looks like some changes are coming

They've gotta shove item points somewhere. If they put all the points into Sta/Armor, then they'd have to up the boss damage to compensate and it wouldn't have made any real difference. If they put it all into Block Stats, then the DKs would have whined. I just think DR didn't give them the numbers they'd hoped for in T9 gear so they had to adjust.

Ulushnar wrote:They've gotta shove item points somewhere. If they put all the points into Sta/Armor, then they'd have to up the boss damage to compensate and it wouldn't have made any real difference. If they put it all into Block Stats, then the DKs would have whined. I just think DR didn't give them the numbers they'd hoped for in T9 gear so they had to adjust.

I'm not sure if this is the case. Avoidance is high, but its nowhere near the point where it trivializes the hard content. EH Tanking and Avoidance Tanking are both viable in my eyes. It seems to me they are trying to make all the unattractive stats attractive. Just like they are changing MP5 so that Healers don't consider it an undesireable stat. I think this change is to make Parry Rating a desireable, or at least not an undesireable stat. Unfortunately, I don't think this will change that. The problem with Parry Rating is the DR curve is too harsh. Similarly, the problem with Defense is the Miss DR Curve is too harsh. Adjusting the DR Curves would be a better solution, as they are what limits our ability to reach high avoidance.

Meyrinn wrote:I'm not sure if this is the case. Avoidance is high, but its nowhere near the point where it trivializes the hard content. EH Tanking and Avoidance Tanking are both viable in my eyes.

It's not currently the case, but at the moment, the high-end of avoidance is around 60-ish%, it's not unreasonable to suggest that full T9 geared tanks would be at nearly 70% avoidance, and that's going to make designing the T10 encounters burdensome. It sucks to see numbers go down, but I'd rather it was in a nerf we can see coming than in another Bullshit Radience-type effect.

Meyrinn wrote:It seems to me they are trying to make all the unattractive stats attractive. Just like they are changing MP5 so that Healers don't consider it an undesireable stat. I think this change is to make Parry Rating a desireable, or at least not an undesireable stat. Unfortunately, I don't think this will change that. The problem with Parry Rating is the DR curve is too harsh.

I think Parry was always overbudgetted. They placed too much stock in the benefits of the Parry haste and priced it out of the market. The DR drop-off may be more severe than Dodge, but hopefully it won't get to the point where people are going "oh christ, not another Parry item". Basically when Dodge needed to have a 700 point lead for Parry to be considered viable, there was something wrong.

I don't think this change will achieve what you are suggesting. I still have to run some numbers, but we have a base 25% avoidance before DR from Talents and our Base. That leave 35% from Ratings to hit 60% and 45% to hit 70%. Even if the change causes a loss of 15% of the Avoidance from ratings, which it won't, it would still mean if 70% was possible than 65% would be possible. Does that 5% really trivialize encounters? It would have to be closer to 80%-85% to reach that point. even at 70% there is a 9% chance to take 2 unavoided hits in a row, which means it will happen in long boss fights.

The DR Curves are what makes Parry Rating a bad stat. The changes will make Dodge Rating diminish in value slower, as we will need more and the curve is based on the pre DR %. Parry Rating will diminish faster. They aren't really resolving the issue of Dodge Rating to Parry Rating, its just delaying the point where the DR Curves effect it by a small amount. The DR Curves are asymptotic, which makes the diminish increase in rate as you approach the asymptote.

A simpler way to look at it is to look at the pre DR % Parry vs pre DR % Dodge where the stats become skewed such that one is worth far less. This isn't changing by the change in costs. You will gain more pre DR Parry and lose some Pre DR Dodge. The ratios will adjust slightly but it will make the comparable ratings move faster towards their trends. Parry as a Rating will diminish faster in an absolute value and Dodge as a Rating will diminish slower in an absolute value. The amount of Parry Rating where you'll need double the amount to get the same % post DR Parry will be reached at a lower amount of Parry Rating, and the amount of Dodge Rating where you'll need double the amount of Dodge Rating to get the same % post DR Dodge will be reach later. This is how you determine where one rating become superior to another.

