Forget me, had the wrong place......

And of course you don´t have really that much options

1) more stamina, but currently many bears are already the tanks with the most HP, and you give armor up
2) more dodge, but for that you give armor up
3) you can now roll on pieces with block/parry *eg*

If you change your rings/necks/weapons/trinkets from armor, you will loose an additional 1k to 3k points of armor, and gain some % dodge and 1k to 2k life.

I'd say the bear armor changes have been discussed about sufficiently. For some gearing levels it comes down to a slight nerf (arguably a justified one) while at others it will come to a slight buff even. Whether this is a nerf or a buff depends mostly on the availability of bonus armor items at that particular gearing level (and luck with getting those and the availability of options as well).

You can go ahead and keep pretending that the highest hit point pool of all 4 tank classes and 34k armor unbuffed before stepping into Naxxramas is in any shape or form balanced.

Go on.

I agree we have an advantage going into naxx and we seem to gain more of an advantage the more geared up we become, the damage I am currently taking is a joke compared to the other similar geared tanks, mainly due to [Defender's Code] we did still need taking down a peg I'll still probably use my trinket for the use effect after the patch however, that and there isn't actually many other trinkets to go with.

Rawr currently doesn't do base cloak armor right. So it'll overestimate how good cloaks are. But it's not that big of a deal.

The fact is that it is a nerf for higher-geared bears. Whether or not it is a nerf that particularly restricts bear tanking remains to be seen.

Last I checked, across all gear levels mitigation * avoidance on druids was superior to mitigation * avoidance of other tank classes, on top of being smoother and having a larger health pool.

The mitigation issue really depends. Druids are by far the best hateful target, but on smaller, multiple hitting bosses or magical damaging bosses they're further behind. The differences between the tanking classes are fairly minor at this point though, with one exception - stamina on druids is somewhat absurd.

It's also a bit absurd that bears are so much better off pre-Naxx than other tanking classes.

I don't honestly think that this will help those issues all that much. The problem is that the two stats druids scale best with druids scale too well with.

The counterpoint to the fact that block is linear is that for anything hitting for over 10k (Enraged Maexxna, enraged faerlina, Sartharion with 3 stacks of Twilight Revenge - all pretty trivial in terms of numbers anyway, but there you have it) druid mitigation still came out better. For stuff slightly under, to about 7k a hit, blocked hits take the average damage per swing to below what a druid takes, at the expense of less-smooth damage-taken profiles. For anything under 4-5k a hit, block (especially prot paladin) wins out hands down.

Magic damage fights are a little harder to profile at the moment - the only two encounters available at the moment which would come to mind are Malygos at lower gear levels where an Arcane Breath and swing has a chance of 1-rounding, or Sarth+3, where you can take up to 30k breaths post-25% hp penalty aura. In both cases, a gigantic HP pool covers the situation. Death Knights hands down make the best magic mitigation tanks (as designed, despite 'tank equality') but the other three tanking classes are somewhat interchangable.

What my beef is, is that every time the three ridiculously scaling stats druids have (namely, Armor and Stam, pre-WotLK Agility) come under the spotlight, hordes of idiots come out of the woodwork crying about nerfs, without any empirical or at least theoretical data to support the claims. (No, gear lists and patch-induced armor nerfs aren't the focus of this - TTL vs other tanks, taking encounters into account is) This does -not- add anything to the thread or open up any avenues of discussion.

I've got Defenders Code, the Naxxramas +armor tanking staff and cloak, and Heroic DtK tanking ring. The patch will drop my armor by a cartload, but only because I managed to RNG all those drops. The bottom line, as has been mentioned in the thread, is relying on chance to get a specific number of drops is hardly good design.

I don't know about you guys complaining about sub-optimal rogue gear and +strength/defense jewelry, but I've had a lot of a better time so far in WotLK looking through gear lists and comparing items by slot to find optimum tanking gear, compared to... tier gear and badge loot and the occasional trash drop in TBC. The fact that its 'suboptimal' doesn't matter. Even pre-WotLK you could have designed tanking gear better than what was in-game, and... have druids scale through the roof.

The final outcome and how said gear stacks up vs other tanks, for the encounters in the game, is what matters. Opening up more itemization choices is nothing if not healthy for the game.

Poor wording on my end. I'm mostly concerned with the fact that the 'rogue' gear still isn't made anymore appealing, nor do the DPS accessories we might've been looking at become anymore appealing.
To me, moving from 'Armour' to 'Stamina' or 'Dodge' (whether straight dodge or Agility) still doesn't make for a massive change of appeal, as those were two stats we were looking at before already. Not to mention 'Defense' as some sort of 'ghetto' stat, which only becomes interesting due to diminishing returns on Dodge and even then has wasted points.

That, and I'm not a firm believer in Stamina to begin with anyway. I consider it massively overrated. In the same way as the old Armour Cap or Hit/Expertise cap, once you hit 'the max', you don't need more. A +111 health trinket is great. But it still won't make the difference once I've hit the 'Oh Shit'-Health Cap.

//edit: Remind me to be awake when posting - didn't even read the remaining 2 pages after this.
My apologies for the slow response, though it still stands.

I do care. Sub-optimal gear sucks. It means that every single time, that gear would be better off in the hands of someone else. It may not matter as much in a 'solo' environment, but you raid as a guild, a team. Same as I dislike people in Epics rolling over people in Blues, I dislike taking gear from, say, a Warrior just because it'll work somewhat for me. It means I have to 'make do' with stuff, instead of having gear tailored to the class or, which would've worked better with the changes they made to Druids, having the class tailored to the gear.

