Upcoming changes to feral tanking.

[Xaverri]

Hello peeps,

There are some changes being discussed currently about feral tanking. Now I know you think "What would I care? I am not a (feral) druid" but there are some things that I just wanna let you guys know.

Now I will try to sum up most of it very shortly and hope most of you will read that, but I understand if it is too long for you.

Why is this important? Cause I wanna let you guys know why you might not want a feral druid in your group/raid....


The first change we got was before WotLK came out. There were a couple of changes that I'll try to sum up as shortly as possible:

- Death Knight tanking was going to be introduced; since they were gonna be tanking without shields, and Warriors would get increasingly more problems with crushing blows, they removed this ability from bosses. Since ferals were built so they could stack armor in able to deal with crushing blows (as we dont have block/parry), this would make druids insanely strong against the now non-crushing bosses. This had to change naturally.
- To counter the druid's over powering, they reduced the bear multiplier that works over all your equipped items down a big percentage. Armor on all ferals went down an insane ammount. This would make it really hard to tank bosses because we had so many mitigation (damage reducing) stats we needed to keep up.
- To counter this again, some talents were changed. The most important was the talent that reduced the bosses chance to crit us by half (bosses chance to crit physically is 6%, the talent reduced it to 3%). Blizzard now changed this to 6% making us uncrittable through talents alone. What followed was that all the defense gear druids had to gather (which was a day-time job) was now not needed anymore. Which was ok since there was going to be an expansion and overall gearchange anyway.
- The stats we now needed to focus on in WotLK were armor and dodge. (I am just talking mitigation stats here, not threatstats like expertise).

- Then someone found out that in the beta there were 2 trinkets and an amulet with armor and dodge that were so insanely good that there was actually no way that you would be a good tank _without_ these items. Thanks to the above change. Since these items dropped in 25 man (heroic) instances only, they would be unobtainable for the majority of the ferals playing.

- Blizzard heared the players and started thinking of a solution for this.

Enter WotLK

- Blizzard announced the "solution". To be less dependant of items as major armored trinkets, they removed the bearform armor multiplier from ALL accessoires: Amulets, trinkets, rings and weapons. To counter this they changed yet another talent, the same talent that makes us uncrittable will now get a 66% increase of armor from our leather-gear only.

They will introduce this change in the coming patch, scheduled to be released before the Ulduan raiding-patch.

Enter the discussion.

People did the maths and nothing seemed to change majorly. But why all the fuzz then?

The problems:

- First of all, as stated above the only stats bears need to get for mitigation now are dodge and armor. I will get into stamina later as this is not mitigation for damage.
Armor - Because armor on gear is suddenly so important, every piece with just a bit more armor on it will be an upgrade. People did the searches and these pieces are bad. As one player in the thread discussing all this stated:

"With the PotP change we still can't make a meaningful gear choice. Before armor was everything, now the item level is almost everything. Here's how wrong the system is: the difference in mitigation between this ilvl 200 epic (http://www.wowhead.com/?item=39531) and this ilvl200 blue (http://www.wowhead.com/?item=43403) after gems is only about 1% dodge and 9 stam.... but the epic is the healing T7!"

The gear scales so weird that in a sense sometimes healing pieces are better then the appointed tanking pieces. Appointed? Yes, because if we take a look at an item that IS supposed to be used for tanking, we will keep seeing a returning trend: Pieces with nice armor have insane ammounts of stamina, strength (sometimes agility), and exp/hit/armorpen/crit/haste. All these pieces are greatly sought after by rogues and the occassional hunter/shammy/warrior/dk.

Even better, some of the best pieces in slot for tanking are crafted frost resistance, healing leather and again PVP rewards(as in start tbc).

Dodge - As said before a lot of pieces have strength instead of agility. Agility doesn't give us as much dodge anymore as it used to do since we have a high dodge count from talents already, so only dodge rating is remotely useful to get it further up, which we need badly. But hardly any piece that also has a lot of armor or stamina also has dodge rating on it. So we even get less choices in this area too.

So what's the solution now? Massive ammounts of stamina. This will make, so called, mana-sponged of us. We can take the hits, but it takes so much off our HP that we need insane healing to keep it up. This makes us the least favorable tank of the 4 classes that can now tank by far. Blizzard stated that they wanted to make all the tanks some what the same level, but this has defenately made us inferior to other choices.

We also will need to be rolling for leather gear against rogues (hunters, melee-shammies/warriors/dk's) and for accessoiry choice the armor rings are still nice, but we will want other stats as dodge as well, which are more present on the appointed warrior/dk/pally rings, so we will need to roll against them aswell!

The heated discussion is now counting 39 pages, with several blizzard responses from Ghostcrawler in between. Sadly enough he still hasn't really gotten into the core of our problem, as some players have.
The entire discussion can be read here:
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/threa .... 2479&sid=1
But the most important posts I've found are from Greenstone in the end.

