Going Forward: Cataclysm Discussion - Page 2

Hinalover · 04/08/10, 10:54 AM

Well, GC did amend by saying

Preventing dot clipping is something we want to do in general. It obviously benefits Shadow priests just as much as warlocks.

This is obviously true to all other dot type specs (fire mages, ele shamans, boomkins). However, if they can apply it also to feral druids, then I don't see an issue. If what they said was that they want it to act like similar to Everlasting Affliction, then we will just be constantly refreshing our rips and rakes.

Fallenangel · 04/08/10, 10:57 AM

It seems reasonable to assume LB-like behavior for anti-clipping, as in casting it resets the duration of the buff while not affecting the tick cycle.
Another option would be that haste will have these odd optimal values, at least for each hot. That can keep it more balanced compared to crit which obviously is underpowered in the currently known/assumed implementation (hots can crit, haste adds ticks). Too many elements are still missing, of course - rating conversions, crit-related talents etc.

Starfox · 04/08/10, 11:17 AM

Originally Posted by Arawethion

That would work, although might be a bit too mathy for a mechanic that's going to be constantly visible to all players. Also, the Warlock changes say something about being able to extend DoT's without clipping them, but it's not clear exactly how that will work.

They said like it does with everlasting affliction, which means that recasting a dot will just put it back to max duration but it won't reset the ticktimer itself.

Hinalover · 04/08/10, 12:38 PM

With the warrior preview out, a few things from a Feral Druid standpoint stands out:

1) Adding a mastery talent for all tanks called vengence

Vengeance: This is a mechanic to ensure that tank damage (and therefore threat) doesn't fall behind as damage-dealing classes improve their gear during the course of the expansion. All tanking specs will have Vengeance as their second talent tree passive bonus. Whenever a tank gets hit, Vengeance will give them a stacking attack power buff equal to 5% of the damage done, up to a maximum of 10% of the character's un-buffed health. For boss encounters, we expect that tanks will always have the attack power bonus equal to 10% of their health. The 5% and 10% bonuses assume 51 talent points have been put into the Protection tree. These values will be smaller at lower levels. Remember, you only get this bonus if you have spent the most talent points in the Protection tree, so you won't see Arms or Fury warriors running around with it. Vengeance will let us continue to make tank gear more or less the way we do today – there will be some damage-dealing stats, but mostly survival-oriented stats. Druids typically have more damage-dealing stats even on their tanking gear, so their Vengeance benefit may be smaller, but overall the goal is for all four tanks do about the same damage when tanking.

Basically it sounds like they are wanting us to be able to do about as much damage as the dps are (so instead of having 16-17 dps dpsing,we now have 19 dpsers). Considering Bears have innated dps stats, we are currently the highest dpsers of between the four tanks (in equal gear level).

Considering we don't have the exact numbers, I'm hypothesizing on the number they will most likely give feral druids. Say they give us 7% of our maximum health is added to our AP. In current ICC gear levels, Druids have about 7k AP and 70k health. By giving us the 7% of our health to AP that is equivalent to having 11,900 AP or 70% increase. I know on my druid, I'm able to do 6k dps in tanking rotation right now. By adding in the 70% to that, your talking about 10k dps which is almost on par with the rest of the melee (still behind but not by much).

At the same time, if this is the case, then I would not be surprised if they decide to lower the threat coefficients for our abilities. We may have to re-evaluate what those threat numbers are.

2) Lowering Sunder Armor's value

Sunder Armor will be reduced to three stacks instead of five, and still provide only a 4% reduction in armor per stack. We want to make this debuff easier to apply and less of a damage swing when it falls off.

Basically it sounds like they are trying to lower melee dps by lowering the amount of armor being reduced.

I would comment on the new Inner Rage ability, but it's too early to say if bear druids will have a similar talent or not.

Duilliath · 04/08/10, 12:41 PM

The warrior preview lists some information for Druids as well.

