Pharmacon

If Blizzard doesn't want us to be the OOM Tank (as Blue's have stated several times) Bears either need more armor to mitigate or more avoidance (read dodge). However, on both fronts, Blizz has stated they don't want. They are trying to put our armor more in line with Plate wearers, and the concerns of another SW Radiance "fix" in the late content.

I think that the Mother Bear talent is a decent approach. However, like everyone else, I'm concerned about the scalability of a talent designed like this. I'm not a fan at all that I was able to be within arms reach of the armor cap at mid to late T4 content and the problem of some of the best bear tanking gear comes from PvP (which I can't stand as feral but that's another thread).

As far as Cat DPS, I think it would go a long ways to change FB to not have the energy dump that it has now. With the Buffs to FB in talents so far it looks so appealing. However, what's the point if I can't do anything for 4-5 seconds? That in itself may go a long way to equalize the Rogue/Druid dps output disparity.

 

• Daboran

TC is getting buffed in damage and can crit, you're not going to call it a wasted GCD.

I hardly think that one GCD compares with having to tab through every mob and use a GCD on each one, then to keep doing that to keep the stack up Imagine what that does for TPS? In 5/10man you're not going to have a dps Warrior buffbot around all the time.

If Blizzard's design intention is to make all tanks more or less equal then it needs to be that way across the board.

 

Mijae

The problem you are referring to is not class design, but instance design. When they change the number of tanks and/or healers that are needed from one boss to the next, someone is going to suffer. Previously we were well off being able to perform multiple roles in the same spec. We often didn't need to get swapped out since our dps was "acceptable". However, we are pretty much the only spec capable of doing this well. Blizzard clearly wants to put us in the same spot as everyone else.

Unfortunately the future for us really does seem to be 4 talent trees. It's the only way they can justify buffing our dps. You will have to choose either full bear, full cat, or some hybrid. You would probably only take a talent like Natural Reaction in a full bear build, in which case you would never be going cat. It's pretty obvious a hybrid build won't work in a 25-man raiding environment since you just gimp both forms. A full cat spec will still be able to OT decently, just not MT as well.

Blizzard will need to address this with either the dual-specs they have been referring to or designing future raids correctly. I can't imagine swapping players between encounters is intended. If it is, someone should be shot.

Feral DruidStats spreadsheet
v3.2.0.0.xls - updated 8/4/2009

 

TheNameLessOne

Prot warriors in DPS gear, spamming devastate are roughly equal to kitty DPS provided they get proper group make-up.

 

kalbear

I think that's the part that I disagree with the most. Why is there such a need to buff cat dps? Druids already have a DPS spec and a healing spec. They have a tanking spec. Do they need a second DPS spec? That just seems like a poor choice, and it also seems anathema to what druids have been in the past.

I understand that having a feral druid not being brought as a cat because their DPS is simply not that good is not that great, but that's the case with prot warriors and prot paladins currently. Making DKs and Feral druids the classes that can do better DPS but have some limitations with tanking seemed like a reasonable crossover to me. As it stands, they're essentially now going to have to balance 31 classes/specs, and doing 2 of those suboptimally.

 

Septus

Because so much time has been invested in cat form design?

 

• sadris

IW needs to not be a stacking effect. It is quite precarious to have an attack speed debuff be dependent on a cooldown-based ability (Mangle). You essentially have to eat a large chunk of time of hasted attacks before its fully stacked.

Feral is not bloated. The requirement of Naturalist + OOC makes being a feral druid feel bloated.

'[The main argument against gay-marriage] always revolves around ... "the gay agenda"... Apparently all these gays only want to get married so they can adopt children, turn the children gay (probably using their mystic gay voodoo, passed gayly down from one gay generation to the next), and perpetuate their gayness.'
-- rantingkitten

 

Maeltne

Personally I think the entire idea of not being able to DPS/TANK in the same SPEC is flawed. Changing specs is cheap and easy, and only getting easier.

The true issue is being able to TANK/DPS in the same GEAR. Getting gear is much more involved that getting gold. This appears to only be getting much worse in the expansion, and as gear homogenization is part of a fundamental shift in the game, I don't think it is going to change.

