Tank Balance and Encounter Design

#0 - Sept. 10, 2009, 11:51 p.m.

If we look at Deathknights in 3.1 we see a tank that had all the tools for the job. Frequent cooldowns, high avoidance, high health etc. As GC said, a lot of guilds were switching to a dk tank to make things easier. Now, I admit, I did not like he changes. Not saying I don't understand that they were needed, but I think every tank in the game understands the feeling and can sympathize.

However, let's examine one of the big reasons that deathknights excelled at these encounters: Frequent powerful cooldowns. We just had a cooldown for almost any big attack a boss threw at us. But let's flip this from an encounter design perspective: Frequent powerful abilities on predictable cooldowns. In Ulduar these types of abilites where found on numerous encounters such as Mimiron, Iron Council and General. If every other encounter was of this type, why not just have the Deathknight tank the whole thing?

Now let's look a Trial of the Crusader, there are far less of these types of encounters. While the encounters might not be numerically balanced they are more balanced conceptually. I personally do trust the Dev team with the numbers, they have far better tools, queries, and raw data so arguing the numbers is a waste of time. However concepts are easier to argue and more profitable. Actually one of the more conceptually imbalanced fights in ToC is Jaxx, in my opinion. Deathknights and Warriors are better able to interrupt is fireball than Paladins and Druids. This however is something a raid can easily adjust to.

TL;DR: Tank balance has two sides: the player and the boss. If the bosses favor a particular style, then it will show up player side.

How do you fix it? Well one suggestion is more overall raid damage. If healers have to spend more time healing the raid then this will make the tank harder to heal without actually forcing him to take hits for 80% of his health. Another would be that just because a boss has an ability open, doesn't mean he needs to cast it. A boss with less predictable cooldowns would, in my opinion, require more skill and coordination rather than less.

Thoughts?

Ghostcrawler

#5 - Sept. 11, 2009, 11:37 p.m.

Q u o t e:
A thought that probably was needed long ago.

But the truth is, players act a specific way due to encounter mechanics. Encounter mechanics are designed a certain way because of what Blizzard sees that players can do.

Avoidance levels were too high.
Blizzard makes bosses hit for 80% of a tank's hp because they otherwise avoid too much.
Tanks stack stamina.
Blizzard makes Impale and other mechanics to counter stamina stacking.

It's the problem with underlying mechanics, not anything as easily broken down.

I'd like to say that removing "predictable" boss attacks and making large "cooldown" attacks on bosses into a more random, but noticeable mechanic would be better. It would have to have a cooldown, but after the cooldown is done- the boss can use it randomly.
Just make it have like a 3-5sec "charge" so it can be called and reacted to.

But the real problem is that class/gear stats are too inflated, so boss damage gets inflated, so players inflate stamina, so Blizzard inflates other mechanics to compensate.

I really wish Blizzard would just tune down the damage, tune down avoidance, and tune down mana regen all at once and tell the community not to be such big babies and understand it's for game balance.
"People don't like seeing their big numbers reduced." is not a valid excuse.
> Tune down, don't tune up.

This is a good post. However, it is very hard to "tell the community not to be such big babies" (in your words). Players can get worked up over very small nerfs, and dropping tank avoidance by half (which is probably the right number) would not be a small nerf. Some players would understand it. Many would not. Players always *always* respond to nerfs to correct class balance with "Why didn't you buff instead of nerf?" Buffing feels good. Nerfing feels bad.

We will make unpopular changes when we think they are best for the game and more or less unavoidable, but at some point you risk actually hurting your players (to the point where they might leave) if you do things that feel arbitrary or cruel, even if it is for the good of the game in the long run. (Incoming: a dozen posts that cite a specific nerf as arbitrary and cruel with threats to bail if it isn't reverted.)

Changing avoidance numbers in between level 80 and 81 feels very different, and that is exactly what we plan on doing. It will feel cruddy to some players when they see their numbers drop with every new level. But then we'll make up for it when 4.3 feels right again.

Ghostcrawler

#62 - Sept. 14, 2009, 9:45 p.m.

Q u o t e:
Have you gotten to the point where you know where you're going with avoidance for cataclysm?

I, for one, am in the camp that favors the idea of very low avoidance, perhaps in the 10-20% range all combined. After all, we're heavy tanks, we shouldn't be that light on our feet. Not even Ali could float like a butterfly in full platemail (and presumably not as a grizzly bear, if he had the power to turn himself into a bear)

We're not ready to talk about it yet. However, keep a couple of things in mind:

-- If your avoidance is 20% in say the second raid tier, then it might be 10% or less when you're running your first heroic at 85. Ugh.
-- If on the other hand, your avoidance is closer to 15% at 85, then the diminishing returns going from 15% to 20% are going to be so brutal that players might just give up and use other stats.
-- If avoidance is 20% in both the first tier and last tier, then you also have DR problems and in fact don't really feel like you are improving by acquiring more gear at all.

Ghostcrawler

#64 - Sept. 14, 2009, 9:50 p.m.

Q u o t e:
If you had done it between 70 and 71 Wrath would have been a much more fun expansion. You knew it was a problem (sunwell radiance) and you didn't deal with it.

Heh. No, we actually did. The problem is we made three changes that undid some of that effort. (These affected all rating and stat inflation, not just tanks.)

