another blue post, all the same pretty much

WoW Forums -> Feral Concerns in WotLK

We do want to give Ferals who want to focus on being cats some excellent melee dps. We do want bears to be end-game tanks. We want to see serious guilds with a bear MT and a death knight OT.

What held us back from that before was that the kitty could turn around and tank almost as well (and sometimes better) than the Prot dudes who abandoned any hope of competitive dps in order to be able to tank for their guild. Clearly (I hope) a class that could do rogue-level dps and warrior-level tanking with the same talent build is the kind of thing that makes other players a little miffed.

But we're reevaluating a lot of old (and some admittedly tired) decisions for Lich King. Not only will tank-spec classes be able to do a lot higher dps (not the highest in the raid mind you, but higher), but we think it's fine for a Feral to nerf their tanking ability a little in order to go for high dps, or lower their dps a little in order to be amazing tanks.

We don't think it will take a complete overhaul of the Feral tree. To be honest, I think it's a pretty fun tree. But it will definitely take some changes to the tree you see on beta today. Imagine 5-10 talent points that significantly increase your survivability but do nothing to your dps. Take those points and you're a tank. Ignore them and you're melee dps. Take a few here and there and you are as flexible as you are today. I'm not saying that is the final or even only sollution. But that implementation gets brought up quite a bit.

Actually haste is still an absolutely terrible stat according to Toskk's calculator. It's below one attack power still even w/ the omen of clarity change.

What about some stat conversion when in forms? It would extremely help ferals with current "unified itemization" approach in WotLK

As feral tanks will sure have crit immunity from a talent it should be nice to have

Defense becomes Agility, when in feral forms. (Pointing to those tanking items for plate tanks)

With Strength gone and AP on all shared gear, Survival of the Fittest all stats raised looks rather bland. There should be talent to convert AP back to Strength for feral forms only.

Like
Feral Mastery (normal buyable skill, but Mangle talent required)
Defense on equipped gear becomes Agility when druid is in cat, bear and dire bear forms.
Standard "equip: + X Attack Power" on armors, utility items and weapon changed into X/2 Strength (Standard Conversion 2 AP = 1 STR) - (Feral Attack Power DOES NOT CHANGE into Strength) when druid is in cat, bear and dire bear form.

Mate, you dont need +defense gear in WotLK, cause you got +6% crit reduce in talents.

And for now, u dont have any defense in your tear gear, and u really dont need it. You can reach the cap with enchants.

Exactly!

If there won't be any +armor on leather ferals must then use rings, necks and cloaks designed for plate tanks for tanking. As defense in WotLK will be wasted stat for ferals, it should at least be possible to convert it into Agility.

I think there will be something to able us to avoid those items and do not get defense stat... I hope at least ^^

Note: As it seems, Dodge rating would be more applicable than AGI for tanking now, due to the AGI : Dodge ratio being nerfed.

(is there a way to make item links to beta items? item= doesn't work)

We don't need defense, but we're likely to have some.

Flowing Cloak of Command
504 armor, 37str, 39sta, 25 defense rating.

is a good example. What cloaks have you seen without defense or str that you'd rather wear? I don't see any rogue cloaks that would be better for tanking.

We're likely to have defense and str on our non-leather slots, whether or not we need them. I think it would go a long way to making us scalable to make us care about those stats and/or other 'non-tanking' stats on leather like crit or AP.

Tappin:

Flowing Cloak of Command - Item - World of Warcraft

That works when you hover over it. Just enclose the wowhead link in [url /url] tags.


TheNameLessOne - like I said, at least it makes haste more worthwhile, maybe not that it makes it good.


Will be interesting to see the next Feral talent push. It sounds like they're going to be rejigging a few talents (I assume they won't be just adding or else the tree will be ridiculous).

Dukes - My point was that even with the changes to omen of clarity, haste still sucks and should generally be avoided like the plague (DST aside). Going from clearly the worst and overall sucky DPS stat to still clearly the worst only slightly less sucky stat, is not a worthy change. Druid mechanics (or haste) need to be changed still so that haste is at least more powerful than one attack power and not so vastly inferior to one strength, agil or crit rating.

Any LvL80 druid here that can give the exact number of AGI : Dodge ratio?