Bear Armor Buff is way Over the mark

The only change made was that the Thick Hide tooltip was corrected in 4.0.6. There was no increase to druid bear armor, the damage taken from a physical swing should be identical to what it was before the patch, the tooltip just now displays it correctly.

02/08/2011 2:45 PMPosted by Gandyn

The only change made was that the Thick Hide tooltip was corrected in 4.0.6. There was no increase to druid bear armor, the damage taken from a physical swing should be identical to what it was before the patch, the tooltip just now displays it correctly.

Bashiok, while the result is true, this is either a blatant lie or you are misinformed.

Thick Hide was buffed. I gained 10k armor. However, bears who had the ghost Protector of the Pack lost it....so your last statement is true, physical damage taken for those bears who had ghosted PoTP is identical.

For bears who didn't have ghosted PoTP, physical damage taken went down by about 12%.

Well... I do love lying...

I'm working of the info I got, I'll ask for a double check. :)

02/08/2011 2:59 PMPosted by Sildas

Don't, just let the guy do his job. He probably got his information from the patch notes, and was just doing the normal post-patch duty of putting out fires when he walked into this.

That's not a bad guess, it happens from time to time, but in this particular case we got info from design from them reading people's confusion and I posted it.

It's possible that the armor bump is just a correction inherited from the tooltip update, which you'd probably notice pretty quick if you let something hit on you. But we can do that too of course, so we'll check it out.

02/08/2011 3:12 PMPosted by Zarko

It's possible that the health bump is just a correction inherited from the tooltip update, which you'd probably notice pretty quick if you let something hit on you. But we can do that too of course, so we'll check it out.

Armor, not health.

Oops, corrected.

After the designers looked into this issue more, there appears to be a pretty complex series of bugs that may have led to where we are now. I'll do my best to explain.

Early on in Cataclysm, it was concluded that druid tanks took too much damage and we deployed a hotfix to buff their armor through Thick Hide. Originally, we had thought that 4.0.6 was just updating the Thick Hide tooltip as well as the armor display on the character sheet for the earlier hotfix, but we think now that the armor buff itself was actually correctly applied with 4.0.6, and the previous hotfix had never taken hold properly.

The reason we missed this is because there is no easy way to know what your armor actually is when you can’t trust the tooltip – you have to have things beat on you and see how much damage you take. This test was tainted by a second bug however, where some druid characters were invisibly retaining the 12% damage reduction benefit of the obsolete Protector of the Pack talent. Even though we removed that talent, its effects were still benefitting some characters, and we didn't know who or how many. Again, there is no easy way to know if your druid was affected without a lot of testing. We knew about the Protector of the Pack bug but were hesitant to try and mess with it too much via hotfix since bear survivability was where we wanted it to be for those characters and we didn’t want to risk making anything worse. In any event, those characters appeared to be taking the correct amount of damage, so we thought the Thick Hide hotfix was successful. In reality, we think we were seeing the Protector of the Pack damage reduction and not the Thick Hide armor buff.

We believe the 4.0.6 patch finally removed the Protector of the Pack effects while finally getting the Thick Hide buff applied. Characters who had the Protector of the Pack benefit won’t see their survivability change much (they lost damage reduction while gaining armor), while characters who lacked that talent will see their survivability improve (they gained a lot of armor). The good news is that current bear survivability in 4.0.6 appears to be where we want it to be for everyone.

We’re still not 100% sure that the above explanation is what happened, but it seems consistent with our observations. Again, as of 4.0.6, bear armor should now be correct.

And the 6% AP?

Was the 20% nerf still really needed?

Dangit, I thought you guys would be slower... ;)

Well that's a point. I avoided it specifically since it's off topic for the purpose of my last post but figured I'd have to follow up at some point. Anyway, it's something we aren't going to comment on as we haven't fully investigated the ramifications or even if this whole situation is being accounted for correctly.

FYI - We've buffed bear Maul and Mangle by about 10%. That went live this morning. That was to bring damage back up from the nerfs that were done when Protector of the Pack was still incorrectly applying for some players, which is now fixed.

S'alright?