MMO-Champion BlueTracker - Talk more about druid items please

2008-09-03 05:59:35

I'm still confused about something and even more confused that there aren't more posts about this. We've been told that there isn't going to be druid armor. That doesn't sound insane to anyone else? They tried this once before back at launch and druids didn't get armor. It was that simple. A main reason feral started to get respect and improvements was because we were getting items specifically designed for us. Gear is also the main problem behind druid role synergy. You can't play a feral druid with no intel on your gear and you can't have reasonable dps with half healer gear half feral gear.

Not having druid gear is taking a gigantic step back for druids. Unless there something I missed? Whats the deal here?

Failure

2008-09-03 20:27:00

Re: Talk more about druid items please

There are a lot of huge changes in the expansion though. Warrior tanks are worried they won't be useful anymore because their big niche (surviving crushing blows) was given to all tanks. Paladin tanks are concerned because better AE threat is being given to all tanks. Death knight tanks are worried that they are going to get nerfed because of the damage they're doing. Druids are worried that they won't have the armor they are used to, and might be inferior tanks because of it. Almost every class is worried that their unique raid buff won't gaurantee them a spot in the raid any longer. We're worried about pulling it all off. :)

Druids have talents like Thick Hide, Natural Reaction, Mother Bear and Survival of the Fittest in part to make up for the fact they aren't wearing plate, parrying or blocking. Is that enough mitigation to make them just as good end-game tanks as the other three tanking classes? We don't know yet. We haven't finished our testing and nobody on beta is in Naxx yet. If Bears are getting clobbered or their healers are running out of mana trying to keep them up, we'll fix it.

Ghostcrawler

2008-09-04 17:15:24

Re: Talk more about druid items please

Q u o t e:
What I wanna know is why druid tanks cant parry.

Flavor. Believe me, if we ever hit a brick wall where we just can't make druids work without parry, then guess what will happen.

Q u o t e:
And for Blizzard to say "Don't worry, other classes have concerns too" is not a very effective way of dealing with them.

Fair enough. My point was more that Lich King is a pretty different game than Burning Crusade, moreso than the change from Classic to BC. It's harder to make assumptions about how things will work based on how they've always worked. Our design philosophy levels up and respecs sometimes too. :)

Q u o t e:
We scaled EXTREMELY well with the few stats we could stack because we just hit Armor Cap and worked around it with higher avoidance and stamina. Then comes Sunwell and they had to nerf EVERYONE'S avoidance by 25% to get us all back on line lest we do the same to bosses like Brutallus.

Agreed. As far as scaling is concerned, we've made great efforts to scale abilities so that upgrading your gear doesn't totally change their effectiveness. Here's the problem with Feral druids: because they have so few stats (in the sense that e.g. parry and spellpower aren't important to Feral), it's easy to focus on those stats. If those stats scale really well, then we run into problems where druids can either hit the caps or get such high numbers that the content starts to break. Once druids hit the armor cap in BC, they could start improving dps stats which would eventually have overshadowed other tanks in both mitigation and threat. When they stacked agility, agility and more agility, it just improved their tanking and damage really quickly.

Warlocks were in a pretty similar situation with spell damage. They wanted almost nothing else and kept stacking the same thing and pretty soon they outstripped similar classes.

From a design point of view, the challenge isn't making druids amazing tanks and dps. The challenge is preventing them from getting too good too easily. (Note, mean old Ghostcrawler is not saying we're trying to keep Ferals really weak. Just remember that while your goal as players is to get as good as possible, ours as designers is to keep you in proportion to other classes.)

Is Mother Bear as effective at level 80 as it is at level 70? Yes. Does it scale with AP or armor? No. Does getting AP and armor still make you a better tank? Yes. Will you spec out of Mother Bear when you reach a certain gear plateau? Unlikely. Until recently, Sunder Armor did not scale. It was just crappier the better your gear became and was less effective at generating threat as everyone else's threat increased.

As to cats, we don't know yet if their dps is too low or not. We should have a better idea soon.

Ghostcrawler

2008-09-05 18:04:51

Re: Talk more about druid items please

We want druids to be able to MT Naxx and Ulduar.

I really don't think they're that far off, but if I'm wrong and bears collapse on Patchwerk, we'll change the numbers until they can stand up. We'll try to change the numbers in intelligent ways so that bears are tanking Arthas too and not standing in the back healing the warrior tank.

Likewise, if cat dps is always near the bottom of the dps damage meters, we'll fix that too.

There isn't any actual armor with bonus armor any longer. It was just too problematic a stat. It does still exist on non armor pieces: the rings, necks and maybe cloaks. The way the game is designed, tanks need a certain amount of armor and we'll make sure you have it without having to resort to PvP gear or Sunwell gear. As I have said before, we can boost the bear intrinsic bonus or Thick Hide or come up with a new scalar off existing stats. This feels like a solvable problem to me.

Personally, I would love to be able to get rid of Feral Attack Power as a stat. It feels a little kludgey and it makes itemization harder because you can't share with anyone else in the game. It's like having a libram for your main weapon. But it's not going to happen for Wrath, at least not initially.

Ghostcrawler