Lets say you need 10% pre DR Parry before you need to double the Parry Rating to gain 1%, and you need 20% pre DR Dodge before you need double the Dodge rating to gain one percent. These values in % are not changing, but the Rating needed to reach these values are moving further apart. If it was like 200 Parry Rating and 700 Dodge Rating before, its going to be like 180 Parry Rating and 800 Dodge Rating with the change. This will be offset slightly in that the pre DR Rating values are 1:1 ratio instead of 4:5 ratio, but unless that offset is big enough then it will just put the number back down to where they were before and give us less avoidance net.

Ran some rough numbers and it looks like its better at low values, but in the end Parry Rating is still a worthless stat after a small amount.

Assuming a min of 700 Defense Rating.

3.1 Values for where you have 0 Parry Rating. Its better to take Def and Dodge until.

700 Defense Rating
675 Dodge Rating

3.2 Values for where you have 0 Parry Rating. Its better to take Def and Dodge until.

700 Defense Rating
250 Dodge Rating



3.1 Values for where you have 150 Parry Rating. Its better to take Def and Dodge until.

800 Defense Rating
950 Dodge Rating

3.2 Values for where you have 150 Parry Rating. Its better to take Def and Dodge until.

850 Defense Rating
575 Dodge Rating



3.1 Values for where you have 200 Parry Rating. Its better to take Def and Dodge until.

900 Defense Rating
1050 Dodge Rating

3.2 Values for where you have 200 Parry Rating. Its better to take Def and Dodge until.

900 Defense Rating
700 Dodge Rating



3.1 Values for where you have 250 Parry Rating. Its better to take Def and Dodge until.

950 Defense Rating
1200 Dodge Rating

3.2 Values for where you have 250 Parry Rating. Its better to take Def and Dodge until.

950 Defense Rating
800 Dodge Rating



Calculations done were very rough, but in 3.1 once you hit 150 Parry Rating its highly unlikely you'll ever reach a point where you want to add more Parry Rating. In 3.2 at 150 Parry Rating it may be possible to reach a point where you would want to add Parry Rating. But even at 200 Parry Rating the Dodge and Def Rating numbers are high enough that its unlikely you'll reach a point where you would want more Parry Rating.

The change removes the barrier where you need to overcome the budget differences to bring Dodge Rating and Parry Rating to a point where Pre DR they are 1:1. You only need to overcome the DR Difference from Dodge/Parry gained from Defense. However, the point where Parry Rating is at a value where you can't possible reach a Dodge and Defense Value where its the better stat is only moved from 150 to 200. I'll have to run some better numbers as using increments of 25 might have skewed things a bit. But, I doubt its enough to make the outcome that far off. Parry is forced on our gear and the value where its worthless to add more is still going to be a small number. The only interesting thing I see is that you'll reach a point where Defense Rating is worthwhile to add.

So we'll continue to take parry rating when it is forced upon us, but never seek it out. Awesome. And we lose some avoidance. Awesome.

I worry about the bears though...

Spectrum wrote:I worry about the bears though...

This...
I really don't see many around anymore. I kinda miss the bear tanks, and it seems they may become more rare.

Ulushnar wrote:They've gotta shove item points somewhere. If they put all the points into Sta/Armor, then they'd have to up the boss damage to compensate and it wouldn't have made any real difference. If they put it all into Block Stats, then the DKs would have whined. I just think DR didn't give them the numbers they'd hoped for in T9 gear so they had to adjust.

If itemization were just the point, they could have itemized some towards agility (avoidance and armor), or threat stats like strength. Strength works well for pretty much every tank (perhaps not for druids? I don't know). I think people are right in that it's about making Parry into something other than an indication of poor item choice. (Well, that's harsh -- many T7 BIS avoidance pieces had parry rating.) It makes the gems less drastically different, also.

I admit, I like that defense is suddenly (comparatively) more valuable. Ironically, it also means that we might start being thankful for pieces with block rating on them.

