Savage Defense double dipping?

[lawomous]

Been playing my Feral Druid on PTR and I think something that needs to be looked at is that Savage Defense is going to be scaling way too well in Cata, perhaps giving Bears a huge lead on other tanks in damage mitigation.

In WotLK: Savage Defense only scaled with one thing, AP.

Now in Cata, as a bear gears up;

1) AP values will scale up.
2) Their Mastery lets this ability scale even more.
But especially this:
3) With the new tank passive, Vengeance as raid bosses scale up the damage, druids Savage Defense will be much much stronger, especially with their high health pools.


They said Vengeance was intended to give Tank threat and DPS a way to scale for all tanks, but I think this is an unintended secondary benefit only for druids.

[Voytrekk]

I think this effect will happen with Death Knights as well. Their mastery talent will give them a shield when they heal with death strike, and the heal is based on a percentage of health. As for paladins and warriors, their chance to block will be increased, reducing damage more over the fight. As gear gets better, the amount they will block for will go up, evening out masteries for all tanks.

[Alski]

Shhh, don't go telling those people over at Bliz HQ now.

[Jodah]

If it becomes too much we will get nerfed or the other tanks will get buffed. No reason to worry about it until Cata is actually out.

[huth]

Death Strike in 4.0 is based on damage taken, not on your health, though it always heals for at least 10% of your MaxHealth.

Aside from that, the mastery double dip is obviously intended, and Vengeance simply increases AP, so there is no double dipping there.
I seriously doubt that Blizzard is unaware of this. Savage Defense numbers will be adjusted with Vengeance in mind.

[Madsen]

Savage defense has already been nerfed once and will be nerfed again.

[exochaft]

The ability for SD to feed off of Vengeance is very well intended.

Will it be nerfed in the future? Eh, not so certain about that, but some people think the most recent drop from 75% AP to 65% AP was because we were too strong... in reality, it's because warriors/paladins were too weak at the outset (they were taking much more damage than DKs and druid tanks). Sounds like just flipping words and saying the same thing, but the intent behind the change means so much more than the actual changes themselves.

It comes down to scaling, and trust me, Blizz will be watching this like a hawk.

The unique thing about druid tanks is how our mastery affects our survivability... DKs fall into a similar situation, but we're unique from each other. Mastery for druid tanks increases how much we can absorb (same for DKs) with our "blocking mechanic," however warrior/paladin tanking mastery increases the chance they will block and the chance of blocking more damage. So why do we care? It's all about how we scale as we progress through content. Paladin/warrior tanks have a static amount their shield block will absorb, 30% normal and 60% critical... as the bosses hit harder, they will block more damage (since using a %damage reduction scales easily)... as an added bonus, toss on some mastery and you'll be blocking more often and getting more damage reduction over time.

If you've leveled a bear tank on the beta, you'll notice that our AP really doesn't go up from 80 to 85 (at 85, it's not even at live raid buffed level), so how does our mitigation scale? If we throw on more Mastery, we'll be able to absorb more damage per SD... as we gear up and get bigger HP bars, Vengeance goes up, and the amount SD absorbs stacks up. So great, our SD absorbs a ton of damage... but none of those mechanics increases how often we can "block" an attack. On the surface, this looks like it could lead to situations where we can reduce more incoming damage than warrior/paladins (which was happening on the beta).

How do you balance this w/o completely breaking the system? Two ways... either drop the chance to proc SD or drop the amount absorbed. If you drop the chance to proc SD, our damage will seem rather spiky in some respects... if you drop the amount absorbed, you can evenly distribute the damage taken a bit more (plus it's much less of a balancing nightmare later if things have to be tweaked). Blizz obviously went with lowering the amount absorbed by SD so we're balanced in the early stages of the game. What happens down the road heavily depends on how Blizz itemizes gear.

[Purrfunctory]

^ Nicely stated Exochaft

[Beetlejuice]

This "double dipping" is very much needed. Don't forget, the shield blocks are %based. So if our block mechanic doesn't also at least somewhat scale with incoming dmg it will be either completely worthless in endgame content or grossly overpowered in hero instances.

The only thing i would worry about is how bad it hurts for pulls since our block mechanic has a ramp up time.

[Elunedra]

i havent tested this but i also assume the AP gained tru vegence will be increase by an extra 35% becase fo +10% raid buff and +255 passive feral ability

but our chance to actualy proc SD depends on our crit so using pulverise is actualy a way to increase migation :/ i know its wierd but its tru lol