Tuesday, April 21, 2009

[Druid] The new tanking staff for Ulduar!

Finally, someone has discovered the new tanking staff for Ulduar! And wow, are you going to love the stats:

224 agi (104 more than Twisted Visage). 42 more stam than Origin of Nightmares! Two sockets, even, so you could have even more agi or stam! No, it doesn't have armor, but those stats are crazy good. So good it doesn't matter, right?

Well, that all wouldn't matter if it dropped from Ulduar. It drops from Arena, instead.

I know that this is supposed to be the top-tier arena weapon and only usable by the best of the best. I know that with the high ilvl of the item, it's meant to be comparable with hard-mode drops. I know that in theory, a hard-mode feral tanking staff could exist that could have similar stat allocation and be that much of an upgrade over Origin of Nightmares.

At the same time, I remain very, very skeptical.

I'll be posting later on how much better the PvP season 6 gear is compared to the tier gear, but right now the long and short of it is that for tanking the PvP gear is almost always strictly better for tanking, even when you factor in threat. It simply has far more stamina and most of the time more agi, and that trumps basically everything else. The set bonuses, unlike T7, aren't worth going for.

But it makes me a bit bummed, once again.

And no, I doubt it'll be necessary to run arena in order to get these things and tank adequately. Even for hard modes; hard modes will cleave tanks in different ways than whether they have 5% more stamina. It's still bothersome to me to know that the best gear I can possibly get must be obtained via PvP.

I really, really hope that there's a tanking staff/mace out there that's yet to be discovered. Really.

And just in case you were thinking that the ilvl 232 item was not nearly as good, think again:
Yeah, it loses 14 agi and 12 stam. And it's still massively better than Twisted Visage for tanking.

12 comments:

Bulamis said...

Awesome cropping on the photo.

And I really can't fathom yet a tanking weapon that would give me +42 stam and +4% Dodge (pre-DR) and 2 bonus sockets, over our current BiS tanking weapon.

Also Kalon:
What precise math do you use do calculate the effect of a Higher DPS weapon gives to SD mitigation?
(Currently Visage absorbs +100 damage over Origin)

Darksend Mercenare said...

I have the gloves from emelon, and all i can say is WOW are they better than 25t8.

the pvp is absolutely amazing for tanking even with SD. The fact that most if not all of it is crit means we do not lose to much uptime on SD (in fact most of the pieces have more crit than their t8 counterparts).

Not to mention they are 232 ILvl so they will have more armor as well.

I love playing my druid and I still feel we are the best tanks in the game right now, but Blizzard has no friggin clue how to itemize our gear after 3 years and its really starting to piss me off

Anonymous said...

Yes for once, the only redeeming factor would be the discovery of equivalent leather & tanking weapons in hard mode ulduar. Otherwise, its a storm of gear inequality for sure. Unless someone can demonstrate we just wouldnt have the dps to clear an encounter if we used pvp gear, I cant see a way around feeling I need to pvp - even though I hate pvp on my druid. Besides, other tank classes have much lower dps than bear druids. How could tank dps ever be a serious factor for a hardmode?

Still, there's no reason for them to release gear lists from instances in advance. Hoping and staying positive over here.

Darksend, not sure I think we're the best tanks in the game. That's always iffy and a super subjective thing to say. Having a lot of fun playing a druid in ulduar =/ best tank in the game. Did you check out ciderhelms videos? The only thing I dislike about them is that he MTs everything, everytime, no matter whether he's the "best" class or not. It would certainly suck to be a druid tank in his guild, dont you think? How would you persuade him your a better choice?

Darksend Mercenare said...

my guild has 3 main tanks, all of us are very good friends and work very well together. We know what needs to be done and if we need to switch rolls we don't care. Almost everything in ulduar requires 2 tanks and sometimes the offtank has a harder and more involving roll in the encounter than the main tank (take ignis for example the main tank just sits there moving once every 30ish seconds to drop a new scorch while the off tank gets to kite and move around etc).

I do not know how Eventide is structured I could ask manbearpig if you like. Personally, if I was getting tells from all my healers saying "PLEASE MAIN TANK ITS SO MUCH EASIER TO HEAL YOU" I would stand up to cider and tell him he was not doing his job as a GM by tanking everything and him tanking was holding the guild back.

Being a tank is the most trustworthy position because it requires the most trust to perform. I listen to my healers and do what they tell me. If they tell me to do a certain job because it will make the boss easier for them than I do it.

John Smith said...

Well, Kalon, grats on discovering the great idea of Blizzard. In case you were unaware of that, in arena season 5 (patch 3.0.0), best weapons for arena were achievable only through PvE (KT weapons mostly). Imagine, how much hate that caused amongst hardcore-PvPers, who usually try to never step foot into PvE encounters. And then they were forced to do it.
Now, when season 6 is starting with 3.1.0 patch, Blizzard reverses the situation.
We all know how blindly stupid this is, but anyway not too much we can do about this.

