Is Cataclysm... "Wow dumbed down?"

#0 - March 2, 2010, 6:40 a.m.

I've got some worries about Cataclysm and all this talk of 'homogenisation' of classes, abilities and so forth...

It sounds to me like WoW is being dumbed down, now.. i'm ok for removing some stats from gear to simplify things such as defence, or expertise (being kept?!) and armour pen etc as these extra variables all become just more headaches for the developers to balance.

What worries me though is the fact that everyone will have roughly the same HP and armour, ie reducing the difference between cloth and plate...

To me this seems to break a lot of the ethos of Fantasy Role Playing.. Plate wearers are fighters and protect the clothies, who are often casters with hunters, rogues, bears and shamans somewhere between the two extremes.

A clothy should never be able to 'tank' things that weild big axes, it's just stupid...

Make no mistake, I'm not making a 'QQ tanks aren't special anymoerz ohnoes', because I can just flip over to RetNub spec and faceroll DPS if I need to.

What I'm worried about is that the structure of groups and raids will be broken and I suppose I am worried that 'Tanking' as a career path will be just something that DPS do when they're required to, and if that happens.. based on the average IQ of the typical DPS player.....

Ghostcrawler

#11 - March 2, 2010, 7:28 a.m.

Let's compare a level 80 tank to a non-tank.

Unbuffed, a level 80 mage in Icecrown gear might have 20,000 health, 2000 armor, 5% dodge, 0% parry, 0% block.

Unbuffed, a level 80 Protection warrior in Icecrown gear might have 45,000 health, 30,000 armor, 25% dodge, 20% parry and 20% block.

To be fair, the mage can cast armor and has a few defensive spells. The tank has Defensive Stance, cooldowns like Shield Wall and Last Stand, and cannot be crit by mobs.

Now the mage gets converted to Cataclysm. Let's pick totally wild numbers, like +50% health and +200% armor, which I hope are much too large. The mage now has 30,000 health and 6000 armor. Wow! Still... think he's going to be tanking anything? The tank still mitigates so much damage through armor (what he doesn't avoid) that he'll still shrug off hits that flatten the poor mage tank.

The numbers are really far off at the moment. We have a lot of room to bring them closer together while still leaving them very far apart. :)