How should this patch affect you?
Well, I don’t really care about the rest of it.
One hit whacks and loot from ore nodes! Yahoo!!!!
Just kidding, tons and tons of changes, and it’s about time the damn shoe dropped so we can get used to them.
Oh, yeah… Druid crap…
Well, speaking to my furry bruddas and sistas….
Your armor may increase, decrease, or stay about the same, depending entirely on whether or not you are still depending on Ring, Trinket, Neck, Back and Weapon armor for multipliers.
I personally still have my Badge of Justice ring and Badge of Tenacity because they were still nice before the patch hit. Now, I need to replace those damn things.
Ahem.
Just in case anyone is still confused a bit by this change… Back armor, Cloaks and such, even though they are crafted by Tailors or Leatherworkers, are apparently not actually made of cloth or leather armor.
And how dare you assume they were! For shame! You should have KNOWN that OF COURSE they aren’t cloth or leather!
Sometimes… I swear. It really does feel like Blizzard WANTS us to all either have to devote our lives to theorycrafting research and playtesting, or accept getting sneered at by others for not mystically knowing this crap.
There is a term we can use to perfectly describe the situation of a game designer telling us in a tooltip that only cloth and leather armor will be affected by armor multipliers, and then excluding cloth and leather cloaks from the multiplier on the backend.
The term is “counter-intuitive”.
In fact, I’m sitting here right now, and to be honest I’m wondering if they REALLY left cloaks out of the multiplier or not in the very final build of the PTR. It just seems so… stupid.
They never included cloaks from the first time they started testing their armor changes, and yet I still am hesitant to post about it before getting my hands on the live version, because phrasing it on the tooltip the way they have is STUPID.
Like Kal who doubted Blizzard REALLY meant to remove the multiplier from bear weapons because it seemed too goofy to be true.
Yeah, well…
Just because it seems too stupid to be true doesn’t mean it’s too stupid to be true.
In my opinion, Blizzard should have had the tooltip specify that the bear and dire bear armor multiplier would only apply to armor on the Head, Shoulder, Chest, Wrist, Hand, Waist, Legs and Feet.
They took the time to do it with Armor Kits, why the hell vague it up for us on the multiplier?
Anyway, I’m going to be logging in, very curious indeed to see what the true, final, made it onto live effects on my armor will be.
I’ve worked hard to focus on picking items with the best armor mix with the stats for what will be affected by the multiplier, so I’m hoping that my armor will stay about the same.
Good luck to you, and happy whacking!
Oh, and bonus points to anyone that emails me with a screenshot of the first Feral Druid winning a loot roll on a Polearm with Agility/Stamina over a Hunter. Not to stir up controversy, just ’cause I want to see it for lols.
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I’m pretty sure that cloaks will be included in the bear form multiplier, it’s just bonus armor that will not be multiplied.
If you’re still using the Badge of Tenacity, you’ll most likely see an armor decrease, or, at best, no change at all.
I made up a quick excel chart with the pre and post multipliers for my furbutt. (5.2734 overall multiplier in current, 8.753844 in patch – higher multiplier from meta gem)
Armor 3.0.3 = 25243
Armor 3.0.8 = 30615
This is with armor rings & weapon, but without armor neck / trinkets. This is counting the multiplier on cloaks.
Without multiplier on the cloak, I’m at 29452.
So either way, a significant armor upgrade for me, and I’m in mostly T7/T7.5/heroic gear.
I’ll 1 up you BBB…
I’ll roll on a Hunter polearm for my RESTO Druid…for his “Feral offset”, because I “might want to do that someday”. Of course, only if a Hunter is actually present, or a DK, since just about all seem to believe all 2h weapons are always meant for them.
Of course, Polearms aren’t exactly falling out of the woodwork in Wrath, and the only 1 that I can think of has Strength, Crit, and a pretty impressive amount of Stam…still gonna roll on it, just because I wanna be “that guy”…just once.
Let the QQ commence! ;)
I just realised something. My Druid (currently at 70) has a Sonic Spear… the thing that my Hunter really wanted but could never get.
It makes sense when you think about the items as mere database entries. If you look at the tooltip, cloaks have no armor type. It just says “Cloak”, as opposed to something like “Chest Leather”. So the multiplier is only applying to items that have the “Cloth” or “Leather” descriptor.
On the other hand, cloaks are unique among items without armor type in that they have base armor. Because of that, Donjio may be correct that we still get their base armor multiplied.
Yep that cloak thing is very confusing, I wish they would sort out the wording as you suggest.
We’ve already decided polearms go to melee before ranged. So as soon as one drops that’s an upgrade I’ll be nabbing it since I’m the only melee that would want it. Screenshot incoming, I promise!
These are excellent comments, but you might want to look at the next post too, since I do explain in more detail my issues and reasoning behind believing that Cloaks are also included in not being affected by the multiplier.
Believe me, if I’m wrong, I’ll be delighted. My armor figures look much better when considering cloak base armor getting multiplied.
There were a couple of things I was hoping/expecting in this patch but didn’t see mentioned in the patch notes.
Strength: I thought that strength was going to be nerfed for us ferals so that it grants far less attack power.
Idol of Worship: I got this pimp idol expecting it to be the best pve cat form trinket in the game only to find out soon after that it has no effect in the game. Blizz moderators had commented on it saying it should be fixed in this most recent patch.
It’s quite possible I just missed something in the patch notes or perhaps Blizz forgot to mention anything about the Idol fix.
Does anyone have any info on either of these?
Thanks!
Blud
I am so getting Tidebreaker trident just so I can make murloc fancy dress xD http://www.wowhead.com/?item=37461
Still downloading the patch here but I logged myself out in Karanos last night so I can get me a mechanostrider this morning!
Happy patch day :D
woo hoo! I can finally equip that pitchfork I bought back before I understood the whole weapon skill thing.
Can I just say that I absolutely love that they took Barkskin off the Global Cooldown?
I adore this change.
Yesteday I wrote up a review of the patch notes from a feral perspective:
http://quaiche.blogspot.com/2009/01/patch-308-feral-druid-perspective.html
Update: I tested out my Idol of Worship on dummies last night and I’m pleased to report that Blizz has fixed it.
Got to play with Kitty swipe in Naxx a bit last night. Very fun. It can certainly pull some high dps in the right scenarios.