Feral talents/abilities - WotLK discussion - Page 17

Merple · 07/23/08, 4:25 PM

Originally Posted by Mikari

We do, however, intend to allow Druids to be able to use items and enchants with procs in forms

It would be stupid not to. As currently implemented, players currently use and rely on the use of items by way of a stupid and borderline exploit macro which doesn't fit with the spirit of forms.

Enchants, I'm honestly surprised, but quite excited. Good change.

kalbear · 07/23/08, 4:33 PM

Interestingly enough I'd still use healing pots as they're done now instead of not switching because they effectively gain 40% more health back per pot that way. Unless it's impossible to do so for some reason. It should be doable; just have to add the cancel form part to the beginning of the macro.

Cat form it wouldn't matter of course, but usually you want to shift in cat form anyway. So that's kind of a wash.

Merple · 07/23/08, 4:40 PM

Originally Posted by kalbear

Interestingly enough I'd still use healing pots as they're done now instead of not switching because they effectively gain 40% more health back per pot that way. Unless it's impossible to do so for some reason. It should be doable; just have to add the cancel form part to the beginning of the macro.

Cat form it wouldn't matter of course, but usually you want to shift in cat form anyway. So that's kind of a wash.

Using potions in forms takes the potion off of the GCD, which can be critical. I agree that when it's convenient, getting the additional 40% health is nice, but I've been in many situations where I'm mashing my pot/HS key and getting caught in the GCD.

torand · 07/23/08, 4:43 PM

If they actually do remove crushing blows, it seems to me that druids will be the new *best* single target tanks of end-game raids. With the scaling of strength to SBV changing for warriors and pallies, they will once again be based on mitigating a static number of damage off of every strike, while bear tanks will still have massively more armor to mitigate a percentage of each strike. Without crushing blows as a factor that warriors can avoid that bears can't, druids will be taking less damage from the hardest hitting mobs.

Warriors also seem to be moving toward more spikey damage since they cannot ensure a block of every attack without stacking SBR, or Defense. If things go in the direction they look to be going right now, Warriors seem like inferior tanks to Druids against anything that does not do targeted magic damage.

I think warrior threat will catch up with (Hopefully not surpass) Druid threat on a single target with the changes to strength as a mitigation stat for them, but consistent mitigation it would seem is moving toward Druids.

Merple · 07/23/08, 4:53 PM

Assuming things remain similar to TBC, Druid tanks will be superior tanks during the early raid game. This mirrors the beginning of TBC, and this is due to the significant returns of armour early in the game.

We are however assuming that armour values for druid gear stay high. With the removal of crushing blows and the homogenization of gear, we may see druid armour come much closer in line with that of plate + shield. So long as our overall avoidance (by way of agility scaling and dodge) stays in line with warriors, paladins and death knights, the tanking returns should remain similar. This also allows us to make more direct use of consumables and buffs that increase armour value, such as Ironshields and Inspiration - one of the major factors in the relative dip in comparative quality of druid tanks near the end of SWP.

Due to the inclusion of armour on trinkets, rings and amulets, we should maintain something of an armour lead simply based on our armour modifier, but it may not be anywhere near as pronounced as it is currently.

To be honest, universal leather homogenization is the single most worrying issue for me going into WotLK. We'll see how it plays out.

kalbear · 07/23/08, 5:02 PM

Using potions in forms takes the potion off of the GCD, which can be critical. I agree that when it's convenient, getting the additional 40% health is nice, but I've been in many situations where I'm mashing my pot/HS key and getting caught in the GCD.

Guess that's true. In that case we could have the best of both worlds; when you need to use a pot have a macro that simply uses the pot no matter what (something you can mash) but when you have the extra time do the GCD version.

• Falk · 07/23/08, 6:55 PM

There already exists the conditional script that makes a mashable pot-if-out-of-GCD macro. Couldn't that be expanded to cancelform-pot out of GCD and simply pot within GCD?

Mijae · 07/23/08, 7:35 PM

Originally Posted by Falk

There already exists the conditional script that makes a mashable pot-if-out-of-GCD macro. Couldn't that be expanded to cancelform-pot out of GCD and simply pot within GCD?

You could probably just move the stop macro call to after the pot use instead of before it. Though you would only use it for a health pot / healthstone macro. Potions like ironshield, free action, and haste could all be used normally now.

tenshirou · 07/23/08, 7:41 PM

The change that has me the most worried is that our returns on agility are being tuned to the same as a rogue. we are going from a 25 agi:1% to a 40 agi:1% crit ratio. From what I have seen, this is going to be for me, an 11% drop in crit. Assuming a simple 1:1 ratio for crit to dps increase (the actualy amount is greater due to combo points) I am looking at a 120 dps drop in damage. The only direct buff I see is the 20% increase to ap from our weapons. For teh Staff of the Forest Lord, this is only a 15 dps increase. So I am easily losing 100 dps.

