I'm personally really optimistic about how they're handling the class changes in WotLK. I continue to believe that this will be my favourite expansion so far.
I still liked the armour cap aspect of the class, but we'll see how the talents play out. It seems like he's saying that the general feel should be the same, but perhaps without actually fighting the armour cap.
Last edited by Merple : 08/20/08 at 9:58 AM.
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I posted basically this on the wow forums (don't have access to beta). It's probably too late for design changes. I suspect Blizzard already has a plan for bears. I'd be interested what other ferals think about this solution though. Some is my original ideas, some is pulling together others' ideas.
Right now, I think the main feral tanking concerns about WotLK are:
(0. Daze is an easy fix so I'll pretend they will fix it.)
1. Getting comparable survivability without becoming a mana drain.
2. Smooth tank scaling from beginning to end game even if with caps.
3. Itemization - not being limited to very rare drops or badge / pvp rewards for gear.
4. A tanking niche, something we're slightly better at (used to be pure physical spike damage fights and threat).
5. A reason for wanting at least one feral on the raid beyond 'really good offtank' (i.e. 'iLotP is not good enough')
I think the devs also have a couple of concerns:
6. If bears can tank in full dps gear, do they become dps monsters in bear form (i.e. I used to be #1 dps tanking Shattered Halls pre-nerf).
7. If bears have huge survivability and good damage, do they get to solo content nobody else could?
My solution involves a few tweaks:
a) Deriving our survivability from more stats than armor/agi/sta (and dodge).
b) A change to nurturing instincts.
c) A change to iLotP.
Assumptions:
i) We will need a mix of leather tanking gear and other tank gear to tank. That is, we won't be able to tank in the exact same set of gear as we dps. This means decisions before each fight, similar to what we have now. It also means we'd be sharing some gear with other tanks. I would be a bit disappointed personally if my Shard of Contempt was end-game tanking gear.
So, if I were a dev, I would...
a) Give bears avoidance / mitigation through some the stats likely to be on our shared tanking gear. This could be done via avoidance (miss, dodge, parry) or mitigation (armor, block, or a total damage reduction). The obvious choice is AP. It makes rogue gear good for tanking. It makes the str on tank gear worthwhile even after we armor cap. Converting to armor is a bad choice due to the cap. Coverting to dodge might also be bad since I think they'll have to make a (miss + dodge + parry) cap eventually to avoid a Sunwell repeat. Personally, I would choose a total damage reduction (including magic) based on some pretty small percentage of AP (including ap from str).
They should then balance total bear damage assuming we'll be looking for armor/agi/sta/str/ap/dodge gear to tank in.
Our total health will be somewhere just over other tanks (10 - 20%ish?) Our total mitigation / avoidance should be somewhere just under other tanks. Before you scream 'sponges don't work due to mana!', read on...
b) Change NI so it works in bear form. Maybe we take 20% more damage, but receive 20% stronger heals. Our health advantage would still be needed due to spike periods and/or silences.
c) Allow IlotP to duplicate (without reducing) some percent of our non-overheal heals received to others in our (group / raid / n of the raid's most hurt?). The total healing would be more more than our current iLotP crits.
How does this help?
1) We aren't a huge mana drain because we get bigger heals. We would be a slightly larger mana drain due to increased overheals. c) should help counter the total mana usage, especially if we're tanking on a fight where multiple melees take damage (Najentus).
2) Because we get survivability from more stats, we shouldn't hit an armor or avoidance (assuming they'll make one) cap early. Even if we did, at least we're not limited to only 2 stats afterwards.
3) Because we want gear with more than just armor/agi/sta, it should be easier to make bear upgrades without making 'bear only' gear.
4) Having at least 1 feral on the raid, even in cat form could really help in AE damage situations. This would be even more useful if we were tanking. The choice between a 3rd rogue and the first feral would be clear.
5) See 4. Also, wanting more str/ap on our tank gear should make us a slightly better role-swapper on fights we only tank part of the fight.
6) No matter what solution they take, they're going to be balancing bear damage / threat eventually (hopefully not a few patches into release). Obviously some bear dps adjustments might be needed if bears start craving AP/str.
