Upcoming Feral Changes, Part III

Here is a thread where you can continue your discussion on the previously mentioned Feral druid changes.

I do urge you to confine the discussion to the armor and FAP changes only. The threads fill up too quickly as it is, so this is not a great place to chime in with totally unrelated questions, even druid ones.

The changes should be a buff for any druid not in full Naxx 25 gear (and I'm pretty sure that means ALL druids for the moment). One of the reasons we are announcing this change early is so you can make your preparations accordingly. A druid with every possible item from Naxx 25-level content loses about 3700 armor, but to be honest, those armor trinkets and weapons were so insanely good that they were likely going to be nerfed anyway.

Also note this is a reasonable buff for PvP, since you typically don't wear a bunch of +armor trinkets in those situations.

We don't want to make any changes to the way Feral druids work at this point to make them more like warriors. Now we also don't want druids to be inferior tanks to warriors, but we see no evidence that is happening at the moment and only speculation that it might happen in the future, at which point we will make additional changes if needed. You can say you don't believe we will make changes, which sort of ends the conversation. :(

The goal was not to make you ignore +armor trinkets. The goal was that a bear lacking those trinkets wouldn't be at such a disadvantage. We would rather you use a new level 80 trinket with a little bit of wasted block on it than a blue trinket from level 62 or something with silly amounts of armor.

It is fine, helpful even, to alert us to situations where you think bears might not be competitive at surviving encounters compared to other tanks. Our goal is they are roughly similar and we will continue to make changes if they are not. While I understand some of you want more different tanking stats to focus on, that is not our goal for the moment. We think it is perfectly possible given the current design to make bears able to stand up to the damage they need to. In other words, the numbers may still need to be tweaked on occasion, but there is nothing inherent to the calculations that says a tank must have block and parry as tanking stats in order for the math to work.

Some more details to help answer some of the questions we've seen:

-- Cloaks do have base armor which gets multipled by the bear bonus.
-- There is no multiplier on any bonus armor. Not the bear bonus. Not the talent bonuses.
-- There is a 2% armor benefit you can get from a metagem.
-- The ultimate bear modifier should be 4.7 (Dire Bear form) x 1.66 (Survival of the Fittest) x 1.1 (Thick Hide) x 1.02 (meta gem).
-- The best bear we can create in current itemization has 35,907 armor, which is 68.34% mitigation vs. level 83 bosses or 70.21% mitigation versus level 80 mobs.
-- Before these changes, you might have been able to build a bear with nearly 40,000 armor, but that relies on using Defender's Code and Origin of Nightmares, items of such ridiculous power that we were going to nerf them anyway before this change. (Now they're fine.)
-- Note how close that 40,000 armor is to the cap already. :(
-- We do have concerns block may be too good a stat for future raids, and we'll keep an eye on it.
-- Equipping a weapon will still boost Savage Roar (and everything else) the way it does currently.

Bottom line: armor was too good for druids. That was a blessing if you could get the items and a curse if you could not.

The counterarguments we get are: 1) Well, I can't be competitive without that armor, or 2) Give me something else to focus on then.

We think number one is a concern, but we're not convinced it's a problem at the moment and totally solvable if it gets to be. Number two is just a different design. We designed Ferals with fewer mitigation stats than other classes. You still have tanking stats, and gear can still provide upgrades. That's not to say it will always be the case, but we have no plans to change it at the current time.

Q u o t e:
Why'd you title it Upcoming Hunter Changes Part III if it's about feral druids?

Sorry hunters and druids. Windows like to be too helpful sometimes. :)

P.S. I am going to delete all of the posts that appropriately questioned my poor choice of titles, just so there is more room for responses on the actual issue. None of these posts did anything wrong and I appreciate you catching it.

Q u o t e:
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Q u o t e:
I would still love to see you explain why Holy Pallies can have gear designed for them, without making them use mail gear and baking in an armor conversion + any thing else they would need into a deep holy talent. Why are we the only class/spec to not get gear for themselves, even tier gear? It makes no sense in a gear driven game.
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This guy hit the nail on the head.

GC, how you can first post that this is not a nerf, and then admit that this change will in fact leave us with less armor than we otherwise would have had? How is that not a nerf? So our armor is gradually being reduced through the loss of bonus armor and the change to DB's armor modifier made back during beta, dodge has diminishing returns, we dont have block or parry, what exactly are we supposed to focus on as tanks? You said you wanted all tanks to be viable, it sounds like druids are just intended to be the last resort when there's no warrior around. Nobody's asking to be a warrior clone, I'm sure I'm not the only druid who has a prot warrior alt. But you can make sure we are every bit as good as they are.

It is a buff to 90% of druids. It is a nerf to a theoretical maximum that nobody currently has, and in truth wasn’t going to be able to get anyway because the armor on those items was so good that we were going to nerf them. In retrospect, a sneaky way to have handled this issue would have been to tell you we were going to nerf those items, then when there was outcry responded that we decided to change the way bear armor was calculated and not nerfed those items. I didn't choose that approach though.

The paladin healing armor is still something that doesn't quite fit in the new system and something we would like to change eventually. We have no announcements to change it at the moment though.

Q u o t e:
We need more scaling defensive stats. That is the root of the problem.

I’ll buy that you *want* more scaling stats. Nobody has demonstrated to our satisfaction that you need them.

Q u o t e:
To me, this sounds like you're saying "prove it to me" instead of proving it yourself. Its quite simple to do this, especially since you have more tools available then we do. Get a boss that does 10000 damage per swing at a pace of whatever you like. Get a warrior that is ilvl 187 geared (blues), 10 man geared (Naxx, obsidian, and Malygos) and then 25 man geared. The mitigation difference between the 4 tanks should be within 2-3% of each other. The difference should change LESS THAN 1% per upgrade (Blues -> 10 man -> 25 man). Also, the theorectical eHP (effective HP) and time to live should be similar between the tanks, which this test will also show!

