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.
Warriors needed 30 agi to dodge at 70. Druids needed 14.7 agi to dodge at 70. At 80, it appears both need 40 agi per dodge. Warriors need 33% more agi to dodge 70 to 80. Druids need 172% more. And this is basically druid's only avoidance stat. Unless they change something, there is no comparison.
Originally Posted by Liar
For the last time, no, Druids are not the only class with static talents either.
That's not the issue. I don't think many (any?) are saying the talents are bad. They just don't address the deeper issues, the issues most of us see as a necessary starting point: do we scale simlar to other tanks given upgrades in gear, and do our mechanics allow us more than a few rare upgrades to look forward to? The issue is that druid's avoidance / mitigation scale with a far smaller selection of the stats on our gear. If they fix that, balancing the rest with talents like these or flat dodge bonuses makes sense. Until they do, they're missing the big picture.
Let's compare avoidance / mitigation on WotLK gear:
Warrior blue Agin's Crushing Carapace - Item - World of Warcraft
Mitigation from str via block.
Mitigation from armor.
Credit towards crit immunity from defense
Parry from defense.
Block from defense.
Miss from defense.
Dodge from defense.
Parry from parry.
Druid blue Bulge-Concealing Breastplate - Item - World of Warcraft
Mitigation from armor (slightly more than plate)
Little over 1% dodge from agi. Negligible armor from agi. (in tbc, this would have been enough dodge to balance all else but not now).
Slightly less chance to be parried.
The results are the same for most leather slots.
Comparing shared gear: Kurzel's Warband - Item - World of Warcraft - Obviously not a bear ring because...
Warriors get:
Block from str
Credit towards crit immunity from defense.
Parry from defense
Block from defense
Miss from defense
Dodge from defense
Dodge from dodge.
Bears get:
Same Miss from defense
Same Dodge from defense.
Same Dodge from dodge.
A better druid ring: Signet of Arachnathid Command - Item - World of Warcraft
Warriors get:
Block from str
Credit towards crit immunity from defense.
Parry from defense
Block from defense
Miss from defense
Dodge from defense
Druids get:
Considerably more armor
Same miss from defense.
Same dodge from defense.
The new talents are good, but they don't address this issue. And the disparity would become more apparent as other tanks gear up, getting avoidance/mitigation from most of their item budget while we get avoidance/mitigation from a much smaller number.
Scaling us with stats on our gear is an easy fix. They just haven't made it apparent that they see the same issue.
It's about starting in the right place. If you're building a house, a strong roof is a great idea. But if you haven't made a floorplan and figured out your foundation, it doesn't make much sense to fret over trusses and shingles.
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.
or ap (and therefore str) since it's on all our gear. But ya, basically that.
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.
Well shred does still require you to get 2 points in SA before it obsoletes claw.
In addition, backstab obsoletes SS as well. It's just that daggers in general are crappy and provide worse benefits than swords.
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?
The bear form dodge is not a talent. That is a baseline static number that they added in due to the agil nerf being deemed to large.
As for the rage, druids could care less under most conditions. Primal fury generates enough rage already.
Looking at the current MMO talent tree, I get this 0/52/11 build as my base Bear/Cat combo build. Where do I put the last 8 points? At this point, I'm focusing on 5-man normal and heroic runs as I'm sure my guild will be slow to level up to point where we'd have enough to start 10-mans.
5/2 Master Shapeshifter -- this is a leading candidate for 5 of those 8 points.
x/3 IW -- if this has no effect on 5-man boss mobs, I won't waste a point in it. If it does, I might go 2/3
x/5 PI -- Is this worth 5 points??? With the way the tree is laid out, I not so sure anymore.
x/5 RaT -- Again, worth 5 points??? Seems more like a Feral PvP talent. With a side of bear.
x/2 iLotP -- I love helping the healers, but I'm not sure I can justify this unless I avoid PI and RaT completely.
Right now I'm leaning toward 5/2 MS, 2/3 IW (assuming it affects 5-man boss mobs) and 1/2 iLoP. For those last 8 points.
I'm looking at something like this Combo build
for my dual spec. Crit chance is going to be lower so I suspect PI is going to e worse dps wise than RnT. Without powershifting Master shapeshifter does not seem worth 5 talents points.
If the dual spec thing is implemented I'd use the following:
I have 5 points left here that can go into RnT, PI or Feral Agression. FA would only be if I was frequently without a DPS warrior to throw up Demo. Otherwise it'd probably be points shared between PI and RnT.
