Warrior Community Let Down.

#0 - June 21, 2009, 7:43 a.m.

I, as most warriors, am disappointed in the patch notes. I looked back at warriors since Wrath launched and I'm a bit confused. Lets see how things have gone.

Pre-3.1: Warriors looked great out the gate. Block was significant against bosses that hit like wet noodles. DPS wasn't an issue as warrior could afford to dump item points into expertise. HS was a pain, but at least warriors were competitive. Then guilds started trying Sarth 3D. It quickly became apparent that warriors (and pallies) were not equipped to deal with this fight well (lacking CDs and Health). Half of the tanking classes required a much higher degree of raid coordination to do the boss. Community was basically told "It is 1 fight." During this entire time people were pointing out that if/when bosses started hitting harder the shield tanks would be lackluster. Warrior DPS while not tanking was terrible.

3.1 PTR: PTR testing of Ulduar shows that there are going to be more fights that favor CDs, or higher HP. Almost every boss hits hard and slow, and there are many fights where CDs are a must. Also it becomes clear that warriors aren't scaling well in terms of mitigation or DPS. What adjustments were made to warriors to deal with this reality?

(Taken from the 3.1 patch notes)
Defensive Stance: Now reduces damage caused by the warrior by 5% (previously 10%).
Last Stand: Cooldown reduced to 3 minutes.
Warbringer: Now also allows Intervene and Intercept to be used in any stance.
Glyph of Last Stand: Now reduces the cooldown of Last Stand by 60 seconds.
Glyph of Shield Wall: Reduces the cooldown on Shield Wall by 2 minutes, but Shield Wall now only reduces damage taken by 40%.
Glyph of Vigilance: Your Vigilance ability transfers an additional 5% of your target's threat to you.

At this point warriors are required to spend 2 talent points and 2 glyph slots to have "equivalent" CDs to be able to handle the burst of Ulduar fights. Warriors lagging T/DPS is "fixed" by boosting the crutch that is Vigilance (another glyph) and an entire 5% DPS boost in Def Stance. Despite the lackluster notes, warriors gear up and head into Ulduar.

3.1: Things look okay while doing the warm up bosses. Then most guilds get out of the easy bosses, and everything falls apart. Steelbreaker, Hodir, and Mimiron deal large amounts of magic damage on timed intervals. Vezax is basically a warrior nightmare incarnate. The cracks in warrior EH start to show. Warriors are forced to start stacking survival stats, only to find the lowest EH against (large) physical attacks of any tank. On top of that warriors are reward with "pogo" rage, and can easily rage starve on many fights where doing so is a disaster. Community is told it is alright because most guilds still use warrior MTs.

3.1 Hardmodes: The wheels have totally fallen off. Blizzard wields the "saber of nerfing" and sets it sights on DK armor, leaving the pink elephant in the room unharmed. One mine IBF is still the preferred tank for hard modes.

Am I missing something? The decline of warriors (and pallies) has been apparent since just after Wrath launched. Now, lets look at 3.2 notes.

3.2 notes
DKs get gutted. IBF is finally put at a 2 min CD, everything else seems overboard. What does early napkin math show? The gutted DK is now equivalent to warriors in mitigation. A class that was just totally destroyed is now even with the weakest tanking class. That speaks volumes. There were some buffs in the notes.

Block Value: The amount of bonus block value on all items has been doubled. This does not affect the base block value on shields or block value derived from strength.
Armored to the Teeth: This talent now provides 1/2/3 attack power per 108 armor, up from per 180 armor.

I know the BV change is an attempted bandaid, but it isn't even covering the wound. As a tank you always gear for the worst case scenario, and for a warrior that scenario is taking X hits in a row (X depends on how hard the boss hits). Increasing BV does nothing to change this scenario, if anything the spikiest tank just got spikier. At least Pallies can consider BV a bit of EH. AttT buff is like washing a Ford Pinto, warrior DPS will still be junk.

Ghostcrawler

#44 - June 23, 2009, 1:27 a.m.

