They've finally come up with the plans for bear armour. Apparently this will come in the next patch (3.0.4?), which is likely to be the patch before 3.1 (when Ulduar arrives!).
No more feral-specific weapons! The feral attack power that was added to feral weapons will instead be caclulated from the weapon DPS ((DPS-55)*14, or something like that) and show up in the tooltip. As far as I can tell, the actual AP value for ferals should remain exactly the same, but everyone gets more choice of weapons (e.g. Terestrian's Stranglestaff will lose the FAP bonus, but it's DPS will increase to match weapons of the same item level - now everyone can hit things with the big tentacle, and have it actually hurt!)
Weapons will no longer have bonus armour as a stat (boo-hoo, I'll miss you, Earthwarden!)
The feral bear form armour bonus modifier (370%) will no longer apply to necks, rings, trinkets and cloak bonus armour. To compensate, the Survival of the Fittest talent will additionally give a +22/44/66% armour bonus to leather and cloth armour values.
There is going to be a LOT of heated discussion about this, an awful lot of which will be utter rubbish. So, as a public service, here's Netty's view on the matter (thus unimpeachably fair, insightful and above all correct!)
Buff or Nerf?
If the jewellery/trinkets/cloak armour makes up MORE than about 45% of your total armour, it's a nerf. Otherwise it's a buff. For Netty then (and I'd guess the great majority of bears), it's a buff (+1% mitigation or so). For a best-possible-equipped bear, in Nax25 gear, it's a colossal nerf (around -10%), some, maybe all, of this could have been necessary IF bears were OP in endgame on beta.
Does it fix the problem with bear itemisation?
Not at all. While before it meant that bears just HAD to have the high armour items because they were best in slot by a huge margin, they now only have to have them because they are best in slot by a smaller margin. This hasn't done anything to make other items more attractive to bears, and armour remains our most important stat.
Does this fix the bear scaling problem?
Not at all. Our mitigation still relies on only armour and dodge, tying us to the smallest range of desirable stats of all tanks, and making diminishing returns a real problem as we gear up. Stacking armour and agility remains the order of the day. While we COULD stack stamina to get needlessly huge health pools this would only turn us into mana-sponges in a one-potion-per-fight world, where mana efficiency will be the number one concern for healers.
So is it all over for bears?
Not at all. It takes more that some badly conceived fiddling to kill a bear! With our new tricks, we're better than ever, but this does pretty much consign us back to being OT rather than MT for endgame raids, just because of the likely mana-drain on the healers.
What would Netty have done?
Take away the bear modifier on jewellery/trinkets etc just like they are doing, but remove the cooldown on Improved Leader of the Pack to compensate (it would also need to be made self-only, and tuned down from 4% healed). This would give us two more scaling mitigation stats (crit and stamina), and act like a "bear block" in terms of mitigation mechanics (a small amount of health returned rather than a small amount of damage avoided). Our itemisation would expand to include +crit jewellery and trinkets. It would also feel a very uniquely bearish mechanic.
In summary?
A missed trick! Blizzard chose a band-aid bodge, especially when they have said that baking stuff into talents like this is something they want to avoid, despite better alternatives being available.
If you've read this far, blimey! Thank you for reading my rant, I hope it was of interest!
Mon 09 Jun 2008, 5:08 pm