An analysis of 3.1 TankingFollow

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=15443418154&sid=1

Normally I dislike linking the Oboards, but I know many druid tanks are worried about the overhaul of our tanking powers come 3.1. I keep hearing people talk about how it's a massive nerf. I had little experience to go on, so had little idea what really all of it meant. The link is one guy's analysis of his own experience using the new system on the PTR (which currently the blues are saying it looks like it is near its final form, as far as the shield mechanic works anyway), including some basic mathematical analysis. Also, before criticizing his breakdown, I ask you read both pages of the thread as he does try to followup with more information as people ask for it. I hope this helps people understand the new system, and having read it things do sounds like they might be good....I hope...

Edited title since there seems to be some disagreement on the quality of the analysis...

Edited, Mar 4th 2009 3:03pm by CrimsonNeko

Plus expertise soft caps at 6.5% not 8%. Where the heck is he getting 8% expertise cap from?

I wouldn't pay much mind to his post at all or that thread in its current state.

Hell, last night I hit 72% reduction with the shammy armor buff. I'm not even BiS everywhere or even most places.

Armor cap is reachable now.

The health buff is QQ driven, I feel due to our ability to avoid all other stats and stack stam at the expensive of everything else. Like the OP in the O-boards thread. S+3D stam stacking has other classes with limited knowledge of the class mechanics paranoid.

The heart of druid issues lies in gear availability, Polar set is broken with stam gems, and scaling too good with to few stats; ie agi and stam.

None of that will gets fixed this expansion. Just temporary buffs and nerfs to keep us in the mix as far as tanking goes.

Wow that was the best insider article I have ever read.

Well I don't know about you guys, but in my guild* a druid, Feralune, and myself are the two highest geared and most experienced (IMO easily best :P) tanks in the guild. The two of us tank all progression runs for the guild and have been since BC. I don't plan on giving up my spot anytime soon. Our next two highest tanks are paladins, which is nice on gimmick fights, but even on fights with adds, Maul + Swipe spam ftw...

I think us druids will do what we've always done and perform above and beyond what we're meant to do. (Hence the constant nerf bat) No matter what, we always seem to find a way to heal better, tank better and still remain competitive in dps roles.

It'll take a little getting used to, but we'll get our gear sorted and be back where we need to be just like always. We'll find a way to make it work, even if Blizzard doesn't want us to :P



*(Cleared 10 man content except Maly(I wasn't there :P) >:(, Cleared Sarth 25, 12/15 Naxx 25(first time in was last weekend) and haven't tried Maly yet. Small guild, still building after my former guild split)

**(Holy parenthesis inside parenthesis!)

There's a lot at play here and it's a shame that so many druids can't see beyond the final numbers on their paper doll pane.

Tanking survivability has never been measured in terms of actual health...it's always measured in terms of effective health. Savage Defense presents a substantial boost to effective health for feral tanks who did more than simply stack stamina which brings ferals more in line with the itemization conundrums all other tanks face. In TBC and early WotLK heroics, I was looking at three numbers on my druid: actual health, armor, and dodge %. Pretty dull stuff.

Weak tanks (regardless of class) stack stamina. It doesn't matter what class they chose. Stacking stamina shows a limited understanding of game mechanics and shifts the responsibility for clever gearing to the healer who has to do that much more healing to keep the tank up. Throw in nerfs to mana regen for 3 out of the 4 healing classes/specs and stacking stamina becomes even less of a desirable option.

Fights like Malygos and Sarth + drakes get tanks critting their pants when they see the big one-shot damage from the breath attacks, but those breath attacks only account for a percentage of damage a tank will take. 25-man Malygos hits my paladin for 7k or so, and he hits me a lot more than 4 times between breaths. In terms of overall damage for the fight, avoiding or mitigating those attacks is what makes soaking the damage from an Arcane Breath less of a burden on the healers.

