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Q u o t e:
Besides, people generally only look at a tank's max Health. Guess who wins in that department.

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I wouldn't worry about what people who are picking tanks like this think, they are setting up a raid full of fail.
Go start your own group or make nachos or something.
The group that you feel you are being excluded from would likely make you want to ninja log if you were present. Dumb leaders are dumb. Just look at Bush.

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Q u o t e:


The word they kept using was "viable". "We want all tanks to be viable."

That means anybody can do the encounters. It also means that some classes can be vastly superior to others, and that's OK. This is why they want all tanks to be "viable". Not "equal". Not even "equally viable".

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Lolwut?

http://blue.mmo-champion.com/26/12662134298-qq-about-warriors-1-tank.html

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Q u o t e:

The goal is roughly equivalent. The goal is not identical. Identical would mean making all abilities identical, down to things like Divine Shield and Innervate. I also want to caution you all that there are plenty of players who are concerned about the degree of homogenization we’ve done to get the tank classes as close as they are. It’s cool for everyone to have their different visions for what the game should be, just make sure not to impose your vision on everyone else. There are eleven million people playing WoW….

As far as the other arguments are concerned…

-- You can argue that our design is for warriors to be the best tanks. But I can debunk that right here. It's not. They will probably be superior in some cases and inferior in others, but never to the extent that you bench the warrior and bring in another class for a certain fight.
-- You can argue that some classes need to tank worse than others to compensate for their other abilities or degree of hybrid-ness. But that is not our design.
-- You can argue that some classes end up being better tanks for some reason or another. This is a totally legit concern. I don’t think we have any evidence that this is really happening yet, but it is something we pay a lot of attention to.

-- In Classic WoW there was really only one tank, the warrior.
-- In Burning Crusade, we added two other tanks, but the design was that they were typically used in an OT role. There were exceptions of course.
-- The design for Lich King is four tanking classes. You should be able to raid in Lich King without a warrior tank, or without a warrior period. You can replace “warrior” in that sentence with 9 other classes. One of the reasons we spent so much time on the warrior Prot tree is we wanted to compensate them for removing them from the “best tank” pedestal, or at least making room up there for druids, paladins and DKs as well.

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I think you've been taking too many "doom and gloom" pills, Tewa.

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Q u o t e:

Ghostcrawler says that battle rez is a factor in figuring out where to peg druid tanking ability. Yet the same doesn't apply for Paladins (lay on hands) or Warriors (berserker stance). Why?

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How do you know that they don't do this? Can you suddenly read minds?

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Q u o t e:

-- The design for Lich King is four tanking classes. You should be able to raid in Lich King without a warrior tank, or without a warrior period. You can replace “warrior” in that sentence with 9 other classes. One of the reasons we spent so much time on the warrior Prot tree is we wanted to compensate them for removing them from the “best tank” pedestal, or at least making room up there for druids, paladins and DKs as well.

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Honestly, at this point with the way this games going, I'm just looking for something more challenging to switch to that has the same "ease of play" warcraft has, with a decently high enough player base that I won't feel like i'm traveling through area's with noone in them.

They'd made this game to easy, to try to accomodate casual players, and for the more hardcore players like me, we just simply, run out of things to do, there really isn't anything left i have to do on my main but wait for raids, or farm BG's for the 100 win achievements i haven't finished yet.

People that rolled warriors when the game came out, like me, 4 years ago, rolled a warrior because it was the pedestal tank, if you wanted to be a tank, you rolled one, you choose the race that best fit that roll at the time, and you worked for the gear you needed to fit that roll the best, while taking the time to learn your class as you leveled. In the game we currently have, all that is gone, you now level so fast that you learn almost nothing while doing so, your race in most cases is limited to 1 for min/max purposes in your faction, and raiding has gone from challenging and fun, to boring and tedious since you can do every raid twice in one week (or 4 times in my case, since i have an 80 alt as well), not to mention that alot of old content is now buggy or problematic to do with mechanical problem, or just way to simplistic because of buff's to the various class's.

Of course we can say that promises of "Uldaur" lie in the horizon, but from what I've been reading, both in the lines, and between the lines, seems to say that that instance won't be anything in comparison to the difficulty of the older instances and is still only going to be something to go "ok look, it's raid time, lets go run this twice a week, after we get everything on farm after attempting each boss twice to three times".

