Unbearably HoT

One of the most recent purported reasons that Blizzard doesn’t want new WotLK content “leaked” is because they “would much prefer to avoid theorycrafting that isn’t based on real gameplay when we can.” this, of course, is considerably milder than Blizzard’s initial response that leaking data is “extremely offensive and inappropriate.”

Let’s get real. I’m sure no one with half a brain expects that he or she can get away with all the same theorycraft information once the expansion hits. Even if every shred of information we have now went live tomorrow AND followed all the same stat rules as today, we’d almost certainly be guaranteed a swift series of checks and balances soon after to make sure that every class was “functioning appropriately.”

But the natives are getting restless. I’m eagerly anticipating new content as much as the next person, and while I’ve away from the rumor mill since WotLK tidbits first leaked, some things are just too good to pass up. There’s recently been an incredibly dirty rumor about Dire Cat Form that has supposedly been leaked by a “reputable source”. While I certainly question the validity of both the information and the so-called informant, these kinds of speculated changes would require a dramatic rethinking of how we DPS. Let’s take a look. As a reminder, I am exceptionally poor at math, but I’ve attempted to do the best I can. I will look at any corrections. The new tooltip supposedly reads as:

Dire Cat Form
Instant Cast
35% of Base Mana S
hapeshift into Dire Cat form, increasing melee attack power by 110% plus agility, armor contribution from items by 180%, feral attack power contribution from your equipped weapon by 100%, and allowing off-hand attacks. Also protects the caster from Polymorph effects and allows the use of various cat abilities.

The act of shapeshifting also frees the caster of Polymorph and Movement Impairing effects.

Before I jump into what immediately makes me boggle and LOL, the “old” Cat Form tooltip:

Cat Form
Instant Cast
35% of Base Mana
Shapeshifts into cat form, increasing the melee attack power by 40 plus agility. Also protects the caster from Polymorph effects and allows the use of various cat abilities.

The act of shapeshifting also frees the caster of Polymorph and Movement Impairing effects.

To start making a comparison, I am going to make a few assumptions that may be entirely untrue in WotLK but are necessary for the sake of extrapolation here: that cat DPS itemization will remain similar and closely follow that of rogue gear, that base stats such as AGI and STR will be valued in the same fashion as today, and that we will still be using two-handed weapons. I am not taking into account any particular WotLK feral talents yet, although they will be pertinent to introduce in a secondary post to elaborate on how rediculous this new Dire Cat formula really is.

Remember, other than the leaked tooltip, we’ve been given no other information—will this “Dire Cat Form” be available as a talent in the feral tree? Will it be a quest? Will this just be a standard “learn” spell for all druids? The base cost for transformation remains the same and, if Furor doesn’t change, powershifting for a little extra DPS juice still seems possible.

The next sentence, however, is where we start noticing the major changes. In our world, Cat Form increases our AP by 40 plus AGI. If you assume base caster form AP of 1500 and base AGI of 500, shifting into Cat Form gives you 540 bonus AP, bringing your sum total to 2040 AP. In the new language, we have an increase of approximately 110%. Assuming that same base AGI of 500 and base caster AP of 1500 again:

(BASE AP * 2.1)+AGI = Total AP or basically (1500*2.1)+500=3650

So if you add the bonus AP to your base AP again, you’d be seeing a Dire Cat Form boost to 3650 AP. At first glance, 110% looks like a huge number—far more significant than 40; however, using our old little system of numbers here, we’re only netting 1650 AP. Isn’t that tremendous? It’s awesome, but no, I don’t think so. I tend to think that we’ll see a revaluing of itemization—all signs right now point to Blizzard streamlining their armor so that multiple class can gain the same useage from it. Rogues and druids sharing more than they already do? Probably, and I’m willing to bet we’ll see more higher base AGI and crit on gear than we do right now, and a lot less STR, which will decrease our base AP and possibly even out those big numbers.

Let’s continue.

Our Dire Cat Form “tooltip” elaborates on the awesome, mentioning that we’ll be getting armor bonuses as well. Assuming base caster armor of 4000 in DPS gear, shapeshifting into Dire Cat Form goes a little something like this:

BUFFED ARMOR/BASE ARMOR = 180%/100% or basically, (4000*180)/100=7200

That nearly doubles our base armor, bringing us up by 3200 points. Wow. To be honest, I wasn’t initially certain why this was added (assuming of course that this leaked information is even halfway legit). If you’re performing a PVE DPS role, you shouldn’t be taking unnecessary damage (unless melee in WotLK will start taking substantial physical damage). But for all the ferals who bitch about their lack of arena viability, this could be a huge boon.

