[Bear]Oh, the joys of savage defense continued

I've talked about how Savage Defense likely would work and how good or bad it'd be, how it works on the PTR and how it continued to work there, how SD uptime works, how good and bad it is against specific fights, and then later comments on SD in cata, especially after we found out that the combat logs are probably bugged.

To be clear: I don't like the mechanic. I don't like that it is a static amount of damage in a world where almost all other mitigation mechanics are percentages. I don't like that it has weird interactions with multiple mobs (though at least that is better with 4.1). I don't like the interaction with vengeance.

But today: I really don't like how weak it is, and I really don't like the bugs in it.

I did some study on the mathematical importance of having Pulverize and having good pulverize uptime, and the results really shocked me. You can find the long topic at the wow forums, but the basic info is that I wrote a simulator that would simulate a boss attacking and dodging and then tested a few sets of values of avoidance, hit, crit, expertise to see what would happen - specifically what would happen when you assume pulverize isn't there and you lose the 9% crit.

I expected that it wouldn't be that big a deal in terms of uptime of savage defense. And boy was I wrong! Pulverize, depending on your gear level and avoidance/crit/cap levels, is equivalent to having about 5-6% block% for a paladin or warrior. In other words, you block 5-6% more of the attacks that land with pulverize active 100% of the time.

That's huge! That'd be a big, BIG bonus for a paladin or warrior. It sounds great! And for the first time I have a nice, simple way of testing various uptimes of Savage Defense in a way that is actually simulated and not entirely theoretical.

Then I dug into it some more. That 5-6% block? Well, on a boss that does 70k damage after armor (which would be one of the more harder-hitting bosses in the game currently, like Atramedes, but not as bad as Nefarian) this would be the equivalent of reducing the average attack damage (average after avoidance, blocks and not blocked) from 35.5k to 36.7k. And that's assuming a 20k shield - which as you'll see isn't a fair assumption.

Huh. That's...disappointing. And that's on something that hits every 2.0 seconds for 70k. For things that hit harder, it gets worse. For things that hit more often it gets MUCH worse; many many more missed attacks means that blocked attacks are even less frequent and less useful when they do happen.

Okay...so it's not as great as we thought. It's not as great as Tangedyn's spreadsheet would indicate or my prior calcs indicate or Rawr indicates. That's not the end of the world, and we never thought it was THAT good, right?

Then today there's a post on SD being 'nerfed'. And the usual folks say logs or GTFO, and that's fair, so they're actually produced. And you see things like this:

[00:55:48.039] Beradon gains Savage Defense from Beradon (Remaining: 18267)
[00:55:54.475] Beradon's Savage Defense is refreshed by Beradon (Remaining: 15009)
[00:55:56.929] Atramedes hits Beradon 54922 (A: 21286)

That's right; SD got refreshed by a later SD proc, but because vengeance was lower the SD shield it created was actually smaller. In other words, it'd be better to not have attacked during that time. That means that any streak of avoidance actually hurts mitigation down the road. Bleh.

There are countless other examples in that post about SD not working the right way with multiple mobs, but we don't know whether that's an actual bug or just issues with the combat log. It effectively makes it impossible to determine the actual usefulness of savage defense from log parses, however; either the log is telling us the truth and SD is bad, or the log is lying but we don't know how badly.

Man, do I hate this ability. So very, very much. I guess the good news is this: Savage Defense is going to be less and less relevant as we get better gear and as we face bigger mobs, so after a while it won't be worth worrying about.

[Bear] The best case for Savage Defense

TL;DR version:
If you take anything from this article, take this bit: to maximize SD uptime make sure that mauls happen on your special attacks' cooldown, so the rotation for multitarget mobs looks like this:
swipe/thrash&maul/swipe/mangle&maul

Obviously you can do demo roar or lacerate or whatever on that mangle bit, but maul is the key thing here. That also means to maximize your SD procs now, you should be doing something like this:
swipe/mangle&maul/thrash/lacerate&maul
Though in practice this doesn't work as you need to have the swipe & thrash right away to get the best threat.

Anyway, onto the article.

Savage defense is getting a nice buff in the 4.1 patch, in case you hadn't heard. It will go from having one charge that is used up regardless of attack strength (more on that in a second) to an absorption shield that will absorb the same amount of damage maximum that it could before, but will not go away with partial hits.


So yay! It's now a fully fledged PW:S that only works on physical attacks! That's awesome, and it fixes bears and makes it just as good as shield block or DK heals or...

Okay, that's not true. Sadly.

As Ahti put it very well on the tanking forums recently:

The problem is that the upper bound on this is set extremely low compared to
blocking (and compared to Blood Shield, I guess, although I'd prefer to stick
with the blocking comparison for simplicity's sake). And many encounters already
have add situations that push past that upper bound.You don't need that many
adds hitting you (and they don't need to be hitting that hard) before you reach
the point where the probability is that every single Savage Defense proc is
consumed before you can possibly generate another one. Past that point, you'll
continue to take more damage, but Savage Defense won't get any better - whereas
for a warrior or paladin, block will scale upwards indefinitely.

Yep. But what is that upwards bound? Let's go with the best case scenario here.

Let's assume that you get an SD proc whenever you can. That means you get one every 2.4 seconds (minus haste) for each autoattack, and you get one every 1.5 seconds for every special attack, and you get one every 3 seconds for every maul. This averages out to a SD proc every 1.03 seconds. Note that this is insanely optimistic - it assumes a crit on each of those attacks AND a SD proc on each crit ,which is only 50% of the time. But again - this is the maximum upper bound you can possibly get.

For ease of computation we'll go with a 20k shield. That means every 1.03 seconds we can absorb 20,000 damage intake before taking any more physical damage. Again, sounds pretty awesome - and then it refreshes magically after that 1.03 seconds later. (note that it doesn't; SD doesn't happen every 1.03 seconds but happens on attack boundaries, so you can get times where you don't have much happening and then times when you have many procs - but 1.03 seconds is the average and will be easy to work with.

Now, let's go comparing to a blocker, who always blocks 30% of all damage. They're block capped, so they will always reduce damage by 30% no matter what.

Where do these things become equivalent? That's pretty easy to figure. It's simply when 20k/1.03 seconds = 30% of incoming DPS. And that turns out to be 64.7k DPS.

This means that whenever you're taking more than 64.7k DPS, no matter what, Savage defense will be worse than block. Of course that changes as you add more SD shielding.

The real trick is that the above is completely insane with respect to the number of expected procs, especially in a single target scenario. For a multitarget you can expect multiple crits per swipe/thrash, so you'll often see a shield every 1.5 seconds. But you'll also be without a swipe/thrash every 4.5 seconds - and you're not guaranteed to get a shield even when you swipe.