Notably:

Heroic Strike will no longer be an "on next swing" attack, as we are removing this mechanic in Cataclysm. To keep the niche of Heroic Strike as a Rage dump, it will become an instant attack, but will cost between 10 and 30 Rage. This ability will not be usable until you have 10 Rage, but if you have more than 10, it will consume up to 30, adding additional damage for each point of Rage consumed above the base 10. Other abilities, such as Cleave, Execute, and Maul (for druids) will work similarly. The goal is to provide players with an option where if you can't afford the Rage, you don't push the button, but if you have excess Rage, you can push it a lot.

Nice to get confirmation, but most of that could've been deducted from previous hints. Will be interesting to see the interaction between base Maul damage, added Maul damage from more Rage and the following:

Vengeance

The comment about 'more damage-dealing stats' makes me wonder if the revision they mentioned about actual Tank gear for Druids vs DPS gear will actually happen. Additionally, 10% AP on top of Bearform for a 50k Health Bear is massive on the, say, 8k AP an unbuffed Bear will have. It'll be even more extreme for the other classes. On top of that, I wonder how they'll deal with Prot PvP now, as they are (currently) already quite dangerous and this'll give them a further damage boost.

//edit2:

Another comment from Ghostcrawler, probably relevant to Cat druids. Wonder if this'll have any implications for Primal Gore and/or Rake:

Almost all dots will crit. The exception will be things like Deep Wounds and Ignite because those are already the product of a crit. Rend will crit.

We are really striving for scaling parity for the various specs and classes. This means that stats like haste and crit can't be awesome for some characters and terrible for others. Most abilities need to benefit from haste and crit.

Makael · 04/08/10, 1:03 PM

Regarding the haste/crit affecting HoT's in particular, (which we can assume will apply to us the same way it does for Priests) it seems to me this will be a great thing. Us Trees get "auto 4pT9", and the question of Rapid Rejuv. no longer becomes an issue. The way I understand the mechanic is that haste will not affect the duration of the spell, but will simply cause more ticks in the original duration. To me, that's the way I'd prefer Glyphed RR to work anyways; added HPS over the same time period, instead of simply more HPS over a shorter duration.

Royalite · 04/08/10, 1:25 PM

Originally Posted by Hinalover

With the warrior preview out, a few things from a Feral Druid standpoint stands out:
Basically it sounds like they are wanting us to be able to do about as much damage as the dps are (so instead of having 16-17 dps dpsing,we now have 19 dpsers). Considering Bears have innated dps stats, we are currently the highest dpsers of between the four tanks (in equal gear level).

I don't know that I'd be jumping to the conclusion so fast that tanks are now a hybird dps capable of tanking. Otherwise everyone could be a dps with insane survivability. I don't think the idea is to have everyone doing hard modes as tanks pushing 10k+.

I think the idea is to close the tanking threat problem when you have overgeared dps. The tank scaling isn't happening on the same level as dps. The different between what dps was pulling in Nax gear and what they are now pulling in ICC gear is a larger scale in comparison to tank damage in Nax and ICC.

I beleive the intent is not to create dping tanking but normalize tank dps around the board between the tanking classes. Also to have a build in mechanic that allows for a progressive increase in dmg/threat without having to do the consistent threat tweeks they have been doing in WOTLK (recent threat buffs to war/dks for example).

While tank dps will improve, I don't predict it will be anywhere near an actual dps spec.

grutak · 04/08/10, 1:34 PM

Depending on how things change in Cata, the AP addition is easy to check. Add 7% of your health as AP to an item in Rawr. My 5k dps goes up to 7500dps when adding 7% of my 62k health. Since I have zero heroic gear, you guys could expect to get past that, upwards of 8-9k dps, easily with 277 gear.

Edit: I went back and added whatever Rawr thought was BIS. 72k health, and the dps went from 5500 to 8000.