7) Because some of our power now requires receiving heals, we're actually not quite as good at soloing difficult content. IlotP would become almost entirely a non-soloing talent.
Finally, I think b) and c) are very inline with the druid-in-tune-with-nature lore.
5. A reason for wanting at least one feral on the raid beyond 'really good offtank' (i.e. 'iLotP is not good enough')
I think Blizzard has been fairly clear that this is not one of the concerns they are focusing on. The goal is to have tanks be fairly interchangeable so that if you don't happen to have a feral, you won't gimp yourself for content. That's the opposite goal from having a reason for at least one feral in the raid.
Their intent, instead, is to say if your 3 best tanking players all play warriors then great, take 3 warriors. If none of them are warriors (or feral druids) that's okay too.
By giving each tank a niche, they are creating fights where there will be a small advantage to recognizing the niche and bringing a tank of the appropriate class - still doable without but easier with. Min-maxers will want to fit tab A into slot B on the niche fights. Everywhere else they'll want to bring their best-geared/best played tanks. Class selection (e.g., Warrior) is no more guarantee of a spot.
Edit: Of course the big advantage to guilds having one of each will be they gear faster than 4 of the same would. But that's neither her nor there in terms of class ability design.
The idea was that you could be a decent tank and a decent melee dps class, so Ferals were something you wanted to bring if you weren't the kind of guild that swapped different people out for every boss. But I don't think "convenience factor" is ultimately a great value to bring to a raid.
seems to make it sound like they're not happy with it being enough to want a feral offtank tank, or only want a feral tank if others aren't available.
There are two ways to interpret this I guess:
1) There will be enough difference in tank / dps specs that you'll have to choose one or the other. But, if you choose that role, you should be good enough at it that nobody would sit you out for another (i.e. a kitty specced feral would be rogue-comparable damage).
or
2) Offtanking is not enough. Ferals might not be 100% of a tank or 100% of rogue dps. But there should be enough value in keeping a feral even if they're not tanking that you wouldn't swap out a feral for a pure tank/dps just before the fight.
Honestly I don't know which way they're going. I'm hoping it's 2. I think my iLotP suggestion would go a long way to that goal. That is: even if tanks are covered, you might bring along (or at least not kick out) one feral in the raid for the utility they bring beyond pure tanking and dps. This would need to be something not offered by other classes.
I don't know if it fits lorewise, or if it's even an original idea, but a possible way to reduce the overhealing effect on iLotP would be instead of having it heal instantly on crit, have it generate an earth shield like buff, maybe stackable to somewhere in between 3-5 depending on balance. So under conditions of not taking incoming damage, you could at least store up healing for when the damage does come. The reactive heal should inherently reduce the overheal, and with a 3 sec cd on charges and 6 sec cd on generating charges, under a constant damage situation, it shouldn't be much different from the current version except for less overheal. Could be interesting in pvp usage since it can give a 12-20% health buffer over 9-15 sec if the opponents are deciding not to attack you and then decide to switch. The downside would be trying to use this to heal against large attacks on long cooldowns i.e. a 50% damage attack every 60 sec with no other damage in between, in which the current version would be better (assuming you aren't getting heals from any other source).
Though ultimately, I'd prefer if they just added the healing effect to the base LotP ability and made iLotP some sort of better raid synergy effect.
You don't have to read anything into it, you just have to read the threads. The quote that you are giving is Blizzard referring to how TBC turned out, not how WotLK is being designed. This is WotLK design in fairly plain English, repeated in three different ways:
Our goal in Lich King is for all 4 tanking classes to be viable...
For raids, we want all 4 tank classes to be viable. If your group has e.g. a Prot paladin and Feral druid as main tanks with appropriate gear and reasonable skill, you should be good to go.
This is a shift in philosophy for us. Previously, we sometimes tried to steer Ferals as being better off tanks than main tanks. We also expected specific classes to appear in the raid. Our new assumption is that you might have any of the 4 tanking classes as a tank. We are trying to achieve as much parity as we can among the 4 tanks without making them too similar. If nearly all guilds want the same class as their MT, we've failed.
It isn't about finding a niche as a dps/offtank/reason for bringing a feral. You will earn your tanking spot by virtue of being skilled and being well geared, not by virtue of the class you chose when first rolling.
