They are trying to lower our PVP burst though, a 5point FB with 100 energy in the bank is pretty devestating, especially if you follow it up with a TF and beserk.

With the change to it only using an extra 30 energy, a better scale on the extra energy shouldn't be too much to ask for.

I honestly can't think how a 2k shield (well, in cat gear, I guess) could have such an effect on tanking. Sorry, but this is ridiculous. It would be way to random.

I haven't seen this suggested, but would having the shield not go away on the next attack, therefore allowing it to absorb the full damage of the shield help? Then your next crit would just renew the shield if it was still up from before. This would help in AoE packs because depending on the mobs, they may not destroy the shield entirely, plus it would allow it to be up pretty much all the time, helping it be a more viable mitigation.

So should we be looking at this FB change as basically pointless and go about our lives the same way or can we now start FBing during Berserk? I can't really think of a situation where this changed things because whenever you're using FB you're trying to do it at 35 energy.

It would be far too easy for this to become overpowered in some extreme but important cases. As an example, if I'm swiping a pack of let's say 50 level 60 trash elites, I can currently heal myself for 1200 every 6 seconds using ILoTP. They have to do 200 DPS to me to punch through that, not unreasonable. The change in its current form wouldn't significantly affect this, since the shield would be eaten by one of the many very small hits. If I could refresh a 1000 damage shield (estimating on the low end of bear AP) every 1.5 seconds, they'd have to do over 660 DPS to me to even make me lose health, plus 200 more to overcome ILoTP.

Short version, this would change the shield into a flat reduction to our incoming DPS, as opposed to a percentage one (the norm for many types of mitigation), or at the very least one based on the enemy's swing speed/size (shields, SD). I don't think Blizzard wants to go there, the flat healing from ILoTP is powerful enough against small amounts of damage.

I believe the most important thing about SD is the combat log, and we are just doing mathematical formulas, what I mean is, the math is taking into account a combat log like this:

Druid Swipe Crit
SD UP
10 Mobs Hit

But actually, the combat log probably will look like this: (Druid does swipe as his attack against an aoe pack, combat log on single swipe)

Swipe crit on first mob
SD UP
Mob Hits
SD Down
Swipe crit on the second mob
SD UP
Mob hits
SD down
Swipe hits on third mob
Mob hits
Swipe crit on fourth mob
SD UP
Mob Hits
SD Down

And so on...

What I mean is, probably with no Internal Cooldown, without charges, and anything else, the Shield Block is dependent on how things shows up on the combat log, this means against AoE pack it can proc more than once every 1-1.5 sec, it all depends if what I am saying rings true.

Pretty much like Hot Streak combat log:

Crit
Hit
Crit

Doesn´t proc it,

Hit
Crit
Crit

Does proc it.

I believe it will scale of our AP and Crit, and it will proc based on how the data will show up on the combat log.

Edit: What I am saying is that mobs will hit at different times, so lets get a 10 mobs aoe pack, lets say 30% crit, so lets say a swipe critted 3 times on 10 mobs, so I got 3 shield blocks of 10 attacks on one GCD, so swipe spam would probably let SD be up 3 times each GCD. And thinking as I said about the combat log, probably the mobs will burn the charge instantly, letting you actually mitigate 4.5k each swipe from 10 attacks of the mobs for 6k ap. Sorry if I am mistaken in math though.

I don't wanna shatter your world, but swipe is an instant attack that hits all targets simultaniously. You hit swipe, you get a maximum of 1 SD from it.

My objective is to get some analytic approximations in order to compute how much our armor needs to be decreased in order to take the same damage on average pre and post Savage Defense. I'd appreciate any comments on whether I've made wrong assumptions somewhere, miscalculated something or generally screwed up

I am assuming the shield does not stack.

Definitions:

c: Basically what percentage of our attacks will be a crit. This is not the same number as in the character window.

a: Our total avoidance.

bs: Time in between two attacks on us.

ms: Time in between two of our attacks.

