This is why, I think, warriors are finished

#0 - June 23, 2009, 9:18 p.m.

First, I'm not trolling for a blue post. I really don't want one. There's really nothing to be said, and a blue post invariably makes a thread become a rockstar 40 page long thread of massive flamefest where people completely ignore the OP's point, be it good or bad (and I acknowledge my point probably is bad).

Second, GC is not an idiot. He is not stupid by any stretch of the imagination. You don't get to his position and be stupid. Making disparaging remarks about him, his intelligence, or his ancestry does nothing at all to help you make your point in any way, and in fact, it only serves to make you much easier to ignore.

Third, blizz does not hate warriors. They don't hate priests. They don't hate mages, or shaman, or hunters. They don't hate any class.

What they do hate is distribution imbalances. This is a quote from a post GC made today:

Q u o t e:

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.

I quoted it all to try to keep the context, which is kind of difficult w/o reposting the original post, but that's too big a wall of text.

The point is this - tanks, be they warriors, dks, pallies or druids, seem to me to be very deliberate people in general. And, to me, and I may be off base here, we seem to be less susceptible to fotm rerolls.

So the problem that I see, is that blizz doesn't like that a plurality, or perhaps even a majority of tanks are warriors. But tanks aren't likely to reroll based on minor fluctuations on who's the better tank for short periods of time. What this implies, again, to me, is that warriors are going to see their viability slowly diminish, either through other classes being buffed, or our class being nerfed, until the distribution rights itself - which is wholly incongruous with the deliberate manner of being that, I feel, all good tanks share.

GC said we shouldn't interpret what he said as "suck it up, warriors." But I don't see how you can possibly, by any stretch of the imagination, square that with "but is also seems strange to buff the most popular tank. Won’t that just make them more popular?"

GC, if you do read this, again, please don't post. I don't think there's a positive thing you can say. I don't mean that in a bad way, I think you're in your own painted in corner (and you're not the one that did the painting), and don't have much choice in the matter yourself. But I do have to ask that you keep in mind that you're eventually going to be successful in obtaining a measure of parity in numbers of tanks if you really really want to do that. But the way you're going to do that is to break the back of the warrior class, and to KEEP it broken for an extended period of time. I truly hope that's not your plan.

Ghostcrawler

#17 - June 23, 2009, 10:24 p.m.

I'm going to comment on this just once, lest we re-start the entire other thread. I am not personally going to address any other warrior issues in this thread.

-- Warriors are very popular main tanks.
-- This is probably because they used to be the best tank (by design) and because many MTs have stuck with the class for many levels.
-- We think they are slightly under-powered in Ulduar relative to other tanks.
-- If we are not careful and buff warriors too much then there are going to be more of them, which only feeds into the perception that warriors are designed to be (or should be designed to be) the best tank.
-- We've worked very hard to make sure there are 4 viable tanks, just as we've worked very hard to make sure there are 5 viable healers. We want to have paladins, druids and DKs tanking Coliseum, and not giving up (or being replaced by the raid leader) because they aren't warriors.
-- We don't balance around popularity. However we do take it into consideration. WoW is a social game and despite the excellent work by the theorycrafting community, player perception and psychology play a big role and often change very slowly.
-- We don't balance around past history. However we do take it into consideration. WoW is a game and players can form an emotional attachment to their characters. Emotion enters into it. While my team deals with cold hard numbers a lot, that is not the only part of game design.

Ghostcrawler

#18 - June 23, 2009, 10:25 p.m.

Q u o t e:
I'm sure GC has nothing else to do than read all these QQ posts and threads about one quote he made, that has been misinterpreted to death by people who only want to read what they want to read.

Maybe if GC didn't spend his time deleting QQ posts and posting over and over what X sentence actually meant, maybe, just maybe, they'd have time to work on the game.

:(