Everyone seems to have forgotten that we will still scale with armor. When you get your T7 drops your armor will still increase just like it does now. We can't control it in the same way as agility, stamina, and dodge, but don't act like your armor won't improve with higher level gear.

As far as avoidance goes there seems to be some misunderstanding. Even though we don't have parry we are compensated by shallower diminishing returns on dodge and with more pre-DR dodge from agility than the other tanks. We actually still benefit from increasing returns on dodge, though at a far slower rate than before DR was introduced. I don't believe the difference in avoidance between us and the plate wearing tanks will be very substantial.

That's the thing though - there's no sign that this is changing. The only comment from GC was that the armor boost from dire bear would be increased to make up for it.

If they do not add some other method of scaling and do not change dodge's DR, simply bears will become worse than other tanks at some point in the future, most likely around Ulduar.

And it's not that I want the most armor, the best mitigation talent (which really can't hold a candle to block, by the way), the most avoidance and the most stamina. What I would like is parity. It's unhealthy to be the best in one category and the worst in others, because it encourages situations like BC.

A lot of people get mixed up in terminology.

The truth is armor DOES have diminishing returns on armor->%mitigation. If it did not it would have exponential'ish returns on armor->TLL. The diminishing returns on armor->%mitigation are balance such that armor->TTL is linear.

The exact same can be said for AGI/Dodge, i.e.

The truth is Agility/Dodge DOES have diminishing returns on Agility/Dodge->%avoidance. If it did not it would have exponential'ish returns on Agility/Dodge->TLL. The diminishing returns on Agility/Dodge->%avoidance are balance such that Agility/Dodge>TTL is linear.

What's your source on the diminishing returns for bears being different than other tanks? As far as I know, it's the same for every class.

You might want to look at this.

It's not that the model is different, only that the scaling coefficients are adjusted per class.

Someone pointed that out to me. Those scaling differences end up making very little difference. At very low(200 DR) percentages of raw dodge, the other tanks come out with slightly higher dodge than druids do! It takes ~1035 raw dodge rating for druids to get 1% more actual dodge than the other tanks. That's not enough of a scaling difference. My guess is that 'k' needs to lowered a bit or 'c' needs to raised.

From what I understood, the formulas are applied to total dodge and parry (so after agility or strength, defense and dodge/parry rating), not to the rating itself. As a druid you'll be getting plenty of agility too, at a favorable 40ish agi per dodge %, rather than slightly over 70 like warriors or DKs, or 50 for paladins, (all values before DR).

Aaah! I'm pulling my hair out (what little is left) looking for this...

Wasn't there a post that contained DPE or DPS per talent point for each talent? I can find the bear TPS version, but I can't find the Cat version. Any ideas where that post is located? I'm trying to decide between a couple of different builds for leveling and would like that information...

Thanks.

This is a an elegant solution. Would it scale fairly? Would we be choosing between rings, neck, trinkets that possess defense over dodge over expertise over agility / stamina?

It would mean that we have to wear jewelry, trinkets or necks with defense on them. I think that's a good thing. If we're crit immune from talents and don't value armor, by default our rings, trinkets, necks, etc. will all be DPS gear. For reasons I explained earlier in the thread, I don't think that's a good thing. Tanks should have to wear at least some tanking gear while tanking.

What you're doing here is further pigeon-hole people into using selected numbers of gear. Even with nerf to armor, and immunity from crit, a lot of stats from tanking jewelries are still desired, and avoidance/mitigation trinkets are still vastly better than DPS choices, especially on progression raids.

I would go as far as saying there are NO PROBLEM with druids using full dps gear as full tank gear if that ever becomes the case, because a max-bear role and a max-cat role still has a lot of varying talents involved in them, and you cannot switch spec during a single encounter. However, that is simply still not the case.

On another topic, getting more misses and dodge out of defense is a pretty solid idea, and AP>Armor conversion is also good. Both of these scales us with gear that we will naturally use. Challenge here is knowing how much better or worse we will scale with these stats for the sake of balancing. I will give the developers some faith since they still have 2-3 months to work out the bear overhaul, before Ulduar patch.

Until then, I will still be getting armor trinkets and jewelries, they will still be 5.5x armor for quite a while.

Edit: I still think the easiest approach at this is change the bear multiplier. As long as they are careful about other specs using bear form it will be fine.

This can be easily remedied by changing the DR formula for each class so that they scale equally well or ultimately reach the same level. Yes, what you said makes sense, but changing it is very easy. Easy example will be allowing bears to start getting DRs on dodge at 60%, while Warriors starts getting DR on dodge at 30% and parry at 30%. This is a very crude example and just for intuitive uses, but hopefully I get the point across.