AP: Our attack power

x: Our armor after the SD change

y: Our armor before the SD change

p: Probability that when the Boss swings at us, the shield is active.

D: Raw damage done by the boss.

Mit(x): Armor mitigation

The average damage we receive everytime the Boss swings is :



With no Savage Defense and an amount of armor y, the average damage would be:

Equating the two and solving for Mit(x) we get

and from this we can get x.

Now I only need to compute p. I will use two approximations. The first one is that the fight is very long (infinite). In general the probability of the shield being up depends on how long the fight has been going on for. However this probability very quickly goes to its limit value. The second approximations is that between any n swings of the Boss I have swinged n*bs/ms times.

The probability that the last time the Boss hit me (I didn't avoid) was k of his swings ago is:

the probability that I have critted at least once since then is:

hence, the probability that the shield is up before a particular Boss swing is:


Now we have all ingredients to compute the armor we would need with Savage Defense in order to receive the same damage on average. This will depends on how much raw damage the Boss does. Below is a graph representing this I assume:

a = 52.6%
c= 40%
bs = 1.5s
ms = 1.2s
y = 35K
AP = 7800



With these values p=68%.

Some preliminary numbers for SotF.

World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> Savage Defense = Nerf disguised as a buff

pepesebranco, I didn't see it, so I'm assuming...

We are at hit and expertise cap with the values you presented.

Considering actual best in slot item. I've made a table with boss swing/ reduction in sof / tank points / difference.

From my math the SoF value should be between 15% and 12%, 11% will be a slight nerf.

Coeff Boss dmg Boss swing TP Difference

Now w/o shield 50k 2.0 396637 0%

20 50k 2.0 429362 8%

18 50k 2.0 419368 6%

15 50k 2.0 404064 2%

12 50k 2.0 390340 -2%

11 50k 2.0 384837 -3%

5 50k 2.0 354291 -11%

0 50k 2.0 329861 -17%

Now w/o shield 50k 1.5 396637 0%

20 50k 1.5 424775 7%

18 50k 1.5 416661 5%

15 50k 1.5 399959 1%

12 50k 1.5 385541 -3%

11 50k 1.5 380852 -4%

5 50k 1.5 351680 -11%

0 50k 1.5 327046 -18%

Now w/o shield 40k 2.0 396637 0%

20 40k 2.0 441551 11%

18 40k 2.0 430695 9%

15 40k 2.0 415954 5%

11 40k 2.0 394195 -1%

5 40k 2.0 361179 -9%

0 40k 2.0 336010 -15%

This will be the stats with best in slot items and 11/22/33% sof. And a boss hitting for 50k (before mitigation) every 2 seconds.


Bear (crit% vs. a boss (-4.4% added)): 33.9352%
Expertise: 56
Hit: 3.72065%
Armor Penetration: 1.94865%
Haste (from equipment): 3.01921%
+weapon damage: 0
Weapon Speed Reduction % (Total without Bloodlust): 21%
Missed % (Total): 3.27935%
Dodged %: 0%
Not normalized attacks parried by the boss: 0%
DPS: 3054

Bear armor: 31562
Physical Damage Reduction Bear: 70.5383%
Defense: 420
Chance to be critical hit: 0%
Dodge (bear): 43.902%
Miss: 9.58278%
Total Avoidance (bear): 53.4848%
Total HP (bear): 48066
Shielded hits: 75.6671%
Shield value = 1701





-----


This is the stats value instead

Stats DEF ATT

AP 5 13

Feral AP 6 16

Agility 137 11

Strengh 11 30

Crit 6 18

Haste 3(-3) 23

Hit 2(0) 34(0)

Expertise 46(0) 34(68)(0)

Armor Pen 0 27

Defense 49 0

Dodge 99 0

Armor 44 0

Bonus Arm. 6 0

Stamina 100 0

Health 5 0

Haste defensive value is -3 if you are not exp. capped.
Expertise def. value is 0 after the cap.
exp att value is 68 before soft cap. and so on.