I was warned by a friend this was coming, but I forgot to include it in my last post because I hadn’t yet been in game to confirm.
Handwraps of Preserved History has been seriously nerfed for Bear tanks.
Prior to today, it was very over-budget. We all knew it. But we all wore them anyway. Today they corrected it and made me take them off.
Here are the old stats:
And the new stats:
Needless to say, they were quickly replaced with Heroes’ Dreamwalker Handgrips and a +16 Agililty gem.
http://www.wowwiki.com/Patch_3.0.8
Enjoy!
The most talked about change in 3.0.8 for feral druids is the so-called “armor nerf”:
Bonus Armor: The mechanics for items with bonus armor on them has changed (any cloth, leather, mail, or plate items with extra armor, or any other items with any armor). Bonus armor beyond the base armor of an item will no longer be multiplied by any talents or by the bonuses of Bear Form, Dire Bear Form, or Frost Presence.
This was something we've known about for a while and I think has much less impact for level 80s than it would have had when we were wearing our level 70 gear, which was heavily stacked with "green" armor values. Most of our current gear doesn't have bonus armor.
The more important part of that change, however, is the "or any other items with any armor" bit. Again, we knew this was coming, but essentially it significantly reduces the total impact that armor has on necklaces, rings, trinkets, cloaks and weapons. This is significant for Bears because pieces where the overall mitigation value was mostly about the armor will now be worth far less than before.
Goodbye Badge of Tenacity and Nerubian Shield Ring and hello Valor Medal of the First War and Titanium Earthguard Ring.
But what about our Armor? Well... they've addressed that with a talent change:
Survival of the Fittest: This talent now grants 22/44/66% bonus armor in Bear Form and Dire Bear Form in addition to all of its previous effects.
The feeling I'm getting at this point is that we will end up with better mitigation after this change. Also it will let us use our non-leather slots to focus on Dodge (up to 50%) and Defense (after 50%) instead of just stacking armor.
Another one that has been getting lots of attention is the changes to how Feral Attack Power (FAP) work:
Feral Attack Power: All weapons now have the potential to grant feral attack power based on their dps (as compared to the best superior-quality weapons available at level 60). Players will see their existing feral weapons grant roughly the same attack power as they did before (+/- 2 or so), but many new weapons will be options for the feral druid. Some feral weapons have had strength converted to attack power to be more appealing to other classes able to equip them. All druids will see the amount of feral attack power granted by an item in the item tooltip, if it grants any, but other players will not see that information.
But there is another little related wrinkle in there…
Polearms: Now trainable by Druids.
Taken together, these are pretty cool. Polearms like Black Ice suddenly move to the top 3 list for feral kitty DPS. Not many others right now compare with that particular polearm, and none of the polearms really do much for tanking, but still... the options are interesting.
I spent some time a couple of weeks ago talking to Astrylian (author or Rawr and contributor on the EJ druid forums and friend of mine). It turns out that the FAP has always been a function of the DPS of the weapon, but what is changing is that now the FAP is automatically calculated.
You've maybe seen screenshots like that show shows FAP on the Titansteel Destroyer or other non-feral pieces. The interesting thing is that a non-druid WOULD NOT SEE THAT LINE in the tooltip.
So where does it come from? Here's the equation:
FAP = (DPS - 54.8) * 14
Since the titansteel Destroyer has 186.5 DPS in the patch, that gives it 1843 FAP. Pretty cool eh? It gets even better. There are now weapons that were basically hunter weapons that are available to us (and vice versa). Any 2H weapon you can equip will now get a FAP tooltip when your playing your Druid.
BTW, Black Ice has 203.7 DPS. That gives 2084 FAP. Since it also has 108 agility and 72 hit rating, you see why it can rate so high on feral DPS.
The potential downside to all this is that we may find Hunters and others classes interested in rolling against us on pieces. I don't think it will be a concern for us, but it does open the pool up a bit.
There are a number of smaller, but still important changes that hit today:
Growl: Range increased to 30 yards
Sounds good. Stack that with Glyph of Growl and you shouldn't have any trouble with runaway mobs in Heroics or that boss transfer on the Four Horsemen event in Naxx.
Primal Tenacity: Now reduces the cost of Bear Form, Cat Form, and Dire Bear Form by 17/33/50% in addition to its previous effects.
Sweet! Since the expansion, we've all noticed that shapeshifting seems to cost more than it did before. Powershifting is way too expensive to even consider. Maybe this will change that... maybe not.
