@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.

Solidstates last blog post..Alchemical Blood

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!

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.

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!

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

@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!

Runycats last blog post..So, what are you wearing? Creating alternate gear sets.

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