Ah, sorry. You're right. In that case I'm not sure what's a reasonable modeling; what's the value of a CP? Is 20% more damage as good as 20% more CP? I'm not sure how to even start modeling that.

A very simple solution would be to remove the bear multiplier from all non-leather pieces save perhaps the feral weapon. (or they could easily remove it from all non-leather pieces and just pile it on the weapon and make armor cheap for itemization on staves). In this way armor would be more in line with other tanking classes and the non-leather slots would be not so much required to have armor on them as they do now.

One way or another, they need to stop nerfing ferals by nerfing base abilities. Either nerf feral talents or nerf feral itemization.

Promethius, have you posted any of those suggestions on the PTR or beta boards?

It's those +armor trinkets that are the cause of "too much" mitigation. Since druids have such bad scalability with just about everything other than armor and stamina, those trinkets are god. Nothing else even holds a candle to those two things.

Did some quick testing on my druid on the PTR, at level 70.

With raid-buffs (shaman, warrior, no blessings unfortunaly) I was able to reach ~5700 AP, 47% crit and 130 hit-rating (Tier6 gear pretty much, Twins-staff).

I specced 0/50/11 full focussed on DPS (cat-talents). With just spamming mangle (no shred), Rake and Ferocious Bite (had 5/5 Feroc. Aggression and 5/5 Rend & Tear and 4x T6 set-bonus equipped) I was able to reach 2.2k DPS sustained (I could keep this number up for 5 mins while testing). I only had 1/3 KoTJ (20 energy on Tigers Fury).

It seems viable that with the buffed mangle, you can do good DPS without positional requirements, atleast I rate 2200 DPS as very nice, eventho its on lvl 70 dummy which (I presume) has 0 armour on PTR.

Unfortunaly I lacked the time to do better testing with Mangle, Rake, Shred, FB rotation, but I don't think the DPS would be much better, as Mangle only costs 29 energy (with 4x T6 bonus, Improv. Mangle 3/3). Also this 'mangle ftw'-playstyle allows you to drop Shredding Attacks and obv. has no positional requirements.

In practice I think you can pump out even more DPS, as I couldn't see my combo-points properly on the PTR I most likely didn't use FB always directly after reaching 5 combo-points and a lack of a decent DoT-timer my Rake probably fell off quite a few times (not used to using Rake yet)

Sure, if we too good a tank in comparison, we need a nerf. But our scaling seems to be on par (if not worse) than other tanks. Thus, not our scaling should be nerfed (as that will create problems in the future) but our starting point.

We gain high benefits early on, because we have very good jewelry with armor available early on and because we don't have to spend itembudget on crit immunity.

I don't expect our armor on jewelry to scale the way other equipment does (i can be wrong though but it has always been that way). In BC, almost all jewelry with bonus armor was from entry level content and after that we never got any upgrades in that category.

Nerfing the armor on early jewelry pieces or weapon would be a far better solution to the problem.

The limitation of nerfing jewlry armor component is that you're hurting DK mitigation. As a result you need to modify their armor benefit, which will create another problem in the DK area similar to what druids have been experiencing.

I still think the most reasonable thing to do right now is adjust agi-dodge ratio since that's the area we are currently the weakest in, and the advantage of having a better hp modifier is actually so you don't need to stack 2 billion stamina gems to get to the line of "safe health"

Or you could just limit the benefit that druids get from the non-leather pieces, which fixes druids while keeping DKs fine.

So what you're suggesting is creating two modifier, as in , 400% bonus for armor and weapon, and 200% (arbitrary number) from jewelry, correct? That is still axing scalability, and depending on the numbers you throw around in your proposal and in the way blizzard adjusted, can be compromised. So I don't really think the two ideas are even that different. What you said is definitely a valid proposal, but I don't know if that's even that different from what blizzard did aside from number tweaking.

Edit: Let's say armor contribution from leather armors is X, everywhere else is Y

Your proposal is: bear armor = 5.5X + 2.2Y, assuming non leather pieces are 200% contribution
Blizzard's proposal: bear armor= 5.06(X+Y), which is assuming bear gives 360% armor contribution right now

Malazaar: Since DK is in the game, I'm fairly confident we'll get new armory jewelries to play with.

They need to junk armor on jewelry entirely, or make it into an equip bonus. It would bring bears in-line with the other plate-wearing classes and save us the headache of being fucking chained to blue trinkets that have no upgrades in later tiers. See my post here: WotLK Beta (US-English) Forums -> GC: Bear Form HP Scaling Too High?

Actually, it'd be 400% bonus for armor, 0 bonus for jewelry, 0 bonus from weapon but make weapons have a ton of armor on them. Scalability is still a problem but it is at least dealt with somewhat, as the importance of armor is limited but is still there. Feral weapons which are sadly here to stay for a while become really feral, on the order of importance of a warrior's shield. It reduces dependence on specific slots so that they must have armor no matter what, brings druid armor on base with warrior/pally/DK armor, and allows for a higher limit on scaling.

This would of course require some changing of talents/skills to allow higher mitigation/avoidance with that gear, but that would be a win as well, allowing for potentially more scaling.

For now, it's either armor (limited returns for DK), or Block (no returns), unless they are better off with DPS jewelries. In this case i'll probably have to check the DK TC forums.

Kalbear: using your latest case, of no additional return on jewelry and weapon(this one doesn't matter since it's unique to feral 5 time 500 is the same as 2500). That'll create another formula that favors our leather pieces. I don't see how this addresses scaling any better or worse than what blizzard did, aside from maybe number tweaking, so if you can explain to me a bit so I can understand more, I'd greatly appreciate it.