So what? All tanks gain flat +avoidance via talents and shockingly it's only you complaining about this. Because of what? Because you are unhappy they nerfed the Agi --> Dodge ratio (which happened to all classes by the way)? They did this so you can grab Rogue gear without completely overpowering your dodge and so that dodge rating is not completely useless. If numbers are not fine, they will be fixed. Beta is in the stage of talent concepts at the moment and from what I can tell, these two talents are really good:

Mother Bear scales. Period. You can argue about the dependency of being in a party for it to work but it scales nonetheless. The AP bonus is just that - a bonus (which I already said in a previous post but you chose to kindly ignore this and focus more on complaining about not scaling). Really, noone would have complained about the talent if they removed the AP bonus and replaced it with nothing at all before releasing it...

Natural Reaction does not scale on the dodge department - and it does not have to. It is powerful as it is, 2% dodge per talent point is extremely good. Other tanks need to invest 5 points for less dodge Anticipation - Spell - World of Warcraft. This talent also combines something Warriors and Paladins would kill for: rage/mana (for Paladins) gain on avoidance. Previously, Warriors would have to invest 5 plus another 2 points to get 5% dodge and 2 Rage on avoidance; this talent trumps both aspects and yet you still complain?

No, they specifically nerfed the Agi -> Dodge rating for druids additionally to the standard reduction with levels.
The talents are good, but neither of them scale with gear and that is the major feral concern at the moment. According to Blizzard feral tanks will use rogue gear in the majority of slots. That means Agi, crit, hit, haste, expertise, armor reduction and a bit of Sta. No extra armor, no dodge rating, mediocre stamina. The majority of the stats on that gear are no tanking stats. And ferals no more scale better with Agi. So a lot of the item budget will be more or less wasted. Even with the high Agi scaling ferals were not overpowered in avoidance in TBC compared to warriors (avoidance was too strong in general because of the increasing returns but I don't see any fix for that from Blizzard yet).

The talent scales with the boss damage, but not with the tank gear. It is a good talent, but it is not the talent feral tanks hope for that makes them scale well with the gear they will be forced to use this expansion.

The complaints are there because the fear increases that Blizzard hopes to balance feral tanks throughout the expansion with such static talents and not proper scaling with gear. Simple number changes won't fix that at the moment, a proper gear -> tanking stats scaling talent will be needed.

First off: My Warrior at level 70 on live has more dodge than on the Beta at the same level because of the Agi --> Dodge shift. So what I said is true and not Druid specific.

And are you really implying that Defensive Stance for Warriors does not scale. Seriously?
For the last time, no, Druids are not the only class with static talents either. Sorry for bursting your bubble that Blizzard is out there to make the lives of Feral Druids miserably - they are not. If Druids don't end up competitve in the end, then you have my full support but at the moment it seems there is alot of useless whining going on.

The point isn't about Def Stance/Mother Bear not scaling. The point is that it does not provide scaling with what we're currently seeing as gear, which is a more pressing matter. Mother Bear, to me, while extremely nice is simply another equaliser as we lost our major armour advantage.
What people are pushing for here is to give us something so we can actually use those massive amounts of Agi/AP and Str that so far seem abundant on the gear we'll be tanking in. That, Mother Bear does not provide.

I have to say I seriously doubt it even was Blizzard's intention to address gear issues with that specific talent, but that's a whole nother kettle o' tea. More likely we'll see a mechanic change that isn't talent-driven. I definitely hope so as I'd rather see the Feral / (+Feral in) Resto tree trimmed some, than have more talents added there.

[e] And I have to say your 'My warrior lost dodge' comment is a bit... silly. I have my doubts your warrior lost 30% Dodge, which some Druids will be seeing in their M'uru kit.