1) We added glyphs, which just inflated player power for almost no cost.
2) We improved a lot of talents. For tanks, Prot and Prot became more streamlined, allowing you to get more survivability at much less cost. (Remember when Anticipation was defense?)
3) We jumped the item level more than we originally intended in order to provide a nice jump from blues to Naxx and particularly to offer hard modes in Ulduar and beyond.

Ghostcrawler

#66 - Sept. 14, 2009, 10 p.m.

Q u o t e:
Your current solution has been to balance the game on the backs of healers - I'd welcome a solution that doesn't do this.

I think that this is a worthwhile point to discuss, because it does come up a lot in the healing forums. In order to make encounters scary (esp. hard modes) there needs to be a real threat of tanks dying. That threat does not always need to be a threat of dying in one hit obviously. However, any situation that lets tanks not take a lot of damage can make the fights feel very easy or in fact make them very easy -- you can analyze incoming damage and guesstimate whether you're going to live or die. On the other hand, any situation where the tank is at a risk of dying then feels like it is punishing the healers.

(I'll also add that I don't think the solution is just to give tanks so many cooldowns and debuffs that they have ultimate control over whether they live or die -- it's supposed to be a group effort and we want tanks to feel sturdy without feeling too self-sufficient.)

Ghostcrawler

#69 - Sept. 14, 2009, 10:11 p.m.

Q u o t e:
Stop trying to balance this game around the simplistic needs of a minute population of elite raiders that are more content with one person shooters then a complex and interesting MMORG. My guess is that , like most hard core raid guilds that I have known, most log on three times a week for their 4 hour raid and could care less about the rest of the game.

Hmmm. This sounds a bit like elitist chest-thumping, but I'll try not to read between the lines too much. It's hard to talk about a typical hard-core raider, but a lot of them do their progression raiding (25 heroic Coliseum at the moment) on 3-4 nights a week, and spend other nights also doing the 10-player version or even going back to Ulduar to get a second hammer or whatever. I don't know very many progression-oriented players that breeze through the content and then log off.

I'd also put the complexity of fights like Yogg, Mimiron or the Twin Valkyr against any ever offered in the game. If it feels like you aren't struggling to learn these fights as much as you used to, then that's probably true: there are now many sources for videos and strategies that have become a lot more robust and user-friendly, as well as pretty sophisticated UI mods to help you track everything going on. The whole raiding community is just more well-connected than it was in the MC and BWL days. Many casual raiders could name a handful of cutting-edge guilds these days, which just didn't happen 4 years ago.

I don't think the server first folks are beating their heads against the content any less than they used to. What has changed is that the rest of us are able to follow in their footsteps a lot more easily now. Blizzard will definitely take some credit for letting a larger population of our player base to enjoy raiding. But I don't think the cutting edge folks are finding the cutting edge encounters any more trivial.

Ghostcrawler

#71 - Sept. 14, 2009, 10:14 p.m.

Q u o t e:
So in Simple Terms your design philosophy is that all your stat percentage such as crit/hit/dodge will revert back to crap with every expansion lets use Crit for a example.

The only real alternative is that you achieve say 60% crit chance at 80, and eventually 75% crit at maybe 85 or 90 then finally 100% crit. Gratz, you win! Improving your gear won't be as interesting at that point, as well as a lot of fundamental models of the game (buffs that provide crit? Trinkets that proc crit? Hit itself losing value?) will start to fall apart.

Ghostcrawler

#72 - Sept. 14, 2009, 10:19 p.m.

Q u o t e:
But if everyone's overpowered, including bosses, isn't that balanced? Being hit for almost your entire healthpool feels like it's an actual challenge!

The bosses aren't overpowered though, and therein lies part of the problem. They actually get proportionately weaker. Say you dodge a Naxx boss 40% of the time and your mages crit that boss 40% of the time. Now you get to Icecrown and you dodge 60% of the time and the mages crit 60% of the time. This is a boss that is supposed to be much harder, and in fact hits harder and takes more damage, yet your chance to crit him or his chance to hit you has improved in your favor. You crit or avoid a "hard" boss more often than an "easy" boss. Bosses don't scale with gear. :)

Since we like boss fights to last around say 5 min, because that just feels good, and the boss misses you more often, that means when he does hit he has to hit really, really hard or you'll never really be in danger and the fight will be trivial. This however makes the fights feel really RNG and places the risk of dying on every boss hit (or at least every second hit).

Ghostcrawler

#83 - Sept. 14, 2009, 10:43 p.m.

Q u o t e:
That's really not a fun philosophy for tank playing though. The idea that you can do everything perfectly yourself and die anyway because an outside cd was required and not in time kind of creates a bad taste.

It's definitely possbile to make very challenging encounter's that aren't all about the tank taking major damage. For example Kael & Vashj had fairly low tank damage but IMO were harder than any of the other TBC fights up till Sunwell.

To the first part, the idea that you have to rely on other players is part of what raiding is all about. Part of what I try to preach is that players tend to focus too much on improving their own character (or perhaps even trying to get us to improve their character) and not on improving the raid. Coordination with other players is HUGE. That is how raids get world first kills, not because their gear is better.

To the second part, I agree and in fact Yogg does not generally hit very hard. We don't want to make every fight like that though, and if we make too many fights like that then gearing up the tanks (or anyone really) doesn't feel like a big deal because coordination becomes everything and gear doesn't feel like much of a reward. The heart of progression-based RPGs is that you get better gear, which then allows you to face tougher opponents.