Ghostcrawler wrote:
47. Re: Talk more about druid items please 09/04/2008 05:15:24 PM PDT
Flavor wrote:
What I wanna know is why druid tanks cant parry.
Flavor. Believe me, if we ever hit a brick wall where we just can't make druids work without parry, then guess what will happen.
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And for Blizzard to say "Don't worry, other classes have concerns too" is not a very effective way of dealing with them.
Fair enough. My point was more that Lich King is a pretty different game than Burning Crusade, moreso than the change from Classic to BC. It's harder to make assumptions about how things will work based on how they've always worked. Our design philosophy levels up and respecs sometimes too. :)
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We scaled EXTREMELY well with the few stats we could stack because we just hit Armor Cap and worked around it with higher avoidance and stamina. Then comes Sunwell and they had to nerf EVERYONE'S avoidance by 25% to get us all back on line lest we do the same to bosses like Brutallus.
Agreed. As far as scaling is concerned, we've made great efforts to scale abilities so that upgrading your gear doesn't totally change their effectiveness. Here's the problem with Feral druids: because they have so few stats (in the sense that e.g. parry and spellpower aren't important to Feral), it's easy to focus on those stats. If those stats scale really well, then we run into problems where druids can either hit the caps or get such high numbers that the content starts to break. Once druids hit the armor cap in BC, they could start improving dps stats which would eventually have overshadowed other tanks in both mitigation and threat. When they stacked agility, agility and more agility, it just improved their tanking and damage really quickly.
Warlocks were in a pretty similar situation with spell damage. They wanted almost nothing else and kept stacking the same thing and pretty soon they outstripped similar classes.
From a design point of view, the challenge isn't making druids amazing tanks and dps. The challenge is preventing them from getting too good too easily. (Note, mean old Ghostcrawler is not saying we're trying to keep Ferals really weak. Just remember that while your goal as players is to get as good as possible, ours as designers is to keep you in proportion to other classes.)
Is Mother Bear as effective at level 80 as it is at level 70? Yes. Does it scale with AP or armor? No. Does getting AP and armor still make you a better tank? Yes. Will you spec out of Mother Bear when you reach a certain gear plateau? Unlikely. Until recently, Sunder Armor did not scale. It was just crappier the better your gear became and was less effective at generating threat as everyone else's threat increased.
As to cats, we don't know yet if their dps is too low or not. We should have a better idea soon.
So feral is taking forever because due to scaling and itemization we are either 'teh suck' or 'uberpwnage'.
Every time I check the beta o-boards for blue posts and see stuff like this I become more convinced feral is getting completely and radically changed. I don't think Blizz has fully realized it yet but they seem to be heading that way more and more, as evidenced by the bold line.
The expansion will bring changes to all classes and specs but I feel ferals are getting altered on a more fundamental level than any other class or spec. How this plays out remains to be seen.