Realistically how many shields do bears get? It's tough to say. Another problem is that shields can get overwritten without being used at all, especially on attack boundaries where the normal attack lines up with the special attack. And since Maul always lines up with a special attack, any time you get a crit with the special attack and a shield with it (like with swipe) chances are that you're not going to get two shields worth anything.

Actually, that's a good point: to maximize SD uptime on multimob packs you should always - ALWAYS - time it so that a maul happens when both swipe and thrash are on CD. So it should look a lot like this:
swipe/thrash and maul/swipe/mangle and maul as the rotation for trash.

But realistically you get one every time you swipe or thrash and then one kinda randomly after that. The random part is the most frustrating part; some times shields will be completely wasted as they get refreshed every .6 seconds or so, like this:

[19:23:22.825] Maeltne Mangle Halfus Wyrmbreaker *30730*
[19:23:22.878] Maeltne casts Maul on Halfus Wyrmbreaker
[19:23:23.148] Maeltne's Savage Defense is refreshed by Maeltne
[19:23:23.228] Maeltne Maul Halfus Wyrmbreaker *18089*
[19:23:23.666] Maeltne's Savage Defense is refreshed by Maeltne

(this one is fine, as both the mangle and the maul procced SD)

[19:23:50.678] Maeltne crits Halfus Wyrmbreaker *12134*
[19:23:51.194] Maeltne casts Thrash
[19:23:51.448] Maeltne Thrash Storm Rider *8881*
[19:23:51.448] Maeltne Thrash Nether Scion 4456
[19:23:51.448] Maeltne Thrash Halfus Wyrmbreaker *9167*
[19:23:51.285] Maeltne's Savage Defense is refreshed by Maeltne
[19:23:51.590] Maeltne's Savage Defense is refreshed by Maeltne
[19:23:51.590] Maeltne's Savage Defense is refreshed by Maeltne
(this one's more frustrating, as that second SD proc just goes to waste)
All those refreshes are basically wasted here.

Ugh, this is making me mad about SD all over again. This is also why it's much more important to look at SD uptime and not number of SD procs when doing SD analysis. Or if you like, just look at the amount of damage SD absorbed.

Anyway - the important thing to note is that while having partial SD absorbs is nice, it doesn't fix a lot of the issues with SD. SD still doesn't scale infinitely like block does, so at some points it simply will be worse than block for mitigation of damage (like on heroic Nefarian currently). At other points it will be better. Sometimes it (like WotLK-era block) will be WAY better than avoidance or partial blocks, as it will reduce far more than 30%; a great example of this is when you can assume you'll get a SD shield every 1.5 seconds and you won't get physically attacked for more than your shield strength, you'll be effectively invulnerable during this time. When 4.1 hits, try out going to Kara and seeing how silly it is. My gut feeling is that you'll be able to do most trash that doesn't have heavy magical components without losing almost any health.

This, among other things, makes old-world content far easier. 15k shields every 1.5 seconds when you're taking 15k damage every 1.5 seconds sounds a lot like most heroics from before and some raid content. This wasn't nearly as good when one hit removed the shield and then the rest piled on (though with latency and the spell reflect bug, that wasn't always the case and often many attacks got absorbed), but now it should be significantly better.

But for current heroics and raids, it doesn't help a lot. The cases where you are going to get a shield and the shield would have been not used up AND would not be refreshed before being used up are small in raids. Most multimob scenarios in raids have mobs hitting for 10-12k each, and while it adds a bit more value here it doesn't add so much as you could reasonably expect to have a shield up fairly quickly. On mobs that hit for more than the shield strength anyway (Mal adds, as an example) this change does literally nothing for you.

[General] The future of block part 2 - short term fixes

Part one is here and establishes some of the rules and goals.

Let's first go with the short term fix for paladins and warriors gaining some traction. This is similar in thinking to Savage Defense; we know that an overhaul is in order and things aren't working right, but we assume they're not going to radically change two specs, multiple stat weighings, gear choices, mechanics, etc all in a content patch. Savage Defense is on the level of the kind of change we can expect: a minor mechanic change combined with an alteration of existing talents and skills to balance it out.

Here's the list again of the issues:

1. Block as a static mitigation fails against hard-hitting mobs. We knew that already.
2. Block as a scaling mitigation fails against soft-hitting mobs. Savage Defense was a great tool for upcoming druid tanks in heroics precisely because it mitigates so much more damage against heroic-level attacks. Expect this to stay fairly similar to what it is now, because most tanks don't go to raids right off; they tank in normal and heroic content first.
3. HP on the steady tanks should be lower than HP on the spiky tanks. This right now is a big deal and is very problematic. Druids are arguably the least spiky tank thanks to the higher armor and SD, and they also have the most HP of any tank. Clearly the less spiky tanks should have less HP, which would put paladins and warriors as the high HP tanks and druids as the low HP tank. That may be unacceptable flavor wise for druids.
4. Magic mitigation on the high-HP tanks needs to be less than the low-HP tanks. Because if you can't block at all and armor doesn't help, everyone takes the same damage - which means raw HP is key. We saw this with druids in Sarth3D. I don't think they want this again.
   
5. SD is in an odd state. I don't know what they'll do with SD. It has a high uptime but is similarly ineffective against hard hits as block. I expect two things to happen: SD to be dramatically improved and the HP of a druid to scale dramatically worse. The alternative is a reversion of SD and making druids and DKs the 'nonshield' tanks and paladins and warriors the 'shield' tanks. I'd actually like this, even though I like SD; it would mean that (similar to healers) tanks would have something of niches again. It would necessitate actually having some ability that scaled with DPS gear.
   
6. Avoidance on all tanks should be roughly similar. This is already largely the case (within a few % depending on build) so I don't see it as an issue. And avoidance stacking is not nearly the problem it was in TBC.
   
7. Blocking tanks must not be able to get 100% block uptime. This represents another drastic change to basically every single tank. Now why is this necessary? Because if you balance around the idea that half of the time, another class will take 10% more and half of the time they'll take 10% less, if you can skew that so that 100% of the time they'll take 10% less...that won't be balanced. Paladins mechanics will be completely changed (and likely to something near the warrior model with shield block). This means gear with block rating needs to be carefully looked at. It may mean that block% will have to have diminishing returns like avoidance does.
8. Block value must be completely redone. This seems obvious. At the same time, you can't have this scale too amazingly well. You might not want it at all or want it to be gamed at all; being able to dramatically influence your scaling mitigation is a pretty powerful ability. You run the risk of block value being like a TBC druid's armor stat, where anything without it is essentially pointless. And then there's the scaling BV with strength.
9. Threat stats will have to be looked at as well. Both paladins and warriors scale their threat with strength and block value, and have many mechanics built around these two values and how they interact. If they are changed dramatically, these things will have to be revised as well.

