nightcrowler

@ RAWR dev

2 things:
a) at least from my simulation and from the tangedyn ones 2 CP SR is usually the best things or, better do a free sr (you do SR when it expire and you have more than 2 CPs).
b) You should try to put a "rip time left" threasold for FB usage into simulation, otherwise you will likely have lower dps using both rip and fb.

 

kameelyan

I've been gone from WoW for quite a while and just recently re-power leveled a druid with the GM of my current guild. They're all in 3 or 4 piece t6 or higher, and after about a month I'm sitting in about t5 or higher.

Using your example above, that's roughly 2.3% more avoidance that a warrior would have versus a druid. But I ask this question, what about TPS? Given that same gear, and the 2.3% less avoidance than a warrior, are we at least 2.3% higher in TPS? If the answer is yes, then I'm happy. I've always been willing to sacrifice X amount of mitigation to gain X amount of TPS, as long as it was within reason [meaning I'm not tanking with 8k HP ]

Here's the thing I've always felt about my druid as a tank. If we are MTing, then we are usually generating more TPS than a warrior would in comparable gear. Since my TPS is higher, DPS can increase their TPS [higher raid DPS output], and therefore the fights should not last as long. So, even though I'm more of a strain on the healer, they don't have to heal as long of a fight, and thus it balances out in the end.

 

halmmar

I find starting Berserk at 25 energy is quite enough (at 70, with 2T4 2T6 mangle spam) since mangle really doesn't cost a lot and once you FB, you're back to square one anyway.
Now, at 80 I'd assume you'd want a bit more energy when you start a berserk, since you now have 2 timers (rip/sr), and your main combo move costs 13 more energy than at 70. FB-TF-Berserk seems like a decent choice at 80. but since I haven't played with it I don't know if it's too much energy (energy wasted by FB during berserk counts double).

 

kameelyan

I had a few questions from some druids on my server a few days ago, so I figure I'd post here too. While the tooltip for berserk says you can't use tiger's fury while this is active, the reverse is NOT true. As is, my cycle tends to end with a rip and having 5-15 energy left. When I was playing around with berserk, I just pop TF then Berserk if it's up. That's 6 seconds of extra damage + half energy cost. It's quite nice.

So if the situation became that you did FB because you're RIP still had 10+ seconds, you could pop TF + Berserk and easily get a new rip + a FB ready by the time berserk was down.

I truly think it's going to be very difficult to come up with a perfect rotation. So much is going to be situational depending on what's still on cooldown, what's the time left on rip, when you get ooc procs, etc.

Here's my questions:

What mods are you guys using on beta at the moment to track SR and RIP/Rake/Mangle? RIP/Rake?Mangle could be tracked by natur enemy cast bar, but what about SR? I know rogues have a slice and dice mod, but wasn't sure if it could easily be used with SR. SatrinaBuffFrame has some options to create filters and send buffs to a stand alone buff bar, so I'm thinking of using that - but wanted to get an idea of what everyone plans on using, if anything?

Secondly, any idea where we're sitting in full DPS cat mode compared to higher end dps classes such as rogues/hunters? Based on the simulator provided here, I see our DPS is very easily 4500+, but wasn't sure what the other classes were pumping out in beta.

 

nightcrowler

The best way to use berserk is after a SR.
You start with few energy and:
TF
Berserk
build 5 cps
rip
build 5 cps
fb

 

manapaws

I'm using Pitbull (dogtags) to track mangle/trauma, and also to track a bleeding target (for the purposes of R&T talent). Also ClassTimers for managing our "dots" - ie rake, rip, sr.

Edit: Wanted to add, in regards to the previous tanking discussion. I honestly don't understand why they can't make defense rating spread evenly x% to each avoidance type your class is capable of doing.

 

Grubsnik

As a trend it's pretty much baseless. You have 2 datapoints and from there attempt to identify a trend. I'd more likely expect that Blizzard is spending around 33% on agility for all items, and the variance you are seeing is mostly due to "rounding errors". If you do the math for the TBC set pieces you will see most of them spending around 25% of itembudget on agility. There is an increase in percentage over Ilvl, but i think that is just a natural consequence of keeping the same amount of sockets.

If you did extrapolate on your "trend" you would find that no epic items below ilvl 100 or so, would ever carry any agility.

