wow Battle for Azeroth Beta Class Feedback: May 3

[Stan 5,240]

The latest blue posts roundup deals with the Druid Travel form, Mistweaver Monks & Protection Warriors.

Druid Travel Form

In case you've missed it, Druid's Aquatic Form & Flight Form now have separate entries in the spellbook as of the latest Beta Build 26530.

Blizzard (Source)

I’ve been thinking a lot lately as to why I still hate the changes to travel form after all these years. There has been a lot of changes to druids forms in the past that I have been against, like the removal of the resto tree, but given time I’ve gotten used to it and I’m cool with not having it. (although I do appreciate the glyph =D ) same with shapeshifting being on the GCD, I prefer it the old way but I’m cool with it. 

So why do I still hate the travel form consolidation? Is it the technical problems? Right now I barely have visual clues as to what I’m going to turn into, so if I’m stuck in combat I end upspaming travel form until I get bird. That’s an annoyance not worthy of hate and if it was just that I would be cool it by now. I can live with annoyances with relation to my forms. it's part of being a druid, our forms are quirky.

When they first combined them they introduced a glyph that separated out flight form, me disliking the changes snatched that up so I could have them separated on my bars. The side effect of that glyph was my stag form was nowridable. Of course all of my guild thought this was a cool new toy and proceeded to jump on my back for a free ride. This did not sit well with me. This was not an annoyance, this unsettled me deeply; I didn’t want people jumping on me with no invitation or consent on my part beyond my desire to chill in my stag form. However I loved having my flight form separated out, so I decided to train my guild to stay off. Lucky there was a lot of death pools around archimonde. It took a few weeks but I could chill in my stag form with no one getting on me, most days. Still every so often someone would jump on and I would play it off as a game, but I killed them to prove a point. Their attempts to ride me was not welcome.

Jump to Legion. The introduction of class mounts, druids got a cooltwo person flight form. It was said it would be separate from our flight form so I was all excited. I got onto the PTR, got my class form and I liked it. It was a separate button, I could CHOOSE to shift into it and let people ride me while still having a flight form that no one could mount. I loved that concept, I could allow people to ride me at my whim. I could easily consent to them riding me just like the two person mounts. Then they combined it into our regular flight form and my attitude shifted hard. I flat out refuse to use it. Thankfully I didn’t fall in love with the appearance, I don’t feel like I’m missing out by not using it but some druids do. 

Ingame our avatars are a reflection of ourselves. What happens to them affects us as players emotionally on some level. So the fact that people can get on me without my consent is very unsettling, it's invasive. Maybe I’m overly sensitive given my own history but I wanted to put this out there and request some change so druids can have the forms they want and still be able to grant some form of consent. I understand the way its set up now it might not be feasible or practical, but at least think about it.

Thanks for bringing this up. It would definitely be ideal for you to be able to have control over something like this, so even though there's not an immediate solution, I wanted to say we appreciate you making what might have been a difficult post.

On live, you at least have the option of Glyph of the Cheetah for the ground case, and as you mention, ordinary Swift Flight Form for the air case. I know that's not perfect since you may prefer to use other appearances--as we try to add more avenues for character customization, I hope we can find a place for this kind of option on Travel Form.

Mistweaver Monk

Blizzard (Source)

6. Using Enveloping Mist while channeling Soothing Mist with TFT active eats a TFT charge.
 This shouldn't happen.

Quick note--the Thunder Focus Tea-Enveloping buff has a new instant heal component added on beta, which you still benefit from if you Thunder Focus Tea -Enveloping during Soothing Mist. While this loses part of the value of the buff, it's still a reasonable option to provide for when an instant heal seems important.

All that said, one concern with the current setup on beta is that Thunder Focus Tea -Renewing might dominate the other uses of Thunder Focus Tea too often. Some of the exact bonuses it provides may have to be adjusted once everything else settles.

Protection Warrior

Blizzard (Source)

I wanted to add to the analysis of protection warriors discussion by looking at some of the mathematics of our baseline 110 mitigation, especially in relation to druids as they are another primarily mitigation based tank. Most of the discussions on these forums have been primarily qualitative analysis; disliking the general feel or flow of the class, and/or commenting on the various talent lines. The goal of this post is to present a numerical overview of our mitigation as it stands on the beta (build 26530), because I think from a mitigation standpoint we are significantly weaker than other mitigation based tanks (namely guardian druid).

Assumptions:

• Baseline 110 warrior and druid on BFA Beta
• Build 26530

Warrior Stats:

• Baseline Physical Mitigation: 47.49%
• Dodge + Parry: 23.13%
• Block Chance: 29.46%
• Critical Block Chance: 39.60%
• Block Fraction: 30%

Effective Warrior Mitigation

If one then calculates the average damage taken (reducing the incoming DPS by the P/D chance and then adding in block and mitigation), the baseline warrior health takes 35.51% of the incoming physical damage. If we addon 100% uptime on Bolster as we already have too much rage, this becomes 31.54%. Thus, with bolster the average mitigation of a protection warrior is 68.46%.

