TheNameLessOne

The big thing is the whole less mitigation but more stam comment. More stam is absolutely meaningless if you take significantly more damage. An arms warrior in full PVP gear socketed w/ stam will have more HP than a prot warrior but would still get obliterated on boss fights. High stam + low avoidance/mitigation == useless mana sponge that will run your healer OOM (assuming they can even survive a boss's attack rotation). Granted this is probably an extreme example.

Also the other thing to note is that warriors will not have significantly less stam due to them getting an extra slot with a bow/gun. Relic system is bad and goes against the whole shared itemization concept anyways.

 

seminarca

Can we please, for the love of god, stop discussing the high HP Druid niche as though it's set in stone? Ghostcrawler explicitly stated it was simply an example, not a direction they were actively pursuing for us. Do you honestly believe Blizzard doesn't understand the difference between damage reduction/mitigation/avoidance vs simply having a high HP pool?

At least wait until they've announced what they have in mind. If it (as in, our niche) does turn out to be a high hp pool, that of course would be the right time to complain and/or bring up suggestions to bring us up to parity. As of now it seems people are just happy to argue for arguments' sake =/

edit:

Two more recent ghostcrawler quotes that are worth pasting here:

1) Making us crit immune from talents alone is seemingly intentional, and not due to potentially as yet unknown changes in combat mechanics or as a way to artificially curb mudflation by having tighter defense requirements.

2) They will get encounter design right. Gone shall be the Kael'thases and Illidans.

3) People are likely overreacting to the Cat vs Bear talent focus.

 

Vaccine

Theres a lot of people making a mountain out of a mole hill. I took Gnoop's post as it was the most recent but its something thats been a repeating trend through this thread.

It doesn't really matter whether we can no longer cap armour or not. Theres not much to complain about at the moment, thats the thing. We can't judge our tanking prowess till we hit 80 and see how both our gear that we are meant to tank in turns out, and how we stack up vs the other classes once they have their gear and 80 skills. The same applies to cat, until we see what damage the main dps classes are putting out at 80 it is going to be pretty tough for us to know where we stand. My personal hope is that since we have this new diversification into speccing for either full tank or full DPS is that we can now overtake classes with far more utiltiy than us like Enh shaman in the DPS meters but rest assured if we come out too low and/or there ceases to be reasons to take a feral (or a feral dps) balancing will be done to make them an equally viable option.

If we hit 80 and we can't tank a thing, then we'll get a buff. Blizzard have stated their intention to have us as viable main tanks already, they aren't just going to leave us unable to so, or drastically worse as an option for it.

 

Prinsesa

With regards to "wanting Rogue gear and not having any bonus armor", I think it's important to note that gear homogenization only applies to a specific subset of gear: Random drops

You can easily justify putting bonus armor (or whatever other spec specific stats you want) on Tier 7 since the tokens do not collide with anyone else's gear.

You can easily justify putting bonus armor on Badge loot since the vendor selection does not collide with anyone else's gear.

And so on and so forth for crafted items, PvP items and reputation rewards.

Shields are a great example of this in action: Death Knights cannot block, so the tanking helms/chests/shoulders/gloves/pants/belts/boots/bracers do not have any Shield Block Rating or Shield Block value. They only have Defense Rating, Dodge Rating and Parry Rating, stats that all three tanking classes can use. Then you have the Blade-Binding Bulwark. DKs can't block, but they can't use shields either, so you're free to throw on as many "DK useless, Warrior/Paladin useful" stats on that as you want.

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler

 

Moof

But then we will end up with a similar situation to today, where the Tier drops will be far superior for tanking than anything else, thus we have little alternative in the way of gear choice. I remember the days of running KZ endlessly trying to get the T4 helm which refused to drop since it was the only tanking upgrade from a craftable blue (before the days of "free" pvp gear).

I'd prefer to see no bonus armor on any gear and the extra armor reserved for accessories and weapons.

 

Prinsesa

Isn't that the fault of bad itemization, though?

In any case, I agree that it's okay to leave Feral Tank armor on jewelry and Feral weapons - my comment was aimed more towards people who might feel that 5/6 slots worth of bonus armor would not be enough. That is, if it isn't enough, you can find it on 5/6 more without necessarily violating gear homogenization.

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler

 

Toranshalur

Personally i think the whole bonus armour thing is bad move. Ideally in wrath you should be able to tank and dps with one gearset. Yes, probably we'll all still have 2 but the thinner the gap between them gets the better.
Also high armour does mean capping, and so loss of scaling.

However the one stat which would facilitate single-set playing is probably agility, and that's been nerfed due to other scaling issues.

