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2008-07-29 00:37:20
Feral Concerns in WotLK
There's a few things bugging the feral druid community right now and it would be nice to get a response on the following issues:

First we have the age old scaling problem. Cat form has never scaled well, not at 60, not at 70, and right now there seems to be little to address these issues. Sure our talent trees have new talents that will help us output more damage, but every classes talent trees have had similar improvements and with the big nerf to agility I don't see feral druids realistically being competitive in a raid setting. Kalgan said we would be getting a “Dire Cat Form” at WWI and many of us thought this form would address our scaling issues, however we were recently told by Koraa that we would not be getting a Dire Cat form and said: “I think what Kalgan meant was that we intend to do different texture variances for Druid forms, including Cat form.” So without a Dire Cat Form to look forward to, we need something to address our scaling problems.

Second, we have no idea what is going on with our gear, but many of us are worried. With all this talk about condensing armor types are feral druids going to be stuck in rogue gear? What about bear form? So far in WotLK I haven't seen any leather with bonus armor on it, which would be a massive nerf to bear mitigation. I know the developers have some new plans for tanking in WotLK as far as tanks being able to deal more damage, but it would be nice to know if they intend mitigation to be less of a factor. Also with all this rogue gear on, will our tiny mana pool be able to cast any spells at all? I know in a raid setting it doesn't matter much, but for everything else I very much enjoy being able to use all of my abilities, not just the ones in the feral tree. (And on a side note, what is up with new ranks of spells costing way more than the ranks we have now?) Another concern I have had for a while is that being a hybrid means that we have to regear completely should we decide to respec and try something new, this is not so much an issue now for balance and restoration druids, but I feel like ferals got left out in the cold here. Seeing all deathknight abilities (whether they are spells or melee attacks) getting to scale off the same stats makes me a little jealous.

The last concern I have is about PvP as a feral druid. It's hard to judge right now what our issues will be at level 80, but it feels like we are going to be pretty dependent on our 5 min cooldown Berserk to get stuff killed. I am also very concerned with the amount of burst damage almost every class seems to be capable of now (ferals included). When BC came out it also carried a huge increase in HP as well as the new defensive stat “resilience”, are we going to be seeing similar HP increases or another defensive stat added to the game to offset the amount of burst damage many classes are capable of now?
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Deep
2008-08-02 12:11:31
Re: Feral Concerns in WotLK
The design is for bears to be viable, end-game main tanks. The design is for cats to be viable, end-game melee dps. In both cases you are going to need the right talents, good gear, skill and companions who can back you up -- I don't mean to imply raiding will be easy. :)

If you want to do a little tanking and dps, you probably won't be as optimal at either, though you'll probably always be better at switching between the two than other classes. In order to be as good at tanking as the other classes, you might have to give up a few talents that maximize your dps, and vice versa. This is a good thing -- it lets you choose to actually be a main tank.

We are adding a new class to Lich King, as well as improving the raid viability of specs such as Arcane mage, Survival hunter and Balance druid. That means you have 30 available specs for 25 slots. There are two ways to design around this problem. One is that there are 25 mandatory specs and 5 that shouldn't be raiding. Boo. A more fun, interesting and ultimately fair direction is that you actually have some choices in who to bring. Imagine running a raid with no warrior tanks at all. :)

Don't worry about your bears. The armor and other changes were done to fix itemization issues, not to nerf druids. You've already gotten the ability to drink pots in bear form and benefit from weapon enchants and windfury. We have plenty of knobs to turn to make sure you can do your job even better than you could in LK.
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Ghostcrawler
2008-08-04 23:15:20
Re: Feral Concerns in WotLK
The changes made to things like armor were done mostly to solve itemization problems. We didn't make them to nerf Ferals (or anyone). We did them because we started to consider bosses who needed to drop 30 different pieces of armor (or tokens to trade for them or whatever) because classes and even specs were heading off into distinct niches. You'll get something to make up for it. No, you aren't there yet.

We're not entirely happy with the way the Feral ended up in BC. The idea was that you could be a decent tank and a decent melee dps class, so Ferals were something you wanted to bring if you weren't the kind of guild that swapped different people out for every boss. But I don't think "convenience factor" is ultimately a great value to bring to a raid. The problem was we were kind of stuck because if we made Ferals end-game tanks and amazing melee, then the rogues were screwed, because they couldn't go respec to tank or heal.

But now we have a chance to add some new talents, and we'd like for some of them to be the kind that let a druid declare that she is more of a cat or more of a bear. It doesn't have to be shoehorning two whole talent trees into one, but even offering a few choices would go a long way.

