#0 - March 4, 2009, 2:26 p.m.
Shifting Perspectives: Tanks, "Wrath," and crushing blows
by Allison Robert
Mar 3rd, 2009
Every Tuesday, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting Druids and those who group with them. This week, we examine the roots of the uproar over the proposed Heart of the Wild nerf, and also ask ourselves if it wouldn't just be easier to reroll a Death Knight and have done with it.
"Why would you title the column this way?" you ask, as you reach for your "Please fire _______ from WoW Insider" form letter. "Crushing blows are out of the game, dipwad."
Well, yes. The crushing blow is technically out of the game, but another and worse mechanic has taken its place.
In this article I'm going to try to explain the source of "shield tank" frustration over health pools -- and why they are correct to see it as a problem -- and the Druid tank's unhappiness over the nerfing of Heart of the Wild -- and why Druids are also correct to see it as a problem.
Why the crushing blow was important
One of the biggest differences between pre-Wrath and Wrath tanking is the absence of the crushing blow. If you're unfamliar with the term, then as a very simple explanation: any given raid boss had a 15% chance per melee hit to perform a 150% damage attack, which was also known as the crushing blow. It was typically a big damage spike and could lead to a wipe on progression content, with healers struggling to compensate in the small window of time before the boss' next attack landed. Burst damage is very unwelcome as it's often the greatest contributing factor to tank death. This is why reaching crit immunity is still so important to all tanks, and why the ability to avoid or absorb crushing blows was a fundamental part of pre-Wrath tanking mechanics.
The only means of avoiding a crush was pushing your dodge/parry/block over 102.4%, which would nullify the boss' higher weapon skill and render the tank immune to crushing blows. And this is how tanks dealt with that individually:
Warriors would use Shield Block to push their dodge/parry/block over 102.4%.
Paladins would use Holy Shield to push their dodge/parry/block over 102.4%.
Bears would eat it. Prayer was often involved as well.
Bears have no form of avoidance beyond dodge. Because crushing blows were the last attack to be pushed off a boss' hit table, a bear would need more than 85% dodge even to avoid some of them. While a gear set with >85% dodge was technically possible in late Burning Crusade content (and something similar was used by Rogues to tank bosses with predominately physical damage, which is why you saw all of those Rogue-tanking videos popping up in late BC), the amount of agility you needed to pull it off left you with a tiny health pool and almost no rage generation. You wouldn't get hit, but you also wouldn't be able to hold aggro, so it was the sort of catch-22 that made the situation an amusing one to consider, but then you'd laugh and go back to your regular tanking set.
Without the ability to avoid crushing blows, a Druid's armor and health had to guarantee that: a). the blow would hit for less, and: b). they would have the health pool to absorb multiple, even back-to-back crushing blows, because there was nothing the Druid or raid could do to change the boss' 15% chance to crush.
The Druid's overall damage taken was thus heavily reliant on RNG. You might go minutes or more on a raid boss without once being crushed -- and then there was the time on Teron Gorefiend where I was crushed on six successive attacks and we wiped. The only thing that could prevent that was better armor and more health, so Druids pushed their armor to reduce the damage, pushed their agility to avoid as many normal blows as possible, and then pushed their stamina to outlive the attacks.
The approach of Wrath and the new tanking paradigm
One of Blizzard's stated aims with the introduction of the Death Knight and the overhaul to existing tank specs was to address the chronic tank shortage on most realms. They did this by reworking the Protection Warrior tree extensively, introducing the ability to frontload threat and CC in the form of Shockwave, generate better reflective damage, and improving Thunder Clap to function as a relatively good form of burst AoE threat. Protection Paladins were altered to have better single-target threat and more controllable aggro generation, which somewhat addressed their relatively weak off-tanking capabilities. Bears overall were changed least in their basic threat mechanics, but were given occasional burst AoE threat in the form of Berserk, the removal of a target limit on Swipe, and cooldowns in the form of Barkskin in forms and Survival Instincts (a clone of Last Stand).
