[Wrathblood]

Kimi,

Tell you what. Make me in charge of the dps and healers as well and I promise to declare all cars equally expensive instead of trying to build espri de corps in MY cars.

You are perfectly welcome to continue posting your thoughts, for as long as you like. The input is always good and I'm happy for any reason to have people coming back to this thread.

[Hecatus]

Wrathblood, on 19 November 2010 - 04:17 PM, said:

Kimi,

Tell you what. Make me in charge of the dps and healers as well and I promise to declare all cars equally expensive instead of trying to build espri de corps in MY cars.

You are perfectly welcome to continue posting your thoughts, for as long as you like. The input is always good and I'm happy for any reason to have people coming back to this thread.

I was in favor of this - then again I can't complain if Bear is heading somewhere relatively near his original views.

[Deceax]

Quote

I was in favor of this - then again I can't complain if Bear is heading somewhere relatively near his original views.

Note that all of the "expectation" posts for cata have not yet been posted. I'm sure the authors of those posts will share somewhat similar views to Wrath since it seems that Heresiarch is trying to get a little more competitive and possibly go for horde first achievs come cataclysm.

[Ballack]

WALL OF TEXT

Quite simply I read this post as Wrath getting the tanks in-line with his expectations as what I assume is his position as "tank lead". His job isn't to worry about dps or healers but rather make sure his tanks are sharp and work crisply together.

[Hecatus]

Rofl, oh silly Ballack xD

Wrath loves educating the needlessly large masses on tanking mechanics It's never just directed at tanks xD!

[Wrathblood]

In case anyone is curios, there's no mention of it on MMO-champion, but the nerfbat has finally landed on DKs. DS now heals 20% of damage taken in last 5 seconds AND Blood Presence is only worth +30% armor. DKs are still ahead of both druids and warriors on damage taken (net of self-healing) on physical fights and the gap grows a good bit on fights with heavy magic damage (which is basically all of them). But, the gap is MUCH closer than it used to be, and you can no longer effectively reduce your healers needed by 1 via using a DK tank instead of someone else.

Plus, DKs take more damage than everyone else, but make it back up through healing, which isn't quite as good as not taking the damage in the first place. Warriors probably still need a Barkskin-like short defensive cooldown that works on magic, but these three classes are basically balanced now.

Paladin self-healing via WoG, however, scales with Vengeance although its not really supposed to. This makes them the current top dogs. Cutting Vengeance scaling out of WoG plus removing Holy Shield from WoG (so that WoG only gets cast every other time instead of every time) would result in all 4 tank classes being more closely balanced than in the history of WoW. I feel good about the future of tanking.

[Hecatus]

Hey Wrath, where do you find this tanking info stuff?

Trying to brush up on bear tanking for cata just as a side thing but the link you have isn't working...

[Wrathblood]

You mean just in general? I've been following the tanking balancing pretty closely, and there's a group of us in the WoW tanking forum who've been modeling the impacts of the changes since early Beta. Its kinda overrun by idiots now, but for a couple of months that forum was absolutely the pinnacle of tanking theorycrafting anywhere, and the stuff that got figured out would eventually drift back to maintankadin or EJ. We actually found and figured out some changes before MMO-champion and other data miners found them, which was nice.

Oh, thanks for pointing out the bear link issue, Hec. I've fixed the link. Let me know if it causes any trouble.

[Hecatus]

Awesome, thx man.

[Drickzy]

I know that current numbers are not going to represent final tally in Cata, but in full 251/264 gear on my warrior and I'm nowhere CLOSE to what Pallies/DKs are HP wise and avoidance. TPS, they aren't far behind, but I seem to get slammed a lot more than the other 3 tank classes do. Even with a decent amount of Mastery too.

I know that people have been saying DKs are rather weak right now, but I just don't see it. Any thought Wrath?

[Wrathblood]

Oh, DK's aren't weak. DKs are a little clunky to play (though that'll change a little with Outbreak at 81), but their pure AoE (like an Ony whelps situation) is very strong and their single target and small group threat are adequate if not great. Their survivability is top notch, though. Even after their recent few rounds of nerfs, they're still fighting Paladins for the top spot in least damage taken (net of self-healing) and Paladins are propped up somewhat by WoG scaling with Vengeance when its really not supposed to. DK damage taken can be a little roller coaster-like, because to minimize damage taken overall, they need to maximize their damage taken during the 5 seconds before each DS. One problem DKs have is that they are the most skill-dependent tank. A really good DK is a LOT better than a really bad DK.