So what could they do? Let's take a look at a current protection warrior - Xav of Premonition. He's on the well-geared side currently, which is why I wanted to look at him since this change will likely affect people going forward from 3.2 at the earliest. He currently has 29k armor but has geared away from block - 12% block chance and 1400 block value after buffs. That's going to be on the low end, but it's not unreasonable anyway. Even if you have a warrior who stacks block, they're going to be on the order of 2000-2500 BV anyway.

By comparison, I personally have 33k armor. And that's all the time. Plus I have savage defense, which (when it goes off) blocks for more on a hit than the warrior, though the warrior has shield block and critical block to play with.

Remember, our goal is to get the warrior to the point where when they block, they take less damage than the DK or in theory a druid (I'll get to that point in a bit). But when they don't block, they take more damage. How to accomplish that?

Well, for starters as it stands now without any modifications they'll take more damage when not blocking anyway. Let's stick with that. That's easy.

So when they block, how about something like this:

Whenever you block an attack the attack's damage is reduced by your block value. In addition, your armor is increased by twice the amount of your block value for that attack.

That's it. Not very difficult, is it?


Now, Xav would have 32k armor, roughly, from any blocks he made. That's not good enough - but he's gone as far away as possible from getting any block rating or value. Plus, he has critical blocks that he can use, and he has shield block which gives him essentially 35k armor and 3k absorbsion for a 10-second duration. It's not quite barkskin, but it's getting much closer; he's increased his armor by almost 25%.

If this didn't prove to be good enough, having a 3x multiplier would likely be fine. Heck, a 4k multiplier might not be too horrible.

Of course, they'd still be the spiky tanks, so a warrior would need to get more HP. Blizzard is fond of giving 10% boosts. We'll go with that.

How does this fare with the 9 rules from before? It fixes 1,2,and 3 outright. 9 isn't an issue since BV isn't changing, nor is 8. 7 isn't that much of a concern since it's effectively impossible to get perfect uptime as it stands now. 4,5,and 6 don't apply.

Okay, that takes care of warriors. What about paladins? Paladins would require something of a nerf and a homogenization, possibly. The easiest solution is to turn holy shield into almost precisely the same thing as shield block.

But that's really inelegant. It also takes away from the very well-established ability of a paladin to deal nicely with many, many mobs via holy shield charges. Let's use one of our guild tanks - Vyre. A bit less geared than Xav, but still pretty decent overall. He has 28k armor and 1600 block value.

What I'd propose is making paladins the other 'steady' tank to complement DKs, and make druids the spiky tank. (again, I'll get to that in a bit). How do we do that? Well, we assume that they're going to have 100% uptime on their shield thanks to holy shield. If we need to, we can guarantee this by giving it even more charges. We only add their BV to their shield once, giving in this case around 30k armor. That sounds a bit low, and it might be - but it's something to balance out in the end. They'd not need any real changing; their armor would stay consistent around 30-32k, and their health is 'balanced'.

To go with the rules again, this is fine with 1,2 and 3, 7, 8, and 9. Magic mitigation might need to be addressed.

So above I said that I'd like to see druids be the other 'spiky' tank. And this isn't that hard to accomplish either, though it might be hard to do with all the other things that we'd like to fix floating around. The reason I'd like them to be spiky is simple: their HP. They already have huge HP multipliers, and HP has traditionally been a druid strength. Armor has as well, but you can't have both huge armor and huge HP in a world without crushing blows to counterbalance; something has to give. And I'm choosing to make it armor for now.

So the way to make a druid 'more' spiky is to reduce their armor yet again. In fact, let's just remove the sotf bonus completely. Insane! But that drops a druid to 26k armor. Yes, that's right - I want super spiky. Now they're the lowest-armor tank of the lot.

Then we supercharge SD. SD will get the following changes:

1. 1. Can stack to 3 charges
2. Increases armor by 100% of AP when active
   

So when SD is up, the armor (say on me) would go from 26k to 33k. And it would be up a fair amount of the time too. And here's the neat thing - polar gear and pvp gear becomes way less useful. With the huge armor multiplier reduced ilvl isn't as special. With the big bonus from AP going to armor, polar gear loses almost 500 armor by itself (and that ignores agility).

And if that's not enough, make it even mightier - 200% of AP. 39k armor when it's active! Suck on that! That's probably a bit high, but it's adjustable. It's another level to move. And with SD's relatively high uptime on single boss fights, it might be fine at 100% AP simply because it should be working so often.

This might require that druids get a health boost, but I doubt it. They're already doing pretty well on that end. It also might require something of an avoidance boost. Nothing drastic, but something close to a 5% improvement overall.

How does this meet the rules? 1,2, and 3 are still okay. 4 isn't addressed. 5 is the dramatic improvement. 6 might need to be improved. 7 through nine are fine.

Finally, DKs. DKs are the baseline model to work off of, since they have no shield mechanic. The only thing they would need to be balanced, I think, is a slight nerf to their HP. Since they're taking the least spiky damage of any of the tanks, they need less HP to counterbalance that.

I'll answer folks questions and comments here shortly.

[General] The future of block part 1

This comes from a very long thread about the weakness of block in the current game, and how warriors and paladins are decently behind druids and especially DKs in content.

Think about it this way.

Avoidance is good because it removes a lot of damage. Avoidance is bad because it is unpredictable. If you stack too much avoidance, you are likely to give your healers coronaries.

Mitigation (armor and straight damage reduction) is good because it's consistent. As you all point out, you can start to learn how much a blow will actually do to you. Mitigation is bad, from a player's perspective, because it can't save you. If you have 10 health and dodge, you might live. If you have 10 health and hope your armor will save you... well, it won't. You become the dreaded mana sponge because you are never avoiding damage completely.

Mitigation also has a risk from a design-perspective that when fights get too predictable they become too easy and unexciting. Imagine a tank with 75% damage reduction and no avoidance. You could calculate from the moment of the first attack whether you will survive the encounter. Heck, you might be able to not even heal the tank and know you'll survive depending on the specific abilities used by the boss.

Block as a mechanic is somewhere between avoidance and mitigation. Ideally it removes a fair amount of damage (vs. all damage) reasonably often (vs. rarely). If block is up 100% of the time it just becomes armor that you improve through a different stat. We have let block chances creep up frankly because the amount blocked is pretty trivial when bosses are hitting for 40% of your health pool every swing. If this still strikes you as too RNG, imagine abilities like Shield Block and Holy Shield that could guarantee 100% chance to block for a short period of time.

We don't think block is cutting it as a mechanic, but the direction we are likely to take it is probably more of a change than you are considering.

We also don't think it's necessary that every tank rely on avoidance, block and mitigation in equal amounts. They can't get too far apart or someone will come to dominate for certain encounters, but we don't think the tanks need to be completely homogenized to get what we want either.

If (to make up numbers) the DK and druid get hit for 20K every swing that hits, but the warrior and paladin get hit for 24K half the time and 16K half the time, then that seems like it would work. When the boss emoted that his big hit was coming, you could make sure you had your cooldown ready to guarantee a block.

