Halion

A prot paladin who is using Blessing of Sanctuary and JoW will have unlimited mana on any large pull. A prot warrior should have near unlimited rage from shield block + shield spec (100% block + 2 rage per block for 10 seconds, every 40 seconds) along with rage gains from multiple mobs attacking. I can't speak to how DK resources work.

However, paladins and warriors are defiantly in a similar "rage" situation to ferals on large pulls.

 

david0925

Promethius:

The game is definitely not balanced around powerleveling. I only brought that up as an interesting side note. With a druid PL, however, you probably won't ever reach the same amount of mobs you get as a paladin because you will be spamming swipe as you grab more mobs. As a result, mobs will die as you move on. This may require lowbies to actually follow you and not just wait at the entrance as the prot paladin pulls everything back, but speed-wise it will be very comparable.

Back on the issue of raiding: I'm not going to try to propose how to "balance" swipe because unless we get new toys to compensate, this is a good band-aid fix that should not be taken away. On the threat issue: do bears have problems holding aggro on single target, or 3 mob packs that's going to be most prevalent on encounters that matters, that we know about? I don't think threat is going to be a big issue if all 4 tanks are well ahead of off the DPS/healer, but have some discrepancy amongst themselves. However, if bears (or any tanks) have a significant harder time to even maintain aggro over DPS in a reasonable situation, then it should be addressed.

Even right now, unless prot paladins pop everything they have, AoEers (especially warlocks) still need to give it a couple of seconds before they go happy with tab-seeding.

Feral druid is always one expansion behind. Such is the fate of an extreme role changer. However if they are able to make us 95% tank and 95% dps, then I don't think I have a problem with that.

Maniq is my hero

 

slant

The devs are not aiming for 95% tank and 95% DPS. They want players to be forced to choose between 100% tank or 100% DPS. Cat spec druids should tank as well as an arms/fury warrior, bear spec druids should DPS as well as a prot warrior. In other words, hybridism is dead. Feedback should take that goal into account.

 

• Falk

Leather seems to be subdivided into 'tank' and 'dps' variants - the tanking stuff generally has a lot of stam (Good rough gauge is to see if the stam is > 1.5 of agi, but it's not always that neatly clearcut) and expertise, whereas the dps stuff has much less stam, and more dps-centric equip: bonuses, like crit and haste. Sure, there's still 'optimum' gear for dps or tanking, but at least a piece of gear tanking gear a tier higher is a dps upgrade, ditto rogue usage of high-stam gear, etc. It cuts down on gear sharding, which is basically the same reason healing and damage got folded into spellpower. A ring with hit on it can serve as a decent healer upgrade if no DPS can get mileage out of it, for example.

For Jewelry, tanking stuff is pretty much stack armor or bust. 450+ per ring slot, 550 (discounting the 800 one from Maexxna) from trinkets, 1k from staff, 350 from neck, 450 from cloak adds up to a TRUCKLOAD of armor in bear form.

At this point of the game, stacking agility for dodge seems a little silly - you're barely going to hit 38-40% in T7 gear, and the tradeoff in terms of effective health pool is (in my opinion, take it with a grain of salt etc) not worth it.

We'll see as Blizzard fine-tunes tank balance, but at the moment the best way to maximize survivability in the current raid zones with the current gear is to milk raw mitigation plus protector of the pack silly with a gigantic health pool.

 

david0925

This I understand. However, the current reality is that there are specs that almost maximizes the role of both tanking and dps at the same time. In addition, when I talked about proposed changes, I did not have Cat DPS or any other non-bear utility in mind. It might have been confusing to mash those in the same post, and I do apologize about that.

Theorycrafting speaking (I don't raid on beta so still need beta raider's input), mitigation doesn't seem to be too bad, and Damage actually looks very solid as a bear (Other tanking classes are pretty close, but it looks like bear still has the best damage overall?). Since our threat scales with damage, and Salvation and Defiance part of NS has been rolled into bear form, at least bear form speaking threat doesn't appear to be a big issue. On larger pack AoE it might be, but that's fixable by increasing the threat modifier of swipe when it hits X number of targets without touching damage, if necessary.

