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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Again, gear lists at the end.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Again, comparing to best in slot:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gear lists:

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

[Druid] Nerfing stamina for bears - the right way

I'm back to hiding behind spreadsheets!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just from fort.

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

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

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

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

Which requires a nerf - until the next time.

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

What would that mean?

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

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

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

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

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

3191 stamina.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[General] 10-mans observations

I've been doing a lot more 10-mans as my schedule's been a bit more free this summer. Up until last week I'd never done all of Ulduar on Felhoof. I had two experiences that were about as wildly varied as could be.

The first was me getting in a bit late, in a group that needed a second tank. I thought it would be okay, and it looked like a solid group - but a number of the people in it decided to leave early, go AFK, or otherwise only stick around for gear on the boss they wanted and then leave. They've since been kicked from the guild, and good riddance. But these all conflated to a very difficult time of it - and it didn't help that the other group that was going at the same time was knocking out hard mode achievements left and right. We finished up without doing Yogg in two whole days, and only managed one hardmode achievement (XT).

It was honestly one of the most demoralizing experiences I had ever had playing. Not just wiping over and over to things we've done before simply because people were leaving and we were scrambling to find people, or people simply couldn't perform at the level we recruited them at - but knowing that it was doable by other people that I raid with...sigh.

The next week I got to go in on the 'hard mode' group's run because they needed a second well-geared tank for Algalon tries as well as finishing up their Glory of the Raider achievement; they had Vezax and Yogg hard mode to go. And sure enough, it was a breeze. One-shot virtually every hard mode in there that we tried (we didn't do Firefighter). We one-shot Freya+3 and did it so fast we got Conspeedatory. The only trouble we had was doing a side achievement on Thorim, and once we stopped trying for that we breezed through things too. We got to Vezax and two-shot him on hard, then got to Yogg and one-shot him on everyone's first try at that hard mode. We went back and did Ignis and Razorscale's achievements, and at the end of the night 7 people had their Rusted Protodrake.

Not me - I started the night only having Hodir and Kologarn done, and finished with only Mimiron to go. Pretty sweet.

I've talked about what makes runs so much better or worse, and in this I think it really came down to leadership and experience. I did the running of the group the first time, and I didn't and don't have a lot of experience on Ulduar. It was frustrating, and I didn't know the strats as well as I should have - and that was compounded by people flailing about and leaving left and right, babies crying, etc. The second group had done most of this many times before and had had practice at it, and the raid leader has been leading these sorts of things for months - and strats were ready, questions were answered quickly, and things went well. I've talked about the importance of leadership before, and it's definitely true now.

At least right now, I shouldn't be doing leading. Too many distractions, not enough knowledge of the fights from top to bottom. Ah well.

Anyway, onto the actual analysis. 10-man is very, very well done. FL+4 and XT are both easy enough hard modes that they're not really gating bosses. The actual fights of the hard modes are pretty nice with the exception of Hodir. Hodir is still a boring hard mode, largely. Thorim adds interesting tension, Freya is quite a different fight.

But Vezax and Yogg are masterful.

Vezax has a tension that isn't in almost any fight I've ever done. Maximizing performance when you can't really do anything is a bizarre mechanic, but one that works. Every move made requires a weighing - if I do this, will the raid wipe? Then you have the Animus spawn, and it goes insane - damage is everywhere, you only have a certain amount of time, and you've still got to watch out for most of the mechanics from before.

Yogg with fewer keepers is astoundingly different. I'm shocked at how important the sanity mechanic is when you can't refresh it. Hodir and Mimiron aren't really missed, but having no sanity is like night and day. It changes how you can DPS, it changes what you're going to do (sending in 4 DPS in portals so that you get fewer brain phases means no healer), and it drastically changes the tension in phase 3 for a DPSer. Instead of worrying that you won't make the enrage, you're worrying constantly whether you're going to take that last bit of damage that'll send you over the edge.

As a cat, what I ended up doing was being absurdly cautious and maximizing bleeds. I'd try and rake, shred shred rip and then rake - and then turn around immediately and await the next lunatic gaze. I didn't start this way, but my sanity was dropping precipitously (to a mighty 4!) and I couldn't afford anything else. It worked, too; I topped the meters with bleeds on yogg.

But the tension was palpable. It was a crazy fight because of that. Just brilliant. Kudos to Blizzard for adding such an interesting mechanic to an otherwise boring fight.

