.jpg)
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.
Showing posts with label nerf. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nerf. Show all posts
Friday, July 24, 2009
Thursday, July 23, 2009
[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.
Now, here's the best in slot values (just the totals)
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?
Again, comparing to best in slot:
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:
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 |
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
[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:
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.
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
