The Patchwerk Rant (extremely long post)

[Breccia]

So I went into the Beta to run an analysis on Prot Warriors. The results were...disturbing, but not in the way I thought at first.

Let me start with a direct quote:
"Being able to trivialize lower level mobs is sort of a bizarre perk though (and one not shared by all tank classes) and not something we're really interested in preserving." -- Ghostcrawler 2/3/2010

So every good experiment starts with a control group. That would be Live. I took my level 85 warrior tank to a boss I knew would make a good test: Patchwerk, in Naxxaramus. Patchwerk does nothing but a large pile of melee physical attacks over and over, and has no non-physical attacks, special debuffs, or anything else besides beating your face in. He's possibly the ideal testing ground for tanking a purely no-mechanics fight. The idea simply is, how long can you survive?

I established some ground rules:
-- always use Battle Shout and not Commanding Shout. In retrospect I'm not really sure why I did this, maybe for avoidance levels or the AP bonus to the Revenge shield, but whatever, that's what I did.
-- no food, no potions, no consumables.
-- use my avoidance trinket and Shield Block on cooldown.
-- use Rallying Cry, Shield Wall, and Enraged Regen at 35% health (or close)
-- keep Thunderclap and Demoralizing Shout on the boss as much as possible. Damage to the boss was secondary to staying alive.
-- use Revenge whenever possible, due to the 2-piece T13 bonus.
-- and no other gimmicks, such as pulling adds to use for Victory Rush procs.
In other words, this was purely about Not Dying.

I went into this knowing full well I was going to lose every fight. Warriors in Live have extremely limited self-healing, and blocking 30% or even 60% of the damage might slow down the rate at which you die, but you can't stop all of the damage entirely. We're not Death Knights, we can't do that stuff.

And this is precisely what happened. I fought Patchwerk 10 times, and of those 10 times, I died between 1:23 and 1:38 into the fight. No surprise there. I also got some damage data:
-- Hateful Strike: 38.8% dodge/parry/absorb/miss, and the blocked hits averaged 4601 damage
-- Melee: 42.2% dodge/parry/absorb/miss, and the blocked hits averaged 2045 damage.
-- MY melee strikes: 28.2% dodge/parry/miss because I reforge away from hit/expertise, average on a hit was 5190.
-- Revenge: 141 uses, 31.1% dodge/parry/miss, average hit damage 12,842
-- Shield Block had a 33.8% uptime.
So far so good? Ok. Now onto the Beta.

For my first in what was planned to be seven experiments, I used exactly the same gear, exactly the same reforges, and exactly the same rules. This INCLUDED not using Shield Barrier. This was purely an apples-to-apples testing scenario. I started off by testing my new abilities on practice dummies. I noticed my white damage from melee strikes was INCREDIBLY low. Like, under 200 low. Wow. Didn't see that coming. Maybe Vengeance would take care of that? Then I looked at my avoidance stats. They weren't kidding about lowering Block chances. My chance was GUTTED, from over 60% to under 30%. Maybe the higher uptime on Shield Block would make up for this? Also a large piece of my Dodge chance was shaved off and glued to my Parry chance for some reason.

As I entered, I noticed a few things on trash. One, Revenge seems to have no cooldown. Hmm. When paired with Shield Block, that could be very interesting. Besides the incredible amount of damage it did on trash, it would also spam that absorb shield from the 2piece bonus. This seemed promising. Secondly, I noted that using Heroic Strike/Cleave was really eating into my Rage, and for Patchwerk I could not afford to do so due to the 60 Rage cost of Shield Block. This I should have seen coming, and didn't have a problem with it, but it was worth noting.

