They can't do that any longer. Their cooldowns have been increased and one removed, so they can only keep it up for so long. In fact, with the changes to warriors, it seems prot can get more damage reduction from cooldowns if glyphed/speced for it.

Fasc, out of curiosity what increase in agil dodge rating and defense are you seeing now and and what is your increase next patch.

After looking at Rarws latest beta, with the gear they have there, i go up to 40.2217963% dodge a greater increase then i anticipated, i did switch from gemming for exp and stam to agi and stam. But the other stats are less then what i was hoping for. Below my stat changes show that while my dodge goes from, 36.33% to 40.22% a increase of 3.89%, the other stats do not increase that much. Least important to me is the less then 2k change in stam and more importantly the lack of increase in armor and loss of hast and exp.

Currently my other stats(not involved in dodge) with 3.1 nerfs included.
hp 35217
armor 27699
ap 4832
127 hit
253 exp
99 haste

After itemization with Ulduar gear
hp 37097
armor 28529
ap 5331
247 hit
188 exp
83 haste

a swing of
+1880 hp
+830 armor
+499 ap
+120 hit
-65 exp
-16 haste

"Will of the Necropolis now cannot be triggered by damage which deals less than 5% of your health."

Hopefully SD will receive similar treatment?

My point was that in a 25 man Raid situation where you knew a Lock was going to be present. Earth and Moon would not be needed as its buff is weaker than Curse of Elements in 3.1. Thus maybe using those same points for Brambles as an alternative for increased dps through the tanks.

COE will be 13% increased damage across all but holy schools I believe and also a 165 deduction in resists of those same schools on a target for 5 mins. Too me that is a better debuff to use than E&M. However there is a personal loss of 3% damage from not taking E&M. I was simply looking to see if it was a viable alternative for dps.

Mobs usually have 0 resistance, making the latter part of CoE is most of the time irrelevant. If warlock casts CoE, he cannot cast CoA and his dps drops. Apart from this, do you always dps the same target as other warlocks? I don't think so. In my opinion, moonkin without E&M is a lame duck.

Here I'll assume that thorns you cast on others will benefit from Brambles, E&M, and MSS. These assumptions will need to be confirmed.

Each point of Brambles will add 2% of your spellpower (SP at the time you cast Thorns) to Thorns damage. (2% = 6.6% * 1.03 * 1.04 * 1.13 * 25%). Each point of Brambles will also add 5% to your treant damage total.

Look at a WWS for a fight that interests you:

PW
Druid did 870k damage.
30k was treants.
Retribution aura procced 135 times. I assume that all of these can proc Thorns also.
Assume Druid can get to 3k spellpower during buffs (using on-use trinket).

Each point of Brambles would add
3000*.02*135 = 8100 thorns damage.
30000*.05 = 1500 treant damage.
Total = 9600 damage

That is a boost of about 1.1%. That is a pretty decent DPS talent (almost certainly better than IIS). It is also threat-free (in-fact most of it is extra tank threat) and mana-free during the fight.

On the selfish side, most of that damage will not be attributed to you in WWS.

For a single, slow boss that hits a single target, it would be much less valuable. I see VoA parses where thorns procced only about once every 6s. For that boss the thorns-contribution of a single talent point would be only about 10 dps.

I seriously hope not. It would make the skill useless in tanking anything but bosses or heavy hitting trash mobs. How often do you tank something that hits both weak and hard at once?

I'll take the incredible ease of soloing old content over the imaginary scenario in which a weak blow will pose a serious threat to my survival by stealing the SD absorption before a large hit lands.

Probably better to have the resto druid in the raid pick up brambles. He loses either Nature's Grace which is incredibly gimp for a resto druid now, 6% off the cost of nourish which may be nice but hopefully not mandatory, or a few percent crit from natural perfection. Revitalize is another option, but it looks like it will be worth picking up atm. My spec I'm thinking about using is this.

Are we sure thorns generates threat? I thought I read it was threat-neutral at some point. Can someone confirm it does generate full threat?

I would want to have more information on which meters we are topping, when, against what classes, etc before putting too much weight on the reports. We already do pretty well at AOE, add 20% haste to Hurricane due to the NG change and the lower cooldown on Starfall and I can easily see us topping the trash charts without gaining much over current vs bosses.

It's also not unusual for me to hit the top spot in our DPS charts for a single boss fight on live. Over the course of a night for "all bosses" I don't see it happening.

The post of mine you quoted is several weeks old. I honestly don't know how the dps rankings are looking currently

Is thorns' strength determined by the spellpower at the point of cast or does it update if you swap gear ? I'm just wondering if i need to gather a spellpower equip for pre-battle thorns buffing.

