[Druid, Offtopic] Oh HELL YES

From today's latest PTR notes:

Swift Flight Form: Druids who have acquired a mount able to go 310% flight speed will now also go that speed while in this form.

Damn, I've missed you, Idol of Flying fast. And while I enjoy my Plagued Proto-drake and the giant trail of farts it leaves behind, the only reason I use it is because it's 10% faster.

Awesome. This patch is full of love for the druid. Sure, there's a nerf to cat DPS. And a nerf to bear avoidance. But between new tauren cat forms, new tauren bear forms, and speedier flight forms? Good times.

Also, I'd strongly recommend any and all druids that haven't done so to get the PTR and check out their forms. Even in video it really doesn't do the things justice.

[3.2] Tier rewards part the second - don't do this, please!

This is a followup to an earlier post about tier rewards. And it's based on the PTR currently.

Right now, instead of what was listed before, each ilvl 245 item requires a Trophy of the Crusader token. This is in addition to the Emblems of Triumph tokens that they require, so items that cost 75 triumph emblems before also cost 1 Crusader token. These are soulbound, and as far as I can tell only one drops per boss on 25-man. 10-man does not drop this token.

ilvl 232 items are unchanged from prior prices, and are 33% less than their 245-ilvl counterpart.

And finally, each boss drops 3 emblems of triumph.

I know this is preliminary, and things can change. I also know that communication is good for actually getting things changed if they suck.

I'm...not thrilled with this idea of progression. For starters, it means that heroics and 10-man content have exactly the same access to gear, save that 10-man content rewards more badges so you'll get more gear quickly. But the actual gear? It's the same. This doesn't strike me as reasonable, but it's the same deal as it was in Naxxramas. If you liked that, you'll love this.

Second, it means that anyone who does 10-man content and 25-man content will gear up at about twice the rate that anyone who does only 25-man content will. Even if you get the tokens in 25-man, you still need those emblems - which means the token is worthless until you get enough tokens. That's not necessarily bad; it's essentially rewarding those people who do more to get more, and they get more of what they want. They can run 10-mans and instead of getting 'useless' tier tokens, they'll be getting closer to actual tier drops. That's kind of nice, actually.

Third, it means that doing daily heroics is (on a weekly basis) worth as much as doing all of the Argent Coliseum. There are 6-7 encounters that we know of (depending on how you count them) and if they all drop 3 emblems, that means 21 for a full clear. Which so happens to be exactly the amount of emblems you get from doing the dailies.

To put this in perspective, it costs 75 emblems + a trophy of the crusader token to get the high-end items like a tier chest piece. Someone who does nothing but 25-man content (assuming they clear it AND assuming they are in for every fight) will get that piece after 4 weeks.

Someone who does 10 and 25 man will get it after 2 weeks.
Someone who does 10, 25, and every heroic they can will get it just a bit after one week.

Fourth, this absolutely fucks over guilds with people on backup, in terms of their loot. Because emblems are tied innately to actual gear they care about, sitting on backup means you're getting further and further behind on getting that tier gear. Even if you get the trophy of the crusader token, you'll have either saved for longer or have to wait for longer every time you sit on backup. DKP, EP/GP? None of that matters.

Blizzard has basically instituted a DKP system that is entirely based on attended amount of time in the raid. For some guilds that will be fine. For others that will seriously mess things up.

Fifth, I really hope more than one trophy of the crusader token drops per boss. Otherwise you're looking at 6-7 tier tokens possible per week. Compare to now, where you can get at least 10 tokens per week, and it's clearly a step back.

My biggest complaints about this are simply that it really rewards doing as much raiding as humanly possible, and somewhat punishes not doing so. It also does something that was never done before in raiding: it converts all tier loot into something like the Valanyr/Sulfuras questline, where instead of getting your gear immediately or getting your gear as a trade-in, you instead get your gear at some indeterminate time in the future depending on how many bosses you get in for and how many heroics you run.

