[General]The dirty secret about armor

This is somewhat based on a post I made on tankspot a while back and references common tanking terms like Effective Health and Time to Live. If you don't know what these mean - read Aggathon's excellent treatise on these things over at Tankspot: Why we do what we do. There's nothing new there for many tanks familiar with these concepts, but it's a well-done document.

But, there's something it doesn't cover - and that's the advantages armor has over stamina. Or at least it doesn't cover it hugely. Similarly, it doesn't cover the advantages that resistance has over stamina in some circumstances.

Effective health is simply how much total incoming damage you could take at once. It is normally referring to physical damage (noted as PEH, or physical effective health) and is simply the following:

health / (1-armor reduction)

So if you have a 50% armor reduction and 50,000 health, you have a PEH of 100,000 - meaning you can take 100,000 physical damage (before armor reduction) before you die. Now, other things like general resistance to all damage (such as protector of the pack) fall in here too, but ultimately it doesn't matter; the important thing to consider is effective health combines the reduction in damage with the amount of health you have.

Similarly, you can look at magical effective health (MEH) as:

health / (1-reduction)

which factors in general resistances and specific ones. Note that for the purposes of effective health, you can't take into account chance; if something could happen that's beneficial (like a block or dodge or SD proc), effective health assumes that it won't happen. Thus for resistance purposes you can take only the minimum resisted value.

So that tells you how effective health works. And you can combine the two values depending on the % of magical damage and physical damage you're expected to take at a given time, and optimize based on that. Now most folks will tell you - often rightly - that the best way to optimize for this is to always go for stamina, even over more armor - because health is in both physical and magical EH and benefits both. And that's true - but only for the calculation of how much damage you could ever take.

Where it gets interesting is in the notion of partial health. And this is where the dirty secret of armor comes in. While effective health is awesome, stamina only helps how much damage you can take at a given time; armor magnifies both how much damage you can take AND how valuable healing can be.

Let's take a very simple example that should be at least somewhat realistic - two tanks with precisely the same physical effective health. One tank has 50k health and 50% armor reduction and no other sources of reduction (or for our purposes they're the same as each other, so they go away) - so using the formula above they have 100,000 EH. The second tank has 40k health and 60% armor reduction, giving them also 100,000 EH (40000/ (1-.6)).

Now, we'll hit both of them with a hit that takes half their EH - a 50k hit. The first tank's health is now at 25k. The second tank's health is at 20k (50k *.4 = 20k). Still the same EH, right?

Now, let's heal them. We'll heal both of them identically for 10k health. This is where it gets interesting.

The first tank goes from 25k to 35k - and their EH is 70k.

The second tank goes from 20k to 30k. Their EH is now 75k. That's a 7% lead in EH over the first tank.

Let's give them another 10k heal:

The first tank goes from 35k to 45k. Their EH is 90k.

The second tank goes from 30k to 40k. Their EH is 100k - up to full. At this point the second tank has a 10% lead in EH over the first!

And that's the dirty secret of armor - and why armor is good. Because it improves the value of healing, partial healing on a tank, it increases the EH of the tank after they've taken damage but before they've been healed to full. That it also makes it more likely they can be healed to full is a nice side effect too. This seems somewhat obvious - since armor reduces damage taken, of course it reduces the amount of health needed to go to full - but the EH model doesn't often talk about partial healing or what happens when your tank is somewhat healed but not entirely. And the bigger the deficit and the larger the amount of heals it takes to get there, the more this becomes obvious.

Yet we don't often have the case where a tank takes damage and then sits there with no heals until they get all the heals at once. Many tank deaths happen because of a combination of lack of enough healing with a set of hits; this was what killed people on Algalon, as an example.

Now the side part of this is that since armor doesn't help with magical damage, this is obviously not as great for things with massive magical burst; in the above example the 40k tank has 40k MEH, and the 50k tank has 50k MEH, which is a big disadvantage. The neat thing though is that resistance math works exactly the same here as armor does - with similar advantages in partial damage and healability. And that means that resistance at certain steps becomes far more valuable than health due to how much damage you can reduce. We've seen this before with Sarth3D and with heroic 25-man Anub'arak, and it's been used nicely sometimes for Sindragosa as well. And resistance also gets a boost from simply being way better at increasing EH than health does; while you can get 110 stamina from a wrist enchant, you can also get about 5% resistance (or 50% of the way to 10% resistance), which is a much bigger boost to MEH than that 1300 health would be normally.

