blue guys wrote:
Feral
* Berserk has been fixed and now causes your Mangle (Bear) ability to hit up to 3 targets. (Up from 1)
* Berserk has been fixed and now causes your Mangle (Bear) ability to hit up to 3 targets. (Up from 1)
and....
Quote:
Feral druids were the poster child for normalization. You were dependent on relatively few drops -- if you were lucky, there were 1 or 2 feral staves per raid tier. Get those and you are happy. Fail to get them and you risk losing your spot. In many cases it isn't even an issue of optimization. Ferals couldn't pick up a tanking sword or rogue dagger as a reasonable backup if the staff didn't drop. You are really dependent on a random number generator to be good at what you do.
So what are the options to introduce more of those items?
Simply inflating the loot tables doesn't fix anything. Either we just drop more Feral loot than normal (which ends up frustrating everyone else and makes druids easy to gear up) or we just drop more loot for everyone on every boss (which makes everyone too easy to gear up). Having a dozen armor rings and staves per tier really doesn't do anything to the problem.
Requiring ferals to persue badge or PvP loot (to the exclusion of random drops) also feels lame. You finally kill Kael or Illidan and get... more badges.
These were not strictly feral issues. Several specs and classes had similar problems, especially as we designed gear that was more and more optimized for the particular stats that most benefit you.
Ultimately, we thought the best solution was to be able to have more players benefit from the same loot. The easy way out would have been to make e.g. all tanks care about the same gear, but at some point we think that leads to the only difference between playing a druid and a warrior what art you see. Now when you roll a druid you care about different gear than other tanks do, but it is still gear that is readily available without having to put it all on rep or badge vendors.
We're not completely done with how feral gear works. (As a minor example, we did just allow druids to use polearms.) We have some other ideas to make collecting pieces more interesting than just whatever the melee leather for your current tier happens to be.
So what are the options to introduce more of those items?
Simply inflating the loot tables doesn't fix anything. Either we just drop more Feral loot than normal (which ends up frustrating everyone else and makes druids easy to gear up) or we just drop more loot for everyone on every boss (which makes everyone too easy to gear up). Having a dozen armor rings and staves per tier really doesn't do anything to the problem.
Requiring ferals to persue badge or PvP loot (to the exclusion of random drops) also feels lame. You finally kill Kael or Illidan and get... more badges.
These were not strictly feral issues. Several specs and classes had similar problems, especially as we designed gear that was more and more optimized for the particular stats that most benefit you.
Ultimately, we thought the best solution was to be able to have more players benefit from the same loot. The easy way out would have been to make e.g. all tanks care about the same gear, but at some point we think that leads to the only difference between playing a druid and a warrior what art you see. Now when you roll a druid you care about different gear than other tanks do, but it is still gear that is readily available without having to put it all on rep or badge vendors.
We're not completely done with how feral gear works. (As a minor example, we did just allow druids to use polearms.) We have some other ideas to make collecting pieces more interesting than just whatever the melee leather for your current tier happens to be.
I thought Berserk wasn't hitting extra guys but was never 100% sure that I wasn't just hallucinating.
The other one is from the Tanking O-boards. There was also a very well written post by an o-boards poster concerning the changes. Which is where the GC response comes from. The link goes straight to the GC post which quotes the o-boards poster.
They also said we will get a tanking Idol as well.