Well that is a completely different thing altogether. There is alot of "OH NOES Mother Bear does not scale" whine going on and you are actually the first one to actually say that they mean it does not scale with their Str/Agi/AP stats. Why some people tie these expectations into Mother Bear to begin with is, as you said, baffling. Mother Bear is not related to these things at all. It is a scaling damage reduction talent, period. Anyone else saying differently is wrong.
If they want to make Str/Agi/AP more useful, they will do so via mechanics. Sunder Armor's threat scales via AP. It does absolutely no damage so it seems counterproductive at the start, right? Except not. It just works well like this and we don't have to spec for it either. It's just there, it's a core mechanic. Instead of pushing for these things via talents (and acting all angry about it when it does not happen), why don't you guys push for it as a core mechanic, maybe baked into Dire Bear Form?

And oh, I know Druids lost alot of their dodge via the rating change but my point still stands. All classes lost dodge via new agi --> dodge conversion ratios. The only thing why it affects Druids a whole lot more is because you stack agility for the dodge more than others (plus, you had an abnormal ratio to begin with). In the end, this nerf will balance itself it out at level 80 when you wear even more gear with agility on it by going for Rogue gear and Dodge rating. It's a nerf now to prevent unbalancedness later. And if it does not work out, the numbers will be tweaked via core mechanics (like lowering agi --> dodge ratios) instead of slapping another +1% dodge on whatever talent.

Again, alot of whine seems to be misdirected at the wrong targets here (talents) when in fact they should be directed at core mechanics.

Please stop Liar, as good as your intentions are, these people don't want to be ... corrected, they want to get their problems with the gear fixed, right now, immediatly, although it's a beta, and they will whine about everything else that is coming into feral-tree (which I have to admit is bloated, but hey, it's a beta!) which does not directly adress that gear-'problem'.
This thread shows that EJ-forums are getting more famous, which unfortunatly results into the point, that public-Blizz-forums and EJ merge more and more - and no, Blizz-forums aren't getting better...

To the topic: I would have expected, that Ferals have to spend more points into cat to do better dps, which seems to be vice versa now. Mother-Bear is a very interesting talent, from both gameplay and roleplaying side, and I hope some visual changes will be made for it

Well i think what's bothering most druids about mother bear is the static AP addition and the group memebver "restriction" on the damage reduction. Yes I appreciate the fact that alot of classes have static talents in their trees, but the feral tree is already littered witth them. After having been promised more scalabilty by devs, it isn't exactyl reassuring to get a static AP component in one of our new talents.
The funny thing is had they made mother bear something like this:
Reduces the damage taken in Dire Bear form by 4/8/12% - there would not be a single complaint, infact you'd have Druids still rubbing their hands in glee.

Also I'm not exactly sure why you are so bothered about Druids beeing crititcal about some of their new talents. I mean you yourself have complained about new improved defensive stance. At first glance it's a great improvement over the old imp Defensive stance, but as you have pointed out it is far from perfect. It's the same story with Mother Bear.

The reason it effects Druids a whole lot more is because Dodge is our ONLY avoidance stat. To me, that's a problem with core mechanics, a problem that will make it extremely difficult to balance uniform tanking gear for multiple classes without some mechanic that allows bears to gain benefit from stats like parry, block, and defense, which are currently vestigial stats for us. Even though the gear we will theoretically be tanking in (Rogue-like leather) should have more agility, the amount of agility now required to compensate for the absence of any other avoidance stat seems like it would have to be ridiculous.

Also, though not all of them state it clearly, the concern with Mother Bear is not that it does not scale, but that its scaling is entirely independent of gear. We want to see incremental and parallel development as a tank class. We don't want to be awesome early on and then fade away as other classes gear catches up in raw stats. We want to see improvements from individual pieces of gear, we would like some options as far as upgrades.

The whine I think stems from people having made this complaint since the agi:dodge nerf came out, and seeing talents like Mother Bear, which while thematically interesting and a step toward tank homogenization in some sense, is sort of a slap in the face given that two of our largest concerns have been (and still are) scaling with itemization and an overly bloated feral tree.

Mother Bear is a great talent with great flavor. Natural Reaction is interesting as well, but it suggests we're not going to see anything except dodge stacking as our avoidance, which is something they've already highlighted as problematic at Sunwell levels - the line between an underpowered bear and an overpowered bear is very fine at high levels of dodge.

