Archive for the ‘Feral Bear tanking’ Category

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Mar
02
2010

Cataclysm Gear changes for druids

So, they announced more details about their plan for Cataclysm gear, which has set off a posting frenzy across the WOW community.

Most of it was stuff we already knew. The summary is that they expect bear & cats to share gear, while they expect resto & moonkin to share gear. This sounds great in theory, but is likely going to cause problems in the long run, and it’s going to take months of Beta testing everything to get all the “nobs” tweaked right to pull this off.

However, please keep in mind that we have multiple months to get everything working right, and that there will be some variety & customization for our gear, and that the sky is definitely not falling (well, except for moonkin who can make stars fall out of the sky on demand).

Overall, they seem to be simplifying gear to a great extent. First, please realize that this is only a plan, and that some things will change between this post & Cataclysm being released. Here’s a rough summary and analysis, rather than a copy/paste of that thread. If you want to see what exactly they said, then go read the original thread. Below combines some of the knowledge from earlier posting, along with what was released today. In all cases, the existing stats on gear are going to change. However, you should wait until we know what individual pieces will look like before you start stocking up on additional gear. There will be several months to get things all straightened out before things go live. Cata is still a long time away.

For cats & bears, stats on leather armor will include:

  • Cat & bear gear will have roughly the same amount of stamina, which will be high like the other classes (so bear won’t need as much additional scaling for stam).
  • Leather gear for cats/bears will likely have a mix of: stam, agility, crit, haste, mastery, hit, & expertise.
  • Bears may need to gear for STR accessories for more tanking-related stats shared with other tanking classes (though bears still can’t block/parry), but this point still isn’t entirely clear. Dodge rating would probably only be on the STR items.
  • Resilience will still be good for PvP.
  • Haste will be a more attractive state for melee specs.
  • Reforging will help with getting your bear & cat sets to have the right combination of stats. However, reforging won’t be perfect (IE. you won’t be able to convert all of that yucky parry/block into dodge at a 1 to 1 conversion rate).

For Resto & Moonkin

  • We’re expected to gear basically the same between resto & moonkin (they said that before WotLK; we’ll see how well that actually works out).
  • Leather caster gear will have a mix of: Int, stam, spirit, haste, crit, & mastery.
  • Resto druids will be happy, and not much is changing for them in terms of gear stats, and everything is happy in tree-land.
  • Moonkin (and elemental shaman) won’t have hit rating itemized on their leather/mail. Instead, we’ll have talents that convert spirit to hit rating. We can still use DPS caster accessories with or without hit on them as needed.
  • It is likely that there will be some leather caster gear without spirit on it (I really hope so). If moonkin ends up with too much spirit (ie. hit rating) from gear, we can either complain to get more non-spirit items, or we can suck it up and reforge (and take the 50% stat penalty) to convert spirit to another more useful stat. However, until we see what happens to the gear, we just have to trust that in most cases, gear will be itemized in a way that makes sense. Also, if other casters end up with too much +hit rating gear, they will have to do the same thing, so it should balance out in the end.
  • My bet is that we’ll end up needing to reforge a couple pieces of gear to get a decent set, but I’m hoping that reforging works out right in the end.
  • We lose mastery if we pick up cloth instead of leather.
  • Spell penetration & resilience will be available for PvP gear.
  • It should be harder for moonkin to reach the hit/haste/crit caps in Cataclysm compared to now.

More About Reforging (ie. what people should be concerned about right now):

Reforging is really what all of druids dreams for the future are tied up in. Bears will need reforging to turn Warrior tanking items into druid tanking items, or to turn rogue leather into tanking leather. Moonkin still won’t have gear perfectly itemized for them, and will need reforging to turn healing gear into moonkin gear (especially for balancing around the spirit/hit cap). For bear druids, there needs to be some way to turn STR accessories into better things for bears without losing itemization points along the way, since bears are likely going to be expected to use them (ie. parry & block rating need 1 to 1 conversions to dodge for bears, or bears will be more limited in the gear they can tank in).

In conclusion:

This isn’t really anything super new or shocking. We have had huge changes to our stats every expansion, and we have survived every time in the past. Cataclysm will bring new and exiting changes, and nothing marked for Cataclysm is set in stone yet. They could make it through part of testing and realize something just isn’t working right, and completely change it to something different. That’s just part of the game, and we’ll adapt just like we always do.

Posted in Cataclysm, Druid - General, Feral Bear tanking, Feral DPS Cat, Moonkin Balance DPS, Restoration Healing Trees | 6 Comments »

Nov
02
2009

The chill of IC: Less dodge for tanks & more healing for healers?

