I just really see an ever worse problem with itemization now than the armor trinkets/rings of the past. Before you knew you were going to try to get the armor trinket and then you were set. It wasn’t fun but at least you had a best in slot to work for. I don’t see it being any different now, just a different item. We only use agility/dodge for mitigation and stamina never hurts, so there will be a Commendation of Kael’thas type trinket in WotLK and we will simply have to go for that instead of the Defender’s Code. It’s not like they nerfed armor so now we want the shield block trinket, or the parry trinket, or the +defense/stamina trinket. We’re in the same boat just not the armor boat anymore.

Also, from my recent experience i’ve noticed with the gear homongenization it is harder for a feral to gear up than a warrior. We are two tanking BT right now, and every single time a piece of +def palte drops of a boss, it goes to the warrior without even a roll because he’s the only one who can use it. A nice leather piece drops and I have to roll against two-three rogues and maybe even an enhancement shaman for it.

I can’t wait till I have to roll on the high agility, stam, +hit/attack power neck that might drop. We run with 5 hunters, 2 rogues, 1-2 enchanment shammies and two DPS warriors. The warrior tank gets his armor/def/parry/block/stam tank necklace by default and I have a 1-9 shot of outrolling dps for my “tank” necklace.

I am hopefully that it will all work out though. I have been having a blast tanking lately and I honestly don’t care if we have an armor niche or no niche as long as I can still MT for my guild it’s all good. So let’s hope GC and the gang get it all worked out. They did a nice job on our new abilities so i’ve got my finger’s crossed.

One thing I’d not take too seriously right this second is anyone that professes to decide what the actual armor modifier would have to be at 80 raiding.

As I said in my speculation post, the Developers are going to have to decide for themselves what target number they intend Bears to hit to be balanced with other Tanks, and then use that as the baseline for designing modifications, while lookin at how such a chjange will scale using Rogue leather armor levels.

I don’t really think that selecting a collection of currently listed Naxx gear and other drops of comparable iLevels, while certainly a good starting point for a rough idea, is a valid basis for QQing just yet.

Seriously though, sorry to hear your having issues. I love it!!! Yaaayyy for swipe and the glyph of maul. So I guess mileage will vary. Our warrior MT is actually bottom of the tank damage meters on all types of tanking jobs: aoe clearing, single pulls, and boss fights. The druid (me) is at the top for the tanks, and the pallies are in the middle. The warriror is MT because of his time and committment to the guild, not because of the mechanics of the class any more.

Your thinking on hybrids is too simplistic, and you’re taking some of GCs comments out of context. The bottom line is that all 4 tank classes are viable main tanks in wrath, so a guild that chooses to progress new content with any combination of tanks will not be at a disadvantage. Dont forget gear plays a large role in all this too – I’m not sure if your gear is comparable to the other tanks in your guild. But mechanically and from a design pov, and from my own recent experience in (nerfed) t6 raids, I believe Blizzard have done an excellent job in balancing the 3 tanking classes. Dont be depressed!

I don’t see any nerfs to my moderately geared druid, in fact it was maybe even easier than last weeks run.

Before we were going to take the “Tank” off slot pieces. Most of those items have some combination of nice armor, good +stam, +def, +dodge, +block and +parry. Some of those stats are terrible for us, especially block and parry, but it was ok because we got a huge amount of armor from the item. Now we will all get “DPS” necks/rings/cloaks and hope we can find some that have mostly agility, stamina and some other stat like +hit or expertise, but most likely Attack Power. That will be ok, the agility will be nice but the stamina on that piece will be only 60% of the stamina on the pure “tank” item. So our stam multiplier will only give us equal stam to other tanks. With no armor on feral weapons, we are looking at having the similar health levels with other tanks, slightly better dodge, and no parry/block.

