Finding a guild where you don't have to ask that question.
I always recommend ZOMGBuffs to folks in my guild who have trouble remembering to buff. Especially with a 10 minute buff like Thorns, it helps immensely.
I always recommend ZOMGBuffs to folks in my guild who have trouble remembering to buff. Especially with a 10 minute buff like Thorns, it helps immensely.
I have a DogTag on my raid frames that knows if someone's a tank, and shows T in green when they're thorns'd (yellow if it's about to run out, red if it's gone). Same for Mark and my Aura. Some of my druids are quite perplexed when I tell them they need to refresh their buffs and I'm not even in the instance (on standby in the raid).
I guess that although the R&T change is a small nerf to PvE DPS on static fights where we have enough spare combo points to use FB, it does allow for some scaling again. I'm at 55%+ crit in DPS gear when raidbuffed now, and after I regem everything to agility I suspect that I would be close to 60% with the potential to go higher in Ulduar gear, and as such the 50% crit chance effect was excessive anyway. For druids in BiS DPS gear this is probably a 15% or so loss of FB crit rate rather than 25% as it might appear at first glance.
On the thorns change I'm glad I have collected a decent set of balance offspec gear, although prebuffing in that gear might become a litle tiresome. Time to get the 1 hour thorns minor glyph I think.
The thorns change makes my old T1 macro alot more interesting again. What you do is get 3 pieces of the Cenarion set in MC and make a macro using an Outifitter type addon, mine looks like this:
And voila you have 15min Thorns when you cast it out of combat.
The disadvantages are that it takes 3 inventory slots, and when you cast it on a player in combat, whilst you arent in combat, you will go into combat from casting Thorns, and will get stuck in Cenarion pieces.
That does make me wonder, is there a macro command to check if your target is in combat?
That actually sounds more like a change intended to be a nerf to PT in PvE - 30% less damage taken while stunned is a pretty big advantage for a tank on a fight where you expect to be stunned a lot. The current implementation of Primal Tenacity might as well read "We cannot implement any fight where stunning the tank is an important element," since such a fight would favor druids heavily.
Except we're not seeing a change to Stoicism, Iron Will, or Icebound Fortitude. Other tanks have stun reduction capabilities, so instead of making any fight with a stun favoring druids (which I'd debate in the presence of IF) they'll not be able to implement any fight where stunning the tank is an important element without completely alienating Druids, much like Fear effects did from release through Hyjal. If they took all of these abilities away, Druids would still be the weakest of the Tanks in any stun situation given our relative lack of defense (+Miss%) compared to the other tanks. Though I am forgetting Barkskin, which assuming it could always be up for stuns, would represent a <7% reduction in damage taken in comparison to the 5.6% miss (which is of varying average DR) of other tanks. As it stands, this is a PvP nerf to one of the least represented classes (0 in the tournament), and a potential PvE nerf that would violate Blizzard's "take the player not the class" stance
Other tanks have stun reduction capabilities, so instead of making any fight with a stun favoring druids (which I'd debate in the presence of IF)
Having tanked as both DK and Feral I can say that the stun "immunity" on IF is pretty worthless on (current) raid bosses. At least on Maexxna it's a scripted event, and you'll stun no matter what.
Still. after shadow priest stun nerf it's only what... Mages are the only class left with stuns that you use cat form against. There are no raid bosses that stun, etc. And if they did AoE stun, it would still be useless (in raids you would want stun time reduced as cat in order to poke the boss faster). Still, I didn't spec the talent before so it's not much of a loss to me.
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The 2T8 bear bonus seems so very bad though. 2T7 at least did something (although a drop in the bucket). Hope the people who can post on US forums complained a lot. The crit chickens did and got their bonus changed, and ele shamans got mp5 removed.