DKs are clearly best against magic damage, but overall (assuming WoG is fixed) all four tanking classes will be in roughly the same league for the first time in probably ever.

[Drickzy]

We'll see I suppose. I'm still not convinced from what I've seen yet (might be that the last 6 years has biased me) but it will be interesting to see how things play out.

[Wrathblood]

You've been playing with DK tanks since 2004?

[Drickzy]

-.- DKs as of late. You know what I mean Wrath!

[Wrathblood]

;D

[Voodie]

Ghostcrawler's post from the Community Page

Quote

A very nice paladin player asked me recently about Vengeance. She had concerns about the mechanic, which made me realize that we haven’t done the best job of explaining to players exactly what Vengeance is supposed to accomplish.

Vengeance is a new passive ability gained by choosing one of the tanking talent trees: Protection for warriors and paladins, Blood for death knights, or Feral for druids. When a tank with one of these talent specs takes damage, she gains an attack power bonus based on the damage taken. This bonus can’t exceed 10% of her health.

Vengeance was designed for a single purpose, which is to make sure tank threat scales as other players improve their gear. Imagine a raid of reasonably geared level-85 characters. In the absence of Vengeance, the tank might generate about 50% of the damage of a DPS character. With the tank’s threat modifiers this should be sufficient for her to generate enough threat to keep her targets stuck to her (unless something unusual is going on in the encounter). The problem is that in later tiers the mages and rogues in the raid accumulate gear that continues to increase their damage, while the tank chooses gear that increases her survivability. Tanks will pick up some threat stats along the way, but as their survival is almost always a necessary condition for victory, they choose gear accordingly. In later tiers, instead of doing 50% of the damage of a DPS class, the tank might start to slip to 30% or less of a DPS character's damage. Now threat becomes an issue. Threat needs to be an important part of the game -- I’ll try to explain why we think so in a future blog. However, it isn’t our design intent for threat generation to get much harder in the third tier of content relative to the first.

So that’s what Vengeance is supposed to be. Here is what it’s not supposed to be. Vengeance is not supposed to solve the threat problem completely. A tank shouldn’t be able to just auto-attack and let Vengeance do the rest. Vengeance isn’t a replacement for the tank generating enough initial threat to get the targets to stick to her. She shouldn’t need to rely on Vengeance in the first six seconds of combat. It’s there to prevent the warlock from slowly creeping up on her threat in the middle of the fight. (If this has never happened to your raid, it’s possible that the huge threat transfer potential of the rogue Tricks of the Trade and hunter Misdirection masked how dicey threat really was for you, but those abilities were redesigned for Cataclysm.) In fact, you shouldn’t need Vengeance at all in the first couple of tiers of Cataclysm content. If a lucky dodge streak causes Vengeance to fall off, and that means that you can’t generate enough threat, then either our numbers aren’t tuned correctly, or you need to L2tank.

Vengeance also isn’t supposed to make you scared to attack a tank in PvP. Tanks have enough benefits in PvP, such as being hard to kill and control, especially in Cataclysm when Rated Battlegrounds provide them with a role where they can defend flags or towers. Players generally don’t hit hard enough to trigger the full effect of Vengeance, unless they are all ganging up on one tank, at which point someone in the group should have the ability to dispel it (Vengeance is treated as an Enrage effect for dispel purposes).

Vengeance is a new mechanic, and like many design changes, it may take some tweaking to get right. Maybe it takes too long to stack up or falls off too easily. Maybe it does too much of the tank’s job for her and ends up producing a generation of lazy tanks. Threat is a tricky thing to balance. If it’s too easy to maintain, then the tank isn’t having fun. If it’s too hard to maintain, then nobody is having fun.

Believe it or not, we want tanking to be fun.

-Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street is the Lead Systems Designer for World of Warcraft and once killed a dinosaur with a spreadsheet.

[Wrathblood]

i hate vengence. its a mechanic intended to solve problems we won't have for like two more tiers, while managing to cause a host of scaling and balance problems right now.

[Wrathblood]

Btw, I've been reading that the EJ guide for Bear tanks is absolutely full of fail and basically not worth reading. The Paladin tank guide isn't perfect but is overall pretty good (I've contributed a fair bit to it). I haven't really read the other two.

[Sobeyet]

@Stab - Generic gear list I've been using for my warrior: http://maintankadin....&rb_v=viewtopic

It's paladin-centric so there are some small differences (e.g., warriors like parry slightly more than dodge for Hold the Line) but it's great for a quick overview on what drops where. Also has stuff on enchants/professions.