mesullivan

I'm not sure how you have a 7.79x times difference here. Does the new 66% buff to armor stack multiplicatively? (i.e the new multiple is 4.7*1.66? That comes out to 7.8, so roughly where you are. That seems too good to be true?

Also how does thick hide play in here? Is that a multiplicative stacking? if it isn't, why do we assume that SoTF will be also? If it is, then it makes a huge difference to include here, as your armor per 1% TTL goes dramatically lower.

Also general numbers here seem awfully low. Armor item budget is 1/10 of agi, is it really more than 10 times better to stack armor than agi? That wasn't even close to true in 2.4. Armor was the best scaling TTL stat by far, but it was only about 20% better per item budget than agi or stam, and even fell behind agi at high mitigation/avoidance levels when there was no DR on dodge.

I took a look at your spreadsheet, but it wasn't enlightening on this as it only showed raw conversion numbers for armor to TTL and vice versa, no formulas. So no clue how you calculated these numbers. Am I missing a feature of google spreadsheets or did formulas not survive a translation from excel/starOff/whatever to google? In any case, these numbers for armor don't look right, and it's not clear from your spreadsheet where they came from (or what your general TTL model is, which I'd like to see if you're willing).

 

Deliverance

Given that GC stated that "it will now also increase armor contribution from cloth and leather items by 22/33/66%. That should be very close to your current armor bonus." there is every reason to believe that it stacks multiplicatively resulting in a total 4.7*1.1*1.66 = 8.5822 multiplicative factor on base armour, since such a factor does, indeed, result in most gear setups being close to what they are now or better off, while only those projected gearsets including the incredible Naxx25 armour trinket are significantly worse off.

As such, the projected differences in stats pre and post patch are widely different for the 10 man and 25 man progression line - which in itself is a strong sign that the very high armour trinkets were an itemization mistake under the current itemization system.

 

bl00mie

Last night I picked up a pair of [Charged-Bolt Grips]. They're an obvious upgrade to [Thunderheart Gauntlets] (neglecting set bonuses, etc), so I threw on a 18-stam enchant (since i had plenty of excess leather in my bag) and equipped them... only to have my stamina *drop* when it should have been a couple-hundred hp buff. Can anyone shed light on what might be going wrong? Looking through my gear, a pair of shoulders (can't remember what they are atm) had the exact same problem.

Is t6 better than its text claims, or is this gear broken?

 

Scurn

Based on your armory you probably broke the 3 blue gem requirement for your meta which lost you 32 stamina.

 

Grubsnik

The 7.79 vs. 7.8 difference is due to rounding on the posted numbers, if you look in the spreadsheets, you will see the correct numbers. Armor bonuses have always been multiplicative. While the 7.8 multiplier seems completely off the scale, remember that bonus armor on leather is gone. So essentially you will only be getting the +1 base armor/itemlevel (* slot mod) throughout WotLK.

The reason you couldn't see the formulas was a permissions issue on google-docs, i've changed it to allow everyone to edit, and simply kept a backup. If you look at it at a later point and the numbers seem all messed up, pm me, and i'll reset it to the "original specs".

For the magic behind the numbers, i'll just reference earlier posts:
Feral talents/abilities - WotLK discussion ->Armor TTL
Feral talents/abilities - WotLK discussion ->Dodge TTL

 

Kink

Even if Bears lose around 7% mitigation from armour, we gain 15% damage reduction for being in a full group from Protector of the Pack. This 15% damage reduction also works against magical attacks, not just melee as far as I am aware. Is this not more of a significant buff than a nerf?

Essentially it works out to having an extra 15% magical damage mitgation and ~7% melee mitigation compared to how we tanked at 70. Am I missing something here? Or is it not as bleak as some would have us believe? I also see us doing significant damage while tanking and most likely will still be an excellent "snap aggro" tank. Our DPS is looking very solid, we also have some emergency skills now for tanking and can even break fear (albeit on a long cooldown). I am quite happy with the current state of my feral.

