Concerns regarding Bear avoidance/mitigation

[Gorg0n]

I quote myself from the official EU forums:

I just made an in-dept TL;DR post about this, but managed to eraze it all before posting, so I will cut to the case and keep this "short".

Bears get Savage Defense to compensate for our lack of avoidance. Savage Defense is the reason Bears scale insanely well, and in a very non-linear manner. The problem with this unique tank-mechanic is that it is quite inferior to avoidance in the beginning of an expansion where stats are generally "low" compared to a later stage of the expansion.

The reason Savage Defence scale so well is because it is greatly based on synergy from other stats. More hp = more ap, more agi = more ap and crit %, more ap = higher absorption values, more crit/haste (even white hit-rating if you want to be picky) = more Savage Defence procs. This means that essentially, our mitigation/avoidance is based upon stam, agi, dodge, ap, crit, haste, (hit). Warrior/Paladin, as an example, only rely on block, parry and dodge for mitigation/avoidance. This leads to Warriors/Paladins having an easier time obtaining decent survivability, than Bears.

Blizzard nerfed Savage Defence which resulted in less mitigated damage. Then there was made a decision that Bear HP-pools were to high, and our HP was nerfed. Savage Defence was nerfed even more along with it (because of the AP we lose when our HP-pool shrinks).

I've tanked HCs non stop for 3 weeks now (both with all out *stat*->dodge reforging and agi-geming/enchanting, all out stam-gemming/enchanting *stat*->dodge reforging, and hybrid gems for socket bonus and a balance between agi and stam) and wanted to spice it up a little bit, so I went Resto OS yesterday. My discoveries were quite shocking. After healing an equally geared Warrior I noticed how much Bear HP actually "spike" in comparison. One of the reasons for this is obviously that Savage Defence is pretty bad versus multiple targets, but the difference were so huge that I had to ask him about his actual values. He had 47% parry/block? and something like 7-20% on each of the two remaining stats, if I remember correctly. This is more than 30% more avoidance than I got with my not so awesome 32% dodge. Naturally this will save the healers a lot of mana and, as far as I know, healers running OOM is usually what causes wipes at this stage of the game. You do the math..

Is all of this intended? Do I fail to see something essential in my analysis?

Turned out this post didn't end up as short as I intended, but I hope people will take their time to read it and join in on the "debate".

[deneweth]

No one in heroics has 30% more avoidance than you. My pally is in 351 ilvl and is only starting to flirt with 27% total dodge + parry while using stat food. He has 40% chance to block 40% of damage because I gem and enchant for mastery.

If you've been doing heroics for 3 weeks and have been doing fine then I think druids will be fine, especially if you're going to scale so well with more gear. You can't really make generalizations about the state of a spec with anecdotal evidence.

[Blahu - Twisting Nether]

I know for my bear I hit around 30% total avoidance. I gem and reforge all my haste and some hit/expertise into dodge. If you have a good amount of mitigation and you manage your bear cd's properly (barkskin, feral instincts and frenzied regeneration) then you should be fine. I'm always paranoid about this and ask my healer at the end of a run if it was difficult to heal me. They usually respond telling me it was very easy,

[Gorg0n]

No one in heroics has 30% more avoidance than you. My pally is in 351 ilvl and is only starting to flirt with 27% total dodge + parry while using stat food. He has 40% chance to block 40% of damage because I gem and enchant for mastery.

If you've been doing heroics for 3 weeks and have been doing fine then I think druids will be fine, especially if you're going to scale so well with more gear. You can't really make generalizations about the state of a spec with anecdotal evidence.

It is not anecdotal, and my concerns are not aimed towards 5-man groups, but raids. I have tanked in BWD, BoT and BH and I have already provided the numbers to back up my arguments. 40% chance to reduce incoming physical damage by 40% + 20-30% avoidance is vastly superior compared to a proc that occurs on 50% of all crits and absorbs around 13k damage (this ability is also requires you to stack hit/expertise, and require you to ramp up Vengeance before being 100% effective) + 30-35% avoidance. You don't have to be a rocket-scientist to see that.

