Block in MoP.

[4KhazModan]

According to the front page, block will now suffer from diminishing returns just like Dodge and Parry. What are your thoughts on this? Will the make our mastery worthless? Personally, I am waiting to see how everything scales, but I'm not liking it so far.

[Ssateneth]

I wonder what the DR curve will be like.. They also mentioned block will be on a second roll, so you won't have 100% block unless you actually have 100% block tooltip

[ishootblanks]

anything will make it more interesting than it is now.. at least with a warrior you can toy around with it to increase your critical block chance.. for paladins it's like hit rating..

[Deleted]

It will enable Block tanks to be a little more interesting than just "herp derp i have full CTC, time to stack Stamina!"

I play Druid and Death Knight tanks simply because they are far more interesting to play than the shield tanks, at the moment.

[Wolfbear]

I hope we can go back to worrying about being hit and exp capped in MOP. Having bigger DRs on avoidance stats will do that, I think.

Arn't they trying to move away from having hit and exp for tanks and making mitigation a more active thing?
Could be wrong about moving away from hit and exp mind, but I'm anticipating the more active mitigation.

[Joels]

They mentioned Holy Shield and Shield Block(w/e the warr thing is) are being reworked completely. That may have something to do with the "Active" tanking and it may be effected by block or mastery, but we'll see once they release the changes for those.

[4KhazModan]

They mentioned Holy Shield and Shield Block(w/e the warr thing is) are being reworked completely. That may have something to do with the "Active" tanking and it may be effected by block or mastery, but we'll see once they release the changes for those.

Holy Shield isn't even a spell according to the new talent trees. It's part of SoTR in a way.

[Boogieknight]

Arn't they trying to move away from having hit and exp for tanks and making mitigation a more active thing?
Could be wrong about moving away from hit and exp mind, but I'm anticipating the more active mitigation.

I think GC mentioned something about hit/exp for tanks in one of his blogs. I remember him saying it should be more important for warriors to generate rage with it or end up rage starved. No telling at this point, but I'm curious about hit in general since I didn't see a mention of offhand hit levels. It confuses me with rogue poisons moving to melee hit calculations, so does that make offhand poisons require offhand hit cap in order to land reliably?

[Deleted]

it sounds like it's going to a 2 rolls system eg

roll one to see if the attack "hits"
0-5 "miss"
5-20 "parry"
21-35 "dodge"
36+ = roll on next table

block or not table

0-50 "block"
51-100 "full damg hit"

so block jsut became worse and "unhitable" is no longer obtainable potentially as the post says " block caped only under temporary effects" but it means mastery will never become useles for prots pallies anymore as you never reach (at current 2.25% levels) enough mastery to have 100% block chance, that said base mastery in mop with raidbuffs will be 13 isntead o 8 ( blessing of might 5 mastery) so we may have higher block % than we do today. as we just gained 11.25% block from that buff.

[MorphexEU]

As Viglante above says, a two roll system. First it rolls for miss / dodge / parry. If you're not avoiding the damage, it then rolls for block.

Now, they have designed us with active mitigation and we can't reach the CTC cap anymore. When you use SoTR you WILL block the next melee attack, and increase the amount of damage you block by 25% for 6 seconds. In addition, word of glory isn't on the GCD. Your judgement will also generate holy power. You can store up to 5 holy powers as prot, but no ability use more than three.

Now combine this with the new talent tree abilities, and you get quite a nice combination of damage out put abilities and survival abilties. You will fill your bars with abilities for both survival and damage.

Seeing that our survival now actually depends much more on our abilities, i believe we will see that hit and expertise will increase a lot in value. We might actually want to cap hit and soft (maybe hard?) cap expertise to always have some active mitigation beside our passive mitigation. This is because we need holy power for the abilities to work, and to get holy power we need our offensive abilities to deal damage. And therefore we will need hit / expertise stats.

Passive; Miss, dodge, parry and block.
Active; Abilities that increase our survival, like Shield of the Righteous in MoP.

We might also see that we will need to use Hammer of the Righteous on a single target, to put up the debuff "Weakened Blows", which reduce the physical damage that your enemy deal by 10%. I am also seeing Sacred shield becoming mandatory together with Sanctified Wrath.