Does this make sense? Is it fun? Does it help with progression when your tier tokens won't be obtainable for at least a couple weeks until you've received the token? If you're trying to gear up new people, does this help?

I do like that it gives the flexibility of getting whatever slot you want. The cost seems far too high.

So, suggestions on how to fix this? Let triumph tokens drop as they do now. Let the 232 ilvl stuff be the stuff that you can get from just running heroics. Let the 245 stuff be token-based only, similar to the 258 stuff, and have the tokens drop from both 10 and 25 man. Because like I said before, I don't care about whether or not 10-man loot and 25-man loot is differentiated at the tier level. But that's off the top of my head - I'm sure smarter folks are figuring this out now.

[Druid, 3.2] The effects of agility/dodge change

I wanted to see if any other blogs would pick this up first - but so far I've seen nothing.

One of the documented changes to the PTR is a change to avoidance in general. Here's the overall text:

• Agility: The amount of agility required per percentage of dodge has been increased by 15%. This change required recalibrating the amount of dodge a player has with 0 agility by a slight amount as well, so all players will see their dodge percentage vary a small amount.
  
• Dodge Rating: The amount of dodge rating required per percentage of dodge has been increased by 15%. This is before diminishing returns. Combined with other changes, this makes dodge rating and parry rating equally potent before diminishing returns apply.
  
• Parry Rating: The amount of parry rating required per percentage of parry has been reduced by 8%. This is before diminishing returns. Combined with other changes, this makes dodge rating and parry rating equally potent before diminishing returns apply. Parry still diminishes more quickly than dodge.

15%? Wow, that sounds like a lot, right? And since druids are the only tank without parry, it's a pure nerf! It's time to freak out!

Don't freak out.

Here's the thing about being a tank that's based around talents primarily: nerfing stats doesn't hurt nearly as much. As an example, let's take...well, me. I'm not totally Ulduar-geared yet, but I have a good chunk of pieces and have mostly gone for stamina, only using agility when I had a shared piece of gear. I have minimal PvP gear.

Here are my stats currently, raid buffed (courtesy of Rawr):

Health: 47931
Agility: 1787.513
Armor: 32645.03
Stamina: 3640
Dodge Rating: 194
Defense Rating: 91
Resilience: 105
Dodge: 50.271%
Miss: 8.145%
Avoidance PreDR: 71.102%
Avoidance PostDR: 58.416%

So what will I lose? Effectively I'll lose 15% of that agility and 15% of that dodge rating. That means I lose 268 agility and another 29 dodge rating on average*.

That would mean pre-DR, my avoidance would go down by:
dodge/agility * agility + dodge%/dodge rating * dodge rating
1/41.67 * 268 + 1/39.3 * 29 =
6.43 + .737 = 7.16%.

So a 7.16% dodge rating reduction before diminishing returns. Or a total, Pre-DR value of 63.93% avoidance overall.

What does that mean after diminishing returns? Well, this is 7% dodge at the top, not the bottom - meaning it's getting hit the 'hardest' by DR. But in practice this means all we need to do is in Rawr reduce our stats by the above and see our post-DR results.

And if you do that...the post-DR results are a mighty 46.1% dodge.

So it's about a 4% loss for me, give or take.

Except...Rawr does things like average out procs for an overall dodge value. Which means things like DM:G are counted as having 100 agility instead of 0 some of the times, and 300 other times. Same with Heart of Iron and Mongoose. The long and short of it is that overall dodge rating is going to not decrease quite as much, but the procs are going to be slightly worse than they were before overall.

In any case, 4% dodge is not really wonderful to lose, but it's definitely not a huge deal. It should bring druid overall damage closer to inline with paladins and warriors, though druids will still take the least amount of damage per hit without cooldowns coming into play. And for the most part, you'll not notice it.

If you're curious about the other tanks, because of the parry change DKs almost are unchanged in terms of raw avoidance (they gain parry and lose dodge), and warriors and paladins lose a small amount (about 1-2 % depending on how they geared).

[3.2] Tier rewards, etc.

