It leaves you facing toward the way you jumped to get to the point just behind the target. Not a big deal if you mouse look, you've got time to change facing while flying through the air.
Ooops! I forgot pounce and ravage. Dang that's quit a few buttons for 1 form.
They can go on your stealth bar, not your cat bar, so they don't count. Anyway, limiting to 12 seems rather arbitrary, I doubt there's many non-druid players with only 12 abilities they could possibly want to use at a time. It seems inevitable that if they're going to add new abilities every expansion eventually something in the default UI has to give (maybe the secondary non-paged bars turned on by default?)
As far as scaling goes, obviously the energy mechanic brings a natural comparison to rogues. But if Ghostcrawler's post is to be believed and the intent is to have a more cat vs bear build, making cat ferals DPS who can tank a bit, shouldn't the comparison be to fury or arms warriors?
Most of the posts here seem related to concerns about dps scaling, arena viability, etc. Personally, I'm more concerned about something else I've noticed:
1) The very real possiblity druid tanks won't scale well due to a) a limited number of stats we care about b) caps for one (maybe 2?) of those stats, c) a lack of itemization / gear availability.
2) A general lack of good tanking gear itemization / availability.
As I see it, we got two big changes to survivability:
- No crushing blows (benefits us more than other tanks).
- No need for defense stat. This would be a huge boon if we could turn all of that item budget into armor, agi or sta, but...
The latter is nice, but it actually worsens problem 1. It gives us an advantage early on, when other tanks are playing catch up on armor and crit immunity. In TBC we wanted defense to crit immunity then armor, sta and agi (dodge and expertise aren't awful). Now we just want armor, sta, and agi (dodge rating and expertise aren't awful). Once we cap armor (very possible, at least for trash), we only care about sta and agi. It's very difficult for us to scale with only 2 stats. Agi may even need to cap (I personally think dodge + miss + parry needs to max at some reasonable number). And, it's hard to itemize gear for a class that only wants 2 stats. It's worse when no other class wants those 2 stats together. Gems and enchants will help a tad, but other tanks have gems and enchants anyway, so...
Making these stats scale better doesn't fix the problem. It just makes us more likely to start OP'd and scale poorly when these few stats cap.
For gear, what gear are we supposed to tank in? Rogue gear has no extra armor or stamina. Tank rings, cloaks, trinkets, and necks will likely include defense, str, parry, block. So druids either tank in sub-optimal gear or be limited to gear designed specifically for ferals (tier gear and other items that would otherwise rot?)
I'd like to see how they plan to give bear tanks gear availability and continuous scaling. Personally, I think we need to have 1-2 more stats that benefit our survivability, even if that means armor and agi are slightly less valuable for bears.
c) a lack of itemization / gear availability.
2) A general lack of good tanking gear itemization / availability.
Most "real" tanking gear doesn't appear until lvl cap -2 quests/5-mans (78-80) and/or "end-game" crafts. The beta only allows lvl 77, so until we go few weeks with the cap at 80 without good gear, I wouldn't worry about it too much. So much will have changed by then, plus more stuff will leak out about the new game mechanics they seem to be adding to the game. Maybe we won't need "green" armor?
BC wasn't exactly dripping with tank gear in earlier content but it did have some such as the ring from ramparts and the chest piece from Hellfire which both lasted me a long time. I expect we'll see some added itemisation early in WOTLK so that Druids entering Northrend with 10k armour can get enough survivability to do the job. That or a mechanic change reducing the need for specialist pieces.
WotLK is the same way though. There's armor weapons and rings and even necks that have been found.
There is a huge difference between armor on items and additional armor on items. That they introduce armor onto amulets is nice (if they up the cap to 80% even nice n endgame) but thats about it.
And besides that issue, that I fear that additional armor is being taken away entirely (we should use rogue gear) I fear that blizzard will heavily invest into the STR stat in regards to tanking necks, rings, trinkets. If it is for threat even hit and expertise are a lot lot stronger for us, or crit rating for instance. So STR is almost USELESS for us.
