[Druid, 3.1] the state of druid testing on the PTR, 04/13

Not a lot of news to report, especially since it looks like the patch will be live tomorrow.

• Savage Defense was imba for a very short time and is now back to normal. The 100% always on shield was turned off, and it's back to the behavior that it's had for most of the PTR. Which means...
• SD still overwrites itself and absorbs nothing sometimes.
• SD still can absorb multiple attacks if they happen close to each other.
• SD still has a really stupid enrage animation.
• Swipe still has a good range and no target requirement
• ...

Basically, take what I said back on 3/30 and redo it. Nothing's really changed. Okay, well, Survival Instincts went to a 3-minute cooldown (and yes, Karthis, the glyph heals for 15% more) but that's it.

I'm a bit disappointed that Savage Defense is making it to live with all these mechanical failures. But it's nothing I can do about it now.

[Druid, 3.1] 5 reasons that ferals make the best offtank in 3.1

Karthis recently posted on the tanking requirements that will be found in Ulduar. This is pretty accurate and what I've found to be true, though it doesn't mention hard modes; they'll require slightly different requirements. What this doesn't say is who is best for what role, and where a feral druid fits in best. I'll get to that in a bit, but I need to cover some history.

Prior to 3.1, druids were the optimal offtank. This was because of a variety of reasons, but most notably because of two primary factors:
1. Their gear could be used for both DPS and tanking in some reasonable fashion
2. Their spec could be tailored to do both good tanking and good DPS at the same time without a respec

This meant that a feral could reasonably be expected to DPS and tank and know both roles well. This was a continuation of the BC model, and in fact actually improved on it due to how they nerfed armor in 3.0.8. Now you could not only just change gear and DPS or tank, you didn't have to change gear! You could just tank in whatever and be fine.

In 3.1, this changes a bit with the advent of dual specs. It's expected that all tanking classes will have at least one 'useful' other spec in my guild so that they can switch if necessary and not be a total gimp for an encounter while still having a chance at drops. That's the real key; if they didn't need anything from that boss, they'd simply sit out in favor of a better DPSer. I'll get to why this is in a second.

This entirely removes factor 2 from the equation above. If any warrior can spec to DPS before a fight, being able to tank and DPS in the same spec is functionally irrelevant. It might be convenient, and it might allow things like a feral's secondary spec to be resto - but it's not affecting anything in a raid, exactly.

Here's the thing though, and what I fully expect to get a lot of flak for: ferals are still going to be the best offtank. Here's the list why:

1. Any fight that has a tank requirement for only part of the fight. A feral will have significant advantages over other tanks. Even in full tanking gear and a full tanking spec a feral druid does significantly more damage than any other tank. Not as much as a full cat spec and good cat gear, but we're talking about a 1k difference in DPS between a feral and a prot warrior. This is slightly not as good as it was in 3.0.8 due to the higher stamina requirements on gear/enchants/trinkets, but at the same time a lot of dps and tanking gear is shared. It helps that the T8.25 gear is superior for bears, stat wise, but also has superior set bonuses for cats too - that's another set of gear that is almost certainly going to be shared.
   
   So fights like Thaddius or Malygos where a second tank is needed only some of the time? Druids win, hands down. That being said, there aren't that many opportunities for this sort of min-maxxing in Ulduar. Iron council could use the third tank to swap to dps. XT could use an offtank picking up adds on the phase change. And...that's about it, at least so far as we know. Not exactly stunning, right?
   
   
2. Ferals will have superior DPS gear over other tanks. Now, this might not be true going into Ulduar. Guilds which have had everything on farm for months may have all of their tanks totally outfitted in offspec DPS gear to the point where they're as well-geared as the next DPSer. I don't believe this will be true (betrayer of humanity doesn't drop nearly enough for us, for example), but even if it is, it won't matter. Because as soon as a feral gets their first tier drop, they're better geared for both tanking AND dps than any other tank. Any other tank must get two sets of tier gear, a separate weapon (or weapons), trinkets and sets of jewelry, etc. A feral can continue to double dip and get close to or best in slot for many slots and gem/enchant them optimally for either role. As it stands right now a druid can (for example) get T8.25 gloves and chest and gem/enchant them optimally for both bear and cat in one go. The best DPS trinket is also the best tanking trinket (or one of them at least). Favor of the Dragon Queen is still one of the best tanking necks. This isn't as true now as it was before due to the higher requirement of gemming/enchanting/gearing for stamina that the 3.1 HotW nerf does, but a smart bear will try and maximize as many shared pieces as possible and then get two sets of gear when the gems/enchants differ significantly to offer a clear advantage (the head and legs are two traditional options, and others can be depending on profession).
   
