SD and SotF changesFollow

Well, that was both an enlightening and painful read. The amount of people who when shown math and and obvious facts who repute them is amazing. At the same time the 3-5 people doing the bulk of the theory craft are doing a good job.

Here a few of the better posts. Ghost makes his post on page 15 so I would recommend starting there. Can't find the link to the antitank set and don't want to have to read through any more o-boards threads today.

This one and the next few have some good simulations of how the shield will work.

Has a few good ones here, showing a Patch type boss and Maexxna style with stuns.

The simulations are using an 'antitank' set which would become the new tank set. Has a greater emphasis on AP, crit, expertise, hit and haste than the current gear methodology. Hurray for more tank DPS and same mitigation.

Overall the change should be a slight buff in most situations. In general the change is minimal. Still not thrilled about learning block, just for flavor/lore reasons. The additional scalars will be a great help as otherwise we would have been shafted by DRs come Uldar.

We will be looking for stats are are on the rogue leather we are using. Except now the hit, expertise, crit, haste and AP will help with mitigation.



Your bear and cat sets are all ready gemmed and chanted differently now with offensive stats in the mitigation mix more pices will be the same. Should create less gear bloat tbh.




I all ready fine tune my gear. You should as well.

Just to sum up the shields proc on crits and are based in strength on AP at a 25%AP to shield value ratio as it stands now. The change is a good change stat scaling wise. As all the stats I mentioned above will enhance he shields.

I can't say I like using a shield tho. I'm a bear not a warrior. But scaling off of offensive minded stats we have a lot of is definitely a good idea.

Both lore-wise and logic-wise this sounds aweful to me. Might be just me though...

its a buff in the sense that blizz wont have to really destroy stat gain conversions for druids at the next tier of gear. as it stands now, a lot of druids are approaching (or were before the armor change) armor caps, and were getting damn close to avoidance caps (soft cap that is). that runs two risks; one, if druids are already this high in terms of tanking power, it means there isnt much room to improve it with gear, and two, the few improvements that do happen will create a problem for later in terms of making the druid too strong.

this change essentially raises the "ceiling" of gear for druids in a lot of ways, allowing for actual improvement via better gear and further homogenizing gear usage between rogues and druids (which means less wasted drops).

I read the OP on Saturday and held off responding until today because I've fallen a bit behind on feral tank shenanigans, but I think the outcry against the changes represents a pretty narrow view. For reference, I'm basing my position on the assumption that SD will proc on any crit (white or yellow) which means that unless it has an internal cooldown, it will be up on almost every GCD for large trash pulls and will still be up frequently on smaller/single encounters (ie. bosses).

Basically, all this ability is doing is giving Blizzard more room to work T8/9 itemization without pushing druids over the armor cap and in exchange, druids are getting the equivalent of a shield block. The best geared warrior tank in our guild right now has about a 30% chance to block and his non-crit blocks are good to mitigate ~1500 damage. While the proposed change to SotF as it stands means that ferals aren't going to be enjoying the same mitigation vs. huge hits (ie. Patchwerk Hateful Strikes), they're going to fair much better against lower damage hits where the differences of flat mitigation % between a feral druid and a plate tank don't provide so much of an advantage. It's not a nerf...it's a tradeoff.

I almost wish I were inclined to post some math illustrating the situations where this could be a benefit, but I know such math would be countered by math demonstrating where it would be a nerf. Such is the nature of a tradeoff: you gain something at the expense of something.

Unfortunately, if you're trying to work in a flat comparison between a feral druid and a protection warrior, a druid's crit % is typically higher than an equally geared protection warrior's block %. A feral druid's AP would put their damage absorbed probably on par with if not slightly higher than an equally geared protection warrior's block value. The main difference is that if the RNG works in a warrior's favor, he can block 5 consecutive attacks within the span of a GCD on a large pull, whereas a druid would be limited by their GCD. Again, it's a lot of situational number crunching that I'll happily leave to Blizzard. I think that given the nature of buffs handed to every tanking class and Blizzard's stated goal of ensuring no tank gets left behind, druids will benefit from the changes.

I agree. From the point of view of trying to create a comparison between the two, the uptime on shield block makes it very difficult. 10 seconds out of every 40 is significant and consistent in its own way, but also creates situational conditions on its effectiveness. The best way to work out the benefits of SD would be to base comparisons on effective health, but even that is subjective. The addon that I use for tracking effective health offers two values based on different unmitigated hit sizes (2k and 10k if I'm not mistaken). It's easier to work out for shield wearing tanks because the mitigation from block functions regardless of how many mobs are attacking you or, more simply, how often you're being hit every 1.5 seconds.

There's no doubt in my mind that there will be situations where having HP equivalent to 25% of your AP mitigated every 1.5 seconds would be superior even after the armor reduction than just a flat reduction based on current armor. There's also no doubt in my mind that there will be a threshold after which the DR from SD will be inferior to what ferals currently have based on the assumption that a druid isn't at the armor cap. For druids maxed out in T9 content, it's a no brainer that SD will have clear advantages in almost every situation.

I only see positive sides to this :)
Im having a VERY hard time getting pure tankgear, cause alot of the agi/stam gear i have gives more avoidance as it is. What i like most about this, is that the insane ammounts of AP and crit u pick up with the WOTLK items for ferals basicly gets a use.

I dont get why people QQ about the tanks who arent max geared yet.
If you compare druids to (after Gargoyle) all but DK tanks, we are having ONE hell of an easy time. I was litterally geared for heroics in under a week after ding 80. Considering im Balance mainspec that is just stupid, it took my Dk weeks.
All you will need to do is actually GET lvl 78+ gear to tank heroics, OMG we are screwed...

Also, i dont see how a druid is a bad aoe tank AT ALL. its easier then anything but paladin to maintain multitarget treat. If your having trouble i advice you to make sure u have the maul glyph and try the following rotation:
Maul (wait for swing) - tab - Maul - tab
with Swipe every global CD.. i can tell you, my frost dk has more trouble :)

I don't really have a problem with my aoe only being a frontal cone. It is quite easy to take a few steps back so the mobs are all in front of you. The thing that pisses me off is the fact that when you have everything *EXACTLY* where you want it, they do that damned maneuver where they spread out in a circle around you, so one or two of them are out of your arc and you need to reposition again. Why the hell do we need mobs to path behind us when there are more than 5 of them? I think I can say that nobody cares if things bunch up on each other.