A simple solution to help balancing things out would be to set the armor cap to 80%, implement addtional armor items, let bears have parry (based on strength maybe) (but no block) and set the total pure avoid cap (miss, dodge, parry) to 70%.
So overall I agree with Tappin the focus on defense, str, parry, block leaves us with almost no benefit, almost no benefit, no benefit, no benefit, no benefit. You can already see items like that in TBC: [Ring of Hardened Resolve] a great ring, for us even though we do not make full profit of the stats but ignore some.
The armor on shared items all tanks can have only seems to me to point out that druids will be wearing rogue leather until their tiers. No actual feral druid drops specifically or even a single quest item? That's what it looks like.
That doesn't mean that bears are going to be hosed; what it means is that it is going to essentially be impossible to hit the armor cap until well into T9, so armor will remain one of three stats that can reasonably improve. That's a good thing. What bothers me is that rogue gear is not all that great for bear threat or bear mitigation and so far the shared tanking rings/amulets/trinkets that have dropped haven't been that great for bear threat or mitigation either. It's reminding me a lot of what T6 itemization looked like for bears; one badly itemized staff, tier pieces, a couple of shared amulets/rings and maybe a trash drop if we're lucky. The rest is all loot from prior instances or lower level crafted items, and it's there because it's simply the only gear with reasonable stats that also has extra armor.
There is a huge difference between armor on items and additional armor on items. That they introduce armor onto amulets is nice (if they up the cap to 80% even nice n endgame) but thats about it.
The necks/rings/weapons DO have additional armor, IE a part of the item budget has been spent on armor. However, Blizzard didn't bother changing the colour of the armor tooltip to green.
Already happens with +armor(green tooltip) weapons, there are none of them even though weapons have no armor by default.
Here's a filter: Weapons - Items - World of Warcraft (Don't know why those three weapons are there, but for sure they don't have any armor on them.)
How is rogue gear not good for threat? The three best stats for threat are, in order, expertise, hit rating, and strength. Rogue gear can be found with abundant hit and AP (which is more or less equivalent to strength), and I would be shocked if expertise didn't crop up now and again. The concern with rogue gear is the sort of mitigation we can pull down in it, and particularly with the AGI nerf, I suspect it will be "not much."
It seems to be that the other tanking classes get a lot more benefit from Strength than druids do (both mitigation and threat):
Warrior: 2 Str = 1 Block and threat from higher white/yellow damage
Paladin: 2 Str = 1 Block and Shield of the Righteous deals 2*block damage as holy
DK: Strength -> Parry and threat from higher white/yellow damage
Druids: Strength gives threat but no mitigation/avoidance of any kind
It looks like strength is being positioned as an important tanking both offensively and defensively, for the other tanks, but only offensively for druids.
If we flash forward ½ year and look at a druid trying to compete with the other classes when the massive amounts of strength does nothing for mitigation on a druid.
I think we need either block or parry as a strength based conversion to increase the value of Strength for Druids compareble to the other tank classes
In addition to the bad scaling with defense rating, parry rating, block rating, block value, there is OFFICAL sources that claim that there will be a lot more strenght on tanking items:
We have to be careful with this talent because prot warriors are going to generate a lot more rage than before, just because their dps is going to be higher. A lot of tanking gear comes with strength now. Strength is a good stat, and even before the shield block change, it was probably the best +threat stat you have. I sort of feel that for too long we have all emphasized mitigation as the primary role of a tank, when in reality it's only half the job. Doing more dps will let tanks be more fun when not-tanking, and for warriors, might make a lot of rage starvation issues go away.
Another thing to look at is the role of Defense Rating: It seems that there will be TONS OF defense rating on ITEMS!
- Anticipation: Even though the change from Defense to Dodge is a net increase in avoidance, I think I still might have preferred the Defense... but this is in line with similar talents so not too much complaining here.
Defense is usually a pretty easy stat to max out with gear, whereas you can't really do that on dodge. We saw some tanks actually spec out of Anticipation at the T6 or so level because it just stops being as useful as your gear improves. Hit is another stat we don't really like to hit in talent trees, since it's possible to hit the cap with gear alone.
