Posted by Spooner | 2 Comments

Something is wrong!

You guys finally drove Ghostcrawler off the edge. This is the double edged sword of official game forums. When you have a place that says “we as developers can read your complaints here and take suggestions etc” it acts like a beacon for discussion both good and bad. Its the internet, the Greater Internet Fuckwad theory is pretty much SEEPING with confirmation by checking the WoW forums. For heaven’s sake we have special trackers to follow blizzard posts on the things.

You take the good with the bad, but I still think Blizzard should chill out with the replying to everybody. They went into this thing not knowing the full extent of how the gamer community at large is nothing but a bunch of emotional cripples that treat forums on the web like the womb of their own mother.

I understand wanting player feedback and that’s a wonderful thing. But be ready to deal with the backlash when one player’s idea was put in game and another’s was ignored. That’s akin to giving one sibling special treatment and shunning his brother. That’s just how some of these forumites take it, which is crazy.

If there is something you think is wrong with the game that we have’t addressed, usually one of the following is true:

1. We don’t think something is wrong. In this case, repeatedly posting the same thing over and over is unlikely to change our minds.
2. We think something is wrong, but we aren’t ready to announce a change yet. This could be because we don’t know how we want to fix it yet, we know how we want to fix it but require new tech to implement it, or because the change is going to take awhile.

In both of these cases, posting the same thing over and over again or bumping a thread when you have no new information to add isn’t going to have the effect you’re looking for. The goal often seems to be to post over an over either because you’re so angry you can’t take it anymore, or because you’re stubborn and are looking for that blue post that finally says “here’s how we’re going to buff you.” That happens, but it doesn’t happen that often, and in those cases it is always because we agree something is a problem, not because you wore us down.

I know some of you just want a thumb’s up or thumb’s down answer on a community question or issue, but even that is beyond what we want to do with these forums. We don’t have the time nor inclination to respond to every issue, let alone every thread. Furthermore, simple answers are rarely enough for a design-savy community that wants to know why, wants to explore edge-cases or perhaps even wants to see hard proof. Short blue answers rarely “solve” anything and more often throw fuel on a fire.

Here is how the process should ideally work: If you have an issue, bring it up. See if other players agree with you. If they disagree, don’t shut them out. Once you’ve explored the issue a little bit, you’ve done your job. You don’t need to keep starting new topics on the same issue nor bumping those already so long that no reasonable person is going to read them (though I try to).

Sometimes we’ll respond to a topic and sometimes we won’t. But given the realities of developer time and the number of WoW players out there (even the minority of forum-posting ones) you should interpret those responses as almost random and not suggestive of a topic’s severity or merit.

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Posted by Spooner | 0 Comments

The Future of Tanking in Patch 3.2

So Ghostcrawler has gone and posted more about how block, avoidance, and threat are going to be changed in patch 3.2. Honestly I got the main concept they were talking about and don’t really see why it is that there needs to be a dissertation on tanking every week. We already know that dodge is better than parry (at this time) but that in itself is a problem since bears (druid tanks) cannot parry, warriors and paladins can use it marginally, and death knights rely heavily on it.

Block is something only paladins and warriors worry about but its not as strong or helpful as dodge/parry and that’s why its being buffed considerably in the next patch. The side-effect we all wanted but won’t get anymore, was the added DPS that abilities like shield slam and shield of righteousness would generate (that means more threat too for PvE).

Just thinking about it hurts my head so I’m going to stop here.

Avoidance (namely parry and dodge)
The main goal of the change was to make parry not so much less attractive than dodge as an avoidance stat. Since tank avoidance is so high already, we wanted to do that by nerfing dodge a little, not by buffing parry.

This hurts druids slightly more than other tanks, but the emphasis is on “slightly.” This is not the big druid nerf that some forum posters have predicted. We will continue to evaluate tank survivability and threat generation based on PTR tests with “Patchwerk” to decide if druids need to be nerfed or DKs buffed or look at Prot warrior dps or anything else.