These two talents are implying to me that there's going to be a fairly severe "change" in the current gear when the 3.0 patch goes Live pre-expansion. My understanding is that the -12% damage is to compensate, in part, for the lack of extra armor in WotLK. If this talent goes live, druids will be taking SIGNIFICANTLY less damage than their counterparts, if armor numbers are not tweaked. Taking -12% less damage on all bosses would be something I'd say would make druids the preferred tanks for practically anything that didn't require a warriro/paladin gimmick.

SIGNIFICANTLY less damage than a warrior with imp def stance and the ability to block?

Yes, Imp. Defensive Stance still only reduces spell damage taken, so it is
75% armor reduction and 12% less damage
vs
65% armor reduction and 10% less damage against non-magical attacks.
Block will also be on a one minute cooldown, so warriors will have to rely on their passive block chance.

The only problem might come from avoidance (goodbye M'uru tanking set), but how exactly the numbers turn out compared to other warriors/paladins remains to be seen.

Both the MMO champ talent calculator and the official one have it as 3 ranks. I suspect the text on MMO-champ is in error.

As it is, Blizzard is going to have to remove the bonus armor on our sets to prevent people from using TBC armor to tank. I don't see how it would be possible any other way.

Bonus armor does come out of the item budget so lets hope that, if they do remove it, they compensate those pieces in some way.

What item level would be needed to match the Bonus armour on current feral pieces with the *normal* armour from leather pieces ? And, can we expect that (reasonably soon) in WotLK ?

I'm not exactly one for these types of things, but I can try working it out for you.

From Formulas:Item values - WoWWiki - Your guide to the World of Warcraft
The formula works for non-bonus armors at 70, so I'm assuming it'll work fine for 80 as well.

[Thunderheart Chestguard] has an armor value of 781.

To match this, we would need an item level of ((781/1.25)/1.1)-10)/2.22) or 251 ilevel.

Seeing as how the base level of epics are ilvl 200 in WoTLK, it'd probably take us the WoTLK-equivalent of Sunwell before we see the same amount of armor.

However, I really don't think this is that big of an issue. Mother Bear and Dire Bear Form multiplier places us in line with Plate wearers as far as mitigation goes. It's currently our avoidance scaling that's a major issue.

Could you provide a source for linear survivability scaling on avoidance stats?
It would pretty much solve any problems regarding avoidance stacking (if all avoidance stats go into the same pool) but this is the first time I ever heard about it.

Liar's point holds-- criticizing a talent that grants more mitigation because it doesn't provide scaling avoidance is about as ass-backwards as you can get. It's more constructive, as others have done, to analyze what a talent does and what its purpose might be, rather than to attack what it doesn't do, especially when that's not at all what it's intended to do.

Mother Bear is one step toward solving the problem of where druid mitigation is going to come from, if we're indeed sharing rogue gear and don't have bonus armor on our gear. The concern that dodge may be more difficult to obtain is a valid one, of course. It's also worth considering that dodge isn't the be-all, end-all stat of druid tanking, and there are plenty of situations where avoidance tanking is less desirable.

Seem to recall that being mentioned before - last I heard it was buried in the Paladin WotLK thread somewhere around page 99-100.

--

Any chance some of the Beta Ferals could push for this apply to Shred too ?

[e] - nevermind, I see it's up already.

I think the problem with removing the facing requirement for Shred universally is that it obsoletes Claw. For non-ferals, Claw is still an important skill. I could see a feral talent removing the facing requirement of shred though. However, I don't think I'd take it for anything other than PvP; and even then, I'm not so sure.

Don't see Mutilate or Hemo rogues using Sinister Strike. Obsoleting a skill isn't necessarily a bad thing.

The positional requirement on Shred kills it in PvP when someone backs against a wall and keeps standing there.
PvE-wise, it's more of a Solo/Trash thing anyway, as you should be behind bosses regardless.

Right, and Mangle obsoletes Claw. The point is that those are *talents*. It's fine for talented skills to obsolete base skills, but base skills obsoleting other base skills is kinda silly.