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Take my examples with a grain of salt. I think some of you are trying to plug them in to today's encounters without changing anything else.

I agree that nobody wants to be the tank that avoids, avoids, avoids and then gets hit for 4X normal damage. (Then again, part of the problem we had with DKs last patch was their avoidance was just too high.) In my example, the shield-using tanks get hit for 4K more damage 50% of the time. If you're calling that "spike damage" and saying it's unacceptable, then I'm afraid nothing can be done to salvage differences among the tank classes.
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Yes, this is why I said not to assume everything else stays the same. We are in a world where almost any healer can heal a tank to full health in just a few GCDs. When healers can heal half your health pool, then bosses have to hit very hard. The test of survival for a tank is whether they can survive two hits or so without a heal landing. Health pools probably just need to be higher. Currently being the mana sponge tank isn't very scary because healers don't realistically run out of mana on most fights and the only real threat is whether you can get the tank back up to 100% before the next hit lands. Mitigating damage isn't seen as something that preserves healer mana. It is seen as something that might let you live through one more hit.

In a world where taking a little less on some hits and a little more on others doesn't translate into scary spike damage, then we think the block mechanic described above world work in some form, especially if you could force a block for those times when you did get a string of unblocked hits.
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Crushing blows hit for 150% of normal damage. So a 20K hit normal hit would be an unpredictable 30K crushing blow. If crushing blows were 120% of normal, but you also had an equal chance for an 80% of normal hit, then it would even out in the end... provided that the spikes were not too big.

It may also be that the blockers would need to take even less damage when blocking because there is some merit to the argument that the tank with the lower variance on damage is easier (or at least more attractive) to heal even if the averages came out the same.

However, we are still just going to reject the notion that anything with an RNG component is unacceptable (provided you have the tools to occasionally get by when you get unlucky). I can totally understand as a player why it's in your best interest to minimize the RNG when tanking. You can also understand, I hope, why it is not in our best interest.

As I said above, once you can totally math out how much damage you're going to predictably take at the start of the fight, it will absolutely be an easier fight to tank... probably to the point of boredom. Imagine the 0% avoidance, 90% mitigation tank in a land in which bosses can never crit or crush. Is that going to be an effective tank? Yes. It it going to be fun to play? I doubt it.

Sorry for the long wall of text, but I wanted everyone to be on the same page.

First off, what's the actual state of affairs right now? Well, right now the example is more like this:

Druids & DKs take around 18k a hit, and sometimes (if a druid is lucky) 16k.
Paladins and warriors take around 24k a hit, and sometimes they'll take 22k.

Clearly that's not reasonable. And yes, this is with all the relevant factors of mitigation thrown in. The fact is, with things hitting as hard as they do block at a static component is not useful compared to armor. I showed this in the SD math post a while back; SD is great against small hits and weak against big ones.

So the situation is that warriors and paladins take both more incoming damage overall and more spiky damage. Some of this is offset relative to druids with slightly superior avoidance, but even that's more spiky. The big worry about block being too good is clearly wrong. Block isn't too good. In a world where blocking isn't required because crushing blows don't exist, armor is king.

The thing is - we already knew this from BC. We knew that on any fight where the boss couldn't crush and where there wasn't some inane 'must block' mechanic, a druid was going to be better due to armor. Well, druids have less armor than ever before but they still have more than any other tank, and most everything else is equal. Is it a surprise that this rules the roost? Same goes with DKs - it shouldn't be surprising that they're better off in pure mitigation on the boss fights in Ulduar.

And I'm not alone in saying this; it's been talked about on the forums, at TankSpot, in a really good overall article by Allison Robert at WoWInsider, etc.

So. Block is broken. GC recognizes it. It's pretty clear when there are a lot of comments by GC that changes are upcoming, even if they've not been finalized. We have seen this before with things like druids being able to use all weapons and get FAP no matter what, or with the trinket armor being a problem, or with savage defense. This is the first stage - sounding ideas off the community to let them know that something is coming down the pipe.

I suspect that we'll see an actual mechanic change here in the next couple of weeks. The question is, what will it be?

A lot of people on that thread are saying that it's unfair that the 'spiky' tank has less HP than the other tanks, and are upset that GC isn't commenting on this. I think that this is just because Blizzard hasn't solidified a design for all the tanks in this 'block is good' world. Why not? Because there are a LOT of things to consider. Let's go through some of them and see if we can figure something out.

1. Block as a static mitigation fails against hard-hitting mobs. We knew that already.
2. Block as a scaling mitigation fails against soft-hitting mobs. Savage Defense was a great tool for upcoming druid tanks in heroics precisely because it mitigates so much more damage against heroic-level attacks. Expect this to stay fairly similar to what it is now, because most tanks don't go to raids right off; they tank in normal and heroic content first.
3. HP on the steady tanks should be lower than HP on the spiky tanks. This right now is a big deal and is very problematic. Druids are arguably the least spiky tank thanks to the higher armor and SD, and they also have the most HP of any tank. Clearly the less spiky tanks should have less HP, which would put paladins and warriors as the high HP tanks and druids as the low HP tank. That may be unacceptable flavor wise for druids.
4. Magic mitigation on the high-HP tanks needs to be less than the low-HP tanks. Because if you can't block at all and armor doesn't help, everyone takes the same damage - which means raw HP is key. We saw this with druids in Sarth3D. I don't think they want this again.
   
5. SD is in an odd state. I don't know what they'll do with SD. It has a high uptime but is similarly ineffective against hard hits as block. I expect two things to happen: SD to be dramatically improved and the HP of a druid to scale dramatically worse. The alternative is a reversion of SD and making druids and DKs the 'nonshield' tanks and paladins and warriors the 'shield' tanks. I'd actually like this, even though I like SD; it would mean that (similar to healers) tanks would have something of niches again. It would necessitate actually having some ability that scaled with DPS gear.
   
6. Avoidance on all tanks should be roughly similar. This is already largely the case (within a few % depending on build) so I don't see it as an issue. And avoidance stacking is not nearly the problem it was in TBC.
   
7. Blocking tanks must not be able to get 100% block uptime. This represents another drastic change to basically every single tank. Now why is this necessary? Because if you balance around the idea that half of the time, another class will take 10% more and half of the time they'll take 10% less, if you can skew that so that 100% of the time they'll take 10% less...that won't be balanced. Paladins mechanics will be completely changed (and likely to something near the warrior model with shield block). This means gear with block rating needs to be carefully looked at. It may mean that block% will have to have diminishing returns like avoidance does.
8. Block value must be completely redone. This seems obvious. At the same time, you can't have this scale too amazingly well. You might not want it at all or want it to be gamed at all; being able to dramatically influence your scaling mitigation is a pretty powerful ability. You run the risk of block value being like a TBC druid's armor stat, where anything without it is essentially pointless. And then there's the scaling BV with strength.
9. Threat stats will have to be looked at as well. Both paladins and warriors scale their threat with strength and block value, and have many mechanics built around these two values and how they interact. If they are changed dramatically, these things will have to be revised as well.
   

