[Offtopic]Pimp My UI

A reader asked a while back if I'd share my UI. This was...well, it was akin to bringing home a date when I used to live in a friend's storage closet. It was a 8x8 room with no heat, no light, and right next to the Bathroom of Horror.

The UI...not so great.

But hey, I'll show it and then ask folks for input.

From the top of the screen to the bottom:

Omen is in the upper left.
Mappy is used for the square map, and is in the upper right.
Decursive and Ora2 are the two things below Omen.
DBM generates the cooldowns at the top of the HUD.
IceHUD is what I use for my HUD; it's nice for showing combo points and energy in an easy way.
SCT is used to generate the text that wraps around my HUD. And as you can see in this shot, it would be nice to move the crit values away as well since I don't often care that I just got a big critical heal.
QBar is floating just above my raid frames. It's a mod that automatically adds quest items to a button for easy use. And it should move somewhere else.
Carbonite is hiding behind Recount, and is a great quest addon.
I use CT_Viewport for the view space mod that creates the black space at the bottom. This is oddly one of my most essential mods at this point. Having more actual screen space is critical.
Bartender is used for the bars.
XPerl is my raid and unit frame system. I have my character in the center, and my target and target-of-target close to the center. (and the debuffs are out of control, I know).
I use quartz to track debuffs that I use on the boss. I probably should use tellmewhen for this, but I didn't like how it tracked infected wounds.
Prat is the chat addon that displays things a bit more nicely.

In addition to all of that, I use CameraDistanceMaxFactor 5 to be zoomed WAAAAY out. I also use TellMeWhen to track my stuff when I'm in cat; this is clearly not here.

For the most part the UI is pretty functional. The raidframes take up all the space on the left side normally in a full raid; this was from my first Sarth3D 10 man kill, so there's only 10. The center of the screen displays a lot of information but is mostly uncluttered to actually see things. Only the corners are particularly obscured by information. Most of the screen is otherwise clear.

Things I absolutely hate, now that I'm looking at it while not playing:

1. Not having a widescreen monitor. Seriously, I fail. It's a great monitor that I love, but a widescreen would be awesome.
2. The empty space for the raid frames. I don't often use my raidframes anyway (mostly for brez/innervate and thorn use), and having that much wasted space is bugging me.
3. The Omen/Recount space is large and ugly, and not well integrated into the whole thing.
4. The debuffs on xperl are going nuts. I want to display important ones (like stacks on 4h) but this is ridiculous. And the debuffs on the boss are insane and spilling into the buttons.
5. The quartz timers aren't useful. TellMeWhen (like Marino pointed out) would likely be better and more intuitive. And they're just...kinda sitting out there.
6. The chat window is huge. I don't need to be able to read every string on one line.

So with those as my goals - what are y'alls suggestions? What can I look into to fix? Here are some constraints: I almost certainly am not going to switch out of xperl or bartender. Everything else is fair game.

Thanks!

[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.

[Offtopic]Picture meme thingy

I got tagged a while back by a couple folks for this meme, but sadly mine isn't all that interesting - that's basically because I got a new computer and a new install, so my screenshot folder isn't super hawt right now.


This was a screenshot I took after our first Felmyst kill. We had downed Brutallus just before the 3.0.2 patch hit, but sadly never got a chance to tackle Felmyst before the patch. So he was nerfed, and even then he was fairly difficult for us - at least the first week. The second week I think we 3-shotted him - and that apparently was because I'm the only person in my guild who watched the video on how to identify which side the breaths come on. They had tried a couple times, and then I log in and people in vent actually say "Felhoof, THANK GOD."

That was pretty amusing.

We went on to kill the rest of Sunwell post-nerf. The one I feel worst about missing was M'uru. M'uru was supposedly the hardest fight that Blizzard has ever done at least in terms of tuning, and I was very curious to see how our guild would handle it. It was also one of the places where a druid tank had a huge advantage; being able to hit max armor and 80% avoidance on the door adds meant the healing budget was much less, and being able to DPS in cat on phase 2 meant you may make the soft enrage. M'uru post-patch, by comparison, was a huge joke. With 30% less HP on everything and huge amounts of extra DPS via the new talent trees, there was no pressure at all, and the mechanics of the fight itself aren't that special if there's no pressure to perform. The ledge boss from Twins was harder.

Sorry that wasn't more interesting. Fortunately I have a couple of more interesting pics. For instance: what happens when you use baby spice on a motorcycle and a gigantic feast on a tauren?



Wee! I haz a minibike.

Okay, that's easy. But what about a flaming woman driving a minibike with a gigantic frog in the sidecar? Now that's impressive.