So I made it to Patchwerk and fought him 10 more times using only Shield Block, and not Shield Barrier. And I got DESTROYED. My average lifespan was about a minute five, with my best 1:20 and my worst an appalling 57 seconds. Ouch. What happened?
-- Hateful Strike was doing about 4,069 per blocked attack, which compared nicely to Live. But I was being HIT over and over. Despite my best efforts, despite spamming Shield Block whenever it was available, despite keeping Shield Block up 47.7% of the time, I was being HIT over and over, each hit doing 5364. I was hit about as often as I blocked. Oh, and I'm not sure you can critically block those, based purely on the comparison between the Hit and Block damage. If the average Hit was 5364, then the average 30% Block should have been 3,755. I didn't see that, I saw higher. Critical Blocks should have LOWERED that, if they happened at all. There was a 39.3% dodge/parry/miss/absorb chance, however, which about matched Live.
-- Melee, same deal. The damage per block was down to 1786, but this was matched by a roughly equal number of hits doing 3178. While this did lead me to believe that Critical Block was working, the overall damage per melee attack was still much higher than on Live due to the number of Hits. There was a 36.6% avoidance result which was significantly down from Live.
-- MY melee strikes were doing 6,193 with a 29.3% miss/parry/dodge result. This seems higher, considering that Sunder was up pretty similarly in both fights. At least the ridiculously low damage I saw earlier didn't remain in place.
-- Revenge jumped WAY to the top of the chart as my Number 1 source of damage. As predicted, the lack of cooldown meant I could spam this Rage-generating, shield-proccing machine basically at whim. I used it 181 times, which considering the much shorter fight lengths is pretty dramatic. Also, the average damage on a hit was nearly 31,000. Since the damage caused by Revenge causes a proportional shield, this should, in theory, have helped my lifespan dramatically. It was not nearly enough.

To say I was disappointed would be putting it mildly. A direct comparison, using the same mechanics, same gear, same everything possible, and my lifespan took about a 30% hit. Despite the significantly higher uptime of Shield Block, the overall reduction to CTC got me mashed flat, sometimes before I could use Demoralizing Shout a second time.

BUT this isn't what disturbed me. This was...unwelcome, to be sure, but expected. We all knew that block chances were dropping, so these kind of results should have been expected. My hopes were too high at the outset, and besides, I had a LOT more testing to do. So I moved on to the second experiment in my lineup: Shield Barrier. The ONLY thing I changed was, instead of using Shield Block on cooldown and never using Shield Barrier, I used Shield Barrier whenever it came up and never used Shield Block. Same gear, same reforges, same lack of tricks and items, etc etc.

First pull, I won. Patchwerk died in under 4 minutes.

What?

Is THIS what tanking on a DK feels like? Is THIS what I've been missing all expansion? I mean, I've seen hundreds, maybe THOUSANDS, of people saying DK tanks are overpowered in basically every fight that isn't off-tanking in Heroic Spine (a fight which, I might add, that according to wowprogress, over 75% of the end-game raiding guilds in the game have not even seen), but I hadn't actually seen it from this side before. Blizzard removed the previous incarnation of Block, which absorbed a flat amount per block, and replaced it with a percentage of damage instead. Then they took the same flat-amount mechanic, made it better by making it into an absorb shield (in other words, you didn't need to "roll to block" to get this to work, and it would last for multiple hits if need be), and gave it to Death Knights, and said

"Being able to trivialize lower level mobs is sort of a bizarre perk though (and one not shared by all tank classes) and not something we're really interested in preserving." -- Ghostcrawler 2/3/2010

And THIS wasn't even the problem! Oh sure, I pointed out the problem multiple times before the GC quote, and so did hundreds of other people on these very forums. These posts continued before, during, and after launch. These posts were either misread, ignored, or otherwise discredited by Blizzard while DK tanks continued to run the show in just about every boss fight while warriors were left either picking up trash, or switching to DPS spec while the DK solo-tanked an increasingly large number of raid encounters. The posts continued to be ignored while DS was coded and launched with high burst elemental and unavoidable physical damage, mechanics that shred warriors and leave DKs largely unscathed. No. Infuriating as that sounds, this was not the problem.