Having to have warrior necklaces and rings for a tank set is also bad, especially when it's easy to think up mechanics which would allow the use of rogue-friendly stats as tank stats, through talents or whatever.

 

urotas

The problem is the devs are talking about us having less armor than other tanks. Armor along with a slightly higher health pool is our only advantage over other tanks mitigation wise, so if you take that away we'll be left with almost nothing. Warrior for example have:

- More and better emergency buttons (50% shieldwall, last stand over berserker)
- Block for less melee damage
- 10% less physical damage and disarm
- 16% less magical damage and spellreflect
- More avoidance
- More armor too?

If we have less armor than warriors we aren't going to be viable as main tanks without compensating for the above somehow. Having a higher health pool isn't enough in any way, and the whole idea of being a damage sponge tank is flawed.

 

Qutossar

I'd luckily trade 20% Armor against +100% Life against Brutallus, for example.

I think the devs want us bears to take more damage, but have a higher effective life, though.
The main goal of a tank is not to take as little damage as possible, but to stay alive.

This would bring us back to the tanking niche we had prior to BC.
I liked it.

Most things warriors tanked (although Bears could!)
But if the warriors died too fast, a druid had to take over.

On many fights the problem is not healers going oom or not enough HpS, but spicky dmg.
A bear tank with double the amount of health of a warrior woud be preferable - even if he took a *lot* more damage.

 

Emi

I dont want that. In fact if Blizzard reduces us to a big pile of HP im rerolling. Plain and simple. I dont want to be a mindless tank that relies heavily on his HP alone. Screw that.

I'm a post TBC guy and if that was what a druid tank was to reduced to before, i'm glad i wasnt there from the start.

Yes yes i know its still early and the latest news seems to indicate our next tree "revision" may have considerable updates.

I'm expressing my concerns in beta so i dont have to do it as much after WotLK is released. Saves time and aggravation

 

Soultrigger

Sincerely, they are massively changing tanking talents and skills. Druids will still get their new talents push. So why discuss on random assumptions so much??

They could give us any new talent that changes it all, be it a parry, a double dodge buff, a hp regen with little cooldown, a change as how our armor deals with damage in a different fashion from other classes, to even just going to the 400% armor and make it 800% armor... it is pretty easy to solve the puzzle...

 

Qutossar

It is not a reduction!

It is different way of tanking.

We have 4 tanks

DK: Magical Tank
Pala: AE Tank
Warrior: Allround Tank
Druid: ?

What is our niche? Same as warrior, just a bit better / worse?
Same as DK, just worse at magical damage?

It would be a good solution to make us tanks for the hard hitters. In fact, that is what we have been traditionally.

To give us more armor than warrior, the same life and the same avoid but no block (like today) does not really make us different enough if there are nop crushings anymore.

I'd like the healers to tell me again: "Hey: Finally somebody where not every big heal is an overheal"


Besides:
I have been socketing dex as much as possible with my druid and liked it. It's just that I have been superior to our warriors until late BT. Druid mechanix are OP in BC. That's why our tanking items suck.

 

urotas

I can't see them giving druids twice the health of other tanking classes, as that would be a nightmare to balance. Losing our armor advantage would be a bigger loss than you might think too. I'll assume a boss hitting for 20k physical damage base.

A druid now would have 75% damage reduction, and get hit for 5k
A warrior with 20k armor and 10% from defensive stance has 66.32% damage reduction and gets hit for 6736. After 500 block value he'll get hit for 6236.
Druids may have slightly lower armor than warriors in Wrath, say 19k equivalent in lvl 70 values. The new druid would have 61.37% damage reduction, and be hit for 7726 damage.

That's a 55% increase in physical damage taken compared to live from losing our armor to lower than warrior levels. Getting a hypothetical defensive stance equivalent isn't going to compensate for it by a long shot, unless we also get something for the many other advantages warriors have. Having a high armor defines our tanking style right now. If we lose that, it'll require very big buffs elsewhere to compensate. I don't doubt their intent to keep druids viable as tanks, but I wonder if they realize how big of an impact losing our armor will be and how much we depend on it now.

 

mydhrin

The thing is its not their way of thinking anymore, according to 1 of Ghostcrawlers post. They want all 4 tanks to be viable main tanks in the end-game raiding. But like previous posters said, if we get lower armor then usual, lower mitigation then other tanks, when you are trying to optimize your raid composition, Druids bear tank will get the shaft again because we are less then others. I believe this isnt a good direction to go towards to...

 

Qutossar

We still have the armor trinkets/rings/weapons/neck items to get slightly better armor than warriors. Just not up to the cap.

I mean .. what other ways are there?