[Elunedra]

It is not anecdotal, and my concerns are not aimed towards 5-man groups, but raids. I have tanked in BWD, BoT and BH and I have already provided the numbers to back up my arguments. 40% chance to reduce incoming physical damage by 40% + 20-30% avoidance is vastly superior compared to a proc that occurs on 50% of all crits and absorbs around 13k damage (this ability is also requires you to stack hit/expertise, and require you to ramp up Vengeance before being 100% effective) + 30-35% avoidance. You don't have to be a rocket-scientist to see that.

it is tru SD is a mechenic thet gets vastly OP when you overgear contant as its a solid absorbed amount but when trying new content its a lot less usefull

[deneweth]

It is not anecdotal, and my concerns are not aimed towards 5-man groups, but raids. I have tanked in BWD, BoT and BH and I have already provided the numbers to back up my arguments. 40% chance to reduce incoming physical damage by 40% + 20-30% avoidance is vastly superior compared to a proc that occurs on 50% of all crits and absorbs around 13k damage (this ability is also requires you to stack hit/expertise, and require you to ramp up Vengeance before being 100% effective) + 30-35% avoidance. You don't have to be a rocket-scientist to see that.

Its actually the text book definition of anecdotal. You have an anecdote about how when you were healing a warrior tank it was 'better' than a druid tank. You can't generalize that to say that all warriors are better than all druids. You certainly can't make any comparison to paladins or DKs.

From your original post I get the impression that you think the grass is greener for warriors because you don't know how they work. Blocking is not avoidance, and you actually have quite high avoidance. You can't judge tanks solely on avoidance though, you have to look at the entire picture which includes things like armor, HP, blocking, cooldowns, savage defense, and self heals. You can't compare your savage defense with my block when you gem for dodge and i gem for mastery. Leader of the pack self heals probably do a lot more than my word of glory self heals, and you don't have to sacrifice threat to get them. If you think bears are the only tanks that have to get hit + experitse then you are mistaken.

I will again point to the fact that you said you've been tanking heroics daily for 3 weeks straight. If you're doing fine whats the problem? Other tanks don't have 30% more avoidance than you like you thought. You healed a druid and he seemed spikier but at that point you already had the idea in your head that bears were underpowered and were looking for proof. You didn't say that you had a much harder time keeping the bear alive. I think we can conclude that both warriors and bears can both be viable heroic tanks.

it is tru SD is a mechenic thet gets vastly OP when you overgear contant as its a solid absorbed amount but when trying new content its a lot less usefull

Wouldn't AP scaling from vengeance help on new content since you'll be taking more damage, and should have higher health going into a new tier of content? SD scales with gear, gear scales with content tier. Blocking scales with the mob's attack. If anything SD is better than block for doing older content.

[Gorg0n]

I quote myself

my concerns are not aimed towards 5-man groups, but raids.

40% chance to reduce incoming physical damage by 40% + 20-30% avoidance is vastly superior compared to a proc that occurs on 50% of all crits and absorbs around 13k damage (this ability is also requires you to stack hit/expertise, and require you to ramp up Vengeance before being 100% effective) + 30-35% avoidance.

Of course you would have to look at the bigger picture (which actually is quite similar when it comes to druids and warriors), but what I'm trying to point out is that our main mitigation-mechanic is inferior to block in an early state of an expansion because of all the numbers involved (hit, crit, ap, agi, stam, haste) while Warriors and Paladins rely on block and str. This leads to warriors and paladins being able to gem/reforge for block and get insane mitigation values, compared to Bears and DKs. You can not honestly say that a 50% chance on 40% of my successful attacks to reduce the next source of physical dmg by 13000 is equally good as a 40% chance to reduce all incoming damage by 40%?

And please refrain yourself from trying to tell me what is going on in my head.. It makes you look rather arrogant. First off all, I believed druids were fine and the QQ were coming from people who did not have a clue about game mechanics etc. My guild does not have a Prot Warrior so I had never seen Warrior mitigation values before I started healing in HC. Then I notice how much easier it is to keep up Warriors compared to myself and DKs I have healed and proceed to talk to the Warrior about mechanics and values in order to clear out the possibility of a gear being the issue.
Second: I picked up healing because my guild will not start raiding officially until 9th of January and I was bored with tanking the same instances time and time again and wanted to try something new.

[Deleted]

Bring the player, not the class. Really.

[Elunedra]

Bring the player, not the class. Really.

not if you want todo progressive content

[deneweth]

You still can't compare a dodge focused druid's mastery stat to a mastery stat focused warrior or paladin and ignore that you actually have more avoidance. SD is weaker than block because mastery is the best stat for warriors and pallies and we gem for it and you may have reforged mastery to dodge.