The talent calculator for MoP; http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/game/mis...ator#bZ!102011!

This is how i currently seeing stats being prioritzed, from top to bottom;

Hit / expertise
Mastery / stamina
Stamina / mastery
Dodge
Parry

Hit because you can specc so judgement no longer have a cool down, and it needs spell hit to come through. This again mean that expertise might be as usefull as hit, because both hit and expertise increase the spell hit %. Hit and expertise also fits perfectly into their new tanking design, because as far as i remember blizzard said that they wanted tank DPS to be as high as an actually damage dealers DPS.

Then mastery because it simply increase the chance to block, and it scales way better with per stat rating then dodge and parry does. Yes you can't reach the CTC cap, because the two roll system stops you from it, since you can't have 102.4% block chance. There simply wont be enough ratings on gear to ensure you this. Still, it is better then dodge and parry because block covers more of it's combat table then dodge, parry and miss will cover of their combat table (the two roll system gives you two combat tables).

Dodge and parry last, since they have no caps and they scale the worst.

Now, stamina is a thing bugging me. But i guess it will be; Get stamina until you can survive the magical damage and a mitigated attack (or a full physical attack?).


If things go as i believe it will, then tanking will be entirly different to what it is now. It will actually include A LOT more theory crafting, stat balancing etc etc. Tanking will be brought back to it's beauty, and it will certainly be way more fun. This will also differ good tank from bad tanks more then ever.

[4KhazModan]

Then mastery because it simply increase the chance to block, and it scales way better with per stat rating then dodge and parry does. Yes you can't reach the CTC cap, because the two roll system stops you from it, since you can't have 102.4% block chance. There simply wont be enough ratings on gear to ensure you this. Still, it is better then dodge and parry because block covers more of it's combat table then dodge, parry and miss will cover of their combat table (the two roll system gives you two combat tables).

Dodge and parry last, since they have no caps and they scale the worst.

I disagree, the post stated block will have a diminishing return similar to dodge and parry. It's yet to be seen if it will scale better or just like dodge and parry, but for now, it greatly decreases the value of our mastery.

Assuming they bring back hit and exp for us, this is what my take on the stat prio system will be:

Hit/Exp until cap
Dodge/Parry
Mastery(assuming block will scale the same as dodge/parry)
Stamina

But as I stated in the original post, we'll see how things turn out.

[Gallahadd]

I think this change is pretty rubbish tbh, but it DOES point to one thing that could be good.

there is NO way in hell that blizz will stick our block on DR, and then leave us with a mastery that is just LOTS of block, it'll make mastery even easier to cap than it is now, as instead of going for 102.4 CTC, we'll just stack until we hit the DR, and then leave it. To me this says 'Paladin's are getting a 2nd effect for Mastery', especially if the DR is based on the Block, not the Mastery.

and 4Khaz, I'm guessing it'll be closer to:
Hit/Exp
Block
Dodge/Parry
Stam

as I don't think even BLIZZ is stupid enough to put Block on as harsh a DR as Parry/Dodge, considering it gives 30% DR, compared to 100%

[MorphexEU]

~zip~

• This gives block a consistent value, regardless of avoidance. Currently block becomes more valuable the more you have.
• Block will also have diminishing returns, much like dodge and parry. This doesn’t mean that the value of block will go down as you get more block. It means that it won’t go up by as much when you get more block.

Yes, it will have a DR, but it still scales way better then dodge / parry per stat rating. I also believe that the cataclysm damage income idea will stay, smooth out the damage by mitigating it. And i highly doubt that it will have the exact same DR as dodge and parry have. I can imagen it being something like this on mastery;

1 mastery = 100 mastery rating
2 mastery = 100 + 120 mastery rating
3 mastery = 220 + 140 mastery rating

So i am imagining that the diminishing return will increase in steps, where each mastery equals a step. With that design blizzard can reach a "cap" on it.

[RehabOC80]

Won't this change make Prot Mastery much lesser compared to say DK's?