If warriors end up with more armor, it won't be by a huge margin. We still want bears to be able to tank Naxx and Ulduar, and we want as many talents and abilities as possible to scale with end-game gear.
Now I know there are some cats at the tops of their damage meters. It happens. But I also know a lot of players who got the best gear they could, learned their class inside and out, and then cried when they saw how far they were below other melee dps.
If you like the hybrid nature of the Feral and enjoyed switching from tank to dps at a moment's notice, we haven't really done much to take that away from you. And even if you try to max out your cat potential, you're still probably going to be a pretty effective tank in many situations.
A cat spec'd Feral made an amazing OT for Karazhan and even Zul'Aman and for the larger pulls in the 25-player content. You were certainly better OTs than DPS warriors or ret paladins in BC. I suspect you will still be a little better than a dps warrior just because the difference between your +dps and +tanking specs is fewer talent points than the difference between a Fury and Prot warrior. But all talents are not created equal and you can't necessarily identify the best tank by the number of talent points they've spent.
Sorry my yes isn't more solid. It's hard to get into the realm of "You can be a 5% less effective tank if you spend 10% fewer talent points but maintain 15% superior dps" or whatever.
Part of the Feral design is flexibility. We don't want to lose that.
It looks like we can expect some new cat-specific talents, to make more of a required switch between tanking and DPS specs, if they do expect cats to be doing a lot more DPS.
Whilst I understand the philosophy of homogenizing tanking classes to make them all equally worthwhile I still feel there needs to be a "unique selling point" for each tank.
At present I can't see one for Bears if they are no longer the high armor/dodge tank. It feels like all they are leaving us with is "good threat" and even that is under pressure looking at the revisions to Warr/Pali/DK.
If all tanks are equal, raids will start to look at the additional utility they bring and I'm not sure that "decent dps, combat rez and Innervate" outweigh in particular the Warrior's array of "oh shit" buttons for tanking or the Paladin AoE tanking abilities.
The bear tank problem is mostly tied to Blizzard's stat spread formulas.
While warriors and paladins have 8 proper mitigation stats, Druids have 4 only (and there is a caveat on each of those 4 in WotLK, see below).
Strength (gives Shield block)
Agility (gives Dodge and a tiny bit of armor)
Defense (-chance to be hit, +dodge, +parry, +block)
Armor
Dodge Rating
Block Rating
Block Value
Parry Rating (hideously expensive on item budget I know)
While druids rely on:
Agility (gives Dodge and a tiny bit of armor)
Defense (-chance to be hit, +dodge)
Armor
Dodge rating
Having 8 desireable tanking stats versus 4 is a much bigger difference than it would intuitively appear to be due to the stat spread formula (ItemValue = [(StatValue[1]*StatMod[1])^1.7095 + (StatValue[2]*StatMod[2])^1.7095 + ...]^1/1.7095 as per Formulas:Item values - WoWWiki - Your guide to the World of Warcraft). This is why a level 68 blue with random stats like [Emerald Beholder Eye] ends up with only 60 points if concentrated on a single stat, and over 93 if spread over 3 stats. This basically causes having a larger number of desireable stats to be far better than having fewer, and then problem keeps getting worse as the item level (thus budget) keeps growing.
Furthermore, in WotLK Defense as it is now becomes basically pointless for druids due to native crit immunity (not that I'm complaining) providing only a residual tiny bit of -hit and +dodge, the Agility to dodge ratio is being reduced FAR beyond what any other class will see, and additional Armor is gone from armor, only surviving on jewelry. That leaves only dodge rating.... oh wait, diminishing returns are being introduced, so heavy stacking of any rating will get worse (basically it will yield a linear survivability return instead of increasing).
Frankly most of these scaling issues would be heavily clamped down, if not solved altogether, by some simple mechanic giving some survivability aspect out of AP and Strength, which are already on the armor/jewelry we'll share with other classes, and by getting much more out of defense, which is currently a terrible waste on us and also seems to be relatively abundant on shared jewelry.
Last edited by Gruturistic : 09/01/08 at 10:25 AM.
Reason: Fixed coefficient in formula
AFAIR, that Titanium Earthguard Ring is pretty much the first relevant tank ring ive seen from WotLK:
420 Armor
28 Str
45 Stam
Red Socket
Socket Bonus : 6 Stam
Equip : 24 hit rating
With the recent blues comment stating warriors may very well be getting higher armor than us(though not by much) this will make it a very sought after piece. Perhaps good enough to be on a "WotLK pre-raid gear list".
