I've been rather worried about what they were doing with feral tanking, but the latest blue posts have been somewhat reassuring on the matter. The fact that they're adding death-knights in is also a plus, as that class as a whole is most like a feral druid.

I think our tier gear will be itemized like rogue gear, (with obviously less hit and strength instead of AP), because it's pretty much worked already, once you remove bonus armour (and int) on the existing feral specific gear you're there. I think they're going to have to retrospectively modify the existing gear, because otherwise the bonus armour on it is too good to miss. Compared to dps, or healing when you have many synergies and have to consider mana, it's actually pretty easy to balance tanking stats.

In fact, perhaps the best way of dealing with the armour issue, is to have bear form (and the frost presence) only increase the armour multiplier for the base body armour. That way the armour is pretty much dependent on item level like a warrior or paladin is (and we wouldn't need separate tanking and dps weapons). Sure it would mean that we probably wouldn't want a lot of the traditional tanking rings, cloaks and necks, but if they're loaded with defense, dodge and shield block then we may not want to use them anyway. (defense and strength need to be made more useful for bears perhaps)

Still, we're probably going to need a few duplicate pieces, due to the fact that we'll probably want to socket stamina in some items, but that's a lot better than the current struggle to stretch your gear so that you can find optimal setups for dps, tanking bosses, tanking trash, magical damage, that we have to engage in at the moment.

I don't think they're likely to change our strength to AP multiplier, even for cat form. To do so would mean that we're even less likely to seek strength on items or gem for it, and from what I remember that was something they wanted to avoid.

They've already buffed our mana regen while in feral forms. Some sort of feral stats --> caster stats conversion could be added as a talent I guess, but it would be mainly a pvp thing, and I fear it would be a distraction for pve.

To me the talent point thing and competing with rogues for dps is a bit of an misrepresentation. What we need to be able to do is to provide some reason for having us in the raid in a dps role, because the real issue is how do you make tanking classes useful on a fight where they're not required to tank. Typically you want your tanks to be some of your best raiders, so it's pretty stupid to require half of them to sit out on half your encounters. The present answer seems to be they can respec to healing or dps, and then do those roles with inferior gear, which isn't really an answer as they'll still be sitting out on the crucial encounters. In reality you need them to be able to fulfill those roles with mostly the same gear, or find other ways to get them into the encounters. The feral druid is actually pretty well setup for working that way, we use mainly the same stats for tanking and dps yet those 2 function have quite separate mechanics. Sadly we have no real raid synergy and our group synergy is currently poor (although fixing totems will help a lot). I think it would be nice if they added a cat form specific group buff and gave us dps equivalent to other hybrids. Combat resurrection is a nice raid-wide bit of utility, but in my experience doesn't really contribute to getting you into progression raids.

I like your base body armor idea (larger bear multiplier, but only on leather slots?). But if that's all they do, and we get no survivability out of rogue off-pieces (agi, ap, hit, expertise, haste) or tank off pieces (str, def, parry, block)... who do we share those slots with? Or is feral the only class/spec that doesn't share these slots with a few other classes? I think they'd need to change the benefit we get from tanking rings, cloaks, necks, etc. as well as the rogue gear end. The end result should not be an increase in total survivability, just more stats to care about, so that the game doesn't so many bear-only items.

This rang home pretty hard for me as a Tier 6 raiding feral who stopped before shortly before sharaz to go play my paladin simply because I couldn't find enough upgrades to make the game continue for me.

Anyway, that wasn't what I wanted to say. Seems there is an awful lot of negativity with regards to tanking ferals in this thread and very little talk about the fact that crushing blows from what I have read about the place have gone away.

So lets talk about armour first, here are two items from WOTLK, blue iLevel 183 one leather one plate.
Constellation Leggings , 455 armour (leather)
Ironshaper's Legplates , 1810 armour (plate)
Assuming items have armour values based purely on item level (which I believe to be the case excepting items with bonus armour values on) the leather piece has almost exactly 1/4 of the value of the plate piece. I put it to this thread that we do not need a great deal of the armour required in the current expansion simply because of the lack of crushing blows.