Spectrum wrote:So we'll continue to take parry rating when it is forced upon us, but never seek it out. Awesome. And we lose some avoidance. Awesome.

I worry about the bears though...

I wouldn't worry about them. This is a post from a Bear Druid Blogger called ThinkTank (http://wowthinktank.blogspot.com)

Here's the thing about being a tank that's based around talents primarily: nerfing stats doesn't hurt nearly as much. As an example, let's take...well, me. I'm not totally Ulduar-geared yet, but I have a good chunk of pieces and have mostly gone for stamina, only using agility when I had a shared piece of gear. I have minimal PvP gear.

So what will I lose? Effectively I'll lose 15% of that agility and 15% of that dodge rating. That means I lose 268 agility and another 29 dodge rating on average*.

That would mean pre-DR, my avoidance would go down by:
dodge/agility * agility + dodge%/dodge rating * dodge rating
1/41.67 * 268 + 1/39.3 * 29 =
6.43 + .737 = 7.16%.

So a 7.16% dodge rating reduction before diminishing returns. Or a total, Pre-DR value of 63.93% avoidance overall.

What does that mean after diminishing returns? Well, this is 7% dodge at the top, not the bottom - meaning it's getting hit the 'hardest' by DR. But in practice this means all we need to do is in Rawr reduce our stats by the above and see our post-DR results.

And if you do that...the post-DR results are a mighty 46.1% dodge.

So it's about a 4% loss for me, give or take.In any case, 4% dodge is not really wonderful to lose, but it's definitehuge deal. It should bring druid overall damage closer to inline with paladins and warriors, though druids will still take the least amount of damage per hit without cooldowns coming into play. And for the most part, you'll not notice it.

I need to point all those bears that went kitty & boom to this, so they will come OT for me again =P

Bears are in an excellent spot at the moment. After the DK nerfs on the PTR, they were probably the best tanks in the game. As the post Honors linked suggests, they can take a little bit of a hit to their avoidance and still be fine.

The dodge/parry readjustment is only a SEVERE AVOIDANCE NERF OMG if you've been actively avoiding parry on your gear (which probably means you've been gearing sub-optimally since a lot of the best pieces have parry on them). At worst, the change just makes some of the gear we've generally been ignoring more useful.

Dread wrote: The most recent change was to make the heal provided by the "Guardian Spirit" proc to scale from 0 to 30% of your maximum hp based off of your defense rating. So a regular level 80 with 400 defense rating will get no health and will still die (a pally wearing holy gear spec'd deep into prot) and anyone wearing 540 defense will get the full benefit of the heal (30% if you've put 3 points into the talent).

It was just a nerf to holy pallys with a prot build so that they couldn't live forever.

I wonder if that means that having a stam/resi enchant on your shoulders and sitting at 536 def will reduce the healing you get from the proc

Vedge wrote:I wonder if that means that having a stam/resi enchant on your shoulders and sitting at 536 def will reduce the healing you get from the proc

Yes, it would. But not by much.

Vedge wrote:

Dread wrote: The most recent change was to make the heal provided by the "Guardian Spirit" proc to scale from 0 to 30% of your maximum hp based off of your defense rating. So a regular level 80 with 400 defense rating will get no health and will still die (a pally wearing holy gear spec'd deep into prot) and anyone wearing 540 defense will get the full benefit of the heal (30% if you've put 3 points into the talent).

It was just a nerf to holy pallys with a prot build so that they couldn't live forever.

I wonder if that means that having a stam/resi enchant on your shoulders and sitting at 536 def will reduce the healing you get from the proc

On the other side do tou think do you think being around 560 def will up the heal done?
With the change on def parry and dodge it may become better to stack def instead of parry/dodge?

Aghrea wrote:On the other side do tou think do you think being around 560 def will up the heal done?

No, i believe it's capped at 30%. The change is like the Icebound Fortitude change: designed to prevent abuse of a tanking ability in PVP.