Mar 01 2007
Posted in Blogs at 10:39 pm by tangedyn
From my original post on the druid forums:
Recently some questions were posted on the general forums that were answered by Tigole. Thread here. Of particular note are questions 5 and 6 regarding the role of hybrids:
5) Healers. 40 mans seemed to be designed around something like 35% healers. Scaling that to 25 mans means 8 healers. R&J in Kara seems to require at least 3 main healers + 1 hybrid. The problem is very few people actually enjoy being healers. The prayer of mending nerf is just salt in the wound. It is very hard to find enough healers - I’d love to see 25 man content tuned for 6 dedicated healers and maybe 2 hybrids healing on healing intensive fights.
6) Tanks. We were planning on bringing 3 warriors and 3 druids to raids - 2 prot tanks, 1 fury, 1 feral tank, 1 cat, 1 resto druid. The Druid tanking nerf is extreme - I think it basically makes bears worthless against bleed immune mobs (all of Karazhan and likely much more), and their mitigation/HP worse than warriors, especially once T4/T5 becomes common and bears are still in quest greens. This means we’ll bring 3 prot tanks, 1 cat, and 1 resto. Maybe a pally OT. As a guild leader I really like the option of having more than one class be a viable MT, but with the druid nerf and warrior buff I don’t think I can justify anything but warrior tanks.
Tigole’s response to questions 5 and 6:
I don’t really agree with points 5 and 6 but I do feel like your previous points all had merit. Hopefully, the changes I mentioned will alleviate some of your worries.
What do you think? Looks to me like a shocking dismissal of the concerns of hybrids, as if it is intended that hybrids have no role in 25 man raid but to be full time healers.
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Feb 28 2007
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:
- The developers considered only 5-man dungeons during the “Internal Testing” and did not consider raid setting at all.
- The developers are still completely clueless about the Shield Block Exploit, or did their testing without using Shield Block at all.
- 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:
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Feb 07 2007
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.
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Dec 15 2006
Posted in Blogs, Druid News, Forum Watch at 12:51 am by tangedyn
Well, apologies for not having any updates for the past 2 weeks, but really there was not much to put up. Very little has been said by blues on any of the druid forums. The patch notes for WoW 2.0 was borked, and instead we were given a crappy version of the 2.0.1 beta pushed into the live realms. TBC Beta 2.0.3 has been pushed, and, what do you know… more druid nerfs!
First the druid changes in TBC Beta 2.0.3
- Tree of Life changed, now +25% Spirit conversion to healing is provided to heals received to party members, instead of heals cast by party members
- Tranquility now heals 1518 every 2 seconds for 8 seconds (around 4-5x more healing done), but has the cooldown doubled to 10 mins
- Rune of Metamorphosis changed from 100% cost reduction to flat 550 mana reduction
- Idol of Ferocity changed from -3 energy to +20 dmg, no longer affects mangle
- Idol of Brutality changed from -3 rage to +50 dmg
- 3/8 Stormrage Set now provides 20 mana/5 seconds instead of 15% mana regen
- Bear form HP bonus nerfed from +40% to +25%
The first compilation of druid questions on the European Druid forums was a pretty good success, with many of the questions answered. There is now a second compilation, and the blues hope to get answers for those as soon as possible. Here’s to hoping!
We are indeed all cheering.
We will try to get replies, but don’t hold your breath (I can’t promise a reply unfortunately, but I’ll see what I can do).
Tier 5 Armor sets are out, you can check out their stats from this huge image, or from the Thottbot links. You can also compare them with the Tier 4 Malorne sets.
Also, the last piece of the Moonglade set has be found
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Dec 01 2006
Posted in Blogs, Druid News, Forum Watch at 1:40 am by tangedyn
In this update we have:
- More updates from the devs through our good friend Vaneras
- New TBC Beta Patch has been announced, we have some preliminary information about changes that affects us, more will be known later
- More information about our Tier 5 set
- Some information about feral druid viability from Kylista over in WorldofRaids forums
- Miscellaneous Stuff: Tributes!
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Nov 27 2006
Posted in Blogs, Forum Watch at 10:33 pm by tangedyn
While the blues are still silent on the US forums. There has been a few very informative posts made by the blues over at the European forums. Also in this update, a few Tree of Life videos!
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Nov 24 2006
Posted in Blogs, Site Update at 1:41 pm by tangedyn
Just added the itemstats module for Wordpress, and made a few modifications to it to enable it to work somewhat for items from the beta. This makes it much easier to display the new items from the beta!
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Nov 23 2006
Posted in Blogs, Druid News, Commentary at 10:58 pm by tangedyn
As posted by CM Vaneras on the WoW-Europe forums, Pots and Procs will be making a return to druids!
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Nov 22 2006
Posted in Blogs, Druid News, Forum Watch at 10:01 pm by tangedyn
In this update, we have a few items from TBC beta, update on a few bugs, and a couple of videos.
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Nov 20 2006
Posted in Blogs, Druid News, Forum Watch at 3:06 am by tangedyn
First in the series of our very own version of Forum Watch, where I will be posting links to notable threads around the various druid forums, as well as latest news and updates that are relevant to druids.
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