Now the new talents might help redress some of the loss, but at the same time we are getting those new talents, the other melee dps classes are receiving theirs.

So am I missing something, or is feral dps about to go from just badly scaling to marginal?

As a side note, this is also going to hurt tanking to a certain extent. I know that depending on the fight, upwards of 50% of my rage can come from the extra rage I get from crits. Obviously on raid bosses, the amount is a lot less, but I see some rage starvation coming on at least until I get past the lvl 75 instances and new gear catches up to where I am now.

• Astrylian · 07/23/08, 7:51 PM

Don't forget 25% more AP, 10% more shred damage, 30% more bleed damage, Tiger's Fury 20% of the time, 60 free energy every 30 sec, 155 free energy every 5 minutes...

tenshirou · 07/23/08, 8:04 PM

I was trying to avoid any new talents since as I said, you have to consider that the other dps classes are also getting new damage improving talents. Or to put it another way, I have to spend talent points to get to where I am NOW, while rogues, warriors, shaman, are all using their talent points to get further ahead. That is why I am so bothered.

• Astrylian · 07/23/08, 8:10 PM

Only half of those are new talents for us.

EDIT: And don't think others aren't losing things too.

Valerian · 07/23/08, 8:11 PM

The confirmation that there is no Dire Cat form does have me slightly worried. If we're going to be sharing Rogue gear we're going to end up with more Hit than we really need unless we get dual wielding from something else. Unless the rogue gear doesn't get a lot of hit itemization and its left to gems...

seminarca · 07/23/08, 8:20 PM

Originally Posted by tlbj6142

Yes I will. I hate shifting out to self-heal while questing. Ugh!

The obvious solution would be to level with a leveling spec (Imp LotP, Savage Fury etc), and then respec to a more raid orientated build once you hit 80.

Originally Posted by kalbear

According to the beta forums, it's 145%. Just wasn't reported.

Thanks for the link! This one had me concerned for a bit, but I was sure it was just an oversight.

No actual Dire Cat makes me a sad panda =(

Zadnak · 07/23/08, 8:31 PM

Originally Posted by Astrylian

Don't forget 25% more AP, 10% more shred damage, 30% more bleed damage, Tiger's Fury 20% of the time, 60 free energy every 30 sec, 155 free energy every 5 minutes...

Not getting Dire Cat doesn't bother me too much considering the changes we're getting, as quoted above.

Sambamc · 07/24/08, 12:12 AM

Originally Posted by Zadnak

Not getting Dire Cat doesn't bother me too much considering the changes we're getting, as quoted above.

I disagree.

Dire Cat was rumored to involve dual-wield. If we're being itemized for rogue gear then we'll have hit be a predominant stat on our gear that isn't very useful in the absence of dual-wielding. As is, our white damage isn't sufficiently impressive for us to want or need to intentionally surpass the special cap.

As for the other buffs that were mentioned, I feel that they put us on par to scale with current damage dealers but do not necessarily leave us poised to compete with other dps'ers when they have their own WotLK talents and skills.

Lastly, while Trauma is nice, it is a Warrior talent. Again, it's nice but not a buff to us any more than you would consider any other buff of another class a druid buff. When rogues get new ranks of Expose Armor, sure it helps us but we shouldn't exactly rejoice or rely on that.

• Astrylian · 07/24/08, 12:30 AM

Us not wanting to get more hit than is required to hitcap our specials has nothing to do with how impressive our white damage is. it's because our hitcap for specials IS our hitcap for while damage. Both white and yellow cap at 9% on bosses.

Us sharing rogue gear doesn't mean we have to end up with tons of hit. Some offset items will have hit, some won't. We'll prolly prefer the ones that don't. And most importantly, there's still the whole tier sets to differentiate us from Rogues. I expect we'll see little hit on ours, a bunch on theirs. They'll gem for hit, we won't.

Trauma is nice *for us*. Nobody else does 1/3 of their damage from bleeds. (assuming we go with a high-rip-uptime cycle)

Protagonist · 07/24/08, 1:55 AM

Originally Posted by Astrylian

Trauma is nice *for us*. Nobody else does 1/3 of their damage from bleeds.

