Well yeah but what are you so worried about getting dispelled?
I mostly PvE, not a big PvPer, so I'm mostly just curious.
Um... you do realize that most of Druid heals are HoTs?
Don't be snide. I figured it was easy enough to refresh a HoT that got dispelled since they're low mana and instant cast that the points would be more useful somewhere else.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
I guess it doesn't matter a whole lot because you'll be replacing a lot of that gear when you hit 70, but stacking STA is kinda silly as that increases the mana needed to heal you. Increasing AGI instead increases avoidance making things easier on healers.
I mean, ideally you should have a balance: you should have enough STA that a series of rapid parries or critical strikes doesn't suddenly turn you into a pulp, but mostly you should be focusing on AGI enchants on high-armor gear.
That's assuming you're grouping in bear form. If you're soloing, you should still focus more on AGI to increase damage done in cat and avoidance.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
EWom, a really good DPS trinket that you might be able to solo is Bladefist's Breadth, avaiable from the following quest chain: http://www.wowwiki.com/Quest:Overlord
It requires killing a level 63 elite mob.
That trinket will last you well into Heroics.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
EWom, a really good DPS trinket that you might be able to solo is Bladefist's Breadth, avaiable from the following quest chain: http://www.wowwiki.com/Quest:Overlord
It requires killing a level 63 elite mob.
That trinket will last you well into Heroics.
One thing to keep in mind: that quest also rewards a pretty good tanking trinket, and those are rarer than DPS trinkets. The DPS trinket from this quest happens to be one of the better ones, though, so it's a matter of priorities.
EWom, a really good DPS trinket that you might be able to solo is Bladefist's Breadth, avaiable from the following quest chain: http://www.wowwiki.com/Quest:Overlord
It requires killing a level 63 elite mob.
That trinket will last you well into Heroics.
One thing to keep in mind: that quest also rewards a pretty good tanking trinket, and those are rarer than DPS trinkets. The DPS trinket from this quest happens to be one of the better ones, though, so it's a matter of priorities.
Yeah, that's a good point. I forgot how much trouble I had getting decent tanking trinkets.
Infected Wounds (Tier 8 ) changed to: Your Shred, Maul, and Mangle attacks cause an Infected Wound in the target. The Infected Wound reduces the movement speed of the target by 8/17/25% and the attack speed by 8/17/25%. Stacks up to 2 times. Lasts 12 sec.
Restoration Skills
Healing Touch base healing reduces for all ranks. Mana cost also reduced.
Abolish poison now lasts 1 minute on the target. (Previously lasted 8 sec)
Restoration Talents
Furor (Tier 1) changed to: Gives you 20/40/60/80/100% chance to gain 10 Rage when you shapeshift into Bear and Dire Bear Form, and you keep up to 20/40/60/80/100 of your Energy when you shapeshift into Cat Form, and increases your total Intellect while in Moonkin form by 2/4/6/8/10%.
Infected Wounds (Tier 8 ) changed to: Your Shred, Maul, and Mangle attacks cause an Infected Wound in the target. The Infected Wound reduces the movement speed of the target by 8/17/25% and the attack speed by 8/17/25%. Stacks up to 2 times. Lasts 12 sec.
Restoration Skills
Healing Touch base healing reduces for all ranks. Mana cost also reduced.
Abolish poison now lasts 1 minute on the target. (Previously lasted 8 sec)
Restoration Talents
Furor (Tier 1) changed to: Gives you 20/40/60/80/100% chance to gain 10 Rage when you shapeshift into Bear and Dire Bear Form, and you keep up to 20/40/60/80/100 of your Energy when you shapeshift into Cat Form, and increases your total Intellect while in Moonkin form by 2/4/6/8/10%.
I guess it doesn't matter a whole lot because you'll be replacing a lot of that gear when you hit 70, but stacking STA is kinda silly as that increases the mana needed to heal you. Increasing AGI instead increases avoidance making things easier on healers.
I mean, ideally you should have a balance: you should have enough STA that a series of rapid parries or critical strikes doesn't suddenly turn you into a pulp, but mostly you should be focusing on AGI enchants on high-armor gear.
That's assuming you're grouping in bear form. If you're soloing, you should still focus more on AGI to increase damage done in cat and avoidance.
