Weapon DPS should contribute to DPS for Ferals

[Farthir-durotan]

There are a lot of good reasons not to change how ferals gain damage. I have mained a feral from Vanilla. I had notoriety on Feathermoon until LFG made that impossible to have anymore for my ability to play at the head of feral of dps and tanking.

There were a lot of ways to get feral to do more damage than expected in Vanilla. Everything from a level 40 helm to choosing the proper weapons, some of which give more dps than you would expect from the stats on them.

The issue I have is not Feral DPS viability as much as it is the lack of excitement when getting an item.

As it is, and if things stay like they are right now, from 1-60 Druids can literally go 10’s of levels without acquiring an upgrade.

This is antithethical to the design philosophy of Vanilla, as noted as early as in patch 1.8:

• Instant Attacks

The mechanics of most instant melee attacks have been modified to improve item balance. Previously, instant melee attacks did damage based on the damage range of the weapon, plus a bonus for the player’s attack power. This bonus was then multiplied by the speed of the weapon. As a result, slow weapons did more damage than was intended, and fast weapons were considered inferior by most players. We have changed the way the attack power bonus is calculated for instant attacks. This change does NOT affect attack power calculations for normal melee attacks. Instead of multiplying by the speed of the weapon, the attack power bonus is now multiplied by a fixed number pulled from the following table:

• Two-handed weapons: 3.3
• Daggers: 1.7
• All other one-handed weapons: 2.4

As a direct result of this, many weapons have shifted position in their relative power. In particular, many Epic (purple) quality items are now more powerful than slower Superior (blue) weapons.

This change was not made to reduce the power of instant attacks, but to correct the relative imbalance of weapon itemization. At a given level requirement, epic quality weapons should always be more powerful than superior quality weapons.

According to Blizzard, getting a new, higher ilevel weapon not register as an upgrade is mistake, and antithethical to the design philosophy of Vanilla.

The same argument applies to Druids, who during leveling might go through various different weapons not receiving an upgrade, which deprives Druid players from the joy of getting a new, higher level weapon.

My suggestion won’t change the status quo of Druid DPS or the viability of certain items like Manual Crowd Pummeler, quite the contrary, many non-BiS items will in fact benefit much more greatly from this thanks to MCP’s lower item level and thus DPS.

As that shows, to give us scaling with weapon DPS, they would have to redo weapons and feral mechanics. Aka, it is a horribly stupid idea for a CLASSIC SERVER.

Nah. I have delibirately put feral DPS weapon scaling at a low value of 8 AP per point of DPS: compared to 14 AP per point of DPS for other classes, to ensure that there will be no balance conflicts and status quo changes.

This will ensure that Druids can still get excited about getting a new weapon, but without impacting the status quo of high-end raiding and hybrids, if people don’t want that to happen.