Okay, so I’ve held off from posting about the mechanic in Icecrown Citadel that reduces tank dodge by 20% (Icewell Radiance). Personally, I don’t think it’s going to have that big of an effect on druids (either the tanking kind or the healing kind). And yes, I do care, since one of my guild’s main tanks is a feral druid bear.

Why it’s not bad for Bear tanks was already covered over at Think Tank, and he said it better than I could. I still wanted to go over a few points, especially for the healer crowd.

  • In short, it hurts all tanks, and it doesn’t seem to hurt bears more than other tanks.
  • While this same thing happened in Sunwell, IC is going to be much less difficult than Sunwell. So, it’s not going to hurt as bad as it may have hurt in Sunwell.
  • The encounters will be balanced around missing that dodge rating. This means that the encounters will do slightly less damage than they would have done without the debuff. If it’s part of the tuning process, it’s a help (by reducing spike damage) rather than a hindrance, especially with all the advantages .
  • Next, it will only be in Icecrown Citadel, so people tanking Naxx, Ulduar, & ToC won’t have to deal with it. It just means you will have to gear up before tanking IC, but I wouldn’t expect someone wearing blues to survive even without the Radiance debuff.
  • So, my conclusion is that the sky isn’t falling for bear tanks in Icecrown Citadel.

Sunwell Radiance also benefits druid healers, or at the very least it doesn’t hurt them.

I want to put in this quote here real fast:

The whole point of this change is so bosses can hit less hard but more often, for the same damage over time but with fewer deadly spikes

  • What this means is that when tanks take more rapid, smaller hits, it actually benefits HOTs. A dodge meant that our HOTs didn’t tick that swing. A smaller direct hit means that our HOTs are more likely to tick more often, and that those HOTs are going to be more meaningful. In this case, the glyph of rapid rejuv may really help tank healing in some fights where you get more ticks more often (needs more experimenting)…
  • Since druids don’t have damage prevention spells or effects, this benefits druid healers. Fewer deadly spikes means that there is less reliance on the damage prevention to save the day (so to speak).
  • Other healing classes benefit in other ways, since less spiking damage to tanks means that you can possibly use your longer cast time heals more often without threat of death.
  • When tree druids are primarily assigned to raid healing in 25-man raids, it doesn’t matter what kind of damage the tank is taking, realistically. However, in 10-mans (especially), druids are more likely to tank heal, since HOTs plus nourish is so powerful, and you may not have a paladin healer to keep up the tank(s).
  • Less random “omg he 2-shot you” deaths benefits everyone. Also, if it’s the same damage spread out over more hits, then it’s not a different amount of total healing done, so you probably wouldn’t know about this dodge change if you didn’t read about it places like here…

So, in conclusion, this change looks bad, but if the intent is just to spread the same amount of damage over more hits, druids (both the furry and the leafy kind) will not be disproportionately penalized compared to other classes. So, yay for druid fun in Icecrown Citadel! I’ll see you there!

I don’t normally raid on the PTR, because I like having one area of the game where I don’t burn out super fast (and seeing all the bosses on the PTR means that it takes out all the thrill of going into the dungeon for the first time on Live). I ducked into IC one day to look at the gunship battle with Fimlys from twisted nether (apparently, you can’t 2-man the 10-man gunship battle, lol). I am keeping a pretty close eye on the reporting of what is happening in those dungeons, and I’m really excited about some of the new boss mechanics (like the boss where we have to heal the dragon back up to full sounds like so much fun).

Posted in Feral Bear tanking, Patch 3.3 WotLK, Restoration Healing Trees | 3 Comments »

Oct
08
2009

I have 9 Eyes! Tier 10 gear & set bonuses for all Druids (Updated)

A lot of stuff happened yesterday, with new patch notes, new Tier 10 info, and a lot of other posts & goodies that need to be covered. I’m going to spread out my analysis of the news over a couple days instead of making one big massive post (because this post is big & massive enough already as it is!).

Okay, so first I need to cover how much the helm for Tier 10 disappoints me. I like the rest of the set well enough, and I can deal with the shoulders eating people… but the helm is a little too much. Anytime people complain about the looks of their Tier 10 sets, I’m already saying “But I have NINE EYES!” I would have been okay with the healm if the face plate wasn’t really just 9 bug eyes glowing and starting at me… I’d rather be able to see my actual real face stick out the front… I have to say (yet again), thank Elune we can turn off helm graphics!

Druid_Tier10

Okay! On to the set bonuses!

