Feb 28 2007

Analysis of the Mitigation Nerf

Posted in Blogs at 1:09 am by tangedyn

While I don’t agree with any of the druid nerfs, the mitigation nerf is the one that is the easiest to analyse and show that it is completely unfair. Following is my post on the druid forum:

It seems obvious to me that the so called “Internal Testing” done by the dev team to justify nerfing druids has a serious flaw - they only tested it against 5-man dungeon content and not against raid content.

It is generally accepted that druids seem to be prefered for tanking 5-man content, and warriors prefered for raid content. The nerf is designed to make us worse than warriors for 5-man content, and unviable for raid content.

This is most easily seen from the mitigation nerf that we received. We have seen several comparisons of damage mitigation between druids and warriors at similar gear level and they have mostly shown two things: Warriors suffer 5% more damage overall than druids when there are no crushing blows, but druids suffer 10% more damage overall than warriors when crushing blows occur, thanks to the shield block exploit.

With the nerf, druids will now be worse than warriors in mitigating non-crushing damage, by about 1-2%. At the same time we are now ~17% worse than warriors when it comes to tanking in a raid setting, in effect makes us useless for tanking raid content.

There is really no reason to nerf druid mitigation in a raid setting. Warriors are already monopolizing the Main Tank roles in the post-BC raids especially in Gruul’s Lair and higher tiers although this is something they choose to hide when they call for druids to be nerfed because we have been ‘monopolizing’ the tanking role in 5-mans. Druids did have some use tanking in 25 man though, for example we are the prefered offtank against Gruul’s Hurtful Strike because that does not do crushing blows, however when the patch hits, even druids will be useless in this role with warriors now having more mitigation even against non-crushing attacks.

Therefore there can only be one of the few reasons why druids will be taking the mitigation nerf:

  1. The developers considered only 5-man dungeons during the “Internal Testing” and did not consider raid setting at all.
  2. The developers are still completely clueless about the Shield Block Exploit, or did their testing without using Shield Block at all.
  3. It is really in the developers intention to wipe druid tanking off the face of World of Warcraft

There’s been some other good posts analyzing why the nerfs have been unfair, unfortunately I haven’t remembered to collect them all yet. Here are a couple I’ve found:

Feb 07 2007

A New Grind Begins

Posted in Blogs at 12:13 am by tangedyn

Yes, I know I have not been updating for a loooong time. As you may have guessed, everyone has been busy with leveling their toons to 70. And getting keyed for Karazhan. And grinding reputation to enter the Heroic dungeons. And for the faction rewards. On top of all that, I have a new guild to run…

Now that the excuses are out of the way, let’s get to some good useful information. Thankfully, it seems that other druids have taken over doing some of the stuff I used to do. Special thanks to Emmerald from over the Euro forums who did the approximation of DPS values for sustained cat DPS, and for bear tanking as well, and came up with the item lists.

I’ve checked the calculations myself and I’m mostly satisfied with the results and the methods obtained. However, in the case of the bear tanking gear list, I’ve found that some subjective factors need to be added in. There are three things affecting bear survivability - damage mitigation, damage avoidance, total health. The values obtained for the bear tanking list treats them all equally for the purpose of surviving many small hits without receiving heals.

When you start receiving heals (most tanks do), then the value of health diminishes. You want to be mitigating and avoiding more damage so that the healers do not run out of damage quickly. When you get very large hits, then the value of avoidance diminishes - you cannot rely on avoidance because a bad roll of the die - which will happen a lot, will kill you.

Therefore I think a weighted approach to the tanking stats will rather more accurate. Unfortunately there is no objective way to assign the weightages, so it has to be done arbitrarily. I would probably give health a coefficient of 0.5 and avoidance a coefficient of 0.85.

Amythryx has came up with a very useful ingame mod that calculates “DruidPoints” based on the rating system that Emmerald has obtained. Check it out!

I haven’t been fully idle, and have been working on the Lacerate threat side of things. Check out the thread where I post results and some calculations of the testing that I have done.