which is not a mitigation stat). With parry for druids all rings/necks/cloaks without block would give the same benefit to all tanks and the only balancing factor would become blocking on warrior/paladin vs. higher armor on bears/deathknights.

As I think I started the discussion about not being crit-immune with SotF (see here), I feel to answer here too.
My suggestion was to give an additional benefit to defense rating through talents.
The whole idea is to give ferals another stat to being interested in.

But on another note, I had another idea how bear-mitigation may be improved after those armor-changes.
I see myself more as a brainstormer than a mathematician and my written numbers may be totally off.
Nevertheless I post it, just to share my idea, the concept of how it may be implemented.

For a first mathematical run I would suggest x1/x2/x3 to be 20/40/60% and y about 7% (stacking to a total of 21%, but keep in mind that the original 12% from current PotP would be overwritten).
As stated these numbers may be overpowered or crappy as hell, so don't judge the numbers.

I see pros and cons with such a talent.
On the pro-side the talent gets a higher and more reliable uptime the better your gear becomes. It also makes the talent usable for solo-play, whereas the current PotP completely lacks.
On the other side, for lesser geared bears the buff may drop off which result in higher incoming damage.

It doesn't introduce a new scaling stat though, it just improves the value of agility and dodge rating (and defense rating, slightly). I think that the preference of most people is for a *new* stat to contribute to our survivability, the new stat being one of the offensive stats through some sort of conversion mechanism.

On a sidenote, PotP will no longer be lacking for soloplay in a coming patch, as the group requirement will be removed (posted by GC in the same post as the armor changes).

edit: as an additional concern, the effect of the talent would be very dependent on what you're tanking. A slow-hitting single mob will mean a much lower uptime compared to a fast dual-wielder or even AoE tanking.

Removing bonus armor is a good idea by itself; it gives more options. The scaling problem will come from the fact that there aint any other desirable stats for a bear. After 3.1 there will be only 2 relevant stats for ferals as far as survival is concerned; Stamina and Dodge (through dodge rating or agility). Stacking stamina is generally bad. After you reach a certain threshold it's just a mana sponge for healers. If you can survive a boss burst with let's say 30k hp, the next step in making stamina useful would be doubling your health pool more or less. And since you cant expect to stack stamina to that effect obviously, going from 30 to 35 or even 40k would be sub-optimal to say the least. Diminishing returns on dodge make it equally bad. After you reach 50% or so (exact number to be determined through further testing at 80) the benefits become marginal.

So ferals will be left with plenty of options, most of em not desirable tho. I'd have more faith in this change if it was announced 6 months ago, tested through beta and before the itemization for the first couple tiers was finalized. As it stands now it just looks like a scaling nightmare waiting to happen.

As you progress through tiers, the only 2 stats you care about for survival will become harder and harder to increase, due to the way itemization formulas work, and at the same time the upgrades will be marginal. Eventually bears will have to turn to more damage oriented stats for non-set pieces that will imbalance threat generation and dmg among the tanking classes.

This is a fundamental flaw in bear design tho; the armor change will just emphasize it further. Whenever a class only cares about 1 or 2 stats, things get ugly. I've seen plenty of blue posts acknowledging this fact as a major factor for class imbalances during TBC. If these couple stats scale well (like spelldmg did for locks for example) the class becomes overpowered. If the stats dont scale well tho (and we know stamina cant scale and dodge has diminishing returns now) the class becomes a mess.

I'm not fond of crying wolf but I really cant see this working without making more stats truly desirable for bears. Huge health pool paired with below mediocre avoidance and mitigation makes for a bad main tank. Insane threat generation paired with a normal health pool while keeping below mediocre avoidance and mitigation makes for a truly annoying offtank.

I dont think it's in blizzard's intentions to make druids any less or any more of a tank than the rest of the tanking classes but I do think they'll end up doing so if they go down that road now that the beta is over. Giving additional benefits from defense, translating block value to something useful for druids, changing the dodge diminishing returns formula for bears only, making something other than sta and agi desirable is the only way to ensure druid baseline abilities wont have to be patched every month to keep em in line with the rest of the tanking classes.

Apart from the PvP aspect, being able to switch forms at -80% mana cost and never switching gear depending on who you're up against. Wearing a full tanking set against a rogue in a duel makes them seem underpowered.