Except we're not seeing a change to Stoicism, Iron Will, or Icebound Fortitude. Other tanks have stun reduction capabilities, so instead of making any fight with a stun favoring druids (which I'd debate in the presence of IF) they'll not be able to implement any fight where stunning the tank is an important element without completely alienating Druids, much like Fear effects did from release through Hyjal. If they took all of these abilities away, Druids would still be the weakest of the Tanks in any stun situation given our relative lack of defense (+Miss%) compared to the other tanks. Though I am forgetting Barkskin, which assuming it could always be up for stuns, would represent a <7% reduction in damage taken in comparison to the 5.6% miss (which is of varying average DR) of other tanks. As it stands, this is a PvP nerf to one of the least represented classes (0 in the tournament), and a potential PvE nerf that would violate Blizzard's "take the player not the class" stance
I'm amazed that you believe that defense's +miss% is a larger factor than the fact that warriors/pallies lose their block while druids still have a stamina and armor advantage. One could make an argument that the Savage Defense change was evening the field for nontrivial stun mechanics.
Suffice it to say, however, that I wouldn't be surprised to see other stun reduction mechanics disappear as well.
I can confirm that all crits now proc savage defense (this includes rip, and lacerate - too bad they took rake out of primal gore). You can also bleed multiple targets and proc savage defense for every crit you achieve on any one of them.
Does the latter mean you are going to want to pull an add up to a boss (assuming there are adds) and just keep a 1 stack lacerate up on it? You could have someone else tank the add. You could just throw lacerate on it and continue to take only damage from the boss. Except now you are proccing SD like crazy.
On fights like gluth where you swap tanks this means you go cat form and throw a quick rip up and then when you taunt back and go bear form you now are getting SD procs from both lacerate and rip and your regular hits.
Nerf inc?
Edit: I'll add that this somewhat addresses my major concern of insufficient mitigation done to mobs that stun you for awhile, thus preventing you from proccing savage defense and therefore leaving you to take it up the rear with our fairly big 3.1 armor nerf (maxxena berserk web wrap anyone?)
The thorns change makes my old T1 macro alot more interesting again. What you do is get 3 pieces of the Cenarion set in MC and make a macro using an Outifitter type addon, mine looks like this:
And voila you have 15min Thorns when you cast it out of combat.
The disadvantages are that it takes 3 inventory slots, and when you cast it on a player in combat, whilst you arent in combat, you will go into combat from casting Thorns, and will get stuck in Cenarion pieces.
That does make me wonder, is there a macro command to check if your target is in combat?
With the change to Thorns; Thorns: This spell will now properly use the druid’s spell power to determine its scaling instead of the target’s spell power.
Is there math somewhere that can tell me how my spell power will scale for the overall effect also taking into account Taking 3 points into Brambles since for a 25Man raiding druid perhaps wont need E&M since a Warlocks COE is far superior in 3.1?
Uh? It has the same magnitude of effect, and requires them to not use a damaging curse. E&M not only is applied by out main nukes, meaning we don't have to give up anything to place it, but the talent also gives 3% total damage, stacking multiplicatively with all other %damage sources. The puts it a fair distance away from "far superior".
I don't think the the Primal Tenacity change was for PvE, Ghostcrawler stated they would not be using stun mechanics on raid bosses anymore. Also they removed it from caster form as well which would make no sense from a PvE perspective although that part of it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me from a PvP perspective either. I checked about a dozen parses and rake was approximately 18% of damage on Patchwerk and 16% on other bosses. I would like to know if Blizzard felt feral was scaling too well or they just decided to nerf the 2 big buffs they had added by half. It makes more sense to me to remove the SR glyph entirely and leave Rake on Primal Gore given feral scaling issues.
There are no raid bosses that stun, etc. And if they did AoE stun, it would still be useless (in raids you would want stun time reduced as cat in order to poke the boss faster). Still, I didn't spec the talent before so it's not much of a loss to me.
The talent lets you take less damage while stunned, not shorter stuns (you're confusing it with fear).
I think removing Rake from Primal Gore simplifies our decision making process a bit during boss fights, as the penalty for having Rake drop will be much smaller.