Resto:

  • Druid T10 Restoration 2P Bonus – The healing granted by your Wild Growth spell reduces 0% less over time.
  • Druid T10 Restoration 4P Bonus (Rejuvenation) – Each time your Rejuvenation spell heals a target, it has a 2% chance to jump to a new target at full duration.

I thought Blizzard was going to push us away from spamming rejuv & wild growth. However, it’s quite possible that these set bonuses are going to make us spam rejuv & wild growth even more. In this context, a shorter rejuv makes sense, since more ticks means that the 4-piece bonus becomes a lot more powerful. I’m not sure how the set bonus interacts with the duration increase from Nature’s Splendor. If it takes into account HOT overhealing ticks, then we’ll probably get one rejuv for about every 10 that we cast (though it’ll be really random), and my quick napkin math says it should make up for about half of the rejuv ticks we lost in the nerf. I started a forum discussion on the set bonus here. For the 2-piece bonus, the text should translate to something like: all ticks heal the amount of the first tick, and don’t reduce in powerfulness over time. The Wild Growth bonus is one I’m pretty excited about.

Balance

  • UPDATED: Druid T10 Balance 2P Bonus – When you gain Clearcasting from your Omen of Clarity talent, you deal 15% additional Nature and Arcane damage for 6 sec.
  • UPDATED: Druid T10 Balance 4P Bonus - Your critical strikes from Starfire and Wrath cause the target languish for an additional 5% of your spell’s damage over 4 seconds.”

The 2-piece bonus I actually also find disappointing, even if it will be a DPS increase (but Graylo estimates only a 2% increase. First, Omen of Clarity is a talent in the restoration tree & NOT the balance tree, so it feels out of place (even if most moonkin get it). Second, it’s incredibly random. As Boize said on the Moonglade blog, You could get 2 procs close to each other, or you could go 2 minutes without seeing a proc.  There are also non-spells (like crafting) that it procs from more regularly than our actual damage spells, but the duration isn’t really long enough to make use of trying to force it to proc at certain times. It’s an interesting idea, but I don’t very much like it from a conceptual point. Moonkin druids already have too many random forces influencing their damage dealing, and so I tend to be against more randomness in an already random system.

The NEW 4-piece moonkin bonus is somewhat interesting. It looks like crits would be putting up a DOT that ticked for 5% of the damage done over 4 seconds. This would interact very strangely with starfire’s super high crit rate  & would need to stack at least twice to not just continuously over-write the buff without actually having it do any extra damage. They have had other buffs like this need to stack twice to work (I remember a holy paladin HOT proc that had the same problem).

Feral bear/cat

  • Druid T10 Feral 2P Bonus – Your Swipe (Bear) and Lacerate abilities deal 20% additional damage and the cost of your Rip ability is reduced by 10 energy.
  • Druid T10 Feral 4P Bonus – Your Enrage ability no longer decreases your armor and instead decreases all damage taken by 12%, and the periodic damage done by your Rake ability can now be a critical strike.

The feral set bonuses are all good bonuses. Bears deal more damage, and get a new defensive cooldown (enrage). Turning Enrage into a defensive cooldown that gives rage & reduces damage done to you is a really nice thing for regular (or emergency) use. Cats will use less energy for rip & get critical strikes from rake. With such a high crit rate for cat druids stacking agility, crits from rake should be a really nice damage boost. My guild’s feral druid (Lauraya) was really happy about the possibility of these feral bonuses. His only complaint was that Enrage would give him yet another button he had to manage for tanking, but if that’s the worst complaint, then I’m sure bear tanks everywhere will be able to handle it (you can doo eeet!).

Posted in Druid - General, Feral Bear tanking, Feral DPS Cat, Moonkin Balance DPS, Patch 3.3 WotLK, Restoration Healing Trees | 17 Comments »

Aug
23
2009

Druids in Cataclysm – What should be our 3 new spells?

I was going to do a recap of the druid things from Blizzcon, with a shorter summary than my 8 epic posts. However, I think I may put that off until tomorrow, since I still need to dig through some more information first. I had something else much more interesting to think about today than just rehashing information we already know. I reported Friday that during one of the DTV interviews, we were told that each class will get 3 new abilities in the next expansion (cataclysm).200px-WildKinArt

So, I wanted to spend some time speculating about what abilities the druid class needs. The excitement of a new expansion means the excitement of being able to talk about what the tools and talents of future druids should look like. With cataclysm, it really feels like the developers are taking what we know about the game, turning it upside down, and shaking it repeatedly.

