If nothing else were to change (ie, no Parry-related talents, etc), giving Druids the ability to parry would let them make better use of Defense as a stat, since they would accrue 3/4 of the benefits instead of half. Obviously still not as useful as shield-wearing classes find it, but equal to DK's at least.

Seminarca:

At the moment, any Feral in Sunwell would love to have 20% of their dodge converted to parry, due to the Sunwell Radiance debuff. This debuff hits Ferals with greater impact than Warriors/Paladins, few of which have 20% dodge to lose in the first place. As to greater benefit from Defense, until we see Lvl 80 items, we wont' know if there are rings/neck/cloak out there other than the +defense loaded War/Pal/DK items. Granted, we are discussing WotlK, and they will probably fix avoidance values to prevent 100% avoidance tanking, but it does make a difference. As a sidenote, it would also be a minor buff for pvp purposes vs. the warrior overpower ability [which I thought I had read was going to be changed, but didn't see anything on mmo.champions latest warrior patch notes].

Please don't say stuff like this. A warrior geared enough for brutallus would find it very difficult to drop himself below 20% dodge without purposely picking some inferior pieces. I myself can reach ~30% dodge when raid buffed very comfortably and i don't even come close to the perfect gear layout.

Are you thinking in terms of quest greens? There is absolutely no way a warrior/paladin is having sub-20% dodge. Unless they're getting ready to raid Karazhan.

Besides which, if I traded in 20% dodge for parry, I'd still have 60% dodge leftover for Sunwell Radiance to eat. I don't want to think what you're doing with your gear to arrive at <40% dodge, that -20% would result in <20% left.

I believe this is the reason ferals got so much dodge from agility, to compensate for not having parry but losing that same scaling from dodge means we need to get some form of avoidance from somewhere else. I'd say odds are we'll get parry to save them figuring out a different mechanic and seeing as they want us to be looting rogue and warrior gear for tanking there might even be a sort of logic to it.

As it stands the only avoidance stat we truly care about is agility, point for point it's better than anything and that's poor design so I understand the reasoning behind changing its scaling but without seeing these other changes the blues keep alluding to it's hard to know for sure. I'm actually dreading what they're going to do, I just don't think they'll manage to figure out a sensible way to allow a feral to tank well with str, agi, parry, def, dodge, block etc even if the suggestions here about putting in conversion talents sounds straightforward.

I stand corrected re: relative dodge %s for Warriors/Paladins. Thank you for the clarification.
Which leaves us where we were before: Waiting to see whether Blizzard will create a separate set of neck/cloak/ring gear that benefits Ferals, or whether we are stuck using the same items as the other tanks which doesn't benefit us as much.

Could work as Sunwell loot does now. One item drops, you can swap it for something better designed for your class. Not a perfect solution, but I suppose they can make Death Knight and Feral Druids both share the loot easily enough since neither uses a shield.

The agi to dodge conversion is exactly why I'd like to see another avoidance bonus added. It doesn't necessarily have to be parry. But losing that much dodge (let's just say Sunwell Radiance suddenly doesn't affect Paladins/Warriors but still affects Ferals) while the other tanks stay at roughly the same level is not something I'd enjoy.

And Kalbear, almost more than role switching during raids, I'd say we have been trailblazers more than anything else. Early on bears tanked Prince Malchazar better. They tanked Morogrim / Fathom Lord better. They tanked Azgalor better. Once gear settles in, you can bring in the Warrior instead. I really would like to keep that spot myself. That, and the role switcher. It's kinda fun ressing someone when Veras vanished again.

No, that won't work - let me explain why. Even though a Death Knight cannot block, he still needs massive amounts of defense (to gain crit immunity), as will a warrior/paladin. So all the tanking equipment will have lots of defense on it. It's true that a DK will only gain parry/miss/dodge from defense, but that is still 50 % more than what a feral gets.

Having no parry ability essentially means that every single piece of equipment with defense on it (most likely 50+ % of all the tanking equipment) will be far from optimal for us.

I believe a solution would be to double our dodge gain from defense to at least bring us up to par with DKs, but defense will still be an aweful stat for us.

