Unbearably HoT

I haven’t always raided on a druid. I mostly have. There was, however, a brief span of time soon after Burning Crusade’s release in which Awen’s guild leader decided we didn’t need a Feral Druid—we needed more Warriors. You know, those losers who stand around with cool weapons and shields. This, of course, necessitated that I bring my Fury specced Level 52 alt up to raiding standards in about a week and a half’s time and somehow become a tanking champion in less than that (that process, of course, was how I met Lycentia, and that is another story altogether). Obviously, I’ve since picked my Druid back up with a certain sort of zeal and never looked back. Until now.

I think raiders like Kalon, who have played every tanking class in the game, would agree that part of the fun in tanking on different characters is that they’re each inherently different. We all know that Warriors have primarily occupied the Main Tank role, that Paladins are the Kings and Queens of AOE tanking, and that Druids are pretty much the sexiest beasts to hit the scene. We all have our niches. Despite the obvious differences—Rage v. Mana, Giant Bear v. Corpsesled—each class has abilities that function with similar purposes. “Similar” is really the key word there: close enough to get the job done, but different enough that each has a class specific perk. Want examples? Sure!

How do tanks address issues where aggro has been transferred to a ranged player (whether by pulling or inadvertent proximity)? While certain stupidities warrant standing by and letting a retard or two die, there are reasonably quick ways in which tanks can get their shiny asses over to the errant mob in question:

Warrior
Intervene
Has an 8-25 yard range and enables the Warrior to “run at high speed towards a party member, intercepting the next melee or ranged attack made against them” and has a 30 second cooldown. 10 Rage.

Paladin
Righteous Defense
Has a 40 yard range and enables the Paladin to “come to the defense of a friendly target, commanding up to 3 enemies attacking the target to attack the Paladin instead” and has a 15 second cooldown. 4% of base mana.

Druid
Feral Charge
Has an 8-25 yard range and “causes you to charge an enemy, immobilizing and interrupting any spell being cast for 4 seconds” and has a 15 second cooldown. 5 Rage.

While Paladins clearly have the easiest job here—LOL I PUSH THIS BUTTON AND MONSTERS RUN OVER—each ability allows the tank to gain control over enemies at range to varying degrees of effectiveness. The Paladin and Warrior variations immediately remove a friendly player from harm, and Feral Charge gets you over there, potentially interrupts, and then requires a little finagling. Tanks might grumble a little about who has what, but ultimately, I think that most are fairly happy with what they’ve got. They chose their class, afterall.

Fast forward to Wrath of the Lich King. Blizzard seeks to homogenize the tanking classes, level the playing field, and make sure that no one chooses a tank based on their class rather than their ability (which begs the question of why you’d roll one over another, but that’s another story). Druids clamored for a Last Stand ability because they essentially had no oh-shit buttons to push save trinkets and the woefully poor Frenzied Regeneration ability. They got it in the form of Berserk, and Blizzard tossed in the ability to use potions and items in animal forms. Great, right? At first glance, that starts putting us on even footing with the other tanks. But what did Warriors get?

Warbringer
A 41 point talent in the Protection tree that allows Charge to be used in combat, and in any stance. It’s basically Feral Charge—except it doesn’t cost Rage, it generates Rage. Warriors have thus gained an ability to increase their mobility outside the 30 second Intervene cooldown.

Enraged Regeneration
A level 75 Fury spell, Enraged Regeneration costs 15 Rage, operates on a 3 minute cooldown, and regenerates 30% of your total health over 10 seconds. The ability requires an Enrage effect, consumes all Enrage effects, and prevents any from affecting you for the full duration. Activate Bloodrage and win. Sound a little familiar? I thought so.

Improved Thunder Clap
This base Warrior ability “blasts nearby enemies increasing the time between their attacks by 10% for 30 seconds and doing 300 damage to them. Damage increased by attack power. This abilities causes additional threat and will affect up to four targets,” and can be augmented with 3/3 Improved Thunder Clap, which “reduces the cost of your Thunder Clap ability by 4 Rage points and increase the damage by 100% and the slowing effect by an additional 10%.”

