#40 - Dec. 18, 2008, 5:02 p.m.
I know you all don't agree with him (or her), but Lyon's summary of the situation was pretty much our in sync with our thinking.
Q u o t e:
Meh, this takes a lot of the luck factor out of the equation.
Go ahead and armory me. I have Origin of Nightmares, Defender's Code, Keystone Greatring, Offering of Sacrifice, etc.
The only high armor drops I haven't gotten so far are the ring out of Naxx 25 (I did get the Heroic Blue one though) and a decent cloak. And honestly, I haven't even been trying. I've just been lucky.
In contrast, there are two other feral tanks in my guild. Both of them have played considerably more than I have (especially in heroics, we've raided about the same) but neither can get the Keystone Ring, Offering, or the Blue Heroic Ring, to drop. One was sat out when Defender's dropped and the other lost the roll to me.
Heck, one of them kept having to run Heroic UK over and over because the Enraged Feral Staff wouldn't drop for him.
In short, I've been lucky so I have great gear. They haven't been lucky. So they are currently SOL.
Acquiring tanking gear as a Feral Druid isn't hard. The research is easy.
The problem is that we are balanced around an incredibly small amount of unbelievably powerful items. If Blizzard made those items drops, we had to farm the same bosses over and over again and hope to get lucky. If we didn't get lucky, we were SOL.
If Blizzard made the gear craftable, BOE, or Badge loot, we complained that there was no point in raiding because our gear didn't come from raiding.
Think carefully about what would have happend to a Druid who re-rolled Feral a year from now under the old system. How hard do you think it will be to get a 25 man Naxx clear in a year when everyone else is off doing other things? If Defender's Code was left in it's old state, that Druid would be doomed to be a gimp tank until the next xpack. Not for lack of skill. Not for lack of effort. Not for lack of intelligence. He just wouldn't be able to convince people to run old content for his insanely OP iLevel 213 trinket.
Ah, you say, but Blizzard should have just kept itemizing Armor trinkets! Well, again, this brings us back to the concept of loot bloat. Very few classes/specs have any interest in an item like Defender's Code. If you itemize them all over the place that's leading to a lot of waste. You also push the envelope even further with Druids nearing the armor cap (I'm currently at 72.26%, and I don't even have my Valourous gear yet or a decent cloak).
So for the umpteenth time (and realize, I'm currently Exhibit A for Druids about to get nerfed) this is a good thing for Druid tanks. It's a bad thing for some individual tanks (like me) in the short term. But in the longterm it's a buff.
Feral druids were the poster child for normalization. You were dependent on relatively few drops -- if you were lucky, there were 1 or 2 feral staves per raid tier. Get those and you are happy. Fail to get them and you risk losing your spot. In many cases it isn't even an issue of optimization. Ferals couldn't pick up a tanking sword or rogue dagger as a reasonable backup if the staff didn't drop. You are really dependent on a random number generator to be good at what you do.
So what are the options to introduce more of those items?
Simply inflating the loot tables doesn't fix anything. Either we just drop more Feral loot than normal (which ends up frustrating everyone else and makes druids easy to gear up) or we just drop more loot for everyone on every boss (which makes everyone too easy to gear up). Having a dozen armor rings and staves per tier really doesn't do anything to the problem.
Requiring ferals to persue badge or PvP loot (to the exclusion of random drops) also feels lame. You finally kill Kael or Illidan and get... more badges.
These were not strictly feral issues. Several specs and classes had similar problems, especially as we designed gear that was more and more optimized for the particular stats that most benefit you.
Ultimately, we thought the best solution was to be able to have more players benefit from the same loot. The easy way out would have been to make e.g. all tanks care about the same gear, but at some point we think that leads to the only difference between playing a druid and a warrior what art you see. Now when you roll a druid you care about different gear than other tanks do, but it is still gear that is readily available without having to put it all on rep or badge vendors.
We're not completely done with how feral gear works. (As a minor example, we did just allow druids to use polearms.) We have some other ideas to make collecting pieces more interesting than just whatever the melee leather for your current tier happens to be.