The problem, was that Blizzard fixed it. Blizzard saw the problem a solid 18 months after everyone else and finally got around to doing something about it. Blizzard finally gave up on trying to make warriors, using classic warrior abilities and skills, competitive and instead just threw in an absorb shield. And they didn't even have the common courtesy to admit that we were right and they were wrong the whole time. And I am, of course, happy that warriors will finally be competitive again, don't misread me on that.

But now, we get quotes like this at the same time:
"Our tanks all have strengths and weaknesses and unusual encounter mechanics may synergize or clash with them, but that's more interesting than extreme homogeneity, which would be the alternative." -- Ghostcrawler, 6/25/2012

Complete. Kodo. P@@p.

Everyone told Blizzard about the problem. Blizzard's own data told them about the problem. They even repaired the problem, using the same homogenizing they claim they want to avoid. And they still come up with quotes like this one, patronizingly implying that everything evens out in the end at the same time fixing the problem they claim not to have.

Full quote/context here. You will note that GC himself did not give warriors any props whatsoever, instead calling out some world first/second tanks with absorb shields and the need to nerf paladins. Whether he could not think of any examples, or whether he simply forgot or ignored warriors, is something you'll have to decide on your own. Neither is reassuring.

I think Blizzard owes warrior tanks an apology. I think they need to come out and say "yes, we admit it, warrior tanks were weak for an entire expansion and we saw it too late to fix it." Based purely on the evidence, I don't think that's asking too much.

Breccia

[Electromatt]

I'd rather have a change like this (shield barrier) and have Blizzard say nothing, then to have it be like live and blizz say warriors are fine.

[PizzaSHARK]

Sadly, this is pretty common, and it's not necessarily specific to Warriors (see: Shamans.)

I'm sticking with my Warrior for MoP because I've played him for 8 years and I'll be fucked if I'm gonna stop now, but it's going to suck ass being a second-stringer compared to other tanks in pretty much every regard.

[Breccia]

I'd rather have a change like this (shield barrier) and have Blizzard say nothing, then to have it be like live and blizz say warriors are fine.

Maybe, but those aren't the only two options. My niece knew how to apologize when she was three. What makes Blizz exempt from apologies?

And yes, I don't mind the Shield Barrier at all! I just view it as proof that Blizzard saw the problem, and I'd like them to confirm it was a problem. Simple courtesy.

[Satori]

Right so I read the whole thing and I'm not sure what your point is, I kinda of lost interest midway through. You're fine with Shield Barrier, but you want an apology because it should have come sooner, that it?

DKs and Druids were underpowered due to Pallies and Warriors being able to CTC cap, also the fact that DKs depended on hit/expertise and rune tetris made them the worst tanks. They still have to live with the fact they have no raid cooldowns, a field where warriors are kind of shining in MoP. Warriors weren't weak this expansion at all, except for 4.3 where encounters favor DK's form of mitigation.

If your complaint is how Blizzard owes an apology for us not being able to tank...huh...ok I guess. I fail to see how that's relevant, you can get around some stuff with Souldrinker, a specific spec and being smart in live, but in MoP with barrier and the healing row of talents it will be just ridiculous.

[PizzaSHARK]

Maybe, but those aren't the only two options. My niece knew how to apologize when she was three. What makes Blizz exempt from apologies?

And yes, I don't mind the Shield Barrier at all! I just view it as proof that Blizzard saw the problem, and I'd like them to confirm it was a problem. Simple courtesy.

Two things:

First, Blizzard is large enough and successful enough that they don't have to worry about their peasants complaining for the most part.

Second and more practically, if Blizzard came out and said "we were wrong, we're sorry," it would start a tsunami of Biblical proportions of whining and self-entitlement from everyone that feels they have a valid grudge against Blizzard. I swear if you read threads by Ret paladins on the Blizzard forums it's like reading a Marxist proletariat screaming at the bourgeoisie.