That's a lot of juggling to do and a lot of problems to solve. Tomorrow I'll post some of my thoughts on how to actually balance some of this in the long term, and what will likely be done in the short term. If you'd like another opinion, Honor has written up a piece too. I think he's on the same track as me, but you should read it and see what is basically an opinion with a bit more paladin focus.

[Druid] Limited Savage Defense analysis

This was taken from my recent Razorscale kill. On this I tanked sentinels and then Razorscale when we got him to 50%. It's not the best representation of a tank&spank, but it should do for a general value. Specifically it should be nice because according to WWS, I received all of two Essence of Gossamer procs, and no power word: shields for the entire fight. Thus almost all the damage absorbed should be from SD and SD alone.

Here's the relevant part of the WWS:



Because I was facing adds and not the boss for half of the fight, the overall avoidance value is much higher - especially since it was sentinels who have a high miss rate (21.6%) due to their dual-wielding.

For this specific encounter, I absorbed 24.3% of total attacks. This was a total of 112188 damage on 71 hits, which is 1580 damage per hit and right about where we would predict it. This was 15.5% of the total damage I received as physical damage, and of the 100 hits I took 71 were absorbed.

What's interesting is that the uptime is much, much worse than what Rawr would predict it to be. With multiple adds beating on me and with their having such a high avoidance, the uptime should be close to 90%. 71% is pretty low. This is due, in part, to weird overlap issues, and partially due to the bugs associated with SD.

Also interesting is how good it was at absorbing damage. This is one of the better places where SD shines; on this fight I put on extra armor (trinket + neck) and basically 'blocked' 25-30% of all damage from each sentinel. The sentinels don't hit hard except for whirlwinds, and the other adds hit almost trivially. Thus, SD should shine as a mitigation tool, and it did okay. This was, oddly enough, a higher block rate than either warrior both in blocked damage and blocked procs. It was also about half as much that was blocked (in damage and in procs) as the paladin.

The next trick is to not be doing tanking the next Razorscale kill and see how other tanks do at the same damage.

By comparison and to show how bad it can be, let's look at the XT-002 encounter. I was offtanking pummelers on this fight. And they're...not dual-wielding and there aren't as many of them. The encounter I'll be checking out is here:



This one didn't do nearly as well. A total of 147 hits, of which only 54 were absorbed - which is a 36.7% absorption rate and an overall block rate of 23.1%. The big problem here was the atrocious avoidance rate. This, more than anything else, should scare you some; avoidance for druids is going to go way down with the focus on stamina in Ulduar being so important, which means that SD is going to have worse and worse overall uptime. What's interesting is that SD procced a total of 197 times in this fight, yet only 54 were absorbed. That's a LOT of overlapping hits, possibly - or a lot of bugged absorptions.

Finally, we get to our horrible tries on Ignis. On this I was tanking Ignis the entire time, so we should see how well SD does against a single target which does massive physical damage slowly.


On this, the uptime was much better. 25 total hits, of which 21 were absorbed is very good and what we'd expect from something like Rawr. Except...that's not all SD absorption. Part of it is Sacred Shields (I received 8). That explains why the average absorb value was so much higher (1740).

Also, SD procced a total of 89 times on this attempt, yet only 21 hits were absorbed. That's shockingly bad.

Finally, the total damage that was mitigated from total absorption was only 7.5%, and that was after armor. When factoring in my armor (and I almost certainly had inspiration/fortitude up) I was looking at around 69% base mitigation. And BoSanc. So the overall physical damage I was taking before armor/bosanc was close to 1.45 million damage. Based on that, SD absorbed a total of only 2.5% total damage. This means practically even if I had 100% total uptime, SD's absorption would have been roughly equivalent to Blessing of Sanctuary's mitigation. If that.

So the long and short of it is that SD really shouldn't factor much into your gearing decisions. While crit rate in theory helps, the bugginess and overlap factors kill this as a really heavy contribution. AP does so little against a single hit that it's better to stack armor; AP and armor are almost 1:1 in value, and armor's much cheaper to itemize on. Avoidance does help, at least. Still, SD doesn't really make PvP gear less viable. It doesn't make polar gear less viable. It doesn't significantly change the game for heavy-hitters. For light hitters it does pretty well, but the chances that you'll want to gear for small hitters is fairly slim.

I'll try and do more testing of SD, but keep in mind that I don't raid often - and when I do, chances are I'll be DPSing as much as tanking.

On a side note, DPS as a cat is quite good, especially with dual specs. It's still as fun as before, and it's great to compete with rogues for top DPS. And as Karthis stated, it's really awesome to see 33k Ferocious bite crits on XT's heart.

[Druid, 3.1] Patch not live, don't freak out

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the patch will not hit on Tuesday. Why? Because Savage Defense is utterly borked.

Right now, the only way it is removed is after the 10-second cooldown dissipates. Until then? It blocks everything.

Yes, Scarlet Monastery is fun this way. Yes, pulling all of Strat while swiping to maintain crits is fun. No, it won't be shipping this way. I'm fairly certain that they didn't make Savage Defense so that it could be the bestest version of block ever.

Though it'd almost be worth it to see the tanking forums explode over it.

Anyway, it's not fixed or ready to go yet, so chances are the patch isn't either. At least another week. I'll have more testing stuff done later this week. :)

[Druid, 3.1] the state of druid testing on the PTR, 03/30

While raiding is out, and while substantial play is out, I can at least do some small amount of PTR testing. So, this week's (well, two week's) testing results

• Savage Defense now procs on Lacerate crits. It also procs on Rip crits. So if for whatever reason you have a rip up on a target then switch to Bear, SD will proc on those too.
• Savage Defense still only works on bear form.
  
• Savage Defense still has weird issues with timing. It can proc .5 seconds after an actual crit, and still appears to be overwriting itself now and then. I need to test this more conclusively.
  
• Swipe's radius has been greatly increased. It feels much more like the old swipe did in terms of radius. And yes, swipefarting still works great. In fact, with a bit of lag you can get really stupid looking chains of people taking damage and following you around.
  
• The T8 2p and 4p bonus is still the same as was listed before. This is still really awesome for cats and still really crap for bears.
• Swipe (cat) does not have a 360 radius.
• Thorns now uses your spellpower/bonuses instead of your target's. This means having a macro that switches you into your spellpower gear to cast thorns first will help some, though it's very annoying. It also makes a moonkin's thorns (assuming they have brambles) exceptionally potent - 420 damage/hit is pretty decent.
• Rake no longer crits with Primal Gore. Balancing for cat DPS, of course.
• The Glyph of Savage Roar is reduced to 3%. Again, cat DPS balance.
• Glyph of Survival Instincts is ass. Just an opinion, but getting 10% more health from SI is really not what bears need. 40% more health for 28 seconds sounds awesome, but how much does that actually help things when you have one healer on you who can't cast most of their spells? That's the hard modes for you, and that's where it fails. (sorry, just an opinion piece.)