I firmly believe that TC will become a staple damage ability for Warriors in much the same way that Swipe and Consecration work for Druids and Paladins respectively. We Druids were tickled by the idea of Infected Wounds, and here comes an improvement to the original that makes ours look pretty pitiful. Compare to the level 77 Swipe and Level 80 Consecration.

While there are precious few new Paladin abilities that even remotely resemble current Druid abilities, Paladins have picked up a familiar spell:

Shield of Righteousness
A Holy spell, Shield of Righteousness is learned at level 75 and “slams the target with your shield, causing Holy damage equal to 240% of your block value. This spell causes a high amount of threat.” Not only can Paladins chuck their shield ala Captain America, they can now punch people in the face with it. Warriors might recognize this as a spell damage based Shield Slam.

I haven’t even taken Death Knights into consideration here, and the above abilities are just a sampling. What’s your point, Runy? While on the surface many of these spells seem like welcome additions to any tank’s arsenal, I’m left wondering what modicum of uniqueness we’ll be left with. I stare at my outdated Warrior and wonder why I’m trying to play my Druid in the expansion when my Warrior will be given my Druid’s tools—and then some. I carefully examine the Paladin Protection tree and marvel at the solid base of talents to choose from, and find myself mentally transforming my Holy Paladin into a tank. I’m not excited about any of the Druid changes anymore, and I think it’s because some of them feel so familiar.

In a move that will likely bore raiders to tears and appease the raving masses, Blizzard seeks to make tanking more accessible by increasing damage dealt and handing each class a similar skillset (with Druids currently holding the short end of the branch…er…stick). How difficult will it be when we can all push the EZ buttons and win? Will tanking really require any sort of acumen anymore? Are Druids going to be the biggest challenge? I wonder. Think about applying Blizzard’s approach to sex: everyone gets the same moves and you’ve got to choose the best one when they’re all doing the same thing. Do you really want the Wham-Bam-Thank-You-Ma’am-One-Trick-Pony every day? It sure gets the job done, right? Does that make it good?

Streamlining doesn’t always make things better; sometimes it’s just “efficient.”

If you ever bothered reading the “Why” section of Unbearably HoT, you probably know that I created this blog for a very specific purpose, and since then, we’ve seen a slew of great sites with similar drive emerge. I’ve incorporated a few posts about Writing 101 and my engagement, but beyond that, I’ve made a strident effort to stay focused on my original intent: providing information and perspective from a feral druid’s competitive raiding POV. Thus, there are very few things that will derail the druidstravaganza—except for THIS. 

That’s right—The Force Unleashed demo was out yesterday for downloading purposes on XBOX Live, and you can bet your ass that I played it as soon as I got home from work. I do play games (and have a life, surprisingly) beyond the scope of WoW, but there are very few that I’ve looked forward to with as much youthful exuberance as this one. Earlier this year, I wrote an article for another website detailing how the game was presented and what we could expect, and I’d like to share it with you before I go ahead and briefly review the demo. 

~

Lock Consoles in Attack Position: Looking Forward to The Force Unleashed

There’s a certain sense of inevitability waiting at the end of the corridor. The young man’s parade boots echo sternly on the grated floor as he strides purposefully toward the blast doors. After a theatrical pause, the blast doors fly open and the snap-hiss of a lightsaber ignites the air with a sharp tang of ozone. With a nod, the TIE fighters in the hangar swerve into motion and systematically crush the scrambling stormtroopers clinging to each other for dear life. I’ve dreamed of this before.

Since early childhood I’ve been compelled by the darting lasers of interstellar battle juxtaposed with the serene mysticism of the Force–and I’m certainly not the only one. LucasArts has created a veritable empire, no pun intended, from the interest garnered from a simple desert farm boy’s destiny. Obviously the screaming TIE fighters, Mandalorian armor, wookiees, wry robots and promise of planetary destruction helped too, but since the spawn of Star Wars in the late seventies, we’ve seen three more (admittedly lukewarm) movies, PEZ dispensers, action figures, bed sheets, lunch boxes, over a hundred books, Legos and, more pertinent to this discussion, over seventy five video game titles.

I’m entirely stymied attempting to produce another franchise that has spawned as much collective hype and merchandise as Star Wars has–and I am totally a part of it. I have admittedly read almost all the expanded universe books, dressed up as Obi Wan Kenobi on one particular occasion, played both Rebel Assault 1 and II and TIE Fighter, obsessed over a mint condition Boba Fett action figure and own a lightsaber replica. So perhaps one can thus understand the intense anticipation I feel when looking toward a title like Force Unleashed that promises to trump the Force experience like “never before”.

