#0 - May 26, 2009, 9:52 p.m.
Q u o t e:
Ghostcrawler:
We will almost certainly change block. I can't tell you when we'll change it, because it's a big change. We probably don't want shield-users to be at 100% up time of block if they block more per hit. We have to be careful what happens to threat since that's a big part of block, especially for warriors. Heck, maybe we fall in love with the 4 piece warrior bonus and decide to make that a core part of the ability.
This strikes me as a massive misunderstanding of what actually kills tanks. DKs, druids and even paladins currently enjoy the simple fact that when a boss hits them, they and their healers know roughly how much damage that hit is going to do. Warriors currently have no clue how hard a boss is going to hit them; they can be completely unblocked and take a series of full damage attacks or they can have a string of shield block critical and knock 3k off each hit. This spike damage is completely unpredictable and significantly harder to heal.
What any sub-100% block rate “fix” does is cause paladins to experience the same problem as warriors.
It doesn’t matter if all tanks take roughly the same amount of damage over say, 5 minutes. The only way that would matter is if it took a boss 5 minutes to take a tank from full to dead. Every tank should take roughly the same amount of damage over 2-3 attacks in a worst case scenario (no dodge/parry/block/miss), because that’s how many hits it takes for a tank to die. Burst damage is the primary source of tank death, and any block fix that retains a significant RNG chance that no mitigation for the block classes will occur in those 2-3 attacks will ultimately fall short.