EWom, a really good DPS trinket that you might be able to solo is Bladefist's Breadth, avaiable from the following quest chain: http://www.wowwiki.com/Quest:Overlord
It requires killing a level 63 elite mob.
That trinket will last you well into Heroics.
Like I said in my earlier post I just respec'd from resto. I was resto from about 45 to 67. I already did Cruels intentions (the first quest you linked) and got the healing rewards, as I didn't see a need for the other trinkets. At the time I was leveling with a warlock, who I no longer level with, so I had to spec feral to continue leveling, as leveling solo resto is miserable.
I have literally been gearing for feral for one level know, and don't think I'm doing to bad, with random drops, a few pieces bought on the AH, and quest rewards.
My +sta enchants are mainly because how I do my enchants are based off of two things: 1) Do I have the mats for them 2) Do I get skill ups off them? If one of those two are met, I usually do it, especially if it's number two. (Hence the fiery on my stave)
I also happened to have the +10 sta armor kits sitting in my bank so I decided they'd get better use being used, than not.
I appreciate the comments, and yes when I group I'm 90% of the time the tank of an instance now, I've only been asked to DPS as catform once now.
I have two main goals with my druid.
1) Off tank, or tank Kara with my guild - Especially since our token bear isn't ours at all but a friend from another guild, who by the looks of things will be less available to tank for us as much as he has been. In truth he's been really nice helping us get through Kara, his guild is in BT/Hyjal etc, not sure how far, but I know they go once a week, and are now going to be doing ZA runs for bears I think on our kara days.
2) PvP heal, particularly arena with my cousin & folks.
Obviously I'll be spending some time on dailies to do the respec dance, but it shouldn't be too bad.
With both these goals in mind, I hope to be able to build a sweet PVE set, for duo'ing to 80 with my girlfriend, who plays a hunter.
But as it is now, my solo play seems much more productive in bearform, than in cat form.
EWom on
Whether they find a life there or not, I think Jupiter should be called an enemy planet.
Resto Druid is so fun right now in Beta...Nature's Splendor in Balance gives +1/2/3 secs to all our HoTs, insect swarm and moonfire. That includes lifebloom. My premade Druid, lifebloom w/ imp tree form and Nature's Splendor heals the target for 331 per tick and heals for 2500 at the end and costs 226 mana. So nuts.
This is just one tiny, tiny part of the awesome.
edit: another example, the lvl 80 hurricane is 50% melee, ranged and attack speed debuff and it seems to work on most bosses, as resto mine does 650 per tick and can crit for 950. As Balance it would do even more. I assume the boss part is a bug, but it is sicknasty for trash.
Resto Druid is so fun right now in Beta...Nature's Splendor in Balance gives +1/2/3 secs to all our HoTs, insect swarm and moonfire. That includes lifebloom. My premade Druid, lifebloom w/ imp tree form and Nature's Splendor heals the target for 331 per tick and heals for 2500 at the end and costs 226 mana. So nuts.
This is just one tiny, tiny part of the awesome.
edit: another example, the lvl 80 hurricane is 50% melee, ranged and attack speed debuff and it seems to work on most bosses, as resto mine does 650 per tick and can crit for 950. As Balance it would do even more. I assume the boss part is a bug, but it is sicknasty for trash.
Tranquil Spirit is worthless, especially if you don't want to have Naturalist. I'd say move the points into Living Spirit and OoC and then put the last point into Replenish.
How is balance leveling these days? I have a 49 druid and I am tired of feral cat and the boomkin is oooo so tempting. I heard pre BC the itemization is shit, how about in Outlands?
How is balance leveling these days? I have a 49 druid and I am tired of feral cat and the boomkin is oooo so tempting. I heard pre BC the itemization is shit, how about in Outlands?
Do it. I've been leveling Moonkin since 40 and it is so good.
With the most recent Beta patch, it has become possible for other people to begin data-mining the loot from Naxxramas (mmo-champion). As a feral concerned about how the gear will be itemized, I looked at the sets for all four of the tank sets to see how they compare.
At this time, I am greatly concerned with the benefit of the Naxx 10-man sets for druids in comparison to the other classes. For each of the following sections, I am trying to focus on a particular element of survival for each of the tank classes to compare them in turn.
