Blue Review: 03/05/10

The wife made a good point last night about the high volume of dev posts on the forums lately. If they keep feeding us blue posts, people are bound to develop delusions of entitlement about it. It would probably not be a terrible idea for GC and the crew to lay off their responses for a while, and let the community simmer a bit.

But, if they're going to post, I'm going to parse. Here's what I've been able to find from recent days that's relevant to the future of our ursine alter egos. (I'll include relevant bits of the OP for the sake of context)

Cataclysm: Druids and the Parry/Block Problem

Based on the just-released information, not being able to parry or block is going to be a huge handicap for raiding Druids in Cataclysm.

This isn't because it will inherently make us weaker; even with the changes to parry and block, it's probably possible to balance a theoretical Druid with only dodge with a theoretical plate tank with dodge, parry, and block.

The problem is itemization. Any item with parry, block, or both is likely to be very undesirable to Druid tanks, and will likely be a downgrade from items 1-2 tiers lower.

Why will this problem likely be worse than it is now?

1. There will be 2 wasted stats which will be common on tank gear, instead of just one. (You don't see block on much tank gear currently).
2. With our Stamina multipliers reduced (and EH probably less important), the increased Stamina on the higher-tier item will be less likely to make up for the avoidance/threat loss, as sometimes happens now.

Why is this a huge problem?

Bears will gear up more slowly than plate tanks, since they have fewer gear choices. This means that when a guild starts doing the hard content, the Bear will likely be weaker as it will be less geared.

What are some solutions?

1. Allow Bears to parry and block. The argument that this breaks flavor is nonsensical; with low-level NPC bears able to parry, not being able to parry breaks flavor.
2. Let Bears use block and parry rating on gear. These stats would be translated to stats we can use.
3. Design Bears to not share tanking jewelry with plate tanks.

I disagree with a lot of the sentiments in this post. For starters, at least on my server, the Druid population outnumbers Hunters and Rogues combined. There are more opportunities for 10-person progression than ever before, and with the coming changes to guild design, we might just see an uptick in small raiding guilds, so I'm not sure that we'll be backbenched by the game design.

I don't know that I've ever seen leather items with block or parry on them. Besides, this post seems to forget the importance of damage negation resulting from Savage Defense on combined probability crits when using Swipe. Druids do more than dodge and absorb damage. Crit IS block for Bear tanks, it's just a lot harder to work combined probability crit strikes into our effective health calculations.

Let's see what GC has to say:

Ghostcrawler: If druids have lower avoidance (assuming you call the new parry and block avoidance), then they'll have higher armor and health to compensate. There is no reason druids must have block and parry to be competitive. They really haven't missed it much in WotLK.

I think the only real risk to druids from a design paradigm perspective is the risk of being a mana sponge. Druids were worried about that coming into this expansion, but as we've seen, it wasn't an issue. With mana mattering more, it could be, but high armor will still help with that.

The comment about leather was just that if leather provides as much health as plate, then the Bear multiplier doesn't need to be as high for druids still to have higher health than other tanks.

We can conclude the following points:

1. Bears will continue to have higher health than other tanks as an element of their core class design.
2. Bears will not be getting block or parry (with Savage Defense, who needs block anyway?)
3. We could see armor and heath buffs if our avoidance is seen to suffer. This seems like a slight clawback from last year's nerfs.

@Cataclysm stat change preview

Parry - Parry no longer provides 100% avoidance and no longer speeds up attacks. Instead, when you parry an attack, it and the next attack will each hit for 50% damage (assuming they hit at all). In other words, Dodge is a chance to avoid 100% of the damage from one attack, Parry is a chance to avoid 50% of the damage from two attacks, and Block is a chance to avoid 30% of the damage from one attack.

Let's not forget that Dodge also feeds Rage to a Bear, indirectly giving us more ways to mitigate damage. Currently, I don't know how well our dodge chance is expected to scale with gear in Cataclysm, but if, as some people fear, we lose a little competitive edge on other tanks whose avoidance stats scale better than ours, it seems from the posts above (merely reiterated by GC in this topic thread) that Blizzard will buff our health and armor.

My concern is that this could pull us back from one of our strong roles, which is magic avoidance. Considering that we can expect to be fighting large dragons in Cataclysm, buffing our armor might not be the way to proceed.

