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2008-09-14 23:17:00
Feral Concerns: Release date announced.
http://www.mmo-champion.com/index.php?PHPSESSID=8551d1af128f6945e3621198d92af0f4&topic=16233.0

GC, many feral's still feel we need massive tweaking if we are supposed to take a main tank roll, please help us understand what changes you are making to do this.

Concerns:

1. Tanking (Bells and Whistles)
2. Dps.
3. Gear / Itemization.
4. Content.
5. Scaling.
6. Mana Regen/Usage

Each one of these is topic covered somewhere on these forums, each one has limited responses.

1. Please pass us some further details as to what other tanking talents/abilities we will be given to help cover the differences between feral tanking and humanoid tanking.

2. Please point out how our dps will be tuned to match rogue dps.

3. Please explain how shifting cost and mana consumption will work with rogue gear (in pvp/pve/soloing).

4. Please explain what will occur with older content fights where druids could not tank due to a missing ability.

5. Please explain if our tanking and dps will scale as we go to harder 25 man content.

Oh im sure there are more questions...however these seem to be the most common I have read.


[ Post edited by Greenstone ]
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Greenstone
2008-09-15 00:38:10
Re: Feral Concerns: Release date announced.
Fear not!

Q u o t e:
1. Please pass us some further details as to what other tanking talents/abilities we will be given to help cover the differences between feral tanking and humanoid tanking.


We have to be careful here. Our goal is to make sure all the tanks can do the job, so we want to make sure we don't give druids an ability that will push them over the edge. Druids were really good tanks in BC, especially near the end of the content. I don't feel that we are having to make up a huge deficit. I understand you want to have more buttons to push, but compared to BC you now have new cooldowns like Berserk and Barkskin, and some old groaners like Tiger's Fury and Frenzied Regeneration actually do something cool now.

Q u o t e:
2. Please point out how our dps will be tuned to match rogue dps.


We'll eventually figure out how much lower cat dps is than rogue dps, and then we will change some druid abilities to use bigger numbers. It's possible we will buff a couple of talents, especially ones that we suspect you're likely to already be getting. But mostly we do it through tweaking core abilities like Shred and Mangle.

Q u o t e:
3. Please explain how shifting cost and mana consumption will work with rogue gear (in pvp/pve/soloing).


Feral mana seems to have taken a big hit. We have some thoughts on how to adjust it.

Q u o t e:
4. Please explain what will occur with older content fights where druids could not tank due to a missing ability.


Maybe Illidan will forget how to Shear. Is that what you're talking about?

Q u o t e:
5. Please explain if our tanking and dps will scale as we go to harder 25 man content.


Yes, they will. By definition, percentages scale and flat numbers do not. You have a lot of percentages in your talents. There has been a lot of discussion about whether Mother Bear is a scaling talent or not, and I'm not sure I'm eager to enter into that debate again. But we have designed the talents to scale. One of the problems to your mitigation scaling was just hitting the upper limit of armor. Armor and avoidance will be much harder to cap out now.
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Ghostcrawler
2008-09-15 01:41:04
Re: Feral Concerns: Release date announced.
Q u o t e:
As if all this wasn't bad enough, we now have more competition than ever. Do you know what kind of avoidance and mitigation a Death Knight gets if you stack +Defense in every possible spot (including gems & enchants) and keep up Blade Barrier & Bone Armor? Run the numbers, you'll be astonished.


Yes, I know. I hear every time I visit that forum how they'll be terrible tanks because nobody wants to heal a tank with high avoidance. :(

In BC, it was pretty clear that the design was for warriors to be the primary tanks and for paladins and druids to be secondary tanks. We are changing that design. That should be very exciting. It puzzles me a little that you seem to worry more about being bad tanks now that we've changed the design than you were when we said you were supposed to be second-tier tanks. :)

I can only say don't worry about the numbers so many times, but I'll say it again: don't worry about the numbers. It's helpful to point out where you see deficiencies, but it doesn't help you, me, or the community to get upset about them at this stage.

