So I did a bit of dummy dps tests of my bear and a veng DH. Both are lowly iLvl 188-189, no legendaries yet.
Single target dummy, my bear does about 1300 dps, and veng does 2100.
My bear’s spec and rotation is somewhat standand (maintain moonfire, use galactic guardian, thrash and mangle on CD, maul to use up rage.
I expected the bear to be lower than DH since she’s tankier, and rage generation is slower against a dummy, but seriously, that much of a difference??
Is that about normal, or am I doing something fundamentally wrong?
Poopy. I wasn’t really expecting to be the top dps, but I was hoping to be maybe 10% behind, not 30
I love the personal utility of druid (forms, slight heals, etc), but the damage difference is painful
Bear dps is really REALLY low, especially on single target.
It’s not going to really change unless we can more freely weave while tanking, and that would take a much more thorough redesign of the entire class.
You’r sim doesn’t really include AOE damage, which we do pretty well on. It’s not entirely unusual for me to do a double pull and get number 1 damage with uncapped thrash aoe and incarn. This doesn’t happen super often, but it does happen.
I’m sure the tanks will be rebalanced eventually, maybe when SL is out of beta.
The reason I was measuring on single target is because with dummies it’s harder to measure AE damage (range, randomness, etc). But DH does possibly even better with AE too, so there’s that
BC Mangle bear would like a word with you, that’s probably why we have never seen bear deal decent damage is it gave people PTSD from Mangle 2 and 3 shotting people in pvp for a whole season.
Our single target damage is pretty low, but we’re not bad in the overall. I’m usually sitting at 2-2.5k at the end of a dungeon, which is on-par or higher than most tanks I’ve grouped with, excluding DH who are clearly at the top of the heap right now.
“When shifting out of bear form, maintain bonus armor/health for 15 seconds. 30 second CD”
There, I’ve made heart of the wild a not dead talent for bears, and made cat affinity useful. Would be awkward with the CD, but probably need a CD of some sort to keep it situational.
It really depends on where you’re planning on doing the damage.
Venge will out DPS bears as they just can, but you’ll be kiting more.
Bears can easily facetank trash without much kiting.
If youre going in to M+ take maul off your bars and use Iron Fur. Yeah its a “dps loss” but you’ll gain massive survivability.
If youre raiding then any time you don’t have something hitting you, pop into balance affinity and fire away.
In M+ its REALLY easy to weave into Balance and get a bunch of casts off or two to put yourself into eclipse and NF ability (convoke).
Like if your just questing or burning something down, then sure go for it, but that and pvp are really the only times to use it.
Example:
But lets say you do two extra mauls for the damage while tanking, and skip two ironfurs. Your healer has to cast an extra heal on you, and thus misses out on refreshing a dot. Suddenly your personal dps increase comes out to a net dps loss for the group.
If your taking practically no physical damage, and its all magical, you can probably maul all the time… but these are very (very VERY) rare and none really come to mind recently.
Guardian Druid damage is very low and needs a buff. Also it’s creating problems with sustaining Agro. I would recommend merging ironfur and maul for an easy fix. Even after that you would need to buff guardian damage another 30-40%.
This isn’t a fix and it’s not a good idea. Giving maul a 50% magic shield for the damage it does while upping the damage it does by 15-20% would at least give us some sort of direct magic mitigation, give us a reason to use maul in situations, and slightly increase our DPS
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