They could give us obcene amounts of avoid. That's exactly what they have done in BC and I doubt they'll do it again.
They could give us things similar to block. That would be especially lame.
They could give us a defensive stance .. lame as well.
They could give us some mayor life leech stuff .. doesn't fit for the class.
Copy/pasting abilities should never be a solution.


If they give us slightly better armor than warriors and comparable avoid but no block, there's just one way left I can think of.

Ask your raid healers, if HpS is the problem in keeping the MT up in late game.
It is not!

Besides having more Effective Health allow healers to use more mana conserving healing spells.
It's not all about how much damage you take. If it was, nobody would ever socket/enchant anything else but avoid.

The most important task of a tank is to survive. A massive amount of health (compared to other tanks) while also taking substantially more damage is a good way to make us the prefered tanks against hard hitters and warriors the preferred tanks for high but non-spiky damage.

Besides, this also makes us viable tanks for pure magical damage.

It comes naturally to the Bears and is a creative forth way that fits into the lore of a Bear
(never liked to imagine my Bear just avoiding all the hits .. I want him to take it and laugh )

 

Duilliath

No offense, but shut the hell up about armour and high health.

It's been shitting up the thread for pages now and it's getting beyond stupid.

If you can't add anything beyond wild speculation over a few words a Blue used somewhere in an example, then don't add a single damn thing. Wait for the push - wait for the talents, wait for the level 80 itemisation.

Till then, stop ruining a perfectly good thread with whining that makes this one feel like the official forums.

 

Merple

I enjoyed the fact that there was a class in BC that could and should take armor to it's limit. It was a unique part of the class that was important, though proved to be less useful when compared to the more wholistic mitigation offered by warriors.

I think the thing that we're forgetting is that it doesn't really matter how we're mitigating damage so long as all of the tanks have reasonably similar overall mitigation. Most tanks in the T6 area are mitigating (by various ways), about 90% of damage.

I can see something along the lines of Massive Armour, Massive Health, Modest Avoidance (we would specialize more in mitigation than avoidance), as well as a few unique modifiers to reduce general damage taken.

I honestly wouldn't mind sitting at 15% dodge and no other avoidance stats, if bears were designed to soak and reduce damage in a way that made that viable.

And like someone said earlier, this would put us as premiere tanks in the "Hard Hitters" category becuase while our healing throughput might be higher, our ability to reduce burst damage to a healable level without relying on chance to survive.

-In our country, any CBC reporter can dream of becoming head of state.

 

Pike

This isn't a complaint, just a suggestion for a talent that might help us with both itemization, and the possibility that we may not be getting equivalent levels of avoidance as other tanks.

What if we added a "toughness" aspect to thick hide? It would give us extra damage mitigation, based on our strength. Since we'll be sharing tanking jewelry and possibly trinkets with other tanks, there's a good chance we'll be wearing a bit more strength than previously. This would put that strength to good use, and I think the concept kind of makes sense. The stronger/more muscular you are, the more body armor/ability to take a hit you "generally" have.

I have no idea how things are going to play out at 80, but by the sounds of it, they're going to make it harder to hit the armor/mitigation cap. If we do indeed end up wearing a lot of rogue leather for tanking, this could help make up the loss of ac, and possibly give us our niche back as the mitigation tanks. The usefullness of this talent is highly dependant on how much more difficult it is to reach the armor/mitigation cap. If it turns out that most classes end up getting very close to the cap, maybe leave us with slightly less avoidance, but push our cap up past the 75% mark. I'm no mathematician, so I'll not even speculate as to how high that cap should be pushed to make up for a gap in avoidance.

Any thoughts? Am I way off?

 

Qutossar

Such things made us too good a magical tank - unless you only want it to affect physical dmg.
I'd like something like
1 strength = 10 extra health

I don't really know why all tanks need to have roughly the same life pool. There is room for diversifacation here.
Adding a deff stance through the back door is not very creative IMHO.

 

angral

Issues with PVP balance and healer mana would be my concerns if there are wildly different hp pools between the different tank classes. Quite frankly, having twice the hp pool of others seems a bit silly if all that's happening is druids are taking twice the damage recieving twice the healing. Sure it would be fun for big numbers... but quite the exercise in futility for game balance.

As an aside I am excited about the intent shown in the blue posts. If Blizzard can actually pull off decent class balance this time round, more power to them.

 

Pike

Sorry, what I meant was physical damage mitigation. Essentially, strength would just convert into armor.

 

Chojee

There seems to be a fair bit of uncertainty in figuring out what the armor value is for bears compared to warriors when bears aren't using bonus armor items. Using the itemization formula here we can estimate:
Assuming ilvl 200 epic items(seems to be the entry level epic ilvl), the warrior doesn't use bonus armor items, and the druid gets 1200(from 2 rings, neck, and cloak) bonus armor. Not factoring in the 10% bonus armor as that affects both classes the same.