The idea was that you could be a decent tank and a decent melee dps class, so Ferals were something you wanted to bring if you weren't the kind of guild that swapped different people out for every boss. But I don't think "convenience factor" is ultimately a great value to bring to a raid.
For me it's hard to reconcile that original statement with how TBC turned out vs. the actual result. Feral druids aren't just taken when there's nothing better and you don't have a choice; there are a number of Sunwell encounters where at least one feral druid tanking is optimal, and much better than a similar warrior. That's what is very puzzling about some of the blue posts. They seem to indicate that feral druids aren't particularly desired as tanks in guilds. Perhaps not a ton of them, but there are plenty of guilds where feral druids are part of the tanking corps. That doesn't mean there isn't room for improvement, but it's odd that Blizzard's viewpoint of feral druids is essentially that they are not good tanks for much of anything. And that's why I feel such a disconnect between where druids are now and where they are going. The niche being lost makes sense if you believe ferals didn't have one to begin with, but it's confusing if you believe that druids are the best physical mitigation class.
The real shift in perception is that ferals are going to be desired as cat dps more. That's quite a departure from before.
Well, nowhere in that quote does GC imply that druids are bad tanks in Live. In fact, I haven't seen any quotes at all from the devs that say they feel druids are underpowered as tanks currently. All that quote says is that their vision for druids' position as role-switchers is not viable, not that they're unhappy with the state of druid tanking. Even rather casual guilds will swap players between boss fights, which pretty much negates our intended advantage (unless the tank/dps ratio requirements change mid-fight).
I think the point GC was trying to make in that post is that they aren't going to continue trying to make feral druids' niche to be the best off-tanks/role switches, which most of us agree just won't cut it in a progression raid. It's a reassurance that they intend for druids to be able to be a full time MT if they and their guild desire, or that they can be full time dps that can reasonably contend with other melee dps classes/specs for progression raid spots.
Another way around the feral staves being only for 1 spec out of 30 (and now with our tree supposedly splitting its even more of a niche) would be to do a bit of weapon piece dropping ala AQ20. I actually enjoyed this as it gave the capability to take say [Qiraji Ornate Hilt] and turn it into [Kris of Unspoken Names] or [Mace of Unending Life]. This would negate the need to lower the ilevel (That we see on badge loot compared to direct boss loot) as the item would actually be a direct result of downing a major boss. It would also further reduce loot rot that has now become a goal for blizzard.
Originally Posted by Oaken
You don't have to read anything into it, you just have to read the threads. The quote that you are giving is Blizzard referring to how TBC turned out, not how WotLK is being designed. This is WotLK design in fairly plain English, repeated in three different ways:
It isn't about finding a niche as a dps/offtank/reason for bringing a feral. You will earn your tanking spot by virtue of being skilled and being well geared, not by virtue of the class you chose when first rolling.
This is exactly what I am looking forward to in wrath, having the capability to earn a spot based on your skill / gear instead of well x class makes much more sense on y instance because why bring less DPS when you can have an under skilled or undegeared z class that tanks/dps's better just by virtue of class selection. Creating real competition between DPS classes, so much so that a DPS feral could overtake a very poorly played [insert DPS class] is a good thing. I know that I personally would like to beat up on my fury buddy and take him down a few pegs if he slacks.
Once they make another pass on our talents and open up the level 80 content for number tweaking we will have to see where we fall for DPS/Tanking capabilities. Blue posts have been very re-assuring in the sense that they all tend to say "If they numbers aren’t where we want them to be... We will change them.".
Now whether they get pushed up against a wall in terms of release dates and cant do all that they want to is a different story. But something tells me with 11 something million subscribers they probably have a bit of leeway funding wise...
This is exactly what I am looking forward to in wrath, having the capability to earn a spot based on your skill / gear instead of well x class makes much more sense on y instance because why bring less DPS when you can have an under skilled or undegeared z class that tanks/dps's better just by virtue of class selection. Creating real competition between DPS classes, so much so that a DPS feral could overtake a very poorly played [insert DPS class] is a good thing. I know that I personally would like to beat up on my fury buddy and take him down a few pegs if he slacks.