After cleaning up the scratches on the film, fleshing out a few previously impossible to shoot scenes and completely upgrading the original trilogy to digital media, the next logical progression seems to be blowing the gaming industry out of the water. I haven’t missed any of the previous Star Wars titles, though I haven’t quite been sucked in. Most recently, Star Wars Galaxies emerged at a point in time when I was focusing exclusively on studies, Knights of the Old Republic was unplayable on a Macintosh computer, and Battlefront seemed best experienced when slightly under the influence with a group of friends. Force Unleashed, however, promises a fulfilling story line with an extraordinarily high level of interaction with the environment.

The player assumes the role of Darth Vader’s thus-far anonymous apprentice, a serious business young man with a penchant for stylish lightsaber handling. Yes, I was checking out his sword. The game aims to fill the gap between the third movie and the fourth at a point in time when Darth Vader sought to systematically destroy all Jedi in the galaxy. You, as the player, control his wayward apprentice as he hacks, Force throttles, and powers his way on a path toward self-realization, likely dismembering more than a few original characters on the way. Unfortunately, decent story line doesn’t make a game anymore.

In a world of “next generation” gaming where graphics and physics engines are being pushed to the extreme on new platforms like XBOX 360 and the ill-fated Playstation 3, a new title needs to look as good as it reads. LucasArts, however, was up for the task. To create Force Unleashed, LucasArts partnered with NaturalMotion (famous for Dynamic Motion Synthesis technology) for a chance to integrate “euphoria technology” with their Force experience. This new engine makes full use of the processing power of the newer platforms, essentially simulating real nervous-system responses for humanoid characters. What does this mean? Each play through will be a dramatically different experience; you have no real way of predicting how a foe will react. In a single scenario, a stormtrooper might A) run B) duck behind a stack of crates C) call for help or D) scramble to hold on to anything within his reach as he’s levitated. The entire idea is that game A.I. will function as a dynamic entity to interact with, which, of course, moves games away from the previous learn-the-encounter-and-move-on strategies.

Clever stormtroopers, however, weren’t enough to get LucasArts excited. In addition to the aforementioned A.I. changes, LucasArts teamed up with Pixelux Entertainment to take advantage of the physics engine they developed called Digital Molecular Matter, or, DMM. In most normal video games, items do not break, bend or stretch the same way they would in real life; this lends itself for an unrealistic and occasionally cartoony experience. DMM relies on Finite Element Analysis (FEA), a structural mechanics technique that assigns certain numeric values to physical elements–engineers might use it in a computer simulation to predict how steel girders will react under stress. Developers establish set values for each physical item in the game and, miraculously, the simulation engine translates those numerical values (I can only imagine how much calculus this requires) into real-world actions. Essentially, glass shatters like real glass, wood splinters, and rubberized items retain the same sort of elasticity as you might find in a rubber band.

Both of these systems will run simultaneously with the Havok physics engine, responsible for allowing realistic interaction between people and objects and made famous for developing ragdoll physics.

LucasArts seems to be giving players a chance to embark on an immersion journey through the Force, encouraging them to embrace the Dark Side and later, seek redemption. While Force Unleashed will be available on every platform under the sun, it’s pertinent to note that Euphoria technology and DMM will not be available on consoles such as the Wii or Playstation 2. Before I hear a collective groan from all the folks who haven’t gotten their $600 incentive check from the government yet, take heart: Force Unleashed will include a variety of extras on what are considered nonstandard consoles. This may include taking part in the original Jedi Trials or (my favorite) dueling your friends with motion sensitive lightsabers via Wii remote.

Will the play actually live up to the hype? I’m banking on it, and I’m trusting in LucasArts’ ability to deliver surprising and groundbreaking new content. I’m slightly disappointed that I’ll be missing out on all the “original content” available in the PSP, PS2, DS and Wii versions of the game (which, incidentally, delayed the game from releasing in May of this year), but am content knowing that, by the time the game actually releases in September of 2008, I’ll be swinging my lightsaber on a 360.