I'd honestly rather not have bears be the best trailblazers again. Being great tanks in T4 was almost entirely because of good itemization on gear pre-Kara which hit caps on values such as armor too quickly. Between the bad itemization and those caps, druid became worse and worse relative to other tanks as progression continued; after T5 there simply wasn't the improvement in tanking ability because of gear compared to warriors or paladins. That was okay; between the encounter design and general abilities it wasn't like a druid couldn't tank most things, but at the same time it meant druids became suboptimal relative to geared warriors or paladins.

I would like to say that Sunwell showed very easily how well druids can do in the encounters there, and there are plenty where a druid is the best choice. So it's not as if druids became the worst choice in tanking for all fights post-T5. I would just like to see more gradual improvement in their gear and what can be tanked, which is something we did not see in most of TBC.

Why all the doom and gloom? A prot warrior is worse off in sunwell than we are as main tanks, ignoring mitigation the tps alone justifies it so I'm not worried about the status quo, we can be hanged equally well by content design, itemisation or class stats/abilities and there's no way to tell which it'll be or any until we're given more information.

All three are plate wearers. I don't see the problem. Dump the +defense on plate items, leave the trinkets and stuff for cross-class.

So far, that's not the case and amulet/trinket/ring/cloaks have def on them.That can be okay though - having a ring with a ton of armor and defense would be fine for a druid since the armor would benefit them so much more; it wouldn't matter that it didn't do much via the defense. Same with strength, given that it's a threat-only stat currently compared to it being mitigation (or avoidance, in the case of DK) for the others. Not every piece has to be perfectly itemized, and I'd honestly prefer it if they weren't so long as there are pieces that are perfectly itemized. Having pieces be okay for some tanking classes and great for others is fine so long as they're not useless for everyone.

The point is that all of that is perfectly itemized for DKs. If it was trying to split the difference then there would have been agil instead of dodge.

Currently druids don't share the same stats w/ any of the other tanking classes, they are the odd man out. And given the mantra of shared itemization, that just means everything you get will be inferior.

Additionally unless they change mechanics if all they are tanking is casters they don't need to be crit immune, it might be a good idea to be in case they do get swung at but how many warlocks tanking Leo or Illidan were crit immune?

While moving the defense rating off armor would help the other three tanking classes we will still want alternatives for optimal gear, but this is all based on another assumption. Do tanks, not us specifically, still need -5.6% crit against plus three mobs?
I see a lot of us talking about it as that is what we expect but has anyone tested it? I am not in beta but if I was I don't think I would have tested it as I would be leveling and providing what useful feedback I could.


Seminarca I agree with you on the strange obsession that some people have with getting parry, as long as the total avoidance we have is comparable to the other tanks it doesn't matter where it comes from.
Having said that we are in a situation where we only want a couple of stats on our ideal gear, this is less than ideal due to the way the item budget works.
I haven't seen anywhere the agility to dodge ratio is listed either, it isn't in the http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t29453-c...gs_level_80_a/ or the first post of this thread, which hasn't been updated for a while.
Searching through the thread now:
This post claims it will be the same as rogues.
Melthar posted, "I know our agi:dodge/crit ratios are being changed".
kalbear asked the same question.
Astrylian posted some data but not knowing all the details I can't work out the new agility:dodge ratio and this is obviously not at 80 anyway.
Zhoreilh posted, "Agility/dodge ratio seems to be 19.5 for 1%@70".

That 19.5 figure seems the same as what my alt rogue is getting now, is there a way of working out the scaling assuming we have the same ratio as rogues?
Any of you guys in the beta think to record your agility:dodge ratio as you leveled?

As said - it's just a mechanism. One that'd tie in closely with what the other tanks get and you do see lowby bears parry. If they invent an entirely new mechanism, most of us couldn't give a rat's ass. This just seems the most obvious choice.

As to the agi:dodge ratio, I do believe it's buried somewhere in the combat ratings @ 80 thread. From the top of my (admittedly sleepy) head, it was tied to the rogue dodge rate.

Exactly! If they nerf the agility to dodge ratio, and then give us back that lost avoidance through parry, they might as well have not bothered changing anything.