So it all comes down to how much armor do we get from the new conversion standard for leather they are introducing. Well Elitist Jerks theorycrafting has run the numbers and with this change and the amount of armor we lose, in full Naxx 10 gear, we would have to have the Dire Bear Multiplier increased to over 900% to have the same armor levels we had before this change. I don’t know about you, but i’d bet serious money they are not increasing Dire Bear Form multiplier to 900%. And of course they aren’t going to allow resto druids to have a 900% bear form modifier in Arena. And yes they will probably add an increased modifier onto a talent in deep feral so resto’s can’t get it, but i’m still betting they don’t make the new multiplier give us a total of 900% increased armor from leather.

So I think we’re looking at having the same Stam as other tanks, probably similar armor as other tanks even after whatever new modifier they give us, much better threat generation (because we have to wear dps rings/necks now) and slightly better dodge, but no block and parry. That is not a good place to be in. What they will have to do to make this change work is introduce some new off-slot items that are agi/dodge, high stam and armor only for the off-slot pieces. But other tanks wouldn’t want those and this would be inconsistent with their plan of homogenizing loot drops.

I do have some faith that we will be adjusted and tweaked, but if it takes months and months to make us viable as MT’s again, it might be too late for some of us. We’ll just have to wait and see I guess. I can deal with Nerfs, it’s the uncertainty that bothers me.

Kudos to you for waiting till live to work on gear lists! Those who jumped the gun are finding they have to revise their lists once more after this change, and who knows how soon again after live.

All those people going OMG wot am i going to do? They have nerfed amour already and now we are getting another armor nerf!

Read the post!
Blizz is changing the armor multiplier and changing it so that we get more armor from the items that do get multiplied!
In other words, NOTHING CHANGES (give or take a few 100 or so) because the increased multiplier makes up for the armor we loose of weapons and trinkets.

What it does mean is that we can go after an increased number of items that aren’t armor focused and give us more SAT, STR, AGI, Ect.. This will make us more diverse and mean we wont have to grind dungeons or rep for that one stellar item that was just for druids!

And that’s the entire problem. It’s impossible to plan what to do with my druid at the moment, because Blizz has no idea wtf they want to do with hybrid classes, but they’re rolling out changes anyway without any understanding of the impact on their players.

They’ve actually come out and said publicly that hybrids aren’t allowed to be “as good” as pure classes at anything, because then those classes will QQ about us until we get nerfed. As a result, our abilities are supposed to be “5% less all things being equal”. They are essentially forcing out hybrid classes in favor of pure classes.

If I’m a Raid Leader, and I’ve got the choice between taking someone who can max out on dps/tanking/healing or someone who is a hybrid and therefore will do 5% less, I’ll take the pure class every time. Or more accurately, so that we canz have buffz I’ll take one resto druid, one resto shaman, and one holy pally. Then I stock up on warrior tanks, priest healers, rogues, hunters, mages, and warlocks. If I’ve got a good player playing a hybrid, I make them switch to a pure class to optimize the raid.

Like FaceTanking said, they’ve made all these changes that relegate us from MT to 3rd OT. What they should have done was keep the game balanced at 70, then re-adjust to 80 once people reached that content. Frankly, I don’t care that things will re-balance at level 80 – I’m playing the game NOW at level 70 running end-game content, and since 3.0.2 I’ve been hit by a massive nerfbat that resulted in my being replaced by a prot warrior as MT. I’m now the first kill target tank, because I don’t have as much survivability as I used to have to MT things – I can hold aggro, but I can’t stay alive.

When the 3.0.2 patch hit I went from capped armor (75% mitigation) to around 25k, maybe a little more, which is 70% mitigation. Add in PotP for an extra 12% and I actually ended up with MORE total mitigation than before, and PotP includes magic damage. I found myself rage starved in nearly every trash pull, and not able to hold agro as well as I’m used to. Definitely no survivablility issues, even on bosses. I switched back to a cat spec after the raid, and doubt I’ll go back until 80.

After these changes, we won’t lose mitigation, as they will increase modifiers. We WILL have more options for our rings/trinkets/weapon slots that we will be able to switch around depending on the encounter. This is a great change, I just hope they work on the FAP mechanic too.