Bosses won't hit for 40k (cont).

Q u o t e:
Theres a limit to how long you can be constructive. I passed mine... if you care to check how constructive I can be, look up my posts.

I proposed changes to counter those made by Blizzard, a way to balance all 3 DK tanking specs, ways to make pallies combat compelling, gone to the PTR and posted parses, cheered them for bringing DW back for DKs, pointed out how ridiculous Unbreakable Armor is... yet we got zeh nerf for the 3rd time.

Theres this point when you get sick of talking to a door and just start punching it. It's not like punching a door will change anything, but you may feel better about it. I sure do.

"I'm so angry that I get to say whatever I want now" doesn't fly here.

[Not tracked]

Q u o t e:
Yes, but has it helped? We are five years into this game and they still can't accomplish the task of class balance. Tanks are all over the place, we are still doing flavor of the month while they take turns blindfolding each other and throwing darts at the development board....and the new raid content is has all the creativity of a third grade science project.

This is the kind of exaggeration that doesn't help your case any. When we see a lot of posts like this in a thread, we start to skim through the responses and often conclude there probably isn't much of interest for us to read.

Tank balance was a non-issue in classic and BC (that's 4 or so years of your 5 years) because warriors were designed to be the best tank. In other words, we made no attempt to balance the tank classes, so beating us up for not accomplishing what we weren't trying to do seems odd to me.

In most cases warriors were the best tank. They were certainly far and away the most common. When there were situations that other classes started to outstrip warriors, we took steps to make sure the warriors still came out on top.

We changed that philosophy in LK (and added another tank). Now all 4 tanking classes can tank any encounter in the game. It is closer than it has ever been in the history of WoW and is close enough that you have to be on a very cutting-edge encounter at the absolute limits of your capabilities for it to really even be a factor. Many of the world first kills and most of the cutting-edge guilds still use a warrior MT and obviously they're still cutting edge. For 90% of us, usually upping your game (learning the strategy, changing what you do, or just improving your skill) or getting better gear will have a bigger impact than switching tanks. In those cases where that has stopped being the case (and that has happened) we took steps to correct it.

It's pretty close. Could it be closer? Absolutely. But make sure when you are making your "tanks are horribly impabalanced" posts that you have experienced those encounters first hand and aren't just replying with what you've read on the forums about how your class needs buffs. :)

Q u o t e:
And to further Darielle's point: posting professionally with a nice writing style definitely helps. It won't persuade GC to adopt your ideas, but it will make your posts easier to read and contribute to the community here

Totally agree with this part.

Q u o t e:
From GC's comments on the previous thread, it would appear that they don't view tank balance as being out of whack. Simulations, theorycraft, and even real world combat logs won't change that view.

But not this. Players get us to change our minds all the time. The trick is not to get so uber frustrated when you can't change our minds.

Q u o t e:
Lesser geared/skilled raids will run their heads against a wall trying to use the tanks available rather than the best tank of the day (which is clearly a paladin due to a passive ability to survive that requires no reflex time, massive mitigation and health that scales obscenely well in comparison to warriors and dk's).

I don't agree with this. Players have tanked various bosses with very good gear and very bad gear. That implies that skill has a much bigger effect than even large difference in health pools.

Q u o t e:
Min/maxing guilds will use whatever's best 90% of the time, but if they don't they usually have a level of gear and skill not open to the general raiding population which is forced to take anywhere from 2-10 mediocre > bad players in order to fill slots. Try to simultaneously carry a tank that randomly gets gibbed or has his "passive" damage reduction fall off, while still trying to watch people who can't understand how to stand on the things they have to or avoid standing on the things they shouldn't without reminders.

I also disagree with this. Min/maxing guilds will use whatever WORKS 90% of the time, not whatever is best. If they can tank a fight with their MT, they will do that and they will often bang their heads against a wall for a long time trying that strategy. If it fails, they will then swap out to the class that does let them progress. The best guilds in the world are generally succesful because of the talent of their players and those players have favorite classes just like the rest of us. If they can make it work with their standard raid allocation, they will do that. (And to be fair, most of the time they can.)

Q u o t e:
I think you are missing the point though. If you have two people, a Warrior/DK and a Pally/Druid, and they are both equally skilled and geared, you will do noticeably better with the paladin or druid. It's that simple.

My point is that the chance your tanks are all equally skilled and geared is probably small.

Part of what I am trying to do (part of what I am nearly always trying to do) is get players to focus more on what they can do to overcome an encounter (or arena comp or whatever challenge you are throwing yourself against) and less on trying to get us to change things.

Consider the delta between the best guilds and everyone else. They don't succeed because they picked the right classes. The succeed because they have individual talent and work together well as a team. Those factors outweigh any differences in class differences by a large degree. In the shorthand you often see on the forums, skill >> gear >> class differences. Therefore, when players presuppose that if they had only had a different class tanking they would have beaten the encounter (or had a much easier time on it) we are a little skeptical.