Blizzard decided that giving the casual player what they wanted was the best way for them to make money, it looks like they also released an expansion before they really had balanced any of the class's through testing themselves. Class balance isn't all about the numbers, it's also about how easy it is for a particular class to accomplish those numbers. If say, a paladin can accomplish amazing dps by pushing three buttons, that's fine, but if it takes a warrior 6 buttons to do the same thing, that's not fine, and if you don't factor in the other abilities that class has, even if there dps is the same, it's still not balanced, and that's what i see happening alot in this expansion.

Anyone I'm rambling a bit in a post noone will probably read, so i think I'll just hit the sack, have fun and good hunting ya'all.

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Q u o t e:
Your comparing battle rez and LoH to berserker stance? do you actually have any idea how just generally BAD beserker stance is? 3% crit for 10% extra damage taken?

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Do you know how much extra damage a bear tank takes while not in bear form? It's a lot more than 10%. Battle rez isn't usable in bear form, yet we're balanced around having battle rez. Thus the basis of the comparison to berserker stance.... although a warrior tanking in berserker stance still benefits from his armor and shield, unlike a druid who has to shift out of bear form.

Paladins, of course, take no penalties for using Lay on Hands... or any other abilities.

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Q u o t e:
But is class viability actually meant anything in blizzards eyes as far as tanking goes, warriors would be the best, dk's second, druids and paladins last.

is that true now? no, so does viability effect the class's ability to tank, no.

Wether or not it should, would have to be discussed in a different post.

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Blizzard has stated that this is the case, and that non-tanking abilities are factored into the tanking balance equation.... at least for Druids.

I've taunted, then IBF'd, had the druid Rebirth a healer, and then go back to tanking.

It's a nice trick. Just thought I'd toss that out there in response to GC...

To answer the TC:

Play a feral druid because you like the way they tank. We can argue numbers all day on who is a better tank, but ferals do perfectly 'fine'. You won't get declined groups for being a feral tank and the ones that do aren't worth going to. As I said, play a feral druid cause you love the way the class plays.

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Q u o t e:

We want to have four classes that can main tank (given appropriate skill and gear). We're pretty close to that right now, but we'll have to see what things look like in the next tier of content. It's possible the gear available then or the types of encounters you experience change the playing field a little, in which case we'll have to make adjustments.

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Lots and lots of heavy hitting bosses please!

Oh and trash mobs and packs that require CC and hit hard so all the nonsense QQ about not clearing trash fast enough making Tank A subpar and terrible will lessen.

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Q u o t e:


Do you know how much extra damage a bear tank takes while not in bear form? It's a lot more than 10%. Battle rez isn't usable in bear form, yet we're balanced around having battle rez. Thus the basis of the comparison to berserker stance.... although a warrior tanking in berserker stance still benefits from his armor and shield, unlike a druid who has to shift out of bear form.

Paladins, of course, take no penalties for using Lay on Hands... or any other abilities.




Blizzard has stated that this is the case, and that non-tanking abilities are factored into the tanking balance equation.... at least for Druids.

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Q u o t e:
We don't really apply a penalty to Feral tanks to make up for the fact that they have Rebirth. (We don't really apply a penalty to Prot warriors to make up for their shouts.)

I recently said in another thread that druids can do a lot of different things well and when doing those things they have a lot less overlap in abilities used than warriors, paladins and death knights. For that reason, we don't want to keep giving bears more and more abilities. We don't want druids to be the class with 120 abilities while every other class has 30. Rebirth is in your spellbook and probably on your bar (and you have probably even clicked it) even though it isn't a tanking tool like Demo Roar or Barkskin. Different classes do have different abilities, and we want to keep as much of that flavor as we can.

We want to have four classes that can main tank (given appropriate skill and gear). We're pretty close to that right now, but we'll have to see what things look like in the next tier of content. It's possible the gear available then or the types of encounters you experience change the playing field a little, in which case we'll have to make adjustments.

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Ouch.

I really enjoy tanking on my druid. I have had few problems with the content I have tried, the only exception so far is heroic Halls of Stone (the timed part with the dwarf NPC, the rest was easy).

It seems I struggle with more than 4-5 mobs at a time specifically when casters are involved. I don't really think this is a druid issue as much as a personal one. I am sure many druids can do this easily and I see no reason to dumb down content because I suck in a particular instance.