Anyway, hopefully this will give you some intuition as to why things like Unidentifiable Organ is good regardless of whether the stack wears off, or why Petrified Twilight Scale is awesome even with the proc being somewhat meh. It should also give you an idea of why bears were so ridiculous before this as far as being healable, especially back in the day of TBC.

[Druid]It's time to play that game again - NERF THAT DRUID

Okay, not really. But this is getting kinda silly.

I've talked in the past about how druid stamina scales somewhat stupidly, and how they can wear gear that is just wrong (like pvp gear) and not really care. I've shown what that means and how it means before. And I've even talked about how to nerf bears the right way, once and for all.

That's not what this is about though. This is about stupid things. Like how much health you could conceivably get now.

And according to Rawr - it's 72.0k assuming LW/JC and a Tauren, and all raid buffs.

I realize this set is a bit ridiculous - it relies on a fair amount of pvp gear - but it's also kinda silly that it's even possible. Here's the full list of gear. Everything save one piece is gemmed for stamina (the second ring has a red gem for the meta). Everything has a max stam enchant. Otherwise it's just like you'd expect:

Head Relentless Gladiator's Dragonhide Helm
Neck Legionnaire's Gorget
Shoulders Shoulderpads of the Intruder
Chest Polar Vest
Waist Polar Cord
Legs Legwraps of the Broken Beast
Feet Polar Boots
Wrist Armbands of Dark Determination
Hands Relentless Gladiator's Dragonhide Gloves
Finger1 Band of the Twin Val'kyr
Finger2 Band of the Traitor King
Trinket1 Juggernaut's Vitality
Trinket2 Juggernaut's Vitality
Back Cairne's Endurance
MainHand Relentless Gladiator's Greatstaff
Ranged Idol of the Corruptor

Health: 72056.19
Agility: 1462
Armor: 34329
Stamina: 5952
Dodge Rating: 156
Defense Rating: 196
Resilience: 303
Dodge: 43.474%
Miss: 8.859%
Strength: 750
Attack Power: 8137
Crit Rating: 290
Hit Rating: 190
Expertise Rating: 47
Haste Rating: 102
Armor Penetration Rating: 0
Avoided Attacks: 14.589%

That's the worst part - this includes about a 50% avoidance rate. Yeesh.

Okay, you say - what if we take out the polar gear and the pvp gear, and we don't use things like Band of the Traitor King? That sounds almost like it'd be okay...except that the best in slot gear is perilously close to polar gear anyway. Still, let's take a look at what that would be like.

(here's a fun game - guess what the health will be!)

Head Runetotem's Headguard of Triumph
Neck Legionnaire's Gorget
Shoulders Shoulderpads of the Intruder
Chest Vest of Calamitous Fate
Waist Belt of the Pitiless Killer
Legs Legwraps of the Broken Beast
Feet Icewalker Treads
Wrist Armbands of Dark Determination
Hands Runetotem's Handgrips of Triumph
Finger1 Band of the Twin Val'kyr
Finger2 Signified Ring of Binding
Trinket1 Juggernaut's Vitality
Trinket2 Juggernaut's Vitality
Back Cairne's Endurance
MainHand Anguish
Ranged Idol of the Corruptor

Health: 69256.19
Agility: 1866
Armor: 37249
Stamina: 5672
Dodge Rating: 119
Defense Rating: 206
Resilience: 15
Dodge: 47.940%
Miss: 8.926%
Strength: 649
Attack Power: 8165
Crit Rating: 321
Hit Rating: 402
Expertise Rating: 133
Haste Rating: 343
Armor Penetration Rating: 165
Avoided Attacks: 7.194%

Wow, a 3k loss in health. Ouch. For that we gain almost 2k TPS, 8% fewer avoided attacks against us, and another 4% dodge.

Oh yeah - we're still over 69,000 health! And the funny thing about this gear set is that it's very, very approachable by many out there. The T9.258 gear is a bit harder to reach - but there are only 2 pieces of them, and things like the non-tier pieces will likely be achieved by many bears before Icecrown hits. The hardest thing to get here is the cloak, but that's only a gain of about 20 stam. The weapon is actually from the hard mode 10 man. The rings are from 10-man and Ony-25.

Heck, realistically? I could likely obtain this in the not-so near future, or close enough to it that it wouldn't matter.