I'll start working on those UI posts here soon. :)

In terms of tagging, I nominate Gray Matter, Jacemora, Lazy Bear Musings and Flyv to find us the 6th screenshot in their screenshot folder and make up amusing shit about it.

[Druid] Balance ain't just for laser chickens

First off - I'm now one of ten horde characters on my realm with the title "Of the Nightfall". It's still a very easy fight for a Sarth tank, but having the FR set and good survivability after things go nuts made it easier. We did it with 2 1/2 healers (an elemental shaman started healing during the Vesperon phase) and all casters. And basically, the first time we killed Shadron with everyone alive it was a win. All credit goes to the other healers, tanks and DPS on the fight. I had the easy job, and I appreciate being carried. :)

Second - the change to improved mark of the wild does appear to give you and you only 2% more stats. So...only about an 8% nerf to health and a gain of 2% more agility. Yay?

I still think that druids aren't going to stop being tanks any time soon. Assuming that the changes on the PTR go live (10% stamina loss, 6k armor loss), the loss of stamina and the loss of armor are both survivable hits for tanking viability. That said, I also don't think that druids are going to be reasonably chosen for progression content where a single tank matters heavily unless there is some stupid gimmick that favors having 10-15k more health than another tanking class. With the current changes on the PTR, simply put, right now druids are outclassed by other tanking classes in every single category save one - health. And health is not as useful for progression as a lot of other factors, particularly when encounters are balanced around the lowest health values.

Of course, it's very early in the PTR and a lot can and will change by the time 3.1 is released, so relax a bit.

But this isn't about that. This is about how to fix druids in the long term. These are a couple of posts I made on the official tanking forums, and I figure that they should more likely be in a blog than there. Also, I wanted people's input on them; I may be missing a lot of ideas here too. Also note that as Greenkappa pointed out, none of these big changes can be done for all of WotLK. There's no way to radically revamp feral tanking right now. That'll have to wait for the next expansion. So this is more of a post-mortem along with some ideas on where things may have to go.

There's a few problems with bears that aren't easily solved. The first and probably the biggest is itemization. In BC bears had very specific sets of gear that were not easily replaced. This meant that if you didn't get lucky with one drop, you would be significantly disadvantaged. It also meant raids were not the primary source of gear upgrades; heroics were via badges. It meant that druid power levels could be balanced reasonably via itemization (since they only had one very flawed set) but that they had very bad feelings about said itemization. And even then, the power of gems, enchants, and using jewelry that was designed for other classes meant that druids scaled too well compared to other tanks. It also had the weird side effect of making PvP gear awesome because of specific requirements to uncrittability that didn't care about things like block or parry; it was too easy to use resilience over defense simply because a loss of defense wasn't expensive enough.

Then we get to WotLK, and we have a totally different problem. Itemization is easy because so much of the itemization 'needs' gets covered with talents. Innate dodge, uncrittability and no real stat requirements. This (as Guaritor has pointed out) leads to really weird scaling issues, where a druid can have a range of 20,000 HP difference between one and another, or 20% more avoidance than another. Furthermore, because there is no extra armor gained from gear, we have the weird situation where anything really can be used without penalty. Spellpower leather? It's got stamina and crit and as much armor as the next piece does. DPS jewelry? Sure, it's got agi and stam on it. This has another side effect of allowing druids to tank reasonably well while wearing nothing but DPS gear, a side effect that almost guarantees druids will be doing DPS instead of tanking on any encounter where tanks are interchangeable and not as required (especially if you need to tank only part of the time in a fight).

No other class has this kind of variability in gearing with the same tier of gear available to them.

Of the two situations, one was balanced via poor itemization, one was simply not balanced. Both stem from the same issue: bears scale too well around too few stats. In BC it was armor and avoidance stats. In WotLK it is stamina and to a lesser extent agility.

Simply tweaking things here and there isn't going to solve the issue that druids can get 20k differences in health; that number is only going to increase with the advent of epic gems and better gear. Requiring druids to have some level of some stat found on DPS gear might help some, but only for a bit; once it becomes trivial to meet that level via improving ilvl gear, you'll run into silly scaling again.

So what are the problems that druids actually need to solve?
Bears need to be uncrittable.
Bears need to have a way to use leather melee DPS gear as tanking gear or have their own set of gear that is balanced for them. If they use melee DPS gear, it means more options but more balancing headaches. If they use tanking leather, it means fewer options, harder gearing choices and potentially wasted gear drops.
Bears need a way to innately balance tanking jewelry that is balanced around plate wearers.
Bears need a way to innately balance gems and enchants that are balanced around plate wearers.
Bears need to make up the stamina loss on leather DPS compared to plate wearers.
Bears need to make up the armor loss on leather DPS gear compared to plate wearers.
Bears need a mechanic to balance a lack of a shield.
Bears need to scale with this gear in such a way that they cannot stack one stat over all others.
Bear talent specs need to distinguish themselves from cat talent specs in such a way that one says 'I'm a bear' - which is difficult since feral talents are all in the same tree.

