I really like the idea of your Thorny Fur... mainly because it's a talent that scales down with gear as required to be balanced. Ie: Better gear (more damage mitigation) = less reflection but ability to tank higher level mobs OR you can manually lower gear (worse mitigation) = more threat but inability to exploit it on bosses.


To extreme's, Thorny Fur could never become the ultimate farming tool since all the lower level stuff is getting mitigated to near nothing.

Something about that really feels balanced to me. Anyone see it differently?


I guess there is a point where we don't want to make passive threat so high that we don't have to do anything to keep aggro... but I don't really see that happening here ... at least not in any competitive DPS environment.

I don't really understand the recent hype about AoE tanking. We've handled it just fine in TBC with a 3-target swipe, except the really big groups that basically only a prot paladin could handle.

Has it been shown the encounters in wotlk are designed in such a way all tanks suddenly need to be able to handle 10 mobs?

There's a number of 6+ mob encounters in CoT Strat that make it harder for a bear to tank, particularly in heroic. There are other places where many multiples of mobs are needing to be tanked as well. In addition to that, swipe had not been holding aggro well enough on the mobs it did hit to make it viable as a 4-5 mob aggro generator.

I'd much rather swipe get slightly buffed and have some kind of new mechanic (thorny bear would be great) to get some aggro on many, many mobs, but in this late stage of the game I think that's simply not going to happen.

I certainly don't think a swipe(still constrained by a cone or 180 degrees) without a target limit would be silly, but I don't know what the ramifications might be beyond standard aoe tanking in an instance. That's not an insignificant change.

AoE tanking is a big deal in WotLK, the reasons why are many:

1. The AoE cap has been lifted so high that it won't be a factor during normal gameplay (a good starting point for more info: the Mage WotLK thread for numbers and discussion).

2. A lot of specs (all of them?) that previously couldn't add significant AoE damage have gained the ability to do so.

3. Paladins are just as good as in TBC at tanking big packs of mobs. Death Knights are close second. Warriors with Shockwave and the glyphed Thunderclap are miles ahead of us. While Berserk is awesome for regular packs (and by awesome I mean omg-this-is-getting-nerfed awesome) we have nothing for big packs.

4. Encounter design, based upon having done quite a lot of regular instances and some Naxx normal raids, seems to be leaning towards larger packs of mobs than in TBC.

The bottom line is that being able to tank big packs reasonably well is currently the norm in WotLK, not the exception like in TBC.

I saw the TPS numbers on various talents, but I didn't see DPS numbers. Does anyone have math comparing cat DPS per talent point for:

Naturalist
Predatory Instincts
Rend and Tear
Primal Precision

I know standard DPS cycles are still a question. Can we assume something like the current, but with the first finisher being a savage roar instead of a rip? Or is that too naive at this point?

[Edit: Forget to include Primal Precision]

http://elitistjerks.com/903105-post2157.html

Here's is an new sorted TPS estimate based on a full blue 80 bear set. This is assuming infinite rage on a single target.

Savage Fury: 510.65 (255.33)
LotP: 139.71
Primal Precision: 242.13 (121.07)
Rend & Tear: 383.58 (76.72)
Predatory Strikes: 205.42 (68.47)
Naturalist: 318.71 (63.74)
Predatory Instincts: 182.44 (60.81)
Sharpened Claws: 167.65 (55.88)
Imp Mangle: 151.58 (50.53)
Protector of the Pack: 132.14 (44.05)
Feral Instinct: 82.01 (27.34)
Shapeshifter (5): 134.84 (26.97)
SotF: 54.07 (18.02)

This order should remain relatively the same if threat values change. As gear levels improve, PI will move up a place in the list. Obviously for multi-target tanking FI goes up and if low rage RnT goes down. I also haven't modeled Berserk (or KotJ) for bear, it will slightly lower Imp Mangle and up Savage Fury.

I'm hoping my estimate for Lacerate is off. Right now I'm assuming the constant threat scales from 70 to 80 at the same rate the bleed damage scales (285 @ 70 => ~588 @ 80). If the 20% damage threat mod still exists, any AP scaling will barely affect threat. Pure swipe is almost equal to just keeping the bleed up (similar to current). Although, the bleed will buff maul through RnT. Maybe they wanted to keep the current bear cycle instead of spamming one or the other.

I've added a macro to my spreadsheet to calculate these from current settings.

Edit: Fixed maul

I've tested bear threat on PTR, the assumption I've made on my program was wrong (probably also the ones from Mijae, looking at bear threat value he posted before).

Those are at level 70:

BEAR base modifier (BM): 2.071428571 (it's basically a salvation included value of (1.3+1.15)/0.7 )

The following value are taken BEFORE the bear threat modifier:

Autoattack: dmg * BM (obviosly)
Mangle: 1.5 * dmg * BM
Maul: (322 + dmg) * BM
Swipe: dmg * BM
Lacerate (initial application): (285 + 0.5 * dmg ) * BM
Lacerate (dot): 0.5 * dmg * BM

Feral Fairie Fire: (553+dmg) * BM (where dmg is 0.05*ap+1)

What was changed?
- The have increased a bit the maul static component
- They have increased a lot lacerate scaling component (from 0.2 to 0.5), making it pretty good!
- They have increased a lot mangle scaling from 1.3 to 1.5 (pretty good!)

- Maul untalented (w/o R&T) = Mangle (+ static threat) at T7-naxx level, maul will do about 1.5 times mangle damage but mangle will do 1.5 times more threat.


I dunno the data from level 80 because I can't log Beta, but if static threat scales like static damage it should be 809 for lacerate and 568 for maul.

Actually a t7-naxx druid with this spec will do (unlimited rage) 3140 DPS and 7520 TPS. An average dpser will be at around 4500-5000 dps making threat not an issue, so probably we will be able to swap some dps talents for utility (like ImpLoP and so on).

P.S.
Can someone verify the data and try it at level 80 in beta? for testing i've used Zthreatmeter

In a full bear spec Master Shapeshifter is clearly not worth taking. Naturalist is essentially a 10 point talent, dropping it to 4th from the bottom in TPS per talent point and not nearly worth taking on it's own. This leaves OOC as the only talent tying a full-time bear into the Resto tree. Can any bears in Beta give an estimate of how important OOC is to tanking, if it is at all? With the feral tree being so bloated for bears I really want to go 0/71/0 (possibly 0/69/2 if I'm the only druid), and only OOC is making me consider the Resto tree. If it can be skipped then all of the important tanking talents can be taken in a single spec, including the situational talents like Brutal Impact and Primal Tenacity.

Hello all. Long time reader, first time poster here.

I was just thinking about the "pure" tank question.

While Naturalist is 10% more damage = 10% more tps, not going into Resto at all does allow for
http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?drui...00000000000000

The primary issue with this build would be that, although you have all the tanking toys in the improved bash for spell interrupts and IW as well as the buffed DR, you might run into TPS issues once your dps start gearing up.

That being said I'll have to take a look at this closer to release as it might be ideal for the gearing game when guilds first hit 80 and surviving instances/heroics is actually a challenge. For endgame raiding however I think you'll miss the threat as well as the viability of cat dps.

On a related note, has there been any further clarification on how the proposed respecing will work?