Anything else you'd like me to test out?

[Druid] the state of druid testing on the PTR, 03/16

First off - thanks to everyone who replied on the Pimp my UI post with suggestions. I've spent the last three days playing around with things, and I'm almost done tinkering, I think. And it's a huge improvement; things are far less cluttered, it's easier to find stuff and overall the UI is much improved and organized. I should be able to show people the results tomorrow or so. The last step is to get rid of Xperl...and that might be painful.

I figure that there's enough interest in how Savage Defense is doing each week that I'll make a post on my weekly testing of it and indicate what, if anything, has changed or not. If you do have requests for testing specific things, please post! I can't guarantee that I'll be able to test something - I don't have infinite resources or a raid group always handy. But I'll do my best.

This week's testing results:

• Druids do appear to get full rage on a hit on them when Savage Defense absorbs an attack. This is hard to conclusively test, but in all the cases that I tested it, it worked. My methodology was to face away from a mob and swipe it until I got a proc, then stopped attacking. In each case the next attack that hit me (which was almost always all of them, since I couldn't dodge) gave me rage and was absorbed.
  
• Savage Defense does proc off of crits on critters. Poor, poor spiders are going to be even more mauled now.
• Savage Defense still procs off of the new untargeting swipe attacks. Just in case you were wondering.
• Savage Defense does not appear to have anything to do with client-side latency. Both a person with high latency and low latency can trigger up to a .5 second delay from a crit and the SD proc. It appears to be entirely on the server side.
  
• Swipe still triggers 'chance on hit' procs. Mongoose still going off all the time when doing AoE.
• Savage Defense still can absorb multiple attacks with a single proc. Nope, still not fixed. And chances are, won't be.
• Savage Defense still overwrites itself some times and does not produce a shield. This is still the most critical bug I can think of involving SD. And it's still not fixed.
• Swipe has a serious range bug right now. Swipe's range used to be about 10 yards since it could 'chain', similar to the mechanics of avenger's shield. Now, it barely hits anyone in melee range. This is apparently a bug and will be fixed. (ETA: the blue response was this:

  The correct range for the new, 360 Swipe should be 8 yards. It appears to only be 5 in your version of the data.

• Swipe is now insanely good for kiting mobs. Before, if you wanted to kite a bunch of mobs you'd have to run, turn around, swipe, spin back and run some more. Now? Just run at mobs, swipe them as you run past them, and keep swiping as you run. You hit most everyone and they stick to you like glue. Stratholme was never more fun.
  

I think that's it for the testing I've done. I'll make a similar post next Monday. As always, please post what you're interested in seeing for testing. Or really, make suggestions on posts in general. I can't guarantee that I'll post about what you're asking, but I'll definitely consider it.

[Druid] Savage Defense on the PTR

Savage defense has finally made it to the PTR. I got to test it a little bit tonight. Nothing insane, but at least stuff that lets us do some basic theorycrafting about it.

It's learnable at the trainer. It requires no talent points.

It has no internal cooldown that I could find. It would proc on any crit, and it would proc after pretty much every swipe on large enough pulls.

It has a 10-second uptime (or until it's used).

SD procs after you already have an SD will refresh the timer, but will not stack. Or, basically, the new proc overwrites the old one. (This is important for later stuff)


And yeah, the buff icon looks unlike the actual skill icon, and looks like frenzied regeneration.

The graphic and animation is that you stand up and get a little reddish bubble in the middle of you. SD looks a lot like an enrage effect in that respect, and it's very easy to miss the bubble. The bubble is basically entirely contained inside of you. I think. In any case, it's not a big graphic, and you're not running around in a super simian sphere.
It does not proc on DoT effects when they crit.
It does proc on the application of DoTs, however - like the first attack of lacerate.
It does not proc on faerie fire.

It does appear to have similar issues to spell reflect, in that multiple attacks can be absorbed by one shield if they happen close enough to each other:
01:48'05.625 Feltest gains 3 Rage from Natural Reaction.
01:48'05.625 Feltest gains Savage Defense.
01:48'05.625 Feltest's Savage Defense is refreshed.
01:48'05.641 Feltest's Savage Defense is refreshed.
01:48'05.641 Feltest's Savage Defense is refreshed.
01:48'05.641 Feltest gains Reflection of Torment.
01:48'05.641 Feltest's Savage Defense is refreshed.
01:48'05.641 Feltest gains 3 Rage from Natural Reaction.
01:48'05.672 Demon Hunter Supplicant #79 attack was absorbed by Feltest. 01:48'05.672 Demon Hunter Supplicant #59 attack was absorbed by Feltest.

The big one for me: it is heavily affected by latency, as far as I can tell, and still has significant bugs. Not that that's a surprise, but keep them in mind. I'd often see a SD proc happen a second or so after actually critting a mob - even after the LotP proc that would trigger. In my testing above, I also came across parts where the log said I'd gain SD but the shield would not absorb anything. I think this is due to it breaking when facing significant amounts of mobs (I was pulling supplicants at BT as a test). Here's an example:

01:48'02.812 Feltest gains 3 Rage from Natural Reaction.
01:48'02.812 Feltest Swipe hits Demon Hunter Supplicant #56 for 911 Physical. (Critical)
01:48'02.812 Feltest Swipe hits Demon Hunter Supplicant #68 for 911 Physical. (Critical)
01:48'02.828 Feltest Swipe hits Demon Hunter Supplicant #60 for 442 Physical.
01:48'02.844 Feltest Swipe hits Netharel #2 for 443 Physical.
01:48'02.844 Feltest Swipe hits Demon Hunter Supplicant #59 for 911 Physical. (Critical)
01:48'02.844 Feltest Swipe hits Demon Hunter Supplicant #58 for 911 Physical. (Critical)
01:48'02.844 Feltest Swipe hits Demon Hunter Supplicant #69 for 442 Physical.
01:48'02.844 Feltest Swipe hits Demon Hunter Supplicant #66 for 442 Physical.
01:48'02.844 Feltest Swipe hits Demon Hunter Supplicant #70 for 443 Physical.
(at this point, I should receive a SD proc)
01:48'02.875 Demon Hunter Supplicant #70 melee swing hits Feltest for 72 Physical.
(and naturally I don't, and get hit anyway)
01:48'02.922 Demon Hunter Supplicant #79 attack was dodged by Feltest.
01:48'03.172 Demon Hunter Supplicant #66 attack was dodged by Feltest.
01:48'03.187 Netharel #2 attack was dodged by Feltest.
01:48'03.187 Netharel #2 attack was dodged by Feltest.
01:48'03.203 Demon Hunter Supplicant #68 died.
01:48'03.203 Demon Hunter Supplicant #60 died.
01:48'03.203 Demon Hunter Supplicant #58 died.
01:48'03.203 Feltest gains 3 Rage from Natural Reaction.
01:48'03.203 Feltest gains Savage Defense.
01:48'03.219 Feltest's Savage Defense is refreshed.
01:48'03.219 Feltest's Savage Defense is refreshed.
01:48'03.219 Feltest's Savage Defense is refreshed.
(now I gain the SD proc - and it's refreshed multiple times. Presumably because I got a total of 4 crits, and each crit separately can make an SD proc - and they all overwrite each other).
01:48'03.250 Demon Hunter Supplicant #55 attack was dodged by Feltest.
01:48'03.250 Demon Hunter Supplicant #55 attack misses Feltest.
01:48'03.578 Feltest melee swing hits Demon Hunter Supplicant #55 for 825 Physical.
01:48'03.578 Demon Hunter Supplicant #70 attack was dodged by Feltest.
01:48'03.609 Demon Hunter Supplicant #66 gains Evasion.
01:48'03.609 Feltest gains 5 Rage from Primal Fury.
01:48'03.625 Feltest gains 5 Rage from Primal Fury.
01:48'03.625 Feltest gains 5 Rage from Primal Fury.
01:48'03.625 Feltest gains 5 Rage from Primal Fury.
01:48'03.625 Feltest gains 3 Rage from Natural Reaction.
01:48'03.625 Feltest gains 3 Rage from Natural Reaction.
01:48'03.625 Feltest gains 3 Rage from Natural Reaction.
01:48'03.625 Feltest gains 3 Rage from Natural Reaction.
01:48'03.656 Demon Hunter Supplicant #79 melee swing hits Feltest for 81 Physical.
(this is where I should have used the shield. I did not).
01:48'03.656 Demon Hunter Supplicant #59 attack misses Feltest.
01:48'03.656 Demon Hunter Supplicant #69 attack misses Feltest.
01:48'03.875 Demon Hunter Supplicant #80 attack misses Feltest.

More testing is required, of course, but my suspicion is that the multiple 'refreshes' confuses the system and causes you to effectively lose your shield. I also think it's somewhat flawed that the shield happens so long (relatively speaking) after the actual event; it means that if you happen to crit in between the first crit and the shield proc, you will just overwrite the shield instead of having it used on any attacks in the meantime. Is that problematic in practice? Not exactly. But it makes it less effective than it should be.

The tooltip is interesting, in that it implies that the shield's absorption is not tied to your AP at the time you spawned it - only at the time that you get hit. Not sure why this would ever matter, but I plan on testing it at some point.

Things I'll be testing:
whether or not it does absorb 25% of your AP (only tested against weak mobs tonight)
whether a DoT tick or something else like it (reflective damage, for example) will remove the shield
If the absorption is based on AP at the time of proc or at the time of use
further testing to see if I can narrow down when you get a shield or not (the bug above)

Any requests for testing that you'd like to see? I'm limited in time and what gear I have, but I'll try my best to oblige.

[Druid] Savage Defense guesses (with math!)

an example of a savage defense: the 1985 Chicago Bears

So...Savage Defense. Blizzard has got to work on better names. Protector of the Pack, when bears don't have packs? King of the Jungle working on bear form? Hmm.

In the wonderful tradition of 'guessing what blizzard will do without knowing what it's going to be', I'll walk through some of the bad, napkin math that I love so much. We're trying to figure out two things here:

1. What is the likely change to survival of the fittest going to be?
2. When the actual change to survival of the fittest goes forward, will it be a buff or a nerf overall?

The awesome part is that we already have the information we need to figure this stuff out. We know what the actual effect is going to be (a shield based on AP/4) and how often it happens (100% on a crit). So we need to figure out how much damage we'll be taking from a boss, typically, how much damage we currently prevent, how much damage a Savage Defense system would prevent, and based on all of this figure out what our armor would have to be reduced to in order to prevent the same kind of damage + shield that our prior armor dealt with by itself.

Simple, right?

Oh, yeah, we also need some data points with armor, crit, AP and avoidance.

Not a problem :)

First off, we'll take 3 different sets of gear. The first is my current antitank set, which uses a lot of damage-related gear. The second is my generic tanking set that emphasizes avoidance. The third is the OMG max stam set that I don't actually like and can't personally use, since it requires JC.

We'll then make some assumptions about the boss. This boss does 50k damage physically every 1.5 seconds. This isn't quite patchwerk level; we'll get to him in a minute. This is more inline with something like Sartharion.

Shield is the 25% of AP, straight up. Uptime is what we would expect the uptime to be for a fight given an attack every GCD and a maul, based on the crit rate.

Reduction is the armor reduction against an 83 mob. Damage is what damage you take from one hit after armor and protector of the pack are factored in.

Shielded is what damage you would shield on average after 15 seconds, assuming your current crit rate. This assumes a 90% hit rate.

15sec damage is the amount of damage that you would expect to take every 15 seconds, assuming the listed avoidance value is correct. Why 15 seconds? Easy to figure out how many mauls and GCD attacks you'll put in with that.

Damage + shield is simply the 15sec damage + the shield. It represents what would happen if you took the same damage as before, but had a shield in it. In other words, what extra damage you would need to take to make a shield awesome.

new reduction is the % damage reduced from armor using the damage + shield. Or, how much damage you would need to reduce to keep the same amount of mitigation you had previously.

Finally, new armor is what the armor would have to be with a shield to keep basically the same incoming damage. And the ratio is how much of a nerf the armor would be.

	Antitank	normal	stam
armor	35421	38505	36915
AP	7800	6846	6233
crit	0.4	0.35	0.3
avoidance	0.526	0.558	0.46
shield	1950	1711.5	1558.25
uptime	6.4	5.6	4.8
boss speed	1.5	1.5	1.5
boss damage	50000	50000	50000
reduction	68.04402951	69.83133841	68.93557423
damage	14060.62702	13274.2111	13668.34734
shielded	11232	8625.96	6731.64
15secdmg	66647.37206	58672.01306	73809.07563
damage+shield	77879.37206	67297.97306	80540.71563
new reduction	0.626585289	0.653959415	0.661023924
new armor	27913.32529	31437.39584	32439.25976
ratio	0.78804453	0.816449704	0.878755513

Predictably, the antitank set shines here; with the high crit rate and very high AP, the amount of damage that will be prevented over time is quite high. The armor can be reduced more than 20% and you'd still be taking about the same damage. The typical set takes a harder hit, which is no surprise, though it's still close to 20% - and the actual armor reduction is about the same, 7k. The stam set suffers the greatest, with no surprise. The poor AP and crit values make it much weaker for shields, and its lower armor means that it would need to have a small nerf only to stay the same.