From what I understand Trauma is a deep Arms talent and not something raiding warriors can be expected to pick up.

angi · 07/24/08, 2:25 AM

Don`t forget that WF will work for us, 20% haste is a huge number.

wuffles · 07/24/08, 2:27 AM

Originally Posted by Astrylian

Us sharing rogue gear doesn't mean we have to end up with tons of hit. Some offset items will have hit, some won't. We'll prolly prefer the ones that don't. And most importantly, there's still the whole tier sets to differentiate us from Rogues. I expect we'll see little hit on ours, a bunch on theirs. They'll gem for hit, we won't.

Trauma is nice *for us*. Nobody else does 1/3 of their damage from bleeds. (assuming we go with a high-rip-uptime cycle)

I agree, and really don't see where people are taking the "oh no what about going over the hit cap" arguement from. When King of the Jungle supposedly had another armor multiplier in addtion to Thick Hide, I could almost see where the line of thinking originated that we'd be sharing TANKING leather(and consequently dps leather - since they'd be dps-oriented pieces) with Rogues. It will be interesting to see what the WotLK raid sets are composed of slot wise (will it be head/chest/gloves/legs like it was before sunwell, will they add boots/belt/bracer like the post-sunwell t6, or hell, even do something like t3 and throw in a ring slot), but regardless - even if we filled all the non-set pieces with rogue loot, you'd be hard pressed to go over the hit cap in tank gear. Consider also that we're clammoring for rings, necks, trinkets, and weapons with defensive stats like armor and stamina, and I think that makes it even less of a concern.

Now if you're talking about cat gear, I don't really understand the argument either, because we're already after off-set "rogue" leather for dps and I haven't heard of any feral having a huge issue with going over the cap (again, mostly because we want our 2/4pc set bonuses and so the number of slots where we do take off-set items is reduced). Personally I think we've taken Blizzard's attempt to reduce loot bloat by homogenizing stats, and run with it, as well as this notion that they expect us to tank and dps in the same gear. It would be nice if Blizzard could make that work, but as long as there are options available - players are going to min/max for the primary role they'll be preforming for the fight.

And while Trauma is nice for us, unless things change pretty drastically, I doubt we'll be seeing it in raids. Right now, warriors can pick up Blood Frenzy and just about every useful talent in the Fury tree at the same time. If you spend enough points to get Trauma you can't get Imp. Berserker's stance (10% ap and 10% reduced threat at 5/5), and if you go deep enough to get Trauma you need 2 more "filler" points in arms to get to the 40point tier talents and then you've only got 1 point to spend (assuming you dont want to start pulling points out of some very useful 25 point Fury talents...)and nothing that deep in Arms even seems as appealing considering the trade off. It really looks like (and this is the notion I get from our warriors) that a dual wielding Arms/Fury hybrid is the "next thing" for DPS warriors.

I hate to be a buzz kill, and its still early in beta, but again - I'm not expecting to see Trauma on the debuff list unless they do something that promotes warriors going further down the Arms tree than Blood Frenzy. Honestly, I'd say we're better off assuming we'll be getting the energy/rage returns from Hunting Party (most of us are veterans of the "lol hunter group" already and they've really done some nice things to the Surv. tree which make bringing one that much more of a boon for the raid) rather than 30% to our bleeds from Trauma.

Zhoreilh · 07/24/08, 7:31 AM

Don`t forget that WF will work for us, 20% haste is a huge number.

Yes, but it would have been even better with off-hand attacks... haste will benefit much more to a dual wielding, "slice and dicing" rogue. It may lead again to end game scaling problems.

Astral · 07/24/08, 9:25 AM

I'm not too bummed about Dire Cat. We never knew exactly what it would've become (someone show me a link of an official word of it having DWing...was just a rumor floating as far as I saw), and it's hard to get too upset over something you've never even tested. Sure it would've been nice if it made it so STR = 2 Atk and AGI = 2 atk, so we'd be good with either feral or rogue gear (enhancement shamans are losing 1 atk from STR but getting 1 from AGI, and another from INT with a talent, so wouldn't be too much to change our formula), or had an AGI:Crit shift in formula to put us back in line, but that wouldn't have fixed the fact bears are still getting screwed there....