Here's the thing, though - this doesn't matter by itself. 69k is a huge number - it's nearly 3 times as much health as a sunwell-geared bear had back in the day. But as long as this doesn't confer a significant advantage, I doubt you'll see it nerfed. Also, as long as it's not significantly higher than the next tank, you probably won't see it nerfed.

Still, it's pretty nuts, isn't it?

The worst part? The best I could get a similarly-geared tauren warrior to was 58.9k. That's...not a good sign. The druid would at that point have 17% more health than a warrior without pvp gear; with pvp gear, it pops up to 22% more. That's close to where blizzard starts thinking about nerfing.

[Druid] Nerfing stamina the right way part 3 - unask the question

A continuation of the big long talk from yesterday.

First, I'd like to say that I really appreciate folks taking the time to look at their fellow tanks in their raiding guilds and do their own legwork on this. It was good to get largely reasonable confirmation that the numbers were correct for other people and that the relative numbers compared to other tanks were at least on par. It gave me some insight as to what is fair and reasonable. For instance - is it okay if druids are below warriors sometimes, depending on gear choices and profession choices? Must they be a bit higher?

But in the end, I think that this sort of stamina nerf would be fair and reasonable across the board, relative to tanks.

The question that wasn't asked but should always be is this: is it fun? Well, clearly being nerfed is never, ever fun. On the flip side, being sat because someone else happens to be playing an overpowered class isn't much fun either. So balance is somewhat important for a lot of people in raiding guilds fighting to get a spot in that guild.

But how many of those out there are there, really? How many people would be benched if (for example) paladins, not druids, had the 15% health lead?

It's not an easy thing to answer. With DPS, it's very simple: either you bring amazingly useful buffs for the rest of the DPS or the raid, or you put out great DPS. This is mitigated by things like 'do you stand in stuff' and 'do you loot whore', but for the most part, we know where DPS stand. If you buffed one class's DPS by 20% over others, tons of people would reroll to that class, and tons of people would welcome them with open arms into raiding.

With healing and tanking I think it comes much more down to the player, not the class. Healing has occasionally been measured by healing meters (which is stupid), but most of the time you bring the healer with the mechanical capabilities you need (Chain Heal, CoH, MC, whatever) or the better role to play (awesome tank heal, awesome movement, etc). It rarely comes down to raw healing output. It's not nearly as quantifiable.

And even less quantifiable is tanking. Tanking has a lot to do with odds and minimizing odds. It has much more to do with being in the right place at the right time, using your abilities the right way, and allowing others to do the right thing. Yes, you can look at health and armor and avoidance and make guesses as to how well a tank could do compared to another tank - and that does happen from time to time. But the bigger limiter isn't class; it's skill.

Now, with DKs a couple things happened. For starters, they were really stupidly overpowered. It wasn't a small degree, it was a huge one. Second, their abilities matched up really well to the encounters. But most importantly, every guild had a TON of DKs waiting in the wings. If you needed another tank, plenty of people would chime in and be happy to go to town. With Naxx, alts had gear, main specs had secondary pieces, etc. It was easy to find a DK with enough stuff ready to tank at least at a decent level, gear wise - and with their overpowered abilities and stats they could find success.

But is the same thing true for ferals? Not really. Having to start from level 1 on a reroll of the flavor of the month is a big difference than getting a ridiculously geared 55 that rolls through early content. Are there a lot of guilds out there with feral tanks waiting to burst on the scene? I don't think that's really true. I can't reasonably study spec/class populations in raids and who gets to do what; I'll leave that to the smarter folks like Flyv. But anecdotally, I hear a lot about not many ferals are seen tanking, or many have chosen to do DPS more than not. It's hard to find a feral tank on my server, and harder to find a good one. Anecdotally, I don't think the population of good feral tanks is particularly high.

So if there's no real danger of people rolling a new feral, and not a lot of guilds have ferals, is it okay if they're not balanced?

I used to think no - it's never okay that they're not balanced. It's not good for the game no matter what. But I talked it over with my wife, and she changed my mind.

The thing is, people do want to have fun playing their character. Some people have fun playing the underdog type - the one that is underpowered but they want to show that they're so awesome they can do well with it anyway. (this, I think, applies to a LOT of protection paladins out there, or did - I know it did for me when I was playing it). Others want to be creative and figure out new, better ways to do old things.