Source: ebd.
Someone on beta should really push reports and forum posts about dual role pve specs and about scaling of strength and other tanking stats. I think strength should push our HP as well or should offer parry rating for bears.
There is a huge difference between armor on items and additional armor on items. That they introduce armor onto amulets is nice (if they up the cap to 80% even nice n endgame) but thats about it.
Here is the thing: It may very well be that there will be no gear with additional armor, but I doubt it. Arena gear anyone? Arena will keep going on in WotLK so either they have to live with Ferals tanking in S5 gear with additional armor or they have to actively remove it from the set (or make it inactive in intances like Resilience). I really wonder which path they will take on this issue and I dearly hope that the Arena aspect of WoW won't mess with the PvE aspects of the game.
See I looked at Ghostcrawler's post from a different angle.
I assume he's talking about the first 2 weeks after TBC was launched and ferals were able to do "nearly as much dps as a rogue" IN bear form (thus being able to tank and dps at the same time). If you look at it in that light, then sure the bear nerf was needed. Bears seem to be ok for now. Cat on the other hand doesn't scale well near end game. The devs know this, and steps such as the OOC are working towards fixing this. Will it? Dunno. But I'm just glad Blizz admitted to knowing of the scaling issue and at least are trying to work towards a solution. If the new OOC change fails to address the scaling issue, then I'm pretty sure they'll try something else to fix the problem.
Someone mentioned earlier that they found it ridiculous that we'll have 4 different specs not counting PvP. I think Blizz will follow the same setup they did back in TBC - we'll have a PvE Resto, PvE Boomkin, and PvE Feral spec. The PvE Feral spec will have everything needed to tank and dps from a cat and bear point of view (meaning the feral tree will be trimmed prior to launch). The "extra" talents for feral will be PvP related. So you have to pick if you want to be a pure PvE feral spec or one with PvP utility thrown in. I don't think they'll make us have to choose a "Tank spec" vs a "Cat dps" spec.
100% agree with the interpretation of that post. The tone Ghostcrawler used was that the devs do have a target for cat end game DPS and they WILL meet it. We also have to remember that Beta is capped at 77 and we haven’t truly seen anything at 80 end game yet.
With the Beta being free of an NDA and everything being broadcast to the entire community, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if they had staff assigned to reading forums like these looking for quality feedback from the community and suggestions on each class. In fact it makes a lot of business sense to do it this way, a couple thousand people giving feedback... or a couple million, which do you think is going to improve your product and insure customer satisfaction more?
But also remember that this is blizzard and even with everything they ARE letting us see, they definitely have to be keeping at least a few things under wraps until either very late in beta or right before release.
In fact it makes a lot of business sense to do it this way, a couple thousand people giving feedback... or a couple million, which do you think is going to improve your product and insure customer satisfaction more?
But also remember that this is blizzard and even with everything they ARE letting us see, they definitely have to be keeping at least a few things under wraps until either very late in beta or right before release.
Sorry for this useless post but - "customer satisfaction" and "druid class" do not fit togather at all.
Blizzard is intrested in happy customers, in happy customers on average, what happens about minorities is not that important.
And I did see preTBC videos of 600 Swipe Crits in Underbog, and everything but maim and cyclone was shown off all the time. What we might not see is Savage Roar and Berserk... maybe.
Sorry for this useless post but - "customer satisfaction" and "druid class" do not fit togather at all.
Blizzard is intrested in happy customers, in happy customers on average, what happens about minorities is not that important.
And I did see preTBC videos of 600 Swipe Crits in Underbog, and everything but maim and cyclone was shown off all the time. What we might not see is Savage Roar and Berserk... maybe.
I think you definitely got that one wrong, Druid was the healer that just won 12 grand and 3 blackbird PCs off of the tourney that blizzard ran (Druid, Warrior, Warlock). Which I will be the first to admit, at that level of play it has very little to do with the class and much more to do with the skill of the player. But still, it did get attention and overall its bad business sense to ignore any part of your product because its "underplayed".
I think we need either block or parry as a strength based conversion to increase the value of Strength for Druids compareble to the other tank classes
I could never understood how Blizz decided that we could not block and/or parry attacks.
There's an image of me seeing one of my attacks parried by a clefthoof bull as i farmed the leather for my clefthoof set that ive never managed to forget.
I'd settle for block or parry. I mean ... what are the big paws for anyway ... sigh
I think you definitely got that one wrong, Druid was the healer that just won 12 grand and 3 blackbird PCs [...]
Feral thread. Not resto.
Originally Posted by Emi
I could never understood how Blizz decided that we could not block and/or parry attacks.
There's an image of me seeing one of my attacks parried by a clefthoof bull as i farmed the leather for my clefthoof set that ive never managed to forget.
I'd settle for block or parry. I mean ... what are the big paws for anyway ... sigh
Try the level 10 bears scattered around. They parry. I still feel Parry would be a valid addition to Druid tanks. I can understand them being hesitant initially due to our high dodge (it'd bump the mitigation up too far probably), but with this new agility conversion there's really no reason not to.
Sorry if its been covered and I missed it, but with the removal of salv, are cats getting any more passive threat reduction? Or is seen as not a problem due to tanks' increased threat? Currently I find salv to be vital, especially for trash.
Edit: I meant additional threat reduction since I remember reading some additions for fury war, spriest, moonkin (I realize, all higher threat than cats) and we have no aggro drop (unlike mage, warlock, rogue, hunter). Oh well, I guess looking at all the numbers, most classes are around -30% so it will be fine.
A) If you feel the amount of tanking gear available early in WotLK isn't sufficient, report that feedback.
B) Stop the QQ about not seeing any bear itemization. It doesn't matter one bit once we hit 80. Itemization at 80 is what matters. If we get there and there's no good gear, then we can report that feedback. Until then, keep your QQs to yourself.
Does anyone else think that ILOTP should be changed to 50/100% chance to heal for 4% rather than its current form of 100% chance to heal for 2/4% ? All of the new moonkin talents as well as Infected wounds are formed in such a way that it allows you to put a minimal number of points into them but still get "full" effect. (Mainly due to ICDs)
The Washington Post helps perpetuate a common and pernicious misreading of the decision, referring to "the Supreme Court’s judgment that corporations have the same rights as people when it comes to political speech." What the Supreme Court actually said is that people do not lose their free speech rights when they organize as corporations, including nonprofit interest groups as well as businesses.
Does anyone else think that ILOTP should be changed to 50/100% chance to heal for 4% rather than its current form of 100% chance to heal for 2/4% ? All of the new moonkin talents as well as Infected wounds are formed in such a way that it allows you to put a minimal number of points into them but still get "full" effect. (Mainly due to ICDs)
Yes, later today when I was playing with trees I wanted to cut out one point from iLOTP to see that that would be useless.
Astrylian is probably right that QQing here (in these Forums) makes no sense but looking at Armor - Items - World of Warcraft and comparing that to official Blizzard quotes reveals Blizzards will to introduce more Strength (mainly to have all Tanking classes doing more Damage Per Threat) - There is no reason to let tanking Bears do more damage as in late TBC (relativly to DPS classes). The problem arises when we do insane damage in Bear Form (nerf crys like in early TBC anyone?) and at the same time have low mitigation (because ALL other classes scale with Strength, Defense, Block Rating, Block Value and Parry).
Now do you think Blizzard will introduce items just for Bears (and NOT for 3 other Tanks)? I do not think so. We have to live with choppy itemization, rare single drops that last forever (like in TBC) cause there is nothing better to upgrade to (like in TBC):
OR, we get STR to be an integral part of tanking. That would be in line with out T6 Itemization anyway and would be a good step. Ideas are probably to add parry or to let strength multiply our HP a bit, I cannot think about much else without upping our damage (which is not required)
So, if I was in beta, I would report on that issue all time, and you should do so too: thats about all the QQ that is important, just whining does not help.
07/31/08, 8:48 PM