Protector of the Pack: No longer changes value based on party size.
Sounds good to me. Everyone likes Attack Power bonuses right?
Savage Roar: The buff now persists outside of Cat Form but only provides its benefits while in Cat Form.
This may be useful for those times when you need to switch out of Bear for just a few seconds to grab that errant trash mob. Now when you go back to Cat your 5-CP Savage Roar will still be there ticking away.
Swipe: Swipe (Cat) has now been added at level 71, dealing 260% weapon damage, costs 50 energy with no cooldown. All talents affecting the Bear Form version affect the Cat Form one as well.
Finally kitty cats get some AOE damage. Given how the game seems to have become an AOE fest, I'm glad we've not been left out of the fun.
Shadowmeld: This ability will now properly restore threat when it is canceled. In addition, it will correctly remove a player from combat if it is active when that player is the last person left alive that the creature hates. This ability is now also unusable while affected by Faerie Fire.
Bummer. I only just learned about our own little "Vanish" trick and now it is basically gone. Oh well...
Bear Form: This ability will now grant the correct attack power per level for levels 71-80.
Good. Better threat gen for bears... except...
Savage Fury - Mangle (Bear) damage was being increased by a higher percentage than intended. This has been fixed, and in result Mangle (Bear) should see roughly a 16% damage reduction. Also fixed a bug with Savage Fury where the Rake bleed effect was not being increased.
...then we lose some. Net effect? Not sure yet.
Survival Instincts: The extra health from this ability now persists in all forms, but the ability can only be activated in Cat Form, Bear Form, or Dire Bear Form. This prevents the health gain from occurring multiple times if constantly shapeshifting.
Darnit! A cool sploit I didn't know about nerfed before I could even try it.
There are also some changes to professions that are relevant to bears and kitties:
Increased the critical strike rating granted by ranks 5 and 6 of Master of Anatomy.
We might see a few more ferals regretting having dropped skinning now.
A new recipe for [Worg Tartare] is now available for purchase with Dalaran Cooking Awards. This delicacy imbues hit rating and Stamina upon those brave enough to eat it.
If you need hit rating, here is another recipe you might wanna try. No fishing required for this one.
Added a new recipe to enchant bracers with Stamina. You can buy this recipe from Vanessa Sellers in Dalaran.
If you aren't a Leatherworker and are coveting our Fur Lining - Stamina for bracers, this might be worth looking at.
The epic leg armor patches now require a Frozen Orb in addition to their other materials.
Again, the non-Leatherworker ferals will feel this the most as the prices of their leg enchants will go up. Leatherworkers have a self-enchant that is almost free, so we won't care much except that maybe we can make more money selling epic leg armors than we could before.
In addition to profession and ability changes, a short list of gear changes is work commenting on:
Dreamwalker Battlegear: The Rip bonus is now 4 seconds instead of 3.
One more second of Rip for the 2-piece set bonus... hmmm... not bad. Might make me spend some badges on them for my kitty set.
Druid Feral Tier 7 Set: The 4 piece bonus now also decreases the cooldown on Tiger’s Fury by 3 seconds.
More changes to the Feral T7 set bonuses to make kitties more powerful. Cool.
There are always a number of “discovered” or “undocumented” changes. These come from http://www.wowwiki.com/Patch_3.0.8_(undocumented_changes)
Rewards added for [Wintergrasp Mark of Honor]
Some ferals might like the Titan-forged pieces. I'm not sure how viable they'll be in PvE however.
Maim duration has been increased by 1 second. (3/4/5/6/7 seconds)
I always like a boost to abilities. This one won't affect raiding much, but may be useful soloing or in a pinch.
Survival Instincts now temporarily grants you 30% of your current maximum health for 20 sec. (Old - 30% of your maximum health)
This is actually a nerf. On those fights where the debuff from a boss causes a reduction in your maximum health (ala the red beam on Netherspite in Karazhan), your "Oh Crap" button now gives less health back. Bummer.
Thick Hide now increases your armor contribution from cloth and leather items by 4/7/10%. (Old - All items)
This is just more of the "armor bonuses for leather only" change described above. This is goodness and helps make up for the lost armor multiplier on neck, finger, trinket and weapon.
[Darkmoon Card: Death]: Changed to improve critical strike rating by 85 (Old - 85 haste)
That might make it quite interesting for kitty cats.
My good friend Jordail turned me on to a great idea to help with this headache.
“Join the bookhunters channel,” he said.
