Tanking Changes
7:17 AM
Survival Instincts -- Damage reduction changed from 60% to 50%. Cooldown reduced from 5 minutes to 2 minutes. Duration still 12 seconds.
o.O
Uhm... whoa. I do not understand this change at all.
For instance, Warriors also have Shield Wall and it also reduces damage by 60% for 12 seconds on a 5 minute cooldown, and they can glyph it to be a 3 minute cooldown which reduces damage by 40%.
Okay, that whole bit above with the line through it... all wrong apparently. This has changed since I last looked at warriors. Now, Shield Wall is a 50% damage reduction on a 5 minute cooldown and there is a second-tier protection talent which reduces the cooldown by 60/120/180 seconds (making it a 3-minute cooldown talented), but it still only reduces damage by 50%. Next, you look at the glyph which increases the cooldown by 2 minutes, but also grants it 20% more damage reduction. Which means that IF you are a prot warrior and you glyph for it, your Shield Wall will be a 4 minute cooldown for 70% damage reduction OR a 2 minute cooldown for 50% damage reduction.
The reason that this Survival Instincts makes no sense to me is because it would be like giving a Fury Warrior a 50% damage reduction button. That is it... the problem that Blizz has not yet commented on (and I hope that they do not) is that Survival Instincts can be used in Cat Form for essentially no lost damage while every other tank has to be tanking specialized, for one, and must be in the correct stance to use this ability, for two. Warriors have to be in defensive stance to use Shield Wall, for example, while Ferals can press Survival Instincts in Cat Form.
I worry that there is an unspoken "oh btw... SI not available in Cat Form anymore" looming, but we shall see.
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October 29, 2010 at 4:19 PM
yea rey, i share your concern.
i'm hoping it's limited to "SI and berserk can't be active at the same time".
kitties really need the defensive CD.
i'm still thinking ferals are going to end up really strong due to us getting both a prot and a dps spec / mastery / tools in one package.
we'll see how it ends up though.
-elle
November 1, 2010 at 7:10 AM
Elle, I share your optimism. There is an outspoken Feral on the beta boards who posts on a paladin named Eleciel (or something very close to that) who is absolutely sure that Feral will be terrible and has a laundry-list of reasons why. It is disconcerting when you read some of his points because a few of them actually do make sense. Most notably, the lack of any defensive magic CD whereas every other melee has anti-caster buttons (CloS, Spell Reflect, Grounding Totem, and not Ret... because Blizz hates Rets apparently).
I am hoping that SI stays as-is, but even as I type this the cooldown has been changed from 2min to 3min on Beta (it seems Blizz knows what they're doing with Balancing after all; quick-n-small is better than slow-n-big as far as patches go).
Our Mastery is rather useful, but again... our Bear Form mastery does absolutely nothing against Casters. Perhaps I am simply jaded by WotLK PvP, but I worry about Casters becoming more dominant, particularly in a world where MS effects are less mandatory (10% is hardly a mandatory debuff, in my opinion).