Unless specifically stated otherwise, I am ignoring the base values of the stats. I am ignoring the bonuses from talents or skills that has no bearing on the classes gains from gear. This is trying to look purely at the gains that each tanking class is seeing from gear.
*****
ARMOR
Assumed equipment: Full item level 200 epic gear. This means the filled slots are the Eight Armor Slots, Cloak, and Shield. (Shield is only for filled for warrior and paladin.)
Druid is assumed to be in Dire Bear Form (base skill) with Thick Hide (Tier 2 Feral Talent).
Deathknight is assumed to be in Frost Presence (base skill) with Toughness (Tier 1 Frost Talent).
Warrior is considered to have Toughness (Tier 3 Protection Talent).
Paladin is considered to have Toughness (Tier 3 Protection Talent).
Druids being the lowest, by a significant amount, is an issue. (I would expect Deathknights to be the lowest for physical mitigation as their niche is mage-tanking.)
- But druids can get extra armor from their jewelry or weapon!
Currently, any armor on the jewelry or weapon costs itemization points. This results in those pieces having less stats for other areas. This results in a (mostly) unseen penalty to druid tanks.
- So how do we resolve this?
I don't know.
Leather with Cloak gives an armor total of 3394.
Plate with Cloak (no shield) gives an armor total of 13037.
Plate with Cloak and Shield gives an armor total of 20567.
The plate armor gives roughly 384% the armor of leather (no shield) or 605% the armor of leather (with shield).
Dire Bear currently gives a +400% armor modifier. This places the druid above the base armor from plate-wearer without a shield (or other armor modifiers like frost presence), but easily falls short of the armor of a plate-wearer with a shield.
Possible solutions to make bear armor roughly equal to plate w/shield armor would seem to be:
1. Increase the base armor of leather by 21%. (This will give a 20% armor boost to rogues and non-feral druids. This would likely be seen as an undesired buff to the non-ferals, from tank balancing.)
2. Increase the base armor modifier of Dire Bear Form to 505%. (This will allow for higher armor on arena restoration druids who are using bear form to soak up damage while their heal over time spells tick. Potentially undesired buff.)
3. Increase the armor modifier of Thick Hide to 33%. (Easily accessible talent to non-ferals thus still allowing a potential buff to arena restoration druids.)
4. Place or alter a deep feral talent to include a 21% armor boost. (Best place would be to replace the +60% dire bear AP bonus from Mother Bear, Tier 8 Feral talent, as it only gives a mere 72 AP with a second armor boosting talent.)
The fourth listed option would place further emphasis between a bear and cat spec for a druid, as Mother Bear gives no benefit to a cat druid. Also, please note that the listed percentages above are what are needed for them to equal the armor mitigation of a warrior or paladin. If it is desired for them to have higher base armor mitigation (due to a lack of block), the listed percentages would need to be increased.
*****
BLOCKING
Assumed gear is 5 pieces of the 10-man Naxxramus tanking set for each class. The shield is considered to have a block value of 211 (epic item level 200 shield).
Increased Chance to Block:
Paladin: 7.37%
Warrior: 5.58%
*Warrior is assumed to have Shield Mastery (Tier 6 Protection Talent) and Vitality (Tier 8 Protection Talent).
*Paladin is assumed to have Shield Specialization (Tier 3 Protection Talent) and Divine Strength (Tier 1 Protection Talent).
Druids and Deathknights can not block, therefore can not gain any benefit here. This simply pushes the warriors and paladins further in the lead for physical mitigation. The block amounts of 600-800 with only 5 pieces of gear shows the amounts to be significant.
*****
AVOIDANCE
Assumed gear is 5 pieces of the 10-man Naxxramus tanking set for each class. Base avoidance values are not taken into account.
Druid assumes Survival of the Fittest Talent (Tier 6 Feral Talent).
Death Knight, Warrior, and Paladin have no relevant talents.
Paladin has the lowest avoidance, but they also have the highest blocking chance from gear. Due to their reactionary damage with holy shield and retribution aura, this seems unsurprising.
Druids are the second lowest, yet they don't (currently) have higher armor or blocking to bail them out.
So how can we resolve the low avoidance issue? (As the difference would simply increase as we extend into higher item levels, the 2% difference between druids and warriors from 5 pieces of gear would likely continue to increase.)
