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The Elephant in the Room: Maul

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Ni
#0 - April 6, 2010, 3:21 a.m.
Blizzard Post
For warriors, Heroic Strike is a bonus. For DKs, Rune Strike is significant. For Bears, Maul is primary threat, dishing out 50-65% of the Bear's damage. GC has barely acknowledged its existence, the entire focus has been totally warrior-centric.

With rage normalization, and rage becoming a real resource, Mauls will, presumably, no longer be spammable. For a class that already has far too few moves, I'm really worried that druids will become the "sabre lash" and "cleaved" off tank only, since the devs seem enamored with having tanks sit out half or more of every boss fight. We've seen this problem many times before: hybrid issues are simply ignored. Bears got jack and squat for Wrath, only patched later when it became obvious that the inattention led to significant overpowering.

Is Blizzard going to leave Druids to rot for Cata with even less gameplay, barely able to hit maul at all and nothing new but another DPS cooldown like they did for Wrath?

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Ghostcrawler
#58 - April 6, 2010, 7:05 a.m.
Blizzard Post
Q u o t e:
I wouldn't mind seeing some more explicit mention of changes to bear abilities, instead of focusing almost solely on responding to warriors, and letting us fill in the blanks with our imaginations.


Almost all of the responses about rage as it applies to warriors also apply to druids. Maul is changing to be an instant attack that hits a lot harder when you have a lot of rage. There is no reason to assume that means bear threat must suddenly drop. It might if we made no other changes, but we won't do that.

The only big difference off the top of my head is that druids have a higher crit rate than warriors when tanking, so they may generate more rage when tanking. But there are ways to adjust for that, such as e.g. letting warriors get more rage when they block.

We've said before that we think bears don't quite have enough to do while tanking, especially given a talent tree that asks a lot of its players while doing dps. That's something we'd like to fix for Cataclysm.