If all goes as planned, patch 3.1 will bring the new Savage Defense mechanic to feral Druid tanks. For those not familiar with the new skill, in its current incarnation it reads:
Each time you deal a critical strike while in Bear Form or Dire Bear Form, you gain Savage Defense, reducing the damage taken from the next physical attack that strikes you by 25% of your attack power.
In parallel to the introduction of Savage Defense comes a reduction in the armor that feral bears receive from leather items. While this change is a departure from the traditional feral Druid tanking profile - many players are used to considering a bear as a tank with an over-abundance of health and armor - it is a move towards a more thematic role for bear Druids; when the next patch lands we will be the only tanking class to generate a non-trivial defensive advantage by landing our offensive abilities.
The question is.... will gaining the shield be enough to balance out the lost armor?
State of denial
The Druid community has been surprisingly quiet regarding the mechanics of Savage Defense. While there has been an extreme amount of hand-wringing (for example,
here), there have been precious few attempts to theorycraft the ability. Notable exceptions go to
Think Tank,
Tossk, and
Elitist Jerks - but even then we have very few descriptions of how the numbers were generated.
The simple fact is that feral Druid tanking math is now incredibly tough to conceptualize. Not only do we have to worry about health, armor, and avoidance, but the concept of "shield uptime" is also crucial in the understanding of a bear's defensive profile, and that is calculated using an enormous mish-mash of offensive stats.
One of the most practical relics of theorycrafting this new tanking mechanic would be a set of stat weightings that could be used to create a prioritized gear list. Nightcrowler (of Elitist Jerks fame) retrofitted his feral simulator with an early version of the Savage Defense mechanics and came up with some weightings, but they simply suggest that
we should keep on wearing what we've always been wearing, and not focus on offense at all.
This feels wrong.... but more investigation is clearly required.
Assumptions
For the sake of the discussion we will consider an arbitrary 15 second window in the middle of a boss encounter. For this time period, the following assumptions have been made:
1. The Druid is tanking a single mob.
2. No special encounter mechanics exist.
3. Lacerate has already been applied once prior to the time period we are examining.
4. Latency approaches zero.
5. The Druid is not rage starved.
Shielding opportunities
In any given ideal 15 second window there exist 21 opportunities to trigger a Savage Defense shield:
10 special attacks - one attack per 1.5s global cooldown
6 auto attacks - one attack every 2.5s
5 lacerate DoT ticks - one tick every 3.0s
Obviously, the more shields that are triggered, the less damage the Druid will take (assuming his opponent continues to attack him). While it is likely that some of these shield-generating attacks will overlap, they should be relatively well spread out throughout the entire window of time, and thus most shields end up being used instead of wasted.
Complicating matters is the fact that not all shielding opportunities are affected by the same statistics. The breakdown looks like this:
| Stat | Special? | Auto? | DoT? | How? |
|---|
| Attack power | X | X | X | Increases damage absorbed |
| Crit rating | X | X | X | Must crit to trigger shield |
| Hit rating | X | | | Two roll system; must hit to crit |
| Expertise rating | X | | | Two roll system; must hit to crit |
| Haste rating | | X | | Decreases time between attacks |
| Strength | X | X | X | Converts into attack power |
| Agility | X | X | X | Converts into attack power and crit rating |
Table 1.
Stats that impact the Savage Defense shielding mechanicFrom the above chart it is clear that agility will remain a crucial tanking stat - not only does it contribute to shield uptime (via attack power and crit rating), but it continues to provide armor and dodge. Attack power/strength and crit rating also always affect the effectiveness of your shield, whereas the benefits of hit, expertise, and haste ratings are all much less pronounced.
Armor equivalence
To understand the impact of the Savage Defense shield, it must be contrasted against the commodity that we lost to gain this ability: armor.
At current gear levels, my own toon has dropped from an unbuffed 33,803 armor (67.02% damage reduction versus raid bosses) on the live servers to 27,901 armor (64.69% damage reduction) on the PTR. These armor levels reflect a gear set containing minimal +armor jewellery and focusing on a healthy balance of both health and avoidance.
My unbuffed attack power is sitting at 4965, which will be good for a 1241 point Savage Defense shield.
The following table examines the damage that a character with the above stats would expect to take from bosses that hit with varying strengths.
| Incoming damage | Live | PTR
shield down | PTR
shield up |
|---|
| 20,000 | 6,596 | 7,062 | 5,821 |
| 40,000 | 13,192 | 14,124 | 12,883 |
| 60,000 | 19,788 | 21,186 | 19,945 |
| 80,000 | 26,384 | 28,248 | 27,007 |
| 100,000 | 32,980 | 35,310 | 34,069 |
Table 2.
Expected damage after armor/shieldTwo notable raw damage plateaus are 40,000 - which is the default value assumed in
Toskk's Time To Live calculator, and 80,000 which close to the damage that
Kalon suggests is to be "reasonably expect[ed]" from bosses in Ulduar.
In the first case the shielded PTR bear is taking a fair bit less damage than a pre-patch bear. However when confronted with a heavy-hitter, the Savage Defense shield starts to lose its luster - and things only go downhill from there. To try to even out this discrepancy and continue to maintain the same damage profile, a Druid would have to stack at least 2,800 extra attack power and that number would ramp up to impossible amounts quickly as the incoming damage grew larger. (In full-out face-ripping DPS gear my unbuffed attack power is 5929, which pushes the shield up to 1482, an increase of only 241 damage absorption).
Of course, it is unrealistic to assume that the Savage Defense shield will be active for 100% of an encounter. When the shield is not up, the Druid really starts to take a beating, and a few missed shields in a row could result in a dangerous damage spike that will tax even the best of healers.