Which brings me to...Algalon. Algalon isn't at all hard. In our first hour of attempts we got him to mid-40s, and that was mostly just learning what to call out and how to move, and what the behaviors are. The only thing that's stopping us right now, and we're having a hard time with, is when to kite constellations into holes and which ones to leave up - but that's mostly because we didn't consider that so important. Once we iron that out a bit more, (likely making sure that no one is near the hole we'll take and kiting constellations into specific ones outside of that) I think it'll be a clean kill. It's disappointing; the actual zone is epic, beautiful, and the lore is great. The fight itself compared to Yogg-1 or Vezax or Freya or Mimiron is much less special.

It's a bummer. It really should be a super hard fight, but the only thing that stopped us was double zones, zones closing early, and melee being stupid about not moving out of Cosmic Smash.

If y'all have any tips, I'd love to hear 'em.

Anyway, will have the cat epic gem comparison later this week.

[Druid] Gearing in 3.2 - Epic gems and you

I was toying around with the old Ulduar loot weighing for bears when I realized that the old link actually pointed to the PTR data. Which was fine...until I checked the chest, and I realized we were comparing the new data from the PTR with the old.

Which...isn't that helpful. So I fixed that.

However, it brought up an interesting point - how do the tier pieces compare to the current tier pieces and hard modes? But more importantly - with epic gems, does that change anything right now? In other words, does anything get better or worse, and should you be on the lookout for anything really specific right this second?

With that all in mind, here's the current PTR comparison ranking for wowhead (for armor). Note that I haven't changed any of the specific rankings, though for 3.2 as it stands defense will slightly increase, agility and dodge will slightly decrease, and everything else should be about the same, give or take. Note also that this is in no way meant as a comprehensive list of gear and gear choices.

The most common question I've had so far is which tier piece to upgrade first - and this has been true for all gear lists ever. Well, it really depends a lot on what you have currently. Assuming you're decked out in all T8.25 gear, here's the ranking as well as the difference between T9.25 scores and T8.25 scores.

Head: 16.17
Chest: 9.4
Shoulders: 8.28
Legs: 8.25
Hands: 6.58

But that doesn't take into account how many emblems each costs. If you look at it as the difference divided by the emblem cost, you get a slightly different view:

Head: .2156
Shoulders: .184
Hands: .1462
Chest: .1253
Legs: .11

The head is still the best overall piece to upgrade (and this is going to almost certainly be true regardless of whatever hard mode gear you have) but the shoulders come in nicely in second place. The legs and chest really aren't great upgrades. Though keep the Clutch of Fortification in mind - at only 35 emblems of triumph it's likely a bigger upgrade than almost anything else you could get, unless you've been very lucky and doing very hard things in Ulduar (like Algalon questlines)

The TL:DR part of this post points out that for the most part, epic gems don't drastically change rankings - but with a couple notable exceptions. The long and short of it is that heroic drops in Ulduar hard modes are very, very competitive with what we've seen from the Coliseum - so prioritize getting these if you at all can, especially the shoulderpads of the Intruder.


Back:

1. Titanskin Cloak - 45.33. Heroic Freya (hard)
   
2. Drape of Icy Intent - 44.74. Heroic Hodir (hard)
3. Drape of the Faceless General - 43.47 Normal Vezax (hard)

About the only change here is that all three of these get even closer to each other than they did before. Otherwise nothing special happens. And currently, Wowhead doesn't have any of the new backs.

Chest:

1. Runetotem's Rainments of Triumph (Heroic) - 100.09. Heroic Coliseum 25-man token drop.
2. Knightbane Carapace - 95.00. Leatherworking.
   
3. Embrace of the Gladiator - 92.04 Heroic Thorim (hard).
4. Runetotem's Rainments of Triumph (normal) - 90.62. 75 Emblems of Triumph + 1 Token of the crusade.
   
5. Furious Gladiator's Dragonhide Robes - 84.89. 1750 arena rating, 2150 arena points.
6. Vest of Shifting Shadows - 81.98. Unknown location (likely 10-man normal)
7. Runetotem's Rainments of Conquest - 81.77. 50 Emblems of Triumph.
   