These are hard problems to solve. No other class in the game remotely has these kinds of issues with balance. The closest analogy is the holy paladin, who has their own loot table and shares jewelry that is close enough to itemization that they want that it doesn't matter. And honestly, at this point that might be cleaner. If you assume that druids are going to use tanking jewelry, gems and enchants AND they can get their own gear sets, you can balance most of that easily as well as make requirements on that gear such that they can't drop it easily. For example, the Polar set wouldn't have been an issue in TBC because it had no extra armor whatsoever.

Making agility count even more doesn't fix all the issues. It fixes the polar set - perhaps - but druids already get tons and tons of agility all over the place. In my polar set I still have about 500 agility. If we made it analogous to defense rating for plate wearers, that's only 189 agility to go. That's not that hard at all. And it causes another problem; reliance on raid buffs. Horn of winter would provide 150 of that agility, for instance - does that make much sense?

If you did do this, you'd have to make tanking leather. Otherwise, it doesn't do enough to make DPS leather valuable for druids, and then we get into the same situation as before where bears go for PvP gear and random crap things like the Polar set just because they can.

The core problem I believe is still that druids can choose to use things like the Polar set and that they have too high a scaling factor with stamina. The recent HotW nerf does nothing to fix either of these things especially.

I still think that tanking leather is likely the way to go here. Remove the uncrittable benefit from SotF and bring back tanking leather all over the place with defense on it. Make defense a desirable stat by converting parry to miss and dodge, and make defense the best avoidance stat for bears over agility so that they actually want the defense on the gear they get. Make 4 sets of tier gear, allow a lot of craftable gear and some kind of turnin tokens for rogue gear to turn it into feral tanking gear. Have cats and rogues itemized the same and have bears need armor and defense on their leather to remain competitive. Balance their stamina multipliers around the idea that bears will be going for tanking jewelry and values. Make SD more valuable and make strength a more desirable stat for bears. Give lots of early craftable gear choices and quest drops.

I don't like this idea so much because it does eat up more item slots on tables and may result in wasted gear, but that's probably the easiest way to balance the spec.

Barring that... I don't know. If you don't do it that way, you need to make dps gear so valuable for bears and so needed for bears that they won't think of taking anything else. Possibly taking the crit chance and turning it into anti-crit? (and not agility - just crit rating). But that feels kludgy. Making AP be armor or stamina, haste into dodge...all of these things have been mentioned, but unless druids are forced to use dps leather over things like the polar set they simply won't be balanceable.

And all of this can't be done any time soon. The best suggestion I've seen so far involves having diminishing returns on health gains from stamina, giving druids more cooldown options to bring them in line with recent warrior buffs and baseline DKs, and nerfing their current health and armor to what they are on the PTR. That's probably reasonable, though I'd recommend keeping the current multiplier on HotW but having DR on health. That should solve the problem significantly without hurting more balanced bears. Barring that, possibly just nerfing the Polar set would help tremendously. Or making it so that only stamina on gear is multiplied so heavily by various buffs and stats and dire bear form, similar to how armor works now.

It is frustrating though, in that a lot of these issues were brought up by myself and others during the beta but nothing really was done.

[Druid] Stamina nerf on PTR

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Druid, 3.1] It's not even my birthday (3.1)

First off, I want to say congratulations and a fond farewell to Phae at Resto4Life. Her blog has been a pinnacle of the druid community for a long time - both as a healer and as someone who has been critical in making others aware of more blogs in the world. Her posts were always well-written, entertaining, and hugely useful. I'll miss ya but I'm very happy that you're leaving on such good news. :)

Sorry I've not been blogging as much recently. Part of it is my work schedule is limiting the time I have to write. Part is that...there really hasn't been much inspiration. I've gotten a couple emails that I'd like to write about - like my terribad UI and preliminary weightings and rankings of gear with SD - but it'll be in the future. I'll also try and respond to the comments a bit more.

As you've heard by now the patch notes and PTR are now available for 3.1 and Ulduar. Karthis has started to do some good analysis of what this is going to mean for folks, and I'm going to try and not step on his toes too much. Instead, I want to point out some basic things that are...well, more relevant to some of the things I brought up, like the antitank strategy. '

First off, the change to Savage Roar. This is going to be a buff - 30% more physical damage beats 40% more AP given how druids scale with AP. A corrolary is that strength is no longer going to be the best stat to stack - it's going to be agility. Which...is exactly the gearing strategy used in the antitank set. Hmm. Oh, blizzard, you shouldn't have! That makes the antitank strategy go from being slightly lower DPS than normal to being actually close to ideal.