Two big changes in the last 24 hours to how raiding will work in 3.2. Okay, three, but I'm not talking about the whole raid lockout extension thing.

The first is that there will be no slot-specific tokens for tier gear. This means that instead of dropping the shoulderpads of the hobo vanquisher, or whatever, it'll be 'regalia' - and with regalia you can buy any piece of tier gear at the appropriate level.

The second bit is that only the top level (ilvl 258) gear is purchasable this way; all other gear can be bought via Emblems of Triumph.

I was going to post something about this, but Graylo beat me to it, saying almost precisely what I was going to say and my reaction.

I have a couple of reactions to this. On the positive side the token change is a good idea. It will make the tokens more useful, and few of them will go to off specs or shards soon after the patch.

On the flip side, I have a big problem with the lower to levels of tier sets being purchase able with emblems. First of all whats the incentive to buy the 232 iLevel tier set when the 245 ilevel tier set costs just 50% more? When you get enough Emblems to buy the first level of gear you will have a choice. To I spend all the badges now and wait 3 weeks to upgrade, or do I wait a week and get even better gear?
Obviously we don't complete know how the system will work, but there are a lot of potential problems. If the Tier tokens are to easy to get, the emblem tiers will be almost completely ignored. If the tier tokes are to hard to get then it will take a really long time to build a set. Finally as I said above there is no real incentive to go for the 232 iLevel set.
I think they need to scale it back to a little more like the current system. Have the top level tokes drop off of 25 man raids. Have a lower level token drop off of 10 man raids, and I think it would be a great idea to have the lowest level tier be purchasable with emblems. That way all three levels have some level of desirability.

I really couldn't agree more. I don't understand why having a piece of gear 33% cheaper would make you want it at all if it's 13 levels below what you have. I don't like the pressure that this puts on raiders to make them almost universally have to do 10-man and 25-man content as much as they can early on in order to get more tokens for their tier gear. Will loot drops be like Sarth, where there's a satchel of gemsEmblems instead of a token drop, and people will fight over those?

Mostly, I really don't like the pressure this would put on hardcore raiders to do as much content in one reset (10 and 25) as humanly possible. I don't mind that for basically 3-4 weeks worth of grinding anyone can get tier 9 gear (3 triumph tokens from daily heroics * 7 days), but it really bothers me that the 232 items are essentially pointless and that there's such a huge incentive to run as much content as you possibly can.

I think that 3.2 is something of an experimental playground for Blizzard. There are a lot of changes to the fundamental raiding paradigms (week resets, gear availability, armor design, trash vs. bosses, 10 vs. 25, BoP trading) that I can't help but think Blizzard's throwing a lot of stuff against the wall and seeing what sticks.

And just so it's clear - there's absolutely no reason to get the lowest tier gear at this price level. None. It is always going to be better to get the higher tier whenever you can, even if it takes you another week of heroics. There are no bonuses for cats or bears that are so essential you must have them now now nao.

[General]Well, that was fast

Another PTR, and bam! T9 changes for all tanks.

Paladin 2p is going for Hand of Reckoning instead of Righteous Defense, which is good; RD is almost never used by comparison any more.
Paladin 4p explicitly reduces the forbearance penalty.

Druid 4P is now reducing the cooldown of Barkskin by 12 seconds (was 10% more barkskinny goodness)
Warrior 4P is now reducing the cooldown of shield block by 10 seconds (was 20).

While I miss the thought of being ridiculously OP, it was pretty clear with some basic math that 30% barkskin wasn't going to see the light of day. Though I'll be surprised if 90-second divine protection for paladins lasts.

[General] Tier9 bonuses for all tanks

MMO champion has the procs for the various T9 abilities for all the gear. And...well, let's just say that apparently the even-numbered sets will be 4 fite, the odd will be 4 bear.

To be really, really clear: These are almost certainly not the final versions. They might not even be correct. Some of the bonuses make zero sense, like adding .01 seconds to the damage of immolate. So take these with a grain of salt and don't get too attached to them.