Q u o t e:
I'm more interested in your current line of thinking. Clearly the big tank balance change in 3.2 was cooldowns. What direction are you leaning towards for the next round of balance? This forum is quite obsessed with EH numbers right now. Are you looking at tweaking the numbers there, or are you focused in another area, perhaps avoidance? (Or even just half of the EH, either mitigation or HP pools?)

We understand the value of effective health. I'm also not sure "best cooldowns" is as balance-able as we originally hoped it would be. Avoidance is tricky because the community will always devalue its RNG nature except in those fights where it's the only realistic way to survive another hit. We do still want the tank to have to take some responsibility for both surviving and threat, and that surviving part has to mean more than just getting gear and the right talent spec. This is why we've been trying to get the cooldowns in a space where they aren't spammed mindlessly (old Shield Block) or saved for only the gravest emergencies (old Shield Wall).

However, I've also tried to be pretty clear that we are much less obsessed with goals of say health and armor being within a couple of percentage points of each other as the community sometimes wants them to be. We maintain that there is no point in having 4 tank classes if they play too similarly, and that includes having identical stats.

Q u o t e:
Now we're being told Gormok is fine. For now? I think the problem is we're confused about what is ok and what is not based on the constant.... flip-flopping.

There is no litmus test. All of this is quite subjective. We have a sharp theorycrafting community so just as players try and figure out exactly how all the mechanics in the game work, the inclination is to try and come up with the set of rules that govern all of our design decisions. It just doesn't work that way.

In the case of Sartharion, we thought it was okay at first, but realized that a number of guilds had started tanking with a DK because it made things so much easier. There isn't a magic number and it varies a great deal which guilds are exhibiting the behavior. As I've said, progression-focused guilds are stubborn with their raid comp so they only tend to swap out when they have to. When they do, it's often a warning sign for us.

I don't recall ever thinking Vezax was fine, but I may be misremembering. The fact that DKs didn't have to kite him while other tanks did crossed the line for us. We didn't make any emergency changes because it was just one fight, and traditional MTs weren't stepping aside for the entire raid. But we did become convinced over time that the DK advantages on that fight probably applied to a lot of other Ulduar encounters.

Often it just takes time, and that may be what feels like flip flopping to you. If we got everything right the first time, then we'd never have to make class changes in content updates. What we're seeing right now is a lot of guilds that blasted through the Coliseum and found it very easy. They then went into heroic mode, probably undergeared after having killed Anub'arak only once, and got hit very hard by the first boss. Few guilds completed many Ulduar hard modes on their first week either. Therefore we feel it's hard to distinguish between encounter difficulty and class imbalance. I'll repeat -- the claims that undergeared paladins are trivializing the encounter are vastly overstated.

However, after a few weeks if it looks like a lot of guilds (of reasonable caliber) are using paladins for a lot of encounters because they feel like they have to and / or tanking DKs feel like they have to step aside or just go dps, then we're liable to take action. For the moment, plenty of DKs are tanking heroic Gormok, but small sample size is small.

Q u o t e:
It's mostly that, with tanks, how skilled we may be has very little bearing on how much damage I'm taking. It's not like I take 10% less damage than Communism because I managed to beat Minesweeper on expert in under sixty seconds because of my supreme skill.

Like, this is, in general, what it takes to be a 'good' tank as far as damage intake goes:

Mobs need to stand in front of you.
Use a cooldown if the situation calls for it.
Don't stand in the bad stuff

They're all very basic things. The only one that takes any real skill is cooldowns, where you'd need to make judgement calls on whether or not 'do I need this cooldown now, or will I need it in the foreseeable future'.

Sorry, I don't buy that. I see the difference between excellent tanks and average tanks every day. If tanking requires little skill, then you must be arguing that only the skill of the healers and dps is what allows you to succeed or fail. I don't think that is what's happening.

The taunting on Gormok is a pretty good yardstick for tank skill. You need to communicate with your OT. You probably need to communicate with your healers so they aren't using external cooldowns at the same time you are blowing on of yours. That goes beyond just keeping the mob in front of you. Besides, if not standing in bad stuff was so easy, a lot more guilds would have the Firefighter achievement. :)

Q u o t e:
That's probably it. It feels like we can predict or "lead you on" a certain path if we complain enough. And since it takes a long time, it feels like dragging a stubborn child around when we're so convinced we're right. Eventually something gets changed and we are "proved" right and then it's off to the next thing that we've got to convince you of.

Like I said, we have a clever community and they are right about a lot of stuff. They are wrong about things too, but those conversations tend to not keep coming up. Even today if we revisited the DK of 3.0 or 3.1, you'd see players argue that they were never OP but that endless QQ and misguided designers got them nerfed.