Samuel said...

As others said, nice cropping of the screenshot, gave much hope before you destroyed our fragile hearts.

Mitch said...

Sadly I had also been using things like my deadly bracers and belt for tanking (with my brief foray into arena'ing last season). It feels like such a cop-out, but the items were available to me and were the best items available to use so I had to.

The only rough part about this season is you really need to work to get your rating higher rather than just spend a quick night or two to get to 1700.

Torosso said...

There is a few things that is disappointing about all the Furious gear.

Even taking into consideration the fact that it is 6 points higher in item level, it's has a better allocation of stats (agi&stam) then our T8.5 gear.

This is even though its giving up a chunk of that item level to resilience.

This is also the same with the offset pieces. The PVE bracers/boots etc give up too many stats, that is needed by feral tanks, for dps stats.

As far as we can see atm (though I am starting to pray that it changes) the hardmodes don't have any good rogue leather to compete with the furious gear.

I also think that the itemisation of that staff is completely wrong atm, it should be at least 100agi less then it is currently. But even so its still better than any of the loot currently discovered.

And all of this goes directly against design goals that GC described

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=16474241534&sid=1&pageNo=4#67

Its very annoying, considering I really hate arena.

Cuer said...

To see how the PVE version of this might look, you can compare and contrast the ilevel 239 two-handed swords, like a Ret Pally would take:

PVE: Voldrethar, Dark Blade of OblivionPVP: Furious Gladiator's ClaymoreThe stats are very similar: the PVE sword gets ArP instead of Resilience, and Attack Power instead of Strength.

If the weapon itemization is as complete in the hard mode versions of Ulduar as it should be, we might see a comparable PVE feral/Hunter staff.

On the flip side, the ilevel 239 arena weapons will be obtained by maybe 50 people per server, so it's not like there's a huge "welfare epic" problem. It is sad to see such nicely itemized gear that will be out of range for nearly everyone, though.

Anonymous said...

If most PvP weapons have resilience then this staff is most likely a frad.
Also item budget (agility, stamina etc.) gets more expencive the higher they are (eg. 10 agility might cost say 10 item points and 20 agility might cost 30 item points).
Comparing this staff to other ilevel239 screeams that this staff is not an ilevel239.

To me it looks like a fake. But maby someone can calculate the item value of the staff and campare it to a level i239 item?

Kalon said...

Bulamis - thanks. I too feed on your tears. On SD calculations, it's very simple: take something like Ignis, Razorscale or XT's normal hits after armor and PotP (Assume about a 70% overall reduction). Take that value (typically 20-25k) and then figure out how much AP actually mitigates on that hit, and then multiply that by the uptime.

For example, 100 AP on the above swing would mitigate 25 damage, or .1%. The uptime is in game about 60% (rawr and other sims are simply unable to model things like server latency for its correct uptime), so the actual mitigation improvement would be about .06%. So Twisted Visage would add...about .24% mitigation total.

Which isn't all that impressive, especially compared to how much 700 armor will.

Darksend, me too. And it won't get corrected in WotLK.

Anon1 - the best possible thing that could happen is that a really amazing feral tanking weapon exists on a hard mode that hasn't been found yet. And that's the best. Right now we have as candidates Yogg Saron's hardmodes, Algalon, probably IC, probably XT, and possibly Thorim. Those are the hardmodes that have been least done. And...I'm kind of dreading finding out that Algalon's loot table has the penultimate feral tanking staff, to be honest. That would likely be as unobtainable as 2200 rating for me.

Trogvar, it's something they've still not figured out. It just seems like bears get the short end of the stick over and over on it. And the solution is as I've stated many times - in order for PvE gear to be better than PvP gear, the ways that PvE gear differ must be more valuable to bears. So haste, armor pen, crit rating, hit, expertise, higher AP - all of these need to be more emphasized. And agility and stamina need to be de-emphasized.

Samuel - I live to crush hopes and dreams. If it's any consolation, the staves are about 100 agi overbudget. Even then...they're still amazing just for that huge stamina and sockets.

Mitch - it does feel like a combination of cheating and pain, and it bothers me. It shouldn't even bother me - isn't it a good thing that I can get near best in slot or best in slot gear reliably for pve compared to other tanks? Isn't that a bonus? But it's not in my mind.

Torosso - they're overbudget. I have no idea if they'll actually be fixed though. And I seriously doubt that the rogue leather we'll find is going to compete with the PvP gear, even on hard modes; the reason being that more stam and agi is not really what rogues want.

Cuer - I hope you're right, I really do.

Anon2 - check the link to the item. It's not a fraud, it's a cropping of an image. You can see the staff and it's correct resilience on the arena vendors in Dalaran right now.

Bas Jansen said...

Furious Gladiator’s Staff and Furious Gladiator’s Greatstaff: The agility values on these two items were too high. They have been reduced by 50%.

Guess they partially fixed this -.-