Q u o t e:
Warriors do not need all that much, honestly. I made a thread about that a few days ago which isn't inflammatory and so fell off the radar in an afternoon.

We always read Satrina posts, even when others don’t. :)

Q u o t e:
It's nice when you see a well thought out post like this and not one response from Blizzard. It gives me a nice warm feeling that making simple fixes to the warrior prot tree is the last thing on their mind.

Please don’t fish for blue responses. We can’t create the expectation that every decent post gets a blue response.

Q u o t e:
if you've been playing a warrior for long, and you don't know how to deal with disappointment by now, i don't know what to tell you.

Being the best tank for 70 levels can be disappointing. :(

Q u o t e:
Warriors have consistently been the worst tank since WoTLK dropped (Or fighting with paladins for that honor). In 3.2 they don't really move "up", rather DKs simply take the paladins old role of "worst competitor".

I’m not sure that statement is accurate, but here is the problem. There are A LOT of warrior tanks. They are tanking every fight in Ulduar. If warriors were too low and if we buffed them, I don’t see how that would increase the numbers on the other tanks. I don’t think the conclusion to be drawn is that warriors are overpowered. I think the conclusion to be drawn is that warriors were the traditional tank and lot of established guilds have established MTs who see no reason to reroll the FotM. It’s not actually a goal to have 25% of each tank in Ulduar, but is also seems strange to buff the most popular tank. Won’t that just make them more popular? Again, don’t misinterpret that as GC sez suck it up warriors. It is something we have to keep in mind, however.

Block is a systemic problem. We're not sure we can make it a very compelling mitigation stat in a world where tank avoidance is so high and bosses hit so hard. However I will say that the Coliseum fights should focus less on the blow-your-cooldowns-or-die style of encounter.

Rage starvation is a problem. Frankly, we're not sure a model where you have to get hit in order to tank is that compelling anymore. Something that has come up a lot is changing rage (even for Prot) to damage done. This is a slight nerf to the PvP mechanic of being punished when you hit the warrior, but there are other ways to solve that as well. Again, we're talking a big change here. I'm not sure we're comfortable jacking with such a core mechanic before 3.2.

We'll try to get a tanking Patchwerk on the PTR again. That provided us with a lot of information before about mitigation, cooldowns and overall time to live.

Ghostcrawler

#46 - June 23, 2009, 1:36 a.m.

Q u o t e:
I heard that the devs balance classes based off of who was the most OP in the past......true story.

I heard players like to ask for buffs based on suffering through years of neglect at the hands of the devs. :)

We do take past history into account. But we won't say allow someone to be overpowered just so they too can have their day in the sun. Being too weak in the past sucks, but past imbalance is no reason to promote future imbalance.

My original comment was more in jest towards the person who felt warriors should be used to disappointment even though they have been a dominant PvP, PvE and tanking spec for 4 or more years. That doesn't mean it's the warriors' turn to be bad, but the complaint rang a little hollow.

Ghostcrawler

#60 - June 23, 2009, 1:57 a.m.

Q u o t e:
Q u o t e:

We do take past history into account.

Why does past history influence how a game should be balanced now?

Because players aren't machines and have feelings. Ret paladins feel that they were laughed at for years. We have to be very careful with the way we buff and nerf them. Hunters have been underpowered in PvP for some time. We don't want to put them on a rollercoaster.

Now we don't let feelings stand in the way of balance, but we do think it's fair to consider them.

I don't think we should turn this thread into a discussion of this topic though. I suspect more players are interested in the warrior specifics.

Ghostcrawler

#61 - June 23, 2009, 1:59 a.m.

Q u o t e:
I had a feeling this was part of the issue. You are afraid to make warriors the best tank because there are already a ton of them, so you have to try to struggle to keep them exactly equal, but err on the side of caution. Likewise, because deathknights were a brand new class, many of us other tanks got the impression that you were purposely making them overpowered just to get people to admit them as raid tanks, and then you'd nerf them later. Which seems to be happening as scheduled. I'm not criticizing this philosophy. But surely you can see this may be frustrating to the members of these classes who are penalized (or rewarded) simply because 1 million other people chose to play that same class.

