No internal CD on OOC seems like an odd change. Internal CDs are there to allow for sustained damage increases without pushing burst damage over the top. From a pvp perspective, removing the internal CD makes our burst damage very "uncontrolled" and harder to balance around... I would rather they nerf our ability to once in a blue moon shred 6x in a row on GCD on some poor clothy, than have our overall damage output lowered to compensate for this possibility.
Yeah it'll be interesting to see how this plays out. Without any checks on it, it'll be a RNG pvp nightmare. A cat could be berserk, immune to crowd control and do 10 shreds/bites in as many seconds.
But is it pretty stellar... per talent point? 2% damage on one skill that's probably somewhere in the ballpark of 20-40% of our damage... That's a 0.4% to 0.8% damage increase per talent point. Is that really stellar? Maybe it is, I dunno, but it's definitely something we should theorycraft out (when the time is right), not just assume zomgbigshredcritz and 5/5 it.
Cat Form be damned, I'm more interested in its effects on Bear TPS =p
Everyone seems to be completely glossing over the fact that it increases Maul damage by 10% as well. In unlimited Rage situations, Maul will be hit on every swing, which ends up making it the highest percentage of total damage output in most encounters for me. So threat wise, it seems very worth it.
while it seems that this will exactly push haste to do 10% more OOC procs which is great, it will not scale our WHITE DAMAGE with haste cause our main weapon damage is low and AS high, percentual scaling of our haste does almost nothing.
*Sadcat*
I don't understand what this means. Haste has the same effect on white dps regardless of weapon speed. By making haste affect OOC it makes it like combat potency which is why rogues like haste.
The full blue posts, in case those forums lag out again:
In the next data push, you will find Omen of Clarity has been changed a bit. The 10 second cooldown has been removed, the procs per minute has been raised from 2 to 3.5, and melee abilities no longer trigger it. Spell interaction with Omen of Clarity remains relatively unchanged, with its hidden chance to trigger off spells reduced by half (and rolling the dice about 2x as often).
What this means is that more auto-attacks landing on the target will increase the benefit from Omen of Clarity. Haste, increased hit chance, and expertise will all make Omen of Clarity better.
We are aware of the concerns with reaching the hit rating cap, and will make sure Druids can pick up Rogue items to wear without exceeding that cap. This means Rogues will likely socket for hit, while Druids socket for Strength or Agility.
Before LK goes live, we will do extensive testing on how much damage classes do, and will increase or decrease their power as appropriate to meet our targets. Cat raid DPS suffered relative to other melee in BC for lack of an Combat Potency equivalent talent (OOC should now be roughly equal), for lack of a scaling finishing move (Savage Roar answers that), for lack of benefitting from Windfury Totem, and for lack of weapon procs (+35 agility != Mongoose). All of those lacks have been addressed. In addition, a change has been made to make the agility rebalance less severe (as I posted in another thread).
In PvP, we are adding many tools to the Feral Druid arsenal, including the redesigned Maim, Infected Wounds, King of the Jungle, and Berserk. We have also made some improvements to the "range bug". Attacks that require you to be behind a target will no longer be able to be parried, nor able to be dodged by a player. Our movement engine will now smoothly interpolate positions of moving units, preventing the "Out of range/You must be behind your target/Out of range/You must be behind your target/Out of range/You must be behind your target..." sequence from occuring any more. In addition, being able to apply a snare makes the Feral Druid able to slow down their target and lessen the severity of the "range bug". Yes, there are still issues with the model, especially when switching into and out of cat form, but many of the issues are being dealt with.
Druids are not being ignored; this forum is being read daily by developers.
To help deal with this issue, in the next data push, Druids should find their melee critical strike chance is about 5% higher.
The conversion of agility to critical strike chance remains the same 40:1 at level 70, but the base amount for 0 agility has been increased by 5%.
As someone who inexplicably enjoys PVP as a feral, it's great to see that some of the larger problems in that arena are being addressed. The movement engine changes especially could make a big difference, both for ferals and other melee DPS classes.
It's funny how in one blue post they talk about increasing feral scalabilty and in the next plan to offset the loss of critical strike chance from the agility to crit ratio "nerf" by adding a static 5% crit, which is well the exact opposite of increasing our scalabilty.
I have a brief question about OOC though, wasn't it stated that it would be a 6% chance on hit to proc, rather than a ppm based mechanic, or is that 3.5 ppm just an approximation(expected value) as to how often a 6% OCC proc on average over the course of a minute?
