Anyone else a bit surprised at those numbers ? I don't even hit that much crit currently in 4t6 raidbuffed and the impression gotten so far earlier in this thread would be that crit was taking a wee bit of a nose-dive at first.
An interesting point... I updated the support for armor penetration of SA and FF being applied before ArP rating. The results make ArP flip-flop from the best stat to the worst (even lower than haste) when SA is applied. So, I've swapped all ArP gems to all Str gems and a few pieces of gear.
I guess i am missing something - what is the deal with ArP and SA + FF? I checked the thread few pages back but didnt find an answer.
I guess i am missing something - what is the deal with ArP and SA + FF? I checked the thread few pages back but didnt find an answer.
Sunder Armor and Faerie Fire reduce effectiveness of the new Armor Penetration because both debuffs are applied before ArPen is taken into account (So your shiny 5% Armor Reduction per melee hit has less of an impact).
I guess i am missing something - what is the deal with ArP and SA + FF? I checked the thread few pages back but didnt find an answer.
Just to clarify Kieran's post, Armor Penetration is being changed to become a rating. Instead of removing a static amount of armor it will now remove a percentage of armor based on your ArPen rating. Armor reducing debuffs like SA and FF, however, remove static amounts of armor, which reduces the effectiveness of percentage armor reduction from ArPen rating.
It looks like we know where Blizzard is going with our itemization, particularly on the tanking side:
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Q u o t e:
I don't understand why it would be so hard to give rogues 2ap =1str, and add str to all rogue loot, making cats happier, and giving bears some more threat (there hasn't been any reports I've seen of bears being too good at building threat compared to other tanks, but admittedly this could be an issue).
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Because of the way the Feral is designed, there are not a lot of knobs to turn. If we improve your Strength too much, bear dps might be too high (a problem we've had before), which infringes on not only cats but also other tanks. If your threat is too high, we have similar problems.
Imagine for a moment that you had one stat, Agility perhaps, and everything -- dodge, armor, crit, stamina, mana, etc. -- all derived from Agility. Obviously you would take nothing but Agility. And you would be a god. We would build a temple to your awesomeness in Zul'Drak with the other animal gods. And all the other classes would reroll. I exaggerate, but that is the risk with the bear especially (less so the cat). It's very easy to make bears too good, so in some sense we are keeping you in a state of denial. You want the gear that makes you the best, but if we let you have it, you're too good.
Now, we could change the way the Feral works, and to be fair, several posts have asked for that. We could make the bear care more about defense, parry and other stats. It might make our itemization easier, but it might also lose something special about the druid class. We like that you play differently. We like it when you pick up a ring and say "THIS is a great tanking ring," and have other people stop and ask you how that could be. We want druids to work differently, so we're going to try this system out this time. If it doesn't work then in a future patch or expansion we might try a different model where your stats are derived differently.
As WoW matures, it's easy to adopt the lazy designer syndrome and say that every spec needs a version of Mortal Strike, an interrupt, an intercept, a root breaker, as ranged stun, a bubble, a pet, a different form they can take on, a cheat death, an ice block, and so on. It makes the game easier to balance, probably even easier to design if we went that route, but we also think we'd lose what makes the classes cool and unique. I know it might feel like we're swimming upstream sometimes in order to protect that flavor, but consider how dreary the alternative might be too.
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Q u o t e:
Your gear comparisons and comments seem to suggest that bears will be gemming for nothing but stam now, which leads me to be concerned that we'll become the mana soakers we strongly don't wish to be. I'd much rather have less of a HP lead over a warrior, while being closer on avoidance, than being 8k hp's over a warrior and running the healers oom from needing alot more healing :S
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As long as your armor is high, this shouldn't be a big problem. Part of the mana-soaker mentality came because you just ate crushing blows before. But those are gone. If anything, I worry sometimes that we'll have trouble challenging the healers with all of the different toys we have given them.
In short, we're going to be balanced around being OP but restricted by poorly itemized gear. I suppose if we end up balanced with everyone else it can work, but I'm not aware of any other class/spec balanced like this. I think this is a frustrating approach to take since you can see how powerful your character would be if only given the right gear. I'd prefer to have our base abilities and talents toned down but changed to make us scale with rogue leather and plate tank accessories so that we can be honestly excited about gear upgrades instead of feeling "Well, I increased my armor by 100 and agility by 10, but I sure wish I had some use for this parry and strength".
I saw that quote as well. And quite frankly, it doesn't make me real happy to know that the Devs say "Nah, we'll keep your gear crap so we're not giving one of a plethora of options just to keep you balanced". What fun. New gear drops and it'd be better off in the hands of everyone else.
I've updated my calculator with the latest patch and used Naxx-10 level gear to run some simulation.
I've posted a very long post with all the rating, mechanincs, simulations in different situations and so on.
