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Beta tester Lisana recently posted a question regarding the scaling of Feral Druids in Wrath of the Lich King and whether they could expect to once again "fall behind" Rogues as in TBC. Blizzard Developer Jimmythenumbers responded at great length with some new information:
In the next data push, you will find Omen of Clarity has been changed a bit. The 10 second cooldown has been removed, the procs per minute has been raised from 2 to 3.5, and melee abilities no longer trigger it. Spell interaction with Omen of Clarity remains relatively unchanged, with its hidden chance to trigger off spells reduced by half (and rolling the dice about 2x as often).
What this means is that more auto-attacks landing on the target will increase the benefit from Omen of Clarity. Haste, increased hit chance, and expertise will all make Omen of Clarity better.
We are aware of the concerns with reaching the hit rating cap, and will make sure Druids can pick up Rogue items to wear without exceeding that cap. This means Rogues will likely socket for hit, while Druids socket for Strength or Agility.
Before LK goes live, we will do extensive testing on how much damage classes do, and will increase or decrease their power as appropriate to meet our targets. Cat raid DPS suffered relative to other melee in BC for lack of an Combat Potency equivalent talent (OOC should now be roughly equal), for lack of a scaling finishing move (Savage Roar answers that), for lack of benefiting from Windfury Totem, and for lack of weapon procs (+35 agility != Mongoose). All of those lacks have been addressed. In addition, a change has been made to make the agility rebalance less severe (as I posted in another thread).
In PvP, we are adding many tools to the Feral Druid arsenal, including the redesigned Maim, Infected Wounds, King of the Jungle, and Berserk. We have also made some improvements to the "range bug". Attacks that require you to be behind a target will no longer be able to be parried, nor able to be dodged by a player. Our movement engine will now smoothly interpolate positions of moving units, preventing the "Out of range/You must be behind your target/Out of range/You must be behind your target/Out of range/You must be behind your target…" sequence from occurring any more. In addition, being able to apply a snare makes the Feral Druid able to slow down their target and lessen the severity of the "range bug". Yes, there are still issues with the model, especially when switching into and out of cat form, but many of the issues are being dealt with.
Druids are not being ignored; this forum is being read daily by developers.
Before you freak out at the statement "melee abilities no longer trigger it," understand that this means that melee special attacks (yellow damage) will no longer trigger it. It will only be able to trigger from auto-attack (white damage), but its proc frequency has been increased. The stated PPM of 3.5 is an average expected PPM and will increase with hit, haste, and expertise rating. Beta tester Werebeef explains in greater detail:
With no cooldown and 3.5 procs per minute, what this really means is that your melee attacks have a 5.83% (3.5/60) chance of proccing Omen of Clarity. Capping hit and having expertise makes sure you don’t fail to land attacks that might have been hits that proc Omen of Clarity, and haste means you land more attacks per minute.
The changes to Omen of Clarity were made with the intention to bring the ability more in line with Rogue’s Combat Potency, an ability that "gives your successful off-hand melee attacks a 20% chance to generate 15 Energy." Despite my earlier skepticism about Blizzard’s interest in addressing the Cat Form range bug, it does sound like they’ve made some large improvements, so I think we should stay hopeful.
In a separate thread, a player expressed his upset over the change to Agility whereby it converts to less crit rating than before:
As we’re aware, it seems most of us are losing 6-10% crit rating off the bat because of the Agility nerf.
We also don’t seem to be compensated in any way for the agility nerf. The agility nerf happened because Blizzard felt that Agility was too good and was leading to lopsided itemization.
Developer Jimmythenumbers comes to the rescue once again, responding with the following:
To help deal with this issue, in the next data push, Druids should find their melee critical strike chance is about 5% higher.
The conversion of Agility to critical strike chance remains the same 40:1 at level 70, but the base amount for 0 agility has been increased by 5%.
This is all very positive news for Feral Druids, and it seems as though Blizzard is paying close attention to all the constructive discussion on the Beta forums. Now if only I could get a beta key! (Although with Revive coming, I’m not altogether sure what I’d post about!)
