It's rather funny that Blizzard once again didn't seem to see this coming when pretty much every player knew it was inevitable just from looking at Naxx-level gear. I remember rocking 50% dodge on Patchwerk on my druid back in 2008, and bears aren't even high avoidance generally!

Personally, I love it. Another relative buff for bears compared to other tanks, but we'll still fly under the radar because people believe it's a nerf to us because "Bears only get dodge". Woo, go bears, everyone keep saying the Pallies are the OP ones and leave us alone.

It wasn't explained properly in the first post, Bov. Here's the follow up post.



It's not going to be like Tidewalker where bear was the way to go. You're going to get hit more in succession of less damage, not huge amounts of damage every x amount of seconds that will need the high avoidence.

_________________
"I'm the best there is at what i do, bub, and what i do isn't very pretty"

Oh, and as a caveat to that, I guaruntee this will only last for as long as it takes from 3.3 till the 4.0 patch to bridge into Cataclysm.

_________________
"I'm the best there is at what i do, bub, and what i do isn't very pretty"

Yah, exactly.

End result will be that bears should take relatively less damage compared to the other tanks with this change. Doesn't matter if the hits are coming faster or slower, the more avoidance you take away from everyone, the greater advantage the highest armor/hp tank gets.

On the surface it sounds like the opposite. Druids have less avoidance than the other tanks, so if you take an equal amount away, we lose a higher % of our avoidance, don't we?? But all the math so far shows that the higher avoidance a tank had (and thus was balanced around) the harder they're going to get hit by this change. The difference actually brings druids more in line with other tanks (Or rather, brings them down to druids level) in terms of incoming damage reduction, but we still have our tremendous EH pools.

There's math on it over at Tankspot and some other places. It's good times.

Like you stated, on the surface to me, it looks like other tanks will be the way to go since dodge is the only real avoidance we have. I'll have to go over to tankspot.

I'm just as well with letting folks think that, actually. It's been nice so far letting people think bears were underpowered when we've actually been pretty amazing. (And letting Pallies get blamed for being the OP tank.)

So let folks think, "omg bears are gonna be so nerfed.", then they'll go looking at Pallies again to get nerfed, not us.

But yeah, dodge being our only avoidance doesn't mean anything unless other tanks were somehow below 20% dodge, which they aren't. Either way, we're all losing 20% dodge. Since we were lower avoidance to begin with, that translates to a lower increase in unavoided attacks, whereas for a high avoidance tank like a DK it means a higher increase in unavoided attacks relative to a bear.

Bov,

Dodge only equates to one out of 3 parts of the equasion for a warrior or paladins total avoidance, you know the formula. Proper bear tanks might edge out warriors or paladins because they know how to stack the agi to gain more dodge but for the norm it won't happen.

All this is goign to do is drop a tank that has 82% mitigation to 62% mitgation and stack hp gems even moreso then now.

_________________
"I'm the best there is at what i do, bub, and what i do isn't very pretty"

Druids will never have the avoidance of a Warrior or Pally. That's why this change equates to a higher % increase of incoming damage for them. Druids will still take more raw damage, but by a much smaller margin now.



Yeah, that'll never change it seems. HP all the way, rawr.