Once they make another pass on our talents and open up the level 80 content for number tweaking we will have to see where we fall for DPS/Tanking capabilities. Blue posts have been very re-assuring in the sense that they all tend to say "If they numbers aren’t where we want them to be... We will change them.".
Now whether they get pushed up against a wall in terms of release dates and cant do all that they want to is a different story. But something tells me with 11 something million subscribers they probably have a bit of leeway funding wise...
This is an interesting idea, although i wouldnt like it if it was the main driving force behind the changes. Every class is unique and thus should bring a unique advantage to a raid. Right now, in BC, iLotP is far from being a buff that is wanted in an end-game raid and i would love them to fix this. I understand that they want to make all 4 tanks viable, but that doesnt mean to make all of them bring the same bonuses to a raid. In the end, what i would really love is to have a factor that makes bringing a feral kitty dps worth it in an end-game raiding, without gimping ur raid dps...
As for the gear problem, they just switched the problem around about druids feral. Right now, in BC, the problem some people are whining about is that feral druids can both tank and dps with the same spec but different gear. In WotLK its going to be that the feral druid can tank and dps with the same gear, but with a slightly different spec. Now i dont know whats the best option, i guess time will tell.
In WotLK its going to be that the feral druid can tank and dps with the same gear, but with a slightly different spec. Now i dont know whats the best option, i guess time will tell.
Well, the new system can only mean good things for Druids since tanking leather was, for the most part, restricted to tiered gear and cat DPS gear was usually reserved for Rogues.
My Druid saw absolutely nothing out of ZA in terms of tanking, and even the DPS gear was totally Rogue-oriented. The only Feral Druid item out of there was the cat DPS staff.
At least with the new system Rogue leather won't really be Rogue leather anymore, but rather Rogue and Druid leather where Druids will gain benefit from the stats for tanking and doing damage, with their spec determining which aspect their gear will benefit most.
Personally, I'm excited to be able to finally look forward to an abundance of gear that will get me running through content more than once and won't make me feel gimped in a certain situation just because the armor value on a certain piece of leather isn't green or that Rogues will grab all the +agi/+arp gear before I'm allowed to have a crack at it.
Tons of blue posts about tanking in general and one about druid ideas/gear specifically:
Tanking in Wrath:
We *will* give you the tools to do it. We just might not give you those tools the same way another class gets them. There are no two-handed tanking weapons, yet I suspect 50% or more of DKs will use two-handed weapons. Neither DKs nor druids have shields. Druids need defense less than other tanks because they can achieve crit immunity. We can do something similar for your damage reduction (bake it into bear form, or put it in a talent are two obvious choices). Now, when you get your leather though, we are assuming you gem and enchant it as a tank would.
I'm sorry we are neglecting paladins on the forums. None of the tanking trees are very far along yet, and ironically the DK ones are probably the most stable. The paladin ones may be the least stable since the class changed so much, so it's hard to offer a lot of comment on specific talents right now. I mention druids a lot because we are talking a lot about them right now. The Arms and Fury warriors recently got some really nice work done on them, so hopefully Prot will follow. (But again I stress we won't know if the talent trees offer all of the threat, mitigation, survivability and tools they need to until we compare endgame tanking more.)
As far as what the Prot warrior brings to a raid, it is true that all tanks bring some ammount of target debuffing. But more importantly, we are in the middle of a pretty big analysis of raid buffs and debuffs. It is a large enough topic that we probably shouldn't muddle up this thread too much of that discussion, but in brief:
The overall goal is that you should want to bring raiders because they are your friends or because they are very good players, not because their buff is so awesome that you can't live without it. We would like you to be able to get all of the big buffs and still have some remaining slots that you can fill how you want (you know assuming you have enough healers and CC or whatever). We would like to get things to where no single spec always justifies a raid spot because their buff is impossible to replace or live without. MMO-Champion BlueTracker - Tanking in Wrath of the Lich King
Feral tanking and Itemization:
I totally get this. Druids won't be popular tanks if everyone knows them as the OOM tank. When I say "big health pool" I'm not talking about 30% more than a warrior, and I'm not even sure that's the route we'll go. But since the "big health" idea generates a lot of discussion, I'll walk you through our thought process.