There's also a couple of other pieces there, though more DPS oriented.
The attack power bonus in Mother Bear seems superflous. Would be rather worth it if they added an armor buff considering all this rogue leather we'll be wearing in WotlK.
About rend and tear, it's already annoying to build rotations around having a mangle debuff on the target - but the fact that you gain less benefit from it than having 5 points in the tier2 restoration talent naturalist i would consider as a flawed mechanic for a end tier talent.
When WotlK hits, i'll be very unsure on how to spend my talent points, it would be crazy if omen of clarity would be worth more than berserk.
AFAIR, that Titanium Earthguard Ring is pretty much the first relevant tank ring ive seen from WotLK:
420 Armor
28 Str
45 Stam
Red Socket
Socket Bonus : 6 Stam
Equip : 24 hit rating
This reminds me of the days when you had to level enchanting to create Smoking Heart of the Mountain to be considered tank worthy.
Why would a Bear now want to use the "Defense" necklace, when they get more "Tanking" stats out of the "DPS" necklace? Currently, the DPS necklace is better for tanking, presuming you want nearly double the avoidance and a ton more threat at the cost of 1 point of stamina.
The only way that will change is if we get some type of "bonus" mitigation from defense and/or mitigation from strength, like all three other tanks. Its ironic that they don't want druids to stack agility, but they are forcing us to do exactly that. Similarly, our old role was that of the hybrid OT/Dps...and gear appears to continue to favor this role, notwithstanding Blue's (Ghostcrawler) comments to the contrary.
I'm encouraged by what they are doing and am fairly sure that it will work out in the end. However, I think that they should be careful when they start forcing us into BC gearing choices which are no longer optimal using WotLK mechanics, and realize that some folks are going to worry about viability because of these odd choices.
Comparative values:
DPS Neck:
+60 AP
+27 Hit Rating
+22 Agility [.55 dodge]
Tank Neck:
+1 Stamina [negligible]
+38 Str [less of a threat increase than the AP/hit rating/crit rage]
+17 Defense Rating [.14 dodge, .14 to be missed = .28% avoidance]
The attack power bonus in Mother Bear seems superflous. ...
Granted its probably there just to emphasize the distinction between a Tank and DPS build.
However, we've been reading about bears having threat issues on the beta and an increase in AP can be used to help to at least partially solve it.
GC also mentioned in a recent post that they're still putting the talents in place and that the numbers will follow so im quite curious to see what the next couple of revisions will bring.
Edit : Mara, i would not be at all surprised if we find another neck piece with similar values but with a different and more useful on equip stat.
Why would a Bear now want to use the "Defense" necklace, when they get more "Tanking" stats out of the "DPS" necklace? Currently, the DPS necklace is better for tanking, presuming you want nearly double the avoidance and a ton more threat at the cost of 1 point of stamina.
The only way that will change is if we get some type of "bonus" mitigation from defense and/or mitigation from strength, like all three other tanks. Its ironic that they don't want druids to stack agility, but they are forcing us to do exactly that. Similarly, our old role was that of the hybrid OT/Dps...and gear appears to continue to favor this role, notwithstanding Blue's (Ghostcrawler) comments to the contrary.
I'm encouraged by what they are doing and am fairly sure that it will work out in the end. However, I think that they should be careful when they start forcing us into BC gearing choices which are no longer optimal using WotLK mechanics, and realize that some folks are going to worry about viability because of these odd choices.
Comparative values:
DPS Neck:
+60 AP
+27 Hit Rating
+22 Agility [.55 dodge]
Tank Neck:
+1 Stamina [negligible]
+38 Str [less of a threat increase than the AP/hit rating/crit rage]
+17 Defense Rating [.14 dodge, .14 to be missed = .28% avoidance]
You missed the 364 armor on the neck. Armor. On a neck! And I had to double check that it wasn't a ring slot, too. :P
I agree though that Str needs to do something for mitigation or avoidance, especially since it's going to be on all the homogenized tanking non-body slot gear.
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
Can you honestly look at gear for Druids over the last 2 years and say that they're really done it right? DPS-wise, Druids are impressive when everyone is in greens/blues, and then get hung out to dry endgame. Tanking-wise, Druids hang in there because of mechanics/gear that Blizzard's throwing out the window in WotLK. They're tweaking other tanking classes, essentially, and revamping Druids.