Block does not reduce all damage by 40%. For paladins it reduces a single melee attack by 40%. It does not effect spells. To get the value of one SD proc I would have to block a hit that would have been for 30,000+. Keep in mind that you are focused on dodge and not SD. I'm sure we can come up with a situation where block is better than savage defense, but there will also be situations where savage defense is better. We are also not factoring in things like leader of the pack heals, or armor and HP. There are just too many factors to try to balance a single part to another.

I'm sorry if I sound arrogant to you, I'm getting whats in your head from your posts. If I got the wrong impression please correct me. The way I read it you're doing content fine, but you think your class is weaker. You tried healing both classes and your pug warrior felt better than the pug druid. I'm fine with this, but I take issue with is

He had 47% parry/block? and something like 7-20% on each of the two remaining stats, if I remember correctly. This is more than 30% more avoidance than I got with my not so awesome 32% dodge.

You're throwing numbers around like its factual, but you're trying to compare apples and oranges. Just say druids are underpowered if thats what you think. There's no need to even bring up block if you don't understand it. 32% dodge is pretty awesome btw

[Deleted]

SD must be a pain to balance which makes me wonder why Blizz has the ability as it is in the first place.

Now, deneweth. I think you're misunderstanding the concerns regarding block vs SD in tanking multiple mobs. The amount it absorbs isn't a big factor. The fact that every hit no matter how small it is, will remove the absorb shield. And the uptime of this shield is limited by the bears GCD so obviously... the scaling with number of mobs being tanked is not as good to a tank with something like block where number of mobs isn't a factor.

But yes, there are other factors. Armor and hp are the same now across the board but we do have our leader of pack heals

[Infort]

Even tho our avoidance is lower, we've been struck too hard with the nerfbat in terms of armor.
I've made several post both here and on the offical forums, cba. to link everything, but I guess
this convo I had with a GM last night (Took me 17-18 days to get a proper answer on my tickets.)
Our armor is lower then the other tanks.

Part 1


Part 2

[Gunslinger]

Thing is like this block is a nice mechanic and great for more than 1 mob since our shield is a bit hit & miss having a 50% chance to proc of a crit.

Lets keep this in mind. A raid boss will hit you for around 25-30k melee ( lets take 30k into account ).

Now lets see what happens when each class blocks:
Warrior: with mastery he can block 60% of the dmg so he could block 18k, normaly he would block 9k.
Paladin: 40% dmg blocked is 12k dmg
DK: well after he gets hit he can make a shield for 27% of that value so lets put the shield he makes at around 9k
Druid: you could easily get to 150k HP buffed and with at least 14k atk pwr that would make your minum shield at 7k with mastery but with maximum Vengeance stack it can get to over 14k blocked.

Basically our block ramps up where as other tanks have a constant flow in their mitigation numbers.

When faced with multiple mobs the story changes a bit since our shield can break on any minimal dmg we can take more damage then other tanks.

However to the original poster, when comparing druids to warriors in heroic please keep in mind that Warriors can STUN his opponents quite often preventing them to deal damage to him. Keep in mind however that our block scales with atk pwr and with vengeance as soon as we'll get better gear our shields will be better and better.

[axxey]

My only problem with SD is the chance to proc being 50% on crit which is already a low chance, vs paladin and warrior's mastery scaling the chance of it to happen when ours only scales the amount when it does actually happen.
Chance of a chance just sucks.

[Deleo]

I have to agree druid and DK feel more spiky compared to Warrior and Paladin.

[Deleted]

Really don't feel weaker than any other tank atm. Damage taken is roughly the same. Cooldowns are there to be used.

[Gorg0n]

You still can't compare a dodge focused druid's mastery stat to a mastery stat focused warrior or paladin and ignore that you actually have more avoidance. SD is weaker than block because mastery is the best stat for warriors and pallies and we gem for it and you may have reforged mastery to dodge.

Block does not reduce all damage by 40%. For paladins it reduces a single melee attack by 40%. It does not effect spells. To get the value of one SD proc I would have to block a hit that would have been for 30,000+. Keep in mind that you are focused on dodge and not SD. I'm sure we can come up with a situation where block is better than savage defense, but there will also be situations where savage defense is better. We are also not factoring in things like leader of the pack heals, or armor and HP. There are just too many factors to try to balance a single part to another.

