About blocking?

Q u o t e:
And sometimes he takes you for the weekend, but then just gets drunk and swears...

That sounds like most of the blues I know.

We haven't announced any changes to block. In a theoretical space, I wonder if a better implementation would be a mechanic where the amount blocked was double (or triple) what it is currently, but you could never block every swing (even on large piles of weak mobs).

I don't think we'd be likely to do away with SBV. I could see doing away with block rating.

It is good for itemization to have some stats which are very defensive oriented. SBV does have some offensive potential and it does play well with Strength so it already is more versatile than say something like armor.

Getting rid of block rating would be a big change and would require us to mess with several items and talents. (Read: this is probably not in the 3.1 time frame.) Ideally though, we think there might be a place for block that is in between say the guaranteed mitigation offered by armor and the RNG mitigation offered by avoidance.

It might be tricky in that world to differentiate paladin and warrior blocking, and maybe we wouldn't need to. Traditionally, the paladin blocked every hit for a small amount and the warrior blocked fewer hits for a larger amount. In reality, I'm not sure that niche buys us much except for paladins being able to tank 10,000 adds without taking damage.