~

After waiting expectantly for the demo to download, you’re given the option of delving straight into the demo or working through a brief tutorial. Erring on the side of wisdom, I went through the Force Grip tutorial, which essentially teaches you how to levitate and manipulate objects. In layman’s terms, pick shit up, throw it through glass/people, and hope you don’t move the left joystick back at the last second and have it explode in your face. Having been playing WoW for so long, the controls initially took a few minutes to get used to, but once you’ve mastered the basics, there’s a cornucopia of Force tricks you can use to defeat your…enemies.

Eager to use my new set of Sith tools, I exited the tutorial and chose “Apprentice” mode. After an intro with Darth Vader and a few strands of vague plot strings, we’re set loose with one objective: kill the Jedi Rahm Kota and bring Vader his lightsaber. Oh, and eliminate anyone who might have seen you. Darth Vader’s apprentice is dropped off into a TIE fighter hangar, and this is where we come in. Visually, the demo is stunning: graphics haven’t looked sharper and there’s dizzying detail. Force lightning looks better than it did in the original movies, crisp and crackling; objects break, bend, and explode in a very convincing manner; stormtroopers act and react in surprising ways; and the depth of “battle” is enhanced by the visualization of your destruction: scorch marks, fires, lightsaber gouges, dead bodies. In fact, different injuries to your person are reflected by torn clothing, burns, and rivulets of blood. 

If you read my article about the graphics/physics engines, the level of visual immersion is understandable, expected even. But the point of the game, the title, the whole marketing phenomenon, is that you’re supposed to feel like you’re “unleashing the power of the Force”. Do you? After destroying an entire platoon of stormtroopers and Empire militiamen, blowing open blast doors with a “gentle” Force push, and tossing around TIE fighters, let’s just say it’s a little like giving a kid an espresso and a sledgehammer and setting them loose in a room full of Swavorski crystal. Even if you’re a retard, you can blithely hack and slash your way through most of the level by mashing buttons—but the real joy is how you stack your moves and manipulate your own environment to your advantage. 

No, seriously. The demo necessitates multiple playthroughs, if only to master the controls’ nuances. The “Options” menu offers a helpful controller diagram when you have understandable “WHAT DOES THE LT BUTTON DO!??!?!” moments, and even lists a few introductory combo moves you can try. Don’t be wary of the word “combo”, which for many brings up angry memories of getting beaten by button-mashing siblings through Street Fighter or Tekken 3. The right combination of abilities produces immensely satisfying results and doesn’t look like a canned move that happens regardless of where you’re situated in the environment.

I immediately mastered the ability to levitate objects and sling my lightsaber (a whirling beam of death) at them; this works with items AND people, much to my delight. Similarly, you can use your Force lightning power to charge your lightsaber and electrify your enemies as you slice through them. You can even just stand in front of them like a champ, using your lightsaber to neatly deflect all of their blaster bolts right back at their faces. Oftentimes, I picked up any moveable object (like a TIE fighter) and Force pushed it through an entire group of troopers, eliminating any need for hand-to-hand combat at all. 

Though you can waste a lot of time literally destroying every single room (Force ripping cables and circuit breakers from walls), the demo ends a little quicker than I would have liked—and I won’t spoil the Cloud-esque Braver Limit Break finale. But despite my utter joy, there were a few glaring issues. With the kind of visual and physical detail you’re provided with in game, it doesn’t make sense that there’s no dismemberment as your lightsaber whirlwinds through a group of people. Additionally, the targeting system is hardly as intuitive as they tried to make it. A simple corridor often has a multitude of moveable objects all within close proximity to one another, and unless you’ve somehow situated your Sith self right in front of it, the targeting function will nearly always try to lock onto the wrong target. In “Apprentice” mode this isn’t critical, but in any sort of harder difficulty (and surely later on in the game), locking onto a passerby rather than say, a landspeeder likely increases your percentage of fail. 

Do you remember how you felt after the first upswelling of Episode 4’s fanfare? The demo offers the same grandiose nostalgia, but this time you’re stepping into the movies and wielding unspeakable power. Careening through a shipwide hurricane of blaster bolts, it’s difficult not to recall the epic, landscape battlefields—and quickly realize you better get your situation under control. If the gameplay in the demo looks and feels this spectacular, my anticipation for The Force Unleashed’s promised complex environments, characters, and storylines (including what looks to be makeouts and possibly high fives) only grows stronger. New recruits will not be disappointed, and longtime fans will be invigorated. Still not convinced? I find your lack of Faith disturbing.