Others want to feel needed - that something they bring to the table isn't done by others. That makes them feel important .

And others simply want to feel like they're super powerful - not only relative to the content they're fighting, but relative to other players. They want to nuke everything and laugh. They want the big numbers, the big crits, the giant stamina. Heck, some don't even care if they're ridiculously awesome tanks; high stamina beats overall survivability, right? It certainly can when trying to find a PUG.

Everyone feels these to some degree or other, but the point is that all of these things exist for people. And I think for a lot of people, if you took away the health and armor advantages that druids have, they'd really cease to be fun. At that point, they wouldn't be overpowered relative to other tanks. They'd be the same - except they'd have worse cooldowns, a more boring rotation, no armor graphics, weird buggy behavior, odd itemization and no real unique abilities.

If you get rid of that, what's left? And it's not a matter of 'why would you bring one' - you'd bring one because they're a good tank, and good tanks are in short supply. No, it's a matter of 'why would you play one?' I think Blizzard did a really exemplary job of making the death knight not only viable but really fun to play; the resource system and the way the trees work along with the graphical awesomeness of the DK made for an excellent hook.

But I don't know whether bears really have those sorts of things.

I'm not saying that everyone would abandon ship if something like a nerf in health combined with a fixing of cooldowns happened. I know I wouldn't; I'd once again figure out how things worked and move on the best I could. Many others I know are the same; they're happy because they can MT anything and do it well, and they're no longer constrained by stupid mechanics requiring shields. Others are just happy they get to tank at all. Yet others really love playing druids because druids are awesome in their own right.

But I do think for many people it would make them change. It would remove the parts of being a druid tank that are fun for them - the big numbers, the feeling like a mighty meat shield. With that gone, they'd move to something that gave them that feeling in some other way.

So right now, I'm not really supporting any big nerf like this would be. Maybe next expansion bears can be revisited heavily, and when that happens things like making bears care more about druid abilities, rotations, interesting shifting mechanics, resource management, itemization and graphics can be fixed. And if bears need a stamina nerf now, perhaps a small one will work to do the trick and balance them reasonably.

But I don't think there's a need for it, not yet at least. Because sometimes, fair and balanced isn't what people want, and it's not what's actually fun.

[Druid]Nerfing stamina the right way 2 - more examples

In the last post, I mentioned a way to make druid stamina scale at any level of gear in a reasonable way compared to other tanks that would require very few nerfs going forward. Basically, it uses the same idea that bear armor had and only uses the bear multiplier for stamina found on leather and leather alone. Everything else just gets the normal feral multipliers, same as cat form does currently.

And by far the biggest concern in the comments (both here and at the WoW forums) was that this was way too big a hit on the starting druid and the midrange druid, and that they'd be hurt the most. (the second was 'would this be fun and is it even necessary, which I'll address tomorrow).

Before I give the answer to this, I want you to think about this for a bit. For starters, I gave an example of a druid not in BiS (myself) and compared them to other tanks and how they were - and trust me, I'm no where near best in slot geared. That gave an idea of what the scaling would be like if you didn't go full stam on everything - it was almost 2.5k difference compared to the best in slot full stam gearing druid.

Now, think about what the actual change does. It emphasizes stamina on leather first and foremost - that's unchanged. It then nerfs stamina from gems, enchants, and buffs.

Lower level gear, by comparison, is not affected nearly as much. There aren't nearly as many gem slots as higher tier gear (point of fact, this is one of the biggest ways that items are an upgrade for bears right now - if they have another gem slot). If you're starting out, you're not going to have the best enchants in the universe. In a heroic, the only buff you're going to count on is mark of the wild.

In short, the worse-geared druid will be affected by it, but not nearly as much.

That's the theory. Let's look and see what it's like.

First up, a bear geared in some of the better gear that they can get that is not a BoP from heroic or above, is not crafted with Ulduar items, is not from a raid or is otherwise easy to get. Note that some of this is expensive - the trollwoven set is expensive, after all. But it's worth it, and it's reasonable otherwise to assume a tank would try and get some of these. The enchants are cheap and favor stamina to some degree simply because the agility enchants are expensive. No profession bonuses are used, and rare gems are used only in a couple places and aren't perfectly ideal. This also means that the total stamina multiplier doesn't include kings, so the total stamina is .1486x normal, and the non-bear multiplier is only 1.189.

