Jone

There have always been very few in game, both Vanilla and Burning Crusade. There were nine quest rewards with bonus armor, of which only one was in an early quest zone. There are a few more scattered in as dungeon drops and six crafted items. We have never been showered with options for high armor gear.

Unless they change the way bear form applies to bonus armor or re-work the stats of every piece of druid leather in the game right now, armor will still be more valuable than any other stat. Just like in BC, people will be wearing gear that's 10 levels outdated like [Mark of Tyranny], and those of us in T6/Sunwell gear will not be upgrading until we get new gear with bonus armor from raid tiers. Something similar happened initially in BC -- greens with good armor were superior to crafted blues and a tier of raiding gear -- and an early patch revised the armor values of a lot of gear as a result. Before the patch, bears were wearing [Manimal's Cinch] if they had done the quest, [Lava Belt] if they had not.

They could modify the armor formula to force us to change, but remember: making armor better will not make us desire it less. To force us to stop valuing bonus armor, reduce the armor bears get from items in some way or you won't see good tanks stop wearing it.

 

loos

I also talked to a Feral in beta who said that Infected Wounds does work on bosses. Although, it seems IW will be the same as Improved Thunderclap or the Judgement boost pallies got so if you have those in the raid you wouldn't need IW in your build at 80.

Any people in this forum who can relate some first-hand experience with IW and bosses?

 

Snarley

So in Blades Edge arena we can or can not jump from the ground up to the pillar where the eye's spawn? According to the pathing we should be able to since there is a ramp up there... But I am doubtful since its such a far path and may have LOS issues if feral charge (Cat) has a sphere of LOS for lack of a better term.

 

Snarley

Depending on the amount of DK's we see in raids, they get benefits to their damage according to how many disease's are on a target. So depending on that bonus it may be good for the synergy of your raid to have at least 1 feral with the talent.

Ultimately I think it will depend heavily on your raid makeup as well as your choice of raiding 10 or 25 mans respectively. 25 mans *maybe* you would have 2 ferals, 10 mans you will most definitely only have 1.

Min/Maxing aside, once you get some respectable gear, your spec becomes less important as encounters get trivialized

 

Zhoreilh

Armor will still be very valuable, but they probably won't allow us to stack insane amount anymore. The main reason being that, with the removal of crushing blows and shield block being on a 20 sec. cooldown, warriors won't be able to compete with our spike damage survavibility.
Let's suppose that lvl80 warrior will start raiding with about 50% armor mitigation. Defensive stance put hem at 55%. My guess is that we won't be far from 55% armor mitigation, versus about 65% in TBC.

 

Edgeworth

MMO-champion is wrong. The official talent calculator got updated with the alpha version of the talent by mistake, and the people at MMO-champion jumped the gun and posted that the talent was being changed back.

For reference, the official talent calculators have been updated again since then and now show the correct versions of Improved Mangle and Primal Tenacity: WorldofWarcraft.com -> Info -> Classes -> Druid -> Talent Calculator

 

manapaws

I was not aware there was a cap. I've been at 0.60 after a powershift (I have haste potion macro'd to my powershift) during bloodlust.

 

• Arawethion

I'd never heard anything about a cap. I know there's been a myth about a general 1s minimum melee swing time for a while, but it wasn't actually true (ask any Rogue who gets Unholy Frenzy in Hyjal). I'm not aware of any evidence of a minimum for Cats either.

Answers to Moonkin questions:
0) Read the TTT/use the spreadsheet: http://elitistjerks.com/f47/t66856-moonkin_pve_dps/
1) Maintain high DoT uptime. Use WiseEclipse.
2) Nothing beats 2T8.
3) Yes, sometimes you cast many Wraths and no Eclipse procs. Deal with it.

 

tlbj6142

From my source...

 

TheNameLessOne

Does anyone know if mobs in that instance have some anti-disease ability and/or cleansing spell?

 

Pike

If they saw the debuff apply, then get removed shortly afterwards, maybe it's just a stacking issue with another debuff? If they only had 1-2 applications of the debuff stacked, maybe a more powerful debuff overwrote them?

 

TheNameLessOne

DKs will also eat the debuff repeatedly w/ obliterate and a few of their other abilities.

 

Arentios

Obliterate only eats diseases that you yourself put up there, not those of other players.

 

• Chicken

It's currently eating all diseases, I don't believe it's ever been stated whether it's only supposed to eat the diseases the Death Knight owns or not, but currently on beta it removes all diseases from who or whatever is being Obliterated.

Source: WoW Forums -> Obliterate and Blood Strike

buff /bʌf/ Pronunciation[buhf]
–verb (used with object)
- to reduce or deaden the force of

 

Shakes

I would be surprised if this was the case. Given all the other stats appear to be doubling (eg green/blue/purple gems are x2 their BC values) it's not unreasonable to expect base armor on items to also double.

The feral T6 has about twice the armor of the rogue T4. So therefore, if stats doubling for equivalent items holds true, you can expect T7 to have as much armor as T6 even without any green armor, as well as much better stats.