[Asatru]

A true man knows humility, whereas a coward is fearful of the consequences therein.

[Drihan]

A true man knows humility, whereas a coward is fearful of the consequences therein.

Smells like Ghostcrawler.

To the OP: If I were you, I would have posted this to the official forums. If you're in the US, then I would gladly post it on the EU forums. If not to help Blizzard realize their mistake, I'd help simply to annoy them.

[PizzaSHARK]

Smells like Ghostcrawler.

To the OP: If I were you, I would have posted this to the official forums. If you're in the US, then I would gladly post it on the EU forums. If not to help Blizzard realize their mistake, I'd help simply to annoy them.

It's not just one guy, people need to realize it. Just because Dr. Street tends to be the mouthpiece for the development team doesn't mean he's the only one making decisions and calling the shots.

Blaming Dr. Street, and Dr. Street alone, for perceived bad decisions, or for perceived poor community relations, is ridiculously unfair to the guy. Remember that whenever any blue says ANYTHING to any player on the forums, or through their Twitters or Facebooks, or even through the game (since people love to share screenshots of conversations with GMs), they're representing their company and their product and their brand.

Now I personally think it's horseshit and they should focus on a more integrated, personal level of interaction with their players, but I'm also not involved in a multimillion (or is it billion by this point?) dollar company, either.

[XepNes]

Probably the best read I've had in weeks. Thank you Breccia and I will now start to use patchwork instead of LFD :P

[asharia]

Yes, but if you go fight something current, and not lvl 80 bosses, block scales up with the attacks, whereas blood shield does not.

I don't really understand what you're complaining about. Do you like the blood shield mechanic more because it makes low level content easier? You can roll a DK if its that important to you..

[Anuibus]

Yes, but if you go fight something current, and not lvl 80 bosses, block scales up with the attacks, whereas blood shield does not.

Technically blood shield does scale up with the attacks. Blood shield is based on how much is healed by a death strike and death strike healing is based on either a minimum amount, or a % of how much you were hit for in the last few seconds. So if you were hit extremely hard in the last few seconds, the heal and absorb shield will be fairly larger. This however, is something shield barrier will not do.

[LurkerOnly]

I hate to burst your bubble, but this is a worthless comparison.

Go on beta, and write down what your AP, parry, dodge, block, mastery, haste, etc ratings, write down exactly how much you have. IE, 80% mastery/20% haste/24%crit.

Then get gear on live that makes your stats exactly those stats, and do a comparison with those stats on beta.

The problem is, the relative worth of each secondary stat is going to decrease in the standard "new expansion cycle" way, so that in the same gear your ratings will be far less effective, your avoidance stats will be lowered significantly.

It's not an apples to apples comparison at all, it's more of an "apples to applesauce" comparison.

You're saying (without realizing it) that "this 10 lb bag of apples that's as big as a small child is now a couple little jars of applesauce!"

You're right, but the conclusions you're drawing ("THEY STOLE MAH APPLEZ") aren't corollary.

It's still interesting information in a purely rhetorical sense, but it's a poor indicator of the "state of warrior tanks", if you will.

EDIT; I'm sure someone will say "YOU DIDN'T READ WHOLE POST", so I'm editing.

My point is, yes, absorb mechanics are going to be broken against deprecated content. The absorb shield is going to be tuned assuming hits that actually threaten the life of the tank on the short term as opposed to "over 1 minute", it's also going to be tuned against the idea of being healed.

It's super awesome on patchwerk: so what? I can take the best 3 dps in my guild to patchwerk and drop him in seconds, and he'll never do a real amount of damage, he'll die too fast. Does this mean that "3 dps tanking is overpowered!"

No, it doesn't. That's my point. Testing with no real control and with so many variables ignored on content that was tuned for specs from 4 years ago isn't relevant data. It's arm-waving. Try the tests in ilvl 500 gear against raid bosses, with a full raid. That data would be relevant.