I didn't say that was our philosophy. I said it's a concern and a problem we have to be aware of. The goal is not to have 75% or more of main tanks to be of any one class.

Ghostcrawler

#63 - June 23, 2009, 2:02 a.m.

Q u o t e:
Q u o t e:
To be honest, I thought adding a 4th tank was a mistake, and I still think it is. Tanking is not like healing or DPS. Close isn't good enough. If any tank has a 10% advantage, guilds are going to migrate to using that tank exclusively over time, because small differences in tank survivability can determine whether a guild wastes 3 hours wiping on a boss or whether they are victorious. It seems like your only hope of balancing tank numbers is to constantly be nerfing/buffing tanks so that it's a different tank with an advantage each patch and thus guilds cannot re-recruit/re-gear fast enough to keep up with the flavor of the month.

^

please pay attention to this Ghost , it is very important for when you guys sit down and think about balancing

How many dps does the fight depend upon: 16-19
how many healers :5-7
how many tanks : 1-2

that makes the differences that much more critical

I don't buy that logic. Pugs may choose the tank that the pug leader read on a forum somewhere is the best tank. (These are the same pugs that require you to be fully Nax 25 geared... for a Nax 25 raid!). But successful guilds tend to stick with their MT once they find one that works. Many MTs have been doing the job for years, and if they stopped doing it, it's because they typically burned out or something, not that the raid leadership decided another class was a better MT now so it was time to retire the last guy.

I can understand how it might be a concern to someone rolling up a new character who wants to be "the best tank" when they grow up. I would advise against thinking about that situation too hard though. :)

Ghostcrawler

#366 - June 23, 2009, 6:56 p.m.

Wow. Poked a beehive here.

First off, I think some players are here wanting to specifically discuss warrior mechanics and we have taken the thread into some pretty different directions. Perhaps someone can start a new thread that stays focused on Prot warriors in 3.2 without all of the philosophy.

Second, I think some of you were taking my comments about popularity to the worst possible extreme. My point about our not obsessing in trying to get all tanks to 25% of representation was just that -- it isn’t a goal. But we do have to keep it in mind. Fun is most important. Balance is second most important (though for many players you can’t have one without the other).

Third, if your contribution here is going to be of the “GC hates warriors” kind, please just spare us. Post that somewhere where intelligent players looking for class discussions don’t have to read it. If you come into our forums and keep posting inflammatory, insulting or overly whiny threads, you will get banned. Please be adults. I’m not sure why I have to keep saying that. :(

Here are some of my responses to some of your comments.

Q u o t e:
Make it so all tanks CAN MT a hardmode boss without gimping the raid.

IF you do this, watch the complaints drop. Most of the time its just a class mechanic's that shine.

This is great as a design goal, but it doesn’t work well in practice. The problem is that “without gimping the raid” part. For my raid, it might be fine if the druid has 5% more health but the warrior is a better player so either one can tank the content. For a lot of players who post in this forum, a 5% health disparity is unacceptable / reroll time. The tanks stats and abilities are not going to be the same across the four classes. Therefore there are going to be situations where one tank has a slight advantage over another for a particular boss. It’s that “slight advantage” versus “without gimping the raid” area that’s sticky. Players are going to define that in very different ways, and what might seem reasonable to you isn’t reasonable to someone else. Tank balance is as close as it’s ever been. All the tanks can handle every encounter in the game, even the hard modes. DKs are still a little good and they are getting nerfed. Paladins need another emergency ability and they’re getting one. Other than that, we think things are pretty close balance-wise. Other players will call that “gimping the raid” though. :(

Q u o t e:

Thorim: Druids own
Hodir: Paly threat is OP
DK: General Versax self heals is OP
Freya: Warrior stuns are amazing

The problem with this kind “give everyone a moment to shine” design is the expectations it sets up. Let’s say that Ulduar didn’t have Hodir. (As an example, the next tier has far fewer bosses than Ulduar.) Now do paladins feel gimpy because they don't have "their" boss? In the previous tier there was basically one fight anyone cared about (WRT to tank balance), and that was Sartharion hard mode. Whoever was the best tank for that was going to be considered the best tank, and the fact that other classes might do better on other theoretical bosses was irrelevant.