1. Change the itemization to better favor avoidance stats. (Druid feral set is trying to be a dps set and a tank set at the same time. Moving the itemization around to favor tanking would hinder the druid dps, unless druid dps was shifted to better resolve around the tank-style itemization.)
2. Change the druid agility-to-dodge ratio. (To get the talented druid avoidance in line with the warrior avoidance, you would need to reduce the Agility-to-Dodge ratio from ~40.4 : 1 to 32.7 : 1. If you extrapolate the current live dodge ratio to level 80 based on the degredation of the ratio, you would get ~30.5 : 1. This may be closer to the old values than might be liked.)
3. Give the druid some AP to defensive stat ability. (Warriors and Paladins get strength to shield block as a base ability. Death Knights get strength to parry rating as a base ability. Druids are the only tank class that is not getting some fashion of damage reduction through their Strength/AP. It would only need a 306 AP : 1% avoidance ratio to bring the druid talented avoidance up to warriors for avoidance.)
*****
HEALTH
Assumed gear is 5 pieces of the 10-man Naxxramus tanking set for each class. Base health is not taken into account.
Druid: 7123
Death Knight: 5220
Warrior: 5575
Paladin: 5981
Druid assumes Dire Bear Form with Heart of the Wild (Tier 6 Talent), Survival of the Fittest (Tier 6 Talent).
Death Knight has no modifying talents. (Unholy and Blood both have small 2-3% stamina boosts, but frost seems like it'd be the raid tank tree.)
Warrior is assumed to have Vitality (Tier 8 Prot Talent).
Paladin is assumed to have Sacred Duty (Tier 6 Prot Talent) and Combat Expertise (Tier 8 Talent).
I'm surprised that warrior is next to last for health. I had thought that they had more stamina boosting talents than paladins had. Interestingly, I seem to be wrong.
Health is druids strong point and the tier set seems to keep that. The druid tanking gear only has ~80% the stamina of the three plate wearing sets, but a larger stamina modifier which should keep this in the druids favor as item levels increase.
*****
OTHER NOTES:
- Can we please get the AP on the druid-only sets changed to strength? This would allow our gear to better synergize with Survival of the Fittest. (I'm fine with non-set items being AP, but can we at least get our set items to have Strength as it's a better stat for us.)
- Can we please get Mother Bear to no longer worry about party member amount and give the full bonus regardless? The only times when this would normally matter would be solo-questing (which seems silly to penalize) and for 2v2/3v3 arena (where ferals have yet to be strong players). The talent is deep enough in feral that the arena restoration druids will not pick it up, so arena doesn't seem a valid reason to restrict it.
This leaves solo-questing and undermanned-instance running as the only reasons where (and why) the party member amount for the mitigation amount would matter... neither of which seem sensible reasons/places to restrict druid tank survivability. (And as a talent that only boosts bears, it is very much a druid tank talent.)
Also... currently, we don't know if the druid is counted as a party member. Nor do we know if there is any range requirement (bad for spread out fights like how some guilds do Karathress), if mind-controls make the person not count (The Maker, Kael'thas, and more), deaths make a person not count (Gorefiend, Azgalor), disconnects make a person not count (power outages or simple random net issues), or could simply force an unbalanced group setup which could be bad for usage of group heals (8-man achievement for Kel'thuzad). Hence, many questions about this NYI talent.
*****
IN CONCLUSION:
With the currently low mitigation and avoidance, druids seem to be on the road to be the OOM tanks. While we do have the largest health pool from gear, it simply means that our healers have longer to heal us. As we have no means of increasing the healing done on us in bear form (we do for cat), this simply means a larger drain on our healers.
If nothing is changed, the notable gap that we can already see in the first
MuddBudd on
There's no plan, there's no race to be run
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
i took that for the mana reduction on nourish, i doubt i'll cast HT at all except for maybe NS/HT
Actually, you'd be surprised. That Glyph that reduces the healing/casting time/mana cost or w/e on HT is rather nice. Had a Tree Druid using it in a Naxx PuG. It heals for about 1k more than a Shaman's LHW, and costs about 100 mana less. Looked to be about 500ish or so mana, for around 4k-4.3k healing done.
i took that for the mana reduction on nourish, i doubt i'll cast HT at all except for maybe NS/HT
Actually, you'd be surprised. That Glyph that reduces the healing/casting time/mana cost or w/e on HT is rather nice. Had a Tree Druid using it in a Naxx PuG. It heals for about 1k more than a Shaman's LHW, and costs about 100 mana less. Looked to be about 500ish or so mana, for around 4k-4.3k healing done.