Also if those above are correct about the armour multiplier, the "nerf" will not be a nerf and we will be significantly better off. I think it is best to see how we actually perform once we start to get somewhat better geared instead of just crying out nerf when very few of us have actually experienced it. In fact, if people are posting from personal experience, please clarify that and explain your gear level etc.

There is light at the end of the tunnel.
The only problem is, it's often an incoming train.

 

• jonny

Protector of the Pack is 12% damage reduction not 15%, and I'm pretty sure the fear breaking bit of Beserk was removed.

 

Duilliath

Protector of the Pack is 12%.

The thing that bugs me about the SotF-'fix' for our armour is not the choice of talent or the numbers. It means we still don't have an extra scaling stat to work from. There were a number of suggestions in the old new megathread and quite a number of them looked rather workable and like a solid fit. I'll readily admit this was most likely the 'easiest' solution and definitely the most fail-safe one. Then again, Ghostcrawler did state they wanted Druids to go through this expansion with less scaling and less-than-perfectly-tailored gear.

//edit: Berserk most definitely breaks fear. Used it for that exact purpose yesterday when tanking King Dred.

An thenn tehy wuz al ded. Srsly. (Exodus 1)

 

kalbear

It would be a buff...if we were getting protector of the pack in exchange for that lost armor. We already had PotP though, so it changes nothing.

And as stated, it's 12%, not 15%.

 

• moz

Couple of tips...

For legs you may want to take a look at [Mind-Expanding Leggings] from KT rep or preferably [Gored Hide Legguards] (Heroic DK). I like the later these since a lot of the other stuff has expertise, whereas hit is a bit harder to find. If you can find someone to make you [Durable Nerubhide Cape] go grab it, it's close to best in slot depending on what you want and relatively cheap to make (plus LW'ers get skillups from it post 440 so it shouldn't be a problem to get made).

The listed gloves are better but given they are random heroic drops you may want to grab [Seafoam Gauntlets] -- again this is one LWers can skill up on and you can probably get these at a bargain basement price (i.e. next to nothing).

 

dooddad

Well sorry to turn the discussion to professions and gems, but i got a couple of questions. The first is what are the best professions for tanking droods?

So far i have minning maxed out. this gives me an extra 500 health, and keeps my bank nice and fat. So even if this is not the best choice for professions im probably goan stick with it for the money reason. So now i have to debate what to do for my second profession.

I do not want to do leatherworking because I have had this profession maxed out before and I found I out grew its usefulness once we got into the harder 5 mans. I have also had other characters with maxed out armor making professions and i found this to be a problem everywhere. So im probabbly not gona take leather worikng. This leaves me with a few choices.

The first is enchanting. The problem with this is that i already have 2 other enchanters, but that aside enchanting gives me 48 stam total for both rings, this means roughly 500 more health ( I apologize here for the estimate, but im not 100% sure the math for stam to health conversion on druids). So this is good because it will be useful for me throughout my entire raiding carreer.

another choice is alchemy. Alchemy gives me mighty alchemist stone which is not the best tanking trinket and will soon be replaced. So this does not seem like a good choice to me over the long run.

Inscription, acording to thottbott does not really offer any significant items for tanking druids. However if I am wrong and there is some item for tanks that only inscribers can get pls let me know.

The last proffesion is JC. With JC you get to equip 3 dragons eyes; and unless im mistaken I can equip 3 of the same dragon's eye on my gear. Delicate dragons eye gives me 27 agil per gem. This is 11 more points of agility than the delicate scarlet ruby, per gem. This adds up to 33 extra points of agility. Solid dragons eye gives me 41 stam gems and that is 17 points higher than solid sky saphire. This adds up to over 500 health which is more than the enchanting buff. thus making enchanting not the best choice for second profession. yeay.