Suggestions have been made to give druids another mitigation stat we can use. Preferably Parry, or something new. Level 10 bears in Elwynn can parry, why can't we? I never even considered wanting such a stat. But this is starting to look grim.

Core of the problem: This change is not fun. We want it to be fun. We're not paying for non-fun.
(Very shortly said)

No need to comment unless you want to discuss it of course, or want me to clarify some stuff.
Sorry that this has been such a long post, I couldn't make it smaller, I tried

-X-

 

[Xaverri]

Here I will post some posts from the thread that I found must-read. Explains stuff from different point of views. Here and there I forgot who it posted but can look it up if needed:

I'm a prot warrior main, and I'd like to offer some feedback based on my prior experiences in BC.

When our guild started Kara, our feral druid was a beast. We used him to tank Prince, because he was basically borderline armour capped, and had a ridiculous amount of health compared to myself. He made Prince a breeze; by contrast, it was a lot more difficult to keep me alive at that point. I took a lot more damage, even with block (and less crushes) and parry.

Fast forward a bit, 25 mans.

Azgalor is another very hard hitting physical boss. Yet by the time we got to him, I main tanked him over the feral. Why? Quite simply, I was scaling better. He had basically not got significantly better since Karazhan, while I had improved significantly with every upgrade - and still had a LOT of growing room. By contrast, he wasn't really going anywhere. Armour capped is armour capped, and dodge/hp doesn't scale as well/quickly as block, dodge, parry, armour and HP.

Now, things have obviously changed since BC. But the problem for ferals then was the same issue they'll have now - with only three basic stats to focus on for mitigation, they'll hit the glass ceiling MUCH earlier than other tanks will. I feel diminishing returns on avoidance will only make this worse. While tanking obviously got switched up a bit in WOTLK, the same problem that plagued feral tank progression in BC will doubtless appear in WOTLK at some point: namely, 3 stats will cap out much faster than 5. And unless no tank is ever going to hit the armour cap, ferals will basically be at a significant disadvantage at endgame.

This is without even looking at the fun factor. Having distinctive gear to chase is FUN. People enjoy it, and they like seeing their character evolve and progress. They enjoy seeing the sprite change. Quite simply, we like to look badass.

Druids basically look the same as they did at level 10, and the bear form and cat form are, frankly, rather boring.

I can understand that block doesn't necessarily make a lot of sense for druids, but why not parry? The bear bats the blow aside with a musclebound, meaty paw. Heck, mob bears do that to me all the time, but I don't feel it doesn't make sense. The animal simply deflected the blow, which is all parrying is. It seems to me that adding parry would give ferals extra room for movement before running into diminishing returns/caps, and would allow required levels of armour to be reduced - thus keeping them further away from the armour cap which has always stagnated their tanking progression.

 

[Ayu]

I haven't actually read this yet, but this thread needs trolling.

NERF DRUIDS OMFG GODMODE

reading it now <_<

 

[Ayu]

Also, is this a quote or a write up of yourself, Xav?

EDIT: I was tanking in classic with a pair of http://www.wowhead.com/?item=22701 myself so it's ironic and sucky that resist gear that was meant to be situationally useful to become full time tanking gears. Oo

 

[Gink]

Heard in Blizz dev meeting: "Druids can't see what they're wearing anyways, so why would they care if resistance is best in slot?"

 

[Braque]

Must. Resist. Emokitty troll....

 

[Khalo]

Interesting thread.... sucks to be you!

 

[Xaverri]

Yeah I wrote this myself in about 30 mins cause it was nearing 5 PM and I was at work

Thanks for the replies and as said, it's not really a rant nor a request for help, I just want you guys to be aware.

I'm passionate about ferals Braque, been so since I rolled one 2 weeks after WoW came out

<3

 

[Anshrr]

Must. Resist. Emobear troll....

fixed! :hi:

 

[Xaverri]

Sigh..


Funny post I found on the thread, page 38 by Gravel from Zul'Jin:

Programming is basically math, right? Here we go!

----------------------------------------------------------------

CurrentDruidTank {

var bear = 0;
var fun = 3;

var bearAssStaring = 0;
var swipeBoredomCounter = 0;

var tweakableStat = 1;

var desirableTankStat = 1;

var armor = tweakableStat + desirableTankStat;
var agility = tweakableStat + desirableTankStat;
var stamina = tweakableStat + desirableTankStat;

var druidMitigation = 'FINE';
var druidAvoidance = 'FINE';

var relianceOnTalents = 3;

DO WHILE (bear < fun) {

bearAssStaring++
swipeBoredomCounter++

bear = armor + agility + stamina - relianceOnTalents;

IF (bearAssStaring + swipeBoredomCounter = insanityDrivenRage) {
fun = bear/0;
}
}

\* The above is the current druid. It is barely enjoyable, but doesn't horrify me into a coma. *\
--------------------------------------------------------