So it seems totally justified to be nervous and not trust that Blizzard's going to make everything fine in beta or early release or... the next XP? You're the calm voice of reason based on... on... surely not past experience with Blizzard, the originators of "working as intended". Even when it's not. Even when they admit a year later that it wasn't. Even when they change it a year later and STILL don't admit it.
However, you shouldn't take that to an illogical conclusion and choose to post nothing since, heck, everything is still up in the air. Numbers and comparisons can be very useful, especially if they help us pinpoint where something is going awry. Just don't conclude A) intent or B) that the numbers will stay that way.
It has been confirmed that LotP will be a raid wide buff like Rampage. Is this true in beta yet? If so, can anyone test if [Idol of the Raven Goddess] applies to all raid members? With the consolidation of crit rating do casters benefit from this as well (or melee from moonkin)? Do moonkin and feral versions stack?
Crushing blows mean 15% * 50% = 7,5% more medium damage for us on BC and will not exist in LK raid environment
Mitigation conclusion:
We are going from 75% mitigation crushable to around 74,3% mitigation for around 5% improved mitigation;
Avoidance
- Loses around 16% dodge from agi (on around 600 agi) and get 6% dodge from talent resulting in a 10% dodge loss
General
+ 5% physical mitigation + 15% magic mitigation - 10% physical avoidance + some stats Survival of the Fittest + some stats going on armor/int/resilience's place
Conclusion
We will be different, but will have around the same damage reduction.
Remember that I'm not talking about scaling here, just about the day after.
Sorry for bad 'engrish' (it is not my natural language).
Crushing blows mean 15% * 50% = 7,5% more medium damage for us on BC and will not exist in LK raid environment
Mitigation conclusion:
We are going from 75% mitigation crushable to around 74,3% mitigation for around 5% improved mitigation;
Avoidance
- Loses around 16% dodge from agi (on around 600 agi) and get 6% dodge from talent resulting in a 10% dodge loss
General
+ 5% physical mitigation + 15% magic mitigation - 10% physical avoidance + some stats Survival of the Fittest + some stats going on armor/int/resilience's place
Conclusion
We will be different, but will have around the same damage reduction.
Remember that I'm not talking about scaling here, just about the day after.
Sorry for bad 'engrish' (it is not my natural language).
A good analysis. The last part is what I think most of us are worried about. We won't be squishy at 70 and might tank ok at 80. But by the time we're in full level 80 epics, the lower armor and dodge from agi and huge amount of stats providing almost no avoidance/mitigation will be magnified. Most of the fixes they've made don't address that.
Scathe! on the beta forums addressed it well:
I'm all for us to come out of the gate strong, but I’d really like us to be able to look at gear upgrades as a HUGE positive not just a trivial difference.
General
+ 5% physical mitigation + 15% magic mitigation - 10% physical avoidance + some stats Survival of the Fittest + some stats going on armor/int/resilience's place
You forgot Ancestral Healing. It will actually be a good buff for druids now, and will provide a good deal of mitigation.
Wasn't thick hide factored in multiplicatively, and thus this would be 5,5 and not 5,06?
That is correct. Also, you underestimate the effect of crushing blows in your analysis. While theoretically, they are 15 % of all attacks, your avoidance increases that percentage (would be 30 % for 50 % avoid and 50 % for 70 % avoid).
I'd assume at least 50 % avoid for a T6 bear so that would up crushings to 15 %.
The BC Bear will take 1.15 * 0.25 = 28.75 % damage while
the LK Bear will only take 0.3024 * 0.85 = 25.70 % damage (26.61 % if MB is only 12 %).
So that will leave the LK Bear with 11 % (8 %) less damage taken than the BC Bear - not that bad if you ask me.
Edit: Nah forgot to edit the armor multiplier but that doesn't change much.
Crushing blows mean 15% * 50% = 7,5% more medium damage for us on BC and will not exist in LK raid environment
Mitigation conclusion:
We are going from 75% mitigation crushable to around 73,8% mitigation for around 4% improved mitigation;
The point stays and they just have to improve scaling as everybody knows that we will get armor and dodge in a slower pace without bonus armor and worse agi:dodge rating.
Edit: Sorry Malazaar, didn't see your post. Ty for correcting that error. Now i am even more confident about our possibilities =)
08/31/08, 6:40 PM
And I had to double check that it wasn't a ring slot, too. :P