Q u o t e:
"Warrior's Make the best tanks."

This statement alone made me roll a warrior.. way way way back then. Heck, before i ever started the game i knew i wanted to be a tank.. So its not fair to say "Well there is ALOT of warrior tanks, so buffing the most popular doesnt make sense"

Q u o t e:
I mean when Ghostcrawler said "Imagine a raid without warriors :)" I was so apoplectic with rage IRL that I literally felt like I was going to die. Instead I stuck it out and continued paying to beta-test a live product on the market and my reward is Ghostcrawler's vision has been brought to life with patch 3.1 and the Ulduar raid instance.

Please read these comments. This is attitude that what we’re struggling against. I’m sorry if you think that only one class deserves to be the best tank (and of course that class is yours). In retrospect it was a dumb design to designate one class as “the best.” You can still tank any encounter in the game. But there are four tanks now, and our design is for none of them to be the best.

Q u o t e:
You (and many other posters here) are doing an excellent job of twisting words.

GC never said it was ok for Warriors to be weak now because they're still popular, or because the class was once the dominant tank. His point was that the devs need to be careful to not overbuff the class, lest Warriors once again become the dominant tank they once were.

Yep.

Ghostcrawler

#367 - June 23, 2009, 6:56 p.m.

Q u o t e:
The thing is, you have said there is a problem. There are too many warrior tanks. and that many of them are already established players who just dont want to reroll.

No, that is your interpretation of my words. I said we have to be careful not to overbuff warrior tanks because there are already a lot of them and we don’t want to go back to the days where public perception is roll warrior or go home. As you can see from above, there are still players who have the hope or expectation that warrior = MT and druid / DK / paladin = OT.

Q u o t e:
You can absolutely have 4 distinct, cool and fun tanks without having to have these huge variances in numbers.

"Class defining" should be more like "A warrior is about being in your face...So he has charges and his shield slam might be able to do a knock down auto-critical when shield wall is up."

Class defining should not be "Druids have 12% base mitigation and Warriors have 10%".

In short, the first one makes the warrior feel different...The second one just makes one class better.

We agree with the "class defining" part. However, we don’t want all of the tank classes to have exactly the same stats. That’s boring. I am also almost certain that if mitigation was identical down to the decimal place that players would then move on to complaining that threat wasn’t equal, or AE threat, or movement abilities, or itemization. It's not going to be identical. It just have to be close enough. It might not be close enough yet.

Q u o t e:
The goal should be to let players play the tank that fits their playstyle and your job is to give us the means to do it successfully without feeling gimped compared with other tanks.

You're nerfing death knights into the ground right now because they comprise 75% or more of main tanks.

I agree with that goal. However, we are not nerfing DKs based on popularity. We are nerfing them because they make some encounters too easy.

Q u o t e:
That philosophy is fine except it only apply to warriors. Look at how much druids were buffed for WotLK, DKs at the beginning, and what paladins are getting in 3.2.

Prot warriors were buffed enormously in Lich King. Go look at the pre-LK talent trees sometime. In the beta, the other classes were as upset as many of you are now because of the Critical Block talent, which in retrospect ended up being not a big deal at all.

Q u o t e:
Your comments above are very disheartening and your comment about PUGs is insulting. How dare you assume we aren't thinking intelligently and just randomly picking people to be responsible for tanking our heroic and hard mode raids?

Your defense of the pug is noble, and there are very good pugs out there. There are also plenty of unreasonable ones out there, and many of us have participated in them. I pug all the time just to make sure I am not too secluded from the general player experience. (I raid Ulduar and PVP too.)