Except Nourish does the same exact thing as HT with the glyph, it's better to keep it unglyphed if you're resto and it gives you an opportunity for 2 sec HTs when you have a Nature's Grace proc that actually heal for a significant amount.
Hmm, Berserk's cooldown has been moved back to 3 minutes, but now only protects you from fear.
only fear? that's retarded. it's not JUST fear that causes feral druids problems in pvp, it's pretty much any CC, but I guess we do have 2 feral charges now though.
And more importantly, it seems as if the Berserk buff may not carry over into other forms, which means if you get fear immunity and are then snared, you'd have to shift out, and then lose your fear immunity. We should either get the full protection back(yes please) or it should carry over into all forms.
And more importantly, it seems as if the Berserk buff may not carry over into other forms, which means if you get fear immunity and are then snared, you'd have to shift out, and then lose your fear immunity. We should either get the full protection back(yes please) or it should carry over into all forms.
I was one of the few people who really tried to PvP in feral at 70 instead of going the healer route. It just seemed like our DPS output wasn't up to par with say a rogue in equivalent gear, especially considering we use bleeds instead of instant attacks.
Any non-melee class could just kite us forever till we were dead. Sure we have the shapeshift to kill snares thing but our damage just doens't cut it considering we have to shapeshift constantly to catch up.
well I think the change to maim making it pretty much like a stun plus damage will help, that way wee can keep wailing on em while they're maimed. Also the cat feral charge with the daze should help too.
Also the infected wounds change to make it so you only need to stack it twice for a decent movement speed debuff.
oh what the hell, i also just noticed that you can't use Tiger's fury while Berserk is active either.
Posts
Well yeah but what are you so worried about getting dispelled?
I mostly PvE, not a big PvPer, so I'm mostly just curious.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Um... you do realize that most of Druid heals are HoTs?
Roots, all your heal spells. You don't use HT in PvP, it also makes them gamble with a lifebloom dispel.
Don't be snide. I figured it was easy enough to refresh a HoT that got dispelled since they're low mana and instant cast that the points would be more useful somewhere else.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I guess it doesn't matter a whole lot because you'll be replacing a lot of that gear when you hit 70, but stacking STA is kinda silly as that increases the mana needed to heal you. Increasing AGI instead increases avoidance making things easier on healers.
I mean, ideally you should have a balance: you should have enough STA that a series of rapid parries or critical strikes doesn't suddenly turn you into a pulp, but mostly you should be focusing on AGI enchants on high-armor gear.
That's assuming you're grouping in bear form. If you're soloing, you should still focus more on AGI to increase damage done in cat and avoidance.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
It requires killing a level 63 elite mob.
That trinket will last you well into Heroics.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
One thing to keep in mind: that quest also rewards a pretty good tanking trinket, and those are rarer than DPS trinkets. The DPS trinket from this quest happens to be one of the better ones, though, so it's a matter of priorities.
Yeah, that's a good point. I forgot how much trouble I had getting decent tanking trinkets.
This quest might be a better idea.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Feral Talents
Infected Wounds (Tier 8 ) changed to: Your Shred, Maul, and Mangle attacks cause an Infected Wound in the target. The Infected Wound reduces the movement speed of the target by 8/17/25% and the attack speed by 8/17/25%. Stacks up to 2 times. Lasts 12 sec.
Restoration Skills
Healing Touch base healing reduces for all ranks. Mana cost also reduced.
Abolish poison now lasts 1 minute on the target. (Previously lasted 8 sec)
Restoration Talents
Furor (Tier 1) changed to: Gives you 20/40/60/80/100% chance to gain 10 Rage when you shapeshift into Bear and Dire Bear Form, and you keep up to 20/40/60/80/100 of your Energy when you shapeshift into Cat Form, and increases your total Intellect while in Moonkin form by 2/4/6/8/10%.
awwww yeah. :winky:
Like I said in my earlier post I just respec'd from resto. I was resto from about 45 to 67. I already did Cruels intentions (the first quest you linked) and got the healing rewards, as I didn't see a need for the other trinkets. At the time I was leveling with a warlock, who I no longer level with, so I had to spec feral to continue leveling, as leveling solo resto is miserable.