I should also add that we work towards more goals at once than the community is often concerned with, and some of those may be quite long term goals.

Regardless, as I say often, we aren't turning over the burden of balancing the game to the community. We think Blizzard's legacy sort of speaks for itself as to the success of our design over time. We listen to our players though, which I think has also worked out well for our games.

Q u o t e:
Would bringing the effective health percentage of all 4 tanks closer together really remove that flavor/difference? That difference in playstyle? I don't necessarily think so. Especially since avoidance could still vary and you could still make block play a role in the tanking game.

But you already see plenty of posts saying DKs must have a block mechanic or that avoidance can't vary too much and still preserve balance. But even if all of those numbers were the same I don't think the conversation would be over. Even today players are concerned about say warrior AE threat generation or DK single target burst threat generation. It's not hard to imagine the threads that said "Since warriors don't get rage when they avoid but DKs have a constant source of runes and runic power, most min/maxxing guilds will naturally pick the stability of a DK over the unpredictability of a warrior." It's easy to conceive arguments that since all of the survival stats and cooldowns are so close, it's things like difficulty of play style, ease of gearing, role when not tanking, etc. etc. that will cause one tank class to be more valued than another.

Q u o t e:
I am sick and tired of hearing about the top guilds. I'm so sorry GC that my guild can't have 25 people all running alts that are equally geared to swap in and out when we don't have the absolute best class balance for the fight. I'm sorry that we don't have 15 extra warlocks giving every raid member soulstone so everyone can rez if they die. I'm sorry that I didn't have countless hours to wipe on Ulduar hardmodes to get them down to an exact science and get full 239 gear. I'm sorry that some people in my guild aren't the most skilled people to ever play WoW and that we don't have lines of people waiting to be recruited so we can just kick baddies to the curb.

I'm not trying to say your experience is invalid if you aren't in a top 5% guild, or even that class balance can't be felt by anyone other than those guilds.

My point is just that skill matters an awful lot, and skill is something you can directly affect whereas getting your class buffed or nerfed is something you have much less control over. For many guilds, getting more attempts, scanning logs to detect failure, reading strategies or asking for help on forums will probably improve your game a lot more than switching tanks.

Q u o t e:
You've read 25+ pages on the tanking forums about warriors and DKs being underpowered, and the same thing is being echoed on the healing forums. What else is it going to take before you stop being skeptical?

I'm sure we could find many more pages of a class that is doing fine in Arenas complaining about how they don't have the tools they need to be succesful in PvP. Number of pages on a topic doesn't get us anywhere closer to truth. Post intelligently, not in great volume.

Q u o t e:
Yup. Player theorycraft moves at a mile a minute. Developer theorycraft moves at a much slower pace. There's much less of them to do the theorycraft and there's a whole lot more theorycraft they need to do. We're concerned about tank balance, they're concerned about tank balance, healer balance, melee DPS balance, ranged DPS balance, melee vs ranged DPS balance, PVP balance, and god knows what else.

Developers sometimes have different goals than the community as well.

Q u o t e:
DKs can't survive that, even with their VE.

Warriors can only survive it with last stand or shield wall.

Paladins can easily survive it with no cool downs.

Druids can easily survive it with no cool downs.

Is that skill?

Is a 12-15% EH difference skill?

Really?

Yet bad paladins and druids aren't carrying their raids through heroic Coliseum, and warriors and DKs seem to be beating Gormok. So either the difference doesn't account for that much in reality or something else is going on.

Q u o t e:
Paladins and Warriors *could* tank all the Ulduar hard modes, I guess 3.1 balance was fine, right?

No?

Well then, this argument was just pretty soundly defeated by your own actions, wasn't it?

As I said, there is no litmus test for us. It's subjective. Our goal is for tank survivability and other parameters to be close enough, not identical. In some situations we think it was close enough and in some cases it hasn't been.

We understand that many of you don't think tanking is close enough on Gormok. But the community might also think that warlock dps is too much higher than other pures or that Holy paladins are the best healers or that rogues are too over-represented on 3s.

We try very hard to make sure there isn't an easy metric the community can use to measure stuff like that because then it feels like we lose the ability to steer the game in the course we want to steer it. If your business is manufacturing, I imagine there are a lot of posted, inflexible rules about when you have to reject something because of its imperfections. That's not what game design is about.

Q u o t e:
Is it *much* easier to do with a paladin or druid? Absolutely, yes---You would be foolish to think its not.

It feels like you are attempting to assign a value to "much." And there isn't one... at least not one we're willing to publicly define. If you said "It is very slightly easier to do with a paladin or druid," then I think we would have all logged off and gone to bed by now.

P.S. Gratz on Gormok. :)