For the record, here's GC's pithy response:

Ghostcrawler: Tanks will still be required to tank raids and I expect most heroics. You're not in any danger of being upstaged by a dps spec who has slightly more armor and health than they do now.

Do Warriors really need another Cleave?

Buried in this post was a nice little nugget for Bears.

Ghostcrawler:
...

The actual problem, in our minds, is threat scaling. Warriors (and all tanks) could AE tank just fine in Naxxramas.* It only became a problem over time when the dps of the dps classes grew so much more quickly than the tanks, largely because the dps classes have so many dps stats on their gear while plate tanks have Strength. Tank damage was pretty close to 50% of dps damage in the first tier of content, which was our goal, but has slipped to 25 to 30% of dps (your mileage may vary) in Icecrown.

We need a system that keeps tank damage scaling at the same rate as dps damage. However, that system can't be dependent on gear stats (unless you're willing to see tank gear go away) and can't be as ridiculous as deep talents that say "You get 5 AP per point of Strength."

I think you just notice threat issues more on AE pulls because things like Tricks and Misdirect mask any problems on single target pulls. Separate problem.

And yes Paladin tank AE damage and threat generation is still too high, largely because of Seals and HoR, but long-term we're going to nerf that instead of making all tanks able to trivially maintain threat in all situations. Referencing the other thread on threat a little, why as a tank would you even care what buttons you push if maintaining threat is a foregone conclusion?

* - AE tanking was fine in Naxxramas. AE damage was, and has remained, over the top. We prefer a model where the risk of tanking too many mobs is that the tank dies, not that you can't maintain threat on them all (within reasonable limits of course). We also prefer a model where the dps do AE damage on some pulls and switch to single target dps on others.

This is a refrain on his previous posts from February on threat scaling, and trying to determine how to make the threat game more fun for tanks. There seems to be a growing concern that the threat game is inhibiting the development of new tanks, because the Journeyman tank queues up with an ICC geared DPS and cannot for the life of them keep agg during trash pulls.

So, with the subject focusing on threat scaling, GC continues:

Ghostcrawler:
...

Dude pulled aggro does not represent a failure of class design any more than you sometimes dying represents a failure of class design. Both are going to happen sometimes unless you're absolutely at the top of your game. That's part of the challenge of playing your role. For our part, we'll make sure you have the tools to do your job, and for the most part you do. I don't think the tools are the issue, as I said above.

I'm talking philosophy here, because I assume that's usually more interesting to a wider audience. Philosophically, tank threat generation is working correctly (i.e. as we intend) with perhaps 4-5 exceptions that we would like to fix:

1) Paladins can do a little too much AE tanking "splash" damage, often without even setting out to do so.
2) Tricks and MD take too much of a burden off of the tank / hide issue #3.
3) Damage and therefore threat generation aren't scaling well at very high levels of gear. <-- this is the big one. 4) There is too much incentive to AE every pull, which puts a burden on the tank to AE tank every pull. 5) You could probably add that bears need a button to hit besides Swipe.

That last little nugget is what made me smile. It might be cool if they'd work toward a system that rewards combinations and rotations with extra threat, similar to the damage of rogues and cat Druids. It would seem to come naturally for Druids, considering how we already use combo points while leveling in Cat form.

Plate wearers have things like Armored to the Teeth which helps them scale up their damage commensurate to their armor.

Generating massive threat might be more fun if we had to pay closer attention to the order in which we mash buttons, and this would also reward skills like target cycling and stacking bleeds, thus providing us with incentives not to just spam Swipe. It would also preserve current PvP mechanics, since threat has no affect on other players.

Interesting things coming from the blue posts these days. I'll keep my eyes peeled for more, but don't be too surprised if they get quiet for a bit and let us all fester.

Wowhead Improvement Wishlist

I love Wowhead.com, I use it all the time. I've got this blog integrated to show pop-up tooltip panels for items and skills.
But there are two things I wish it did better.

1. The Druid Talent Calculator on wowhead.com correctly shows Feral Charge as a 5th tier talent in the Feral Tree.  However, the page which enumerates all of the Druid Skills incorrectly lists Feral Charge as being available at level 20.
2. I wish that on the talent calculator pages for each class, there were tooltips for the various skills affected by any given talent.  Perhaps a sidebar on the left with an alphabetical list of skill tooltips so that we can quickly look up the skill a talent refers to without leaving the page.  Another potential solution would be to build a list on the left or right column of the page that indexes every skill affected by the talents currently chosen.  For example, if I put 3 ranks into Feral Instinct, it could add Swipe and Prowl to the list of affected skills.  For added clarity, it might default to the highest rank of any given skill that the user can train for, as indicated by the "character level" required to have the current number of skill points.

