What was so wrong with crushing blows?

#0 - June 12, 2009, 11:04 a.m.

Theres the conundrum when balancing tanks of block vs armor/stamina. Or, warriors/paladins vs dks/druids. The trend is as a boss hits harder, shield-users become worse and worse. This is a frustrating trend, because all that really matters is the very hard content. Having great survivability in 5mans is not fair compensation for being sidelined in progression raids. Especially since WotLK is supposed to be all about bring the player not the class.

In other ways lvl 60 and lvl 70 tanking wasnt balanced, but the block vs armor/stam thing was pretty fair. This was because of crushing blows.

Any autoattack from a "boss" that wasnt blocked had a 15% chance to do 150% dmg. A warrior's shield block was not like it is now. It was like a paladins holy shield but with fewer charges but much higher block chance.

Druids ussually took less spike dmg, but they could take crushing blows which evened things out. Warriors or paladins could also take crushing blows, but only if they made an error (or for a warrior, if a boss had a wickedly fast attack speed)

Aswell as making things balanced, crushing blows were fun. A raid boss really was a whole new level of badass'ness.

Why couldnt crushing blows be put back in? A warriors shield block would have to be reverted (or in some other way prevent them from taking crushing blows) and dk/druid armor would have to be buffed up again, so they were flirting with the cap. Other than that its an almost ready-made fix.

It even makes sense from a roleplaying point of view. A deathknight might have heavier armor, and take more punishment before dying, but lacking a shield, it feels like he could take a brutal hit once in a while. Holding a shield might not absorb much damage from a giant monster, but it guarantees the monster wont ever get a completely clean shot at you.

Ghostcrawler

#53 - June 13, 2009, 6:58 a.m.

Q u o t e:
The problem with Crushing Blows is simple: RNG Spike Damage. 2 tanks could deal with it by pushing them off the combat table, 2 tanks (today) wouldn't be able to.

In the current environment in order to retain crushing blows, Druids & DKs would need to have a way to push crushing blows off the table. The options are

1. Enough physical damage reduction to not care
2. Give them block (or clone) and a method to use it to push crushing blows off
3. Give them a way to push crushing blows specifically off the combat table.

If you go with #1, you have lots of problems where Druids & DKs are just too good at physical damage, which completely displaces Warriors & Paladins. If you go with #2, then your just spreading the War/Pal mechanics to everyone, at which point all the tanks start operating the same. If you go with #3, then you've effectively removed crushing blows from the tanking environment... which is different from now how? Oh, you'd have to push a button every 5 (or whatever) seconds to prevent crushing blows... snore...

Crushing blows were designed to keep players from doing things they shouldn't be able to do. In classic and to a limited degree in TBC it was to keep Warriors as the premiere tanking class. Given that in Wrath that isn't the goal any longer, then its natural to see Crushing blows removed from the raid game.

I like Angua's explanation.

Crushing blows were basically like another way for mobs to crit -- sometimes (and you didn't know when) a really big hit was going to come. It might have made healing exciting but the only way to handle it tanking was to randomly throw up your short cooldown defenses and hope that sometimes they overlapped. Of course sometimes you'd get a crushing blow right after a normal hit and a special attack and you'd be liquid.

The way more bosses work these days is that a big hit is going to come at reasonably predictable intervals. If the intervals aren't predictable, at least they have cooldowns so you know when they aren't going to happen. Then timing the use of your cooldowns with these big hits is a test of skill for the tanks, and often the healers.

We recognize that blocking no longer provides the mitigation it once did, and we think that is a problem. But we don't think bringing crushing blows back is the way to fix it.