I'm sorry if I sound arrogant to you, I'm getting whats in your head from your posts. If I got the wrong impression please correct me. The way I read it you're doing content fine, but you think your class is weaker. You tried healing both classes and your pug warrior felt better than the pug druid. I'm fine with this, but I take issue with is



You're throwing numbers around like its factual, but you're trying to compare apples and oranges. Just say druids are underpowered if thats what you think. There's no need to even bring up block if you don't understand it. 32% dodge is pretty awesome btw

If there are too many factors to determine what class got the highest survivability, you would have to rely on the healers to tell you what classes are the most mana-consuming/hardest to heal, and judging from mine and several guildies' experience druids and DKs are a lot "harder" to keep up than Warriors and Paladins. The general conception (at least on EJ) is that Warriors are the superior tanking-class at the moment.

To present my concerns regarding Savage Defence in an easier to understand-way: Paladins/Warriors only have to stack str, block, parry, mastery and stam. That's 4 stats. The rest of their stats are not affecting their survivability. Druids on the other hand have to stack agi, dodge, haste, hit, expertise, crit, stam, mastery. Yes, we can gem/enchant only for agi and get like a 33% dodge-chance, but that will gimp one of our main mitigation mechanics (Savage Defence).

What people mean by Druids starting off weak, then to proceed to skale immensly as they upgrade their gear is somewhat comparable to DPS scaling. The higher ilvl you have, the more DPS-increase you will get from an upgrade. The reason is this - Example: Rogue does 100 DPS from autoattacks. He gets an upgrade that amounts to 10% haste. He will now deal 110 DPS from autoattacks, in other words a 10 DPS increase. He proceeds to gear up and after aquiring more ap, crit and hit his autoattacks are amounting to 150 DPS. He gets a new 10% haste upgrade, and this time, his autoattack DPS increases to 165 DPS. He now get 15 DPS from the same 10% haste. This is because the stats synergizes, and this is why Druid tanks start off very weak, and then proceed to scale immensly untill they eventually get to the OP mark. I would be totally fine with Blizz nerfing us in the future if that happens, but then I would like them to buff us now, so that we dont just get the short end of the stick.

[littlepiggy]

That's 4 stats. The rest of their stats are not affecting their survivability. Druids on the other hand have to stack agi, dodge, haste, hit, expertise, crit, stam, mastery. Yes, we can gem/enchant only for agi and get like a 33% dodge-chance, but that will gimp one of our main mitigation mechanics (Savage Defence).

Uhh, what? We do NOT stack haste, we get crit and, for the moment, mastery from gear. Dodge is going to be in a hybrid gem or two and reforged for. Hit and Expertise are nice on gear, but not necessary.

Soo, Agi, Dodge, Stamina, Mastery. Oh look, 4 (all you did was list every stat that does something for us, even the ones that are fairly unimportant).

Savage defense is weak versus multiple mobs, which is lucky for us that all bosses, minus the rare few, do not have multiple adds which mess us up. I take less damage than our prot paladin in raids, this is also the general consensus with a lot of good druids on the official forums.

There was also a test done on the beta, right before it ended that showed Bear's being the best tank in full T11. Unless we scale massively with gear, we cannot possibly be far behind any other tank.

Lastly, why would you say the class with the most avoidance has the least...

[Mroz123]

From my experience bears are the hardest to heal in HC dungeons, paladins are the easiest one. It almost seems you don't even have to heal very good paladin tank
But on the raid boss they are pretty the same.

[Deleted]

Uhh, what? We do NOT stack haste, we get crit and, for the moment, mastery from gear. Dodge is going to be in a hybrid gem or two and reforged for. Hit and Expertise are nice on gear, but not necessary.

Soo, Agi, Dodge, Stamina, Mastery. Oh look, 4 (all you did was list every stat that does something for us, even the ones that are fairly unimportant).

Savage defense is weak versus multiple mobs, which is lucky for us that all bosses, minus the rare few, do not have multiple adds which mess us up. I take less damage than our prot paladin in raids, this is also the general consensus with a lot of good druids on the official forums.

There was also a test done on the beta, right before it ended that showed Bear's being the best tank in full T11. Unless we scale massively with gear, we cannot possibly be far behind any other tank.

Lastly, why would you say the class with the most avoidance has the least...

I think he means what gear we are given, plate tanking gear never comes with haste, ours does