That's it, these are really the only two things that I constantly wish for when I visit Wowhead.  I have nothing but admiration for that site, though--it really is the best information portal for the game that I know of, and I've spent time on just about all of them.  Kudos to them on the continuing tradition of excellence.

Mob Handling Notes from Wailing Caverns

When I was running Wailing Caverns last night I was forced to do a lot of fancy mob handling.  WC is chock full of casters, and they know not to come running when you slap them with a Faerie Fire.

One common method used to force the casters to actually come to you is to use a Line of Sight (LoS) tactic.  Since they can't cast at you if you're not in line of sight, you hit them with a Faerie Fire, then back around a corner and they'll come running over.

But using an LoS is not always in the cards.  Sometimes, as is frequently the case in Wailing Caverns, you have dangerous multi-caster pulls, where you have to keep multiple mobs on you that don't want to move.  If you're fortunate enough to have a patient and cunning party that will back up and let you use an LoS ambush, that's great.  But sometimes you just need to throw caution to the wind and get into the thick of things.

It's during these situations that effective aggression management is so important.  One of the things I always try to do is to use Faerie Fire (Feral) on as many targets as I can, and preferably early in the fight.  FFF actually generates threat, unlike Growl.  Having the Glyph of Maul is useful for building threat against a large number of opponents, if you take the time to frequently change targets to spread the love around a bit, but casters are very problematic because they don't line up in front of you the way you'd like them to, and you can't kite them around by walking backwards.

In 3.1, Swipe was changed to affect all mobs in a 360º area around you, a major improvement from Burning Crusade, in which its area of effect was a frontal cone.  This helps in the beginning of a fight, especially if you have spare rage from an earlier encounter.  However, it costs 15 rage with 5 ranks of Ferocity.  Unless you are literally surrounded by mobs, this is not a very good skill to use in terms of threat-to-rage ratios.  Compared to Maul, which costs 5 less rage and generates far more threat, Swipe becomes, at least at the early levels that we're talking about, an emergency button to be used only in special circumstances.  Not until much later on will it become a mainstay, front line workhorse of an ability.

So, barring the frequent use of Swipe to maintain aggression on multi-caster mobs with meat shields tossed in, and potentially adds or patrols, what I do is keep tabs on my threat meter.  If I have at least 3x as much threat as the next guy, even if I'm dealing with a caster, I just leave them and go to the next caster.  Try to get two mobs in front of you if you can, but focus on the casters because the melee mobs will follow along with you.  If you see a caster going after one of your party members, use FFF to suck them back into your threat well.  And if you really start to lose control in a heavy melee situation, because we're in the level 10-19 bracket here and don't have a cooldown to force every nearby mob to attack us, just punch Demoralizing Roar to at least hamstring the attack power of the nearby mobs.

Two more tips for Wailing Caverns.  First, armor doesn't mitigate magic, so building a massive effective health pool is the best defense against these sorts of encounters.  Eat your buff food.  Second, save your Bash for when the druids try to use their sleep spell--losing your healer or one of your dealers in a big fight could get you squished.

The Terrible 20s

From the standpoint of an ursine enthusiast, the 20s bring very little to the table in the terms of feral tanking improvements.  They are, in order of appearance:

1. Demoralizing Roar, Rank 2 - Level 20
2. Feral Charge - Level 20
3. Swipe (Bear), Rank 2 - Level 24
4. Maul, Rank 3 - Level 26
5. Challenging Roar - Level 28

This is a fairly sparse list, and the 20s seem to be more dedicated to the introduction of the various Cat abilities, as well as some respectable improvements to the Restoration skills.  I am on the brink of leveling to 20, and will likely do so if only to achieve the remaining skills needed for The Flying Bear Maneuver.

My thoughts on the 20s, however, are rather grim with respect to feral tanking.  My next entry will focus on the love-hate relationship we have with the Maul skill, how it is best used, what its relationship is to swipe, and other Maul-related things.