If you look at the numbers i've done, you will see that even with the low point for agility on our gearset, we will only drop 2.3% behind in avoidance. That should be seen in the light of the bonus armor from agility granting us +4.6% TTL (provided we aren't armor capped).

Going from Ilvl 200->300 gives us the exact same scaling as warriors.

As a side comment, it seems the item budget formula it's quite up to spec for 3.0 any more. or [Heroes' Dreamwalker Raiments] is about 7 levels over budget, before sockets.

TPS got a huge boost in Wrath, for all classes. Doing higher TPS will most likely not be a selling point. But what we loose on avoidance we gain in mitigation from agi. In the current game.

Biggest question right now is how we will make up for the armor we will lose from the bear form revamp. Getting more Armor from AP or just flat out increasing bear modifier seems like the obvious candidates. Adding scaling from STR or def is stillborn as the vision from blizzard is clearly to reserve these stats for platewearers.

 

Mysticum

That explains everything, except how incredible stupid I am. Gonna put a barrel on my head for the next hour.


Regarding dps rotation. Will there ever be situations where Faerie Fire will be worth to keep up? Let's actually say I raid without any armor reducing debuffs except Fearie Fire, will it be woth to keep it up, or should I just ignore it?

 

halmmar

As cat, you will always have time slots where you are too low on energy to do anything, so you might as well FFF.
As bear, the threat boost is good enough to reapply often (unless you get the bug where you aren't allowed to...).

 

Mysticum

As for cat, yes it feels like there will be spot to fill with Faerie Fire. Initial as well of course. Just wonder if it's worth to break the normal dps cycle to reapply Faerie Fire.

As for bear, are you sure about that? Seems like FFF is a poor choice when you have rage to spare.

 

Rhaegal

FFF lasts 40 seconds. If you reapply it whenever you have spare time between GCDs and not enough energy to do anything else, you will never find yourself in a situation where you'd have to consider breaking a normal dps cycle.

Stand back! I'm going to try SCIENCE!

 

Monedula

As I see it Blizzard tackled the defense problem. Giving us 6% crit immunity from talents means you will never need defense. True defense did also increase avoidance but it was way more worthless to Druids then to other tanking classes. I don't see blizzard ever listening to people who complain they don't want to spend the talent points and instead have defense on their gear. Blizzard would need to make leaher with defense or let people use PVP items in raids, which is not something Blizzard likes. Instead of seeing pretty worthless stats like defense on our items we now can have agility which is better for druids.

Having crit immunity from talents also means you are as a tank no longer required to become crit immune via using BG/arena items (cause there simply were no good tanking items in raids that had enough defense).
Also by dropping the extra armor on leather they made the items more universal.

This making items more universal is, I think, part of a greater plan Blizzard has.
They want to let people see all of the game (talking PVE here).
gearing up can take a long time. Especially when a Cenarion item dropped in Molten Core and all druids had it but there were priests that really needed their Tier set item.

This was solved completely in TBC when they introduced tokens. If only one person needed a tier item (the others had it) there was a 1 in 3 chance he would get it, not a 1 in 9.
For each class though there are certain items that are unique to them. Gun, Totem, Libram, Idol, and possibly some other items that were clearly for that class only. However most items could be worn by multiple classes.

For tanking druids the gear was very thin. Armor, defense. Leather items were rogue or druid items, but not for Bears.
This left them hard(er) to gear up, though if using DKP they would get the Tier items first... what else to spend dkp on?
Now leather items that will drop will be rogue, feral druid cat and tanking druid.
This makes our armor something less, true, but our avoidance better. One big advantage, most of our cat gear is tanking gear. Switching from cat to bear in raids will be easy and, except for talents, will make us able to be better dpssers while in catform (and offtanking in a fight). It will save us from dying too when we are dpssing and all of a sudden a tank dies. You can take over without much strain on the healers.

If we seem to lack in certain aspects I am sure blizzard will correct it at some point. I however do not see us needing defense which would then work differently for druids. That only introduces the problem of having to make lots of different gear for Blizzard. This is the way Blizzard has intended for us tanking druids in WotLK, and with WotLK around the corner I do not see Blizzard designing extra items that are for tanking druids only (and then again, only those tanking druids that do not want to invest talent points to get crit immune).

 

halmmar

A little test with 2908 AP gave 148 dmg for FFF, and 546 for a swipe crit. FFF is more threat (single-target, assuming FFF never crits and swipe always does).