Before LK goes live, we will do extensive testing on how much damage classes do, and will increase or decrease their power as appropriate to meet our targets. Cat raid DPS suffered relative to other melee in BC for lack of an Combat Potency equivalent talent (OOC should now be roughly equal), for lack of a scaling finishing move (Savage Roar answers that), for lack of benefitting from Windfury Totem, and for lack of weapon procs (+35 agility != Mongoose). All of those lacks have been addressed. In addition, a change has been made to make the agility rebalance less severe (as I posted in another thread).
I hope they take the base damage of our abilities into account as we tend to have 3 times or more the amount of base damage on our attacks when compared to similar abilities (which is one of the reasons we did so well in early end gear I think).
I don't know if this has been posted yet, but there's confirmation on the crushing blow changes
Crushing blows used to apply to mobs 3 levels above you, which included most bosses. The change was to make them apply to mobs 4 levels above you. If you are running an instance of the appropriate level, you will not be crushed.
Crushing blows originally served a dual-purpose: they discouraged you from attacking mobs much higher level than you, and they made bosses more challenging. Now they only fulfill the first role. We have plenty of other knobs to make bosses more challenging that feel less random.
It's funny how in one blue post they talk about increasing feral scalabilty and in the next plan to offset the loss of critical strike chance from the agility to crit ratio "nerf" by adding a static 5% crit, which is well the exact opposite of increasing our scalabilty.
I have a brief question about OOC though, wasn't it stated that it would be a 6% chance on hit to proc, rather than a ppm based mechanic, or is that 3.5 ppm just an approximation(expected value) as to how often a 6% OCC proc on average over the course of a minute?
Hopefully they do implement it as a 6% proc rate and not 3.5 PPM. Any PPM mechanic inherently means that it will NOT scale with haste.
With no haste, 3.5 PPM means a 5.833% procrate. With 100 haste rating, the proc rate drops to 5.485%.
I don't understand what this means. Haste has the same effect on white dps regardless of weapon speed. By making haste affect OOC it makes it like combat potency which is why rogues like haste.
The point is that haste increases white damage and does not increase yellow damage (because yellow damage is based on energy, not swing timers). Druids have a MUCH smaller portion of our output as white damage (about 30% white other classes are 50% or more?). So, we get less rewards from haste because it benefits a smaller portion of our damage.
Similarly, hit rating is less useful for us. A missed white hit is lost damage. Hit rating stops that lost damage from happening. But most of our damage is from specials. And a miss on most specials refunds a big chunk of the energy. So a missed special is not entirely lost damage. This seems good until you look at end game gear and realize it's dripping with hit rating, haste, expertise... lots of stats that benefit others more than us. Hit rating avoids wasting a larger portion of damage for other classes than it does for druids.
Along with no procs, no windfury, and no methods other than 2T4 of increasing our energy regen rates, these factors are a big part of why we don't scale in dps very well. And they are very much why our dps itemization has never been great. We simply don't get that much value out of 'end game gear' designed for most of the other dps classes.
These changes are a good start. Hopefully they do extensive testing, and with more than just entry level 80 items. We scaled great at 70, but fell behind as gear continued to get better. They need to balance us both at newly level 80 gear and in stats that are likely to be on feral level 80 gear a full year or more after we hit 80.
Hopefully they do implement it as a 6% proc rate and not 3.5 PPM. Any PPM mechanic inherently means that it will NOT scale with haste.
With no haste, 3.5 PPM means a 5.833% procrate. With 100 haste rating, the proc rate drops to 5.485%.
The Blizz dev specifically confirmed that it was a PPM that was based on original weapon speed (1.0 for cat, 2.5 for bear). So it does scale with haste.
I have to say, with all the stuff happening to feral (berserk, tiger's fury, snare, cat feral charge, maim not breaking immediately on damage, no cooldown undispellable OOC) feral druids might actually be half decent for PvP as something more than flag running and annoyance value now.
How it plays out in practice remains to be seen, but it's good to see that they're trying to make more specs PvP useful. Hopefully with this next expansion they can do to PvP what they did with PvE the current expansion and really round it out so it's something every spec has a niche in.
Its kinda odd that OOC is becoming our combat potency despite the fact its in the resto tree. Also means we have to chose between it and berserk if the talents get released early (and for the leveling from 70-71).
Looking at people's suggested raiding talent builds, I see improved leader of the pack being left out of a lot of them. This struck me as an interesting tradeoff, so I decided to dig through a few WWS reports of my guild to get a handle on it.