This is also not the big avoidance “come to Naaru” that some posters predicted. Overall, we think avoidance is too high and the game would work better with lower tank avoidance, but suddenly dropping everyone’s avoidance by 20 or 30% would be a very big change with many ramifications for healing and gear among other things. It would also feel like a big nerf to the many players who didn’t understand why it would be better for the game in the long term. But I still expect it is coming at some point. (Source)

More on Block
I feel like we’ve been pretty candid about its future. You can probably find my previous comments relatively easily. We think block needs to mitigate much more incoming damage per hit, but to make that change we would also need to lower tank avoidance across the board and prevent every hit from being blocked (especially in situations with more than one target beating on you). To make Prot tanking more interesting, we have allowed block to become too much of a dps stat. In retrospect, we’d rather it remained a mitigation stat and that Strength was pushed up as the big warrior and paladin dps stat.

You shouldn’t overly worry about outscaling content. We said from the beginning that there would be three major patches to Wrath of the Lich King. We aren’t setting up a system that is going to remain on autopilot for 10 more tiers of content without our intervention. It’s totally valid for players to worry about scaling, and all things considered, we’d rather have mechanics that scale well. But if those scaling problems aren’t going to manifest themselves until you have item level 500 items, then you’re worried prematurely.

We would like to get Prot warriors into PvP in a legitimate way, but our first priority is making sure every class has at least one viable PvP spec first. By “legitimate” I do NOT mean that you sometimes can do a 19K Shield Slam when all the stars align. That’s not acceptable even if it is rare. Also consider that tanks do have a legit role acting like actual tanks when running flags or tanking AV-style NPCs. That may not be enough of a role, but I did want to point out that emphasizing BGs more and Arenas less also helps to carve out a niche for PvP tanks.

I know there are plenty of Prot warriors out there who couldn’t care less about PvP. Sorry. We have to.

We want Prot warriors to do decent damage in PvE. We don’t want them to do as good damage as actual dps specs — there needs to be a trade-off for such high survivability. This means we need threat multipliers or you won’t be able to actually hold aggro. It’s okay if Shield Slam can make big (yet not absurd) numbers, since you don’t Shield Slam all that much. That’s fun. As I said above though, it would probably work better if Shield Slam hit hard because your Strength was high, not because you built a gimmicky set.

The problem, GC, is that this doesn’t scale between 10s and 25s. Damage in 25s is considerably higher than 10s, but amount of damage blocked is not. If block becomes powerful, it could easily dominate 10s and still be weak in 25s.
If only there was a mathematical operation we could perform that would scale the amount blocked to the size of the hit. (Source)

Threat generation
There has been a lot of discussion about +threat moves being a crutch and tanks should just be able to hold aggro based on their dps. But that implies that your dps is as high or higher than a class or spec who can only dps. There will probably be +threat added to stances and abilities for the foreseeable future. That does not mean your dps needs to be 10% of a dps raid member. (Source)

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Posted by Spooner | 14 Comments

Polishing your shield and how to grow as a tank…

I wouldn’t consider myself an expert on all things tanking but I’m pretty sure that I’m better than your average run of the mill tank. I’ve always looked at tanking as a test of reaction and attention, if you can see everything going on in the battlefield and can react quick enough to it while lending faith to your healers, you’ll do well. It takes more to be great but that’s the starting point for all tanks; do well.

I recently moved to a new guild and had my first taste of tanking in 25man Ulduar with DPS that hands down fucking annihilates any other DPS I’ve ever played with before, I’m not going ot say it was impossible or hard but it was a refreshing and at times frustrating challenge. So now’s the time for me to polish my shield and either get better, or get out.

When your situation changes (especially when the support around you has shifted in skill and gear level) one must be ever observant. I switched my build to a fine balance between off-tanking/support and threat. I learned that since most of the time the DPS will be balls deep on adds I need to change up my rotation some just to generate as much spread threat as possible.