   Any other tank does not remotely have this flexibility. Even a death knight using DPS 2-handers as their weapon still must enchant for tanking or DPS. Because of the stamina and defense requirements for plate gear, virtually no shared gear exists for plate wearers. The long and short of it is that even if a feral's DPS gear is on par with a tank's DPS gear now, they'll quickly have an advantage when getting more gear in Ulduar. A good raid leader will maximize this advantage. Furthermore, even if the gear can't be shared most of the gear is still DPS-centric. A helm enchanted with Stalwart Protector and gemmed with Austere isn't as good as a DPS-centric helm, but it's still a leather helm with tons of agility and AP. Plate tanks have virtually nothing that can double in this way. Thus, it will take significantly longer for the plate wearers to get comparable DPS gear to the ferals - and by the time they do, chances are the encounters will be on farm.
   
   
3. Ferals will tend to have more experience DPSing. This one I admit is very subjective, but I think it's realistic. The amount of people that roll ferals and know nothing about DPS is I think quite small. The ferals I've encountered have known quite a bit about both how to tank and how to DPS. BC ferals had a lot of experience DPSing as a feral while being expected to offtank here and there, if not tanking the whole way. That was the BC way: if you as a feral weren't willing to tank and DPS, you weren't really pulling your weight.
   
   Plate tanks are not necessarily so inclined. Some will have been DPSers for a while at some point, or even prefer it. Others will have rolled that warrior to tank first and foremost, and have no interest or inclination to DPS. Others will have simply never dabbled in it at all; as an example, one of our tanks went from a prot paladin to ret for the first time on Brutallus.
   
   I realize that this is entirely anecdotal, and there exist no hard numbers to compute that show how many ferals prefer only doing bear, only doing cat, or doing both in some fashion. I still suspect that this is so. I'm curious what others out there think.
   
   
4. No other tank can tank as well in DPS gear if you really need to. This is more of the 'hero' thing that you see now and then. Because of Survival of the Fittest and how armor works, and even with the HotW nerf, ferals will still be able to switch to bear and tank adequately in some situations while wearing DPS gear. They won't have as high of stamina as another tank, but they'll have far higher stamina than a DPS of another class will. They won't take crits either, and their avoidance and threat numbers should be significantly higher. Whereas if you ask a ret paladin to tank in a pinch, they'll have significantly less armor, avoidance, and huge gulfs in stamina as well as not being able to avoid taking critical hits.
5. Innervate and battle res are huge raid buffs that are impractical often when tanking 100% of the time. This speaks to the scenario where you have two or more tanks and you're trying to figure out which to have swap spec. Do you have the prot paladin go ret (so you have two ret) or do you have the feral go cat? All the other raidwide buffs can be covered by another feral or other classes entirely, but single abilities are not. Another battle res and innervate for a progression encounter can mean the difference between a wipe and a win. At the same time, there are plenty of fights where if you are tanking, you can simply not reasonably do this. Ulduar has these in spades: Ignis, Vezax, Hodir practically, Freya, Auriyaya - none of these fights have significant breaks where you could reasonably expect to res someone if you're in the middle of tanking. Other fights like XT or Iron Council have breaks where you can, but you might not be able to when you need to.
   
   Does any other tank bring this kind of class utility? Not particularly. The closest might be a paladin, but most of that utility is in raid buffs which they would bring anyway while tanking.
   

Now, what this does not mean is that I am saying that ferals are only good for offtanking in Ulduar. Make sure you understand that. For the record I don't think ferals are significantly disadvantaged in fights in Ulduar as they stand and as we know about them - though I also think that other tanks bring significant advantages to tanking encounters that druids really don't. The only fight where a feral may make it easier is on normal-mode Hodir, where they can wear FR gear and still tank significantly. Pretty much everything else favors another tank, primarily because of cooldowns and avoidance. Still, there's nothing that says a feral can't tank anything in there, so if that's what your raid feels is best for whatever reason (skill, gear, experience, social reasons) that should be fine.

I personally am a bit saddened by this, as I don't like the notion that because other tanks can't do DPS that ferals are basically forced to. This was the model for BT, and it wasn't fun at all. Some solutions I've seen have been to enforce specific gearing requirements for tanking similar to how they were in BC (with armor and defense/resilience) and allowing innervate/brez in bear form with a talent (but only in bear, so cats wouldn't want it). And personally it doesn't really matter a ton; my raiding time is much constrained for the future, and I'll likely be doing it only part-time if that (and often, raiding on my wife's toon, a holy priest). Still, I'd like to see more fights advantage druids or at least level the playing field a bit, and I'd like to see other tanks get more incentive to do DPS (or possibly disincentivize druids a bit).