And I didn't even have to change one gem. Aww, thanks, blizzard!

Second, the addition of Primal Gore. The crits from bleeds are currently only 150% of damage, not 200% like melee crits, but even so it's a big buff to cat damage. And if they can crit...that makes agility even more useful for overall damage, both for cat form and for bear form. Which...is exactly what the antitank set emphasizes. Aww, thanks Blizzard - that's so sweet. That's like another crit every 3 seconds for SD, making it even better (if, hopefully, it actually procs SD; not sure if it will yet since SD doesn't actually work right now).

Third, the change to improved Mark of the Wild - 2% more stats for 2 talent points. Some people liked furor, but I've gone with iMotW for a while now since Furor really isn't that much of a requirement. And now I get 2% more stats for my trouble without respeccing? Oh, blizzard, you're too nice!

And then there's a glyph for Savage Roar that just says 'get 6% more DPS, period'? Oh, Blizzard. I don't even have to theorycraft that to show how awesome it is. Really sweet of you.

Really, all they need to do is make the DPS gear even better for tanking than it is already, and I'll start thinking that Blizzard is trying to woo me. Though if they were, they could've had that stupid Peddlefeet drop.

[Druid] Armor as sacred cow?

I've been reading and posting on the main tanking forums more, especially now that there's news of a new mechanic in 3.1. There's quite a few good posters and good players there, and it's nice to be able to talk with other tanks in a sort of free flow of information that isn't quite so moderated as EJ.

At the same time, there are a ton of druids that are irrationally afraid of what's in store. And one of the things I keep seeing is this basic idea:

"Don't nerf our armor, you've already nerfed our armor twice already!"
or
"Predictable mitigation is ALWAYS better than RNG mitigation or avoidance!"

I don't want to talk about the incorrectness of the latter; the math has been demonstrated, and it's clear from simple examples that this is going to depend on a lot of things. What struck me as odd is how the identity of the druid tank really seemed to be wedded to having high armor. It didn't matter that things like crushing blows were removed or that bears were given protector of the pack. It doesn't matter that right now, druids are the least spiky they've ever been in the history of WoW (better magic mitigation, usable barkskin in forms, no crushes, PotP, and use of consumables in forms all attribute to this).

All that seemed to matter is that they have huge armor.

I guess I can see that; armor was a huge deal in TBC after all, though avoidance became a lot more important when we could stack 80% of it. But I never really thought of it as my identity. Though to be fair I don't tend to think of myself as a druid or a bear anyway; that's just the toon I play on WoW. But when I think about druids and druid tanking, the thing that I think of first is something I've mentioned before.

Versatility.

To me, playing a feral meant being able to tank in some places and DPS in others. It meant being able to pull using ranged aoe spells and build extra aggro via healing myself. It wasn't in the bosses that I could tank or fights I was more advantaged on, and it certainly wasn't about my gear or the specific values on that gear. Honestly, it's tough for me to imagine any druid identifying with much in the way of gear since itemization was so ass for such a long time; should you identify with the Pillar of Lol? How about that awesome Badge of Tenacity?

No, to me it was about experimentation. About thinking about approaching things differently, figuring out ways to work around disadvantages (like pvp gear or intervenes on shears), to take certain problems (not using potions in bear) and making them advantages (getting 40% more health with a pot drinking macro). For me, that's basically morphed into figuring out what gear and spec I can use to be a great tank and a good DPS at the same time, or how I can tank Sarth without using anyone else's cooldowns.

Nothing intrinsic to feral playing has really changed thematically. Only the specific problems to be solved have. That's a good thing too; I like solving new problems. I like having to figure out new ways to do gear and specs and encounters. That's where I get a lot of pleasure from WoW.

I think that if they made ferals ridiculously rigid - akin to prot/other specs in the other tanking classes - that would make me seriously consider another class. If they made it so that the stats that bears use for tanking and DPSing were hugely different (which is close to what TBC was like) and the spec was hugely different - so much that you could not do decent DPS as a cat while bear-specced - would make me want to switch.

I'm curious though - what do you all think about this? Is being the high-armor, big physical hit tank what being a feral means to you? If you lost all your extra armor and had exactly the same armor that you do in cat but nothing else changed, would that bother you? If you were forced to spec into cat or bear so that you really couldn't do much in the way of damage when bear-specced, would you care?

What's your concept of a feral druid? And what would make you not want to play a feral any more? What's your sacred cow?