However leaving that argument aside and going with the idea that we should not be able to DPS/TANK with the same spec, the truth is that there is FAR too much bloat in the tree. By bloat I do not mean what is usually meant, what I mean is that to pick up the crucial and important tanking talents, I get too many dps related abilities. I simply cannot get all the tanking abilities that I want, but I get a whole bunch of DPS abilities that do little for tanking. Let there be too many tanking abilities so that I need to pick and choose, but don't give me a bunch of dps junk while not letting me have the ability to get the crucial tanking talents.

The reason for this is due to the change in idea that we are OT/DPS to MT capable. OT/DPS lends itself to bear/cat mixed talents, whereas MT or DPS lends itself to split bat/bear talents. I don't mean to say that they ALL should be split, but there is a great many that could easily be.

Take for instance tier 1 of the feral tree. In there current form both a Bear and a Cat would want both Ferocity and Feral Agression, however since Ferocity does more both Cats and Bears skip Feral Agression en mass.

What if the exact abilities in these talents where redistributed?

For instance:

Ferocity
Reduces the cost of your maul, swipe, and mangle (bear) by 1/2/3/4/5 rage, and increases the AP reduction of your Demoralizing Roar by 8/16/24/32/40%.

Feral Agression
Reduces the cost of your claw, rake, and mangle (cat) by 1/2/3/4/5 energy, and increases the damage caused by ferocious bite by 3/6/9/12/15%

Suddenly both of these talents become critical to the various flavors of druid, and both will be used, however there is a very cut and clear choice between which relates to bear and which relates to cat.

There are several talent pairs that lend themselves to this redistributing in either the same or neighboring tiers, for instance: Feral Instinct and Brutal Impact, Shredding Attack and Savage Fury, and other that do not. The cross-over is enough to allow Tanks by choice to do mediocre dps, and vice versa.

 

Pzychotix

There's nothing wrong with being an OOM tank. Well, not exactly an OOM tank, but a tank that takes more average DPS than other tanks.

Take for example, 2 tanks with 100 health each. They each face a mob that does 50 damage per hit.

Tank 1 has 0% mitigation but 75% avoidance.
Tank 2 has 50% mitigation but 0% avoidance.

Tank 1 is taking an average DPS of 12.5 while Tank 2 is taking an average DPS of 25. Yet Tank 2 is probably the tank you want, because Tank 1 is much more prone to dying to spikes.

Certainly the numbers are highly exaggerated in this form, but I hope you can get the idea. When GC brought up the idea of high effective health tanks, people jumped all over the fact that we would require more healing, but completely glossed over the fact that we would be less prone to actually dying. Since the #1 problem in raiding is about how to keep your raid alive, especially tanks, not about keeping your healers from OOMing, I'd take that trade-off. Considering the amount of mana restoration abilities being flung about, I'd say that this holds even more true in WoTLK.

However, stacking in PVP is somewhat beneficial. In PVP, rogues aren't exactly liking the single stack wound poison change. I'd rather have it a 2-stack than not stack at all.

 

Pharmacon

However, taking more DPS means it takes more HPS to keep you up. At that point you end up having to Healer stack in order to keep the Druid tank up vs. the Warrior tank (or whatever). Sure you may not be as prone to spike deaths, but that doesn't stop you from needing more heals to be kept alive (which the OOM thing might become magnified due to downranking changes, even with the extra mana battery).

 

TimWischmeier

Well, no. If druids would end up taking less spikey damage and haveing a slightly greater HP pool it could also very well help healers to conserve mana, because they are able to safely(!) cancel heals more often.

But, honestly: we don't know yet, and we can't interpolate this yet. We wil have to wait for gear, raid instances and even the next big feral talent tree push to show up in beta before you can arguably make conclusions in regards to survivabilty / healabilty etc.

 

TheNameLessOne

Either the HP pool is irrelevant or the healers never cancel cast. You cannot have both in the given example.

The avoidance tank is the one who wants more HP. More HP means less chance of a spike killing you. If you remove spikes completely, then you just need enough HP to not get killed between heals.

 

Pzychotix

The problem of the matter is that you're thinking that we will need a lot more healing. But that certainly doesn't have to be the case.

How bad would it be if we took 5% more DPS, but had 100% more health? Certainly 5% more DPS would be acceptable, and wouldn't require healer stacking, and 100% more health pretty much eliminates spikes. If 5% more DPS is still unacceptable, what about 1% more DPS and 1000% more health?

It's just a matter of adjusting the numbers to acceptable rates. I would find it hard to believe that there isn't some reasonable level of rates that people would find acceptable.