Also it’s important to actually call out in vent when you’re going to taunt so healers can compensate, pretty much everything can 2-3 shot a tank regardless of gear in 25man Ulduar so those heals better be fucking coming. Being a tank means that you’re one of the few people that should be talking in vent during a boss fight other than the raid leader.

I guess the main point of this post that I’d like to get across is that when you’re transitioning to a new raid core and you can’t just take what you’ve always been doing and adjust it. Start from scratch and relearn how to do your job, try out everything you’ve learned and use your better judgment to deduce what might work better and what will utterly fail. Remember:

• Be observant, never miss a thing!
• React faster.
• Be humble because odds are you don’t know shit.
• Listen to the raid leader as if your life depended on it.

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Posted by Spooner | 0 Comments

Just say No to Crushing Blows

Tanking is still pretty much being dissected under the microscope by the developers and players alike, some of the latter are suggesting we bring back crushing blows to help make block less of a garbage stat. “This is terrible idea”. Luckily I’m not the only one that feels that crushing blows really won’t do anything constructive for the game. How then should block be changed to make it a more attractive stat?

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Q u o t e:
The problem with Crushing Blows is simple: RNG Spike Damage. 2 tanks could deal with it by pushing them off the combat table, 2 tanks (today) wouldn’t be able to.

In the current environment in order to retain crushing blows, Druids & DKs would need to have a way to push crushing blows off the table. The options are

1. Enough physical damage reduction to not care
2. Give them block (or clone) and a method to use it to push crushing blows off
3. Give them a way to push crushing blows specifically off the combat table.

If you go with #1, you have lots of problems where Druids & DKs are just too good at physical damage, which completely displaces Warriors & Paladins. If you go with #2, then your just spreading the War/Pal mechanics to everyone, at which point all the tanks start operating the same. If you go with #3, then you’ve effectively removed crushing blows from the tanking environment… which is different from now how? Oh, you’d have to push a button every 5 (or whatever) seconds to prevent crushing blows… snore…

Crushing blows were designed to keep players from doing things they shouldn’t be able to do. In classic and to a limited degree in TBC it was to keep Warriors as the premiere tanking class. Given that in Wrath that isn’t the goal any longer, then its natural to see Crushing blows removed from the raid game.

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I like Angua’s explanation.

Crushing blows were basically like another way for mobs to crit — sometimes (and you didn’t know when) a really big hit was going to come. It might have made healing exciting but the only way to handle it tanking was to randomly throw up your short cooldown defenses and hope that sometimes they overlapped. Of course sometimes you’d get a crushing blow right after a normal hit and a special attack and you’d be liquid.

The way more bosses work these days is that a big hit is going to come at reasonably predictable intervals. If the intervals aren’t predictable, at least they have cooldowns so you know when they aren’t going to happen. Then timing the use of your cooldowns with these big hits is a test of skill for the tanks, and often the healers.

We recognize that blocking no longer provides the mitigation it once did, and we think that is a problem. But we don’t think bringing crushing blows back is the way to fix it.

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Posted by Spooner | 20 Comments

Raid Comps in Ulduar

So I was wondering, as I tend to do sometimes, about the strengths and weaknesses of my current raid composition for Ulduar (10). We have two tanks (protection paladin and feral druid), three healers (holy paladin, discipline priest, and restoration shaman), and 5 DPS (ret. paladin, affliction lock, arcane mage, combat rogue, arms warrior). Running without a hunter or death knight isn’t making things impossible by any means but I’m curious to see what you folks run with and why. What exactly are the benefits if any?

Having more melee DPS than ranged seems to be making a big difference in Ulduar (more than it ever has actually) and making AOE burns (like the repair bots during XT002) a little more of a hassle. Both tanks in my group are geared enough for the fights, healers as well, and DPS (although could be much higher) isn’t having any trouble making enrage timers. So what do you all run with and why?

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