But PvE, I don't really see a huge problem. Sure, we could do some extra dps on bosses like brutallus, and switch forms during trash pulls, etc. While nice, it doesn't seem overpowered.

There's quite a few changes here I'm concerned about.

(1) Armor changes, basically it will still scale with gear, but not a stat over which we will have any great degree of control any more. As mentioned before, this leaves us basically sta and dodge as tanking stats, of which one will have a diminishing return.

(2) Mana/Shifting changes. I think this is the wrong way to go. Increase total intellect from HotW. The idea of a lvl80 Druid with 6k mana is simply ridiculous. It's heading for a place where you will barely have enough mana to heal yourself up to full and rebuff yourself.

(3) PvP/Arenas - well, Feral still largely broken in terms of desirability. Rogues will be loving these changes as our high armor has been the main reason that we have been seen as the anti-rogue class.

Ok, I finally got tired of the "dodge has diminishing returns, so it's useless" - chant.

Basically you gain a bit in excess of 1% time to live, for each % of raw dodge you acquire.

Math:
1% increase in raw dodge => x% increase in mod dodge
+TTL = x% increase in mod dodge / (100 - current avoidance) * 100
this gave me the spreadsheet:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?k...ET8M9KeuCXUMcw

If you assume 0% base avoidance, you will get the "doomsday" graph where we go from 1% TTL at 0% raw dodge all the way down to .6% TTL at 120% raw dodge.

If you assume 14.91% base avoidance (base dodge + talents), you will get a much nicer view, with 1.2% TTL for the first % of dodge, and going no lower than .95% TTL per dodge. Until 50% raw +dodge, you are still getting +1% TTL per %.

If you assume ~20% Base avoidance (base dodge, talents and misschance), you get the minimum 1.1% TTL for a % raw dodge around 67% +dodge.

So for any tanking scenario, you can pretty much assume that 1% dodge means 1% longer life.

The problem is that dodge rating and agility have a diminishing return on raw dodge given sufficently high values now.

Did you mean:
The problem is that armor have a diminishing return on mitigation given sufficently high values now.

Or perhaps:
The problem is that dodge rating and agility no longer offers exponential returns

Old system
Going from 0% avoidance and adding 1% raw dodge gives you 1% longer life expectancy
Going from 90% avoidance and adding 1% raw dodge gives you 10% longer life expectancy

New system
Going from 0% avoidance and adding 1% raw dodge gives you 1% longer life expectancy
Going from 90% avoidance and adding 1% raw dodge gives you 1% longer life expectancy

So to recap:
Yes, it's been changed, yes, bossfight are balanced around it and yes, it scales perfectly for any value of dodge you can think off. The only beef we have left is itembudget concerns which means an item with +dodge and +parry will possibly give more total +TTL than a simple +dodge trinket. I say possibly, because parry is less effective per point, and because I haven't bothered making a spreadsheet for platewearers.

You seem to be missing the point here. Yes, 1% dodge is always desirable; the question is how much dodge rating/agi is required to get that extra 1% dodge after a certain threshold. If you need 200 agi (random numbers) to go from 54% to 55%, you can pretty safely say it's not a sound investment gearing towards agi anymore. Especially considering the itemization formula which penalizes the stacking of single stats on any item.

Now consider that every avoidance stat is on separate diminishing returns. A parry/block class has way more stats to spend itemization points on before starting to get less value from his item's budget. A druid will be able to reach a decent amount of dodge fairly easy and from then onwards it will become increasingly harder to improve on that stat.

Let's say in tier7 you end up having 50% dodge and you can do 5k tps (always random numbers). You move to tier8. You can get tanking upgrades or switch some dps pieces in slots. Due to the diminishing returns in both avoidance and itemization formulas, by taking the tanking upgrades you ll end up having 53% dodge and 5.3k tps. By switching to dps pieces you ll end up having 50% dodge and doing 7k tps. You dont care about armor, you dont care about crit immunity. You can keep doing this tier after tier of progression. Eventually the choice becomes 60% dodge and 6k tps versus 50% dodge and 15k tps. That's the scaling problem.

Well, I think it's a mutual case of "not understanding".