8. Conqueror's Nightsong Rainments - 81.22. Heroic Hodir(easy), 58 emblems of Conquest.
9. Valorous Nightsong Rainments -76.93. Normal Yogg-Saron?(easy)

Yes, that's right. Currently the hard mode Thorim drop is better than the next tier of content's 25-man gear, and it's almost entirely because of the extra socket. Knightbane carapace is also a surprisingly strong piece for the same reason. One thing to note, above all else - unless you really, truly want that set bonus, the T8.25 chest isn't that much worse than the T9.10 chest, and if you've got it you shouldn't upgrade.

I was really surprised by how weak the new chest pieces actually are. So work on Thorim hard mode!


Feet:

1. Treads of the Icewalker (heroic) - 76.07. Heroic 25-man Coliseum.
2. Relentless Gladiator's Boots of Triumph - 66.85. Arena rating, honor.
3. Icewalker Treads - 64.72. 25-man coliseum (likely)
4. Runed Ironhide Boots -59.13. Heroic Iron Council(easy)
5. Acidmaw Treads - 58.96. 10-man coliseum (likely)
6. Footpads of Silence -57.54. Leatherworking BoE (from Heroic Ulduar pattern)
7. Furious Gladiator's Boots of Triumph - 57.48. Emalon, 62000 honor and 1500 arena rating
   

The main change here is that the Footpads of silence become slightly better than the PvP selection. And as before, the next best normal mode gear is PvP. Runed Ironhide boots are surprisingly durable.

Finger:

1. Clutch of Fortification - 50.53. 35 emblems of triumph.
2. Ring of Callous Aggression - 50.15. Heroic 25-man Coliseum (likely)
3. Fate's Clutch - 45.93. Heroic Thorim (hard)
4. Band of the Twin Valkyr - 44.26. 10-man Valkyr twins.
5. Mark of the Relentless - 41.68. 5-man heroic Coliseum.
   
6. The Leviathan's Coil -41.49. Heroic Flame Leviathan (easy)
7. band of the Traitor King - 41.30. 25-man Anub'arak.
8. Brann's Signet Ring - 40.71. Quest from Heroic Algalon.
9. Ring of Callous Aggression - 40.10. 25-man Coliseum.
10. Dextrous Brightstone Ring - 39.24. 35 emblems of triumph.
    
11. Platinum Band of the Aesir -37.76. Heroic Auriaya
12. Loop of the Agile -37.40. Normal Iron Council (hard)
13. Signet of Winter -37.19. Normal Hodir (easy)
    
14. Gatekeeper -35.76. Heroic Sapphiron.

Another awesome item from Heroic Thorim. And yes, how Leviathan's Coil has fallen makes me sad too. Mark of the Relentless is a pretty decent drop from the new 5-man as well. But really, the thing that shocked me is how good that Clutch of Fortification is, and how cheap it is. At 35 emblems that might be one of the highest bangs for your buck you can get for your emblems - it's 15 points higher than Gatekeeper, for instance.

Hands:

1. Runetotem's Handgrips of Triumph (Heroic) - 72.30. Heroic 25-man.
2. Runetotem's Handgrips of Triumph - 65.01. 45 emblems of triumph + 1 token of the crusade.
   
3. Furious Gladiator's Dragonhide Gloves - 59.63 Emalon, 1600 arena ranking and 1300 arena points
   
4. Conqueror's Nightsong Handgrips -58.43. Heroic Mimiron(easy)
5. Runetotem's Handgrips of Conquest - 58.32. 30 emblems of triumph.
6. Gloves of the Endless Dark - 56.45. Normal Algalon
7. Gloves of the Stonereaper -55.26. Heroic Auriaya
   
8. Valorous Nightsong Handgrips -55.03 Normal Freya(easy)

Note that when the Relentless PvP gear pops up on wowhead, I'm sure it'll show up higher here. It's interesting that so far, there's no real reason to go from T8.25 to T9.10. Here on the glove side, it's actually a downgrade. The 25-man might be worth it as your first tier piece.

Head:

1. Runetotem's Headguard of Triumph (heroic) - 101.85. Heroic 25-man coliseum.
2. Runetotem's Headguard of Triumph - 92.02. 75 emblems of Triumph + Token of the crusade.
3. Hood of Lethal Intent - 89.30. emblems of triumph.
   
4. Furious Gladiator's Dragonhide Helm - 83.50. 1900 arena rating and 2150 arena points
5. Runetotem's Headguard of Conquest - 82.88. 50 emblems of triumph.
   