It is simple. Join the channel. Encourage anyone else you find who is obviously camping a bookspot to join it. When a real or fake book spawns, announce it in the channel. If it is a fake book, open it to get the timer restarted ASAP. If it is a real book, announce it to give people a minute or three to get there so they can read it too.
For extra credit, create a macro to track the timers. Mine looks like this right now (channel 7 is the bookhunters channel on my system):
/7 Upper VC: ??
/7 Lower VC: 11:35
/7 Visitor Center: 12:25
/7 ToF Balcony: 12:03
/7 Violet Hold: ??
/7 Port Room: ??
/7 Upper LL: ??
/7 Lower LL: ??
Anytime someone announces a timer, I update the macro. Anytime someone asks for timers, I click the button. Easy as pie.
Since joining I’ve gone from 0/8 on this achievement to 4/8 and have a good shot at getting the other four in the next day or so.
Thanks Jord!
I spent some time today chatting with Astrylian, the author of Rawr, about how to best balance Survival and Mitigation. From the Rawr.Bear tooltip, we see that “Survival Points represent the total raw physical damage (pre-mitigation) you can take before dying.” Essentially it is a quantitative measure of your health and stamina related stats.
One thing I’ve been noticing lately and have talked about with Hautian one of our Paladin tanks, is that Rawr seems to like Stamina a whole lot. More than I expected. This is what I wanted to ask Astrylian about. I wanted to understand the balance and understand how to control it better.
It turns out that since version 2.1.5 there has been a feature in the Bear model that lets you put a “soft cap” on the Survival statistic. This means the relative weighting of the Mitigation statistic starts to go up as you cross over the soft cap. "PERFECT!” I said, “How does it work?”
First, how you set it up. Open Rawr and select the Bear Model. Your current Survival value will be listed in the “Summary” section of the Stats tab as shown in this screenshot:
So with the gear I have on in this Rawr profile, I’ve got 137,385 Survival Points. That number is when I am buffed as I would expect in a typical 10-man Naxx raid. When typically 25-man buffed I’m up over 145k.
Now let’s look at how the Survival Soft Cap is configured:
As you can see, the default value is 140,000. Talking to Astrylian, that number was chosen as ‘about right’ for current 25-man boss. It happens to be around the amount of unmitigated damage from three of Patchwerk’s Hateful Strikes (25-man version) or three of Sartharion’s hits (with three drakes up). This formula isn’t precise, but is something he and some of the other folks on Elitist Jerks worked out. And as you can see, I’m short a few points, which explains why Rawr wants me to stack more Stamina right now, but with 25-man buffs I actually cross over that 140k line and it starts to focus more on Mitigation.
I asked Astrylian what the soft cap does to the relative weighting of Survival and Mitigation and he sent me this graph to show how it works (click to see full-sized):
This graph is for a 140,000 softcap. The X-axis is the raw unscaled Survival and the Y-axis shows the scaled Survival. As you can see up to 140,000, the values match (the scaling is 1). After 140,000, however, the value slowly falls off.
What this does in the long run is weight the Mitigation stats higher in the Rawr Overall points system.
Other softcap values courtesy of Astrylian:
| Content | Softcap |
| Planning for Ulduar 25-man Raiding | 160,000 |
| 25-man Raiding | 140,000 |
| 10-man Raiding / Heroic 5-mans | 120,000 |
| 5-man Dungeons | 100,000 |
SWEET! Thanks again to Astrylian and the rest of the Rawr team for this amazing tool.
Since early in the Burning Crusades, Quaiche has been a bear tank. I originally converted from resto to tanking one evening when a guild officer needed a tank for Shadow Labs. I had some feral gear, but not much, so he went to the AH and bought me a set of Heavy Clefthoof gear and a ring or two and off we went. Then with the help of Emmerald’s Gear List (and later Rawr) I tanked all the way to Black Temple.
Now we’re heading into Naxxramas in the new Lich King expansion pack and the opposite is happening. We’ve got plenty o’ tanks. Bears, Warriors, Paladins and even a DK tank. But we’re short healers. “Fine, I’ll be a healer,” I said, “it’ll be fun.”
I started by crafting as much resto gear as I could (I’m a 440+ Leatherworker so made all this myself):
After that I hit the AH for some shopping. There are some pretty good BoE blues out there that can be had for a steal if you get lucky:
I ended up replacing all of the crafted blue leather in less than two weeks with better drops from Heroics and Naxx-10, but those pieces and the other stuff I bought enabled me to be a Heroic and Naxx-10 healer in very little time.