It has been my experience that crushing blows can be a real preventative against druids main tanking, while not impossible it certainly makes it a great deal more challenging. With the removal of them, this removes a scaling issue that we faced along with an evening out of our abilities as compared to the other tanks. Certainly it has also been my experience that where crushing blows are not faced (bosses such as Archimonde and Mother Sharaz) druids became instantly the primary choice for MT.

The only major difference between a druid and warrior/paladin is the lack of shield. Which can generally be made up for by having armour value on rings, amulets or trinkets. Giving the increased armour rate from being in bear form.

So lets look at our position coming into raiding come WOTLK:

• Our armour values will be similar
• Bear HP should be slightly higher. This is an assumption given our high scaling.
• Our avoidance should be similar or slightly higher given our armour is likley to have agility on it. This also assumes little or minor changes to our dodge from agility ratio, which I have heard rumours of but nothing official.
• Assuming current 5% crit mechanic on PVE encounters we should have no requirement for defence.
• We have damage reduction inline with the other tanks through Demoralizing Roar and Infected Wounds (assuming this lands on bosses, again I haven't heard anything about that yet )
• We have one major emergency button in Beserk on a similar cooldown to paladin and warrior abilities.
• We cannot block.

So where does this leave us? I'll quote two posts ago:

We should be in a heavy dps leather set having similar tanking ability to the plate tanks while retaining our ability through having the dps gear on to go cat form and push out some decent to heavy dps. In my eyes we are the only true hybrid in this sense, we can properly furfil two roles in near identical gear. In closing, there are still minor balancing issues to be sorted out (such as the current armour values on items which push them way above their item levels as discussed) but we're looking good as a class.

PS. Something noticed in the above posts with regards to strength scaling in cat form. As tanks we will be using items likely laden with strength in our ring and amulets if this is anything to go by, due to our sharing the items with Warriors, Paladins and Death Knights. As such, while the item isn't optimal for use in cat form, to nerf it further seems illogical.

Missing a flat % reduction like defensive stance. We either need that or higher armor.

I'm still trying to figure out why Blizzard were so quick to remove our spell damage reduction. It's like it was there one day and the next it was gone.

The problem with the current situation is that, without additional armour items, bear form gives 400% armour and thick hide gives a further 10%, which makes us approximately equal to a warrior in similar ilvl gear in terms of damage reduction (our 440% against their 400%(plate) + 10% defensive stance).

If they nerf the agi->dodge conversion to balance out avoidance they need to be careful - the new SotF means defence is very much not worth it for us, so dodge needs to make up the avoidance difference of not having parry, not having additional miss (from defence), and not having block as an additional damage reduction. We also then don't have improved defensive stance (an additional 6% reduction), AND we don't get a magic damage reduction.

Either Warrior avoidance needs to be kept low so that our dodge percentage doesn't have to be ridiculous at higher tiers to keep us equal, or something else needs to be introduced to balance out the damage reduction a bit. It would seem that, with the armour cap as it is, and the above avoidance conundrum, there needs to be another factor introduced for bears to make it balanced.

Bearform *increases* armor by 400%, making the modifier 5, rather than 4 (and 5.5 with Thick Hide, rather than 4.4). Note that Warriors also have a +10% armor talent which cancels out against ours if we want to do side-by-side armor comparisons.

Thinking further on them actually ripping the tree apart and giving us two completely different mini trees inside of the feral tree sounds like a pretty bad idea. Ideally what they will do is add in 2 separate linked talents. So that one will drastically increase our damage output in cat (leaving us with all the same utility and tanking capabilities we have now, but not enough to MT a progression raid in LK) and one that will give us some drastic mitigation increase in bear.