I didn't mean to sound condescending. The pot example was to offer that we haven't forgotten about bears. My point was NOT: hey, you lost armor but gee you got health stones, so why all the QQing? It was cool to see those big armor numbers on bears, and we have some plans for how to replace them (and not just with pots).

The DK gets a lot of attention because it has a lot of catching up to do. There were no DKs in UBRS or MC or TK or even Arathi Basin. Nobody knows how their abilities and power system are going to work so we feel like we have to cover a lot of the ground that was explored literally years ago for some of these other classes.

We will be really disappointed if there aren't bears main tanking Naxx and later raids, and cats that if not consistently as high as rouges, are at least a lot closer than they are now.
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Ghostcrawler
2008-08-05 14:03:44
Re: Feral Concerns in WotLK
Q u o t e:
The implication of GC's post is that they are going to try to throw somethign at us and wait til we are being regularly sat at of naxx raids before they do something about it. The fact is that they need to really look at druid's now and not then before fixing us.


I didn't mean to leave that impression. Druids are not all done and ready for live. We need to "really look" at druids before ship. As I have posted in other forums though, we don't generally look at all classes all at once. We work very collaboratively, which unfortunately means classes get appraised one at a time. (We don't yet feel like we're out of time though -- no worries there so far.)

Q u o t e:
what i got from the post is that they were disappointed that ferals in one spec could tank well and dps well (their words not mine) and so want feral druids to "specialize" in either feral tanking or feral dps through talents which sacrifice the ability in the other form.


Someone reference the druid nerfs in BC. I think this was partially the reason for them (as well as bears being able to do a lot of dps as bears, IIRC). We don't think druids NEED to choose bear or cat. But it would be nice if you had the option of choosing bear > cat or cat > bear. Going that route lets us justify your being an awesome tank (because you're giving up some dps) or vice versa. I don't think anyone is arguing (I hope) that all Ferals with any spec need to be as good at tanking as prot warriors and as good at dps as rouges just by shapeshifting and swapping gear. I think we all know the outcome of such a design. But there is a difference between "as good as rogues" and "worth bringing on a raid."

Q u o t e:
and i know that dps druids are eager to be doing alot better dps at the expense of tanking, but that train of though is going to lead to either feral bloat or a complete watering down of talents so that they just affect one form as others have suggested. this seems rather shortsighted and takes away from being a feral druid which is a single talent tree that can do two functions, i may tank more than i dps or vice versa but i'm not a feral cat/tank i'm a feral druid.


We don't think it needs to be bloat or watered down talents. We think just a few talent changes or new talents could accomplish this. The alternative is the model where every Feral is an okay tank and an okay melee class who gets brought on raids for Innervate and battle rez.

Q u o t e:
Tanking: In order to make bears MT later raids, we need to not only keep up with the joneses, we need to surpass our current levels. Most use Warrior MT's TBC, as I'm sure you know. If you want to spread the MT'ing around, then Feral Druids, Paladins, and yes Death Knights need massive buffs to their tanking, on a scale that Blizzard doesn't seem to be close to approaching. Blizzard will also need to stop making gimmick fights that favor warriors like Illidan, Reliquary, and every single raid boss that fears.


Yes, totally agree. At the moment (meaning in LK) I think paladins are close to or surpassing warriors. Ferals and DKs need some more attention. I want to stress that we have made virtually NO attempt yet to line up the tanks and compare their abilities, threat, mitigation and dps. We are not yet at that stage. It's coming, and we will get even more data when everyone is at level 80 in the beta.

Q u o t e:
Are we going to have a repeat of bosses like Kael'thas and Illidan where druids can't tank them because we can't block and/or spell reflect? Are we going to continue to have encounters that overtly favor warrior mechanics in that manner without encounters that similarly favor other tanks in the MT role? This is relevant to all of the tank classes, not just druids. I think we're all assuming some kind of caster gimmick raid encounter that will be massively easier or just plain impossible without a deathknight.


As far as gimmick fights, in order to have four viable tank classes, we're just going to have to avoid that kind of encounter. We hope we can do so without making every boss fight feel too similar. We have no problem if paladins are better at some bosses than others, so long as a guild that runs with a druid MT isn't months behind the paladin MT guild because the encounter is so hard without the paladin.
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Ghostcrawler
2008-08-05 22:45:26
Re: Feral Concerns in WotLK
Q u o t e:
My concern is much like Golana's. Druid's up until now have depended on their innate flexibility as their group buff. This will no longer be unique and the other classes offer better side benefits in the terms of buffs or debuffs. What nitch Feral's will occupy is difficult, and in a very crowded field especially in which the middle ground between tank and dps is becoming so narrow?