DK's ignore Block anyways, so basically their Mastery will improve the shields more and more, where Paladins basically get theirs cut in half. We lose the chance to avoid cap, so we aren't constantly at least 30% less damage, where this doesn't effect DK's or Bears any...as they will just keep stacking it to increase their shields, etc. Won't this broaden the gap between tanks in general?

Tbh, I'm not a huge fan of it. While I would like to focus more on my CD's, active mitigation, that's why I love all the Cd's available to my Paladin, as well as the other abilities like bubbles/ HoS/ HoP/ Freedom and what not, its more than just smashing a single button, I do like the feeling of Stam stacking. I was upset when they dropped Bear Stam back in Wrath, as it always appealed to me to have a ton of Stam and soak hits, and I love that Paladins can focus on so much Stam after they hit their Cap.

I would prefer they allowed the Block Cap reachable while still maintaining a way to actively mitigate damage, but I can't make that call until I begin playing and see how it plays out.

[Ealyssa]

Won't this change make Prot Mastery much lesser compared to say DK's?

DK's ignore Block anyways, so basically their Mastery will improve the shields more and more, where Paladins basically get theirs cut in half. We lose the chance to avoid cap, so we aren't constantly at least 30% less damage, where this doesn't effect DK's or Bears any...as they will just keep stacking it to increase their shields, etc. Won't this broaden the gap between tanks in general?

You missed whole cataclysm ? Where protpally were the absolute best tank ? (minus some T13 fight with LOT of magic damage OR unblockable huge damage, that blizzard specifically made to counter block tank domination)

It will tune down paladin/warrior to druid/DK level. So that blizzard never had to specificaly tune bosses to counter some tanks (madness unblockable hit).
You can see that like T11/T12 with all the five tanks on the same level (/me hope monk won't be as OP as DK @wolk launch)

[Nillo]

instead of going for 102.4 CTC, we'll just stack until we hit the DR, and then leave it.

How do you "hit" a diminishing return? -.-

---------- Post added 2012-03-04 at 12:46 AM ----------

I disagree, the post stated block will have a diminishing return similar to dodge and parry. It's yet to be seen if it will scale better or just like dodge and parry, but for now, it greatly decreases the value of our mastery.

Assuming they bring back hit and exp for us, this is what my take on the stat prio system will be:

Hit/Exp until cap
Dodge/Parry
Mastery(assuming block will scale the same as dodge/parry)
Stamina

But as I stated in the original post, we'll see how things turn out.

That's why it's pointless to assume stuff now. Besides they'd have to do a pretty bad job if they allow mastery to fall below dodge/parry.

[RehabOC80]

You missed whole cataclysm ? Where protpally were the absolute best tank ? (minus some T13 fight with LOT of magic damage OR unblockable huge damage, that blizzard specifically made to counter block tank domination)

It will tune down paladin/warrior to druid/DK level. So that blizzard never had to specificaly tune bosses to counter some tanks (madness unblockable hit).
You can see that like T11/T12 with all the five tanks on the same level (/me hope monk won't be as OP as DK @wolk launch)

I did skip FL, so I can't say about that. But as of now in DS...DK is by far the top, Pally is great for like Madness cuz of CD's, but that's got nothing to do w/ their Block or Mastery.

But I'm not talking about now. Right now, if you took away our Block Cap, we'd fall way behind, as would Wars, compared to DK's and Druids...it wouldn't put us on Par without adjusting something, it wouldn't even it out at all, it would just make DK's stronger. So that was more my point, will they effect how DK/Druid Mastery works since if they kept it as is, while just putting Block on a seperate roll, it would def make a huge difference.

[Gallahadd]

How do you "hit" a diminishing return? -.-

Let me rephrase then, 'Till you reach a point where the DR is too steep for block to be worth the points'

[Nillo]

Let me rephrase then, 'Till you reach a point where the DR is too steep for block to be worth the points'

I'm pretty sure there is no such point and never will be - if anything you will have a ratio you want to keep your avoidance stats at (like 3:1:1 for blockarry:dodge)

[Keyur]

I always liked to be hit and expertise capped as tank. Without threat issues tanking is now more boring.