At this point, I don’t see resto druid healing needing that much more help – we already have a bigger & more diverse tool set for healing than we can actually use at one time, and adding more healing abilities to increase complexity probably isn’t the way to go.We also got multiple new heal spells over the last 2 expansions (lifebloom & nourish – along with wild growth from talents). The resto healing tool set feels mostly complete, aside from maybe a revamp needed for tranquility – but at least that’s an already existing spell.

Cat form is also already totally complicated with a ton of buttons to press, and adding another button for cat form’s DPS rotation might not help game play that much – unless it was something mainly designed for PvP play, where the complicated PvE rotation mostly leaves cats pretty frustrated.

That leaves moonkin and bear form as the best candidates for the main focus of the 3 new abilities.

Moonkin would probably be a lot better if they got at least one or two new spells. I’m not 100% sure what spells moonkin need at this point, but they definitely need something. If the expansion doesn’t come with a good moonkin DPS spell, then the spec is probably going to drop out of favor more than it already is. At least one new moonkin spell should be an instant-cast single-target with a short cooldown (like lava burst), where it has an interesting interaction with our other spells, and we can use it on the move without having to worry about breaking crowd control with our AOE, or having other undesired effects.

There has also been a lot of rumbling about maybe needing another nuke spell for moonkin form, maybe something that has a secondary effect to increase the diversity of our tool set. Only having 4 single-target damage spells is really super limiting in terms of how they can make the rotation interesting and complex. Switching back and forth between wrath and starfire (with eclipse) is a neat idea, but wrath and starfire are basically the same type of ability, just with different magic types (which doesn’t mean much), and different cast times. There is nothing inherently interesting about switching between starfire & wrath. Refreshing moonfire & insect swarm adds a little more complexity, but not really – and refreshing them when we’re on the run just feels like it wastes mana if we are moving around too often. Eclipse is also a frustrating mechanic because you have no control over when (or how often) it will proc, meaning that it tends to proc for me at the worst possible times such that my DPS feels like it’s out of my control. When heroism hits, other classes pop a bunch of cooldowns, and just about the only one that moonkin can pop is treants – and then I just have to pray that Eclipse will be kind to me (and most of the time, I’m just not that lucky).

They could also perhaps introduce a new moonkin spell that is more PvP focused to help moonkin stay competitive in arena PvP play – where the limited PvE tool set becomes even more limited with mobility being a really big problem for moonkin’s playstyle.

For bear form, it might be nice to add more complexity, more cooldowns to pop – either defensive or offensive. Or, maybe another spam-able ability that isn’t tied to your next hit (like maul is). I think that our reliance on things like swipe for single targets or faerie fire as something you use to generate threat leans towards bear needing something else in it’s damage repertoire. Like moonkin, it’s also pretty much limited in the range of abilities that it has to use. It’s not quite as limited as moonkin, but it definitely has a less diverse set of tools than cat or resto has. As much as I’d like to see all 3 new abilities be for moonkin, bear form could definitely use at least a little lovin’ in cataclysm.

What new spells/abilities do you think druids need in Cataclysm?

It’s also possible that epic travel form would be one of our three new abilities, in which case – I definitely think bear & moonkin form should get the two “real” new spells.

Posted in Cataclysm, Druid - General, Feral Bear tanking, Moonkin Balance DPS | 31 Comments »

Aug
04
2009

Patch day!!!

Okay, so Blizzard decided to give me a huge birthday present (and I was so excited that I spelled “patch” wrong in the title). I’m updating this thread over the course of the day with all my 3.2 stuff (most of which I have ready to go). So, if you check back later, there will probably be more as I collect all the patch day info.

  • Here’s the post where I wrote about 3.2 resto specs. There are a couple builds here where I recommended ways to drop talents to pick up the new (improved) Empowered touch talent. Blizzard wants us to be using nourish a little more, and a 20% healing increase on an already powerful spell is probably worth listening to.
  • Travel form is trainable at level 16 instead of 20. Low level druids should visit their friendly trainer for a special surprise. Regular flying form is also available now at 60 instead of 68 (and there’s all sorts of regular mount changes, too!).
  • The feral DPS changes in the patch notes look like a big deal, but they shouldn’t be more than a couple percent reduction (with some estimates as low as 1 to 3% decrease).
  • I changed the moonkin leveling strategy a bit, but haven’t yet changed the feral one.
  • Innervate is changing again (on a 3 minute cooldown for half the mana, instead of a 6 minute cooldown). With the changes to replenishment, you will want to use it earlier in the fight so that you can get off at least two when you need it. It also means that you can use it on someone else and yourself in the same fight if you time it right, too.

Additional resources (why repeat them if I can link them?):

I’m going to work on expanding this a little more over the day as I can.