I'll post here only some consideration. If moderators think that I can copy & paste my posts here I'll do, I just don't want to fill a page with my post.
Tank specced druid doing dps in dps gear/cat form using 2SR/5RIP cycle:
2934 dps without naturalist and OOC
3983 dps with naturalist and OOC.
Seing that number I think I'll go for this spec: lvl 80 Bear Spec
that allow me to tank efficiently while doing only about 7-10% less dps than a cat-druid.
Last edited by nightcrowler : 09/17/08 at 11:25 AM.
I suppose if we end up balanced with everyone else it can work, but I'm not aware of any other class/spec balanced like this.
I'd say the last time they did that to a significant extent (for someone other than feral) was in the very early days of level 60 play where agility and attack power could not be on same piece (with a few notable exceptions which were used for that very reason for a long long time). That's why early rogue tiers have strength instead of agility.
Of course, if we look at druid argument of strength against attack power that's really no different than plate classes have been dealing with for a lot of their item slots (getting attack power instead of strength - they'll probably have to keep dealing with that).
Of course there's the odd other examples such as crit being shoveled at shadow priests or spell penetration on mage tiers (or spirit being thrown around in general).
Seing that number I think I'll go for this spec: lvl 80 Bear Spec
that allow me to tank efficiently while doing only about 7-10% less dps than a cat-druid.
No fair, that was going to be my spec! I still have a hard time believing that 5/5 PI > 5/2 MS. You theorycrafters say its so, but I keeping thinking something has to be wrong. As it just seems like 4% Crit, or DPS/TPS (for bear), would be better than 10% extra damage on a crit. But, I trust you guys.
So, which DPS rotation would you use with your build? The last one you mentioned 2SR/5RIP? Are you considering any Glyphs in your rotation? Or is that all posted in your wow forum post (I can't see it a work)?
Thats a great looking piece of work - any plans to release the source code for your simulator?
As it stands the 7-10% gap beteen cat and bear spec just doesn't seem big enough to meet the goal of having Bear druids and Cat druids.
Did you do a run that tests the value of OOC alone?
Depending how much of the 1000dps difference is OOC i can see denying bears enough points to reach it being the key way of differentiating Cat/Bear spec - even if it means pushing it even deeper into resto.
I saw that quote as well. And quite frankly, it doesn't make me real happy to know that the Devs say "Nah, we'll keep your gear crap so we're not giving one of a plethora of options just to keep you balanced". What fun. New gear drops and it'd be better off in the hands of everyone else.
The problem is mainly that with that method of balancing class balance can vary greatly depending on if the itemization team decides to provide you with a certain type of gear in a certain tier or not.
In vanilla WoW that happened in many slots with greens, blues and epics that had a high amount of armor.
In TBC certain quest greens and blues had that property at the start and items like Badge of Tenacity and the Kara exalted ring were very powerful throughout all tiers.
In WotLK there is no epic armor ring at the moment, only blues and greens and even the TBC epic armor rings are still viable choices. If they don't add any epic armor ring then feral druid might wear a blue ring for several tiers.
So while this adds flavor to feral druids, it also greatly reduces choice and the chance to upgrade your gear.
It depends on your crit%, but a flat crit% bonus technically doesn't scale, while the crit damage bonus will scale with your crit percentage. When you consider the benefit to snap threat and longer term threat considering that we will be tanking in what is effectively DPS gear (i.e. relatively high crit percentage) and the bonus to mitigation (however small) from AoE avoidance, I think PI wins out over 5/2 Master Shapeshifter.
I was disappointed to read that the developers are intentionally balancing a spec around poor itemization. I find it surprising given their generally well thought-out high level goals for the expansion. They may not realize all those goals, but they pretty much all make sense-- except for this one.
I was disappointed to read that the developers are intentionally balancing a spec around poor itemization. I find it surprising given their generally well thought-out high level goals for the expansion. They may not realize all those goals, but they pretty much all make sense-- except for this one.
I guess the priority is to make the spec work, however messy it might turn out. I don't like it either but as long as it works i can live with it.
Better than having good items and dealing with screwed up mechanics like in BC.
I wouldn't exactly call itemization in TBC fantastic. Look at feral tanking weapons for a good example. Ferals used a faction reward (earthwarden) until we picked up a random zone drop from tier5, a tier that was largely skipped for the past year or so after attunements were removed. After that there were no clear upgrades until we started capping stats through other gear and just didn't need tanking weapons anymore, and started tanking with DPS weapons. That's not good design, and I always assumed it was an oversight.
Yes PI wins out over 5/2 Master Shapeshifter. From a dps point of view they are about the same for cat druids but you also have 15% AoE resist.
As for 7-10% difference as I said in my WoW-forum topic the difference is using a spec with Naturalist and OOC (sacrifing Demoralizing Roar and ImpLoP) if you don't take Naturalist and OOC the difference is about 30%.