The second thing Im wondering about is what gems should we be getting in general? Just from questing I have noticed that all gear has tons of stam adn decent amounts of agil. So should we be putting on more agil than stam for our gems in wotlk? or should we be stacking equal amounts or just agil? or just stam? Also how should I socket my dragons eyes? should i do 3 agil or 3 sam or a combination? So pls feel free to give me your opinions on the gem issue for wothlk, Im sure there is no best case senario, but your points of view will be greatly apreciated. Personally Im thinking to go 2 agil per stam gem, due to the greater stam stats in wotlk gear so far.

Lastly can anyone tell me how to get links to items posted on these forums. I am more of a reader than a poster, btu i realized that I need to learn to post links on forums for occations sucha as this.

 

• moz

1. Post links to items with the Item Code Tag, it will appear with a little rocket icon (wowhead) in the compose box (but not quick-reply). You can also just use the item tag like any other tag with the name of the item in between them.

2. Go and review WOTLK Profession Thread to be able to evaluate your choices more intelligently. It's generally a matter of personal preference/convenience -- personally I would rank Mining, JC, Leatherworking and Enchanting as good viable choices for feral tanks. Inscription is nice, but you'll eventually have the shoulder enchants from SoH reputation, and honestly glyph swapping isn't that big a deal unless you do plan to respec a fair bit for healing or what not. I disagree about the comments regarding LW, given the huge boost from fur linings and the extremely cheap crafter-only leg enchants. Even if you didn't see benefits from the crafted gear, these seem very handy for a feral druid.

3. As for questions regarding gemming and such, go look at RAWR and read some of the specific threads (namely the bear one) for information. A lot of the questions you asked have been covered ad nauseam.

 

mesullivan

Ok, that appears to work. Also the links below that make it clearer where you are coming from. Is that armor formula tested for 80 that it did not change again?. I haven't been willing to trust the old wowwiki armor formula until I hear so.

Your TTL on agility doesn't take into account the 2 armor per agility. If I account for that, I get 17.59 agi per 1% TTL. Still not even close to armor per item budget (armor for 1% TTL is only 10.82 item budget points), armor is 60% better scaling.

I like to take your numbers and convert them to TTL per item cost. That indicates armor (without the SotF/bear multipliers) overtaking stam at around 29k health and being better than agi from the start. So agi versus armor is a mitigation for t/dps tradeoff. For max mitigation (at a given item level) armor trinkets/rings are still better than agi or stam (after 29k health) even without the multiplier (agi would be better if not for DR on dodge). So no reason to eschew the armor accessories, they are probably still better mitigation than other options close to their item level.

Agi/stam tradeoff (per item budget where agi is 1.5x more expensive) looks like it hits at around 46k health for expected TTL. Of course agi is worthless for worst-case TTL, but presumably by the time you get to 46k health, you've got worst-case situations covered.

 

lissanna

Hi druid tanks.

I didn't want to start a new thread, but I also didn't see enough discussion about the changes to druid armor mechanics.

It looks like Ghostcrawler posted some numbers for you guys to work with, for comparing the new druid armor conversions:

Some more details to help answer some of the questions we've seen:

-- Cloaks do have base armor which gets multipled by the bear bonus.
-- There is no multiplier on any bonus armor. Not the bear bonus. Not the talent bonuses.
-- There is a 2% armor benefit you can get from a metagem.
-- The ultimate bear modifier should be 4.7 (Dire Bear form) x 1.66 (Survival of the Fittest) x 1.1 (Thick Hide) x 1.02 (meta gem).
-- The best bear we can create in current itemization has 35,907 armor, which is 68.34% mitigation vs. level 83 bosses or 70.21% mitigation versus level 80 mobs.
-- Before these changes, you might have been able to build a bear with nearly 40,000 armor, but that relies on using Defender's Code and Origin of Nightmares, items of such ridiculous power that we were going to nerf them anyway before this change. (Now they're fine.)
-- Note how close that 40,000 armor is to the cap already.
-- We do have concerns block may be too good a stat for future raids, and we'll keep an eye on it.
-- Equipping a weapon will still boost Savage Roar (and everything else) the way it does currently.