6. Garona's Guise - 77.21. Heroic Yogg-Saron
   
7. Conqueror's Nightsong Headguard -75.85. Heroic Thorim(easy), emblems of conquest

Finally, a T9.10 item that's worth upgrading from T8.25! And from a pure standpoint of points, the T9.25 is much better of an upgrade over anything in Ulduar compared to the chest or gloves - 15 points. Though part of that is simply a function of there being no hardmode heads.

Legs:

1. Runetotem's Legguards of Triumph (Heroic) - 100.88. Heroic 25-man Coliseum.
2. Runetotem's Legguards of Triumph - 91.28. 75 emblems of Triumph + 1 token of the crusade.
3. Legguards of Cunning Deception - 90.62. Heroic Yogg-Saron (hard)
   
4. Furious Gladiator's Dragonhide Legguards - 84.77. Emalon, 1700 arena rating and 2150 arena points
5. Titan-forged leather legguards of Triumph - 84.65. Koralon, 40 WG marks.
   
6. Conqueror's Nightsong Legguards -83.03. Heroic Freya (easy)
7. Runetotem's Legguards of Conquest - 82.33. 50 emblems of triumph.
   
8. Valorous Nightsong Legguards -78.76. Normal Hodir (easy)

And the trend yet again continues in the T8.25 > T9.10 gear. The T9.25 gear isn't that much of an upgrade over T8.25 either - only 8 points. The heroic hard mode legs from yogg are very competitive again thanks to having more gem slots.

Neck:

1. Legionaire's Gorget - 50.30. 25-man Valkyr.
2. Pendulum of Infinity - 42.86. Heroic Vezax (hard)
   
3. Bronze Pendant of the Vanir -41.39. Heroic Freya(hard)
   
4. Mark of the Unyielding -40.17. Normal Kologarn (easy)
   
5. Titanstone Pendant -38.22. Heroic Trash
   
6. Shard of the Crystal Forest -37.43. Emblems of Conquest

So far, no vendor necks, so no great deals to report...yet. It's interesting to see how meh most of the necks are for bears - especially compared to the differentials in the rings.

Shoulder:

1. Shoulderpads of the Intruder - 71.77. Heroic Iron Council (hard)
2. Runetotem's Shoulderpads of Triumph (Heroic) - 71.32. 25-man heroic Coliseum.
3. Duskstalker Shoulderpads - 65.00. emblems of triumph.
   
4. Runetotem's Shoulderpads of Triumph - 64.26. 45 emblems of triumph + Token of the crusade.
   
5. Furious Gladiator's Dragonhide Spaulders - 60.98. 2050 arena rating and 1750 arena points
6. Runetotem's Shoulderpads of Conquest - 57.74. 30 emblems of triumph.
   
7. Conqueror's Nightsong Shoulderpads -55.98. Heroic Yogg-Saron(easy)
8. Valorous Nightsong Shoulderpads -52.23. Normal Ulduar (easy)

Yes, that's right. The hardmode Iron Council item is better than the highest-ranked shoulders that can only drop from the hard mode of the next tier. And the reason? Entirely because of the gem sockets. Well, that, and the fact that the T9 shoulders have haste, AP and armor pen. Not exactly the most exciting stats for a bear; by comparison the Intruder have hit and expertise. Now, if you're not lucky enough to own those, upgrading the shoulder slot from T8.25 is a good thing (8.28 difference) - but you should beg your raid leader to do hard mode Iron Council until you die or until you get those.


Waist:

1. Relentless Gladiator's Belt of Triumph - 66.66. Arena rating, honor.
2. Belt of the Merciless Killer - 63.63. 25-man coliseum (likely)
   
3. Soul-Devouring Cinch - 61.21. Normal Yogg-Saron (hard).
4. Death-warmed belt -58.12. Leatherworking BoE from Heroic Ulduar
5. Furious Gladiator's Belt of Triumph - 57.38. Emalon, 1450 rating and 62000 honor
   
6. Waistguard of the Creator -55.38. Heroic Mimiron(easy)

Not a lot of belt info from the PTR so far - I expect this to change soon, and I know of a couple items that aren't on here. As expected, the hard mode belt from Yogg makes out somewhat well because of the 2 gem slots, as does the crafted Death-warmed belt. Note that the Death Warmed belt will become reasonably cheap to make given that runed orbs will be like frozen orbs to buy (15 conquest badges is basically three heroics), so consider this if you're not getting lucky. But do so after 3.2 hits.