[atrophis]

People seem to not grasp that there cannot be complete BALANCE. Unless you homogenize to the point all classes have the same abilities.

Now, OP specs change with patches/expansions. I really like it. If my class underperfoms i try to do my best to compensate for it. Feels more rewarding tanking Heroic Madness as a Warrior than as a DK.

People get too much into numbers instead of having fun with their class.

[blackdennis]

u forgot that flat miggation is better on less hitting mob like patchwerk
Explanation:
U have skill a) that migates 10% dmg in 1 minute
and skill b) that gives you 100 points of absorb in one minute
Than: Fight against low hitting mob that deals u 200 points of damage per minute, absorb is better, becouse it miggates half on damage taken.
On the other hand, harder hitting mob = flat miggation is worse:
If u test that skills on mob that deals 10000 points of damage per minute, than absorbs migate only 2% of damage. And we can cleary see that percentage miggation of 10% from skill "a)" is much better in this case. U tested skill on weak boss from WOTLK. If u tested it on current content, your math would be diffrent ;p

[Electromatt]

EDIT; I'm sure someone will say "YOU DIDN'T READ WHOLE POST", so I'm editing.

My point is, yes, absorb mechanics are going to be broken against deprecated content. The absorb shield is going to be tuned assuming hits that actually threaten the life of the tank on the short term as opposed to "over 1 minute", it's also going to be tuned against the idea of being healed.

It's super awesome on patchwerk: so what? I can take the best 3 dps in my guild to patchwerk and drop him in seconds, and he'll never do a real amount of damage, he'll die too fast. Does this mean that "3 dps tanking is overpowered!"

No, it doesn't. That's my point. Testing with no real control and with so many variables ignored on content that was tuned for specs from 4 years ago isn't relevant data. It's arm-waving. Try the tests in ilvl 500 gear against raid bosses, with a full raid. That data would be relevant.

I don't think his rant is about numbers, it's about how blizzard doesn't want to fix the warrior class so they just threw in an absorb shield that seems pretty strong.

[Breccia]

I don't think his rant is about numbers, it's about how blizzard doesn't want to fix the warrior class so they just threw in an absorb shield that seems pretty strong.

This is pretty close. My real issue is that Blizzard was the absolute LAST to see that there was a serious problem, and didn't even have the stones to admit it. They just slapped an absorb shield on the class and moved on. Yes, PizzaShark is also right, that for a business an open apology is a risky thing to do, and they're not going to do it. Doesn't make me any less annoyed when they say, basically, "We don't think there's a problem, and by the way we fixed it" and pretend we don't notice.

[PizzaSHARK]

This is pretty close. My real issue is that Blizzard was the absolute LAST to see that there was a serious problem, and didn't even have the stones to admit it. They just slapped an absorb shield on the class and moved on. Yes, PizzaShark is also right, that for a business an open apology is a risky thing to do, and they're not going to do it. Doesn't make me any less annoyed when they say, basically, "We don't think there's a problem, and by the way we fixed it" and pretend we don't notice.

What concerns me is that the Blizzard responses indicate that they don't think there are any problems with the Warrior class... when there clearly are, especially with Protection.

Maybe they need to get better testers if they can't see the problems.

[HolgerDK]

They need people like Birgirpall to help break their games - maybe he can help them

[slime]

This is pretty close. My real issue is that Blizzard was the absolute LAST to see that there was a serious problem, and didn't even have the stones to admit it. They just slapped an absorb shield on the class and moved on. Yes, PizzaShark is also right, that for a business an open apology is a risky thing to do, and they're not going to do it. Doesn't make me any less annoyed when they say, basically, "We don't think there's a problem, and by the way we fixed it" and pretend we don't notice.

I'm sure they weren't last to see anything - in fact - the way they test stuff before we even see beta I'm sure they knew well and good the issue with War tanking. They just didn't give a shit. That will always be their stance.