Again, gear lists at the end.

slot	leather	nonleather	gem	enchant	other
head	69		0	0
neck		49	0
shoulder	79		0	30
back		75	0
chest	169		72	8
bracers	61		24	6
weapon		117	0
hands	71		0	18
belt	72		0
legs	67		0	45
feet	61		0	18
ring1		34	12
ring2		51
trinket1		45
trinket2		0
fort
motw					51
base					121
food					40
total	649	371	108	125	212

Now, here's the best in slot values (just the totals)

slot	leather	nonleather	gem	enchant	other
total	781	828	569	222	426

That's right. Compared to the best in slot stamina, the preheroic only loses about 132 stamina directly from leather. Part of that is using the Polar chestpiece - which is perfectly normal for early bears to do. Part of it is simple: there simply isn't that high of scaling between stamina pieces per itemization level.

But look at the gems! 461 stam just from gems. And the nonleather pieces are huge too - 457 stamina difference. And that's the part that's getting nerfed the most.

The final numbers for the preheroic geared bear with few enchants are thus: they start at 23.2k health. With the nerf, they lose 2420 health, bringing them to 20.6k health. That's a bit low, I think. One easy way to fix this would be to include the base stamina (121) as part of the bear multiplier. They'd then go to only losing 206 stamina total, or 2060 health and bringing that preheroic-geared bear to just about 21k.

Now a reasonable comeback here is that, much like the heavy clefthoof set from TBC, bears could be forced to depend on the Polar set simply because it gives way too much stamina. And that's fair. It may be reasonable to simply apply the stamina bonus on all gear but not enchants, gems and buffs. That would help quite a bit in the low-end case, still nerf those best in slot druids with massive enchant and gems, and help scaling otherwise. Just food for thought.

Okay, what about a more modestly geared druid than yours truly? I'll try this with one of the forum naysayers - Azshannya of Kirin Tor. They're modestly geared, only having a couple of pieces from Ulduar 25, a couple from U10, and the rest from Naxx and various other places. They've gone another route, choosing to maximize armor whenever possible. They start out at 44172 total health after buffs (again, 25-man). What do they get knocked down to?

slot	leather	nonleather	gem	enchant	other
head	90		56	37
neck		88	0
shoulder	85		18	0
back		84	0
chest	100		48	0
bracers	57		0	40
weapon		150	0
hands	75		0	0
belt	75		24
legs	99		24	55
feet	57		0	22
ring1		94	0
ring2		84
trinket1		111
trinket2		0
fort					214
motw					51
base					121
food					40
total	638	611	170	154	426

Again, comparing to best in slot:

slot	leather	nonleather	gem	enchant	other
total	781	828	569	222	426

The leather total doesn't increase that much. The gem gulf is still ridiculously huge though. Might be interesting to consider just nerfing gems, no?

However, the total comes to something a bit alarming - this druid would lose about the same as what I would - 4450 health. That's quite a bit, bringing them down to just above 40k health. Is that reasonable?

It might be. The thing is, this druid didn't gear for stamina only. They don't have a second stamina trinket, their professions aren't stamina-centric (at least one of them), they've enchanted for armor and avoidance over stamina in many places, etc. Whereas that comparable warrior or paladin is putting stamina in every single slot they possibly can. It might be the case that this is too much, too. Is it fair that warriors have to gear for nothing but stamina, but bears have the luxury of branching out? I don't know. It feels like this might be a bit too extreme to start with. Then again, one of the goals was to nerf bears so that they wouldn't have to be nerfed again.

On some of the commenters (Nandy and others) that mentioned that they're only 3k ahead of other tanks in their guild - I'm really curious now. My suspicion is that there are either buffs that are missing or that the gear isn't perfectly full - on stamina centric, or professions aren't. I could be wrong, in which case this would put that bear behind the warrior. But again - might not be so bad.

Anyway, tomorrow I'll talk about the fun factor of it a bit more - where the summary is "My wife is more often than not right".