Another example of a savage defense. OH YEAH!

Okay, what about Patchwerk offtanking? Patch hits for 80k damage every second. Yikes! Let's see how the shields fare there:

	Antitank	normal	stam
armor	35421	38505	36915
AP	7800	6846	6233
crit	0.4	0.35	0.3
avoidance	0.526	0.558	0.46
shield	1950	1711.5	1558.25
uptime	6.4	5.6	4.8
boss speed	1	1	1
boss damage	80000	80000	80000
reduction	68.04402951	69.83133841	68.93557423
damage	22497.00323	21238.73776	21869.35574
shielded	11232	8625.96	6731.64
15secdmg	159953.6929	140812.8313	177141.7815
damage+shield	171185.6929	149438.7913	183873.4215
new reduction	0.658000709	0.679832563	0.677550818
new armor	32005.45176	35322.18896	34954.52459
ratio	0.903572789	0.917340318	0.946892174
armor loss	3415.548239	3182.811037	1960.475413

Big, big difference. The AT set still is best, but now the nerf must be very small. And on the stam set the nerf is basically wearing armor jewelry vs not. (this, by the way, should illustrate how big a difference the defender's code trinket can make). Lose anything more than 3k armor, and it'll be a nerf against the effectiveness we've had on Patchwerk.

Now, let's look at some nice, round numbers for Survival of the Fittest and make some guesses. Currently it provides 22/44/66% more armor on leather. Blizzard loves round numbers, so let's assume them.

A base ilvl 213 armor set provides 3480 armor from leather and cloth. This multiplies to 29866 armor with the current SotF bonus.

With a 16/33/50% boost, that changes to 26987, or a loss of 2878 armor. Hmm. That's still pretty decent, and with that value we'd still get a very slight buff for Patchwerk.

With a 11/22/33% boost, we'll have 23928 armor, or a loss of 5937 armor. Ouch. Well, if we're going against Patch we'll be hurting a bit more, but we're still pretty good if we went for a balanced tanking set. If we're stamina snobs we'll be hurting a bit more.

With a 10/20/30% change, we'll have only 23389 armor - or a 6476 loss. Really ouch.

Which is more likely? I suspect that it'll be the 11/22/33% change to start with. This would result in about a 20% loss to most people's armor and hurt bears deal with the max physical damage mobs a bit - but that's probably for the best. Patchwerk is exactly the sort of fight that blizzard likes to use as a gating fight, and if one class has a huge advantage over another (as druids really do here) it's not good for designing fights. Reducing armor quite a bit allows for inspiration to help bears for a while instead of butting them up against the armor cap.

So what about another example - multiple mob tanking? There's a lot of wrong information on how this will be a nerf to AoE mitigation, and really...they just don't understand how weak armor is when dealing with multiple small mobs. This is a bit different in the assumptions. In a 15-second period, when dealing with 4 or more mobs you can assume you're going to have a shield up every swipe and every other maul pretty much regardless of crit rate - so 13 shields in 15 seconds. You'll also be attacked a lot more than once every second. Let's take a 5-mob pull. These guys hit for 10k each - a decent value for elite mobs in raids and slightly more than most mobs in heroics. They each swing every 1.5 seconds, so their effective swing time is .3 seconds. And of course, they're lower level, so the armor reduction value is better ( we'll assume level 81). What kind of armor loss are we looking at there?

	Antitank	normal	stam
armor	35421	38505	36915
AP	7800	6846	6233
crit	0.4	0.35	0.3
avoidance	0.526	0.558	0.46
shield	1950	1711.5	1558.25
uptime	13	13	13
boss speed	0.3	0.3	0.3
boss damage	10000	10000	10000
reduction	69.28855069	71.0358823	70.16060059
damage	2702.607539	2548.842358	2625.867148
shielded	25350	22249.5	20257.25
15secdmg	64051.79867	56329.41611	70898.413
damage+shield	89401.79867	78578.91611	91155.663
new reduction	0.571337751	0.595953743	0.61634822
new armor	20925.57184	23156.93709	25222.52612
ratio	0.590767393	0.601400782	0.683259545
armor loss	14495.42816	15348.06291	11692.47388

That's right - in order to do the same thing with a shield that you do currently on lower level mobs, if you're in the antitank gear, you'd need to be hit with a 14.5k armor nerfstick. That's how good those shields are against multiple targets. Now, 4 or 5 mobs is the sweet spot. What about 10? That makes the effective swing rate .15. That can't be that good, can it? I mean, shields have to give out some time, and you'll be taking a lot of unblocked hits...

	Antitank	normal	stam
armor	35421	38505	36915
AP	7800	6846	6233
crit	0.4	0.35	0.3
avoidance	0.526	0.558	0.46
shield	1950	1711.5	1558.25
uptime	13	13	13
boss speed	0.15	0.15	0.15
boss damage	10000	10000	10000
reduction	69.28855069	71.0358823	70.16060059
damage	2702.607539	2548.842358	2625.867148
shielded	25350	22249.5	20257.25
15secdmg	128103.5973	112658.8322	141796.826
damage+shield	153453.5973	134908.3322	162054.076
new reduction	0.632111629	0.653156283	0.658977113
new armor	26975.98879	29565.34351	30337.96575
ratio	0.761581796	0.767831282	0.821833015
armor loss	8445.011211	8939.656489	6577.034253

Nope. Armor just isn't that good compared to a static reduction against multiple mobs. In case you were ever told that you were harder to heal in a heroic compared to a warrior or paladin, here's why: block is really, really strong against multiple targets that hit softly.

Fred Savage wants you to hit him softly.

So unless the armor nerf to SotF is huge, the benefit for mitigation against a lot of targets is going to be really good and an overall buff.

As I've said before, I was all for this change and seeing it makes me pretty excited. Especially for the antitank set; the antitank set basically transformed from a max damage offtank set that was a bit squishy to a really great set against multiple targets and quite decent against bigger mobs. I love that AP and crit will actually matter, and that the ilvl of gear may matter a bit less. I also love the notion that druids can value different sets for different purposes. And if it works against magical damage too? Oh, that's 6 kinds of awesome.

The only thing I'd really like is for this ability to be under user control. My wife doesn't like the randomness of the mitigation, and she's got a point; there's no way to predict whether you'll have a good string of crits or not. If instead savage defense gave you a shield charge when you got a crit, which you could use to put up an absorption shield at a later time at your command (off the GCD, of course), this would give the same overall functionality but allow druids to be less squishy when they wanted to be. It would also give some interactivity back to the bear, which would be stellar. It could be macroed to always be used if you didn't care, or you could use it when it really mattered for that extra oomph. But that would be significantly harder to code. :)