Edit: I'm 70 and the static +632 is for the lv80 version of FFF I believe. The number is pretty high (450-500-ish? for 70).

 

kameelyan

Sorry, I figured having SR up first was assumed .

 

Rolfcaron

For Bear armor scaling, is there a chance that using a Stamina > Armor would be a possibility to consider?

The gear we share with Rogues is already pretty heavily laden in it, and it would give us incentive to stack Stamina in higher values even beyond the point in which it is not drastically increasing our survivability on extra Hp alone. While I would not be fond of the overall conversion (using a defensive stat to assist with a defensive stat, would much rather see defensive to offensive or vice versa).

We can see at least one example of a Sta to Stat conversion in the Prot Pally tree (33% stamina to Spell Damage if I recall correctly).

The only advantage Blizzard would have to doing this that I can think of is that there is little to no gear change, and there is then a reason to keep throwing out large amounts of stamina rings/trinkets/neck pieces.

 

Gingershnaps

from mmo-champion.com:

Feral AP changes
I've made no secret that we think the FAP solution is a little awkward and kind of sticks out with all of the other shared gear solutions.

We think we could probably get the druid AP to scale off weapon damage. It wouldn't take too much effort to make a staff that might be appealing to both a druid and a hunter. This would also allow druids to pick up the odd two-handed mace. Those probably wouldn't have the ideal stats for a druid, but a purple dps plate mace might be better than a green Agi staff for a bear or cat.

If we did this, the net result would be that druid dps would stay the same. They would just have more loot options, and maybe hunters would too.

 

Davaeorn

<40 means below 40. If you use Tigers Fury when you have 40 or over energy, you will, in the truest sense of the word, waste it. Personally I try to use it whenever my energy doesn't exceed 30 to allow for some space to make sure you've got the time to use an ability before your energy caps out. It doesn't really matter when you use it because you're bound to be shredding if you've got 100 energy. If you time TF with gear procs, used abilities from trinkets or a DPS consumable you could possibly reap more benefits out of it seeing how you'd increase the number of abilities you can fit into the duration of said occurence.

 

david0925

I've thought about sta>armor as well and it's another valid idea. It would also make stamina a bit more useful past the survival threshold as well.

Maniq is my hero

 

• Astrylian

EDIT: Nevermind, found it.

EDIT 2: How about base stats of a naked, untalented NE and Tauren Druid at 80? Anyone know them, for sure?

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manapaws

I posted Tauren ones back a few pages Astrylian:

Feral talents/abilities - WotLK discussion

NB: That was a couple of builds ago, not sure if anything's changed. I don't have beta access anymore to see.

 

Herb

I've done some Omen of Clarity testing, mainly to find out whether it's a PPM mechanic (as posted by Blizzard's Ghostcrawler) or a fixed-percentage mechanic (as implied by JimmyTheNumbers earlier): preliminary (going to add more testing hours) results imply that it's, in fact, an ordinary PPM mechanic, and thusly, haste has no influence at all (it's around 3.5 effective PPM with 10%-haste gear and without). There's no internal CD, OOC can proc on consecutive swings.

It shouldn't differ, but if anyone has a resident shaman to test with, that would be helpful as well; for my (rather anecdotal) 5 minute test with WF totem up, OOC was proccing like a madmen.

 

Mijae

In terms of current mechanics, 1 stamina is equal to roughly 5 armor (pre-multipliers) in terms of Survival only. Stamina has zero Mitigation value though. This is the main problem. Stacking Stamina increases your survival rate, but turns you into a mana sponge. Of course, this very well could depend on healer mana regen. If they never run out it doesn't matter, but that's highly unlikely.

Feral DruidStats spreadsheet
v3.2.0.0.xls - updated 8/4/2009

 

halmmar

When most healers have a 40-50% overheal rate I don't see this as a major problem.

 

kameelyan

To add to this note, being a mana sponge is also a huge disadvantage to the entire raid. More healers will have to focus on the tank, which means less healers on the entire raid, which clearly is not something you want.

 

Prinsesa

Wouldn't this have the same problem as an AP to armor conversion with regards to raid buff variability? Granted, you'd be looking at 'defensive' buffs instead of 'offensive' buffs, but missing Fort and Kings (among others) would be a sizable blow to your supposed armor value, depending on how large the conversion factor is.

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler