◊ Lord BEEF

Yeah that portion of the item budget would then be amplified by kings, and the new death knight group buff. They'd also gain more attack power from things like mark of the wild, and any temporary potions, enchants, or abilities.

I'm confident that they could balance around that, but again I don't see such a sweeping change being made at this point of development.

 

Shuror

100% of AP into armour would be nice. I think that would make decent sense and be the most balanced conversion. It would be an increase of 14% in the pure item budget value of attack power, which is less than many other talents. I could see 150% being decently balanced too, that would put it pretty much in line with Forceful Deflection at a 21% vs 20% increase.

When thinking about it, it would be cool if it applied in cat form too. Could help with melee mitigation in PvP.

Edit: regarding Str vs. AP, I fear that Druids are going to lose their 2AP/Str instead of Rogues gaining it. It would be exactly in line with the change made to Shamans.

 

• Playered

In today's standards you are talking about a 125-150 AP gain which is roughly a 5% increase in total AP on a fully buffed raiding Rogue in Sunwell gear - assuming there is no slight decay to the conversion rate (which doesn't exist for current Str users... or?).


Sadly as Lord BEEF says it is too late to change really but it is just something which has irked me for a very long time as it is completely illogical to implement a whole new stat which is near enough equal to another adding unneeded bloat instead of changing the stat conversion rate for 2 classes - something which could of allowed much more fluidity in gear sharing on offset slots.

 

manapaws

Firstly, if it's going to be pointless we should be pointing this out and having them change it to something worthwhile, no?

I like int on my gear in PVE, for powershifting, rezzing, etc. I dont remember where I saw it, but someone suggested our dps rotations will have more frequent powershifts in wotlk. Perhaps master shapeshifter will be mandatory.

In saying that, obviously our bear gear doesnt need any int. We aren't going to shift out and innervate our healer and get smacked for 50k in the mean time.

 

Tappin

As I see it, we have 2 sources of tanking gear, and only about half of it is rogue gear. We have:
Leather with lots of agi and no extra sta or armor.
Non-armor slots (rings, neck, cloak, trinkets) with armor, sta, str, defense, parry, block, dodge.

They need to balance us assuming that's the gear we'll be using. This probably means giving us some of our mitigation from rogue gear (added benefit from agi, or ap or maybe just additional armor benefit from the leather slots only?) and shared tank gear (be it str, defense, parry, etc). Or, they could just make all of the shared non-plate tanking gear look like armor + sta + dodge. But that's pretty boring, so...

And as already pointed out: none of it has int. Tier gear might. But a class shouldn't be balanced assuming they will wear only tier gear. Maybe an AP --> mana or mana regen change. Could be done through HotW?

 

Snarley

I can’t imagine that they would go that far into the extreme when separating the tank and DPS portion of our spec. And if that IS the case, and we cannot tank anything (5 mans included) without being specced for bear talents, then we damn well better be 95% of a rogue DPS.

Now, the reality is we will most likely be able to tank 5 mans, heroics, 10 mans (initially I don’t think we will be able to MT 10 mans unless we have the tier gear appropriately ahead of the instance or we are specced "full bear") and OT the 25 mans if we are specced for cat and we have an appropriately gemmed/enchanted set of armor. But I think it's safe to say that while we may see 90%ish of rogue DPS in the appropriate gear, we wont ever see 95% or higher (and due to our utility in cat, we shouldn’t).

 

Snarley

I could definitely see them making sweeping changes to the feral druid spec. They have been doing it regularly with the mage as well as the DK's.

I think your suggestions have been valid thus far as to how to improve our mitigation, hopefully devs will take some of it and use it.

 

• Astrylian

If we do end up not getting extra armor on our tier gear, and nothing changes about how Armor is the most valuable stat until cap for us, then BC tanking gear is going to last alot longer for bears than most other classes/specs. It'll take approx item level 260 epic leather items to reach the armor of our sunwell gear. While the agi/sta/etc will pass the value of sunwell gear for sure, the armor will take a long time to, so I would not at all be surprised if T6.5 > T7 for bears, if the above holds true.

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TheNameLessOne

Assuming they are actually redo-ing the trees to split cat/bear (and that is a huge assumption).....

The class/spec you want to compare against is a DPS warrior not a rogue, since you still have bear form (albeit a weaker one). Pure cat should be some where between arms and fury, as fury has less utility (if any w/ shouts going raid wide) while arms has better utility w/ trauma + blood frenzy.

The mage changes are mostly number tweaking, breaking cat and bear is a massive overhaul of the tree like DKs had.

 

Tappin

Agreed, unless they retro-change level 70- gear to not have +armor as well. And, this is not a good solution. Making us get more armor bonus than we get now will lead us to the situation we're in now: if we can cap armor, we only have 2 stats (and dodge rating, expertise to a lesser extent) that we care about. That means scaling and availability problems trying to find gear with only those 2 stats (sta and agi). Instead of upping armor benefit, spreading our survivability into other stats we are likely to find on gear we'll be using allows us to share a wider set of gear and continue to scale even if we hit a cap.

 

kalbear

If they'd really like to make bears and cats separate in terms of talent trees, the best choice would be to give a 5-point talent that would allow parry and to give parry rating based on strength. Or even a 6-point dual talent (Path of the Bear->Improved Path of the Bear, if you will) that first grants parry and then gives parry rating based on strength for the improved version. If you really want to beat people about the head with it, you could actually reduce cat DPS for having this.

While I'd rather not have bears be the avoidance tank again, this would help quite a bit with scaling and with separation of bears and cats while improving both the value of defense and strength on the shared tanking gear. It would clearly not be required to tank 5-mans, though you'd be better off with it.

I'm not sure that int will be necessary any more, given that regen will be unnerfed come WotLK. While it's a useful stat it certainly is not required on gear for PvE, and unless they are going to change druids and their role (doing random heals in between tanking bouts/dps, for instance) I don't see this changing. Int can remain on pvp gear.

 

ionasej

Actually nerfing T6 gear by 30% armor and moving Thick hide to t5/t6 - which should just give 30% instead of 10% armor, and infected wounds or primal tenacity reducing ALL damage by 5/10/15% would fix it.

500 * 1.3 * 1.15 = 747.5 - lets say current leather shoulders have 330 armor, t6 feral have 480

Current Leather Shoulders Without Additional Armor, by "possible" talents: 330*5*1.3*1.15 = 2466.75 "Armor"
Current T6 Shoulders (Feral) With Additional Armor, by current talents: 480 * 5 * 1.1 = 2640 Armor

Thats about fair I think. We really need around an additional factor of 50% - what I suggested (1.3*1.15) is about that.

This is no QQ, just a suggestion, how to fix the issue that T6 would scale so well - nerf T6 post WOTLK release, add scaling to talents (in DEEP feral) that allows us just to wear rogue gear and thus skip the "tier/additional armor only" itemization problem. If we get that I do not see need for str=>parry, but adding a spell reflect move (with maybe 10% of "spell damage returned", just a weaker, but utility wise comparable solution) that in addition converts strength into absolute DR, on an active GCD/rage cost would be good)

edit: 65 items with 100+ additional armor ( Armor - Items - World of Warcraft )


p.s. @ kalbear - nopes what I suggested is ramping up armor talent from 10 to 30% and thus bear form would result into 6.5 armor coeffcient - this would allow us to use rogue gear - but we would not as fast reach the armor cap. for example if we look at [Duplicitous Guise] resulting in 2717 armor while [Mask of the Fury Hunter] currently results into 643 * 5.5 = 3536.5 armor - that seems to be a huge nerf, but with additional 15% damage reduction from all sources - the result should (if my math is not faulthy) be the same, and still a gap to go. further blizzard could just ramp up the armor cap, armor cap is no issue to set to 80%, what I really wonder about is why there is no avoid cap (and rogues, ferals and warriors tanking mother with FULL MELEE avoid show how flawed that is)

@ dukes: who talks about 95% - there is no need to do 95%. Hunters in SWP can do 3200 DPS on brutallus (at least WWS says so) - what if we can just do 80% - that would be 2560 DPS at max, why not? sure there are many factors, but for sure blizzard can hot fix "too low dps" of mages/huntes/warlocks/rogues relativly fast and they got nice statistic tools running in the background for sure

 

• Astrylian

It's not just T6 gear, but all high end gear with extra armor. Badge gear, T6 gear, Sunwell gear, even T5 and crafted gear. That's not an insignificant amount of gear to go back and reitemize (and they'd have to convert that armor to something else; agi or sta most likely).

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TheNameLessOne

Don't forget arena gear as well.

Of course thats the brings up another mess of feral druid pvp and how separate cat/bear is supposed to work there.

 

kalbear

Nerfing old BC content's armor (and you're talking all shared gear, all crafted gear, all pvp gear, and all tier gear) is probably not the best solution, as it still doesn't fix the relative uselessness of strength or defense on shared tanking gear. (you'd have to even go further and nerf all pre-BC content too). If their goal is to make all tanking classes reasonably share the same pieces of ring/amulet/trinket/cloak gear, they'll need to buff what defense does for bears, what strength does for bears, or make that item so good for bears that it doesn't matter what other stats it has wasted on itemization (similar to how good the [Ring of Hardened Resolve] is right now).

It also means that bears will be hitting the armor cap early again, and that's a goal that Blizzard has explicitly said they want to avoid. I agree, as this was one of the bigger problems with itemization going into the tier level; armor was so good that any non-armor pieces were quickly removed.

The other possibility is for bears to hit the armor cap even earlier. If armor is treated like a paladin or warrior's defense rating (required to max out before raiding), one could see bears focusing on armor in every slot early on, and then moving to more avoidance/threat pieces as they gear up and get more armor on other pieces. That might be an interesting decision, but I doubt they want 75% mitigation with no crushing blows as the default value for starting raiding.

 

Ravager

Rogues have been freaking out over the cat-DPS changes.

I'm happy to see Blizzard is still retaining cat form's utility while scaling DPS much better than before, yet not overtaking Rogues. I really hope the scaling gap disappears and you can expect to see cat Druids a little behind Rogues on the damage meters by a consistent level no matter the gear (assuming they're equal).

 

dukes

The problem with scaling is that there's a lot of crossover once classes start to get close to one another. WoW has some very streaky mechanics (like Crits) that if you get particularly (un)lucky over a short-ish fight then you can easily get higher or lower dps than you "should" get.

As soon as Druids get to an "average" DPS of 95% of a Rogue, you end up with a LOT of crossover, and many, many people will be whining because there'll be loads of WWS posts of Rogues getting beaten by Druids just because of luck. Also, some people just plain suck at their class while others are good. Consumables also come into it, along with gear, and with group composition (although it's looking more and more like there'll be a lot less group synergy due to raid-wide buffs). It wouldn't take much for Blizzard to get the scaling slightly wrong and end up the DPS of a Rogue being slightly worse than anticipated for some reason (say there's a PVE Non-dagger user gap, such as that between Morogrim and Mother Shahraz) and suddenly there's a bit of an uproar because of it.

e.g. (with simplified maths and made up numbers that could be about right - this assumes LotP in the druid damage):
A Druid does 95.0% DPS with equal gear/buffs a 5% spread of base due to luck in a fight.
A Rogue does 100.0% DPS with equal gear/buffs with a 5% spread of base due to luck in a fight.
Druid has 90.5% low end, 99.5% top end. Rogue has 95.0% low end, 105.0% top end.

A further 5% spread downwards of base dps is added due to moving out of a boss ability (flamestrike, for arguments sake) and the skill of the player at raid awareness losing contact time during the fight.
Druid has 86.0% low end, 99.5% top end. Rogue has 90.0% low end, 105.0% top end.

Suddenly there's a big crossover, with an average Druid being lucky on both crits and raid abilities potentially being better by some margin than an unlucky rogue who has to reposition a lot. With the look of combat becoming potentially more complex in terms of both Druid and Rogue rotations (combo point generation, more finishers) skill of the player will probably be a larger factor than it is now (that's not to say it's not a factor now).

The line to tread is very fine, and I think Blizzard know that. I understand that it's the "average" that really matters, but most Rogues will NOT see it that way and I doubt Blizzard will balance for that situation due to the volativity of the subject, when Rogues are supposed to be "de facto" damage dealers while druids have a lot of other utility (even though in a perfect raid something like Combat Res or Innervate shouldn't be needed).



I am also wondering if bleeds will become more important for other classes now that there's both Mangle and Trauma affecting them. Rupture would certainly seem to be pretty good on high armour bosses. Again, showing the lack of keeping up with WotLK news, is the debuff limit being lifted further? It would seem that there'll be some serious competition for debuff slots with all the new things being added if not.

 

◊ Lord BEEF

I haven't heard anything on the debuff limit. I agree that it will be VERY cramped.

 

Ravager

The bolded part is what I think is one of Blizzard's goals. If you bring a Shadow Priest with a Warlock, that Warlock's damage will increase substantially. Same with things like LotP, Battle Shout, Blessing of Might/Kings, etc that all increase a Rogue's damage. The main issue being addressed is the fact that Feral Druids become weaker in comparison to other classes when everyone's gear gets better. At least, with these changes (I hope), cats will do X% less damage than Rogues in Naxx and also X% less damage in Icecrown.

Skill, consumables, and awareness will always be more valuable to a raid than just mashing Sinister Strike, and that's why I think Ferals will always be viable in raids. You simply can't beat an additional 5% crit and the ability to resurrect a dead person in battle, and even in a cat spec you should be more than ready to offtank some boss adds.

Besides, I don't think Rogues and Mages are quite concerned with Ferals beating them on the damage meters just yet. I think the big issue for them are the Shadowbolt-spamming 0/21/40 Warlocks who get ~10k SB crits on Brutalus.

 

piteq

Reworking whole mitigation/avoidance mechanics for bears, so that it uses strength as one of most important stats is just simply a bit late, but honest response for druids' pleas, asking for making [Pillar of Ferocity] more attractive tanking weapon.

 

Zhoreilh

Let's try to look at the bright side, ok ?
- even in "rogue gear", we have 30-40% more armor than other tanks. We will still be "king of armor".
- rogue gear DOES have stamina. Rogues' sets have more stamina than ours, in fact.
- strength giving parry rating to dk and more block value to warrior/paladin is in fact probably a way to get rid of parry rating/block value on shared slots. A least, we get something that is not totally useless. Current itemisation in the beta seems to confirm this.
- armor and stamina on shared slots is better for us than for anyone else. If others stats are worst, that's just fair.

 

aldy

As to the debuff concern, there was a blue post about it within the last week (sorry, no link; I think it was as a sidenote in a warlock or DK post) which stated that Blizzard was fully aware of the debuff problem and was looking into ways to solve it.


Edit: Here is the blue post:
There is no way a Frost, Blood and Unholy DK is getting into every raid. Likewise, there is no way an Affliction, Demo and Destro warlock is getting into every raid. As I am fond of pointing out, we have 25 raid slots and 30 specs. Over the next few weeks, we are going to take a really hard look at raid buffs and debuffs. We are going to combine some when we can and give different specs alternate ways of providing the same debuff. As an example, shadow priests, ret paladins or survival hunters should all be valid mana batteries. As another example, Ebon Plague may offer the same effect as Curse of Elements (and neither will stack). You'll want someone to bring the debuff, but you may not need both debuffers in one raid.

(from MMO-Champion BlueTracker - New talents up)

 

Tuftears

My first thought here was - why not? (re: assuming a dependence on tier gear for bear tanking)

Okay, you can't assume that bears will raid in order to get bear gear, but tanking is fundamentally an instance/raid group function. So what happens if you have a 'WotLK dungeon set' that drops from the high-end dungeons of WotLK? Say, 'dungeon set tokens' that drop from the bosses, usable by several classes and specs within those classes, and redeemable for spec-dependent armor pieces.

Ferals have already had to deal with a relative scarcity of tanking gear. Why not imagine that cats will be able to regem rogue-style leather to cat preferences and that the feral tier pieces will receive free armor and extra stamina for bears, as well as to increase cat longevity in PVP? As long as the gear is achievable early enough to get them 'in the door'.

upstart feline miscreant (47 feral/14 resto)

 

Tappin

Because then we end up limited to tier gear. Why should ferals have less upgrades to look forward to than any other class/spec? I wouldn't call myself greedy. But I enjoy the game more if there's a shot at having an upgrade drop. I still love my druid, but I've been frustrated that I had the #1-#3 non-tier item in most slots (pre-Sunwell) after 2 trips to SSC and a bunch of heroics. Having a class limited to only a few upgrades in the game while other classes can get (probably minor) upgrades from almost any drop makes it a little less fun. Look at tanking gear in T4-T6 zones. Plate classes get tier and non-tier upgrades for most slots in each zone. Bears only get a few non-tier pieces. This works, but it's a little frustrating. Without changes, WotLK could be even worse in this respect. With a few small changes, the exact opposite could be true (us tanking in rogue gear or sharing non-visible armor with other tanks).

I'm not saying we should gear up outside of raids. In fact, I'm saying that we should get MORE of our gear in raids. Part of what was wrong with TBC and why we got nerfed was that we got good tanking gear pre-KZ while other tanks struggled.

But in those raids, we shouldn't be limited to looking forward to a few possible drops (just tier gear?). We shouldn't have to be the tank with the least upgrades to look forward to while raiding (crafted leather the best tanking gear until tier gear, tanking weapons from rep and ssc and that's it, best trinkets from outside raids, etc).

If we could re-gem rogue leather to tank, that would be one thing. But look at what's out there right now. Unless they change the gear or bear mechanics our tanking stats won't be good, even stacking sta or agi gems. Remember that most of the non-tier rogue gear doesn't have a lot of gem slots. And (currently) we can't gem armor and get the bear multipliers for it.

 

• Cluey

Removing the bonus armour may be as simple as setting an item budget stat in the data base to zero.
They also have no need to add something to replace what they would take away if they did this as the entire reason behind a change like this is to make the newer gear an upgrade.
I hope they come up with a better plan but it is a possibility.

A conversion like this has been suggested in the past and dismissed, wracking my brain this would be going back to posts made by Caydiem a long time ago.
Back in the day there was a lot of interest shown in converting intellect and spirit into stats which helped cat or bear depending on which form you were in, moonkin didn't even exist back then!
It would be possible to have the different stats convert between forms, with or without talents, but it would probably be too strong in PvP.

Now given that they currently have talents like this for shaman and death knights in the beta maybe their stance has changed or at least softened.