But let's take a look at all of them, starting with the druid:

• Druid T9 Feral 2P Bonus (Class: Druid) -- Decreases the cooldown on your Growl ability by 2 sec and increases the duration of your Rake ability by 3 sec.
• Druid T9 Feral 4P Bonus (Class: Druid) -- Increases the damage reduction granted by Barkskin by 10% and increases the critical strike chance of Rip and Ferocious Bite by 5%.

This is an interesting change for bears. The 2p bonus is decidedly lame unless we're facing huge amounts of random dorks or something (more on that in a bit).

The 4 piece, to me, reads "We're very sorry about your bad cooldowns. We're very sorry about your bad cooldowns". A 30% barkskin every minute is approaching IBF-levels of awesome. If they wanted Druids to be the next DKs, this is a good way to do it. Between a druid's innate damage soaking ability and this set bonus, they'll be in pretty good shape. A really excellent ability.

Blizzard got a bit lazy with the set bonuses in general though. For instance, here's the DK version:

• Death Knight T9 Tank 2P Bonus (Class: Death Knight) -- Decreases the cooldown on your Dark Command ability by 2 sec.
• Death Knight T9 Tank 4P Bonus (Class: Death Knight) -- Decreases the cooldown on your Unbreakable Armor, Vampiric Blood, and Boneshield abilities by 20 sec.

Dark Command, shockingly, is the DK taunt. Hmm. The 4P bonus improves each tree's 2-minute cooldown to 1 min 40, which doesn't sound awe-inspiring. Helpful, sure - it's basically a 16% improvement in the cooldown if you're using it every time - but that's over a long duration. On a lot of fights that'll mean you might get to use it once more than you would have.

The Paladin one is awfully familiar...

• Paladin T9 Tank 2P Bonus (Class: Paladin) -- Decreases the cooldown on your Righteous Defense ability by 2 sec.
• Paladin T9 Tank 4P Bonus (Class: Paladin) -- Decreases the cooldown on your Divine Protection ability by 30 sec.

Wow...another 2 seconds off of taunt. Thrilling. The 4p bonus is similar to the DK one; cutting it from 2 minutes to 1.5 is good, but does it actually do much? It's not nearly as game-defining as the barkskin one. I also bet they forgot about forbearance stopping this from working at all, but I bet that's at least their intent.

Finally, warriors! And I bet you can guess what the 2p bonus is:

• Warrior T9 Tank 2P Bonus (Intervene) (Class: Warrior) -- Decreases the cooldown on your Intervene ability by 5 sec.
• Warrior T9 Tank 4P Bonus (Shield Block) (Class: Warrior) -- Decreases the cooldown on your Shield Block ability by 20 sec.

Oh, those tricksy Blizzard people. Intervene with a shorter cooldown - that might be actually more useless than growl having a shorter cooldown. Though at least it doesn't run into the stupid diminishing returns that the taunts do.

The 4-piece for shield block, however, is really intriguing. This would cut shield block down to 20 seconds, which basically means shield block is active fully half of the time. While this isn't as game-changing as the 4pT8 bonus in the sense that you can't plan on stopping special attacks with it, the amount of threat and damage mitigation this should stop should be decent. This effectively allows for a much higher block rate overall (half of all attacks will be blocked for sure, and they'll be blocked at the 200% block value) as well as a much higher amount of damage blocked. Depending on gear, this'll be close to a 2% mitigation boost by itself.

I'll have to figure out more on what the cat bonus is, by the way, but for now it doesn't look that impressive to me. Rake's duration increased is nice and should add another shred in the cycle, but 5% more rip crit and FB crit just seems not all that hot.

Oh yeah, one last tidbit: the tanking T9 idol:

• Druid T9 Feral Relic (Lacerate, Swipe, Mangle, and Shred) (Class: Druid) -- While in Bear Form, your Lacerate and Swipe abilities have a chance to grant 200 dodge rating for 9 sec, and your Mangle and Shred abilities have a chance to grant 200 agility for 16 sec.