NewDruidTank {

var bear = 0;
var fun = 3;

var bearAssStaring = 0;
var swipeBoredomCounter = 0;

var tweakableStat = 1;

var desirableTankStat = 1;

var armor = desirableTankStat;
var agility = tweakableStat + desirableTankStat;
var stamina = tweakableStat + desirableTankStat;

var druidMitigation = 'FINE';
var druidAvoidance = 'FINE';

var relianceOnTalents = 4;

var insanityDrivenRage;

DO WHILE (bear < fun) {

bearAssStaring++
swipeBoredomCounter++

bear = armor + agility + stamina - relianceOnTalents;

patience = patience - 1;

insanityDrivenRage = patience;

IF (bearAssStaring + swipeBoredomCounter = insanityDrivenRage) {
fun = bear/0;}
}
---------------------------------------------------------------

\* Above is the proposed druid. Due to the loss of a tweakable stat and more necessity baked into talents, bear's rating to fun will never be equal. That will drive the druid eventually into dividing by zero *\

ExtraStatTank {

var bear = 0;
var fun = 3;

var bearAssStaring = 0;
var swipeBoredomCounter = 0;

var tweakableStat = 1;
var untweakableStat = 0;

var desirableTankStat = 1;
var undesirableTankStat = 0;

var armor = desirableTankStat;
var agility = tweakableStat + desirableTankStat;
var stamina = tweakableStat + desirableTankStat;
var newTankStat = tweakableStat + desirableTankStat;

var druidMitigation = 'FINE';
var druidAvoidance = 'FINE';

var relianceOnTalents = 2;

var insanityDrivenRage;

DO WHILE (bear < fun) {

bearAssStaring++
swipeBoredomCounter++

bear = armor + agility + stamina - relianceOnTalents;

patience = patience - 1;

insanityDrivenRage = patience;

IF (bearAssStaring + swipeBoredomCounter = insanityDrivenRage) {
fun = bear/0;}
}

\* Note how the addition of a new stat at the loss of talent reliance makes bear more than fun, and we never divide by zero. *\

 

[Khalo]

Parry as Feral
These are all interesting ideas. We're probably less excited to make parry into a useful stat for druids just because one of the interesting things about druid tanks is that they don't care about parry. But that isn't to say we wouldn't do it. Healability, damage reduction or some other ideas nobody has come up with yet are all possible too. This one is going to take some discussion to figure out though. More input is certainly welcomed.

Blue Today.

 

[Xaverri]

Thanks Khalo Atleast they recognise it can become a big problem

I already hate to say it that I am uncrittable by talents alone, it just takes no bloody effort :/
Nothing to be proud of!

-X-

 

[Anshrr]

I think it's fairly relaxing to be uncrittable by talents. The old juggling of defgear, resigear, and enchants were not helping making tanking more fun.
It was a bigger effort to not have too much, than enough tbh..

 

[Xaverri]

Hmm I see that differently, I like to put effort into something cause I can be more proud of it. If I shift into bear now and see my hp-pool I just think "yeah, nice..hmm"

 

[Xaverri]

Apparently a change have been made, as the patchnotes that I've read today are different from the announced changes.

Druids
Survival of the Fittest: This talent now grants 22/44/66% bonus armor in Bear Form and Dire Bear Form in addition to all of its previous effects.

Instead of making the talent add 22/44/66% bonus armor from all leather items as announced before, it seems like blizzard has now decided to make it an increase of the bears overall armor. This might actually be quite a buff. Or am I reading this wrong?

I'll make a screen of my stats tuesday evening so I can see wednesday what exactly has been changed

 

[Arly]

It's cloth & leather. So we will still have armormultiplier from cloaks. But not other slots afaik.

 

[Ayu]

Wait wut, there is a patch this week?

 

[Xaverri]

I sure hope so :S Taking so long.... But I think it'll be next week or even next year

If it's only cloth & leather then they really need to specify that more in the official patchnotes when they're due

 

[Arly]

Apparently a change have been made, as the patchnotes that I've read today are different from the announced changes.

Druids
Survival of the Fittest: This talent now grants 22/44/66% bonus armor in Bear Form and Dire Bear Form in addition to all of its previous effects.

Instead of making the talent add 22/44/66% bonus armor from all leather items as announced before, it seems like blizzard has now decided to make it an increase of the bears overall armor. This might actually be quite a buff. Or am I reading this wrong?

I think the problem is that you read that regarding SotF and forgetting that it still says this a bit further up in the patchnotes:

Bonus Armor: The mechanics for items with bonus armor on them has changed (any cloth, leather, mail, or plate items with extra armor, or any other items with any armor). Bonus armor beyond the base armor of an item will no longer be multiplied by any talents or by the bonuses of Bear Form, Dire Bear Form, or Frost Presence.

 

[Xaverri]

Ah yeah ofcourse, being blonde again :S