Feral casting wrath on elegon

[huth]

On a side note, I wish Nurturing Instincts was a straightforward conversion from Agility to Intellect instead like Killer Instincts is, so Feral and Guardians benefit from the spell critical strike granted by Intellect and Moonfire is affected by it.

I understand they want to avoid Moonfire to be rotational for Feral or Guardians, but a Guardian would probably die or about to die if he tries while tanking and I really don't think it'd be a dps gain, 2 Feral autoattacks you miss when doing so (casterform+Moonfire+re-shift back to Cat Form GCDs) should hit harder.

They could also convert melee to spell crit for Feral and Guardian.

[Pascal]

Oh my god seriously. Reading this thread makes me want to smash my head into a wall.

HotW's on use is supposed to be a utility cooldown. It increases melee ability for balance druids and offensive spell ability for ferals because the idea was, if you are in a situation where you can't melee or melee is difficult, you can pretend to be balance for 45 seconds. If you are in a situation where it is hard to cast spells - constant interrupts, boss has reflect, spell resistance, you name it - you can go cat for 45 seconds. In that sense, it's a DPS cooldown. It shouldn't be a DPS increase, but rather a means to sustain your DPS in a situation where otherwise you may not be able to because of mechanics in your current situation.

The idea is not that you just pick an ideal time to pop it for a DPS cooldown to vastly increase your DPS.

It originally was so bad as a DPS cooldown that Blizzard added the 6% stat increases to make it an attractive DPS talent. Somewhere along the line, the percentage increases for balance -> feral and feral -> balance got calculated poorly to the effect that you could pretend to be a different DPS spec for 45 seconds for a vast and inappropriate DPS increase. It was never supposed to be this way, so I'm not sure where all of you are getting this "it's supposed to be a DPS cooldown" thing from. It never was. It. Never. Was. If it IS now, it's an accident, and they're trying to fix it without making the talent actually useless. Just because, right now, it's broken and causing completely ridiculous DPS increases, doesn't mean it was intended to work that way, so saying "it's supposed to be a DPS increase," is misinformed and misled.

I'm not sure why people think it's seriously supposed to be a DPS cooldown. It's something called utility. It's the ability to adapt to the situation, the 'hybrid' name druids used to be known for long ago.

[teddabear]

The stat-bonus is passive, the DPS part people talk about here is the 45 sec you have to use another specs abilities with higher damage/hitpercent.

Nothing funky there, check the tooltip. Not really sure what you mean by "not supposed to be one" really.

Huge fly in this logic soup. What part of HotW loses to other talents depending on the fight did you not understand. If you massively nerf a talent that is essentially tied with the other talents then you might as well remove the talent from the game.

---------- Post added 2012-10-13 at 04:54 PM ----------

Oh my god seriously. Reading this thread makes me want to smash my head into a wall.

HotW's on use is supposed to be a utility cooldown. It increases melee ability for balance druids and offensive spell ability for ferals because the idea was, if you are in a situation where you can't melee or melee is difficult, you can pretend to be balance for 45 seconds. If you are in a situation where it is hard to cast spells - constant interrupts, boss has reflect, spell resistance, you name it - you can go cat for 45 seconds. In that sense, it's a DPS cooldown. It shouldn't be a DPS increase, but rather a means to sustain your DPS in a situation where otherwise you may not be able to because of mechanics in your current situation.

The idea is not that you just pick an ideal time to pop it for a DPS cooldown to vastly increase your DPS.

It originally was so bad as a DPS cooldown that Blizzard added the 6% stat increases to make it an attractive DPS talent. Somewhere along the line, the percentage increases for balance -> feral and feral -> balance got calculated poorly to the effect that you could pretend to be a different DPS spec for 45 seconds for a vast and inappropriate DPS increase. It was never supposed to be this way, so I'm not sure where all of you are getting this "it's supposed to be a DPS cooldown" thing from. It never was. It. Never. Was. If it IS now, it's an accident, and they're trying to fix it without making the talent actually useless. Just because, right now, it's broken and causing completely ridiculous DPS increases, doesn't mean it was intended to work that way, so saying "it's supposed to be a DPS increase," is misinformed and misled.

