That's it in a nutshell, and my concern is that the T8 content is released in 3.1, which kicks off the new arena season, and the devs are unable to fix the problem until the season is over or even worse until the next expansion. According to GC that's exactly what happened in TBC. They didn't want to implement major class balance changes due to the impact on e-sports arena play. Bear stat scaling should be addressed now, before the WOTLK arena season starts.

You might want to look at this.

It's not that the model is different, only that the scaling coefficients are adjusted per class.

Someone pointed that out to me. Those scaling differences end up making very little difference. At very low(200 DR) percentages of raw dodge, the other tanks come out with slightly higher dodge than druids do! It takes ~1035 raw dodge rating for druids to get 1% more actual dodge than the other tanks. That's not enough of a scaling difference. My guess is that 'k' needs to lowered a bit or 'c' needs to raised.

From what I understood, the formulas are applied to total dodge and parry (so after agility or strength, defense and dodge/parry rating), not to the rating itself. As a druid you'll be getting plenty of agility too, at a favorable 40ish agi per dodge %, rather than slightly over 70 like warriors or DKs, or 50 for paladins, (all values before DR).

I was converting the DR to dodge before diminishing it. I realize that druids will get "better" dodge through kings/sotf/agi and the diminishing returns formula, but all of those aren't enough to overcome the stat budget's formula for single stat stacking. And lets not forget poor itemization on accessories.

Aaah! I'm pulling my hair out (what little is left) looking for this...

Wasn't there a post that contained DPE or DPS per talent point for each talent? I can find the bear TPS version, but I can't find the Cat version. Any ideas where that post is located? I'm trying to decide between a couple of different builds for leveling and would like that information...

Thanks.

It would mean that we have to wear jewelry, trinkets or necks with defense on them. I think that's a good thing. If we're crit immune from talents and don't value armor, by default our rings, trinkets, necks, etc. will all be DPS gear. For reasons I explained earlier in the thread, I don't think that's a good thing. Tanks should have to wear at least some tanking gear while tanking.

The higher avoidance gets, the bigger the diminishing returns penalty. Reaching the same total avoidance through dodge or parry exclusively is exponentially more "expensive" than reaching it through a combination of the 2 stats. There's really nothing more to say about it. If a druid has 40% dodge and a warrior has 25% dodge and 15% parry, they both have 40% avoidance. If a ring drops with 40 dodge rating, the druid gets less bang for his buck out of it just because he already had too much dodge. And the gap keeps getting bigger and bigger. That would be fine if the druid could invest elsewhere to make up for it, which unfortunately isnt the case.

What you're doing here is further pigeon-hole people into using selected numbers of gear. Even with nerf to armor, and immunity from crit, a lot of stats from tanking jewelries are still desired, and avoidance/mitigation trinkets are still vastly better than DPS choices, especially on progression raids.

I would go as far as saying there are NO PROBLEM with druids using full dps gear as full tank gear if that ever becomes the case, because a max-bear role and a max-cat role still has a lot of varying talents involved in them, and you cannot switch spec during a single encounter. However, that is simply still not the case.

On another topic, getting more misses and dodge out of defense is a pretty solid idea, and AP>Armor conversion is also good. Both of these scales us with gear that we will naturally use. Challenge here is knowing how much better or worse we will scale with these stats for the sake of balancing. I will give the developers some faith since they still have 2-3 months to work out the bear overhaul, before Ulduar patch.

Until then, I will still be getting armor trinkets and jewelries, they will still be 5.5x armor for quite a while.

Edit: I still think the easiest approach at this is change the bear multiplier. As long as they are careful about other specs using bear form it will be fine.

This can be easily remedied by changing the DR formula for each class so that they scale equally well or ultimately reach the same level. Yes, what you said makes sense, but changing it is very easy. Easy example will be allowing bears to start getting DRs on dodge at 60%, while Warriors starts getting DR on dodge at 30% and parry at 30%. This is a very crude example and just for intuitive uses, but hopefully I get the point across.

This is the solution I've been pushing for for a long time. My warrior loves defense. It increases 5 stats that are all useful to me. Even after I become crit immune defense is a great stat because it still increases the chance to be missed, chance to dodge, chance to block, and chance to parry. If I want to focus on threat I'll look for more block value. If I want to increase avoidance I'll look for parry or dodge, but I never worry too much about getting over the crit immune cap because defense continues to be good.

On my druid, I tweaked my gear constantly to make sure I had just enough defense to be crit immune, then started looking for other stats. If I upgraded from a trinket with no defense to one with a lot, I started looking for places where I could take off defense because getting only the dodge / chance-to-be-missed out of defense made it a pretty lousy stat to have a lot of.

If the "chance to be missed" and dodge values of defense were doubled for druids (since they can't take advantage of dodge or block) it might not be the ideal stat to look for, but it wouldn't be something you tried to avoid. DKs should also have defense adjusted slightly to account for their not being able to block.