I have no threat, rage or survivability issues so far and feel that druids are the best single target ( or two) tanks in the game. So, knowing my own limitations, I just will not MT this instance unless I am grouped with guildies who don't mind dying while I master it.

PS:

I know my spec is screwy, I am still trying to figure it out.

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Q u o t e:
We don't really apply a penalty to Feral tanks to make up for the fact that they have Rebirth. (We don't really apply a penalty to Prot warriors to make up for their shouts.)

I recently said in another thread that druids can do a lot of different things well and when doing those things they have a lot less overlap in abilities used than warriors, paladins and death knights. For that reason, we don't want to keep giving bears more and more abilities. We don't want druids to be the class with 120 abilities while every other class has 30.

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Thanks for the clarification. It's still galling, however, that Warriors' new trainable abilities in this expansion were Enraged Regen (usable while tanking) and Heroic Throw (usable while tanking), and Paladins got Shield of Righteousness (usable while tanking) and Sacred Shield (NOT usable while tanking), while druids got Savage Roar (NOT usable while tanking) and Nourish (NOT usable while tanking).

The problem always seems to come back to Druids' forms. A Paladin could use Sacred Shield while tanking, and a Warrior could use something like Berserker stance while tanking. All of the things on their spellbook are usable. Might not be a good idea, but usable.

For a fully feral-talented bear tank, your spellbook contains only 15 things. That's the number of abilities we can put on our toolbars and use. The other things in our spellbook cannot be cast while in bear form. Not just "not a good idea" like for Pallies and Warriors, but impossible to cast at all. I can't even use Warstomp in bear form.

So when Blizzard says "we don't want to add new abilities because you already have so many" it's just not the same in-game reality that we're faced with every day. We only have 15 abilities, and in common practice, we only have 3. (Four if you use Lacerate.)



Two easy fixes to this:

1. Make more abilities have functions depending on the form. Have Savage Roar do something in bear form. Have Maul do something in cat form. You're doing this a little with Cat Swipe. Keep it up.

2. Make all abilities usable in all forms. Let us pull with Hurricane in Bear Form without dumping our entire rage bar. Let us cast Rejuvenation in Bear Form. It will be terrible, because we have zero spellpower and almost no mana in feral gear, but the option would still be there. Prot Paladins can cast Flash of Light. Why can't we cast Rejuvenation?


Oh, I forgot #3:
3. Remove the bear form armor multiplier and have us wear plate. That way, shifting out of bear form doesn't kill us. (This would require re-itemizing our stats so that we convert block and parry to dodge, and restoring the armor multiplier for staves so that they become our equivalent of a shield.)

Now that I think about it, #3 would fix just about everything that's wrong, from itemization to class balance.

Without the armor multiplier, what would be the point of bear form ?

I must not be experienced enough because I don't see the problems. Other than our aoe tanking I like my druid.

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Q u o t e:


Thanks for the clarification. It's still galling, however, that Warriors' new trainable abilities in this expansion were Enraged Regen (usable while tanking) and Heroic Throw (usable while tanking), and Paladins got Shield of Righteousness (usable while tanking) and Sacred Shield (NOT usable while tanking), while druids got Savage Roar (NOT usable while tanking) and Nourish (NOT usable while tanking).

The problem always seems to come back to Druids' forms. A Paladin could use Sacred Shield while tanking, and a Warrior could use something like Berserker stance while tanking. All of the things on their spellbook are usable. Might not be a good idea, but usable.

For a fully feral-talented bear tank, your spellbook contains only 15 things. That's the number of abilities we can put on our toolbars and use. The other things in our spellbook cannot be cast while in bear form. Not just "not a good idea" like for Pallies and Warriors, but impossible to cast at all. I can't even use Warstomp in bear form.

So when Blizzard says "we don't want to add new abilities because you already have so many" it's just not the same in-game reality that we're faced with every day. We only have 15 abilities, and in common practice, we only have 3. (Four if you use Lacerate.)



Two easy fixes to this:

1. Make more abilities have functions depending on the form. Have Savage Roar do something in bear form. Have Maul do something in cat form. You're doing this a little with Cat Swipe. Keep it up.