Offtopic: Although they are pushing for specialization. The reality of the druid class is that our physical damage and tanking tree exist in the same tree, and unless it is extremely bloated (much more so than even right now), then a complete sacrifice of DPS for tanking will be impossible. Druids by nature has been the damage-tanking class. Other classes seem to be closer to us now, but the gap is still there since we get a lot of AP and Crit from our gear.

Maniq is my hero

 

• Falk

Re: damage scaling with druid gear: that's why Blizzard has been pushing up Strength's benefit as a mitigation/avoidance stat for the plate classes.

Also Death Knights have not one, but three talent trees which have both dps and tanking talents in them. Things certainly are looking messy at the moment, but not nearly as silly as it was earlier in the beta. It's getting there. Will it 'get there' in time for launch and beyond? Who knows. We'll see.

 

Beace

Hadn't seen this one before, seems to be a bit of a problem to me.

We have Origin of Nightmares, epic from 25-man Naxx:

714 armor
77 str
100 agi
150 str
2084 FAP

Enraged Feral Staff, blue from some 5-man heroic:

1084 armor
45 str
56 agi
117 sta
1602 FAP

Obviously the epic one wins out on TPS (and from what I hear threat isn't really an issue regardless), and also have slightly more stamina and avoidance. But the difference in armor is pretty damn huge, and to me the blue one seems to be superior in any physical fight.

 

manapaws

I think the latter is quite overbudget and will be re-calculated at some point.

 

Korhaug

Origin of Nightmares has significantly more stamina and avoidance (and threat, which we'll leave out of this), at the cost of armor. It's possible that by the time we're in full ilevel 213 (or 226) we'll want to swap out the armor for more avoidance. That wouldn't be unprecedented.

More likely that it's just bad itemization, though. More's the pity.

 

Beace

Keep in mind that 46 agi isn't what we're used to today, at lvl 80 it turns into a rather low ~1.2% dodge, possibly even less due to diminishing returns. Compared to a ~2k armor difference

 

• sadris

So feedback it on the beta.

The item formula changed for WLK so old TBC calculators will not provide "accurate approximations" of the item's calculated iLevel.

'[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

 

• Falk

Actually, the item level formula didn't 'change' per-se. It's almost 100% confirmed to have always been on a logarithmatic scale, the results of which are close enough to linear below ilvl 150 or so that we didn't notice or put the difference down to just rounding errors/minor typo's/gem slots. It's actually apparently been logarithmatic all the way back to Naxxramas 1.0 gear, where 13 ilvl is a shade under 13% better. This is in contrast to the assumption that it was a linear scale. When ilvls past 150-ish started appearing (i.e. WOTLK) the deviation from linear was much more pronounced.

You can see this by plotting feral AP vs ilvl on staves from Earthwarden to Journey's End. Any other stat would work as well, but FAP = big numbers = less rounding errors, due to more significant digits.

The more you know!

Edit:
lv100 712 FAP - Earthwarden
lv134 992 FAP - Wildfury Greatstaff
lv146 1110 FAP - Staff of the Forest Lord
lv154 1197 FAP - Stanchion of Primal Instinct


lv200 1845 FAP - Staff of the Plague Beast
lv213 2084 FAP - The Undeath Carrier
lv226 2354 FAP - Journey's End

 

Beace

Wish I had a beta account.

ilvl doesn't really matter though. It's a case of a blue staff from a 5-man heroic being stronger than an epic staff from 25-man naxx. Maybe someone with a beta account could feedback it though, unless Blizzard realizes the issue themselves.

 

raffy

Could someone post naked NE Druid raw stats at 80? Thanks.

 

Deathwing

Epic ilvl 110 mace used until T5. Said T5 replacement used until...? KZ ring used forever unless you armor cap, then probably replaced by Mu'ru ring or 2.4 badge ring. There's many more examples.

Yes, I know those don't translate 1:1(feral tanking staves are just for ferals), but there's been many a tanking rings, yet the KZ ring has lasted quite a long time. I expect to last through most of the leveling process too. So, there's _some_ loose precedent of "worse" tanking items being better than comparable "better" tanking items.

I look at it as your threat/magic heavy staff versus your physical damage heavy staff.

