Tanking in Wrath of the Lich King as of Sept. 16th
This discussion has been going on for a while now and as they change more in the Beta I’m sure more points will come up in the debate. It seems they’re getting much closer to a finished product of stable Wrath tanking for all 4 possible tank classes.
Couple of thoughts:
1) You should only face instagib problems when you can be crit since bosses no longer crush targets 3 levels lower than them. The fact that 3 of the tank classes are having trouble being uncrittable by Naxx is something we’re look into. Druids can be uncrittable through talents.
2) DKs will probably have lower armor than warriors and possibly health as well. Their avoidance will almost certainly be higher to compensate for the lack of block. DK situational abilities are better than warrior ones. We want to keep these differences as much as possible without gimping anyone. Everyone realizes that a 95% avoidance tank with 10K health is not going to be an effective tank, nor is one that is so dependent on cooldowns that he dies when the cooldowns aren’t up.
3) If you are having threat issues, that is concerning. We are trying to get away from +threat modifiers on abilities because they don’t scale well with with gear. For those we’re keeping (like Sunder Armor) the threat scales with AP. The ideal design is something closer to the paladin, where threat scales off of damage really well. If the DK dps is too low, that would certainly account for lower threat as well. We don’t want to have a lot of variance in threat on tanks. It’s hard to balance (and not really much fun) to have low threat tanking classes.
Bottom line: the design is that the 4 tank classes are roughly equal in their ability to survive and maintain threat, while preserving whatever differences among them that we can manage. (src)
Loading ...
Sep 16th, 2008 at 1:34 pm
I don’t get it. The warriors are always asking for “BOOST FOR WARRIORS THANKS” “WE WERE MADE FOR BEING TANKS” and then when a warrior joins your group it’s always “I DON’T WANNA TANK, WAAAAA” or “I’M ARMS/FURY FFS” and then they leave.
Sep 16th, 2008 at 2:05 pm
you are right that there are a lot of warriors in LFG that arn’t prot and never plan to be. so its not fair to just invite a warrior and assume hes the tank. 9 outa 10 times a warrior in LFG isnt prot. i know cause i have a prot warrior and when i log on i usually have 3 pts’s askin me to tank somthing before i even make it to the mailbox. and being prot im pumped about the dmg buffs. it means i can actually kill stuff. instead of watching every other class mow through 3 or 4 mobs while im still trying to kill my first. and maybe now i wont have to carry a FULL set (right down to trinkets) of gear just for when i want to kill something when im not tanking.
Oct 3rd, 2008 at 10:26 am
Digging up an oldy moldy here and maybe I should have just made it a contact, but how is itemization changing for protection pallies? If they are moving away from Stam, Int, Def, Spell Dmg, gear what are they moving towards? Is strength now a stat that prot pallies are going to be stacking with their stamina instead of spell damage? No more caster weapons?
I ask because as patch 3.0.2 rolls out and things change am I going to need to regear my prot pally? I’m not on PTR so I haven’t tested it out, but I’m curious because if I come across any gear from now until the Xpac I’ll want to be sure I snag it up.
Oct 3rd, 2008 at 10:38 am
prot paladins are going to need (from what I can see and feel free to correct me if I’m wrong) Stamina, Strength, Spell power, block, defense.
stamina is a no brainer, strength is going to be a bigger part of all tanks now even prot paladins, spell power is more for consecrate and dmg from holy shield, block is self explanatory with the new blessing of sanc., and defense adds overall avoidance for no crits. Int is nice but from new sanc blessing and from heals you should not be running out of mana. drop judgement of the wise on the mob as well.
Oct 3rd, 2008 at 11:05 am
Okay, so most of the itemization is going to be the same, it’s just that now strength will be factored in as a more important stat than it used to be, I don’t think that is bad!
It’s not that I generally stack Int either, it’s that lots of the pally tanking gear had it included. The new judgements and lowered costs of some abilities are probably factored into this. I remember seeing that the Int was being removed from Tier sets with the patch…that was awhile ago though.
Thoughts on caster weapons though? Still needed for prot pallies or can they use regular tanking weapons or even more powerful damaging one handers?