Cat barber shop

Posted in Druid - General, Feral Bear tanking, Feral DPS Cat, Moonkin Balance DPS, Patch 3.2 WotLK, Restoration Healing Trees | 4 Comments »

Jun
30
2009

PTR for 3.2 means constant changes – here's a look at a few recent developments

Okay, so I blinked and the PTR patch notes for 3.2 changed again.

It looks like some of the tier 9 set bonuses may have been place holders, or that they listened to feedback and changed some of them.

Only 2 druid set bonuses are changing to:

  • Druid T9 Feral 4P Bonus – Reduces the cooldown on Barkskin by -12.0 sec and increases the critical strike chance of Rip and Ferocious Bite by 5%.
  • Druid T9 Balance 4P Bonus – Increases the critical strike chance of your Starfire and Wrath spells by 3%.

So, the tanking bonus lets you use barkskin more often, instead of increasing how much it reduces damage. I believe that the rip & FB crit increase didn’t change.

The balance druid set bonus change isn’t really a surprise, since the changes to balance DPS overall means that giving crit to only one of the two spells would make it a bad set bonus. So, with this change, it should (more likely) be a worthwhile set bonus. However, it’s interesting to see that the feral bonus is 5% crit to 2 abilities, whereas the balance bonus is 3% crit to 2 abilities. At the very least, we’ll be able to benefit from the set bonus for both solar & lunar eclipse portions, so it’s probably better than before, but Graylo is already crying big tears of angry about the 4-piece moonkin bonus.

Other changes worth noting:

  1. They made the warrior 2-piece tank bonus decrease the coodown on taunt, so it’s more similar to the druid feral tanking 2-piece bonus. I’m really not sure why they needed to decrease the cooldown on all the class’ taunts right after they put taunt on diminishing returns. It doesn’t really make sense to me. However, having this as the set bonus for all the tanking classes at least makes it “balanced.”
  2. They changed the way that boss tokens will drop for the coliseum, so that the tokens will let you buy any of the set pieces (but the tokens will still have the class restrictions). The token you get from the first boss you can use to replace any of the armor pieces (helm, chest, legs – doesn’t matter which piece you get).
  3. Also, it looks like with new faction changes, druids may be able (in the future) to change from Night Elf to Tauren (and vice versa). I really don’t like the idea of faction changes, but since Blizzard has been caving in on the other ideas people have had (ie. paid server transfers, sex changes, name changes, et cetra), I guess it was just a matter of time before they tried this. It likely won’t make it out for 3.2, but it really just makes me sad…. My druid will NEVER, EVER change factions (I’m more likely to just finish leveling my tauren druid if I wanted to switch factions). I can’t imagine changing my druid’s race from what it is right now. Your race and your faction are just as important as what your class is, and changing that huge decision to something else just seems to trivialize what this game is about.
  4. Also, my favorite change of all is the change they are making to items in the raid dungeons -> you can trade them to other raid members for a short amount of time (IF they were there for the kill!). Have you ever had a raid leader that just couldn’t seem to assign loot to the right person? Were your guild members constantly opening tickets to trade items to the right person? Yes? then this change is going to save your raid from an awful lot of frustration!
  5. Also, does your raid need an extra day (or few!) to kill another boss? Well, good news! You’ll now be able to extend your raid lockout timer, to give you a little extra time for those pesky new bosses that just won’t die before Tuesday’s reset!
  6. Looks like the purple with green hair NE bear form finally made it to the PTR.

Posted in Feral Bear tanking, Feral DPS Cat, Moonkin Balance DPS, Patch 3.2 WotLK | 5 Comments »

Jun
25
2009

New PTR druid form pictures – Mostly Night Elf

Okay, so here’s a handful of the pictures I took from the PTR today (my pre-made druid got copied over before my live-druid did), with the help of some unsuspecting druids who stayed still long enough for me to take pictures with them. You don’t realize how awesome they are until you’ve actually seen them in action. So, these pictures don’t really do them justice. I also took some rear-end pictures, since most people just post faces. We need to know what we’re going to have to stare at for the next… several years!

So, here’s a small assortment of random pictures. I took a lot more, but like I said, you really need to see them for yourselves. They have really awesome movement. The Night Elf cats are way better than the preview made them look, and I’m willing now to take back all the bad things I said about Night Elf cat form before. The preview just failed to capture their level of awesomeness. I’m really happy with how they turned out in-game.

You should be able to get bigger images by clicking on the thumbnails of each of the 6 pictures below.

Posted in Druid - General, Feral Bear tanking, Feral DPS Cat, Patch 3.2 WotLK | 8 Comments »

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