One slot that is hard to fill is the weapon. I ended up with War Mace of Unrequited Love from Heroic Nexus as my main hand and Watchful Eye in my offhand, so I didn’t have this problem for long. One thing I’ve seen people using is the Chilly Slobberknocker from Champion of Anguish quests. YMMV.
This week I’m back to bear tanking again, but now I’ve got a pretty good healing set going and am totally ready for Blizzard to ship dual-spec in patch 3.1 so I can be a Bear Tree full time!
My first hacked up solution to the channel lock problem was a quick-n-dirty little addon that I created using the Dongle framework. Dongle is a great addon framework for things that need a bit more than nothing, but not as much as a full-featured configurable UI.
When I decided to work toward releasing ChannelLock (after pressure from guildies to give it up) I realized that doing the config UI I wanted using Dongle and native Wow UI manipulation would have been, to put it mildly, a pain in the ass. On the other hand, using AceConfig would make it easy.
Converting the DB code from Dongle to AceConfig was basically a no-op. AceDB-3.0 doesn’t use a mixin any more, while dongle does, but with a few minor changes, it just worked.
But the whole reason I made this switch was the get the integration with the in-game addon config system for free. Ultimately I wanted the tree in the addon list to have the following entries
For the “about” info, I’ve been using Tekkub’s tekKonfigAboutPanel.lua code for a while. It is simple and “just works”. But I hadn’t tried to integrate it with Ace3 config before.
Getting all of this to work as expected took some experimentation, but ultimately it was quite easy:
LibStub("AceConfig-3.0"):RegisterOptionsTable("ChannelLock", self.options )
LibStub("tekKonfig-AboutPanel").new(nil, "ChannelLock") (Line numbers added to enable better explanation of the code.)
Line 1 takes the Lua table stored in self.options (it is just a standard Ace3Config table) and registers it with the AceConfig-3.0 registry using the name “ChannelLock”. This let us later add the options described in the table to the config system, to slash commands, etc.
Line 2 uses Tekkubs code to create an About box panel that contains various bits of information from the TOC file. By passing nil as the first parameter to new(), it tells the library to make this a root node in the config tree. The name is passed as the second parameter.
So far so good. We’ve got our root config node and we’ve registered our options table. Before I show you the next bit, however, let’s take a look at what is inside the options table. It looks something like this:
self.options = {
type = 'group',
name = "ChannelLock",
args = {
channels = {
name = 'Channels',
type = 'group',
args = {},
},
profiles = LibStub("AceDBOptions-3.0"):GetOptionsTable(self.db)
}
} The trick is that the table contains two sub-tables: channels and profiles. The channels table is filled in dynamically by other code in my addon and the profiles table is filled in by the AceDBOptions-3.0 library. That library automatically creates an options table for all the typical profile operations (copy, new, delete, etc.) so I don’t have to.
We’ve registered the table with the AceConfig registry up above, now what we want to do is insert the channels and profile sub-tables as separate pages underneath the root page. We do that using the AceConfigDialog library and the AddToBlizOptions method. The arguments are: registered table name, display text, parent and sub-table key. The code looks like this:
LibStub("AceConfigDialog-3.0"):AddToBlizOptions("ChannelLock", "Channels", "ChannelLock", "channels")
LibStub("AceConfigDialog-3.0"):AddToBlizOptions("ChannelLock", "Profiles", "ChannelLock", "profiles") Line 1 adds the channels subtable and Line 2 adds the profiles subtable.
That’s it!
I know I said I was working on ChannelLock right now, and that is true, but earlier this week I decided to respec resto since Benevolent Thuggery is feeling a bit light on the healer front.
I quickly realized that as a healer I missed the indicators I used to use in Grid when I healed a year ago. Since I now use a custom oUF layout instead of Grid or Pitbull, I decided to hack something together. What started out as a quick little lifebloom timer quickly blossomed into a full blown Druid HOT timer.
Here’s a diagram showing how it looks and what they each mean:
It attaches the indicators to the top left of the Health bar.
So far I love it. I’ve already gotten used to seeing the colors and instinctively knowing what heal I want to put on the target. There are a few things I still want to do however:
It is up on the CurseForge project site if you wanna give it a try in your layout. As with all oUF extensions, it requires that you have oUF (the base frame framework) and an oUF layout (the definition of how you want your player/party/raid frames to look) installed.
Enjoy!