Druids are going to have a harder time hitting the armor cap in Lich King largely because there is no leather tanking gear, and virtually no bonus armor at all (except on a few pieces like rings and necks). Now we can't just make druids do without armor, or they won't compete with other tanks. We can't just bake the armor into Dire Bear Form though, or we risk making resto druids even better in PvP. So when I have mentioned big health pools, that is partially because we're trying to solve the problem where druids need armor but can't get it. Big health is a way to do with less armor, but it's not a total fix for the situation, it definitely has drawbacks, and it doesn't mean 30% more health and 30% less armor. If I had to guess, all of the tanks will end up having pretty similar endgame stats, minus obvious things like block.
Keep in mind how good a well-geared druid tank would be in live if we hadn't added Sunwell Radiance. It is surprisingly easy to make bears too good or not good enough. We have to tread carefully.
But we haven't changed the design of wanting bears to be able to MT. And that doesn't mean technically they can MT but all the healers complain and as soon as the warrior logs on, you eagerly swap him back in. MT means MT. MMO-Champion BlueTracker - Tanking in Wrath of the Lich King
So that makes three posts in 2-3 days that specifically addresses about 90% of the concerns I've seen in this thread. I still have faith they will do everything correctly in the end.
Tons of blue posts about tanking in general and one about druid ideas/gear specifically:
Here's one more, though it overlaps (a bit) with what was said above
Regarding weapons for our furry gladiator bears, well, there might be some overlap between weapons for you and for the Death Knight as we expect many Death Knights will be wanting to use two handers.
We need to see the endgame tanking for all classes, not just the bears, before we know truly where things are at. But we are currently speculating that, give or take a few obvious things like block, most endgame main tanks will have similar stats. So when we refer to the "big health pool" of bears, we're not necessarily saying anything like "you'll have approximately 25% more than a Protection Warrior" or something similar, as it could well be the endgame stats between all the viable main tanks are fairly comparable.
One stat that druids might differ on is armor; currently there's no leather tanking gear and barely any armor can be added on through trinkets or rings and the like. Of course, you will get armor and you will be able to gem them as you see fit! So, we're not saying you won't get armor, or that you won't get a decent whack of it, because you really do need it to be a viable main tank. So you might wonder why don't we just whack a big wad of armor into the dire bear form. We very well could do that, but then that might mean that in PvP resto druids would gain an unintended advantage.
So the idea of the "big health pool" is one thing that is discussed internally to mitigate the issue with the lack of druid armor. But like other possible ways of alleviating this, it too has the potential for issues. With just a few changes here and there we can flip between making the feral tank exceptionally overpowered or painfully lacking, and so we're having to be careful with the changes we do make.
With regards to armor, one solution might be to have a talent fairly high in the feral tree that increases armor by x% while in Dire Bear Form. It would make up for the loss in armor in the new WOTLK gear and it would also prevent resto druids from using it in PVP. The talent won't be useful if you're already armor capped at 70 but as you start to replace gear in WOTLK, it will become more useful, up to a point where bears will have the same, if not more, armor than the other tanks.
Edit: Looks like the post just above mine got posted just as I was typing this out. Fundamentally, it's the same idea but moving Thick Hide lower in the tree doesn't help lower level ferals just starting out who want to tank. Plus it would lead to massive armor inflation for non-WOTLK gear. Having a new talent way down in the tree will allow druids to pick up the talent just as it coincides with the gear change in WOTLK. So, having thick hide where it is right now will allows druids to tank from 15-70 just fine with the old gear. From 70 onwards, you'd pick up the new talent, drop your heavy armor gear in favor of gear with more copious amounts of agi and stam in WOTLK.
This doesn't have to be a new standalone talent but a combined talent that is supposed to be for feral tanking.
Is he saying we may Gem for armor? Or am I reading that wrong?
I don't think he's saying that necessarily. He's just reassuring druids that the armor will come from somewhere.
