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  1. #41

    Re: The much-maligned bearkitty spec

    Quote Originally Posted by enigmaran
    Finally, to the person who said.

    "If you absolutely don't see any space for such a hybrid spec in a progression raid, then frankly maybe you're doing some progression fights wrong."

    There's really no space for such a hybrid spec. Progrrssion raids hinge on people doing their job properly. That spec prevents you from filling any role in the raid properly.
    This. You won't see any serious raiding guilds using hybrid kittybears.

    For more casual play, sure go for it if it makes you happy, but even then you're most likely hindering the group you're playing with, not helping.
    I don't hate you. I'm just not necessarily excited about your existence.

  2. #42

    Re: The much-maligned bearkitty spec

    I apologize if I came across harshly, Sidonis. I do have ToGC/ICC kills on other toons. I'm not sure why you think my druid doesn't have any ICC by the way. At any rate, I understand where you're coming from, and that you believe what you do strongly, and that your reasons aren't bad per se.

    But no one has put forth a logical, numbers-based argument against the conditional viability or average viability of a hybrid spec. Anyone wanting to respond, please read that again- conditional viability or average viability. It's easy to rail against the idea of a hybrid, and clearly it's not the ideal spec for all circumstances, but if you want to convince the forum (and me) then give us numbers.* Let's avoid the more complicated issue, conditional viability, and focus on average viability. You have two points to prove: the impairment in tanking from being a hybrid is significant, and the return on a hybrid dps is lower than a full-spec dps for 'enough' fights for it to be significant. kgo! Seriously, I'm interested in hearing this. Numbers and talents.

    *I wasn't able to find anything current at EJ- if you find someone else's numbers please link.

  3. #43

    Re: The much-maligned bearkitty spec

    Quote Originally Posted by getefix
    Jaraxxus (between portals/volcanos) : Jaraxxus is not a DPS race. The portals are but the mistress comes out very shortly after the portal spawns. You're not going to make much difference there.
    True, but being able to throw some dps on him between portals & volcanoes is nice. I prefer to OT this fight since he's a PITA to dps as a cat as he constantly spins and gives position messages.

    Lady Deathwhisper: Not a DPS race really. You'll spend max of 4-5 15 second periods on the boss after the adds are dead. Your hybrid spec will give you what? an extra 750 DPS? That's 56k dmg. Not very much in the grand scheme of things.
    I'm not in favor of a hybrid spec at all, but as I said I do put points into two cat/bear talents (shredding attacks and King of the Jungle which will become popular when more ferals have 4t10). http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#0ZxGGsfbzceRccuVkbE0z is what I run for bear. I run tank spec/gear but once I drag my add from the back to the side the other tank taunts and I go cat to help dps the adds/boss until the next set spawn and then I play taunt tag with the other two tanks in phase 2.

    After spending about 40 minutes the first night learning the fight we haven't had more than 3 add phases on her in 10 or 25 man. We almost got her in 2 add phases last night but we waited to make sure the timers were correct.

    Kreth, I'm not sure what you mean by viabilities. You're more of a liability in a cat/bear spec unless you out gear the content. You're missing rather valuable talents for each form. You're missing glyphs that increase your dps or survivability by a significant margin. It really just doesn't work for progression content.

  4. #44

    Re: The much-maligned bearkitty spec

    Anyone who has a survival cooldown and healers who have an aggrowatch mod (I'm certain there's one in grid) can save the day.

    I've evasion tanked nearly every boss in the game (and actually survived the duration of Evasion, too) due to wipes, sometimes the DPS are too busy panicking to do any good, but I've finished fights on bosses with my poor little rogue at the helm more than once.

    Does this mean I should spec into all the survival talents in all my trees to make that "off chance" more of a viable situation? HELL NO.

    If what you're looking to do is Offtank most of the time with your spec, but be able to do damage when you're not needed, on those fights where add-phases are shorter than the boss fight itself, have a spec for that, sure, whatever. I know back in Vanilla, there was a popular offtanking spec that had a lot of points in Fury for extra damage for just that reason. But that "offtank" spec was for trash, and still required you to be defcapped for the mobs in question.

    But that spec should not be your main spec. Just like my old "lolwut AOE spec (and yes I had one and yes the numbers were HUGE pre-FoK nerf)" was not for anything but Naxx trash and Hodir worms.

    Pick a role. Make that role your main spec. Take your hybrid spec and make that your offspec. That way you can serve a real purpose when you're not trying to do two roles at once (during those few fights when two roles at once aren't necessarily a bad thing).

    But don't come in here and sass the best theorycrafters who can use blanket statements because blanket statements ACTUALLY APPLY.

    You want numbers? You've already provided us with some. Your kitty DPS during DPS-only fights is capped at 5k. You could be doing WAY more than that. But you don't, on the random off chance that you might be called on to tank for a few seconds, which is something that you could do without sacrificing any DPS.

    Use a pure kitty spec on DPS-only fights. Use your offtank spec when you're offtanking (and only when you're ACTUALLY offtanking, not "maybe the tank will die so I should be ready to offtank"). Don't try to use your offtank spec when you should be providing max DPS. You're only holding your guild back.

    To reiterate: BARE IS FOR TANK, CAT IS FOR FITE - and nothing should come between the two.



