X
Xaverri
Guest
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:
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-
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-