 

seminarca

One thing that needs to be kept in mind re: DPS cycles is that the Rip formula is changing. At the moment, we are content to do either 4 or 5 cp Rips since they both get the same AP contribution (4-5 cp = 0.24 * AP, 3 cp = 0.18 * AP). In WotLK, 5 cp = 0.3 * AP, 4 cp = 0.24 * AP, 3 cp = 0.18 * AP. So this will affect finisher priority, I hope you considered this in your simulation nightcrowler.

Re: Infected Wounds. That does seem more like a bug, or dispel or override than the talent not working. As for whether to take it or not, while it's true that if you can get a Warrior TClapping for you IW loses value, it's also true that it's not always possible to have a Warrior TClapping for you.

E.g. MT'ing Felmyst, you either cripple your DPS Warrior by forcing him to stance dance and TClap for you, or cripple him by forcing him to stay Battle Stance and lose Whirlwind and some crit, or bring in a Prot Warrior just to debuffbitch. IW would have value there. Also on phase type fights (like Kalecgos) where your Warrior won't always be there to do it for you. Or on multimob fights where you can't expect your Warrior to saunter over and TClap Veras for you while he's tanking Gathios.

 

nightcrowler

Sure. I used the new formulas reported by MMO-Champions. Basically a 5-cp rip will do more damage, but you will lost 1 cp on crit and you'll increase the cycle lenghts making more difficult to have both SR and RIP up. So a 4 cp RIP is still the better choce. For a similar reason, while doing a 2-3 or 4 cp SR cycle is similar dps wise, doing a 5 cp SR cycle lower the dps by a large amount.

 

seminarca

Fair enough, that makes sense. What kind of SR and Rip uptime are you seeing with 2s/4r? Also, would you mind posting your source code for review? Thanks for all the work on this!

 

TheNameLessOne

Prot paladins' judgments and DKs' Icy Touch also do the attack speed lowering. So you don't need a TC spamming warrior anymore. Also either of these abilities could also be screwing w/ IW, especially Icy Touch as any DK can cast it.

EDIT: Forgot, there is also Rank 9 Curse of Weakness which is 20%. So add warlocks to the mix as well.

 

Shifting

Glyph of Mangle - Increases the duration of Mangle by 6 sec.
Glyph of Rip - Increases the duration of your Rip ability by 3 sec.

Anyone care to come up with a rotation using SR now with those glyphs?

 

wuffles

Am I missing something, or does it seem odd to anyone else that they would add a glyph to extend rip's duration by 3 seconds when the damage ticks every 2?

edit: this is the rest of whats listed on mmo-champion (that's applicable to ferals), I still don't know what to think of it considering the oddities I've mentioned, again probably worth taking with a big grain of salt until things are further hashed out--

Glyph of Moonfire (Class: Druid) - Empowers a Lesser Glyph to reduce the rage cost of your Demoralizing Roar by 20. (There's another glyph with the same name which actually affects moonfire so the name is probably an error, and the new rank of demo roar is still only 10 rage so who knows what's actually going on here...)
Glyph of the White Bear - Changes the appearance of your bear and dire bear forms to that of a polar bear.
Glyph of Frenzied Regeneration - While Frenzied Regeration is active, healing effects on you are 20% more powerful.
Glyph of Growl - Increases the chance for your Growl ability to work successfully by 8%.
Glyph of Mangle - Increases the duration of Mangle by 6 sec.
Glyph of Swipe - Your Swipe ability now hits 1 additional target.
Glyph of Shred - Increases the damage dealt by Shred to stunned and incapacitated targets by 20%.
Glyph of Rip - Increases the duration of your Rip ability by 3 sec.
Glyph of Rake - Your Rake ability prevents targets from fleeing.

this is also listed as a change in the new build:

"Challenging Roar now has a 3 minute cooldown, reduced from 10 minutes."

 

Septus

Some people have already reported changes in tick mechanisms, like energy and rage ticking "continuously," so energy ticking at many times per second.

If that's true it might have implications for dots as well.

 

Saraya

Something like this: TICK TOCK on Vimeo
I'll check on the dots ticking tonight.

 

seminarca

Yeh, I saw the Glyphs, and many of them seem to be very interesting for PvE tanking.

# Glyph of Frenzied Regeneration - While Frenzied Regeration is active, healing effects on you are 20% more powerful.

Pretty much makes Frenzied Regen a fairly effective "oh shit" button. I like it, and it would be cool if it affected its own healing as well.

# Glyph of Growl - Increases the chance for your Growl ability to work successfully by 8%.

Obviously, would be incredible for Kalecgos type fights.

# Glyph of Mangle - Increases the duration of Mangle by 6 sec.

Would have a somewhat radical effect on Cat DPS cycles, and I suspect will help in maintaining a SR/Rip cycle without having to Mangle more than once.

# Glyph of Swipe - Your Swipe ability now hits 1 additional target.

Quite the boon for AoE tanking.

# Glyph of Shred - Increases the damage dealt by Shred to stunned and incapacitated targets by 20%.
# Glyph of Rake - Your Rake ability prevents targets from fleeing.

These would be the PvP ones. I wonder how easy it will be to swap Inscriptions around, because it's hard to settle on just 2 good "major" ones for PvE tanking >.<

 

dlanod

I read the Rake one as applying a CoR-style debuff where mobs who normally flee would no longer do so. I agree that it would be a lot more interesting if it is a snare of some sort.