Right below berserk seems like the best place for a "Path of the Cat" vs "Path of the Bear" type talents (so that you have to put 5/5 in either of them to ultimately get to berserk... Maybe even go as far as to grey out whichever path you dont choose once you put 1/5 into either cat or bear)

So if I put 5/5 into X Bear talent I can then choose 1/1 of drastic new mitigation talent that gives me MT status

I put 5/5 into X Cat talent I can then choose 1/1 of drastic new DPS talent that gives me MT status(or just make these flatout 5/5 talents)


Would give us even more bloat but at least it would give us a choice (And I am sure they will trim the fat before release and streamline it once they figure out what exactly they are going to do)

Either that or put a few talents so high in the tree that we can only choose one or the other depending on what we want to be specialized in.

Overall though I would hate to loose our versatility we have now, being able to go from one extreme to the other is what really makes the class enjoyable to me. I am sure blizzard knows that too, so we will just have to wait and see what their first attempt at a solution is.

I think a clever solution would be a conversion talent like the protection paladins got where a fraction of stamina also creates spell damage so as to remove spelldmg from plate tanking pieces. We could recieve base armor from stamina or attack power for example. I believe attack power would even be the better choice since rogue items will forcus around Agility and atack power rather then stamina. It would also prevent Arena gear with high stamina values from being too powerful in a PvE perspective.

To match a warrior's physical mitigation through armor alone (not counting block) we need to compensate for defensive stance.

So against lvl83 mobs (wotlk bosses) you will need 11.11 % more armor plus 1848 to match a warrior's physical mitigation.

This does assume we wield a weapon with bonus armor to compensate for a shield though.

Bear form gives us (4+1)*1.1 = 5.5x modifier to armor assuming 3/3 thick hide.

Assuming plate items will have four times the armor value of leather items and the warrior has specced 10% bonus armor that leaves us with

5.5 / 4.4 = 125 %

So we will get even at an armor level of 14784, with is easily reached and we will still pull ahead through rings and possibly trinkets with bonus armor as we get five times the benefit from them.

Thanks for clarifying that, it does indeed put us at a level much higher armour (IE about 1/5th) than the plate equivelent.

I would like to know how this was calculated, but your numbers do seem to fit.

Given that my maths was incorrect, the increased armour should compensate for the lack of defensive stance as shown in the above post.

I'd also like to point out one of the issues with high armour at end game, in that within TBC it was very quick and easy for a druid to cap armour in the t4 to t5 range. As armour is one of our best stats, to remove the ability for it to scale (simply by hitting the cap) halted the progression of druid MTs at this point, our only other stats being dodge and stamina. While this is okay to an extent, I'd like to see lower armour values in WOTLK with greater compensation from a wider range of stats other than armour simply for this reason. If I cap out in first level of tier gear again it'll be a real pain :P. By comparison, our tier 6 plate wearers at the moment are hitting the 65%+ mark at end game.

Pardon the catching up, but what exactly is the problem with AC at the moment? Are we simply whining because there haven't been any/many bonus armor items dropping, and that a Blue or two have stated that they 'want druids to share gear with rogues', so we're all simply assuming that there won't be bonus armor items? I sound sarcastic and rude, but that is a sincere question, is that the problem we're having currently on Beta?

Could someone on the beta forums please ask (or test themselves) how the glyph of rip works with the 15-second duration? I would expect the last second to be basically useless, but it would be good to get confirmation.

TBC had quest rewards + crafted patterns w/ bonus honor that started showing up around level 67. Nothing comparable has been found in current beta even though it is at the point where the bonus armor stuff should start showing up (based on TBC and to a lesser extent original WoW). Also there is also some nebulous blue speak that hints that the +armor isn't coming back and they are looking at other means.

In the end what it really comes down to is scaling & itemization. Feral druids have always had terrible scaling mechanics and unique itemization that doesn't fit w/ any other class. Simply waving your hand and saying you will now like rogue gear w/o actually doing anything about it doesn't mean you will actually want rogue gear. However, Blizzard has been slowly addressing the issues w/ rogue gear on the cat side. It remains to be seen what "other means" actually means in regards to bear. The most likely source is necks w/ +armor (which have been found) and better trinket itemization. However this still does not address the fact that bear does not really share the same stats w/ the other tanks.