As for rotations: for a Bear specced druid (No R&T) 2SR/5RIP is better, you'll trow in 1 or 2 FB x fight when you use Berserk.
Code: I'll release the code here in some days, I just need to translate some piece of comment (I'm italian) and erase some old unused parts.
I'd say the last time they did that to a significant extent (for someone other than feral) was in the very early days of level 60 play where agility and attack power could not be on same piece (with a few notable exceptions which were used for that very reason for a long long time). That's why early rogue tiers have strength instead of agility.
Of course, if we look at druid argument of strength against attack power that's really no different than plate classes have been dealing with for a lot of their item slots (getting attack power instead of strength - they'll probably have to keep dealing with that).
Of course there's the odd other examples such as crit being shoveled at shadow priests or spell penetration on mage tiers (or spirit being thrown around in general).
Spriest crit
"We'll be increasing Mind Flay's coefficient (base) by roughly 30% to start, and allow Mind Flay to crit. We may also do some tuneups to the Shadow tree as well, but as other players have mentioned the tree is really not the problem, just the base spells not scaling.
Hopefully we can get the new Mind Flay in the next build, but allowing it to crit involves rebuilding the spell completely, which may take some time."
Spirit
Can't find the quote but blues have stated Blizz wants to go back to people having to think about mana conservation unlike is the current issue in TBC. Hence changes like potion sickness.
As for spell penetration, I can't speak to that end as I haven't seen anything about it (or know much about it anyways).
Anyone thought of a n SR/5FB already? I'm actually too tired to make a calculation, but having a warrior giving you the bleed shouldn't be too difficult...
edit: Nevermind, found it in Nightcrowlers post... Though the difference of 10dps seems to be quite low
I haven't seen it mentioned here, and I don't know if any of the 3 calculators take it into account or not... but currently on beta, SR doesn't stack with UR/AbomMight. Since we're pretty certain to have one of those, SR is effectively +30% AP, not +40%. I'm guessing this is a bug though, and should be reported to Blizz, if anyone has the chance. (Same with Trauma overwriting Mangle)
I posted this on the beta forums, but I figured that more eyes on it would be nice. I'm very troubled with the best tanking gear coming from pvp. The long and short is that it looks like PvP gear is going to be better for tanking (or at least very, very comparable) relative to tier gear at any level.
Gear name agi stam sockets AP crit resil exp hit haste arpen
DeadlyLegs 84 102 RB 134 51 66
T725legs 85 102 RY 154 55 42
Infectious S 77 87 200 72 50
The Tier legs win out again, barely edging the deadly legs thanks to more expertise. NOte that the infectious skitterer leggings are worse than the 10-man loot for bears. This is disappointing, as it means bears will not have a particularly good set of options to choose from.
DeadlyGloves 67 75 B 100 31 39
T725gloves 59 75 R 114 50 37
Dislocating H 55 75 150 38 50
The PvP gear wins again, having more agility. Note again that the dislocating handguards are strictly worse than the 10-man loot for bears.
I've laboriously searched all 80 pages of this thread and haven't seen much discussion of the "sweeping strikes" part of Berserk. Has anybody done much testing with this? Does it seem useful? Personally, I've never wanted a multi-target mangle, although I have hoped for a multi-crit swipe.
One question I'm really curious about: If you're tanking next to a CC'd mob and you hit Berserk, does your mangle pop the sheep? Obviously if our "oh shit" button has the potential to break CC on nearby mobs, it's much less useful. Even if CC'd mobs are not affected, if it could pull a mob off another tank it's very dangerous.
Is anybody really excited about the multi-mob part of Berserk -- or about Berserk in general, now that they've nerfed the "Beast Within" part of it?
We want druids to work differently, so we're going to try this system out this time. If it doesn't work then in a future patch or expansion we might try a different model where your stats are derived differently.
Gotta love it when they say "hey, theres a good chance we will entirely fuck up your class, but don't worry, it will be fixed a year later with the next expansion." It very well looks like I will be tanking with warrior or DK and leave the druid in cat or moonkin.
I've laboriously searched all 80 pages of this thread and haven't seen much discussion of the "sweeping strikes" part of Berserk. Has anybody done much testing with this? Does it seem useful?
It doesn't get much press around here since many are focused on raids not 5-mans.
One question I'm really curious about: If you're tanking next to a CC'd mob and you hit Berserk, does your mangle pop the sheep?
I would assume it would break near-by CC'd mobs.
Is anybody really excited about the multi-mob part of Berserk -- or about Berserk in general, now that they've nerfed the "Beast Within" part of it?
I am seriously excited about Berserk for tanking, the shortened cooldown on challenging roar, the 4-5 mob swipe, and the KotJ bear buff and their affects on our AoE tanking ability.
09/17/08, 5:49 AM