While the simple fact that today is my birthday has nothing to do with Warcraft or druids, what I found on top of my desk this morning does:

Naga what? Vosges: recycling your slithery friends since 2006. I look forward to savoring it later.

Before I start making any frenzied posts detailing why I worry about feral tanks in WotLK, let’s take a step back and address the now.

Just about any melee DPS class fully invested in damage will explain that +hit and expertise is invaluable—or at least important. Four thousand spell damage or eight million attack power can be rendered useless in a raiding environment unless you can actually connect with the mob you’re targeting. The same situation can apply to a PVP scenario as well: pesky cyclone or root resists can cost you an arena match. A simple armory search can pull up gear-listings for many high-end Restoration druids, and if you take a good look, many of them stack those lovely +10 spell-hit gems, along with Spell Penetration on their cloaks.

But +hit and expertise rating isn’t just for damage classes—the more you connect with the target(s) you’re tanking, the more TPS (threat-per-second) you’re generating. I might even add that it’s even more important for bears than our cat counterparts. I can sit around in front of Brutallus wearing every piece of my super don’t-die-gear, but I guarantee that I’ll miss maybe 2 out of every 3 mangles or have my Lacerates dodged or parried—you get the idea. If the specials with the highest threat multipliers aren’t landing, DPS will be perilously riding your ass.

Let’s clearly outline what we’re talking about here:

According to WoWWiki, “hit” can be defined as “the physical damage that occurs as a result of an attack made with a melee or ranged weapon. The chance to hit increases by 1% per 15.77 hit rating points at level 70.”

For druids (single-wielding, mind you), you need approximately 142 hit rating to increase your chance to hit a level 73 mob by 9%—this is your “hit cap”. When I reference a “cap”, it’s the generally accepted limit at which adding any more of a certain stat doesn’t actually help you. Exceeding 9% to hit won’t help counter dodges or parries (that’s expertise) or even misses; in my opinion, you’re actually better sitting just below the hit cap and chewing on some Spicy Talbuk Steak to bring you up to par rather than over-gearing or over-socketing (when you could be stacking more AGI or AP, etc.). Additionally, you can plan to take off a piece of gear with lots of hit on it and exchange it for a piece with more AGI if you know you’re going to have a Draenei in your party (passively increasing your chance to hit by 1%). While there never seem to be “absolutes” with Blizzard, a 9% chance to hit virtually guarantees zero misses against a target of level 73 or below.

Do you need 9% to hit for trash mobs? No. It rather goes without saying that you need less chance to hit when the level of the mob decreases and the gap between your weapon skill and its defense skill closes. Therefore, if you want to be a super dr00d (or rogue, or whatever), you can actually itemize two different DPS gear-sets: one hit-capped set (9%) for the boss, and one set (~5% for level 70s) that stacks more AGI for trash mobs.

What about expertise?

Expertise is a combat rating that decreases the chance your attack will be parried or dodged. Because druids don’t have any special racial talents (human sword/mace specialization, for example) or class talents (i.e. rogues) that increases expertise (this is changing in the expansion, however), we can calculate the amount of expertise needed to negate dodge as follows:

Boss mob’s base dodge = 6.5%
1% Expertise = 15.77 Expertise Rating
6.5 * 15.77 = 102.505

So realistically, you’d want approximately 103 Expertise Rating to completely negate a boss mob’s ability to dodge your attacks. If you’re melee DPS, you should theoretically be standing behind a target anyway, which theoretically eliminates parries.

Capping hit and expertise sounds like it makes a lot of sense, right? Connecting with your target generates more damage and more threat. The problem is getting there. It’s hard to bitch about getting hit capped when a dual wielder like a rogue needs twice as much as we do, but Blizzard doesn’t itemize hit and expertise for druids. Not specifically, anyway. If you look at the entire Thunderheart Harness, Sunwell items included, we net 50 hit rating (3.17% to hit) and 20 expertise rating. For the record, that’s pretty miserable, especially since 23 of that hit rating is on the belt, which is arguably inferior for tanking to the Belt of Natural Power, a T5 crafted item. Thus, if I’m wearing my “TPS” set for tanking (which is, by the way, beneath the armor cap), I have approximately 4.5% chance to hit and 4.62% dodge/parry reduction.