Bottom line: armor was too good for druids. That was a blessing if you could get the items and a curse if you could not. From: World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> Upcoming Feral Changes, Part III


It looks like what we need is math worked out to compare druid physical mitigation/avoidance versus other classes. This isn't something I can do, so I thought I would bring it to a much better number crunching community to see if you guys can do the math.

My question is essentially: Does the armor change make it such that druids past Naxxramas with the armor changes are likely to run into problems main tanking raid bosses compared to other tanks? I know you guys can work out the math, and it would help add to the current feral druid discussions going on regarding raid itemization. My fear based off the limited numbers I've seen is that druids are more likely to end up taking more damage than other tanks, but I haven't seen good comparison of druids versus other tanks in full raid gear numbers, given the upcoming changes to druid itemization.

 

Deliverance

I will note that those arguing that these changes alone (without looking at a wider view than "I lose X armour in ideal 25 man raid armour" so this is an Y% nerf for me in gear I do not have and which was likely to be nerfed under the current system) makes bears inferior in T8 25 raiding are also, though it might not seem so at first, making the implied argument that bears are currently inferior in T8 10 man raiding - since there's no [Defender's Code] for 10 man bears.

Lissanna, I am not sure that we currently know enough about how tanks will actually perform post T7 to compare them by other than base stats for how they are under the current system, much less with this change, and while base stats are indicative they are seldom sufficient to draw conclusions without knowledge of the specific encounters unless the numbers are very out of whack. That said, they would certainly be nice to have. One particular question is of interest to me - is it possible to stack enough stamina that a soaking tank is a realistic possibility? Given that overhealing is an ever present factor, it just might be if we can stack enough stamina over and above what everybody else has. The answer is probably no, but it is an intriguein question.

 

lissanna

Not really. Those high +armor items or other warrior-itemized defense pieces have the highest stamina, and the warriors will have those pieces, too. Yes, we have a multiplier, but I doubt that we could find sources of stamina that the other tanks won't already be wearing.... We risk dropping in stamina below other tanks if we decide to pick up the Agility damage-dealer items, because they have substantially lower stamina than warrior-itemized tanking items. In addition, we share our leather "tanking" items with rogues, wheras they can design plate specifically for tanking - so we risk losing stamina there, as well.

In addition, we could only do it if the healers have enough mana to support it. With the changes to raid buffs, potions (1 per fight only), and trying to make healers have limitations on their mana - It's possible that healers may or may not have the longevity to deal with huge burst damage.

So, basically, what you are saying is that we'll just have to wait until everyone is past Naxx and see what happens, because we can't do anything before then? Oh goodie.

 

◊ Abradix

This is just pointless doom and gloom and it's not even accurate. Even though our leather "DPS" items have less stamina on them then tank oriented plate, does not mean we in bear form gain less stamina from them then warriors do from their tanking items. If you take these two items for example: [Tunic of Indulgence] vs [Chestguard of the Exhausted] . They're the same itemlevel and it's a "rogue" chest vs a tanking plate chest. It's 100 vs 126 stamina, but warriors will "only" gain 148 Stamina from that chest whereas we gain 159 from Tunic of indulgence. This is including the socket bonus and excluding Blessing of Kings, which would make the difference bigger and even more in our favour.

Having said that, a "soak tank" is not what we want to be, since healer mana and HPS is limited. At the moment we're eating a nerf but will be scaling better in the future. The only concern that is left, is how our avoidance will scale in Ulduar and beyond, but that isnt worth worrying about until we see Tier 8.

 

Duilliath

I'm not worried about scaling.

