Spooncraft

Coming from a long time playing and tanking as a warrior this particular read was very enlightening. Check it out, even if you’re not a warrior it’s good to see how Blizzard thinks.

I know it can seem like a useful strategy to act outraged or insulted in order to get changes made. But please try and be civil while we’re in the beta forums. It tends to attract more blue posts.

AE tanking is hard for warriors. This tends to mean that pugs in particular would rather have a paladin tank just for the consistency. I agree this feels broken. We think we can make it easier for warriors to AE tank, especially in 5-player instances, without displacing the paladin as the best AE tank. At the moment we are considering increasing Thunder Clap to 5 targets. We’ll see how that feels.

The old Shield Block wasn’t fun. We think we can make the new one fun. Numbers are the easiest thing to tweak if that’s all that’s called for. So we tend to focus on mechanics at this stage in development. Once we like the mechanics, we can massage the numbers.

Hit is a good stat, but it’ a tough one to itemize since you can hit the cap at which point more becomes useless. While more defense is almost always better, it isn’t as good once you have removed crits and maxed out block (though this will be harder now). Strength and stamina are almost always beneficial no matter how high you get. We can always put them on an item (or talent for that matter) and know they’ll be valuable for warriors. You’ll get some hit, expertise, defense and all your old friends too. But strength and stamina will be everywhere.

It’s almost impossible at this stage to talk about which class can generate the most threat or has the most survivability at level 80. There are no level 80 characters in beta, and we haven’t done our own testing yet. We want to come up with mechanics we like, then we get the numbers in good shape. I’m not saying don’t talk about it — it’s very useful when someone can point out a potential problem, particularly if it’s one we hadn’t thought of. Yes, that happens–a shock, I know. Just don’t slip down the slope from there by declaring the class dead or breaking out the slaps to the face.

There are 4 tanks in WoW. They all are intended to tank 5-player, 10-player and 25-player instances. They all have their specialties, and the warrior specialty will probably remain as the best tank for single, hard-hitting bosses. But if you only have a death knight for that encounter, or you bring a warrior to a fight with a bunch of adds, you’ll still be able to get purps. This is a slight change in philosophy for us, but one we feel is necessary in a world with 10 classes and several specs getting a boost to raid viability. (src)

But wait! There’s more.

Warriors need to be better AE tanks without eclipsing paladins. Thunder Clap is a good place to address that problem. If Shockwave becomes the ultimate tanking ability than we’re concerned nobody would want to run a 5-player dungeon without it. That’s not the goal. We don’t want to hand out Consecrate to every tank, but we want you to be able to tank groups better.

I didn’t want to imply that all tanking gear would be strength and stamina with no other stats. But compared to what you are used to, expect more strength and expect strength to benefit you more.

Let me also clarify a couple of previous comments. I can’t always spend as much effort analyzing every word I type as the community ends up doing, or else I would never get to post. For that I apologize.

I understand the value of defense and Anticipation, though you must agree that volumes have been written about how well defense scales and its value at various points in progression. Tanks have debated about whether it was always worth 5/5 in Anticipation, even if they ultimately concluded that it is. That was the point I garbled.

I also acknowledge that hit and expertise are great threat stats, and expertise can offer a little mitigation to boot. The point I was trying to make is that putting strength on tanking gear solves a lot of problems in the game — it can improve dps and threat (and mitigation if we build the talents correctly) without us having to worry about whether plate-wearing tanks are already capped in some other stat. Defense means something different for warriors and paladins than it does for death knights, and unless we build different gear for each class we can’t count on defense as always being desirable above everything else. The last thing we want is for some classes to feel that they don’t have access to the gear to do their jobs properly. Make sense?

Sorry for any confusion. It’s never going to bother me when players point out errors I may make in my posting or that we make in our design decisions. It makes the game better.

The fact remains that we want warriors to keep tanking. If they aren’t there yet, we’ll get them there. (src)