That assumes that the mob is hitting faster than the healers can cast. Overall, a high EH tank would take smoother damage intake, meaning that healers can cancel cast easier without fear of missing a spike.

 

• Daboran

At the risk of being a little flippant, I point you to Brutallus, sir.....

This seems to me to be the downside of effectively removing mana management from the game (which is basically what has happened since TBC launch). Thinking back to fights like Chromaggus - he didn't need to hit the tank either very fast or very hard. The challenge for healers was to manage healing/decursing/dispelling effectively enough to last the fight (I'm talking about attempting him with MC gear levels here remember). There's not many fights in the game now where cast/cancel is actually required.

If healers don't have to manage their mana, then how do you challenge them? The choices are limited really. Either you go for "Faster, harder" (Brutallus, Kalecgos demon, Felmyst, Muru Void Sentinels) or you introduce other mechanics to keep them on their toes (Twins, Muru, Felmyst) - or both of course.

Both of these methods will favour either mitigation over avoidance or vice versa and therefore tank design.

 

Pike

I think you hit the nail on the head! This seems to be the direction that blizz would eventually like as well (or at least that's what it sounds like from the blue posts). Provided we have enough points to get all the required tanking talents, then some extra to put into a few dps talents for occasional cat form useage. The same would work the other way (we get all the necessary kitty dps talents, and a few tanking ones for the occasional OT'ing). I've heard a lot of talk about bloat, but this is by far my favorite solution so far. Is there any similar suggestions on the beta forums yet?

 

tlbj6142

The latest Druid Blue Post confirms they aren't done with Druids yet. Mentions scaling, cat dps, gear, etc. I quote it, but it quite long.

 

xpuntar

What about fusing current NI effect into Heart of the Wild? Like

Heart of the Wild

Increase Intellect by 20% and Spell Healing by 70% of your Agility + Bear part & Cat part

 

Pharmacon

I just don't agree with your logic here. Taking 5% more DPS means one of two things. 1) We have to be healed 5% more than one of our counterparts, becoming a tax on their mana and putting them OOM. 2) We get healed the same amount as our counterparts (because that's what the healers are capable of) and we have to have the (5% DPS*Fight length) extra health just to stay alive compared to our counterparts.

 

Bold

3) Healing becomes more mana efficient on druid tanks due to the change in healing mechanics surrounding the loss of downranking.

 

◊ Lord BEEF

You can't talk about tanking mechanics while ignoring hots and earth shield. These are going to be on you constantly regardless of whether you're high avoidance or high armor, and they favor high armor somewhat since they're going to provide more effective healing in that scenario.

 

Duilliath

Make NI include Bearform and suddenly you have a very definite tanking flavour. More stable damage intake, more healing (and it scales as healer gear upgrades!) and you don't have to care too much about lower overall avoidance.

 

gnoop

How so? The downranking change will impact all healing and all tanks. A tank that takes 5% more damage is still a tank that takes 5% more damage. If you're referring to healing per mana, we can't really say how it will play out in beta yet. Certainly, a tank that takes more damage would potentially favor the larger, more mana-efficient, heals but those heals don't seem to typically be preferred by healers of any class in my experience.

 

Bold

Yes I was referring to heal/mana. Certainly we don't know what Blizzard will end up doing with healing and downranking, so this is just hypothetical. In order to ensure an avoidance tank doesn't go down, a certain amount of constant healing must be applied. This has historically been down with downranked larger heals. If healers can no longer do this, they will be forced to a) spam mana-inefficient small heals or b) cast mana efficient large ones. Where the incoming dps of the tank (druid) is more predictable it should be possible to use larger/longer more mana efficient heals. Although again, who knows what will be done to address downranking.

 

Pzychotix

Let's say we take Brutallus on. Would you rather have someone who can last several hits, or someone who has a chance to dodge all those hits as well as a chance to get hit every time and autodie? It's the consistency that matters.

I would rather my healers OOM than die at 1% because my tank's RNG luck ran out. And 5% more mana requirement isn't as big as you're trying to make out. At level 70, it's equivalent to 630 armor. Maybe around half of a gear upgrade. Healers won't live or die by a single piece of gear. OOMing isn't a problem any more.

 

TheNameLessOne

If your healers always run OOM, you die and never kill the boss. You have a 100% chance of auto dying, the other tank does not.

If you have a random chance of getting gibbed but your healers don't run OOM, you still have a chance of killing the boss.