I have literally been gearing for feral for one level know, and don't think I'm doing to bad, with random drops, a few pieces bought on the AH, and quest rewards.
( http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Cenarion+Circle&n=Berrok )
My +sta enchants are mainly because how I do my enchants are based off of two things: 1) Do I have the mats for them 2) Do I get skill ups off them? If one of those two are met, I usually do it, especially if it's number two. (Hence the fiery on my stave)
I also happened to have the +10 sta armor kits sitting in my bank so I decided they'd get better use being used, than not.
I appreciate the comments, and yes when I group I'm 90% of the time the tank of an instance now, I've only been asked to DPS as catform once now.
I have two main goals with my druid.
1) Off tank, or tank Kara with my guild - Especially since our token bear isn't ours at all but a friend from another guild, who by the looks of things will be less available to tank for us as much as he has been. In truth he's been really nice helping us get through Kara, his guild is in BT/Hyjal etc, not sure how far, but I know they go once a week, and are now going to be doing ZA runs for bears I think on our kara days.
2) PvP heal, particularly arena with my cousin & folks.
Obviously I'll be spending some time on dailies to do the respec dance, but it shouldn't be too bad.
With both these goals in mind, I hope to be able to build a sweet PVE set, for duo'ing to 80 with my girlfriend, who plays a hunter.
But as it is now, my solo play seems much more productive in bearform, than in cat form.
This is just one tiny, tiny part of the awesome.
edit: another example, the lvl 80 hurricane is 50% melee, ranged and attack speed debuff and it seems to work on most bosses, as resto mine does 650 per tick and can crit for 950. As Balance it would do even more. I assume the boss part is a bug, but it is sicknasty for trash.
what spec are you using in the beta?
i was thinking of something like this http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?druid=00000000000000000000000000000230033302531500501353013510532001300000000000000000000
thoughts?
Do it. I've been leveling Moonkin since 40 and it is so good.
http://blue.mmo-champion.com/2/9679909397-tank-itemization--how-do-druids-compare.html
Spoilered for OMG huge
At this time, I am greatly concerned with the benefit of the Naxx 10-man sets for druids in comparison to the other classes. For each of the following sections, I am trying to focus on a particular element of survival for each of the tank classes to compare them in turn.
Unless specifically stated otherwise, I am ignoring the base values of the stats. I am ignoring the bonuses from talents or skills that has no bearing on the classes gains from gear. This is trying to look purely at the gains that each tanking class is seeing from gear.
*****
ARMOR
Assumed equipment: Full item level 200 epic gear. This means the filled slots are the Eight Armor Slots, Cloak, and Shield. (Shield is only for filled for warrior and paladin.)
Druid: 18667
DeathKnight: 21739
Warrior: 22623
Paladin: 22623
Druid is assumed to be in Dire Bear Form (base skill) with Thick Hide (Tier 2 Feral Talent).
Deathknight is assumed to be in Frost Presence (base skill) with Toughness (Tier 1 Frost Talent).
Warrior is considered to have Toughness (Tier 3 Protection Talent).
Paladin is considered to have Toughness (Tier 3 Protection Talent).
Druids being the lowest, by a significant amount, is an issue. (I would expect Deathknights to be the lowest for physical mitigation as their niche is mage-tanking.)
- But druids can get extra armor from their jewelry or weapon!
Currently, any armor on the jewelry or weapon costs itemization points. This results in those pieces having less stats for other areas. This results in a (mostly) unseen penalty to druid tanks.
- So how do we resolve this?
I don't know.
Leather with Cloak gives an armor total of 3394.
Plate with Cloak (no shield) gives an armor total of 13037.
Plate with Cloak and Shield gives an armor total of 20567.
The plate armor gives roughly 384% the armor of leather (no shield) or 605% the armor of leather (with shield).
Dire Bear currently gives a +400% armor modifier. This places the druid above the base armor from plate-wearer without a shield (or other armor modifiers like frost presence), but easily falls short of the armor of a plate-wearer with a shield.