Q u o t e:
I can't believe this is even on the table. Please looks for alternative ways to improve the warrior class than changing [rage] a 4-year mechanic that makes this class what it is.

This is also what we are up against. Some of you want rage changed. Some of you do not want rage changed. This is why I say we have to do what we think is right with the game and not obsess too much about the response our changes will have in the forums.

Q u o t e:
Tank parity is still closer than it's ever been.

We think this is true. That doesn’t mean it’s close enough however.

Ghostcrawler

#432 - June 23, 2009, 8:02 p.m.

Q u o t e:
I think this is a bad strategy to be shy when trying to balance because nerf's are generally quicker to hot fix then buffs, which when dealing with a role that is highly scrutinized for gear and balance, should be a priority on getting balanced so you don't alienate a class for an expansion.

I think you need to shoot for balance and and if you err on the side of one class scaling slightly to well, to get it hotfix nerf'd quickly, since they seem easier and faster then buffs. Being overly careful with some classes to make sure they don't seem over powered seems like a bad balance strategy and will probably lead to them being underpowered for most of an expansion, because as time goes it gets harder and harder to find raids, if your perceived as the worst at your role.

It is easier to nerf in a change-the-data sense. It is very hard to do from a public perception sense. Nerfs always bring out the worst in the community. Now ultimately we are going to do what is right for the game, but we’d still much rather have the community in a happy place than to have forums that people dismiss as being melodramatic QQ devoid of any real discussion. The game is supposed to be fun. When you nerf people it is never fun for them, even if it is the right thing to do. We like to avoid it when we can. Do we care about our player’s feelings. We just don’t turn that into putting every design decision into a community vote.

Q u o t e:
Ghostcrawler: Thank you for not being a smart ass in your latest post. Not being demeaning towards the posters in this thread like you were in those first comments here may help your case in the long run.

If I don’t get to be a smart ass, you don’t get to post that warriors should be used to being disappointed. Classes like shamans or hunters who have never been able to be the best in anything read stuff like that and just conclude that warriors have such a sense of entitlement. It’s that attitude, coupled with past history, that has created this perception that there are top tier classes and bottom tier classes. It’s an attitude we have tried to work hard to dismantle because of the expectation it sets among the community. WoW has 10 classes and it should feel worth your time to play any one of them (and that includes warriors).

Q u o t e:
Saying "this is a big change so we're not going to make it any time soon," completely flies in the face of the urgency of this change.

Players are always going to view many changes as urgent. We take a broader view. It isn’t worth horribly breaking warriors (consider the bugs, the exploits, consider making warrior tanking too good, or warrior PvP too difficult) in order to rush a poorly-implemented change into the game. There are a million things we think we can improve in WoW, and I promise you (and I rarely promise) that we are much harsher on the design than you are. People play to have fun. The rage mechanic may be a deal-breaker for you, but a buggy unpolished game is a deal-breaker for a lot more players. We do things slowly and carefully. I’m sorry if that frustrates you – it frustrated me when I was a player. But it’s a model of development that has worked really well for the company.

Q u o t e:
I'm fine with having the lowest health pool *if* we were the "best" at something else to counter that. Right now, all we have is the ability to charge around the battle field, which in many instances, isn't beneficial because it only causes aggro'd mobs to follow us, forcing melee DPS to run around after them, lowering their DPS and leading to longer fights.

We have no problem with that line of logic. No tank can be the worst at everything and remain viable. That’s a different argument than “all tank stats must be the same” however.

Q u o t e:
All of this basically comes down to guild leadership telling us warriors that "sorry you can't MT this fight because you're not a Dk."

That ^ right there is the WORST feeling in the world. That is the problem you need to fix. Players shouldn't have to face that kind of disappointment.

Totally agree. Sometimes that is our fault. However, just be aware that sometimes it is player perception or misunderstanding. I saw a pug this week that didn’t want any melee in the raid because they supposedly drag down the raid.