Interestingly enough, ILotP accounted for 3-4% of all healing done on boss fights from my guild's WWS reports in Hyjal/BT. That's with the druid in a hunter group consisting of either 3xHunter/druid/resto shaman or 4xHunter/druid. I was expecting in the 1% region at best, so was shocked to see it this high.
3-4% of a raid's healing for 2 talent points seems to me to be an extraordinary good deal. If you look at what the tradeoff is, assuming a feral druid is doing 6% of a raid's DPS (probably on the high end of what a druid does), and those two talent points could otherwise be used to boost their DPS 2% (1% per point seems to be the range the last couple of points end up at), that's only a 0.12% increase in raid DPS.
After looking at the figures, to me ILotP is a must have raiding talent.
Unfortunately the feral tree is still too bloated. I haven't theorycrafted this to death yet but given that a sensible feral build without intensity will require 16 points in resto, that means 55 points for feral.
I'm not saying that there shouldn't be difficult choices when speccing, but the addition of 15 points "beyond" mangle, as well as the addition of primal expertise, is just too much. Here's why. Let's assume the baseline Feral spec was 0/47/14 in TBC (which it might well not have been, but that's the minimum sensible investment in the Feral tree). Now it's going to be something like 0/55/16. 17 points of additional talents, and only 8 points to take them with. That's too low a hit ratio.
To improve the situation I think Rend & Tear should probably be reduced to 3 points, or improved mangle down to 1 - or alternatively even merge King of the Jungle and Improved Mangle. The other option would be to merge the 3 "cat form specific" dps talents into 2 - i.e. some combination of Shredding Attacks, Primal Precision, and Savage Fury. I just think the decisions are a bit too tough otherwise.
Infected wounds could probably use a tweak as well, right now I don't see anyone taking more than 2 points in there considering we'll be mauling on every attack & mangling every 4.5 seconds. That's going to give you around 10-11 proc chances in a 12 second cycle - that means even with only 1 point in the talent you only have a 1.57% chance of letting it drop off the mob. Sure it'll take longer to stack up, but that's a small issue.
<Fric> I think the only kind of gay buttsex I'd enjoy on any level would be assraping a smug hipster douchebag (also possibly a roid head and/or fratboy/Jersey Shore cast member)
I hope they take the base damage of our abilities into account as we tend to have 3 times or more the amount of base damage on our attacks when compared to similar abilities (which is one of the reasons we did so well in early end gear I think).
Which is also the reason why we got nerfed so hard. Static damage means: you are GOD without GEAR and a SLAVE with any.
@ Haste and Rouges/Ferals - You are right! - i did some math and 10% Haste is 10% White Damage (Hit Capped) be it Feral or Rogue.
So basically one can say
- Lets say a Rogue has a combined 450 Mainhand DPS and if we had 400 Main Hand DPS not 330 (for instance) and
- OOC would be as strong as combat potency and
- other abilities would abound equal out
then in result our DPS should be scaling in a similar way.
The question for now is: doesn't MH+OH scale better than 2H which each itemlevel upgrade/stage?
@ Bloating / Feral Tree
A 0/0/0 "Feral" Druid is very very weak.
A 0/0/0 "Rogue" or "Warrior" is very strong already.
After pushing point in all useful talents: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft
We miss 1 Talent Point in Feral, At least 16 in Restoration and probably one in Balance. Result: 18 Points missing
They have 5% Dodge as a talent, which they do not really require to take (it would be like a 2% buff to spirit and int for us maybe)
They have many "this or that" talents - either dagger or sword and so on, you do not need to take all of them.
While going full Combat rogues have 4 talent points left for other trees, we have -1 one left. They could really use some talents in the assassination tree for instance and its hard to distribute points as well, but overall you can see how bloated the feral tree actually is (having at least 11 further pure feral talents, furor, naturalist and omen of clarity in other trees)
@ iLOTP
the problem with this is: a.) it is random (like a shaman spamming lesser chain heal all the time without a brain) b.) there is no perception. Nurturing Instincts is a very strong talent at some encounters, do you really think most raid healers know about it? All they see is "you live, your dps was horrible (compared)"
I agree with you but I don't think it's so much the Feral tree that's the problem. I think its actually that the early Resto section is too good - Omen of Clarity is virtually required, and who's not going to pick up Master Shapeshifter when the "filler" talents just aren't filler. Master Shapeshifter should probably be nerfed to half it's effectiveness which would make the Natural Shapeshifter/Master Shapeshifter combo a choice rather than a necessity - however Omen is still so good that it makes no sense not to pick it up, which in turn makes Master Shapeshifter very easy to pick up again. The choices towards the bottom of the tree are more towards utility than pure usefulness, such as Primal Tenacity, Improved LotP and IW. Comparison of these to the Resto talents are, in a direct min/max way, always going to come out with the Resto talents on top. In practice they may not, due to particular fights requirements or personal preference.