Before you go gaga, I'm assuming that the mangle only applies to cat, not bear. If it didn't, it would be one amazing idol. As it stands it's going to be a nice way to combine the best of two idols without having to go crazy to get both. 200 dodge rating is a bit higher on avoidance than Corruptor, and 200 agility is a much better boost than Ravenous Beast or Worship.

[3.2]Thoughts on the new emblem system

Copey asked this a couple days ago:

I think the biggest deal in the current patch notes is that they stepping away from the different tiers of emblems that are offered, and making emblems of conquest drop from heroics and T7 10 man raids. This will be a huge boon to people that don’t or can’t run Uld 25 man because they can now purchase iLvL 226 gear and never step into Uld 25.

It’s like back in BC where you could get Black Temple level gear just by farming Kara for 22 badges a week. What are your thoughts on this?

Lots of other bloggers have chimed in here and there. I wasn't going to bother because it didn't seem that big of a deal, but what the heck.

First off, the basics: everything that did drop valor or heroism will now drop conquest. Daily normal and heroic runs will drop triumph emblems. The 10 and 25-man versions of the new raid will also drop triumph. The new 5-man dungeon will also reward triumph badges.

That's the new rules.

What this means, practically, is that anyone will be able to get ilvl 226 gear fairly quickly. It also means things like older WotLK content will be valuable to run, in a similar way to how Kara was before.

It means that 10-man Naxx and 25-man Naxx will drop the exact same badges if you care, so the only real advantage to running 25-man is to get a couple pieces of loot and do 25 people at the same time instead of 10.

Heroics will be fairly valuable, but more importantly the dailies will be very valuable and sought out after; 2-3 triumph emblems a day is (at current tier prices) a piece of tier 9 (or equivalent) gear in a month, assuming you do no other raiding.

For the record: this is a good thing.

I have never had a problem with folks getting geared up at a faster pace as an expansion goes along. Point of fact I think it's pretty stupid to think otherwise. Why should anyone care how fast someone else gears up? Why should that matter? If you're worried about achievements, it still doesn't mean that they'll have cleared the places you have. Giving a bunch of people 226 or 239 gear doesn't mean they'll be able to faceroll Sarth3D, much less much of Ulduar. And even if they do clear it later - how does that reduce your accomplishment?

The notion that other people can somehow reduce what you did by doing it thanks to easier times or easier loot seems...weird to me.

Furthermore, gearing people up faster is crucial to the success of the game. You can't have people go through long slogs to get to the point where you're at as an expansion moves on; otherwise, you'll never be able to get new players in. They'll see this progression path of months and months and simply say fuck it. Or you'll try and recruit but they'll never be able to participate in progression with you, or at least not for significant amounts of time.

Furthermore, heroics had to be buffed. Heroic content was being utilized at an all-time low, and one of the reasons was simply that raiders had absolutely no need to run heroics. Not even laughable, quick ones. They didn't need emblems. They didn't need drops. They didn't need anything; it was just a waste of their time. This is a great boost to the heroic system, and that's good; as I've said in the past, heroics are where you meet future guildies, it's where you try out new specs, it's where you learn to raid. It's important for this to be a vibrant part of the world, and the only way to do that is to actually reward it.

So almost entirely I think it's a good idea.

Where do I think they went wrong? Well, I don't like that both 10 and 25-man drop the same thing. Why? Because I think (at least early on) this can put too much pressure on raiders to have to raid both if they can. In the same way that Kara being a heroism pinata last expansion was somewhat annoying, I think that this could be problematic. I'm not sure what I'd do here; I'd probably have some kind of quest or reward system that had a 1-week lockout and rewarded badges on the first boss killed of a certain name, but didn't after. That way no matter what flavor you choose you'd get the badges, but you couldn't double up on them. You could still run the 10 for loot or whatever, but it wouldn't be as needed.

But really, that's about all I feel is a flaw. If nothing else, raiders know that they completed things months before other people. That alone is achievement enough.