I´d say it actually makes it harder, because you have to decide now whether you refresh rake, shred to increase rip or (worst case) mangle to keep the bleeds high.
edit: That said, I think it's a good way to tune down feral-dps(pve) and burst (pvp), though it might slow down our scaling a bit.
The talent lets you take less damage while stunned, not shorter stuns (you're confusing it with fear).
It sounded to me like he was saying that a duration reduction would be preferable to the current (worthless in PvE) cat form damage reduction, not that it was actually implemented as a duration reduction.
With the change to Thorns; Thorns: This spell will now properly use the druid’s spell power to determine its scaling instead of the target’s spell power.
Is there math somewhere that can tell me how my spell power will scale for the overall effect also taking into account Taking 3 points into Brambles since for a 25Man raiding druid perhaps wont need E&M since a Warlocks COE is far superior in 3.1?
In a quick test on the PTR I got the following numbers with 0/3 brambles:
0 spell power = 73
900 spell power = 133
1522 spell power = 174
1822 spell power = 193
2033 spell power = 207
Napkin maths shows this as a spell power scaling of ~0.066 I think?
A quick skim over some recent WWS reports shows that at 207 dmg a hit it will make up ~5% of a warrior add tank's dmg output on something like Sarth3D this is up from ~1-2% where thorns is currently.
An estimate for raid buffed caster at 2.5k spell power and 3/3 brambles would be a damage shield of 73+(2500*0.0667)*1.75 = 364.8125 a hit or fairly useful.
Last edited by Hellebore : 03/30/09 at 4:33 AM.
Reason: Correction to brambles scaling
Brambles is +75% thorns damage (not 15%) which results in approx 420 damage per proc in your previous calc. Considering that you should be able to get about 3500SP with trinket procs, you're looking at ~535 damage per proc.
I'm not looking forward to the possibility of taking ~400-500 dmg per hit when I attack a moonkin (or any of his arena partners, or battleground teammates) as a kitty. Sounds horrid.
Interesting PvE change in terms of 25man content, but sits a little awkward with the nurturing instinct talent - which only gives 'healing' power not spell power. Thorns scaling will still exist in earnest for tank druids not rolling around in a group containing a tree/moonkin (in 5mans, 10mans, pvp, etc.) - but it will be based on gearswapping all that lovely offset spelldamage gear for buffing thorns.
In all honesty I hope they will realize how much penalized feral is by the thorns change and make it scale with some feral stat aswell as spellpower (All other tanks with reflective tanking ability have it scale somehow don't they?). They'd probably have to tweak thorns a bit, since we don't tend to have loads of stats while in caster form as ferals if they decided to scale it with AP for example.
Fingers crossed, since feral thorns now are pretty pathetic xD
They could always change Nurturing Instinct to 100% agility = spell power. I never did understand the nerf to 70%, and this talent always seemed to be left behind in the healing to spell power conversion. It's always made me cry seeing the other melee hybrids (and DKs) actually be able to do non-trivial damage and healing at range on fights like Malygos and Heigan.
I have been noticing alot of problems with itemization when it comes to feral tanks. Very few gear pieces i have seen from 25 Ulduar have a increase in stam from 25 naxx. The 7.5 pads having more then the 8.5 is a perfect example, with less on the previous set. This stam loss, with the nerf and itemization considered, would leave us at (after ulduar gearing) at equal hp to what we have now on live. This is just an observation i havn't had time to do math.
Im worried less about the fact that our hp will remain the same, and more so that with the dodge diminishing returns. It already is so prevalent with current gear already that bears will substantially fall behind not only in stam/armor but in avoidance since we are not able to balance our stats with block and parry. Our avoidance will be hurt substantially as i feel that even with the increase of agil on gear we will not increase enough. My current after dr dodge is 36.3258654. Now assuming that we get even a 15%(hypothetical number) increase in agil, defense, and dodge rating, our after dr dodge would be only 38.2372711. This will be based a lot on how you itemize your character, but it still stands that we will only archive about a 2% increase in dodge. The scaling of the feral spec on ptr comes into question with me. I don't believe that after dr warriors and paladins would, if correctly geared, archive this little of an increase. Dk's while also being hit hard on their own dr's i feel will also out show this low number.