    Click on my website link - it's the whole history of Azeroth in point form!

  5. #45

    Re: The much-maligned bearkitty spec

    I'll just throw in my 2 cents on this one.

    I would venture to say that druids are the ONLY class that could get away with DPS/Tank with the same gear w/o changing specs. I'm not saying you'll DPS or Tank very well, but it is possible.

    That being said, Blizz does not design fights around a tank going DPS or a DPS going tank. That would be saying that Blizz designs fights around feral druids, and that would be very presumptuous. Blizz has come down hard to make sure that druids can only be a tank OR dps well with one spec, since the rest of the WoW community found this to be very unbalanced, and rightly so. This isn't a "here's X math to prove such," Blizz has come out and specifically stated what assumptions they design raid content for, and I'm pretty sure I didn't see "We assume there is at least one tank/dps hybrid." If you NEED to design your raids around this, you have bigger issues at hand, even for progression.

    For that list of fights someone posted that support a bear/cat spec... no, just no. All you have shown is that you have weak full-time tanks or dps for those fights. Do not hinder your abilities to tank or dps just because someone else can't do their job well, that's just compounding your problems instead of fixing them.

    But I digress, you wanted numbers right? Alright, I'd say, barring glyphs, that's pretty close to one of my PvP specs I play around with, glyphs being slight off (I tend to PvP with glyphs of Rip/Shred/Barkskin). Now I actually did do Saurfang 25man as PvP spec just because the raid leader didn't care since the content is not demanding (plus my main spec is tank, and I offer to DPS cuz I'm too lazy to click off Maul glyph, and it gets me in trouble), so I can give you an actual number between my PvP spec (aka, your bear/cat hybrid) and a full PvE dps spec. Full PvE spec last week I pumped out around 8844 DPS, and this week I think I was around 7k if I recall (logs haven't been posted yet). So on a fight that heavily promotes a kitty playstyle, I lost 1.8k DPS. Take an average 4 minute fight, 432k damage loss. From this standpoint, if you went a full-blown kitty DPS spec instead of a hybrid bear/cat spec, the fight could've been over before a tank died and you saved a raid from a 1% wipe. On the flip side, since my bars look very similar for tanking and pvp spec, sometimes I forget to respec and end up tanking in PvP spec. There's no mistake about it, you will notice the difference, and so will the rest of the raid. Gear can carry you through a fight with the wrong spec to some degree, but you better outgear the fight.
    “Society is endangered not by the great profligacy of a few, but by the laxity of morals amongst all.”
    “It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights — the 'right' to education, the 'right' to health care, the 'right' to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are the rations of slavery — hay and a barn for human cattle.”
    ― Alexis de Tocqueville

  6. #46

    Re: The much-maligned bearkitty spec

    Hybrid specs fail. Don't do it. Stop bringing your groups down. Stop being cheap and just spec cat or bear.

    I gave up about 2 weeks after dual spec came out... I respecced/reglyphed almost bi-daily between full resto, oomkin, cat, and bear.
    Quote Originally Posted by Okard View Post
    they took out chill of the throne, if you havent looked. Youre going to do 30% less than youre used to.

  7. #47

    Re: The much-maligned bearkitty spec

    Quote Originally Posted by Jaiie
    Perhaps, just as importantly, exochaft, the BearTTL Calculator on Toskk's site can, in fact, provide numbers as to a bear's survivability minus specific talents (or with them, for that matter). And, of course, the same site has a DPS Gear Method which will show how dps suffers without appropriate talents.

    It takes a few minutes of effort to yield very measurable benchmarks. Can it predict best and worst case scenarios? No. But what it can tell someone like Kreft: This is how badly you're going to hurt if you don't spec appropriately.

    If he wants numbers, he has the resources to do so. At this point, however, I think even he acknowledges he's not sure what his point was.
    Yeah, he does have resources like that, but they're based on models and may/may not actually yield practical results that'll match in-game outcomes. Better than nothing, though! =D I just happened to have a situation recently occur that happened to yield an actual in-game number to answer his question, just throwing it out.
    “Society is endangered not by the great profligacy of a few, but by the laxity of morals amongst all.”
    “It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights — the 'right' to education, the 'right' to health care, the 'right' to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are the rations of slavery — hay and a barn for human cattle.”
    ― Alexis de Tocqueville

  8. #48

    Re: The much-maligned bearkitty spec

    Thanks for the numbers, exochaft.

    Thanks for the link Jaiie, though your past statement seems odd since I've stated several times in this thread my point is to figure out whether it's worth having a second feral spec or picking up a resto or boom spec. Also you got my name wrong. The tool you provided does not seem to include glyphs (which can be swapped out fight-by-fight anyway). It does seem like a cool tool. The one and only skill listed that my spec does not include is infected wounds, and I will be raiding with a DK specced into ITT.

    So, setting aside the benefits of a hybrid spec, so far the numbers suggest a 20% damage reduction while dpsing without swapping glyphs during fights which matter; given swapping glyphs, the only dps talent missing would be master shapeshifter's 4% crit, so perhaps a 5% difference in dps? And a 0% tank TTL reduction (given a DK or another tank on the target).

    Can anyone else contribute some numbers or specific talent analyses?

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