Gear lists:

	Preheroic	Azshannya
Head	Eviscerator's Facemask	Weakness Spectralizers
Neck	Torta's Oversized Choker	Mark of the Unyielding
Shoulders	Trollwoven Spaulders	Valorous Dreamwalker Shoulderpads
Chest	Polar Vest	Tunic of Indulgence
Waist	Trollwoven Girdle	Belt of the Tortured
Legs	Mind-Expanding Leggings	Proto-hide Leggings
Feet	Jormscale Footpads	Dawnwalkers
Wrist	Drake-Champion's Bracers	Thrusting Bands
Hands	Handwraps of Preserved History	Dislocating Handguards
Finger1	Ring of Earthen Might	The Leviathan's Coil
Finger2	Iceforged Battle Ring	Gatekeeper
Trinket1	Goblin Rocket Launcher	Essence of Gossamer
Trinket2	Scarab of Displacement	Defender's Code
Back	Durable Nerubhide Cape	Cloak of the Shadowed Sun
MainHand	Stave of Shrouded Mysteries	Origin of Nightmares
Ranged	Idol of Terror	Idol of Terror

[Druid] Nerfing stamina for bears - the right way

I'm back to hiding behind spreadsheets!

On the official forums, there's a lot of talk about nerfing druids health once again now that DKs have been brought down to the level of mortals (or at least, undead mortals...err...).

And for the record: I agree with it. I've agreed with it for a while Given non-pvp gear/polar gear and comparing best in slot pieces with all tanks across the board, druids have about a 7k health lead over warriors, paladins, and any non-blood DK right now. That's before epic gems and before the DK nerfs as well, so if anything this gulf will only increase in the future. That's about 15% more health than other tanks. Now, part of that is that druid itemization is shockingly 'better' than a lot of plate tanking itemization; there simply aren't that many hardmode T8.5 items out there that are exceptional, and there are quite a few hardmode leather items that are. But it's a continued saga from WotLK release, and it'll continue.

The fact is that bears aren't quite on a level playing field. They haven't been for some time - basically, since crushing blows got removed. With that removal, the idea of bears being the high armor, high HP tank just doesn't make sense. It made sense originally in that bears were supposed to be this buff, hard-to-kill thing that took tons of damage too; that was the concept. Along the way, though, they got about the same avoidance as other tanks, higher health, and higher physical mitigation. They also got pretty decent magical mitigation too. And they ended up taking exactly the same hits without crushing blows.

But without crushing blows, why does a bear need higher health and armor than another tank? This might make sense if avoidance numbers were far apart from each other, but it turns out that this really isn't the case; avoidance is largely close to each other as tanks. So they're taking about the same incoming damage physically. And with Protector of the Pack, they're taking about the same magic damage.

And barring cooldown use, it doesn't make sense for one tank to simply be better in all ways than other tanks.

Now, you can't take cooldowns out of the equation entirely. That's not reasonable, especially with the design of so many fights being 'blow cooldowns in scary place and survive'. But balancing around lack of cooldowns with average mitigation doesn't make sense either; it means that either you're the best tank because cooldowns don't matter, or you're the worst because you do. There's no middle ground.

Part of the real problem here is how well bears scale with only a couple stats. I've talked about this before and predicted the actual gain bears would get, and have been largely accurate. The biggest deal here is, of course, how well bears scale with stamina. Specifically, for every point of stamina on gear, enchants, gems or buffs bears gain the following multipliers:

1.25 for bear form
1.1 for heart of the wild
1.1 for Blessing of Kings
1.06 for survival of the fittest
1.02 for improved mark of the wild

For a grand total of 1.63 stamina for every stamina point. Now, part of this is to make up for the deficit in stamina on leather vs. plate tanking gear; leather has about 25% less stamina than plate, so that makes sense. And most other tanks get close to the same kinds of multipliers other than bear form for their stamina; 1.1*1.06*1.02 is a 18% multiplier for base stamina, which is in line with other tanks to a large extent.

But what doesn't make sense is the bear multiplier applying to everything else. For example: a warrior gains about 1.16x stamina per point of stamina after all buffs. A druid will get 1.63 stamina for every point. So improved fort gives 214 stamina normally; for a warrior that will be 249 stamina. For a bear, that's 350 stamina - a difference of 101 stamina!

Just from fort.

Similarly, every solid sky sapphire gives a warrior about 26 stamina. It gives a bear 39 stamina.

Every leg enchant gives a warrior 64 stamina. It gives a bear 90.

Heart of iron gives a bear 265 stamina; it gives a warrior only 188.

These sorts of things are why bears get nerfed every patch. With that high of a multiplier, bears simply win more every time they get an upgrade relative to other tanks. Warriors have some compensation in that they have higher base stamina and they get things like a gun slot and typically more gems, but that's a static value; by comparison, bears simply have a huge multiplier to wield scarily away. And at some point that isn't going to be balanced.