On Bricks, Backstrafing, Talents and Professions for Baby Bears

After doing more work last night with backstrafing, I wanted to share a couple of my observations. But first, a note on the name "Brickflank". Since choosing this name for my new Bear Tank, the word "Brick" has been marinating, infusing itself into my whole mindframe regarding Druid tanking. Bottom line is that it's just a fun word, and a damned fine metaphor for the tank role.

But enough on that. On to the sauce.

First, I have absolutely confirmed that while backstrafing away from an enemy, I can not only dodge their attacks while withdrawing, but also deliver my own attacks. And, at the moment of my choosing, I can drop a Nature's Grasp for the root and make a little distance. This could be very useful for tricky pulls where you are forced to pull two mobs but need a little one-on-one quality time with one of them.

All in all, it led to quite a few interesting encounters. Imagine me, strafing into trees and shrubberies while trying to learn how to backstrafe while still remaining aware of my surroundings. I still feel like a baby bear, batting around bunnies in the backyard. But, I tell you, there's a Brick inside, just waiting to claw his way out.

The day after I got Bear Form, I continued to struggle with what professions I'd pick up, and spent an evening doing prep work and chores. First, I took the long boat and train ride to Ironforge and trained up maces, happily ending my fishing pole's reign as the best weapon I could afford. After that I decided to grind out some startup capital and get the old economic engine up and running, churning out about 30 gold with various fish, herbs, leather, and other farmed goods, as well as a few well placed local recipes that tend to sell for a lot on the auction house. Some poor guy also bought a stack of Refreshing Spring Water from me for 10g. Now I know how Coca Cola Company feels.

I immediately dumped this income into a couple of green tanky items and a respectable lumberjack shirt. Let's face it. I'm going for the "Brick" effect, and nothing about a wiry pink-skinned Night Elf with his chest-bits showing says "Brick" to me. Lumberjack shirt took care of that issue. I now feel that I can call myself an ursine of promise. That shirt will be with me forever, I have a feeling about this.

Fully recognizing that these profession choices are temporary, I picked up herbalism and skinning, and started to make the most of them. While doing so I had time to think about the three main gathering professions. Each of them "feeds" one or more of the crafting professions (I'm not talking one-off recipes that require a crossover item, but honest daily working relationships here). Skinning feeds only Leatherworking. Herbalism feeds both Inscription and Alchemy. Mining feeds Engineering, Blacksmithing, AND Jewelcrafting. Experience tells me that there's a glut of glyphs on the auction house, because people rarely need to change their glyphs out, so there's not a great deal of income in Inscription, effectively negating it from the list of potential professions I could feed with a given gathering specialist. Some time ago, I recall reading a comparison of the end-game profession benefits on Druid effective health, and Engineering was high on the list. Experience confirms that engineering makes for fun tanking. So, I can guarantee I'll switch Brickflank into Engineering at some point. It's also worth noting that as you go through the leveling process you tend to accumulate tremendous amounts of various materials. I don't think that maintaining two serious gathering professions on the same character is in the cards for me, at least not for very long. Brickflank is destined to be an engineer, but I'm not resolved on whether or not I'll make him a miner as well. Skinning begets Crit and leather for tanky gear as I level.

I had a proverbial "moment of fear and pain" deciding how to allot my first handful of talent points. It really comes down to two choices. First there is Furor, which gives us that rush of Light, Sweet, Rage upon first switching into Bear Form and helps to prime the line for an opening Maul. The second is Ferocity, which reduces the Rage and Energy requirements for a host of our front line skills such as Maul, Swipe, Claw, Rake and Mangle.

You want them both. It's true, but until L19 you can't handle them both. Too much power in one so young leads only to the dark side. Or so I'm told.

I went with Ferocity, because it comes with a guarantee, whereas climbing the ladder to Furor 5 still leaves a chance of zero effect in the crucial opening moments of an encounter. It could mean the difference between holding aggro on a group fight and wiping on a pull.

Level 12 brought with it Enrage and Revive, both of which will prove tremendously useful for when I get in over my furry little head or things go South in a fight. And I will. I've got a full slate of quests lined up in Darkshore and plan to pound back some levels tonight and push for L19, at which point I might actually turn off XP for a bit and do some tanking in Deadmines and Wailing Caverns, try out the new random dungeon feature, and get back out in front of a crew.

Coming up: A glimpse at glyphs, tanking cuisine, bartender and macros for baby bears and a special surprise for old times' sake.