Possible solutions to make bear armor roughly equal to plate w/shield armor would seem to be:
1. Increase the base armor of leather by 21%. (This will give a 20% armor boost to rogues and non-feral druids. This would likely be seen as an undesired buff to the non-ferals, from tank balancing.)
2. Increase the base armor modifier of Dire Bear Form to 505%. (This will allow for higher armor on arena restoration druids who are using bear form to soak up damage while their heal over time spells tick. Potentially undesired buff.)
3. Increase the armor modifier of Thick Hide to 33%. (Easily accessible talent to non-ferals thus still allowing a potential buff to arena restoration druids.)
4. Place or alter a deep feral talent to include a 21% armor boost. (Best place would be to replace the +60% dire bear AP bonus from Mother Bear, Tier 8 Feral talent, as it only gives a mere 72 AP with a second armor boosting talent.)
The fourth listed option would place further emphasis between a bear and cat spec for a druid, as Mother Bear gives no benefit to a cat druid. Also, please note that the listed percentages above are what are needed for them to equal the armor mitigation of a warrior or paladin. If it is desired for them to have higher base armor mitigation (due to a lack of block), the listed percentages would need to be increased.
*****
BLOCKING
Assumed gear is 5 pieces of the 10-man Naxxramus tanking set for each class. The shield is considered to have a block value of 211 (epic item level 200 shield).
Increased Chance to Block:
Paladin: 7.37%
Warrior: 5.58%
Increased Block Value (with shield):
Warrior: 335 (609)
Paladin: 515 (789)
*Warrior is assumed to have Shield Mastery (Tier 6 Protection Talent) and Vitality (Tier 8 Protection Talent).
*Paladin is assumed to have Shield Specialization (Tier 3 Protection Talent) and Divine Strength (Tier 1 Protection Talent).
Druids and Deathknights can not block, therefore can not gain any benefit here. This simply pushes the warriors and paladins further in the lead for physical mitigation. The block amounts of 600-800 with only 5 pieces of gear shows the amounts to be significant.
*****
AVOIDANCE
Assumed gear is 5 pieces of the 10-man Naxxramus tanking set for each class. Base avoidance values are not taken into account.
Druid: 8.36% (8.36% Dodge)
Death Knight: 14.28% (1.72% Miss, 6.4% Parry, 6.16% Dodge)
Warrior: 10.33% (1.74% Miss, 3.45% Parry, 5.15% Dodge)
Paladin: 7.55% (1.63% Miss, 2.35% Parry, 3.57% Dodge)
Druid assumes Survival of the Fittest Talent (Tier 6 Feral Talent).
Death Knight, Warrior, and Paladin have no relevant talents.
Paladin has the lowest avoidance, but they also have the highest blocking chance from gear. Due to their reactionary damage with holy shield and retribution aura, this seems unsurprising.
Druids are the second lowest, yet they don't (currently) have higher armor or blocking to bail them out.
So how can we resolve the low avoidance issue? (As the difference would simply increase as we extend into higher item levels, the 2% difference between druids and warriors from 5 pieces of gear would likely continue to increase.)
1. Change the itemization to better favor avoidance stats. (Druid feral set is trying to be a dps set and a tank set at the same time. Moving the itemization around to favor tanking would hinder the druid dps, unless druid dps was shifted to better resolve around the tank-style itemization.)
2. Change the druid agility-to-dodge ratio. (To get the talented druid avoidance in line with the warrior avoidance, you would need to reduce the Agility-to-Dodge ratio from ~40.4 : 1 to 32.7 : 1. If you extrapolate the current live dodge ratio to level 80 based on the degredation of the ratio, you would get ~30.5 : 1. This may be closer to the old values than might be liked.)
3. Give the druid some AP to defensive stat ability. (Warriors and Paladins get strength to shield block as a base ability. Death Knights get strength to parry rating as a base ability. Druids are the only tank class that is not getting some fashion of damage reduction through their Strength/AP. It would only need a 306 AP : 1% avoidance ratio to bring the druid talented avoidance up to warriors for avoidance.)
*****
HEALTH
Assumed gear is 5 pieces of the 10-man Naxxramus tanking set for each class. Base health is not taken into account.
Druid: 7123
Death Knight: 5220
Warrior: 5575
Paladin: 5981
Druid assumes Dire Bear Form with Heart of the Wild (Tier 6 Talent), Survival of the Fittest (Tier 6 Talent).