Yes, we do that all the time. We haven't found Feral mitigation to be lacking, and my point is that even if we do, we can fix that by tweaking the numbers. Regardless of the outcome, it doesn't prove that the class needs more defensive stats on which to scale. If the bear mulitiplier is 700% (and there is no armor cap), then I promise you will scale very well with every piece of armor you pick up even if you have no other stats. You will be far and away the best tank and the easiest one to gear as well.

Like I said, you can argue that you would rather have lots of defensive stats because you just think it's more fun to pick up gear under that model. But now you're in the realm of wanting to change the class into something slightly different to suit your preferences. That still isn't off the table (almost nothing ever is), but it's a different sort of argument than saying "we *must* benefit from block and AP."

There are advantages and disadvantages to having a lot or a few stats to focus on. One of the disadvantages of fewer stats is diminishing returns on avoidance, but bears don't diminish on Dodge as fast as warriors in order to compensate for this. Part of the implementation of diminishing returns was to discourage warriors from stacking one stat, but that isn't an issue for druids.

I don't mean to sound argumentative in any of this. I just want to make sure I understand the issues. We were prompted to take a look at this by all of the discussions (and not just on this forum) about how few neck and trinket choices bears really had in all of WoW. By which I mean they helped us to understand the issue. We knew the situation felt a little off, but it was more off than we imagined, and we took steps to fix it.

Q u o t e:
defenders code has 850 armor. Is that considered bonus armor? if so than it does not get modified by thick hide and will continue to be 850 armor no matter what.

Defender's Code will grant 850 armor unless you have the meta-gem.

Q u o t e:
if the wording you posted in your previous post holds true, than obviously only the 8 item slots will be affected by SOTF, but what thick hide affects even with your new post is still ambiguous.

Thick Hide, Dire Bear and Survival of the Fittest only affect base armor. This is the armor on all the base armor on your gear. Leather never has bonus armor, so it's not complicated. Rings, necks, trinkets and weapons can have bonus armor. This is usually shown with the armor number in green, but confusingly, not always. Cloaks are complicated because they have base armor (which is multiplied) and sometimes bonus armor (which is not).

Q u o t e:
requesting further clarification of what exactly thick hide will and will not multiply.

Thick hide multiplies the base armor on leather and cloaks.

Q u o t e:
also, what exactly does the meta effect, from your wording it looks like it will affect everything.

The meta gem increases all your armor so it's just a 2% bonus to everything. You want this gem. Fortunately it is not a rare drop like some of the other gear so we know you can get it.

Q u o t e:
finally, in a previous post, you stated that all armor item budget would be reallocated on staves. For example my staff from heroic halls of lightning has 700 armor. Will it continue to have 700 armor that just no longer gets multiplied by anything, or will those item budgets be spent and the staff will gain (purely random here) say 20 agi and 30 stam?

It will get 700 armor that is not multiplied by anything (except the meta).

Q u o t e:
I just don't understand one thing. You said this won't effect any items value, rather just open up druids to using other weapons. Well, take these two staves:

http://www.wowhead.com/?item=39422
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=40280

They both have 2084 feral AP attached to them, but they both have different DPS. How are you going to calculate feralAP from the dps and expect to get the same number from each? One is going to be higher/lower, and will consequently gain/lose value. Are you going to adjust the DPS on all staves or something?

We'll change the dps to be the appropriate FAP. This change won't affect anyone but druids who currently don't care about the dps at the moment. And to answer another question, yes, if you really want to you can use fishing poles. Generally their stats are not great though.

I agree there is too much QQ, too much "Blizzard is trying to phase out bear tanks," and too much "you're doing it wrong." That is not appropriate for this forum and not anything I really read. We are concerned about the numbers not working out or you not having fun. Those are totally legit responses and the kinds of things we are interested in.

Armor
We changed the way armor worked because we thought it was a bad design that a druid with the Naxx 25 armor trinkets would be amazing and one lacking them would be far behind, perhaps to the extent that you wouldn't be invited to tank. As a few people have pointed out, the change to the armor calculation is as much of a nerf as not getting those trinkets to drop is a nerf.

Having armor as a good stat is fun. Having armor as such a good stat that you don't really care what else the item has on it is a problem. (And to be fair, I initially didn't realize the situation was quite as broken as it was, so thanks to all the persistent druids out there on this and other forums.) While some of you liked the element of having to get a couple of fairly rare drops to be a really good tank, other druids seem to understand the problem and agree with the change.

Stuff besides armor
The other part of the design is that without bonus armor being so ridiculously good for druids, you are left with fewer stats on which you can try to improve your tanking survivability. This is the "It may have been broken, but it's all we had" argument.

While I think it is a bit silly to totally discount Stamina ("because nobody wants to be a mana sponge") and Dodge ("because it has diminishing returns") as bad tank stats, overall we are sympathetic to the idea that it's fun to get drops that make you a better tank and druids don't get to do that as much as other classes. We're talking about other ways to scale your mitigation through gear. I don't have any announcements to make about how that would work, but you should keep a couple of things in mind: 1) We wouldn't want to do it through armor or dodge, since making it easier to get those values very high unsolves the problem again, 2) Adding additional mitigation of any kind would probably mean having to nerf Ferals in other ways (like say armor) to keep you from getting too far ahead of other tanks. But we need to see what block actually does for paladins and warriors too.