3.1 possible changes.Follow

Druid

* Savage Defense – this is a new passive ability. When a druid in Dire Bear form deals a melee critical strike, the druid gains a damage shield equal to 25% of
their attack power. The next hit completely removes the shield regardless of how much damage was done.

* Survival of the Fittest has had its bonus armor reduced to compensate for the above increase in damage mitigation.

* Faerie Fire (and similar debuffs) now reduces armor by 5%. See Sunder Armor in the warrior update below for additional details.

* Thorns and Nature's Grasp can be cast in Tree of Life form.

* Survival Instincts now works in Moonkin form.

* Replenish – to avoid confusion, this talent has been renamed "Revitalize." It now also works with Wild Growth.

* We are also looking at increasing the sustained (not burst) damage of feral druids in cat form.

WoWInsider: Upcomming 3.1 Class Changes Warlock, Druid, Warrior


Savage Defense, I am intrigued.


Edit: WoWInsider also posted a Analysis >> WoWInsider: Analysis of Druid Changes in 3.1

Edited, Feb 5th 2009 3:25pm by GryphonStalker

A shield for around 1k sounds lame if they are gonna take mah arma.

Will look for math on this but sounds kind of umm... weak sauce.

The other stuff looks good and along the lines of what Blizz has been doing with buffs/debuffs. The SI in mookin and tree changes are all for PvP. Well the Thorns can have a slight PvE impact but more of a convenience than actual buff.

Its even stated in your quote. The shield proc's in dire bear form. Not kitty.

Assuming 38k armor and 7k AP the shield would be equivalent to 4716 armor.

Assuming 38k armor DR is -->    0.695524847 
Boss hits for -->               40000 
Damage reduction -->            27820.99387 
Hits for -->                    12179.00613 
SD is 25% AP -->                1750 
Hits for  after SD shield-->    10429.00613 
Total DR -->                    29570.99387 
As a percent -->                0.739274847 
Worth in Armor ->               4716 

The benefit of this depends largely on the SotF nerf. Plus in a pack of 4 mobs assuming the shield comes up every GCD it only helps on the first mob to hit that GCD not the other 3 mobs pounding away. Coupled with the SotF nerf would seem to indicate more incoming damage, without me having to do more math.

The benefit against magic damage would be nice. The affect of this against mobs that stick a DoT would be marginal as the DoT would kill the shield and the armor nerf would increase regular physical damage intake.

My brain hurts.


Edited, Feb 5th 2009 6:09pm by Horsemouth

While the Revitalize change is nice, I'm not really sure that it's going to be as beneficial as it seems unless I start to spam WG on every cooldown. Unless raids are a drastically different situation, I really don't find myself using it that much. Even if I were to start to use it more, it's only a 15% chance on 6 ticks. Someone else can do the math, but I'm skeptical that it will suddenly provide a bonus to make it worthwhile.

EDIT: I use worthwhile carefully. There's no doubt that it is still a good talent, but it has been said, by GC, that it just isn't good in its current form. I don't believe this will save it.



Edited, Feb 5th 2009 3:59pm by CBD

I'm not keen in Savage Defense at all.

In AoE situations, you are getting a 1hit shield every 1.5 sec (assuming you get at least one crit in a swipe) but are getting hit by who knows how many mobs in that time. To compensate for not being hit by that one hit from one mob, you get hit harder by all the others due to the armor reduction from SotF.

In cases like Patch & Sarth 3D, with 6k AP for instance, you get a 1.5k shield, which is tiny compared to the size of their hits and your health pool. In Sarth you can take a small hit from any other incoming damage and lose the shield before the big hit anyway. In addition to this, the shield will be up much less often as single target crit is a lot lower than when we are swiping. So for those hits where it isn't up, we take more damage than current because of our reduced armor.

It seems to me that this new skill (and the armor reduction) makes us a worse tank than we are now. The healers have a slightly reduced load, but our survivability if anything is actually reduced!

Hopefully after testing, they will make some changes.

I'm leaning towards that not being their goal at all. As it stands, the talent provides an opportunity (15%) to restore a small amount of mana (1%) per tick of Rejuvenation (every 3s). This isn't even a noticeable difference for most casters, so the talent, in general, sucked. It would be silly to not put the points in there, but it really wouldn't be ground-breaking if they weren't there either.

What I'm hoping is that they also increase the chance for it to proc. This still won't create a situation where people will be bringing a druid just to keep RJ up on people, but it'll at least make it have more of a use.

Even with the nerfs to armor druids are already getting close to the armor cap again. With 25% increased armor from holy priest or resto shaman crit heals I'm at 74% reduction vs lvl 80 mobs. What savage defence means is, when i get up near the armor cap again with Ulduar raid loot, my total mitigation will end up beeing higher than it could be without savage defence.

It will probably mean we take more damage now, but as we get closer to the armor cap, this will be a rather big improvement.

Revitalize won't be Replenishment, that's the reason they're changing the name. Where TONS of classes will be able to put up the Replenishment effect and none of them will stack, Revitalize WILL stack with it. It's an additional mana generation buff that can't really be compared on the same grounds as the Replenishment effect.

Sure, it's potency is a good bit underwhelming right now, so much so that it's debatable whether the talent is worth it or not, but it's only made even more pitiful sounding by trying to compare it directly to Replenishment.

I'm curious: how is this decent? Right now FFF removes like 1250 armor. I believe boss armor is 13k or so (might be like 13.7). If this only removes 5% armor, and it doesn't stack, then it's a pretty big nerf (only takes off ~650 armor). On lower level enemies it's even worse, because they have less armor anyway.

I saw this as a big nerf.

As for Savage Defense, what I would LOVE to see is that the shield lasts for 10 seconds (or until the next attack) AND it stacks up to 5 times. Now that would be a great thing. Right now this shield will be terrible for AoE packs, or taking on more than 3 enemies at a time. You'll crit at least one (huzzah!), one hit takes it off, and with the reduced armor you get hit for even more by the remaining two+. Now, if it would stack multiple times, you'd have a chance to crit all three+, which would give you multiple shields, thus reducing incoming damage.

I would love love love this to stack, but I highly doubt it will happen. Depending on the armor nerf's severity, I see this as another nerf :-/. Only interesting thing it does is give crit some marginal avoidance value... or rather, it gives agility even more.

Got that right. the only things we've had changed for us since Wrath hit was Dispell Poison in Moonkin form and losing Starfall hitting stealth, then have it not be able to stun. Whereas all the other classes and talents have had a lot of tweaking and buffs and....Moonkin get nothing :(

Something that was overlooked in the notes listed above because it was not specifically listed in the druid section :


This makes me wonder if dumping spirit and heading back to the mp5 train will be a worthwhile investment and how much innervate will be reduced.

it was a nerf for some of us ;-D