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All these things can be done in 5 mans though. Riverwishs...
Very nice summary,
*claps*
Helped me enlighten the PPM they mentioned, for some reason I had it stuck in my head that a PPM amount is just the amount of time it happen during a minute and you can’t in any way get more than that, including haste rating.
But this makes it look a whole lot better, actually… but I dunno… feels so odd to get haste rating when considering our… measly 1sec attackspeed… but I guess the math will prove my gruesome assumption wrong.
Oh also, Phaelia, I have some never-released screenshots to share with you on the new haircuts that I data-mined. Interested? :p (thinking of dispersing it between you and BBB actually, half of it to each)
Andriges last blog post..Around Azeroth: Lullaby and goodnight
I’m very wary of these changes, and I was just in the process of trying to write something up about it myself. Obviously I need to see what WotLK itemization looks like, but are we really going to want to start stacking Haste for more OoC procs? What’s this going to mean about hit rating? Great, so we have more base AGI–I’ll have to get back to you on this one.
Runycats last blog post..So, what are you wearing? Creating alternate gear sets.
@Andrige: That’s actually what I thought when he initially stated that value which would have invalidated the article I wrote about OOC procs from spellcasting. I was relieved to discover that it wasn’t true, though.
And yes, please! Hairstyles! Is it sad that changing my hair is one of the things I’m most excited about in the expansion? (Well, that and Revive. Have I mentioned I’m excited about Revive?)
@Runycat: I hope you’ll write something up anyway. Obviously you have a more accurate picture of how changes like this will affect the spec, and I’ll try to include a link and snippet from your perspective if you do!
A quick bit about PPM mechanics.
PPM is just a way of looking at the expected frequency of something. I’ve run into it a lot with paladin skills because Seal of Command is defined as a certain number of PPM, not a % chance on hit. To get to the % chance on hit you calculate PPM / ( weapon speed * 60 ). So 3.5 / ( 1 * 60 ) = 0.0583 = 5.83%. Once you’ve calculated that it’s just a % chance on hit like anything else. If the skill doesn’t have an internal cooldown you could get one every hit for an hour (if you were really really really lucky).
There’s no cap, and there aren’t any “lost” procs due to misses. Every hit is an independent event, so that quoted thing about hit rating and expertise helping you not “lose” a proc is kinda silly. The proc isn’t even determined until you hit. Really it should be that you want to hit more so that you can get more procs, because if you never hit you never had them to begin with.
Spectrums last blog post..Coefficients and Mana Efficiency in WotLK
In late tier 6, I retired my cat suit due to the scaling issues. In a melee group, with procs, buffs, etc, I was briefly going over 6500 AP and 60% crit, and maintaining over 5k AP most of the time. The DPS output was laughable compared to other DPS in the raid. These were the same DPS players that I was mostly keeping up with back in Tier 5 instances. I went Boomkin, and now put out enough damage again to make me not a waste of a DPS slot. But currently, there is little reason to bring more than 1 feral, and they should be tanking.
The Blue post above was brought up in our guild, and I would like to share my two cents, as posted in our guild forums, on the changes:
I will wait to see what these changes really add up to, but I think they are barking up the wrong tree. They are giving cats many chances to do more of what they are already doing. The basic problem is that cats aren’t doing enough damage per hit, due to not having a basic scaling ability.
Compare a caster class. There are abilities that increase damage out per X amount of spell damage by a certain percentage. That means that untalented, say an ability does 2000 damage, with 1000 spell damage gear. With such an ability/talent, it may do 2400 or 2500 instead. Boomkins have several talents that flat out increase the damage a spell does, or the damage a crit of a spell does. That means if you add another 100 spell damage, you get more than 100 additional damage due to the talents.
My gut feeling is that Blizzard is going after a way that is linear, not logarithmic, which is exactly what cats already have. The end result, if I am right, is going to be something that is never balanced correctly. At certain gear levels, it would be underpowered. At other gear levels, it would be severely overpowered. Instead of a smoothly scaling end result damage output, I think this is going to create something that is very twitchy and not possible to balance correctly. Hey, that sounds familiar! Thats what we have right now! They are just giving us more of it.