Q u o t e:
Oh come on, this is a straw man and you're probably going to get panned again

I don’t think it is a straw man. A lot of these posts are complaining about say AOE threat. DKs complain about not having enough burst threat. Druids complain about not having strong enough cooldowns. If we had confidence that identical armor and health would cover it, we might consider that model. But I don’t think it will.

Ghostcrawler

#433 - June 23, 2009, 8:02 p.m.

Q u o t e:
Why is there 100+ posts of warrior dps being 30%+ behind other tanks, but we never get a "we are looking into it"

Because we try not to reward fishing for blue responses. There are plenty of players on these boards who have very legitimate concerns and make very long threads and are unhappy that they don’t get a blue response. Our goal is not to put a blue reply in every thread (or even every good thread, or even every 100 page thread).

Q u o t e:
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Q u o t e:

I was shocked at how many he took out of context, and put his spin on them.
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Why? It's almost always been that way. I would like to say I was surprised at the type he didn't respond to but I wasn't. He can say it's GC bashing but it seems to me it's avoidance.

If you’re going to make this thread about me and not about class mechanics, I’m going to move on. I am trying to have a conversation with the community here. If you are making posts about how I communicate instead of making posts about WoW, then you are not providing information for the players who come to these forums. It will only lead to me reading more and posting less, because then all we'll have are "they're ignoring us" posts, which we will have almost no matter what.

Q u o t e:
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Q u o t e:

First off, I think some players are here wanting to specifically discuss warrior mechanics and we have taken the thread into some pretty different directions. Perhaps someone can start a new thread that stays focused on Prot warriors in 3.2 without all of the philosophy.
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I think Satrina has already started that thread, here:

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=17900080831&sid=1&pageNo=1

Yeah, I know, and I read that thread. But if I post in it I fear that it turns into this one. Already you see on the first page: "Do the devs even notice there are still warrior tanks in the game?" That's not a good way to get us to post. :(

Q u o t e:
Do you want us to requote you? Just like you are giving us the advice of reviewing our post before we hit the "submit" button, you should reread yours. You specifically said "warrior tanks are overpopulated, we have to keep that in mind". In mind of what? Of balance obviously. We're too numerous for your taste, which goes against the philosophy of tank parity. You cannot claim to be balancing this game when you seem to be fine with :

“Keep that in mind” does not equal “we’re too numerous for your taste.” This is why it takes me so long to make a response to anything. I have to spend the next hour posting “No, I didn’t say or mean that.”

Q u o t e:
Yea..... I keep checking this thread, hoping to see something I've missed, but everything in here keeps telling me that 3.2 is going to be a monumental failure.

Alright, I give up. Keep discussing the issues and we will keep reading them. But I am burned out on deleting all of the QQ posts.

Q u o t e:
I know people are passionate about this topic and deservedly so. Many people here - both GC and the posters - know the issues well. I like to think its because tanks take a special personality that really cares to learn the job well. However, try to post like adults please. Every page I've read just burns me out because of a lot of irrational, furious statements.

I too have a warrior tank that I love playing, and I personally hope for a rage and block change as soon as possible. However, post like you were talking at a meeting in a conference room. Not like you are sending hate mail.

Thank you, Abuna.

Ghostcrawler

#462 - June 23, 2009, 8:40 p.m.

Q u o t e:
Even if I ask people to stay on topic, people will jump in with whatever retarded jab they think makes them look Internet Cool. Sadly, I don't get to moderate threads and delete offtopic stuff and the just plain retarded comments. I have my say, hope that the thread stays marginally on topic, and hope that it gets read. That's plenty good for me.

We know you can't moderate your own posts. The most we can ask for is that players stop and ask themselves what their post is really going to accomplish aside from (possibly) making them feel catharsis through venting.

I'll try and take the bizarre step of pointing out here that I am reading your other thread in hopes that it doesn't derail as this one did.

We do greatly appreciate posts from Sat, Charsi and others who can articulate their points, even and especially when they disagree with us, without resorting to traditional Internet flaming.