A warrior has a chest AC value of (200*9+23)*1.1*1.25 = 2507AC
Across the 8 slots gear, the warrior has 2507*5.75 = 14413AC
The shield grants (200*85/3)*1.22*1.28 = 8849AC
Non bonus AC cloak grants (200*1.19+5.1)*1.1*1.25*12/25 = 160AC
So the warrior would total 23422AC.

A bear has a chest AC value of (200*2.22+10)*1.1*1.25 = 624AC
Across 8 slots of gear, the druid has 624*5.75 = 3589AC
Non bonus AC cloak grants (200*1.19+5.1)*1.1*1.25*12/25 = 160AC
With the bonus armor, that's 4949
With the druid's bear multiplier that's 4949*5 = 24745AC

I personally think 1200 bonus armor from cloak, cape, and rings is a bit conservative as we can currently get about 1000 bonus AC from [Slikk's Cloak of Placation], [Violet Signet of the Great Protector], and [Ring of the Stalwart Protector], with Amulet of Wills being linked around a fair bit as a blue neck addition. When we tack on the bonus AC from a weapon, we'll have similar base mitigation compared to a warrior in defensive stance. Blizzard's intent seems to be giving us similar mitigation levels as a warrior, and they can certainly tweak our AC value(via multipler or availability of bonus AC necks, cloaks, rings, and possibly trinkets) to match the expected amount of mitigation that we'll need.

The side effect of this reduction in armor is that druids with T6/Sunwell gear may likely find it difficult to replace that gear until the second or third tier of raid instances as bonus AC provides extremely good value for the itemization budget.

 

Qutossar

I agree with PvP balance - especially with the updated dmg output of Bears.

But it is not such a big problem regarding mana pools of healers.

For example, a druid that can concentrate on casting LB often produces more than enough HpS on his tank.
But he needs a rejuvenation to get a swift heal every now and then.
In addition he sometimes needs to leave and reenter tree form to cast an instand HT.
(This is a BC example. Please don't argue this will be different in WotLK. The details will be different - the main point remains)

If the tank had a lot more Health the druid just needed the LB. That would cost A LOT LESS MANA.


There are 2 factors when it comes to healers going oom:

1) Damage received by the tank
2) Spikiness of the damage.

It is absolutely possible to produce a lot more HpS with the same mana if there are no spikes.


Besides:
The 200% Health pool was an example.
130% -150% might also do

 

david0925

Quoting from a blue post found on MMO

"Armor is one of the most important stats a tank can have. We aren't trying to keep bears from getting it.

The change to itemization was done solely to avoid having so much diversity in the items we could drop. It's lame when you're leveling up to keep seeing quest rewards that are itemized for your spec (which TBH is still a problem we haven't solved for Feral weapons and idols). It's lame when your raid kills a boss and he drops say elemental mail, healing leather, and a spellpower mace, none of which your group can use. Having bears, cats and rogues all desire the same leather drops isn't a panacea -- it helps some problems, but it creates others. Having bears run around with as much armor as a rogue would be a big, big problem.

Fortunately there are plenty of ways to give bears the armor they need -- through talents (like the crit resistance one) or through Dire Bear form itself for example. Even if another tanking class ends up having slightly more armor than a druid, the differences should be so minor that neither of you is at a significant disadvantage on a boss.

I am glad someone mentioned the hunter example. I am really hoping you guys have the same reaction when you see the next pass on druid talents."

In my opinion, as long as tier pieces are separate and we retain armor from it, all is well. If it doesn't, and we still don't receive benefits for losing the armor, then its time to complain.

As mentioned above, you CAN put armor on tier pieces and badge gear because you won't have the "RNG rotting loot" problem. I think we need to actually see what the loot looks like from Tier 1 raiding instances in WoTLK before we can judge.

Do you really have a choice in TBC? At least I didn't. Every slot had a clear best ever since T4. The rings and trinkets are a little more debatable, but I have yet to see people argue about the armor and weapon slots for tanking.

This is also true for pretty much every class. All physical dps want pretty much same items, all magic dps, save for maybe shadow priest, want the same items. It really is about how much you're willing to stray away from best in slot to accommodate for RNG (aka your best in slot never drop)

Having choices, while nice, bloats the loot table, which is very annoying from a progression view point when you disenchant loot from a boss you have only beaten twice.

Maniq is my hero

 

Qutossar

It is bad right now with customization.. yes.
It could be a bit worse, still.

For example we have the wtwo 'high end' tanking staffs right now that both serve different purposes.
Perhaps one is better at most encounters - but the other one it better at a few encounters.

That's customization. At least a little bit -.-