Which requires a nerf - until the next time.

So let's try a thought experiment (with math!) What would happen if the bear stamina multiplier applied only to the stamina on leather, and only the base stamina? In other words, all stamina found on non-leather (cloaks, trinkets, rings), all gems, all enchants, all buffs - they're all going to only be given the non-bear multiplier, which is 1.1 (hotw) * 1.1(kings) *1.06(sotf) * 1.02 (motw) = 1.31, about.

What would that mean?

Let's take my current character in their balanced set as an example. This doesn't take into account sockets or anything like that, but it's otherwise correct. It doesn't stack stam exclusively, has a few shared slots with cat that use agility, has a mix of agility and stamina enchants when it made sense, and only uses one PvP piece (the bracers). I also have JC and LW for my buffs. A full list of the gear can be found at the end.

Here's the breakdown of how stam looks on that gear:

slot	leather	nonleather	gem	enchant	other
head	99		73	37
neck		94
shoulder	67		24	30
back		84
chest	119		82	10
bracers	73			90
weapon		121
hands	93
belt	73		60
legs	114		48	55
feet	90
ring1		84
ring2		89
trinket1		162
trinket2
fort					214
motw					51
base					121
total	728	634	287	222	386

That's right. 728 stam from the leather only. 1529 stam from everything else.

With this setup we have roughly 3690 stamina currently, after all buffs save food. If we applied the bear multiplier to stamina only on leather, what would be the result?

3191 stamina.

In practical terms, this is a reduction of almost exactly 5k health in this situation. This bear would go from 48.7k to 43.7k, give or take a bit. Now, 43.7k sounds awfully low compared to some other tanks, I will admit - but that's just my general bear prejudice talking. As far as tanks in a similar gear set, it's almost precisely on the money; this is a tank without any hardmode gear, not fully T8-upgraded in all slots and only wearing one stamina trinket.

So that's...actually pretty close to reasonable. It's a big nerf, mind you, but the value is pretty good and it wouldn't require a lot of balancing relative to warriors (which I'm considering the benchmark right now). Let's take the next test case - the bear best in slot. This will be without any PvP gear or polar gear, and while it will gear for stamina heavily, it will not do so at the cost of juicy bonuses or socket bonuses. It will use two stamina trinkets though. Again, full list of gear at the bottom.

At the start, this bear would have 57.7k health. A similarly geared warrior has about 50.5k health.

slot	leather	nonleather	gem	enchant	other
head	122		73	37
neck		96	47
shoulder	96		48	30
back		96	24
chest	127		72	10
bracers	61		24	90
weapon		129	36
hands	93		47
belt	65		72
legs	127		72	55
feet	90		30
ring1		96	24
ring2		94
trinket1		162
trinket2		155
fort					214
motw					51
base					121
food					40
total	781	828	569	222	426

In this example, the bear has 2826 stamina from all sources, of which 2045 is from non-leather and 781 is from leather. Currently that bear has 4621 stamina.

With bear only applying to leather? 3952, or a loss of 668 stamina, taking their health from 57.7k to 51.0k.

Which is again almost exactly the same as a similarly equipped best in slot warrior with a similar gearing strategy (it's about 1k higher). Which is just about perfect.

What's good about this strategy is that it's future-proof. Bears will scale a bit faster than warriors, but that's acceptable to blizzard (as shown by paladins in TBC) so long as it's not by more than 10% or so.

What's not good is that without that health lead, druids become much less interesting on certain fights because of their lack of potent cooldowns. So if this did get changed, I would hope that the cooldown situation would also be addressed.

Now you might say that you could get to this result in other ways - and you could, at least to start with. You can remove HotW's bonus, which would reduce health by about 3.5k to 4k. You could nerf SotF and MotW as well. The problem with all of these things is that it still leaves bears with a huge, huge stamina multiplier as a base. Sure, it's a nerf now, but it would mean that bears would still get 30 more stamina than a warrior for every 100 stamina they both get. Eventually, that will break. This way, it won't break until sometime well past the end of the expansion; it can't, since the numbers are essentially the same for all tanks.

Furthermore, it means a lot of degenerate gear choices go out the wayside. Gem slots are not the sole arbiter of whether gear is awesome or not. DPS jewelry becomes somewhat more usable.