2. Make all abilities usable in all forms. Let us pull with Hurricane in Bear Form without dumping our entire rage bar. Let us cast Rejuvenation in Bear Form. It will be terrible, because we have zero spellpower and almost no mana in feral gear, but the option would still be there. Prot Paladins can cast Flash of Light. Why can't we cast Rejuvenation?


Oh, I forgot #3:
3. Remove the bear form armor multiplier and have us wear plate. That way, shifting out of bear form doesn't kill us. (This would require re-itemizing our stats so that we convert block and parry to dodge, and restoring the armor multiplier for staves so that they become our equivalent of a shield.)

Now that I think about it, #3 would fix just about everything that's wrong, from itemization to class balance.

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I can and have used innervate and brez while mting, along with all the oh #@*# buttons, trinkets etc... not saying we've got "too many" abilities, but we certainly use more then 3 buttons.

Edit: Unless you put your entire rotation into a macro like i did :)

Another bear move and I'll give up soothe beast. That's a sacrifice I'm willing to make.

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Q u o t e:


Do you know how much extra damage a bear tank takes while not in bear form? It's a lot more than 10%. Battle rez isn't usable in bear form, yet we're balanced around having battle rez. Thus the basis of the comparison to berserker stance.... although a warrior tanking in berserker stance still benefits from his armor and shield, unlike a druid who has to shift out of bear form.

Paladins, of course, take no penalties for using Lay on Hands... or any other abilities.




Blizzard has stated that this is the case, and that non-tanking abilities are factored into the tanking balance equation.... at least for Druids.

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When those "non-tanking" abilities can be used on a regular basis in the majority of raid encounters, they do matter.

Get over it.

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Q u o t e:
My enhancement shaman is a viable healer. Would you ever take my enhancement shaman to heal if you had a healing-specced character available? No.

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No, your enhancement shaman is not a viable healer. Viable never has meant what you think it means.

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Q u o t e:
I don't really give a damn what gear I'm wearing as long as it benefits me. Blizzard decided to force us to wear rogue gear, most of the stats on which do nothing for us.

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Can you tank in it or not? If you can tank in it, then its benefiting you. Your unhappy that all of the stats on that gear doesn't assist you directly in survival, but Druids at present are balanced around having fewer survival stats than other tanks.

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Q u o t e:
It's like forcing warriors to tank in Holy Paladin gear. Hey, it has armor and stamina on it - what more could they want, right? That is, of course, utterly ridiculous. So why is it OK for druids?

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No, its not even close. Warriors are designed around having a lot of mitigation & avoidance stats. A Warrior in Holy Pally gear is not a viable tank in any sense of the word. Thats like a Druid tanking in caster gear, where you have virtually no avoidance or threat stats.

Having more stats doesn't make Warriors automatically better than Druids. It doesn't mean they will necessarily scale better, or that they are necessarily the best tanks.

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Q u o t e:
This is where you're wrong. Blizzard didn't lift a finger to make rogue gear work for us. What they should have done is make the stats on the gear give us benefits. Make hit rating, crit, haste, and armor penetration give us defensive benefits.

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Druids are not currently balanced around hit, crit, haste and armor pen granting increased survivability.

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Q u o t e:
They made Strength affect block for Warriors and Paladins. They made Stamina convert to Spellpower for Paladins. They made Strength convert to Parry for Death Knights. The examples are all there. We were begging them to do this for druids in the beta, but they just weren't interested.

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Warriors & Paladins had previously been designed around getting the majority of their Block value from specific block value modifiers on gear. Now they get a significant amount from Strength, because otherwise they wouldn't have been able to afford to put Strength on their gear (which would mean that both classes would have terrible threat generation in the new design).

Stamina converts to Spellpower for Paladins in order to ensure that they can generate enough threat independently of Ret talents. In the same vein, Druids get tons of threat stats on their tanking gear -- stats that you disparage!

Death Knights can't Block. The Strength to Parry conversion is similar to the fact that Warriors & Paladins get significant Block from Strength.

But in the end, none of this matters. Each of those classes are balanced around these conversions and talents. Druids are balanced around their own. You don't like the design which is fine, but complaining that it means that Blizzard hates Druids it not fine and not productive to the conversation.

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Q u o t e:
But Blizzard is nerfing us because "it's too hard for people to get Defender's Code, and there are no other options".