• No Bolster: 64.49% effective mitigation
• Bolster: 68.46% effective mitigation

Another calculation worth doing is our damage reduction in our active mitigation (shield block). This gives us 100% chance to block and at 110baseline a 69.06% chance to critically block. Thus the results are as follows:

• No Bolster: 80.07% effective mitigation
• Bolster: 82.30% effective mitigation

If we then amortize the active mitigation calculation by assuming 33% uptime (6s with 18s recharge), the average mitigation of a protection warrior is as follows:

• No Bolster: 69.69% effective mitigation
• Bolster: 73.07% effective mitigation

This does not take into consideration the change in any additional cooldowns, this is merely a base mitigation calculation.

Effective Druid Mitigation:

It's worth comparing this against a baseline druid on the beta who can maintain 100% uptime on IF (ironfur). We'll look at 100% uptime 0, 1, and 2 stacks of IF. The baseline druid has 21% dodge.

• No Ironfur: 52.42% effective mitigation
• 1 Stack IF: 60.90% effective mitigation
• 2 Stack IF: 66.43% effective mitigation

Assuming a druid can keep 100% uptime on 2 stacks of IF, the protection warrior with 100% bolster uptime (easily maintained) manages 2.03% higher mitigation without the use of shield block. With consistent shield blockusage this gap increases to 6.64% higher mitigation.

Disclaimer: this is sort of analysis is necessarily rough--beyond these basic estimates, talents and many other things will affect mitigation and overall tank performance in any given context.

Disclaimer 2: I didn't review your calculations or assumptions, but the approach seems reasonable.

Even based on your own conclusions, you're greatly downplaying the Warrior's mitigation advantage in your example. "Only 6.64%" is a very large difference when the Druid is only taking 33.57% of incoming damage in the first place. The Warrior (who's taking 26.93% of incoming damage) is taking 19.8% less damage than a Druid. 19.8% is a very large mitigation advantage--it amounts to a 25% increase in effective health, which is very close to the 29% higher health the Druid has in your example.

[Migol 433]

*Cough*

Protection Warriors, not Protection Paladins.

 

Blizzard never talks Protection Paladins :(  

[Stan 5,240]

7 minutes ago, Migol said:

*Cough*

Protection Warriors, not Protection Paladins.

 

Blizzard never talks Protection Paladins :(  

Fixed, thank you!

[Yridaa 490]

But effective mitigation is a lot more than the factors explained there. We're not taking into consideration sustainability from healing effects.

 

Or cooldowns, which are also very important in the overall performance of a class. Or that the druid has increased healing received from all sources in their mastery but that wasn't calculated in the effective mitigation, while critical block (The warrior mastery) was.

 

Am I overlooking something or was his assessment really shortsighted?

 

Edit: not to mention unblockable effects that might still be dodge-able (i.e. blocking a physical attack may still cause bleeding depending on the encounter but dodging it entirely will not) There are so many more variables involved...

Edited May 3, 2018 by Yridaa

[Allseye 96]

2 hours ago, Yridaa said:

But effective mitigation is a lot more than the factors explained there. We're not taking into consideration sustainability from healing effects.

 

Or cooldowns, which are also very important in the overall performance of a class. Or that the druid has increased healing received from all sources in their mastery but that wasn't calculated in the effective mitigation, while critical block (The warrior mastery) was.

 

Am I overlooking something or was his assessment really shortsighted?

 

Edit: not to mention unblockable effects that might still be dodge-able (i.e. blocking a physical attack may still cause bleeding depending on the encounter but dodging it entirely will not) There are so many more variables involved...

I'm with you, i'm a bit scared what blizz is doing with my lovely prot. I learnd to play with IP and i do enoy it. Now its gone, and atm also our selfheal is gone. 

Its funny, its stated this more live of a druid is due to less mitigation...and how are we gonna be buffed for magic dmg, where we havent more mitigation than a druid? Do we again have to live with it, so we have less health and got less selfheal? Mhhh, not amused. Gonna say my healers they have to save all cds for me again (odin and krosus sent me some greetings).... 

[PatrickHenry 293]

3 hours ago, Yridaa said:

But effective mitigation is a lot more than the factors explained there. We're not taking into consideration sustainability from healing effects.

But strict mitigation, which is what this OP was talking about, doesnt take into account self heals.  Strictly damage reduction.

I agree that overall class effectiveness should take that into account, but strictly mitigation is warrior's home cooking.  

[Perak 25]

Taking IP from warr, buried him realy deep, compared to other tanks...paladins/druids/Dks/DM have self heal with prety low CD and rdy to use when need..even monks have some absorbs...warr now just have only shield block and then CD (WR can be used only after killing or every 30sec on use with talent..that not enought) ...now in beta warrior tank hardly survive 1/2 the amount of mobs than other tanks and some healers just wanted them to switch in to arms :(

Edited May 4, 2018 by Perak