Q u o t e:
ok, i'll bite. say ferals do have to make a slight choice between feral tanking and dps, does this mean that druids will then also have more utility to line up with the raid wide buffs that other classes are getting?


The best solution is that Ferals bring something great to the raid. Imagine Mark of the Wild was as good as Blessing of Kings, but they didn't stack. Now a druid or a paladin is a great addition. Or imagine the health return from Imp LotP was at the level of Blood death knight or Shadow priest. Now bringing a Feral makes it noticably easier on the healers. These are just examples, not changes I'm announcing. :)

I do think the Feral flexibility will still count for something, as will unique abilities like Innervate. But we'd like the Raid of the Future (tm) to be one where you need various roles filled, but have options for how to fill them. Ferals can fill tank roles or melee roles (or both!) and can also supply the X raid buff. It would be nice if every spec of every class could bring a version of some raid buff.

Q u o t e:
My suggestion would be to offer a near end of tree heavy 5 point talent that would be chosen for flavor that would define the spec. To split the rest of the tree into cat/bear seems a waste now, and the class as a whole should still play very fluidly between the two, just with that 'something extra' at the end. Those flavor talents would be a reason also why a raid would 'pick bear' or 'pick cat'.


Yeah, that's the kind of thing I'm talking about.
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Ghostcrawler
2008-08-08 17:02:50
Re: Feral Concerns in WotLK
Q u o t e:
Now I'm not saying that ferals aren't benefiting from these changes, but they're very very mediocre compared to the other two melee hybrids. I just wanted to point this out. Hopefully this was taken to account when it was done so that feral benefited else where.


We're not done with Ferals. :)
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Ghostcrawler
2008-08-12 14:33:23
Re: Feral Concerns in WotLK
Q u o t e:
We currently do not have the capacity to do so. EVERY talent now effects both forms. We cannot pick the "bear-only" talents if we want to specialize in tanking, because there are none. Every single talent has a bonus to both bear and cat forms. There are no talents that we can drop which lowers our dps effectiveness without also lowering our tanking effectiveness.

Please stop feeding us contradictory design philosophies.


We're not done with Ferals. The builds you get are often a week or more behind ours, and that assumes that a designer actually went in and made changes. It's impossible for us to balance the threat and mitigation of the 4 tanking classes until we can take a look at the level 80 characters, wearing raid-level gear, and fighting a raid-level encounter. None of that content is done yet.

I said above that I think the old design of "You can't ever be a MT, but you get to be a terrific OT" feels dated. But in order to be a MT as good as a paladin or warrior, you can't also dps as well as a Fury warrior with the same spec. I don't think anyone is asking for that, but realistically the only way to address is it with talents. (And before someone asks, if you like the OT role, you can still do that too.)

I'm fine bouncing between druid, warrior, paladin and death knight forums posting "You will be able to MT Ulduar without gimping your raid" every few days if that's what it takes. :)
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Ghostcrawler
2008-08-12 15:18:37
Re: Feral Concerns in WotLK
Those statements aren't mutually exclusive. A druid can be a better MT on some fights and a warrior a better MT on some fights without the fight being impossible for the other class. I can't promise that each raid will have an equal number of fights that benefits one tank over the other, and ultimately it shouldn't really matter. If your guild has a bear and prot paladin as your 2 MTs for LK raiding, you are good to go. At no point will you stop and say, "Gee if we only had a warrior MT, we would have beaten that boss by now."

The comments on "niche" are more to address concerns that the 4 classes have to be carbon copies of each other. Warriors, like other tank classes, are worried that with all of the changes, their role will somehow be eliminated. I am trying to reassure you all that that is not the case. I think we can have say druids have larger stamina pools and warriors have more mitigation without making one of them the tank that 90% of raids run with.
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Ghostcrawler
2008-08-16 10:45:39
Re: Feral Concerns in WotLK
Nobody can really compare a level 80 prot warrior to a level 80 feral druid because those individuals don't exist yet. Therefore, we have made almost no attempt to compare their tanking stats except to say "Man, bears could probably use something like Last Stand and something like Thunder Clap" and "Hey, let's make sure bears don't have to scrounge for rare +defense leather or even +resilience in order to be uncrittable." That work is coming.

Bears are able to tank some end-game content even on Live, so I don't think they are orders of magnitude behind warriors. In situations where they struggle, it is sometimes because of crushing blows or mechanics introduced specifically to drive warriors to tank, Shear for instance. I'm going to be tanking Ulduar on my bear, so I'll be the first to complain if I feel the class design isn't up to it.