Malleus · 04/08/10, 2:39 PM

Originally Posted by Hinalover

Basically it sounds like they are wanting us to be able to do about as much damage as the dps are .

You've read them wrong, I think. If tanks had the same damage output as DPSers, DPSers in the tanking classes would be all but strictly inferior to tanks - no better for DPS, but much more vulnerable. The only reason you'd ever bring a Fury Warrior, Ret Paladin etc is if the tree had a unique high-end buff or debuff.

I think it's pretty clear from the statement "ensur[ing] tank damage and therefore threat doesn't fall behind" that Blizzard want to allow better threat generation without providing some high threat move or crazy multiplier that takes all the skill out of it. The easiest way to do that is to up tank damage a bit. In this way, tanks will have to practice a good rotation to maintain a threat lead just as DPS need to practice a good rotation to do their jobs.

Fallenangel · 04/08/10, 2:47 PM

Might wanna read the fine print:

"Whenever a tank gets hit, Vengeance will give them a stacking attack power buff..."

You can scrap that 20 tanks raid now.

Promethius · 04/08/10, 2:51 PM

There are quite a few knobs to turn with druid tanking and these revealed changes. Assuming Savage Defense isn't reworked, Vengeance can potentially increase the potency of the shield somewhere in the 50-60% range given current ap and health levels. However, that also assumes when ap is removed from gear, bear ap will stay relatively constant in agi gear. One of the potential situations is that bears may only get 1 ap per agi or maybe even none at all and Vengeance would be the dominant method of scaling bear damage.

The rage and maul changes are interesting. The single target rotation currently would devolve to something like maintain mangle then lacerate, then maul unless rage starved where you'd faerie fire or demo roar for rage. I'll be giving Blizzard the benefit of the doubt that they'll readjust bear aoe threat appropriately so that it isn't relegated to simply spam swipe and auto attack and rather something more like occasional integrated abilities like warriors, and hopefully make it so single target isn't just mangle once a min, lacerate once every 12-13.5 sec, and maul as much as possible.

Vyshe · 04/08/10, 3:20 PM

Assuming all or most DoTs become more like a debuff you refresh on your target that does periodic damage at intervals based on your haste, then the only potentially problematic aspect of it I see is whether or not things like +haste/crit procs/pots/dynamic buffs are factored into it every refresh, every tick or every 0.x sec. Probably as much of an technical limitation as a design decision.

Nitz · 04/08/10, 4:39 PM

Their value (and haste, crit, damage components) will most likely be refreshed when... refreshed. As Lifebloom works now.

ttyl · 04/08/10, 5:00 PM

Originally Posted by Playered

It will be interesting to see if they end up adding a 3rd direct healing spell for us such as how Shamans and Priests have gotten thus far and how they decide to deal with the hot 'downranking' aspect considering we are so based on them for our healing - unless they try and push us further to being more direct heal based. They have to be somewhat cautious with us in the fact when players are not meant to be fully topped off all the time it will make hots very very strong and I would expect a fair increase in cost of them too.

Ideally I am looking for some inter-class synergy between our spells rather than any more new ones especially when Lifebloom has been somewhat abandoned over the expansion after being a fairly core aspect of our tank healing.

I'm curious too. After this statement:

Originally Posted by http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=24038607788&sid=1&pageNo=19#365

To get there, many healers will need a new spell B or A, except potentially druids, who just need the numbers tweaked on some existing spells so that they have more defined niches.

It sounds like we'll stay HoT-centered. Lifebloom as the quick heal, Rejuv as the efficient heal, and Regrowth as the big heal. Swap the current HoT coefficients of Rejuv and Regrowth and we're basically there.

• Hamlet · 04/08/10, 5:03 PM

There's nothing wrong with that--Healing Touch, Tranquility, and to a large extent Lifebloom were completely dormant for an entire expansion. They don't have to make "new" spells to greatly expand the functionality we have.