Going from 50% dodge to 51% dodge is a 2% damage reduction.
Why are you surprised that it takes more to get those 2% then the 1% you got from going 0->1% avoidance?

It is true that plate classes will most likely be higher in the avoidance department then us. But did you really expect us to have the best flat melee damage reduction (PoTP) , best armor (it's getting changed, but not nerfed), best stamina scaling AND highest avoidance?

This isnt the official forums, I'm not trying to say buff druids; I'm simply illustrating what I see as a problem. I might actually be saying nerf druids.

There's 3 tanking variables. Health pool, Mitigation (armor) and Avoidance (dodge). Health pool is not scaling, you either got enough hp or you dont. It does not affect TTL at all to worth gearing around it. Mitigation we can not control anymore. It's all built in the tier of leather you re wearing. The one variable we can actually control, we can do so from only 1 side of it (dodge). So either dodge will scale well as was the case with TBC, forcing Sunwell Radiance type "fixes" or not scale well and we re left with no desirable tanking stats. Both cases are equally bad.

Let me elaborate further. To increase your TPS output you have: Strength, Agility, Attack Power, Feral Attack Power, Crit Rating, Hit Rating, Expertise Rating, Armor Penetration. To increase your TTL you have Agility and Dodge Rating (on the same diminishing return) and Defense (getting 50% value from it). All of them are wasted itemization points; you re forced to either nerf the value of your items if you insist on stacking Dodge forever or switch to dps oriented items. If you stick to dodge you scale badly since you keep reducing the effective ilvl of your gear and if you switch to dps you scale wrong. The advertised options are simply not implemented.

Stejo, I strongly recommend you look at Grubsnik's spreadsheet. He is entirely correct in saying that Dodge rating now gives a linear return on Rating -> TTL instead of a previous exponential return. This is the exact same way armor works, for those needing a point of reference. The argument that we have one stat less for our migitation is of course valid, but in reality has little to do with the new avoidance rating returns, which are really just like armor.

Yes, but that has nothing to do with the new returns on ratings. It's a result from the item formula promoting a large number of stats to be most efficient, while we don't have that many useful stats. But considering that is most likely being changed, it doesn't make any sense for people to deliberately hammer on about "Dodge diminishing returns" while we can all agree it's our lack of effective stats that is the problem.

Everyone seems to have forgotten that we will still scale with armor. When you get your T7 drops your armor will still increase just like it does now. We can't control it in the same way as agility, stamina, and dodge, but don't act like your armor won't improve with higher level gear.

As far as avoidance goes there seems to be some misunderstanding. Even though we don't have parry we are compensated by shallower diminishing returns on dodge and with more pre-DR dodge from agility than the other tanks. We actually still benefit from increasing returns on dodge, though at a far slower rate than before DR was introduced. I don't believe the difference in avoidance between us and the plate wearing tanks will be very substantial.

It's not exactly linear. If you'll look in the combat ratings thread, we've done some fairly complicated math to show that it is indeed diminishing, even in terms of ttl, up until a certain point (~65% avoidance, if i recall, for a druid), at which point it becomes .. whatever the opposite of diminishing returns are.

That's the thing though - there's no sign that this is changing. The only comment from GC was that the armor boost from dire bear would be increased to make up for it.

If they do not add some other method of scaling and do not change dodge's DR, simply bears will become worse than other tanks at some point in the future, most likely around Ulduar.

And it's not that I want the most armor, the best mitigation talent (which really can't hold a candle to block, by the way), the most avoidance and the most stamina. What I would like is parity. It's unhealthy to be the best in one category and the worst in others, because it encourages situations like BC.

A lot of people get mixed up in terminology.

The truth is armor DOES have diminishing returns on armor->%mitigation. If it did not it would have exponential'ish returns on armor->TLL. The diminishing returns on armor->%mitigation are balance such that armor->TTL is linear.

The exact same can be said for AGI/Dodge, i.e.

The truth is Agility/Dodge DOES have diminishing returns on Agility/Dodge->%avoidance. If it did not it would have exponential'ish returns on Agility/Dodge->TLL. The diminishing returns on Agility/Dodge->%avoidance are balance such that Agility/Dodge>TTL is linear.

What's your source on the diminishing returns for bears being different than other tanks? As far as I know, it's the same for every class.