Lycentia, in his tanking gear picked up from similar raid instances, has approximately 6.34% to hit and can reduce the boss’s chance to dodge or parry an attack by 15.75%. We have to remember that Lycentia is a human wielding a sword and is also receiving the human sword specialization bonus, but that’s considerably more chances to connect with the boss and thus generate more threat per second. Even though druid threat is largely generated by high damage, if you’re not able to cause that damage, you might have a problem. Add Windfury to that equation, and now you’re looking at a chance to proc an additional attack that will, more than likely, connect as well. I’m a little jealous, and I’m looking forward to receiving the bonus from Windfury Totems (so long as I don’t have to give up Gift of Air).

My point is that druid tanking itemization is currently flawed, and that it should be a little bit easier to maximize your chance to hit and chance to reduce parry and dodge without sacrificing our bread and butter stats of AGI and STA. It’s that important. The more damage you, as a tank, put out, the more damage your raid can produce without worrying about pulling aggro. By not pulling your own weight, you’re threat capping your raid’s DPS and severely limiting the speed at which you can destroy a boss. If you can afford to wear a Shard of Contempt and a necklace such as the Brooch of Deftness, Pendant of Titans, Shattered Sun Pendant of Resolve, or Collar of the Pit Lord, I recommend it. To remain above your DEF cap, you can supplement your armor with the S3 chestpiece and socket with the AGI/HIT gems. This will likely drop you below the 35,880 armor cap, but if you set up a clever potion macro, you can join the ranks of warbots and slam down Ironshields with the best of them.

But those are (mostly) set pieces. As a cat, you’re probably wearing two pieces of T4 at least, and if you’re lucky, two pieces of T6 as well. Since most of the DPS gear we pick up is rogueish in nature, climbing to 142 hit rating isn’t too difficult at all. This is important because a successful cat DPS rotation relies on heavy crit for combo points and bleed debuffs; if one doesn’t “stick” or “hit”, you’re essentially blowing your whole cycle. A simplified DPS rotation (assuming high crit and ignoring powershifting for the moment) might go as follows:

1. Mangle
2. Shred
3. Shred
4. Shred
5. Rip

Because Mangle amplifies Shred damage and bleed effects, you will not want to Shred or Rip unless your Mangle debuff is up on your target. If you miss your Mangle or your Mangle is dodged, you’re a step behind in your rotation. If you miss it twice, you’re two steps behind and now you’re just wasting energy.

In Cat Form, I’m hit capped but not expertise capped. Some of this is based on the item slots I’ve chosen to use for my two piece T4 and T6 bonuses, but it’s also not quite as easy to get without sacrificing a lot of high-end stats. Often, I only run with the Shard of Contempt, which reduces a mob’s chance to dodge my attacks by 2.79%—not too stellar, but nearly 3% is much better than 0. If you’re not quite as worried about set bonuses or exchanging a high level item without expertise for a lower level item with, here are some easy expertise grabs:

Shard of Contempt (Heroic MgT): 44 expertise rating
Shapeshifter’s Signet (Lower City Reputation): 20 expertise rating
Grips of Deftness (Karazhan Trash): 15 expertise rating
Total: 5.00% dodge reduction

Slightly more difficult to obtain:

Shoulderpads of the Stranger (Hydross): 10 expertise rating
Belt of One Hundred Deaths (Lady Vashj): 25 expertise rating
Gloves of the Searing Grip (A’lar): 18 expertise rating
Total: 3.36% dodge reduction

Total with the best items combined: 7.41% dodge reduction, effectively negating a boss mob’s chance to dodge (6.5%) your attacks. You could even take a piece or two off.

Playing any hybrid class requires a veritable balancing act of trying to make the best of subpar itemization, but while you’re min/maxing for DPS and TPS, remember that you’re gimping yourself if you’re ignoring your hit and expertise ratings.

For a discussion about spell hit and spell damage for moonkin, visit Gray Matter.

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.