Keep in mind that while some blue posts are fairly carefully worded, others are not. I wouldn't try to read too much into them. If they're going to make a change as big as allowing armor gems, they'd say that more specifically once they've decided, rather than dropping vague hints. Half the blue posts I've read on here lately seem to just be clarifying the more hastily worded posts, which often get over-analyzed or taken the wrong way.
IMHO this would be a panacea pack for feral problems:
Proposed changes:
- FAP = Weapon DPS/14;
- Remove the base ~55 dps;
- Change Predatory Strikes to +10% melee dmg and remove it from Naturalist;
- HotW +15% AP instead of +10% AP(to make up for Predatory Strikes AP loss);
- Remove extra armor from current leather and weapons, giving agi/stm/ap on its place;
- Remove FAP from all current weapons correcting their dps;
- 50% lower costs for cat and bear forms;
- New base skill for mitigation:
-----------
Natural Protection = Gives the druid, a chance* to reduce any damage taken by 100% of his AP.
-----------
* Stamina/LVL % (The formula would have to be studied and tested).
This ability would apply on MELEE and MAGIC, after other ways of mitigation.
What we acomplish with this changes:
- Can use the same gear as other melee dps, including to tank;
- Around the same dps as the actual WotLK setup;
- Get 2 points for Imp. Mark of the Wild and 3 to use somewhere else;
- 70 gear fades in power on leveling;
- Viable shapeshifting on 'manaless' gear;
I just interpreted the blue posts as "yea, you'll get armour but if you want to tank you have to use different gems and enchants than if you want to DPS in it". Nothing more to it really.
Not sure why I, or someone else, hasn't caught this statement from the above quote (See post 1163 for the full quote)...
Regarding weapons for our furry gladiator bears, well, there might be some overlap between weapons for you and for the Death Knight as we expect many Death Knights will be wanting to use two handers.
Does that mean that FAP is gone? Or, I guess, the same weapon would have good DK DPS (and weapon speed) which is ignored by bears as well as FAP which would be ignored by DKs? Won't that affect the weapon's iLevel?
I've never really looked at our current Druid weapons to see if they would be "good" for other classes. I assume they are not.
Does that mean that FAP is gone? Or, I guess, the same weapon would have good DK DPS (and weapon speed) which is ignored by bears as well as FAP which would be ignored by DKs? Won't that affect the weapon's iLevel?
I've never really looked at our current Druid weapons to see if they would be "good" for other classes. I assume they are not.
I really don't see any reason why not every weapon can have normal swing damage and the equivalent of FAP at the same time. Since there is no class that can use both at the same time, there wouldn't be any problem - or they could just give us normal weapon DPS (as they should have 3 years ago).
Originally Posted by Astrylian
A few feral staves are decent for hunters already. Not the best, but decent.
Yeah you should have seen my jaw dropping as i saw the first "need this for endgame equip" posts from hunters as Stanchion of Primal Instinct dropped :P
If Blizzard were to do this (have DK and Feral tanks share weapons), wouldn't they have to either show the FAP on all 2H (maces, staves) weapons' tooltips or remove FAP all together? I know when most players see a FAP entry on an item they immediately know it is a feral item. But if the same item could be used by a DK, it could lead to some loot roll confusion. Seems like the best thing to do would be to get rid of FAP. Though, if they remove FAP, they'd have to re-work a few of our talents that boost AP and/or give us additional AP from our equipped FAP.
Unless they drop moonkin from FAP, they aren't going to just hand it out for free.
As for hunters wanting druid weapons, staff of primal fury is the only one they would consider since it doesn't have strength on it. The rest of them are worse than stuff several item levels back, so I would hardly call those decent.
Looking at that blue post, I think we will see a removal of feral attack power within a near future. Personally I never liked the concept, although it did provide nice effects in the aspect of scaling of AP abilities and percentage AP boosts. Most likely, weapon DPS will be equalized to paw DPS, and the base 55 DPS of paws will be removed.
Sharing tanking 2H maces(that is the only type of twohander which both classes can equip) with Death Knights is quite a good concept.
However, making Druids share DPS weapons with Death Knights, Paladins and Warriors would mean that a large majority of twohanded weapons dropping in raids would be maces. In the aspect of character customization and also weapon specializations for Warriors I think it would be, however convenient, lame.
08/20/08, 9:47 AM