I'm all for synergy between trees, but at the moment the top 16 points in Resto are better (by a significant margin) than anything that is a "choice" in the Feral tree, making it slightly broken because although the choice within the Feral tree is there, the choice between picking up the Resto talents and not isn't exactly a choice at the moment. I'm not saying it's any different with the TBC talents, but there's less choice in the Feral tree so it's not so bad.
The opposite doesn't occur for Resto - none of the top points in Feral or Balance are required or even particularly good from a "full Resto" point of view. A bit more synergy spread out at the top of the trees would be nice, rather than all the synergy things packed into the top of Resto.
As an overview of the synergy in talent trees from my perspective:
The Balance talents that synergise with Resto are in tier 5/6 while the only Balance talent that affects Feral is the range increase to Faerie Fire. The Feral ones that synergise with Resto/Balance just aren't really there (unless you count SotF and Thick Hide). The Resto ones that have some synergy with the other trees are all packed into the top 3 tiers, and nearly every talent there has some impact on the Feral and/or Balance setups with Omen of Clarity and Master Shapeshifter being major talents for both Feral and Balance builds.
Shakes: The question is whether that 3-4% of raid healing is actually effective in total terms or not. If it's the case of someone getting hit for 2.5k, getting a 400 heal from LotP and then getting a 2.5k heal of which 400 is overheal, it's not an effective talent. The majority of situations it is not a life saving talent - it is useful to have, but it is a utility talent that comes down to personal preference rather than something directly quantifiable in min/max terms.
Well, Naturalist is half the problem really. Going 10 points into resto is absolutely required, by which point yes, OOC is a huge gain for 1 point. You could go 11 points in if Master Shapeshifter wasn't so amazing. Why are the Shapeshifting talents even in the resto tree? Going 11 deep means you have to go 16 deep into resto at the moment, which is a problem. Funnily enough shifting Natural Shapeshifter and Master Shapeshifter around makes the situation a lot better.
<Fric> I think the only kind of gay buttsex I'd enjoy on any level would be assraping a smug hipster douchebag (also possibly a roid head and/or fratboy/Jersey Shore cast member)
I just thought of 2 things they could do to improve feral scaling, what do you guys think of these?
1) Make missed/dodged/parried yellow attacks not refund any energy, but buff them in such a way to make that change not nerf our current DPS. That will make hit and expertise significantly more desirable stats, helping our scaling with high-end gear.
2) Change Naturalist so that it doesn't directly boost yellow damage, and instead gives a much larger bonus to just white damage. Since our yellow damage already scales with white damage, our specials would have to get tweaked a bit, but by giving say a 40% increase to "normal melee attacks" (as blizzard seems to be calling white damage these days), hit, exp, and (most importantly) haste would become significantly more valuable.
Regarding the bloat in feral talents, remember that for TBC we got the biggest amount of bloat reduction of all classes ending up with the ability to get practically everything we wanted for both PvE cat and bear in one spec - it appears that it is an explicit desire not to have that be the case for WotLK:
I realize your druid argument was really about PvP but I am going to talk about PvE here. The problem with ferals in BC was that with a single spec they could do nearly as much dps as a rogue and also tank as well as a warrior. The warriors and rogues understandably cried foul. If you look at the feral tree for Lich King, you'll see that it does have more bear-centric and cat-centric talents. If you pick the cat-centric talents, you'll still be able to tank to some extent, but you probably aren't your guild's main tank. Likewise, there are definitely talents that will help a DK be a good MT. Blade Barrier is a great example. But there are other talents too. You need some of them. You don't need all of them. We don't want either the druid or the death knight to be jack of all trades, master of none. If you want to tank, it's going to come at the expense of some dps talents. But you'll have more options about which tanking talents and which dps talents you do take. The trees are designed so that you can't have them all.
Disregarding an astonishing statement like "nearly as much dps as a rogue" (which, after all, was the case in early L70 content, though definitely not later on), unless I'm reading too much into Ghostcrawler's statement, it would appear unlikely that we experience any significant bloat reduction at this stage, since even freeing up a meager 5 points would go a long way towards cat and bear unification in WotLK.
EDIT: Which, inter alia, raises the interesting question: If the design intention this time around is that the feral druid picking all the cat talents thus skipping a handful primarily useful for bear isn't likely going to be the guild's main tank, just what sort of damage is he supposed to be putting out in cat form? Enough to match the ret. paladins, enh. shaman, and warriors... or nearly as much as the rogues? I would love to see a statement of intent regarding where feral's damageoutput is really supposed to be.