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Lets get the clear (one more time). The changes are not a nerf to the vast majority of Druids out there. It is a nerf to those Druids that specifically have Double Armor trinkets (which has been shown over and over again). Blizzard also stated that 1) Druids with Double Armor Trinkets were OP and thus 2) These trinkets would have been nerfed if they had not changed Druids.

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Q u o t e:
Well then, provide more options, dammit. That's certainly within their power to do. Wringing their hands over the lack of gear and nerfing us is a ridiculous solution, when they should have just put gear in the game in the first place.

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Just because almost all of the best in slot gear doesn't change in 3.0.8 doesn't mean there aren't more options. By definition there will always be only 1 piece of gear for each best in slot. What the changes do is bring a lot of gear that was previously not viable closer to the gear that previously was.

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Q u o t e:
OR they can make rogue gear work for us. God knows we've been trying to get them to do that.

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Again, can you tank? Yes or No? And keep in mind that there are plenty of Druids that have main tanked every encounter in the game to date.

The gear works. It just doesn't look like you want it to look.

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Q u o t e:
Maybe Blizzard just ran out of time and had to ship. Maybe they just don't care. But it's one of those two, that's for sure.

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Or maybe Bears are balanced around the gear that they are being given.

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Q u o t e:
It's possible the gear available then or the types of encounters you experience change the playing field a little, in which case we'll have to make adjustments.

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But GC, we should cross that bridge before we come to it!!!!1111




Thanks for coming in here and unequivocally stating that ferals are not made to be worse tanks because of Brez and Innervate. Hopefully no one can twist this around on you like your last quote. I wouldn't bet on it, but I'll remain hopeful...

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Q u o t e:

Thanks for coming in here and unequivocally stating that ferals are not made to be worse tanks because of Brez and Innervate. Hopefully no one can twist this around on you like your last quote. I wouldn't bet on it, but I'll remain hopeful...

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People can and will read into any quote whatever they want to and twist or not based upon their own personal levels of cynicism, bitterness, satisfaction, anger, spite, happiness, thankfulness, etc etc etc. If you already have it in your head that Person A is out to get you, before you even examine the evidence, all signs (for you that is) will likely point to Person A trying to ruin your day. Perceptions are varied as can be.

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Q u o t e:


People can and will read into any quote whatever they want to and twist or not based upon their own personal levels of cynicism, bitterness, satisfaction, anger, spite, happiness, thankfulness, etc etc etc. If you already have it in your head that Person A is out to get you, before you even examine the evidence, all signs (for you that is) will likely point to Person A trying to ruin your day. Perceptions are varied as can be.

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This goes both ways. They could reduce bear armor and health by 50% tomorrow and Fasc & Celik would be OK with it.

You would think that the overwhelming amount of QQ from ferals blizz would at least look into it?

Sick GC to post more condescending responses?(most likely just following the SOP)

Imagine it was Warriors?

Imagine if a Naxx geared druid was better than a quest blues/5 man gear OMFG NO we will not have that!
What kind of game is this! No way No how No raiders!

My concern is what happens when we get Ulduar gear are we going to get another "balancing" ?

When does it end?

I don't like the precedence that is being set.

my questions will never be answered until the nerf bat starts swinging again

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Q u o t e:


This goes both ways. They could reduce bear armor and health by 50% tomorrow and Fasc & Celik would be OK with it.

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If that's all they did, I'd be pretty pissed since that makes us not work anymore. You doth complain far too much and your hyperbole masked ad hominem of Celik and I (and others that agree like Lyon and Angua for example) is pretty base.

If they reduced armor and health by 50% and followed it up with a "Here's why" and with it came an AP --> Health/Damage Reduction mechanic, I'd go through the numbers for a bit and reply with how it stacked up. If it put us significantly behind where we are currently and looked as if it would only get worse with time, I'd post so and say so. If the change was negligible (for better or worse) and proved to keep scaling the same (from 3.0.8 that is, not currently) or improve scaling, I'd post so and say so.

Accepting the current mechanics does not mean we give in to mediocrity because we do not believe we are mediocre in the least. Furthermore, no one is showing anything in the slightest in terms of PROOF that we are mediocre. So call us out for being suck ups or brown nosers or simply out of touch with reality all you want, you're doing little more than crying and rabble rousing without much substance.