It doesn't fix the PvP or polar set gear, and that is a legitimate problem. However, PvP gear only gives about a 2k health lead over non-PvP gear, if you use all of it. That's still within a 10% margin of error, and still better than what we have now.

It also doesn't do anything to fix armor. I think that the 4-5% difference in avoidance between the druids and the rest of the tanks can deal with the armor, honestly. 4% more mitigation vs 5% avoidance seems like a wash.

Now, I hear some druids really like having huge health pools. Okay. They also like having huge armor. Hmm. A bear can't have the same baseline mitigation as other tanks but have higher armor and higher stamina while maintaining similar avoidance levels. Either their avoidance would have to be nerfed, or their base mitigation would have to go away.

If you really want to have health and armor aplenty, I think the only way to fix that would be to remove protector of the pack. In that situation, druid health and health scaling would be unchanged (which would break druids later on in icecrown), but their incoming damage would be 12% higher than currently. They could even get a buff to armor to compensate for this. I don't think this is a good long-term design idea, but I can see the value in it; a lot of bears don't care about whether or not they're easier or harder to heal so long as they have tons and tons of stamina and armor. That would be one way to go about it.

Anyway, there's my idea for fixing the stamina issue so that it's no longer so insane for bears. I do expect some criticism here, but try and make it somewhat constructive if you can. Also, check out the gear choices and see if they make sense or not. Enchants were kept the same across both sets for ease of use.

	My gear	Best in Slot gear	Enchants
Head	Garona's Guise	Conqueror's Nightsong Headguard	Stalwart Prot
Neck	Boundless Ambition	Bronze Pendant of the Vanir
Shoulders	Valorous Nightsong Shoulderpads	Shoulderpads of the Intruder	Great Gladiator
Chest	Conqueror's Nightsong Raiments	Embrace of the Gladiator	Power Stats
Waist	Death-warmed Belt	Soul-Devouring Cinch	Eternal Belt Buckle
Legs	Valorous Nightsong Legguards	Legguards of Cunning Deception	Frosthide
Feet	Runed Ironhide Boots	Runed Ironhide Boots	Superior Agi
Wrist	Furious Gladiator's Armwraps of Triumph	Solar Bindings	Fur Stam lining
Hands	Conqueror's Nightsong Handgrips	Conqueror's Nightsong Handgrips	Major Agi
Finger1	Gatekeeper	Fate's Clutch
Finger2	Signet of Winter	The Leviathan's Coil
Trinket1	Heart of Iron	Heart of Iron
Trinket2	Darkmoon Card: Greatness	Royal Seal of King Llane
Back	Cloak of the Shadowed Sun	Titanskin Cloak	Major Agi
MainHand	Twisted Visage	Dark Edge of Depravity	Mongoose
Ranged	Idol of Terror	Idol of the Corruptor

[Druid] Stamina nerf on PTR

This isn't going to be a long post, but before it overwhelms other comment sections I wanted to make sure that there was a place to talk about the change to Heart of the Wild:

Heart of the Wild: Stamina bonus changed to 2/4/6/8/10%.

The important thing to note is that it's from 4/8/12/16/20% on live. So it's about a straight 10% nerf.

What does this mean? Does it change gemming strategies or gearing strategies? Eh, not really. Not for most things. Druids still have a very substantial stamina edge over other tanks if they want it.

For normal tanking, we'll still be looking at around 40-42k in BiS gear even after this, depending on what you're gearing for. That's still very high. I'll do more analysis of this later. My suspicion is that DKs will have more armor, better cooldowns, much more avoidance and a bit more stamina than a druid using similar strategies, which should be more alarming. But I don't want to say that definitively until I've actually talked with some DKs and seen how they gear.

For Sarth3D - that really hurts the notion of a druid safely tanking without external cooldowns, at least unless they have jewelcrafting and leatherworking. Well, almost. If you can get to 47k and 345 FR, you should be able to survive with one barkskin and one survival instincts. But the nightmare seed + fire resist pot is out unless you're a JC and a LW.

For antitank: in order to keep the same level of health, you'll need to have something like essence of gossamer equipped. Really, that's about it. You lose about 2-3% DPS from that, and that sucks, but it's not so horrible that you'll be seriously disadvantaged. You'll still be able to tank well and DPS decently in the same gear.