In my opinion, clearing all wrath content on this toon, druids are currently strong tanks capable of tanking all bosses with general ease, but with the looming next patch i do not see a place for us out side of a needed off tank for fights such as iron council and that is just considering progression. Once Ulduar is on farm i feel ferals would be picked last when it comes to tanking clears due to their lack of growth from current gear.
Im looking for your opinions on my numbers but also if you feel the increased mitigation from sd, and tps will help after the increase in ap/crit/haste from gear.
Thiss: Just from using the known gearing items and putting them into the latest Beta for Rawr I'm gaining quite a bit of Avoidance going from my entry Ulduar25 set to current "BiS" pieces. However the progression of my gear is not a simple increase in the priority of stats I chose to build up. Currently on Live, my MT set is a heavily stacked Agility/Dodge set that pretty much sacrifices everything for additional Avoidance. The reason being that the baseline health we can get from simply wearing 213 or better gear is enough to survive all encounters save Sarth3D more than adequately. Couple that with our high threat relative to the DPS and you really don't need to worry about anything. I have a separate set that stacks for the other direction, Threat, that meets the same requirements.
My current sets though don't have heavy Stamina, something that is going to really hurt me going into Ulduar25. I have already gathered most of the gems and enchants I need for when 3.1 hits but I will be gaining a TON of health from Live (39k raid buffed) to 3.1 (46k raid buffed). Now if we for the moment accept the preset values for the survival soft cap and incoming damage per swing for Ulduar25 on Rawr, then by the time I'm in full Nightsong with some other assorted pieces, I've swapped back to heavier Agility from my almost exclusive Stamina setup I began Ulduar25. My health actually drops a bit but my Armor, Avoidance, and Threat all jump up quite a bit, and the loot tables are far from finished.
I don't feel that Druids are going to fall behind in the slightest and we'll continue to see big gains and be effective tanks provided we balance our stats accordingly.
Looking at how druids will gain avoidance doesn't really address the issue that having fewer separately diminishing avoidance stats is inherently worse. The counter to that would be more along the lines of that druids scale better with stamina than other tanks, allowing them to gem and gear more heavily favoring avoidance to make up for it scaling worse, while maintaining the same health as a warrior or paladin. With the nerf to our stamina scaling though, that is less true than it was. If in current BiS gear a druid gems to match another tank in overall damage reduction, then without superior stamina scaling, with time the tank with the least loss of avoidance due to DR will take less damage with a matching health pool. Obviously everyone will gain a combination of either survival or mitigation with more gear, but will the mitigation from savage defense combined with a slower scaling avoidance, match other tanks assuming comparable effective health.
Ideally, you'd run some sort of model of tank damage taken and healing received to give tanks true survivability, but there would be so many variables it would be hard to really determine a fair standard. In the absence of that, about the best thing you can do is make 2 tanks match on effective health, and compare their total damage reduction. I've been debating building a sim that would basically have programmed heal bots that followed some specific logic to determine what they cast. Then a given tank could put in their stats from rawr or their character sheet, buffed of course, along with some info on the boss's damage pattern. With that, and a few hundred runs of "did I die" seem like they would be a far better measure of tanking theory craft than attempting to guess what HP and avoidance might be best. Sort of the same idea as the premonition tanking tests that everyone was all "but they didn't do a billion tests" as if there was some way they were going to spend 100s of hours on the PTR doing sample fights. I'd be very curious how tanks would stack up in that case. Prior to deathknights you could probably have done it without any input from the tank, assuming that tank cooldowns were something of a tie breaker where if the warrior was close to the druid or paladin in true survival, his cooldowns meant he was actually better. However, as DKs are actually reliant on cooldowns as part of their overall damage reduction, something like "any time you're below 50% hit IBF" would have to be added. Actually, as I've been very bored lately, I may begin work on that sort of sim.
03/27/09, 9:37 PM
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