Can't test it, cause it's not actually implemented. The glyph spell is in the data files, but there's no way to actually get it yet.

It looks like they will continue to itemize non-visible armor items with +AC (Evidence here and here). Since AC is still an incredibly powerful stat for us, we should be able to at least partially close the mitigation gap with warriors that way. But we definitely need more.

Maybe a talent that converts int into some form of melee and/or spell mitigation? Would certainly make bear itemization more interesting.

How about this for an idea: make Nurturing Instinct also increase healing done to the druid in bear form by some factor of attack power. Would make the rogue gear with AP and offset pieces with strength useful and would increase bear survivability without making their mechanics just a mirror of the other tanking classes.

That's how it was originally when they introduced the revamped Nurturing Instinct. I bet they are still thinking about it, but I doubt it'll happen. And tbh, it'd be a pretty boring fix too, can't figure an encounter where that would make ferals more desirable than the other tanking classes.

That's basically accurate. There was a blue post stating something along the lines of:

~Well crushing blows are gone from tanking so druids don't really need to be lol-armor-capped as much as they used to. So you can just use more rogue gear and it'll be fine!~

That's not a direct quote at all, just the gist.

So of course people used to being armor capped are bitching up a storm. That then leads to some other people saying something like this:

~Well look! There are still cloaks/rings/necks/trinkets with armor -- at least a few of them!~

But those items are mostly itemized with what appear to be more warrior- or DK-esque stats like Strength and Defense, which leads to more bitching about how they aren't optimized for bear tanking and how we clearly need Strength to grant us paw-rry or something along those lines.

That's a summary of this thread (on this topic) so far.

Pretty much.

Having ferals as viable tanks is certainly what we all want, but it does have major issues related to itemization of both body and common slots, in addition to the general feral weapon issues. The issues are basically scaling issues irrespective of what they want the final relative mitigation values to be for the different tanking classes.

The biggest of those issues is surrounding armour. On the live servers we have an issue with anti-crit as well, but that's fixed in the WotLK talents. If for a moment we ignore the armour values, most rogue items are almost as good for tanking as the feral ones, and many dps items in other slots are almost as good as the standard warrior tanking ones. Thus if you find a better way of dealing with the armour situation, then you don't really have to itemise speciality feral tanking gear, which better fits the concept of a spec that can do two roles at once. (An interesting alternative might be to make all tanking gear a raid wide responsibility, using BoE drops and crafting / purchasing class specific items, as the desired stats are different for the different tanking classes).

Now the way bear form armour works is pretty screwed up, especially if you look at it from an itemisation perspective. The multiplier of 5.5 only works on the base armour of an item, so we often prioritise additional armour on an item above all else. This means that armour gems (not that they exist), enchants and buffs are pretty much useless for us which actually makes balancing feral mitigation a bit of a problem. The reason for the armour multiplier is to compensate us for wearing leather and not having a shield, so it kind of makes sense to limit the effect of the multiplier to body items, and to not really go with additional armour on any of those items.

It seems to me that a simple solution would be:

- Add armor gems and +armor patches
- Allow bearform to multiply armor from enchants/gems/patches
- Don't put extra armor on anything anymore

This would allow druids who want to do so, to use the bearform multiplier to stack armor, while preserving the "use the same gear as other physical DPS" ideal they seem to be going for.

Edit: I'm not sure how easy that would be to code, or how it would interact with Ironshield potions (although I'm aware that potion chain-chugging is also nerfed now, thankfully.)

I think that general goal is only going to apply to cat gear, and not bear gear. Even assuming that +AC is a thing of the past, and knowing that defense is no longer an issue, you still have the problem of rogue gear not having enough stamina for tanking. Sure you can use gear with slots and gem for stamina, but that's not going to be a viable option for all of the slots where you will be needing stam.