Blizzard missed the boat--- and the OCEAN!!!

#0 - March 7, 2009, 3 p.m.

There was one tanking class that was ideal for tanking expected new content. Only DK's (after bear-nerfs) had the HP, mitigation, and avoidance to deal with expected big waves of non-physical damage. This was grossly unfair to the other three tanking classes.

Instead of giving warriors and paladins more tools to deal with the new damage expected, they took away the DK's ability to deal with it.

Beautiful. We went from one viable tank to NONE.

Just like scrapping the stam weapon enchant eliminated the "must-have enchant" problem by leaving NO tanking enchants that make a real difference.

This is more laziness, more lack of creativity. Paladins and warriors, who couldn't effectively tank Sarth 3-D type encounters without ridiculous multi-healer work-arounds, STILL can't effectively tank Sarth 3-D type encounters without ridiculous multi-healer work-arounds. Only now, neither can anyone else.

So WTF are we supposed to do now?

Instead of ruining classes by rampaging through talent trees like Sherman through Atlanta, why not give other tanks tools they need to increase mitigation and avoidance to raise them up to DK standards? Blizzard developers had many routes to go down to fix the DK disparity; as usual, they chose the easiest, least effort-demanding, but the absolute worst path possible.

A much better alternative would have been to give other tanking classes some competitive cd defenses. It would have made tanking (as a paladin especially) less repititive and more interactive. It would have given paladins something to do besides spamming 96969 and an occasional LoF or DP or wings-pop. You could have made paladins and warriors more capable, more fun, and more interactive; instead you chose to make others less capable, less fun, and less interactive.

Horrible. Absolutely terrible. I can not imagine a worse means of addressing this problem. Of course, you also developed the problem in the first place. You people buff to fix broken, ill-conceived, poorly planned nerfs, then nerf to fix broken, ill-conceived, poorly planned buffs.

Ghostcrawler

#80 - March 7, 2009, 6:29 p.m.

"You should just buff everyone else instead of nerfing a few" is a flawed argument that I have tried to address before.

We have absolute targets for things in the game, not just relative targets. We don't nerf someone because they are better than other classes. We nerf them because they are too good. (This is more true for PvE than PvP; in PvP there is almost nothing to measure but relativity.)

Our encounters, especially in Ulduar, are supposed to be of a certain difficulty level. If we buffed all tanks then those encounters are too easy. We would then have to increase how hard all of those bosses hit, which probably also means changing dps and healing capabilities on the encounter. It probably also means changing gear, since for example one of the things we wanted to hit was how high DK avoidance could get already.

I think many of these discussions come down to "It sucks to get nerfed." Believe me, we know. Nerfing classes means there was a failure on our part. You should blame us, and certainly not other players who make decent posts or participate in PTR testing.

Ghostcrawler

#120 - March 7, 2009, 7:41 p.m.

Q u o t e:
Give shield tanks a means of dealing with massive damage spikes, magical or physical. Shield blocking will grow increasing inconsequential on all but trash.

All tanking classes have cooldowns they can blow when big hits from the boss are coming. However, to be clear those hits are also supposed to be scary. It's a good time for healers or whoever to blow their cooldowns too to help the tank survive.

We still want the DKs to have a lot of cooldowns, and they still do. The problem was those cooldowns just made them too effective at tanking many of the big encounters in the game. We need to see what things look like with the changes we put in place and re-evaluate then.

Shield block is a lot more useful on bosses that hit quickly for smaller individual hits -- something like Prince in Karazhan. It just so happens that Saph, Malygos, Sarth and KT don't use that kind of mechanic. In an ideal world I suppose there could always be four equal bosses at the end of a tier, each one showcasing the tanking abilities of one of the classes. That really constrains our encounter design though, as well as suggesting to the community that what you are supposed to do is have all 4 tank classes available and swap in a specific one for each fight. No doubt some guilds who want world firsts will do that, but our design is that you need 2 to 3 tanks for an encounter and you have 4 classes from which to choose them.

We thought that DKs and druids made the Sartharion encounter too easy, and looking forward we saw encounters in Ulduar where we thought the same thing would happen.