3.2 PTR notes on tanking

[Vitandus]

I found this amusing from wow.com:

The amount Ardent Defender heals for when you take fatal damage varies based on your defense. With no +defense gear, you will receive 0 healing; when defense-capped against boss mobs, you will receive 30% of your health (with 3/3 points in the talent). In other news, it is still massively overpowered.

Font size theirs, not mine. I suspect, though, we'll see a lot more Paladin tanks unless it's toned down.

[Vitandus]

From the actual blue:

Ardent Defender: Redesigned. Any damage that takes the paladin below 35% health is reduced. This reduction applies only to the portion that pushes the paladin below 35% health (example: a paladin at 50% health takes a 40% hit; the first 15% hits as normal while the next 25% is reduced). In addition, once every 2 minutes an attack that would have killed the paladin will fail to kill, and instead heal the paladin for up to 10/20/30% of maximum health depending on the paladin's defense rating (example: a paladin with defense equal to only 5 times his or her level will receive no healing from the talent, while a paladin who is immune to critical strikes from boss creatures through defense will receive the maximum amount).

[Dave]

It's very similar to Last Stand. Actually, it is the same effect, but automatic, kind of like Cheat Death is. The defense part of this entire thing deters people from using resilience to become crit immune.

It's kind of funny, because Prot paladins have been asking for some sort of cooldown style abilities for a while now, and Blizzard gives them this. It's like they're trying to answer the question: How do we make Paladin tanking better, but not make it harder?

[Vitandus]

From Blue:

The main goal of the change was to make parry not so much less attractive than dodge as an avoidance stat. Since tank avoidance is so high already, we wanted to do that by nerfing dodge a little, not by buffing parry.

This hurts druids slightly more than other tanks, but the emphasis is on "slightly." This is not the big druid nerf that some forum posters have predicted. We will continue to evaluate tank survivability and threat generation based on PTR tests with "Patchwerk" to decide if druids need to be nerfed or DKs buffed or look at Prot warrior dps or anything else.

This is also not the big avoidance "come to Naaru" that some posters predicted. Overall, we think avoidance is too high and the game would work better with lower tank avoidance, but suddenly dropping everyone's avoidance by 20 or 30% would be a very big change with many ramifications for healing and gear among other things. It would also feel like a big nerf to the many players who didn't understand why it would be better for the game in the long term. But I still expect it is coming at some point.
Ghostcrawler
Lead Systems Designer

[Vitandus]

I feel like we've been pretty candid about its future. You can probably find my previous comments relatively easily. We think block needs to mitigate much more incoming damage per hit, but to make that change we would also need to lower tank avoidance across the board and prevent every hit from being blocked (especially in situations with more than one target beating on you). To make Prot tanking more interesting, we have allowed block to become too much of a dps stat. In retrospect, we'd rather it remained a mitigation stat and that Strength was pushed up as the big warrior and paladin dps stat.

You shouldn't overly worry about outscaling content. We said from the beginning that there would be three major patches to Wrath of the Lich King. We aren't setting up a system that is going to remain on autopilot for 10 more tiers of content without our intervention. It's totally valid for players to worry about scaling, and all things considered, we'd rather have mechanics that scale well. But if those scaling problems aren't going to manifest themselves until you have item level 500 items, then you're worried prematurely.

We would like to get Prot warriors into PvP in a legitimate way, but our first priority is making sure every class has at least one viable PvP spec first. By "legitimate" I do NOT mean that you sometimes can do a 19K Shield Slam when all the stars align. That's not acceptable even if it is rare. Also consider that tanks do have a legit role acting like actual tanks when running flags or tanking AV-style NPCs. That may not be enough of a role, but I did want to point out that emphasizing BGs more and Arenas less also helps to carve out a niche for PvP tanks.

I know there are plenty of Prot warriors out there who couldn't care less about PvP. Sorry. We have to. :(

We want Prot warriors to do decent damage in PvE. We don't want them to do as good damage as actual dps specs -- there needs to be a trade-off for such high survivability. This means we need threat multipliers or you won't be able to actually hold aggro. It's okay if Shield Slam can make big (yet not absurd) numbers, since you don't Shield Slam all that much. That's fun. As I said above though, it would probably work better if Shield Slam hit hard because your Strength was high, not because you built a gimmicky set.

[ Post edited by Ghostcrawler ]
Ghostcrawler
Lead Systems Designer

[Vitandus]

Re: The Future of Block???

The problem, GC, is that this doesn't scale between 10s and 25s. Damage in 25s is considerably higher than 10s, but amount of damage blocked is not. If block becomes powerful, it could easily dominate 10s and still be weak in 25s.

If only there was a mathematical operation we could perform that would scale the amount blocked to the size of the hit. :)
Ghostcrawler
Lead Systems Designer

This is the point GC seems to be ignoring or missing entirely. He takes the community's request for a dps buff and turns it into a "zomg, they want to do 8000 dps! NEHVAR!"

No, I don't miss it. I know some of you just want to do more damage. We don't have a problem with that point of view, and in fact the Devastate buff will help in that regard.

There has been a lot of discussion about +threat moves being a crutch and tanks should just be able to hold aggro based on their dps. But that implies that your dps is as high or higher than a class or spec who can only dps. There will probably be +threat added to stances and abilities for the foreseeable future. That does not mean your dps needs to be 10% of a dps raid member.

It wasn't initially brought up by the OP, which may have confused some people, but usually I am just looking for a relevant thread in which to dump some information, not necessarily waiting for the perfect question before answering.
Ghostcrawler
Lead Systems Designer