I imagine some concern might be due to rogue comparability: a rogue can Feint or Vanish to drop aggro, use Cloak of Shadows to ward off magical damage and debuffs, and pop Evasion to dodge any physical damage. While I’d argue that we don’t need to be furry rogues (afterall, we can transform into a giant fucking bear if we’re really getting destroyed), we cannot shrug off damage in the same fashion without giving up our primary form of DPS. PVE? Not a big deal. But in a PVP scenario where a rogue can slam Evasion or proc Cheat Death and they can still dish out an obscene amount of high damage, feral druids can only attempt to toss a few heals on themselves, go bear, and hope for the best. So perhaps with this AC contribution and a few of the new feral talents, Feral Combat might be a more competitive (easy) spec for arena.

Erdluf writes in and reminds me that if we apply the same rules from our Dire Bear Form tooltips:

Note that your current bear tooltip says that your armor from gear is increased by 400%, but that means you get 500% (400+100) of what it says on the gear. Likewise, I’d expect a 180% armor boost to mean 280% armor. Your dire-cat friend gets 11200 armor, not 7200 armor. Apply the same logic to the 110% (seems iffy to me) and your AP jumps from 1500 (in caster) to 3150 (before adding agility and FAP)

If the same rules apply, then he’s definitely correct in assuming that. Thanks!

But that’s not all! We have another added bonus for Dire Cat Form that our regular pussies can’t handle: feral AP on our weapons increased by 100%. If we take an easily obtainable item such as the Staff of the Forest Lord that has 1110 Feral AP on it, we get this:

(Feral AP*2.0)=BONUS AP or, (1110*2.0)=2220

This effectively doubles the feral AP contribution on our weapons. If we add those numbers to our imaginary AP from earlier, we get:

[(BASE AP*2.1)+AGI]+(FERAL AP BONUS * 2) or, [(1500*2.1)+500]+(1111 * 2)=5870

Wowzers. Those are some massive numbers, especially since I assumed some fairly basic baselines for AGI and AP. But how does that actually compare to now? Unbuffed, Runyaruso has somewhere around 3590 AP in Cat Form.

5870-3590=2280

Given today’s standards and gear and using the new Dire Cat Formula, I stand to gain 2280 base AP. That’s nothing to sneeze at, but feral druids do tend to accumulate AP in spades. But why wouldn’t I jump for joy today? One of the reasons that rogues can still heavily out-damage us in a raid environment with half our AP is because they rely more heavily on white damage whil druids rely more heavily on yellow damage. Here’s a quick explanation using a very very old, pre-Sunwell Illidan split:

Firstly, Illidan is a poor measure of melee DPS because half the time we’re running around dick in hand, unable to DPS save throwing, shooting, or halfheartedly casting off-spec spells. One of our best rogues did about 465,592 white damage during that fight, which ended up being about 65% of his total DPS. My white damage, on the other hand, equaled about 171,994, which ended up being 36% of my total DPS. The majority of my damage is put out by “specials”, and while our rogues’s specials sure hurt, they didn’t account for the majority of his DPS output. Why? I single-wield, and he dual-wields. Think about it: if every auto-attack consists of two successive hits, that’s twice as much damage as me smacking a mob with one paw. Now, take Haste Potions, Slice and Dice, and Windfury into account, and that’s a lot of two-handed whacking.

But don’t worry—according to our little Dire Cat Form tooltip here, that will all change. Dire Cat Form will allow “off-hand attacks”. After years of only beating people with one paw, we’ve apparently learned how to really get our claw on and dual-wield. What does this change?

Beyond the white/yellow damage discussion, stats that weren’t super useful to druids pre-WotLK will become important in the expansion, further cementing the argument that Blizzard will only itemize one piece of armor for both rogues/druids. Like haste? Yes. When you’re not dual-wielding, haste isn’t a decent enough stat to stack as it primarily boosts your white damage DPS (already not our forte). If cats dual-wield, we too will be focusing on boosting our white damage. We’ve already heard that Windfury will affect transformed druids, so that adds a little credence to our leaked information. This is cool. Really cool.

With that much AP and being able to attack with both a “main paw” and an “off paw”, wewill do an absolutely ridiculous amount of damage—providing, of course, that we still retain the same levels (or greater) of AP now. Additionally, if we’re still using our two-handed weapon, I am also making the assumption that we’ll get our off-hand damage based on a percentage of our AP rather than the weapon damage itself. Interesting. Rogues, presumably, will also have to get a major AP boost, otherwise I’m sure we’ll be hearing the “nerf druids” battlecry all over again.

What isn’t cool is that moving from single to dual-wielding means we need to rethink our hit cap. Right now, druids need approximately 142-146 hit to effectively DPS a boss level mob. Rogues, on the other hand, require more than double that amount of hit to be capped on a boss level mob. While I won’t delve into a discussion of how important I think hit is right now, you can think about it like this: if you can’t hit a boss, how much damage are you really doing? Historically, druid gear has been absolutely shit for hit, and we’ve already been taking rogue gear to boost our ratings. Come the expansion, it looks like we’ll be competing even more—in more ways than one.