I'm not sure why people think it's seriously supposed to be a DPS cooldown. It's something called utility. It's the ability to adapt to the situation, the 'hybrid' name druids used to be known for long ago.

Multiple mistakes here. The cooldown is far too long for it to fill this utility gap. If Blizzard is going ot change it to a 2 minute cooldown then fine but pretending that phases where melee twiddle their thumbs are 6+ minutes apart is ludicrous.

There is still no data showing Druids destroying the DPS charts, the data we do have shows the opposite. There are anecdotal stories of dominating the charts but zero data.

Blizzard has not said why they are nerfing HotW so far. We don't know if it is because of a certain spec, Raids, Challenge Modes, Arenas or Battlegrounds. They certainly were well aware of how it was working on the PTR before MoP was released.

[Deleted]

You are the one coming with claims here, while blizzard nerfed it to NOT do competitive dps when you use it as a cooldown. Now what is intended, i wonder..

Yeah, wasn't you I meant. I was thinking about huth.

My point is that it should be equal to, or at least very close to DoC when using it on CD. Of course nobody with a brain wants it to be overpowered. I could see picking this talent for fights where the boss is not reachable with melee, has air phases, etc. Some might not like DoC mechanic and prefer to wrath spam even still.

One other thing is that, while nerfed, we have NO data of dps after the nerf yet. It might be balanced, it might be UP, might even still be OP. So saying that it won't do competitive DPS is just throwing out assumptions at this point.

The choice should be there regardless. Having a go-to talent for the last tier would be really bad design.

[huth]

We have the exact changes imparted by the nerf. We could even calculate the exact change to DPS this will bring.

Huge fly in this logic soup. What part of HotW loses to other talents depending on the fight did you not understand. If you massively nerf a talent that is essentially tied with the other talents then you might as well remove the talent from the game.

Have you considered that this might be a separate, unrelated problem? Yes, this might make it weaker than the other options... but that might be because it is undertuned when used as intended, not necessarily because it was intended to be used as a DPS CD.

[exochaft]

Well, I think the problem with HotW is more towards how each individual spec uses it, how some double-dipping may occur, and in which area of the game it's being used in.

I remember when I commented on HotW back during the beta, and I stated that the passives should be the main portion of the talent while the on-use portion should fill a supplementary role while not exceeding the potential of a druid spec'd for that role. Simply said, if you Guardian, the talent shouldn't make you better than a Feral/Moonkin/Resto when you pop HotW (and this applies to every combination you think of). However, there are side effects to this...

If you haven't seen any of my other posts on this topic, I'm NOT a fan of being able to double-dip with HotW by switching weapons (where I think a good portion of the HotW headache is coming from). As a Guardian druid, if I switch from my agility weapon to a 463 caster weapon, I add roughly 40-50% to the damage of my Wraths... that's pretty crazy. I'm certain Ferals will likely see similar increases, which leads to higher HotW Wrath numbers than expected by Blizz. If Blizz did something along the lines of Feral/Guardian not benefiting from spell power on weapons, which has been done with other classes, some of this "zomg HotW is too powerful" would be a non-issue. Unfortunately, as the changes go, now you likely need to get a spell power weapon as Feral/Guardian.

Breaking certain weapons for druid specs wouldn't solve all the issues, but that's when you reduce the scaling of HotW where double-dipping via weapons cannot be avoided or doesn't contribute to the problem.

Be that as it may, HotW needs to pack some power behind it in order for the on-use to actually be useful. No one should doubt that the 6% passive is the meat-and-potatoes of the talent, but if no one presses the button, it is a design failure.

[teddabear]

I'm NOT a fan of being able to double-dip with HotW by switching weapons (where I think a good portion of the HotW headache is coming from).

I think there is a LOT of agreement with this philosophy. Now if someone will just send Blizzard the memo.