I like playing my druid. I'm sad that not everyone likes theirs. :(
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Ghostcrawler
2008-09-15 17:06:32
Re: Feral Concerns: Release date announced.
We looked at tank mitigation in Naxx this morning, and guess what? Druid armor was approximately 10k higher than warrior armor and health was perhaps 7k higher. (I say "perhaps" because bear has such a big multiplier on stamina that your exact buff situation can swing this amount a lot.) Warrior avoidance is higher (if you count block as avoidance), but flat damage reduction was about the same, except for the extra 6% spell reduction warriors get from Imp Defensive Stance (druids were a little higher on the physical side). Expertise and crit were much higher for the bear. The warrior had to spend a lot of gems to reach 540 defense, while the druid could stack all health. This was in all blue and purple PvE gear -- nothing from PvP or BC content. All in all, the relationship was much closer to BC than I at least predicted.

Now these are just numbers. It's possible we'll discover something different when we do more tests where the tanks are actually getting beat on. We also didn't look at dps or threat at all.

Furthermore, I also toally buy the argument that you can be a good tank but not have fun doing it. Different problem, but not an invalid one.

I am less worried about the bears having mitigation scaling problems at higher level content, though that armor cap that originally seemed so far away is a little closer now. :)

FWIW, Paladins were very close to warriors -- tied in almost every stat. Death knight health and perhaps armor were a little low. It's possible their numerous cooldowns can make up the difference and it's also possible we'll have to buff them a little.
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Ghostcrawler
2008-09-15 17:16:48
Re: Feral Concerns: Release date announced.
Yes, internal. I'm sure there are changes you weren't seeing -- Barskin for one. We also don't have to wait as long for our gear to drop... :)
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Ghostcrawler
2008-09-15 18:46:31
Re: Feral Concerns: Release date announced.
Q u o t e:
And if there was no content past Naxx' this would mean something. Still waiting to hear how attack power and the like help our tanking abilities scale.


I see no reason why druid armor, health and crit won't maintain the same proportion above warriors for many tiers, assuming you don't hit the armor cap. Neither class derives armor or health from Strength. Warriors do gain block from Strength, but that's a lot of block needed to make up the difference.

(Dear warriors, this is not me saying you're doomed. Your mitigation is fine. Love, Ghost.)

On the question of paladins, all of the stats were similar down the line -- not just base attributes. I believe warriors had slightly higher Agi and paladins had more block chance. The class and item designers did a good job keeping thing fairly equitable among the mitigation stats.

P.S. These are still not the final numbers though.
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Ghostcrawler
2008-09-16 00:57:42
Re: Feral Concerns: Release date announced.
I understand you want your gear designed to specifically support those stats that are most important to you. I'm telling you that you are dangerously close to being the best tank from a mitigation-standpoint even without it. I suppose it's possible your threat generation will be very low, but I kind of doubt it.

If your concern is you'll have to wear PvP gear or BC gear because it's better than LK gear, don't worry about that. In fact, that also answers the question of why we can't put strength on some leather without doing it to all leather -- because then those few sacred pieces become the only ones that can / will be used.

If your concern is that your gear won't scale, don't worry about that either. The only reason it became a problem in BC was because you hit the armor cap, which led to you not wanting more mitigation and us not making more tanking bear armor. It wasn't that we hit the max stat budgets in BC, if I am understanding that concern correctly, or you wouldn't see 200 ilevels now.

If you want armor on your leather because you like hitting the armor cap, sorry. This is one of the few times you'll hear me say no, but no. It does bad things to the game.

If your concern is that you just like having leather with strength, armor, stamina, dodge and agility on it, and don't want to see AP or defense because partialy-wasted stats just creep you out, *and* you would rather have druid talents and bear form nerfed to compensate for that, well I guess that is a different way to design the game. It would probably work okay, but it would mean going back to a model where bosses dropped rogue loot or feral loot. We just think the current design works better.

On an entirely different topic, I also understand that you want to have more interesting abilities to use on a regular basis. That's a fair request, and one that is made by several other classes as well. It's something we will keep talking about and keeping a close eye on. It wasn't our priority for the Feral this time around, but I can understand how you wish it was.

My hope is that this giant wall of text helps you understand our thought process, and helps you feel that yes we do listen to you, and yes we do understand how the class works. If it doesn't convince you, well there's always tomorrow. :)
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Ghostcrawler
2008-09-16 10:09:39
Re: Feral Concerns: Release date announced.
I'm not going to leak items from Naxx, but there are tanking rings with armor. There are some epic ones in the heroics too and on badge vendors I believe.