[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. :)

[General] ToggleOnNextStrike (Maul/HS)

In an earlier post I mentioned that Sarf of Elitist Jerks was working on an addon that can automatically toggle your macros with maul (or heroic strike, or rune strike).

Well, here it is.

It isn't the most user friendly thing in the world, so I'll talk through it a bit.

The trigger is /tons. What you'll want to do is have a macro for each attack you want. Unlike before, you can have your macro be fairly in-depth and big, too - so #showtooltip, modifier tags, whatever all work here.

To add them to be toggled, do /tons addmacro {macroname}, where {macroname} is the name of the macro you'd like to toggle. Do this for each one.

To add maul or remove maul from those, simply do /tons toggle.

Now, here's the cool thing about this - it works for all the tanking classes. It works for DKs and druids and warriors, and will add the appropriate ability depending on the class you are.

It's fairly new, and I'm sure isn't quite tweaked out - but it does a lot of nice things that I like. Check it out if you're tired of spamming your maul button. One thing I'll try and add is the ability to customize what is toggled so that instead of adding/removing maul, it adds a [modifier:shift] maul or [nomodifier] maul depending, so you can use it in a pinch.

[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?

[Offtopic] Phat lewts

I got the best drop of all on Friday, March 20th.

Alaric James was born. He was 7 lbs, 20" and perfectly healthy, as is his mom. Everyone's doing great.

So if I don't blog much or answer questions all that quickly - you'll know why. I won't be raiding a whole lot in the upcoming months either, so...this is sort of a hiatus for the blog. I'll occasionally make the random mathematical post and I'll try and do the Ulduar gear list. No promises though.
Thanks to all for your well-wishes. :)

[Druid, 3.1] PTR fun - idol & T8!

I'm going to go with mini posts, apparently. They're easier to digest. :)

The T8 gear is out on the PTR. For both 10 man and 25 man. There's also a new idol of terror that drops from General Vezax (the 3rd to last boss in Ulduar) in 25-man only:

Druid T8 Feral Relic -- Your Mangle ability has a chance to grant 153 agility for 12 sec.

That's just a direct upgrade from Idol of Terror, and that's awesome...but it's a drop? And only from 25 man? Ugh. Maybe it'll be BoE or something. Yeah, right.

Onto the T8. The set bonuses are at best very lackluster for tanking. Clearcasting procs on bleeds are not particularly important for bears given bear rage generation normally. And 8 seconds of extra time on a 5-minute cooldown is not particularly interesting either, especially given how you would normally use 30% extra health. 30% extra health for 28 seconds sounds like a lot - but when do you actually use it for that whole length of time? It's very disappointing.

What isn't disappointing is the actual overall values of the T8 gear compared to the T7. In what's going to be screamed about for a bit, the T8 bonus is best for cats but the gear itself is likely much better for bears overall because of stat allocation. Here's the comparison between the full T7 and full T8:

Agi: +93
Stam: +64
Armor:+50
AP: -22
crit: +11
hit: +49
haste: +46
armor pen: +15
Expertise: -34

Yeah, 93 extra agi for the whole set, not counting socket bonuses (which in two cases are on red sockets and are a total of +14 agi too). That's a big gain in overall value. AP has been itemized so much less that it's actually worse than T7. Small amounts of crit and armor pen. A bit more haste than I'd like. And less expertise, which is probably good given how easy it is to get expertise.

Just great stats for bears.

For cats? Not so much. The expertise loss is welcome, but not much crit doesn't help. Hit is nice to see, and more agi over stam is good - but my suspicion is that it'll be easier to get those non-set pieces for cats and get better stats.

If of course the set bonuses could be ignored, which they really can't. Sigh.

What's interesting is that the new T8.10 set follows this pattern almost more (compared to T7.25)
agi: 58
stam: 25
armor: 24
AP: -68
crit: -9
hit: 45
haste: 39
armor pen: 8
expertise: -38

Again, a huge bump in Agi compared to all other stats, way less AP, less expertise, less crit, and a good chunk of hit. The T8.10 chest is going to be quite good just for that big hit bonus, as will the T8.25 chest.

What's really interesting to me is comparing T8.10 to T8.25:

agi: 35
stam: 39
armor: 26
AP: 46
crit: 20
hit:4
haste:7
armor pen: 7
expertise:4

That's right - the item budget is almost entirely devoted to stat boosts. That's one reason that the T8.25 is going to be so good for bears from a gear perspective - the stats on them are insane.

As always, I'll do a more exhaustive analysis of what to look for when we get better ideas of loot tables and whatnot.