Last edited by Deliverance : 07/31/08 at 6:22 AM.
Reason: question added regarding intended feral damageoutput
An interesting new finisher, that most druids seem to have missed the blue talk about is this one, which I've screenshotted from my druid in the beta:
A quite interesting finisher addition, as this quite obviously scales rather well. In just present gear, in a DPS group, this would add roughly 1500 AP on a pretty constant basis, at the sacrefice of 5 combopoints and 25 energy every 21 seconds. As mentioned in the quote of the blue post above this will probably help druids scale better in PvE quite a lot.
Which, inter alia, raises the interesting question: If the design intention this time around is that the feral druid picking all the cat talents thus skipping a handful primarily useful for bear isn't likely going to be the guild's main tank, just what sort of damage is he supposed to be putting out in cat form?
Actually I disagree that it's impossible to get nearly all the talents you'd really want to perform both roles as well as possible in one build. See here. Right now, we don't have a huge need for either stun or fear resist in PvE, especially not after the changes to targeting priority during fear, nor do I see Infected Wounds being useful for PvE at all. The reason for this is that it seems unlikely that bosses will be susceptible to the disease, as it reduces movement speed. I still need to test this on the beta though.
I agree that it is possible to build for a pure Cat build or a pure Bear build (Cat assuming IW affects bosses, Bear assuming it doesn't), but I know that at least in our guild, ferals are cherished for being able to perform both roles rather well in one instance, meaning we only have to bring one person to fill both slots after what we actually need, while at the same time still providing our CR and Innervate. I would think that our overall value to a raid is in that ability, not in being almost as good as Rogues at DPS, or a perfectly on-par, instead of "nearly as good" tank.
Last edited by Starbrow : 07/31/08 at 8:35 AM.
Reason: Added a quote and response
Regarding the bloat in feral talents, remember that for TBC we got the biggest amount of bloat reduction of all classes ending up with the ability to get practically everything we wanted for both PvE cat and bear in one spec - it appears that it is an explicit desire not to have that be the case for WotLK:
Disregarding an astonishing statement like "nearly as much dps as a rogue" (which, after all, was the case in early L70 content, though definitely not later on), unless I'm reading too much into Ghostcrawler's statement, it would appear unlikely that we experience any significant bloat reduction at this stage, since even freeing up a meager 5 points would go a long way towards cat and bear unification in WotLK.
EDIT: Which, inter alia, raises the interesting question: If the design intention this time around is that the feral druid picking all the cat talents thus skipping a handful primarily useful for bear isn't likely going to be the guild's main tank, just what sort of damage is he supposed to be putting out in cat form? Enough to match the ret. paladins, enh. shaman, and warriors... or nearly as much as the rogues? I would love to see a statement of intent regarding where feral's damageoutput is really supposed to be.
The problem with that line of thinking is that death knights only have 2 specs, tank or dps. If druids can't be the best cat and bear with the same line of talents, then they effectively have 4 specs excluding pvp which is ridiculous. We only have 3 talent trees and the way the class is designed you should be able to be a cat and bear in one line of talents.
This is a PvP Tank+DPS build. Though there is need for 3 Points in Thick Hide, 1 in Infected, 3 in Primal Tenacity, 2 in iLoTP and 2 in Primal Prescision. To say it in other words: What we do not need for PvE in the Feral Tree is improved Bash. Even Nurtruing Instincts is great Stuff (I spec that currently cause it is great at ROS and Najetus and Archimonde and so on)
Originally Posted by Starbrow
[...]
Actually I disagree that it's impossible to get nearly all the talents you'd really want to perform both roles as well as possible in one build. See here.
This is a valid build if you do not want to maximize DPS (-10% Cat Mangle DPS, 2% lesser Crit Damage) and if you think that Hit Rating and Expertise are rather crappy overall and that you do not need them and do not use Ferious Bite. If you stack Hit and Expertise as a Cat too, Primal Precision becomes worth less and less and Feral Aggression is a huge buff that you leave out.
For now either Ferocious Bite will still suck (Imagen Savage Roar 5pt and Rip 5pt being already up cause you got so many combo points by crits and want to go and spam FB?) or you will need Feral Aggression. If FB sucks then there is no real need to take Rend and Tear imho. 10% Mangle (Cat) Damage PER POINT is for sure more than 1% Shred (Cat) Damage Per Point
07/30/08, 7:01 PM