I'm worried about there simply being no viable alternatives. The original tanking gear was 'okay'. Not perfect, but it'd have to do. The DPS items simply won't hold up. The tanking gear now got hit with the 'no modifier'-bat, but that doesn't mean that all of a sudden the DPS items are looking like a great idea. If this whole idea was to give us more options, they've managed to miss the mark by a mile. Tank upgrades still reign surpreme, just boost us less. That doesn't give you more options. Armor on staves still makes them a must-have for tanking, instead of opening up more options through differentation of stats. The fact that they don't get multiplied armour doesn't make them any less of a necessity.

//edit: As an example; the change still isn't going to make me use [Greatring of Collision] over [Gatekeeper]. I'd gain a wee bit of stamina, but would lose out on mitigation.

An thenn tehy wuz al ded. Srsly. (Exodus 1)

 

Shrea

I didnt see this discussed anywhere, but with druids not benefiting from Mongoose on weapons. Mongoose is still the best enchant for tanking all around. However I was testing out some things ingame and I noticed that every time mongoose would proc it would remove my [Idol of Terror] proc. I was just curious if anyone else was noticing this?

Becuase of that I went with the new maul/swipe Idol from the grizzy hills vendors. [Idol of Perspicacious Attacks] Should I stick with [Idol of Terror] though for avoidance? Maybe on bosses, but it seems [Idol of Perspicacious Attacks] would be better all around for tanking trash, and even threat on bosses.

 

◊ Abradix

It does make them less of a neccesity. Right now, compare a feral with Defender's Code and Offering of Sacrifice to pretty much any other feral. They will absolutely blow them out of the water. That was the huge problem, blizzard had to balance bears around having Defenders Code and Offering, otherwise ferals with those items would've been far better tanks then Blizzard wanted and putting them far over warriors. Or alternatively, they could balance ferals assuming they have those items, and then if you don't have them, you don't stand a chance of being a viable tank compared to a warrior with similar gear.

This change doesn't mean we suddenly have a lot of different options or that other items are now superior for us, but armor items are much less of a neccesity then before, not having them doesn't decrease your TTL by 10% and that is most definitely a good thing.

 

p3lim

Picked up [Handwraps of Preserved History] today, seems VERY nice for tanking now. Any comments on that pair of gloves?

// p3lim.net

 

Valerian

Ridiculously overbudget? I suspect they're going to get nerfed like those shoulders in BC did (that aldor quest reward that had both AP and Str on it making it a crazy good dps piece for druids).

 

Harmonics

Any comments on Idols? I was thinking about going and picking up Idol of terror (I didn't tank at all in TBC) but I don't know if the proc rate goes down as I level or not. I picked up [Idol of Perspicacious Attacks] which isn't so hot, but I don't really see anything very interesting at all in terms of idols.

.

 

Duilliath

Agreed, but it's not what I'm arguing about. We gave a number of solutions earlier that would've turned rogue stats into useful tanking stats for us, providing us with a scaling survival use for the AP/Haste/ArP that our gear comes loaded with.
We had precious few stats to look forward to and one of them now is worth even less.

Forgoing TTLs here for a minute, where's the 'wow, cool new item' factor? Armour scales because we go from an iLvL 200 to a 213 one. It'll also upgrade AP, Hit/Crit/Haste/ArP - all of which would better suit a Rogue or Kitty, but offers no mitigation advantage to a Bear. Rings? I've seen precious few items which don't have wasted stats on them.

Pretty much every single item we could get would be better off in the hands of someone else, which is what bugs me currently. Or, at the very least, have wasted stats. Armour rings with +str, +def. Armour necklaces with +str, +def.
Try a search for Chest armour with +100 stamina. Pretty much all of those are PvP gear or the Frost Resist (!) piece. I'm not quite sure Resilience or Frost resistance will do me a whole lot of good in regular encounters. With +90 stam, we get lucky with ArP, Hit or Crit.

In short, itemisation was crap (which Blizzard admitted to during the Beta) and they have now nerfed another part of the few upgrades we did have left.

An thenn tehy wuz al ded. Srsly. (Exodus 1)

 

david0925

Edited out: this is why you shouldn't do math at 6am =P

Maniq is my hero