Limitless potential; is someone up there listening to me?
According to the blues:
PROTECTOR OF THE PACK
We are removing the group requirements from this talent. The new tooltip will say: “Increases your attack power by X and reduces the damage you take in Bear Form and Dire Bear Form by Y.†The values of X and Y themselves are not changing.
Great news, in my opinion. It was a rather pointless talent specification, and I’m glad that Blizzard is holding true to its word in regards to streamlining tanks (if that’s what they’re really so determined to do). I recommend reading through the full post, because it details some dramatic armor Bear armor changes as well. Don’t freak out yet; I don’t think this will be a bad thing at all. Please note that these changes won’t be live when WotLK ships.
Edit: Kalon, from ThinkTank, has also posted about the same Blue thread, specifically regarding the armor changes. You can read it here.
Smirkfang
YES. So irritating that I can’t live up to my full tanking potential if we 3-man stuff.
Also I won’t need to do the whole “hmmmmmmmmm……” spiel when picking items and trying to way up stats against armour.
This is great.
I only wish this was getting hotfixed in now.
*saves freaking out for later* Just promise me you will let me know when to start freaking out. Because I am knew to this whole Bear thing.
Everything is going to be changing, but if you go into it with the attitude that everyone at Blizzard has been getting high and throwing darts at a list of potential talents, you’ll automatically be upset and disappointed all the time (even if it’s true, haha).
So long as they can get this to work correctly, I think it’ll be a great change and we’ll be able to stack better/different mitigation stats.
I think that the new changes are great!
We are less dependent on gear, we get to powershift, and we can get in small groups and not be gimped!
It just goes to show that Blizz does listen to us after all.
I don’t think we’ll be any less gear dependent (that’s sort of a tank requirement, is it not?) but rather less armor dependent. We’ll finally be able to pick up rings, trinkets, and all that jazz for different mitigation stats rather than picking up whatever shit we can just because it has a stupid amount of armor on it.
Additionally, unless I missed something, we’re still not able to powershift; or at least, it’s a pointless endeavor. GC was only alluding to the fact that they’re going to reduce the base mana cost of our shapeshifting abilities to alleviate Feral PVP mana issues.
While I love the changes, I’m curious how they’re going to replace our armor in other ways. They can’t just up the modifier again in some other way because that will just make PvP gear that much better (unless they take away the bonus armor from it). They can increase the leather armor amount, but they also have to be careful to weight the increases as to not benefit rogues and other leather wearers too much.
Let’s just hope they don’t screw it up. It’s not like the expansion comes out next week or anything . . . oh, wait . . . -_-
Relax, IMO. Remember that they came right out and said that these changes will not be available when Wrath ships. They’ve still got time to dick around with this and get it right.
Sorry, cynic at heart ^_^ When they fix it for good I’ll be happy and say they proved me wrong, but until they do I’ll be a little uneasy deciding what gear to pick up while I’m leveling (which I plan on doing quickly, but hopefully they’ll get the changes in before I start doing heroics).
Very glad that PotP is having that annoying requisite removed to be fully utilised. It will be interesting to see how they modify other stats to increase our mitigation. Have heard some ideas thrown around, such as an AP==>AC action, meaning the rogue leathers we will likely be picking up will be useful. I do like this change, as the itemization in BC was ridiculous. Damn badge of tenacity is still stuck in the trink slot, and there were few extra armor epics or blues that dropped from heroics or entry level raids. Seriously, if we look at ZA, how many druid tanking items are there? A warr tank in my guild got a drop off 5 of the 6 bosses. Slightly unbalanced.