As to your second point (I think you meant them giving us parry could be justified because we could then get avoidance through 3 stats on gear?), I don't think this is a likely cause. Considering our dual role, imagine how much wasted itemization we would have in the form of parry and dodge rating on our tier gear.

If they go with the T4-T6 token system, we'd have just the one Feral set. So while we are dpsing, our parry and dodge rating is giving fuckall benefit. Will they make 2 Feral tier sets, one for cat the other for bear? Who knows. I think it's unlikely.

If they don't using a token system, and instead go with the Sunwell mechanic of drops and tradeins (i.e. cannibalizing Rogue gear), we have almost the same problem as with tier tokens. The "bear" drops (Mask of the Fury Hunter) will have parry and dodge and the "rogue" drops (Duplicitious Guise) will have only dps stats.

But everything we've gotten from Blizzard so far seems to indicate they want to homogenize gear as much as possible. They want to lessen the amount of loot they want to have to design and drop. This would completely fly in the face of all that. They *want* us to be using rogue gear for tanking, and unless they are willing to incite an ocean of protests from rogues having parry rating on their dps gear, I just don't see it happening.

Now I know Naxx isn't open yet on beta, so it's hard to say what raid loot is going to look like. But parry rating for bears just doesn't seem like a sensible idea given what we know.

As suggested on the wowhead comments, that could just be a random enchant crafted item.

This is a valid point .. but only at post patch 3.0 at level 70. But I get the feeling no one is going to care what happens at post patch 3.0 at level 70.

Rating requirements for all things is almost doubling. Dodge rating required for 1% dodge will go up from 18 to something like 36, it's not fair to flippantly claim we are the only ones getting unfairly targetted by avoidance nerfs. While it's true that our agi to dodge is getting worse at 70 while other classes aren't losing anything, and that there's also no doubt it's going to get even worse by the time we're 80, it's also true that the other classes will lose tons of avoidance by that time as well.

Let the dust settle at level 80 and then start complaining.

Well put, Tappin. Posted that in the feral concerns thread in the beta forums for ya.

Right, only it doesn't. This was already brought up, but once again:

[Thunderheart Chestguard] vs [Slayer's Chestguard]
[Thunderheart Gauntlets] vs [Slayer's Handguards]
[Thunderheart Cover] vs [Slayer's Helm]
[Thunderheart Leggings] vs [Slayer's Legguards]
[Thunderheart Pauldrons] vs [Slayer's Shoulderpads]

I know, it was kind of surprising to me as well. It's obvious we do need to scale with more stats than just agility, but parry is not the answer (you spoke about how dodge rating is worse than agility for avoidance .. parry rating is even worse). Itemization wise, they have said they want us using Rogue gear, which will have no dodge or parry rating, but will be loaded with AP. Hence, it (as in the the "fix" they have in store for us) is likely going to be tied somehow to Str/AP.

I'm not disputing that we need help scaling better with gear, but really, giving us parry doesn't solve the problem.

Also, with the reduced agi:dodge ratio, dodge rating may be more dodge than agi finally. I haven't looked that up yet, so don't quote me on that.

This assumes that they would have to balance our tanking around leather with parry, block, dodge, etc. This doesn't have to be the case. They could balance us around tanking in rogue-ish leather (with respectable survivability from the agi, armor and sta that is already there) and tanking gear in the rest of the slots. They could even cause bears to lose some of their benefit from AP in rogue gear for survivability via a mechanic. Given the way they're moving towards sharing rogue leather, I wouldn't expect to see much parry/block/dodge/str/defense leather, even if we benefit from it more than now.

If they did balance us in tanking with non-rogue leather we would be limited to tanking in the little bear-specific gear available (tier, badge and the rare other piece?)

Consider the opposite. If they balance us around only high agi with moderate armor and sta (rogue leather), we won't have to make sacrifices for difficult tanking. Currently we need to make a judgement call: how much dps gear can I put on for my role in this enounter? Do I go pure dps to offtank, or mix in some tanking gear? If we don't want tanking gear at least in every off-slot, we will be huge threat bombs in bear who can swap to a dps role even more effectively than we do now.