As far as the previous poster who likes the Feral as the tank / dps hybrid, I don't think anything we're doing will really hurt that. You may be 5-10 talent points behind a tank-focused Feral or a dps-focused Feral but if you liked OTing the bear boss in ZA and then dps'ing on the eagle boss, you should still be great at doing that. The difference is the bear who does spend those talents on threat, mitigation and oh snap abilities instead of +Shred can actually be a raid's primary main tank.

One of the best rogues I know occasionally raided in blue gear or with no talent spec just to remind everyone that player skill often has a much bigger impact on your contribution to a raid than anything else. I know it's easy for anyone to drag out antecdotes that nobody else can validate, but it's worth keeping in mind.

Now I am imagining the "GC said you don't need talents or gear to tank, so obviously X class isn't going to get any!" quotes. 1) Not true. 2) Sigh.
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Ghostcrawler
2008-08-18 19:03:08
Re: Feral Concerns in WotLK
Armor is one of the most important stats a tank can have. We aren't trying to keep bears from getting it.

The change to itemization was done solely to avoid having so much diversity in the items we could drop. It's lame when you're leveling up to keep seeing quest rewards that are NOT itemized for your spec (which TBH is still a problem we haven't solved for Feral weapons and idols). It's lame when your raid kills a boss and he drops say elemental mail, healing leather, and a spellpower mace, none of which your group can use. Having bears, cats and rogues all desire the same leather drops isn't a panacea -- it helps some problems, but it creates others. Having bears run around with as much armor as a rogue would be a big, big problem.

Fortunately there are plenty of ways to give bears the armor they need -- through talents (like the crit resistance one) or through Dire Bear form itself for example. Even if another tanking class ends up having slightly more armor than a druid, the differences should be so minor that neither of you is at a significant disadvantage on a boss.

I am glad someone mentioned the hunter example. I am really hoping you guys have the same reaction when you see the next pass on druid talents.

Edited : added a lost NOT.

[ Post edited by Ghostcrawler ]
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Ghostcrawler
2008-08-19 13:35:58
Re: Feral Concerns in WotLK
Q u o t e:
We are just asking for you to think carefully when you make these decisions, because some methods of tanking are better than others in lots of situations, including in 5 mans, soloing and duoing mobs. The one you are suggesting for druids leave a lot to be desired in every aspect.


Tanks need armor, tanks need avoidance, tanks need health and tanks need threat generation. A few oh snap abilities don't hurt either. That applies to all 4 classes and any differences in the final numbers will almost certainly be minor... because if they aren't, then a class risks being unable to tank a particular boss. Believe me, we do understand the math.

I also hope you can appreciate that whenever I say the goal is to have 4 classes that can tank any encounter, some players worry about homogenization and losing what is unique and precious to them about their class. When I assert that we'll try to keep classes as different as possible (without violating the primary goal of letting them tank), other players interpret that as "Oh, so we get to be the crappy tank?" :)

A particular class MIGHT be better at a particular encounter. We're okay with that as long as A) you aren't prevented from progressing if you lack that class, and B) your class is less desirable because it is seen as less effective.

Bears need to be compensated for less bonus armor on leather and lack of parry and block. Period. We haven't added those talents or bonuses or whatever they are going to end up being yet because the game isn't in a state where we could say e.g. what amount of armor a L80 tank needs to handle Patchwerk. Pointing out where you think bears (or any class) fall short in mitigation (or any aspect of tanking) is helpful. This is a beta though, and there is going to be a lot of iteration until we're happy with everything.
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Ghostcrawler
2008-08-24 00:47:07
Re: Feral Concerns in WotLK
We do want to give Ferals who want to focus on being cats some excellent melee dps. We do want bears to be end-game tanks. We want to see serious guilds with a bear MT and a death knight OT.

What held us back from that before was that the kitty could turn around and tank almost as well (and sometimes better) than the Prot dudes who abandoned any hope of competitive dps in order to be able to tank for their guild. Clearly (I hope) a class that could do rogue-level dps and warrior-level tanking with the same talent build is the kind of thing that makes other players a little miffed.

But we're reevaluating a lot of old (and some admittedly tired) decisions for Lich King. Not only will tank-spec classes be able to do a lot higher dps (not the highest in the raid mind you, but higher), but we think it's fine for a Feral to nerf their tanking ability a little in order to go for high dps, or lower their dps a little in order to be amazing tanks.

We don't think it will take a complete overhaul of the Feral tree. To be honest, I think it's a pretty fun tree. But it will definitely take some changes to the tree you see on beta today. Imagine 5-10 talent points that significantly increase your survivability but do nothing to your dps. Take those points and you're a tank. Ignore them and you're melee dps. Take a few here and there and you are as flexible as you are today. I'm not saying that is the final or even only sollution. But that implementation gets brought up quite a bit.
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Ghostcrawler