There would have been a fairly easy fix to the armour problem. Base AP -> Armour conversion would've opened up a lot of items and the conversion could've easily been set in a way that it'd be about equal to the current Armour Multiplier we get on SotF. It would've have actually made us care about and scale with the gear that we are apparently supposed to be using.

I completely agree about the tanking parity sentiment you stated in your post. All I'm (we're?) saying here is that nerfing one of the three stats we *can* use is not a great way to go about things.

I think the thing that bothers me about the gear is that upgrades are not particularly big in terms of upgrades. The jump from T5 to T6 was a huge jump in overall tanking effectiveness; the jump from 7.10 to 7.25 is minor. There are definitely a lot more things to choose from, but at this point there's no real impetus to choose anything. All choices are equal, but they're all equally meh.

This is only true insofar as said piece is actually optimal for someone. Once you get right down to it there isn't a huge lot of optimal pieces out there for any class or spec (some pieces come close but that's a different story). Even when a piece is optimal that isn't so much important as the quantity of updates that it might give and putting those in perspective compared to other gearing options.

I think this is by design. We are still in T7 and we haven't hopped to T8 yet. Little difference between T7.10 and T7.25 is what Blizzard wants. They said they want progression between the two to be parallel for all tiers. So the difference in T8.10 and T7.10 is the same as T8.25 and T7.25. Will this happen? I'm skeptical. So I feel like you're comparing apples to oranges here. T7.10 and T7.25 are not a tier different like T5 and T6. Also you're comparing a gear sets in the starting tier and sets in the jump to the last tier in that expansion. Blizz won't give us optimally itemized gear in the first tier because that only leads to needing the same gear in the next tier but same stat + 5%. I don't expect to see really well itemized gear until T9.

T4 was ilvl 120
T5 was ilvl 133

T7.10 is ilvl 200
T7.25 is ilvl 213

The itemisation formula means there's actually the same level of increase between the two, it's just not as obvious because the T7 sets are duplicates except for the extra budget going into increasing the stats slightly.

[Antlers of Malorne]
[Nordrassil Headpiece]
Gained 1 stat, so 6 stats instead of 5. Gain hit and spell power, while stats / crit are sidegrades / very small upgrade.


[Heroes' Dreamwalker Cover]
[Valorous Dreamwalker Cover]
Zero stat gain (5->5) but a small increase to every stat.

The tier difference is actually the same (tier 5->6 is also 13 levels, being 133 to 146, although the sunwell pieces are 154). I think you'd be surprised at just how much of an increase over a full set of gear the 25 man equivalents of the 10 man are. It's pretty significant.

Maybe I'm thinking of this wrong but that seems to prove my point. A 13 iLvl increase when you're talking 120 to 133 is more significant than 200 to 213. I don't know much about item budget (and I've read it's a little weird with WotLK anyways) but assuming it's linear to iLvl, T4 to T5 would be a 10.8% increase, or T5 to T6 is 9.8% increase where as T7.10 to T7.25 would be a 6.5% increase. I don't feel you can make this comparison until we see T8.10/25.

ilevel is not linear, it's approximately a 1% increase per level.

Two points:
1) Socket bonus on [Headpiece of Reconciliation] is +9 SP

2) From comparing many items while leveling, I've noticed Haste seems to always take an inordinate amount of extra stat allocation and always seems to lower the AP/SP budget considerably from even level items. (Or this is just a figment of my imagination)

No, he's got a point. The armor's correct, but every other stat being exactly the same (16 MP5 is very similar to 42 Haste in itemization value)? That item's definitely under-budget, and also definitely iLvl 226 since it only drops off of Sart+2. If it's not been changed on the PTR, you may want to submit a bug report to let them know.

Two similar ilvl 213 items:
[Cowl of Vanity] and [Valorous Crown of Faith]

Either way it is strictly using the stats you would associate with ilvl 213 and these items have similar socket bonuses too - 9 sp vs 8 haste or spirit follows gem budget exactly.

Personally I would rather use the leather variant but when it is so inferior the cloth alternative looks far more appealing - much to the sadness of several cloth users I'm sure.

I'd say grab the leather and assume that it will be fixed. These things happen - the CoT quest blue gloves are still hilariously overbudget, but I can't imagine them staying that way.

Regarding item level formula, it's pretty clear now that 13 ilvl is very very slightly under 13% better, not taking itemization differences into account (1 ilvl for 1% is a close approximation, but veers off slightly across a large ilvl range). Almost all tier differences are 13 ilvl, and I'd be highly surprised if T8.10 and T8.25 were anything other than 213 and 226 - remember, Blizzard also specifically said that 10-man gear will be 1 tier behind.

Do take another look at the stats if you're underwhelmed at the difference. 13% is a pretty significant upgrade. The minimal armor increase, on the other hand, I'm not too sure what to make of.

Armor's a function of iLvl, so the small extra is definitely consistent with it being a 226 instead of a 213.

No, what I meant is, the amount of armor you get going up one entire tier seemed a little lackluster. Defender's Code (post-3.0.8, i.e. 850 total armor) alone gives more of an armor boost than going from 5t7.10 to 5t7.25 plus boots/belts/bracers for good measure, at the sacrifice of one trinket slot.

This is an issue (if it can be called that, may turn out balanced after all) with how armor maps to ilvl in general, not a druid itemization issue.

Edit: Also to clarify, it was in reference to Valorous vs Heroes, not the Reconcilation headpiece vs t7.25 resto headpiece.