Tank scaling is terrible

#0 - Nov. 28, 2008, 10:17 p.m.

Let's get something clear--I'm not talking about gear scaling, or mitigation scaling or dps scaling. I've found all those to be fine so far. The thing I have a problem with is 25man encounters. How many tanks do you bring to 25man vault? 25man OS? 25man Naxx? 25man Malygos? ~2.
How many do you bring to 10mans? ~2.

Healers and dps always scale up well to higher player encounters, as more dps will always be needed and healers will scale to account for additional damage, except the mechanics of the fight rarely change so more tanks are rarely ever needed. I had pretty good tanking gear--I'm over the defense crit redux cap, I have excellent dodge and block and pretty good parry. I have a good enough amount of HP and armor to MT 25man encounters but still there's never any room for me in 25mans. If I want to get to fight archavon or sartharion, I have to respec dps. What's the point in even bothering to compile a tanking gear main set if after 10man raids I'm useless? 10man raids are easy in heroic blues and crafteds, is there ANY incentive whatsoever to even continue gearing out my tank set? In a few emblems I'll have enough to buy the T7 chest piece (my third t7 piece) and I'm wondering if I should just buy the Mirror of Truth and permanently respec fury.

EDIT: At least all Dru tanks have to do is respec, seeing as how they tank with high-stam rogue-ish gear anyways. Warrior and Paladins especially are SoL unless they pass up tanking items for DPS items (which, at the itemization level of Naxx raids, will likely be leather anyways) .

Ghostcrawler

#21 - Nov. 29, 2008, 9:30 p.m.

It would be elegant if a 5-player run took 1 tank, 3 dps, 1 healer and a 25-player run took 5 tanks, 15 dps and 5 healers.

It just doesn't work out that way. We don't think we can offer enough interesting encounters if they all have to require 5 tanks and we would have to severely punish stacking healers if the encounters were designed for 5, otherwise you'd probably be able to trivialize the encounter. (Usually we do that in the form of berzerk timers.)

It's just two competing design goals and we're pretty okay with how it has landed. We did try and make it so that non-tank specs can tank 5-player dungeons, and dual spec will help as well.

Our goal with dual-spec though is more that you can tank heroics on weekends and raid as dps during the week, not that you tank the trash then switch to dps for the boss. Doubtless players will still do the latter, but we aren't designing raid encounters knowing that players have access to dual spec. Don't expect to see 12 tank fights or that sort of nonsense.