I guess they could make us only want 1 set of gear for tanking and dps'ing. It would be more in line with other classes and how they gear up. I just think it would be very difficult to do correctly. And I like the challenge or working out the gear I need for various roles (I try not to roll on dps gear that's better used by full time dps'rs though).

Finally, we have to enchant/gem our gear for one role or another. Until we get two full sets of gear we already do a bit of what you talk about now: wasting item budget on our most important role.


A little creativity could make us tank with rogue style leather in our leather slots and tanking gear in our other slots without ruining tier gear.


On a related note, they talked about us being 'more bear' or 'more cat'. To some extent that will already happen without 'bear' or 'cat' talents because of enchants and gems on tier gear and augment choices. Those may be larger factors in what we're better at than our talent choices, especially if they make it relatively easy to swap talents (the 2 talent tree thing?) and expensive to change enchants/gems/augments and/or get 2 full sets of gear.

The other way of thinking about it is fine too. Scaling off only one or two stats is fine, as long as you itemise that way, and the numbers work out. Quite frankly I'd prefer it as a feral druid if I didn't need to get 2 completely different sets of gear. The problem at the moment is we don't have that flexibility (outside of pretty much full sunwell gear).

The comments about lower level gear are right on, but actually independent of the particular stats, it's a matter of scaling. In that sense they did get some things right. The (TBC) agility to avoidance ratio is actually right about where it should be if you compare it to an item that splits defense and dodge, and those two rating actually give about the same avoidance per point (assuming you can parry). Warriors actually have quite a base avoidance advantage over ferals, although we scale slightly better mostly due to sockets and enchants.

The crit immunity is a bit of red-herring, lack of it is what makes it difficult for us to get together tank sets atm, but that's more of a result of typical itemisation patterns than anything else. If we could work on average damage, feral tanks would currently run around without crit immunity, but still with a non trivial amount of defense (and dodge), which suggests that we a fair bit of non-optimal avoidance because it's on items which have desirable other properties usually bonus armour (or a lack of other tanking options).

In short it all comes back to armour values. Fix that (in the right way) and then you can look at how to deal with the other problems. The main problems there are: the mechanics of bonus armour, lack of ability to enhance base armour (a scaling issue), and the armour cap (potentially). I've outlined my solution earlier (no bonus armour, armour multiplier applies to body armour only), and if that body armour resulted in say 120% of the plate + shield armour value for a warrior, it'd fix most of the other problems. The armour cap would be unreachable, I wouldn't be stuck wielding badly itemised +armour weapons. Would it be over-powered? Perhaps, but it would be a lot easier to balance and itemise for. My feeling is we'd still collect (or socket) some items as tanking items.

The other way is an option, but honestly I feel's it's never really going to work out. If you add bonus armour to any slot, then almost by default that makes it the best feral tanking item. Give us parry or block and then defense becomes a bit better, but you really need to give us both to make it work. Unless you make our stats exactly the same as what the other tanks want, their gear is going to be suboptimal, which forces them to make feral tanking gear. In that respect, with the badge gear and the like things are a lot better than they used to be, but it's still very patchy. Thus, I'd prefer a solution which made it easy on the itemisation team, and which made it easy for us to gather the required gear.

This is somewhat true, but at the same time misleading. In most of the existing encounters we do this all the time, what's the best way of balancing mitigation, avoidance, threat, stamina? Agility is mainly concerned with avoidance and threat, but it is hardly the best stat for increasing threat, especially in a main tanking situation. Fix the armour issue and it's harder to change your mitigation, but I note there are fights that warriors use the feral cloak, so that dimension still applies. Without having to worry about crit immunity it does make things a bit easier, but I note that my tanking gear is currently quite different from my dps gear, and only one or two of those pieces are for anti-crit. While it's true that we may switch roles within a single fight a bit better than say warriors, they are looking to buff the protection trees, especially for dps, and it's actually very rarely a reason to bring someone to a raid.

It seems likely that the reason the gear so far for bears in WotLK is so piecemeal because the developers don't know exactly what role bear tanks are supposed to fill: Keeping the tanking classes distinctive without making them different enough that "you don't need any one class" to tank specific bosses is no doubt a difficult task. It's hard to imagine the itemization being sorted out before they know what it's supposed to produce, in tanking abilities.