And like people have said, it's still early in beta. Classes can still and will get big changes and suprise talents (have you seen the Mage arcane tree? those were some pretty big changes in just one day). We could end up with a 3/6/9% haste talent at the bottom of the tree (Arcane Mages got +6% spell haste, why not?) We could get a SwordSpec-like talent and get a chance to do extra attacks. That would sort of simulate DWing. How about a talent to lower dmg taken in cat for 3-4 seconds after using Cower (like Hunter pets get). Useful while soloing, in PvP, getting aggro while raiding. Oh imagine if we did get a Vanish as a 45pt or something. Or maybe something really cool like "Inspiring Roar" that made Savage Roar not only give the 25% to you, but also give 5 or 10% of your atk to your party (depending on how itemization goes, +500 atk from having 5k atk might be a bit much, or maybe not at lvl 80 /shrug). I've always wanted "Feeding Frenzy" that would somehow imbue certain attacks (like Ferocious Bite) to lifetap a huge amount, since we couldn't use potions. Either use it and "Your next Ferocious Bite has a 20% increased chance to crit and heals you for 30% of the damage it does" or "For the next 15 seconds your attacks have a chance to heal you for .5% of your health per bleeding effect on the target."

So many new mechanics they could still give (or steal for) us to make up for not getting something we supposedly weren't getting anyway.

there's still time for change...

As for the new textures (repeatable quests from the Bear and Cat spirits in Moonglade would be great!)...here's hoping for Polar Bear, Koala Bear, Panda Bear, Black Bear...Tiger, White Tiger, Snow Leopard, Panther, White Lion! Maybe you could get the quest from the bear or cat, and they'd give you a spirit item that you'd go and then use on different kinds of bears/cats in the world and "sample" their essence and mimic their model. I'd love it if Blizzard went nuts with a dozen new models/textures (as if) and the 3-4 feral cats that somehow found a way into your 25man all looked different.

Btw, while playing with talents, I somehow came to a feral spec that ended up with only 3 points in Naturalist to get the 2 points in Master Shapeshifter. Losing 4% dmg but gaining it back in Bear, but at the same time losing 4% dmg, but gaining 4% crit back in cat. Would that be worth it? Especially losing so much crit with the stupid new AGI formula? I mean, I'd rather have both, but with so many points needed in the Feral tree, can only put so many in Resto (want imp motw, but that's not happening, either).

joe_in_hell · 07/24/08, 9:54 AM

Panda would be incredible!

Valerian · 07/24/08, 10:12 AM

There are several things that need to examined, WRT comparative scaling, both good and bad. Note this is not looking at new talents since everyone has these and no real analysis of the numbers for these, on both sides, has been done.

1) New WF: Clearly this is a boon to us, what effect does this have on dual wielders. At first glance it appears to be a buff to them as well since previous WF only worked on their MH weapons. Rogues will get extra energy from combat potency due to this so its unclear whether this is a larger buff for us or them. Similarly Fury warriors will gain more energy due to extra OH hits so again exact analysis is unclear. It has no effect on Enh Shaman (assuming WF weapon did not change). Its effect in 2H warriors and Ret Pallies is in fact detrimental since the 20% chance of an extra hit before added extra AP to said hit, whereas now its just a flat 20% increase to white damage. So new WF gives us more benefit than it does for Ret pallies, 2H warriors and Enh Shaman. Its unclear if its better scaling for us than for Rogues and Fury warriors, but at worst its probably about equal.

2) Predatory Strikes 20% more AP from weapon. This is a very large scaling factor, which means our base weapon DPS will be nearly a tier higher (if not more as AP increases) than other 2H weapons. At the start of TBC when everyone was using relatively low DPS weapons, Druids had an edge. This is essentially going to allow a situation similar to this to continue, by adding a scaling factor to Druids base weapon DPS. Since AP affects all druids attacks (even those weapon damage does not) this is an even larger benefit.

3) Agi->Crit change. This is one thing that is FAR worse in terms of scaling. Going from 20ish Agi for 1% crit to 40 agi for 1% crit is a huge hit. It does make Agi a less appealing stat, though likely still a good one. No doubt though this is a large hit to our scaling. I haven't read anything about other classes changes to their Agi/Crit ratio (besides the standard increase as we level) so its unclear how this affects us WRT other classes.

4) New scaling to Rip and FB. Unclear how this was changed, but getting numbers here will certainly change our scaling one way or another (assuming it wasn't just the constants that got changed). Seeing the extra scaling factor on 5 points rips (over 4 point ones) is one slight benefit we're getting.

Duilliath · 07/24/08, 10:51 AM

Anyone else annoyed to just have the range bug brushed aside ?
"Yea, I looked at the reports, they go back for four years, there's nothing wrong."

Hello... ever stop to think (period, I should've quit this sentence here) that if the Druid community is complaining for four years now, there might actually be a reason for it ? Rather annoying after they stated earlier they were looking into fixing that range bug.