The strong point of feral tanks has always been their ability to soak an enormous amount of damage. In terms of physical damage, the bigger the hit the better bears scaled. In terms of magic damage, the high actual health is what kept druids viable in most cases. Those cases where bears were deemed not viable were due to their shortage (see also: lack) of ******* buttons.

Thought has to be given to where T8 itemization is going to put a given tank class. In the case of bears (were they to not be nerfed), it's going to push them to the armor cap, it's going to boost their dodge and tps a bit, and it's going to push their HP through the roof. If you think of the next full tier of raid gear as a 13% stat increase over the tier before it, where does that leave a BiS fully raid buffed bear for max HP? 50k? 55k? More? At what point does that health pool force a given encounter to be trivial for a feral tank because that same encounter has to be tuned for a tank with 3/5-3/4 that amount of HP?

Blizzard has to consider where T8 itemization will put a given tank class in terms of survivability (and thus, desirability) for a given raid encounter. It's too easy for tanks in general to stack stamina and think they're doing a good job of gearing their toon. I remember standing at the Azjol'Nerub summoning stone when I was leveling my pally and seeing an 80 orc warrior run by with 32k health unbuffed. I'd have hated to be his healer...

One of the biggest problems Blizzard has had with bear tanks is their potential to scale out of control. That's what happens when you take a leather wearing class and try to give them stat boosts that bring them in line with plate wearers for one tier of content and then watch as successive tiers of raid gear skyrocket their stats.

Bears should be used to this by now. A given tier of raid gear is designed to make a toon viable but in doing so, the way bears scale makes it so that the next tier of raid gear creates an OP class. We saw it in TBC, and the same thing is happening again in WotLK. If you look at the big picture, it's necessary.

I won't be surprised if we eventually see some kind of alteration to frost presence on DKs because of this. I'll come back to this.



I actually have to disagree - I think Blizzard realizes that there's a serious scaling problem here and Savage Defense is their first go at fixing it. This isn't the typical scaling problem that classes complain of, where they don't improve comparative to other classes - feral druids, and I'd imagine DKs soon enough with what frost presence does to their armor, were going to be the class compared to.

Druids were already hitting or getting very close to the armor cap in the first tier of gear in LK. If it continued at this rate, itemization would start to become a huge issue. Where the other tanking classes have a variety of stats to improve in, we were too focused on stamina and armor. If we don't need any armor, where do the ilvl points start to go? Armor will be completely wasted, so bears will need more stamina - at some point this will also just spiral out of control given how HotW scales stamina. More and more points need to be allocated to other stats, and frankly the only other extremely important stat was agility. But we don't really get much off of that other than dodge - which also becomes less and less important after a certain point.

Savage Defense fixes a lot of this by opening up other stats as beneficial to our itemization, and also requiring an armor nerf so that we can stay in line with other tanks. In reality, SotF should really have never gained the bonus armor effect. This was just a lazy band-aid to Druids before they added Savage Defense, but it very quickly became something that we found far too important.

In all honesty, I don't think this skill is going to become the end-all be-all solution to our problems, and that at some point we're going to see any additional armor given by SotF taken away as well.

As a final note - not every boss from now on is going to have large magical burst damage. I can't find an exact quote of it now, but GC has pretty much continually said that it's unfortunate that two of the current endgame bosses do, because they won't always.

And, of course, at this stage of development, Death Knights are really just too good, and I think the developers are truly struggling to keep all three trees viable for any role, yet keep them in line with the other classes. Whenever I see someone complain about a buff or a nerf, it's usually because Death Knights can do better and they are the class being compared to. The dev's ability to learn from their past mistakes with other classes was honestly just too good when designing DKs, and this'll probably be a problem until at least the next content patch.

He's speaking theoretically, and he's right; with Dodge on a DR, when you hit the armor cap the only way to improve your survivability in our current scenarios is to further increase your health pool.

I'd have to agree with Horsemouth.

I think there should always be a better stat to stack than Stam once you have reached a reasonable amount of health, as Stam will never make the healers' job easier, except for easier spike management. But they'll just have to pump more healing into you. Even Expertise past the dodge cap, but before parry cap, would be better to stack for the additional reduced chance of parry-haste. However minimal it would be, it would improve your mitigation better than more stamina.