Death Knight has no modifying talents. (Unholy and Blood both have small 2-3% stamina boosts, but frost seems like it'd be the raid tank tree.)
Warrior is assumed to have Vitality (Tier 8 Prot Talent).
Paladin is assumed to have Sacred Duty (Tier 6 Prot Talent) and Combat Expertise (Tier 8 Talent).
I'm surprised that warrior is next to last for health. I had thought that they had more stamina boosting talents than paladins had. Interestingly, I seem to be wrong.
Health is druids strong point and the tier set seems to keep that. The druid tanking gear only has ~80% the stamina of the three plate wearing sets, but a larger stamina modifier which should keep this in the druids favor as item levels increase.
*****
OTHER NOTES:
- Can we please get the AP on the druid-only sets changed to strength? This would allow our gear to better synergize with Survival of the Fittest. (I'm fine with non-set items being AP, but can we at least get our set items to have Strength as it's a better stat for us.)
- Can we please get Mother Bear to no longer worry about party member amount and give the full bonus regardless? The only times when this would normally matter would be solo-questing (which seems silly to penalize) and for 2v2/3v3 arena (where ferals have yet to be strong players). The talent is deep enough in feral that the arena restoration druids will not pick it up, so arena doesn't seem a valid reason to restrict it.
This leaves solo-questing and undermanned-instance running as the only reasons where (and why) the party member amount for the mitigation amount would matter... neither of which seem sensible reasons/places to restrict druid tank survivability. (And as a talent that only boosts bears, it is very much a druid tank talent.)
Also... currently, we don't know if the druid is counted as a party member. Nor do we know if there is any range requirement (bad for spread out fights like how some guilds do Karathress), if mind-controls make the person not count (The Maker, Kael'thas, and more), deaths make a person not count (Gorefiend, Azgalor), disconnects make a person not count (power outages or simple random net issues), or could simply force an unbalanced group setup which could be bad for usage of group heals (8-man achievement for Kel'thuzad). Hence, many questions about this NYI talent.
*****
IN CONCLUSION:
With the currently low mitigation and avoidance, druids seem to be on the road to be the OOM tanks. While we do have the largest health pool from gear, it simply means that our healers have longer to heal us. As we have no means of increasing the healing done on us in bear form (we do for cat), this simply means a larger drain on our healers.
If nothing is changed, the notable gap that we can already see in the first
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
Correct.
I'm glad someone is crunching the numbers and that the thread is actually pretty constructive.
So far the Blizz response is just "This is an awesome thread" (they did their job for them!)
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
Actually, you'd be surprised. That Glyph that reduces the healing/casting time/mana cost or w/e on HT is rather nice. Had a Tree Druid using it in a Naxx PuG. It heals for about 1k more than a Shaman's LHW, and costs about 100 mana less. Looked to be about 500ish or so mana, for around 4k-4.3k healing done.
First Blood 85 Priest 80 Mage 85 Paladin 83 Druid 80 DK 85 Huntard 85 Shaman
"Tardo Wan" sounds like a Jedi that required 436 years to train and then killed himself by looking into his lightsaber while turning it on."
Except Nourish does the same exact thing as HT with the glyph, it's better to keep it unglyphed if you're resto and it gives you an opportunity for 2 sec HTs when you have a Nature's Grace proc that actually heal for a significant amount.
only fear? that's retarded. it's not JUST fear that causes feral druids problems in pvp, it's pretty much any CC, but I guess we do have 2 feral charges now though.
I was one of the few people who really tried to PvP in feral at 70 instead of going the healer route. It just seemed like our DPS output wasn't up to par with say a rogue in equivalent gear, especially considering we use bleeds instead of instant attacks.
Any non-melee class could just kite us forever till we were dead. Sure we have the shapeshift to kill snares thing but our damage just doens't cut it considering we have to shapeshift constantly to catch up.
Berserk just might be one of the better options, and was already designed.
Yeah, I just don't know if it's going to be enough, feral needed a lot.
Also the infected wounds change to make it so you only need to stack it twice for a decent movement speed debuff.
oh what the hell, i also just noticed that you can't use Tiger's fury while Berserk is active either.
This one may actually be a reasonable change for pvp. That combo gave a ridiculous amount of energy in a short time span.