Wrist:

1. Bracers of Swift Death - 49.22. Leatherworking
2. Relentless Gladiator's Armwraps of Triumph - 46.15.
3. Armbands of Dark Determination - 45.38. 25-man Coliseum Valkyr.
   
4. Fluxing Energy Coils - 42.04. Normal XT-002 (hard)
   
5. Furious Gladiator's Armwraps of Triumph - 39.18. Heroic Emalon, 1400 arena rating and 39400 honor
   
6. Mechanist's Bindings -37.46. Heroic Leviathan (easy)

Also not a lot of revealed items so far here. While the bracers of swift death look neat, they're a bit expensive to make and likely won't be available to you for a while. Plus they're just not that big of an upgrade. Wait a bit on them.

[Druid, Offtopic] Oh HELL YES

From today's latest PTR notes:

Swift Flight Form: Druids who have acquired a mount able to go 310% flight speed will now also go that speed while in this form.

Damn, I've missed you, Idol of Flying fast. And while I enjoy my Plagued Proto-drake and the giant trail of farts it leaves behind, the only reason I use it is because it's 10% faster.

Awesome. This patch is full of love for the druid. Sure, there's a nerf to cat DPS. And a nerf to bear avoidance. But between new tauren cat forms, new tauren bear forms, and speedier flight forms? Good times.

Also, I'd strongly recommend any and all druids that haven't done so to get the PTR and check out their forms. Even in video it really doesn't do the things justice.

[3.2] Tier rewards part the second - don't do this, please!

This is a followup to an earlier post about tier rewards. And it's based on the PTR currently.

Right now, instead of what was listed before, each ilvl 245 item requires a Trophy of the Crusader token. This is in addition to the Emblems of Triumph tokens that they require, so items that cost 75 triumph emblems before also cost 1 Crusader token. These are soulbound, and as far as I can tell only one drops per boss on 25-man. 10-man does not drop this token.

ilvl 232 items are unchanged from prior prices, and are 33% less than their 245-ilvl counterpart.

And finally, each boss drops 3 emblems of triumph.

I know this is preliminary, and things can change. I also know that communication is good for actually getting things changed if they suck.

I'm...not thrilled with this idea of progression. For starters, it means that heroics and 10-man content have exactly the same access to gear, save that 10-man content rewards more badges so you'll get more gear quickly. But the actual gear? It's the same. This doesn't strike me as reasonable, but it's the same deal as it was in Naxxramas. If you liked that, you'll love this.

Second, it means that anyone who does 10-man content and 25-man content will gear up at about twice the rate that anyone who does only 25-man content will. Even if you get the tokens in 25-man, you still need those emblems - which means the token is worthless until you get enough tokens. That's not necessarily bad; it's essentially rewarding those people who do more to get more, and they get more of what they want. They can run 10-mans and instead of getting 'useless' tier tokens, they'll be getting closer to actual tier drops. That's kind of nice, actually.

Third, it means that doing daily heroics is (on a weekly basis) worth as much as doing all of the Argent Coliseum. There are 6-7 encounters that we know of (depending on how you count them) and if they all drop 3 emblems, that means 21 for a full clear. Which so happens to be exactly the amount of emblems you get from doing the dailies.

To put this in perspective, it costs 75 emblems + a trophy of the crusader token to get the high-end items like a tier chest piece. Someone who does nothing but 25-man content (assuming they clear it AND assuming they are in for every fight) will get that piece after 4 weeks.

Someone who does 10 and 25 man will get it after 2 weeks.
Someone who does 10, 25, and every heroic they can will get it just a bit after one week.

Fourth, this absolutely fucks over guilds with people on backup, in terms of their loot. Because emblems are tied innately to actual gear they care about, sitting on backup means you're getting further and further behind on getting that tier gear. Even if you get the trophy of the crusader token, you'll have either saved for longer or have to wait for longer every time you sit on backup. DKP, EP/GP? None of that matters.

Blizzard has basically instituted a DKP system that is entirely based on attended amount of time in the raid. For some guilds that will be fine. For others that will seriously mess things up.

Fifth, I really hope more than one trophy of the crusader token drops per boss. Otherwise you're looking at 6-7 tier tokens possible per week. Compare to now, where you can get at least 10 tokens per week, and it's clearly a step back.