 

Promethius

I understand that the current discussion is on swipe's number cap removal, and that may have caused you to misinterpret my previous post. My main point had been a comparison of the iLotP talent to blocking mechanics, and how the current version of iLotP falls behind greatly in an aoe situation. I proposed it become a proc similar to primal fury (i.e. without a cooldown and able to proc off multiple targets) with reduced healing/mana return separated from the LotP aura, so that stam becomes the block value equivalent for druids and agi/crit/haste/expertise/hit become the block rating equivalent. Ironically, those stats happen to already be present on a lot of leather pieces which druids have been complaining about not being helpful for tanking beyond threat. A properly tuned change could make those stats more valuable while justifying remaining the lowest avoidance tank (meaning probably no 85% avoidance m'uru druid tanks at the end of the expansion).

I agree that the game shouldn't be balanced around power leveling or aoe grinding. That's basically my argument for why removal of iLotP cooldown wouldn't be considered overpowered; the content would have been trivial enough for a decently geared prot warrior or paladin to solo aoe down anyway.

 

Deathwing

Wanted to post something from the warrior blues that I believe pertains to us:

MMO-Champion BlueTracker - Upcoming Protection changes

specifically:

So, can that be construed to mean swipe and tclap(well, duh) will be putting on near consecrate levels of threat? I'm guessing this means swipe's threat modifier will get a boost soon.

EDIT: Later on in that link someone asks:

GC doesn't specifically states anything swipe's CD(but he does say they're leaving in the positional requirement), which I assume means they aren't doing anything with it. Which also means that the Swipe/Primal Fury thing is either unbeknown to them, they don't have time to fix it, or they actually don't think it's a problem.

Or they have "fixed" it and that solution wasn't implied in that post.


Slant, your link isn't working, it's sending me back to posts from 9/12.

 

slant

That's certainly what it implies, yes, and if the numbers match up it would address one of the issues issues we discussed yesterday but not necessarily the others. We'll just need to wait and see how it's actually implemented.

 

halmmar

The numbers you showed proposes an exponential scale (or maybe quadratic), not logarithmic (you get more and more FAP per item level as item level grows).

 

• Falk

Quick refresher here, you can refer to exponential relationship as a logarithmatic scale.

Quick and dirty example:
Amplitude is an exponential function of decibel value.
FAP (or item budget) is an exponential function of item level.

Decibel values are logarithmatic vs amplitude.
Item level is logarithmatic vs FAP (or item budget).

It's definitely not quadratic. If anyone can find a neat way to assign item levels using a quadratic scale so that each succeeding tier is X% better than the last, I'd like to confer with them.

If you want, you can whip out a calculator and get approximations which match expected values by taking each 13 ilvl as 12.96% better (or an approximate 1.13 multiplier). Logarithmatic.

 

kalbear

I posted a comment on the itemization in the druid forums and item forums. Hopefully it'll be seen. Also hopefully they'll improve the Naxx-10 and 25 drops instead of flat out nerfing the feral enraged staff.

 

• Falk

Actually, the current issue is ferals have way more flat mitigation and not nearly as much avoidance as the other tanks. (No, this isn't because I'm stacking that. The numbers don't add up even when I've actively tried to work out a high avoidance set). This will cause issues as gear levels get higher and avoidance starts scaling upwards for all 4 tank classes, diminsihing returns taken into account.

I wouldn't be surprised if the blue staff was toned down armor-wise.

 

Zuult

Just a thought : many tanking items are itemised with +def, which is useless because of 3/3 SotF. Has anyone evaluated moving to 2/3 or even 1/3 SotF to make it valuable ?

More specifically :
- how much def should we need to make up for one point in SotF ? Can this def be gained throught known def trinkets/rings/necks only ?

- If not (which is likely), would the freed talent point be beneficial enough to compensate for the regemming/reenchanting ?

 

Oiysters

I want to make sure I understand this - we have less avoidance that the other tank classes because they nerfed our agility to dodge ratio, we lost the dodge component of defense rating due to not needing the stat, and we cannot block or parry? And they are attempting to compensate for the lack of block or parry with flat damage mitigation, i.e. high armor values?

 

• Falk

I'm not saying that's what they've intended, but that's pretty much how it is on beta at the moment. I'm sitting around 32% dodge with full tank spec, and I doubt I could push it past 36-38% with full Naxx25 gear without the sacrifice of a boatload of stats (i.e. swapping out armor jewelry for DPS/agility jewelry)

Edit: rechecked numbers.