I see it going down like this:
Leveling to 80: Hey, this is actually working! Not bad at all!
Getting in to early 10 mans: Wow, by cat form is really getting strong! This rocks!
Geared from early 10s, getting some gear from early 25s: ZOMG OVERPOWERED!!!
Followed shortly by the nerfs.
Hey, this sounds familiar too! Just like BC!
Meugly. Don’t despair. They are looking very closely at the errors that were made previously and addressing them. I doubt that cat will ever be #1 on the meters, but it is an amazing damage form for what is essentially a tank on-call. There is something that you are not accounting for in your estimates. They have learned.
Compare Feral originally (oh boy do I remember those days), to Feral post-druid-revamp, to feral in BC. Yes. Feral currently has dps scaling issues in endgame for cat, and it has problems in pvp. But they are trying, and they have seen what the early-expansion nerf did. Having seen the vast improvements and the hole-patching they did in the first expansion, and the fact that they are listening to the problems being brought up and trying to handle them, I’d say give them a shot. Don’t give up yet ^_^ Worst case you’ll get a nice timely ‘toldja so’ in December.
I am not saying that cats should be top dps in a raid or anything. Well wait, I wouldn’t really mind it *that* much… Nah really, with the utility a car brings being top dps would be unfair to other classes. My reservations don’t have to do so much with the actual damage output per se, but with the way we get there.
It all comes down to not having any percentage based modifiers that work off each other, or off AP. Back in Kara, not long after BC (but after the Great Nerf of ‘07), cats were doing very high dps compared to other classes. Getting in to tier 4 and early tier 5, cats could were often topping the meters. At that point, cat form was overpowered. Fast forward to mid BT, and cat dps is at times 50% that of pure dps classes. Thats pretty underpowered.
The whole thing is, that without percentage based modifiers, they are essentially creating static modifiers. Plug those in to a game where practically everything else is percentage based, and you get something that will never quite fit in right.
Hopefully that explained it more clearly. I am running low on caffeine!
To be honest, since I went Boomkin about 6 weeks-ish ago, I’m having a blast, and not just sucking up a raid spot. DPS is where it should be, 80-90% that of the pure classes, and I gotta say, its pretty fun! Well, as long I get a Shadow Priest lol!
I think one area where LK will shine compare to BC will be in raid utility, synergy and cross-class buffs. LK will bring even more talents to increase raid-wide damage, hit and crit rating, or reduce the damage the boss does.
So don’t judge a spec or class based only on pure DPS. Even if your boomkin does 20% less damage, the extra 3% hit rating on the boss is a huge boost assuming the raid is geared accordingly. In a similar manner, the Feral “Infected Wounds” talent should help tank survivability by a lot (assuming it stacks on raid bosses - here’s hoping :)).
Solidstates last blog post..Alchemical Blood
@Spectrum: Thanks for the additional information.
OOC in TBC will have a 10 second internal cooldown. It’s something I discussed on my Omen of Clarity discussion for healers.
@Meugly: Great analysis of the current (and likely future) issues with Cat Form. Hundreds of players seem to be clamoring for abilities that don’t scale linearly, but it doesn’t semm like they’re listening.
@Zaira: I do hope they’ve learned; from the latest blue posts, though, it sounds like they intend to widen the gap between Cat and Bear Form in the expansion so that someone who does 90% of the damage of a Rogue (optimistically) is only 75% of the tank of a Warrior (these numbers are totally made up and meant to illustrate my point). At the same time, they’re increasing the hybrid nature of Warriors so that non-Protection Warriors can generate a lot more threat and be more viable OTs than before.
@Solidstate: I agree that we’re likely to see better raid utility, synergy, and cross-class buffs. This is probably because they’re creating the two different progression paths: 10-man and 25-man. In 10-man raids, flexibility is king; the ability to have an OT switch to DPS for a particular fight where only one tank is necessary is important and valuable. Druids in particular are going to do well in a 10-man.