My biggest complaints about this are simply that it really rewards doing as much raiding as humanly possible, and somewhat punishes not doing so. It also does something that was never done before in raiding: it converts all tier loot into something like the Valanyr/Sulfuras questline, where instead of getting your gear immediately or getting your gear as a trade-in, you instead get your gear at some indeterminate time in the future depending on how many bosses you get in for and how many heroics you run.

Does this make sense? Is it fun? Does it help with progression when your tier tokens won't be obtainable for at least a couple weeks until you've received the token? If you're trying to gear up new people, does this help?

I do like that it gives the flexibility of getting whatever slot you want. The cost seems far too high.

So, suggestions on how to fix this? Let triumph tokens drop as they do now. Let the 232 ilvl stuff be the stuff that you can get from just running heroics. Let the 245 stuff be token-based only, similar to the 258 stuff, and have the tokens drop from both 10 and 25 man. Because like I said before, I don't care about whether or not 10-man loot and 25-man loot is differentiated at the tier level. But that's off the top of my head - I'm sure smarter folks are figuring this out now.

[Druid, 3.2] The effects of agility/dodge change

I wanted to see if any other blogs would pick this up first - but so far I've seen nothing.

One of the documented changes to the PTR is a change to avoidance in general. Here's the overall text:

• Agility: The amount of agility required per percentage of dodge has been increased by 15%. This change required recalibrating the amount of dodge a player has with 0 agility by a slight amount as well, so all players will see their dodge percentage vary a small amount.
  
• Dodge Rating: The amount of dodge rating required per percentage of dodge has been increased by 15%. This is before diminishing returns. Combined with other changes, this makes dodge rating and parry rating equally potent before diminishing returns apply.
  
• Parry Rating: The amount of parry rating required per percentage of parry has been reduced by 8%. This is before diminishing returns. Combined with other changes, this makes dodge rating and parry rating equally potent before diminishing returns apply. Parry still diminishes more quickly than dodge.

15%? Wow, that sounds like a lot, right? And since druids are the only tank without parry, it's a pure nerf! It's time to freak out!

Don't freak out.

Here's the thing about being a tank that's based around talents primarily: nerfing stats doesn't hurt nearly as much. As an example, let's take...well, me. I'm not totally Ulduar-geared yet, but I have a good chunk of pieces and have mostly gone for stamina, only using agility when I had a shared piece of gear. I have minimal PvP gear.

Here are my stats currently, raid buffed (courtesy of Rawr):

Health: 47931
Agility: 1787.513
Armor: 32645.03
Stamina: 3640
Dodge Rating: 194
Defense Rating: 91
Resilience: 105
Dodge: 50.271%
Miss: 8.145%
Avoidance PreDR: 71.102%
Avoidance PostDR: 58.416%

So what will I lose? Effectively I'll lose 15% of that agility and 15% of that dodge rating. That means I lose 268 agility and another 29 dodge rating on average*.

That would mean pre-DR, my avoidance would go down by:
dodge/agility * agility + dodge%/dodge rating * dodge rating
1/41.67 * 268 + 1/39.3 * 29 =
6.43 + .737 = 7.16%.

So a 7.16% dodge rating reduction before diminishing returns. Or a total, Pre-DR value of 63.93% avoidance overall.

What does that mean after diminishing returns? Well, this is 7% dodge at the top, not the bottom - meaning it's getting hit the 'hardest' by DR. But in practice this means all we need to do is in Rawr reduce our stats by the above and see our post-DR results.

And if you do that...the post-DR results are a mighty 46.1% dodge.

So it's about a 4% loss for me, give or take.

Except...Rawr does things like average out procs for an overall dodge value. Which means things like DM:G are counted as having 100 agility instead of 0 some of the times, and 300 other times. Same with Heart of Iron and Mongoose. The long and short of it is that overall dodge rating is going to not decrease quite as much, but the procs are going to be slightly worse than they were before overall.

In any case, 4% dodge is not really wonderful to lose, but it's definitely not a huge deal. It should bring druid overall damage closer to inline with paladins and warriors, though druids will still take the least amount of damage per hit without cooldowns coming into play. And for the most part, you'll not notice it.

If you're curious about the other tanks, because of the parry change DKs almost are unchanged in terms of raw avoidance (they gain parry and lose dodge), and warriors and paladins lose a small amount (about 1-2 % depending on how they geared).