The difficulty I see with trying to compare one tank class to another is that typically, all of the comparisons are based around the example of a hard hitting raid boss. That explains the predilection of novice tanks to stack stamina. No thought is given to bottom-end damage because what's 2k health/hit when you've got 40k HP? Not much *cough* healer mana *cough*.

Savage Defense won't have the utility of a shield, but it's a start and if Blizzard decides it's not mitigating enough it's a simple matter of letting it stack charges (with a limit and a short duration) so that 4 crits from a Swipe on a cluster of baby spiders in Naxx (for example) will allow Savage Defense to proc on the next 4 hits the druid takes. As the numbers are shaping up now, however, something like that would make druids OP relative to current shield tanks.

That addresses the "armor" nerfs, and for right now the stamina nerfs are pretty much moot. There isn't a single encounter I've come across so far where nerfing a bear's actual health will make them not viable for content they're currently doing well in. That's not to say a stamina nerf won't be noticed, but it's not like guilds are suddenly going to start having their bears go cat in favor of a warrior Sarth tank because suddenly druids can't cut it. I guess it depends on how you look at the definition of a nerf. If you look at it as simply the reduction of a beneficial stat, then ya...the stamina changes are a nerf. If you look at a nerf as something that reduces performance, then no...the stamina changes are not a nerf simply because bears are sporting more health than is actually needed in any current encounter. (Note that I'm not saying they're sporting more health than is needed simply because other equally geared tank classes have less, but because the content that currently represents a near one-shot pally/warrior tank (Sarth 3D) still leaves bears with a good chunk of health left over).

Perhaps a poor wording of mine, I didn't mean to say that.

It's just that it might lull the healers into a false sense of "Oh, the boss doesn't seem to hit our tank that hard, I can slack on the healing." (since they'd see how little of the tank's health goes away per boss hit). And once the tank's health gets low, healers will go "Wtf why won't it go back up!?" as they chain cast their heals like mad.

That being said, I haven't played healer in WotLK, so maybe your heals are strong enough to bring a tank back up to full in no time. My example might be just a caricature, really. I can imagine it being a non-issue, but mostly I can't imagine how having tons of health would help healers.

That's why, in my opinion, almost any stat would be superior to Stamina (beyond a certain health level).

Anyway, I'm rambling, probably don't make so much sense. Not really trying to convince anyone here, it's just my point of view. So long as a tank doesn't go balls out on Stam, it's up to him to find the right balance.

I have my own thoughts and opinions on stacking stam vs stacking agility vs stacking crit vs stacking your mom.... wait.... Ok on a real note. I think it's hard to say just yet what we're all going to look like after this next content patch. As Horse mentioned, we do have real concerns when it comes to the fact that the only truly singular stat that we have that is not effected by DR is Stamina. His examples on gear expressed that.

Me personally, having read as much as I can find on the changes to our furry ****** I see the changes in a positive light because to me, at least it shows me that Blizzard is putting in some effort to change something that is obviously going to be a problem as content comes out. I mean, if we're hitting 35-40k self buffed in balanced gear right now, where do we go from there? I mean we were at 15-16k in BC. That's 20-25k more in 10 levels on the first tier of raid content. I meant at what point do you step back and say. Wow, this druid in T9 can solo heroics damn near because he has 90k hp and does 3.5k dps. I mean, imo, that's an honest fear and I think that not just druids are going to be at that level.

It's at the point where so many people have gotten so truly GOOD at this game, that they have to make things so much bigger and shinier and crazier just to keep everyone happy. The hardest thing to see is that it might end up being the killer of the game.

Anyways, off that bad tone and onto something different.

Here's a link to the PTR Patch Build 9658. New PTR Patch Build Notes

Crabz-a-lot talks about the Patchwerk testing, tanks as a whole and a bunch of other stuff as well.

/discuss