It would be easy to make defense too good, since dodge, chance-to-be-missed and parry are all much better stats than chance-to-block, but a step in this direction would solve a lot of issues. (Incidentally, I'd push for just double the normal value, perhaps even less, so each point of defense offered 0.6-0.8 dodge / chance-to-be missed for ferals).

Defense still provides less avoidance than dodge even for a warrior, item point for item point. Just because a stat covers a wide array of other stats doesn't necessarily make it optimal. This can be changed through stat conversion if re-balancing is necessary.

This is not completely true. Look at the effective caps for Dodge and parry for Warrior vs Druid. 116 Dodge for Druids vs 47parry+88dodge for Warriors. It's still 116 vs 135, but also keep in mind that druids get much more avoidance that bypasses DR than the others, which makes up that difference.

Hello,

I am new here and tried reading up on the threat but realized it has very outdated posts in em.
2 questions.

The first: Will there be a new threat on feral druids come WotLK. One that has no "lets try this change"-Beta info, one that possibly has good tips on people playing WotLK, like a nice place to get good items while leveling etc.
Possibly it would be a good Idea to make 2 threats. Kitty DPS and bearform tanking. As it is now the feral tree can be specced either for tanking or for dps. Some talents are great if you are a cat in the raid, others are useless and same for tanking. Might be a good idea to split those 2 up. Since imo feral is no longer the feral we are used to.

The second. Is there anyone who has absolutely nothing to do? I used to be resto hardcore raiding and have been casual feral for the last few months. I really need an update on feral and all the new stuff. Not saying I am a complete noob but as to certain things I sure am. If you have nothing to do and are a kind spirit contact me so we could have a small chat about tanking.

Agreeing with Neddie here. .1% per point would be a little too high (up from .04% base).
1.5x or 2.0x for defense baked into a deep core cat/bear talent (Like HotW) would be more than sufficient for druids to make good use of a +def item. (like the oh so pretty [Signet of the Impregnable Fortress])

1.5x would give us mythical parry lost, while 2.0x would gives us the missing Anti-Crit we don't need. (The other .5X is for block, which our armor will still be able to absorb)

You are forgetting that warriors will have a higher miss than druids.

Thanks, but I'm not. That's accounted for.

1.5% higher base dodge. Not insignificant amount of Miss from defense. More dodge from base agi. They have to spend itemization points on that higher miss from defense rating, we don't. Our k value is higher.

I really wish they wouldn't. I don't want flat mitigation baked into the class, I want to scale with gear like everybody else. Anything less and you end up working great at tier X, falling well behind at X+1, and being essentially useless at X+2, like cat druids in TBC.

The appropriate solution is to make bears want tank cloaks, rings, necklaces, and trinkets as currently itemized.

The obvious alternative is to make standard DPS stats (AP, crit, hit, etc) provide tanking ability (armor, dodge, miss) through yet another bandaid conversion mechanism. That would work too, and the devs have shown no reluctance to do such things in the past, but it's not an elegant solution.

A flat percentage damage reduction scales perfectly: 12% is better on Illidan than Prince, and 12% of damage after armor is 12% whether you have 10k armor or 40k. It's linearly better, not exponentially better the way dodge used to be. Given that Blizzard nerfed dodge because of the unintended high-end effect of exponential scaling, I doubt we will ever see this scaling for anyone's tanking again.

Higher k value is actually a bad thing. Also, don't forget warriors have 5% base parry.

Not exactly. The fear isn't the flat percentage damage or avoidance; the fear is that other tanks will scale more quickly, making them more desirable.

Let's take a hypothetical. I hate these, but it works in this case. Tank A has a base avoidance of 12% and scales at a rate of 20% per tier. Tank B has a base avoidance of 8% and scales at a rate of 24% a tier.

At tier 1, they're equivalent and balanced.
At tier 2, tank B is better by 4%, a minor difference.
At tier 3, tank B is better by 8%. A major difference.

Unless you allow all the tanks to scale with gear similarly, this is going to happen. Is it guaranteed to? No. But that's what the values of diminishing returns combined with having only a couple of stats to scale with imply.

You propose that other tanks' avoidance will scale super-linearly due to a varied stat allocation, while we only scale linearly because of a more limited selection of defensive stats. This is a reasonable fear, and nothing I disagree with -- for example, unholy DKs are predicted to come to a point in gear scaling where they become massively higher mitigation than other DKs specs. If you linked PotP to a gear stat (preferably one favored on rogue gear), we would have our own super-linear scaling to match; I agree it could very well be beneficial and give us some interesting rock-paper-scissors games to play with gear.

I hope we can stay clear though: if PotP is intended to scale linearly, it does so perfectly, being more useful at reducing damage as content becomes more difficult, and providing the same linear benefit at each level of gear. It shares this in common with defensive stance and imp RF. Suggestions that only druids' linear damage reduction be modified by gear to be super-linear are suggestions for a new mechanic in game, not pointing out a flaw in the existing mechanic. Given that other tanks are likely to scale better with avoidance than we are, I suspect any alterations we get will be more along the lines of improving our avoidance scaling per stat than the introduction of a whole new axis along which we can scale.