"Flavor" vs Balance

Q u o t e:
It really seems like when GC replies on this board that he is playing a different game, where the damage intake of the MT is flavor.

Are you struggling on hard mode raid encounters because your guild picked the wrong tank? I understand that some of you are, but according to our data, it’s a pretty small minority of players trying those encounters. If you’re just offended that the health pools are not identical, then your argument isn’t going to carry as much weight as a guild that hit a brick wall because they didn’t have the best tank for an encounter.

When druids couldn’t apply the Thunderclap debuff, that was considered a big problem. The fact that a druid can’t interrupt as well as a warrior is still considered a big problem by some. We used to let abilities such as Berserker Rage, Spell Reflect or Intervene play big roles on some encounters, but that inevitably leads to one tank being massively better on one encounter than another. None of the deltas are massive in the current game in our opinion, and we think that the number of cases of players who state with certainty that they can detect a difference is overstated.

Q u o t e:
The problem with tanks is there is no real easy way to benchmark their effectiveness. With DPS, it is easy, their damage/DPS output pretty closely says it all. With tanks, they don't really have that. Effective health while many say is king, it does not translate into a 15% (or whatever number) effectiveness advantage overall. More things just factor in for tanks to fill the big picture than DPS, or even healers.

I agree. And even the dps classes try to cite various sources as the official measurement of their dps, when in reality it varies a lot from fight to fight and certainly from player to player. I don't mean to discredit those players who have done a fantastic job trying to theorycraft out how things stand. But it's not as simple as beating on a target dummy (or being beaten on by one).

Flavor and balance are both important. Players will give up on an unbalanced game, but they’ll also give up on a perfectly balanced but boring game. Rock-paper-scissors is perfectly balanced. It also has absolutely no depth. Some of these posts seem to be arguing “If the numbers are the same, then it’s okay for the abilities to be different.” I disagree with that. The abilities often have an even larger impact on how well you can tank an encounter than the raw numbers.

Q u o t e:
NO ONE wants to be replaced because the FotM took their spot.

That is an important concern, but it gets turned into sky falling posts a lot. Every tank can still tank every encounter and the number of cases where MTs are losing their slot is pretty small. I know that’s not the impression you’ll get from these forums, and I also know there will be some anecdotal cases where players say it happened to them. However, tank balance is as close as it’s ever been and you can choose any class for your MT and OTs.

Q u o t e:
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Q u o t e:
I understand the sentiment behind this thread, and I used to think like this. However, it's a very narrow and boring view of game design.
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Actually its a very accurate depiction of current game design.

They want Homoginization. Making all tanks equal accomplishes that.



If one tank gets block, and one tank gets armor, that will create a nich. It may not be a large one, but it goes against their deisgn of bring the player not the class.

I’ll attempt to explain this at a vision level. In my experience, the community tries to approach game design too often with “laws.” They know “Any tank class can be MT” is something we want to accomplish, but then they take that to trump all other concerns and expect identical tanking classes to be the only possible outcome. That’s not how game design works. Player flexibility (bringing who you want) is a big concern. But so is class distinction. So is making the game approachable. So is making sure all the classes are fun. It may seem like an inherent contradiction when you have two design goals heading in opposite direction (simplicity vs. depth may be the most obvious one). But that doesn’t mean all other concerns can get swept aside. You have to take everything into consideration when you make changes.

Q u o t e:
Here's what happens when you bring all the tanks inline, stat-wise. Give all tanks roughly the same health, then roughly the same armor - so now they all have roughly the same EH. Because the debate of 'Who's The Best Tank' is never going away, we move from EH onto the next important stat - Avoidance. If all the tanks have the same EH, and avoidance levels are still not even, we're going to have this same discussion all over again. Alright, so bring avoidance levels inline. So now we've all got even EH and avoidance, what's the next thing? Cooldowns. Oh man...You *definitely* can't have all tanks with the same stats, but uneven cooldowns. Bring those inline. Next? Threat. If survivability between all 4 truly is the same, you'd be silly to not use the highest threat tank, right? It just makes sense. Keep everyone happy and bring threat generation to the same level. So where does that leave us...

Agree with Jiraati.

Q u o t e:
Druids have 10% more health than Warriors (upwards of 20% more if they wear PVP gear).

Even if the numbers are 10%, think about what that means. To be generous, the warrior has 50K and the druid has 55K? How many times is that 5K going to make a difference when the boss hits for 40K? I know more Stam is always better, even in relatively trivial amounts. But until the magnitude is so large that the druid can survive one more hit than the warrior, it isn’t likely to crop up often. Even if you don’t buy that logic, then I ask what is the magic number? 2000 more health than a warrior? 500? 100?

Q u o t e:
Actually the testing showed druids living no longer than warriors due to warriors have better cooldowns and unholy DK laughing at everyone. But why let facts get in the way of bad math.

You can learn things from a Patchwerk test and perhaps detect some problems. But remember ultimately that how you tank Patchwerk really only matters when you’re tanking Patchwerk. As soon as you take specific encounters into consideration, then the results can change. That doesn’t mean Patch tests are pointless. But that doesn’t turn them into the thermometer that stack ranks tanks either.

Q u o t e:
the bottom line problem right now ghostcrawler is how important effective health tanking is to this game.

Effective health is very important to tanking right now. It's probably too important, though some players would argue it's impossible to ever make it not important.

However, that really wasn't my point. My point was that those small differences might matter on Algalon. However very few of you are on Algalon. If you are on a heroic 5-player dungeon or XT normal then we could make much, much larger changes to tanking and you still probably wouldn't notice a difference. My concern is that a lot of players are reading theorycrafting (both the good and bad attempts) and coming up with the conclusion that they should only have paladins tank their pugs, which I think is a quite flawed conclusion. It's the equivalent of the level 40 mage who sees a rogue ahead on an Ignis fight and thinks to themselves "Ah. No wonder my dps feels low."

I'm not at all saying tank balance is only important at the cutting edge. However, we think things are close enough that it's going to take a really, really challenging encounter before any differences in tank stats are really an issue for you. Most of the time, better gear or improving their game will have a bigger improvement on your experience.

Algalon probably favors some tank classes over the others. Most bosses do. But you should not be at a significant disadvantage if you don't have those classes. Fortunately, different bosses in LK have favored different tanks. And I don't even have to look to know that more warriors have killed Algalon than any other tank. I'm almost positive the same will be true of Arthas almost no matter what changes we made to tank balance. Maybe that means warriors are stubborn, but more than likely it means that the differences aren't so significant that they struggle too much or have to be replaced for the fight.