It has been confirmed several times in this thread that thorns damage is calculated on cast and does NOT update. Just one example:

Sorry to interrupt the thorns discussion but I had a question I haven't seen an entirely conclusive answer to:

What do the HOTW changes mean for bear gemming? My pre-3.1 opinion was that since we naturally get enough health to tank anything (around 30k unbuffed, which is fine outside of special exceptions like 3d sarth) the best thing to do is pile on the 16 agi for more dodge and armor. With the 10% stamina nerf and the harder ulduar bosses should we be switching our agi gems to agi/stam (or even pure stam) gems, or keeping the agi to positively interact with Savage Defense?

Pre-3.1 I have agi in basically every gem slot. We naturally have enough health to survive stuff, so it's avoidance all the way. The crit from the agi has been handy for rage / threat as well.

Post-3.1 what I've seen so far is that Ulduar bosses hit a fair bit harder, and we have less armor (infact the set I've built in Rawr has less armor in full t8.5 than I do on live in full t7.5). This leads me to believe we have to care about stamina a little more. To cut a long story short, I'm probably going to switch my dragons eyes from the 27 agi ones to the 41 stam ones, and leave the 16 agi ones as is.

I generally think there's enough agi / crit on leather as is to keep Savage Defense up all the time, so it's more about avoidance / threat for me.

Are there any plans to clean up the druid threads or start over with new patch day?

I'm going to be keeping my stamina-heavy 3D gemming for Ulduar, I think. Just looking at some of the burst abilities from the Ulduar bosses (Fusion Punch on council, for example), and taking into account that healers tend to react less quickly in an unfamiliar situation, more stamina seems like a good idea for Ulduar progression. The sort of question to ask is: what if my healers make a mistake and get Spell Locked on Ignis? Do I have enough health to survive using a cooldown without praying for some lucky dodges?

I believe my experiments with the Rawr beta showed something like 83% expected SD uptime (gemming for stamina but using the Darkmoon Card) against the "boilerplate" boss, for something like 8.5% mitigation. I have no idea whether this will play out in an actual encounter or not, but 83% is big enough that it seems safe to give a stamina setup a try. (I will however be regemming to take advantage of more socket bonuses now that we have an excellent purple gem.)

Wanted to provide some further data from a short test I did:

3/3 Brambles -> Moonkin Form -> Buff Thorns -> /duel = 417 feedback damage from single autoattack on target.

3/3 Brambles -> Lifebloom to 200 SP (IDS) -> Moonkin Form -> Buff Thorns -> /duel = 427 feedback damage from single autoattack on target.

200 SP gain seemed to equate to +10 feedback damage produced.

Since I play on european realms and won't be able to log on until tonight, I was wondering if someone tested the new savage defense on lvl 70 heroics and zul'gurub, and how savage defense is good or bad seeing that will have a nearly 100% uptime with all the crits floating around.
My guesses are that SD will help greatly, but I'm too curious to wait and test it by myself. :P


EDIT finding the right keywords on google can go a long way! A guy made some tests in lvl 70 heroics (namely anzu's trash and boss) and posted his results on the european forums

FULL REPORT (trash and 2 bosses)
Damage In (full report)
Live: 300,483
PTR: 190,497
Damage Out (full report)
Live: 1,234,949
PTR: 1,118,575
Heals (full report)
Live: 267,801 (overheal 3%)
PTR: 170,377 (overheal 7%)

BOSSES REPORT
Damage In (bosses)
Live: 109,519
PTR: 60,687
Damage Out (bosses)
Live: 568,198
PTR: 532,180
Heals (bosses)
Live: 77,672 (overheal 0%)
PTR: 41,290 (overheal 11%)

TRASH REPORT (bosses excluded)
Damage In (trash)
Live: 190,964
PTR: 129,810
Damage Out (trash)
Live: 666,751
PTR: 586,395
Heals (trash)
Live: 190,129 (overheal 5%)
PTR: 129,087 (overheal 5%)

As expected savage defense will be a boon to most of soloing activities in low lvl content.

That delta seems too low. Multiple sources have reported 6.6% scaling (untalented). If you were getting only 5% = 10/200 (talented), you would need something like 6000 SP to get your thorns up to 417 damage.

Assuming (plausible, not tested) that the thorns you cast on others benefits from Master Shapeshifter, Brambles, and the personal benefit from E&M, damage would be

(73+0.066*SP)*1.04*1.75*1.03

and you would hit 417 damage at around 2264 SP. But at that point, adding 200 more SP should add another 24 or 25 to thorns damage.

I've always used the Simulation thread to determine what the current "best dps" build is, but that is still showing the 3.0.9 builds, is there a thread somewhere that shows the current 3.1 "best dps" build? And the 3.1 stat weights?

I looked around but wasn't able to find it.

I guess while I'm asking, how about a 3.1 Resto build too?

Thanks,
Thane

Only 2 talents changed in regards to "best" feral DPS spec: Primal Gore and Improved MotW.
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft
I go : Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft because I'm not a selfish jerk who cares more about 5% more DPS than 1500 HPS.