To attempt to counteract this negative change a Druid could wear more +armor jewellery, however the value of that is questionable due to the lost health and avoidance that generally results from these sorts of shuffles.
Struggling with uptime
As alluded to in Table 1, the best way to boost the Savage Defense shield's uptime is to stack crit rating - preferably through high agility since dodge rating and armor are also bestowed by that stat.
While individual encounters may vary, most information on Ulduar seems to suggest that many of the bosses have a base swing timer of 2s (which can be modified by slowing abilities like Infected Wounds). If this holds, then the average boss will attack 7.5 times every 15 seconds, in addition to whatever special attacks they direct at the tank (many of which will be magic-based, and thus not affected by Savage Defense or armor).
Assuming an even spread of critical strikes (and no RNG disasters), a Druid need only sport a 36% crit rating to mathematically cover each of these 7.5 attacks with a Savage Defense shield. Even wearing tanking gear not designed with offense in mind (and not buffed at all), my current gear grants me a 35% chance to land a critical blow.
While more crit rating would help guarantee that Savage Defense is always up, stacking 50% crit would only result in 3 more shields per 15 seconds, on average.
The other offensive stats do not fare much better.
Hit and expertise rating impact the 10 special attacks that a Druid can launch in a 15 second window, however even with (a totally unrealistic) zero in both of these ratings, the loss is only 3 chances to crit.
Haste rating is an even tougher sell. Every 32.79 haste rating increases attack speed by 1%. To squeeze an extra full attack into the 15s window, a Druid's swing timer needs to be reduced from 2.5s to 2.14s. This in turn requires a whopping 551 haste rating, and the extra attack is not even guaranteed to generate a shield - it still must crit!
So what's a bear to do?
While much of this may sound grim on a first read, keep in mind that Druids were exceptional tanks through all of the early Wrath of the Lich King content - in fact at times we were almost too good. Certainly taking feral Druids down a notch (along with Death Knights) was inevitable, and is by no means catastrophic.
That all said, after examining the new Savage Defense mechanic in some detail, the tuning does seem a little extreme, especially when confronted by the damage profile of the hard-hitting bosses that a main-tanking Druid would expect to face. (Multi-tanking is
another story all together.)
In my opinion, the best approach right now is to continue to play the game as you have been: if you're an offtank, keep it up - and if you're a main tank, then by all means keep going toe-to-paw with the baddest enemies the game has to offer. If survivability is simply too difficult, then build up some solid evidence to support that assertion, and bring it to the World of Warcraft forums - the developers have repeatedly stated that they do not want to gimp any class. Imperical evidence is best.
Do not, on the other hand, drastically change how you play your toon - and certainly don't start gearing wildly differently due to this change. Appendix A details a number of gear weightings systems that can be used to aid your decision - all of them will guide you down the same path that you walked in the tier 7 content, with only a mild focus on offense.
Appendix 1: Sample gear weights
The following are three different scales that can be used to put together a gear rating list on a site like
Loot Rank.
Agility - 212.36
Stamina - 168.03
Dodge Rating - 159.80
Defense Rating - 130.48
Expertise - 104.08
Armor - 80.28
Strength - 18.59
Bonus Armor - 11.34
Attack Power - 9.37
Crit Rating - 9.44
Hit Rating - 5.18
Haste Rating - 0.44
Agility - 100
Stamina - 80
Dodge Rating - 70
Defense Rating - 55
Expertise - 16
Strength - 12
Hit Rating - 8
Crit Rating - 6
Armor - 6
Attack Power - 5
Haste Rating - 2
Stamina = +4.001882628623221ms
Agility = +3.3200094409515657ms
Dodge Rating = +2.6009582493315975ms
Defense Rating = +1.8416494536683814ms
Expertise Rating = +1.5676567460136681ms
Base Armor = +1.2217691206259929ms
Crit Rating = +0.4824046461067155ms
Strength = +0.3904683498987538ms
Attack Power = +0.18056744681160808ms
Bonus Armor = +0.17420226094699842ms
Hit Rating = +0.12109134831206347ms
Haste Rating = +0.004988096202751535ms
As you can see, in all cases the traditional defensive stats rank higher than the stats that affect the Savage Defense shield - a disappointing trend.
Appendix 2: Thoughts on an alternate mechanic
In my opinion the current implementation of Savage Defense fails to meet the design goals set out by the Blizzard developers: it neither addresses the broken feral scaling, nor does it adequately reward selecting offensive-minded gear; in fact there is now more reason to stack armor and health than ever before, not less.
The major problem appears to be that stacking offensive stats is simply not cost effective, and the resulting shields are far too small to make a difference when they are most needed. Flat damage absorption shields based on attack power are almost too powerful when confronting light-hitting mobs, and nearly meaningless against the powerhouses that await us in Ulduar.
Instead of granting a fixed amount of damage absorption per critical strike, I propose that Savage Defense should be modified to provide bonus armor for a single attack. The primary win here would be that armor scales more favourably with incoming damage.
For example, modify Savage Defense to read: "Each time you deal a critical strike while in Bear Form or Dire Bear Form, you gain Savage Defense, increasing your armor for the next physical attack that strikes you by 85% of your attack power."
Recall that my unbuffed pre-patch armor is 33,803, while post-patch armor is 27,900 and my attack power is 4965. Under the above proposal my shielded armor would be 32,120 - good for a 65.9% damage reduction. More intriguingly, if I stacked attack power, as with my current DPS gear set (5929 AP) then I would enjoy a shield strength of 32,939 which translates to a 66.5% reduction.
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