If we put Strength on your set pieces, don't you think it would lead to Ferals only wearing those set pieces and anyone without them would feel like an ineffective tank? One of the problems we've always had with druids is that the item requirements were so specific that you were held hostage to getting the right item. Take FAP on staves (which is something I'd still like to move away from) -- the jump from one to the next was huge because there were so few of them. If you couldn't get one early on, you felt gimpy.

Honestly, I think druids are in even better shape in dungeon blues. You are uncrittable when you get off the boat, while plate-wearers are not yet crittable in Naxx without stacking gems that druids can replace with as much +Sta as you can afford.

The numbers I referred to were done without buffs of any kind. On the other hand, the raid stacking mechanic was changed so that we could assume everyone would most likely have a core set of buffs in any 10 or 25 player run.

5K for rogues is a little silly. Don't expect to get buffed to that point. And they shouldn't either.

I appreciate all the appreciation. For those of you still grumpy and unconvinced, I remain apologetic.
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Ghostcrawler
2008-09-17 01:12:01
Re: Feral Concerns: Release date announced.
I didn't start this thread, but it would be nice to keep it on the original topic. I understand that rogues are concerned that they will lose their place in raids if other classes can dps as well or better, and I understand druids are concerned they will lose their places in raids if other classes can tank as well or better. Many classes are concerned that they don't bring unique buffs anymore. But we have to get the design to a place where we can add new classes to the game without displacing someone else. Having some amount of redundancy and equality feels like a good place to start.

Q u o t e:
I don't understand why it would be so hard to give rogues 2ap =1str, and add str to all rogue loot, making cats happier, and giving bears some more threat (there hasn't been any reports I've seen of bears being too good at building threat compared to other tanks, but admittedly this could be an issue).


Because of the way the Feral is designed, there are not a lot of knobs to turn. If we improve your Strength too much, bear dps might be too high (a problem we've had before), which infringes on not only cats but also other tanks. If your threat is too high, we have similar problems.

Imagine for a moment that you had one stat, Agility perhaps, and everything -- dodge, armor, crit, stamina, mana, etc. -- all derived from Agility. Obviously you would take nothing but Agility. And you would be a god. We would build a temple to your awesomeness in Zul'Drak with the other animal gods. And all the other classes would reroll. I exaggerate, but that is the risk with the bear especially (less so the cat). It's very easy to make bears too good, so in some sense we are keeping you in a state of denial. You want the gear that makes you the best, but if we let you have it, you're too good.

Now, we could change the way the Feral works, and to be fair, several posts have asked for that. We could make the bear care more about defense, parry and other stats. It might make our itemization easier, but it might also lose something special about the druid class. We like that you play differently. We like it when you pick up a ring and say "THIS is a great tanking ring," and have other people stop and ask you how that could be. We want druids to work differently, so we're going to try this system out this time. If it doesn't work then in a future patch or expansion we might try a different model where your stats are derived differently.

As WoW matures, it's easy to adopt the lazy designer syndrome and say that every spec needs a version of Mortal Strike, an interrupt, an intercept, a root breaker, as ranged stun, a bubble, a pet, a different form they can take on, a cheat death, an ice block, and so on. It makes the game easier to balance, probably even easier to design if we went that route, but we also think we'd lose what makes the classes cool and unique. I know it might feel like we're swimming upstream sometimes in order to protect that flavor, but consider how dreary the alternative might be too.

Q u o t e:
Your gear comparisons and comments seem to suggest that bears will be gemming for nothing but stam now, which leads me to be concerned that we'll become the mana soakers we strongly don't wish to be. I'd much rather have less of a HP lead over a warrior, while being closer on avoidance, than being 8k hp's over a warrior and running the healers oom from needing alot more healing :S


As long as your armor is high, this shouldn't be a big problem. Part of the mana-soaker mentality came because you just ate crushing blows before. But those are gone. If anything, I worry sometimes that we'll have trouble challenging the healers with all of the different toys we have given them.

Man, TLDR.
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Ghostcrawler