[Prot] WoD/Legion Alpha Discussion

[bicycle]

Every tank spec in legion LITERALLY HAS THE SAME PREMISE.They DONT have it "on demand" it requires TIME SPENT GATHERING RESOURCES.
All of them except paladin have a resource required to use some form of their AM. It will be balanced when the uptime/dr is around the same time/strength, its fucking alpha boys. I have no idea why you idiots are complaining, holy power is basically the same thing as the current legion build, you just use shit at different rates rofl. "Oh god i can only used sotr every x seconds" WELL GUESS WHAT YOU PROBABLY WOULD ONLY BE ABLE TO USE IT AT THE SAME TIME INTERVAL WITH HOLY POWER GEN. The interaction from few spells prot pallies have is what makes it in legion.

With perfect play, sure, you press it every X seconds anyway. So Blizzard should just assume perfect play and make the benefits of perfect play completely passive? Follow that to its logical extreme and you end up with just autoattacks.

How about, instead, they present us with a design where it matters what buttons you press on any given GCD, so that it matters how well you're playing. I'm not even asking for a super high skill cap play style (I play divine purpose/holy shield far too frequently to pretend I'm some kind of skill god who needs Blizzard to design for my level), I'm just asking for there to be a connection between quality of input and quality of output.

[Templar 331]

Yes, when you zoom out that far, all of the tanks have to wait some amount of time between hitting their AM. Replace AM with DPS CD's, and you've described the core DPS gameplay loop as well. The very big difference, however, is that the specs that have to pool resources actually have gameplay to earn those CD's. Prot Pally in the current alpha has no meaningful gameplay in between those CD's. You just wait. Yeah, you can hit some buttons in between, but they don't impact the core gameplay loop of the spec in any meaningful way. You don't play the spec, you wait to play the spec. That's not engaging or fun, which ultimately is what any of us really wants from the spec, to enjoy playing it.

Welcome to tanking back in Wrath, which I loved. I didn't have to worry about building resources for mitigation. I could concentrate on boss location, raid status, adds, boss mechanics, etc. Now AM is on demand instead of having a separate resource to be built up which is a welcome change for me.

What is fun for you has caused me to not tank for years. First it was "fighting for aggro" back in Cata. Thankfully they toned it down a bit. Then it was "no passive mitigation" in MoP. Because of that I was done with tanking. How is it meaningful to have to press one button to reduce a large % of dmg when the mitigation doesn't stay on long enough to refresh it? You are no longer fighting the boss, you're fighting the keyboard.

[Deleted]

Welcome to tanking back in Wrath, which I loved. I didn't have to worry about building resources for mitigation. I could concentrate on boss location, raid status, adds, boss mechanics, etc. Now AM is on demand instead of having a separate resource to be built up which is a welcome change for me.

What is fun for you has caused me to not tank for years. First it was "fighting for aggro" back in Cata. Thankfully they toned it down a bit. Then it was "no passive mitigation" in MoP. Because of that I was done with tanking. How is it meaningful to have to press one button to reduce a large % of dmg when the mitigation doesn't stay on long enough to refresh it? You are no longer fighting the boss, you're fighting the keyboard.

Arguably the current iteration of tanking has all of the aspects of Wrath that you 'loved', and I would say arguably the amount of boss mechanics adds and movement has only increased since then. That hasn't been removed or toned down. Many of the fights in WoD were very pleasant to tank from a mechanical point of view; some worse than others, as always, but overall I quite enjoyed tanking this expansion (class balance notwithstanding). However, on top of the 'Wrath tanking style', there's now also resource management, mitigation and meaningful windows of damage intake that you cannot mitigate.

Essentially, tanking's become more involved, complex and skill demanding. What I get from your post is that you do not enjoy having to play a tank to a level above "place face in front of boss." All of your examples given, and I don't wish to attack you personally, simply screams "I don't want to play better or improve! Give me back braindead tanking!" Fighting for aggro in Cata? Perhaps not the most engaging iteration, but it was an attempt at bringing back the earlier style of tanking that required you to manage your threat well, and form a relationship with your co-tank in order to maximize output while keeping the boss under control. Again, a skill increase. MoP's no passive mitigation? Honestly, I can't say much here because I didn't tank in MoP at all. But we can move on swiftly to WoD here, where I feel the most glaring part lies:

"How is it meaningful to have to press one button to reduce a large % of damage when the mitigation doesn't stay on long enough to refresh it?"

Let me break this down into a few things. First, having pure mitigation passively requires no effort and is completely without meaning, you are playing a DPS that stands in front of the boss and none of your abilities outside of cooldowns make any difference at all. Second, having charges of mitigation with no resource, which I think is what you're excited for, basically comes down to "use ability X on window Y" with absolutely no variance. You advocate both of these styles, on the premise of "current iteration is not meaningful." Onto your statement.

You have a finite amount of resources to work with. Some of that have to be used to mitigate in order to keep you alive and sometimes you have less resources available than you need to stay alive. Because you are dealing with a limited resource, both your ability to generate that resource adequately and spend it efficiently heavily impact your performance as a tank. The current system allows for resources to be spent elsewhere, adding another layer to tanking: maximizing resources spent on throughput (damage) while having just enough resources to mitigate damage in order to survive. There's also the progression layer; there are times when you have to pull resources out of thin air to make-or-break a progression fight.

Because of the way resource management and active mitigation work at the moment, there is a lot of room for pushing performance as a tank, as explained above. Resource expenditure on mitigation is meaningful because there is a trade-off (small as it may be) that can be made, exchanging mitigation for throughput. It is meaningful because you can't get it to 100% uptime, or refresh it before it wears off. There will be times when you don't have it up, and how you manage those times and where you aim to have them is meaningful gameplay.

Tanking has all of the aspects of Wrath that you enjoyed, but it now has a few layers on top of that. These layers require skilled play to manage effectively and appeal to skilled players aiming to push their performance. Again, it is not my intention of attacking you personally, but you've basically just stated that you're not able to step up to what the role demands and want to bring it back to an era where it required significantly less attention from the player to be effective, that you don't have the ability to manage resources, mitigation and tanking mechanics.

[sexybeast]

Welcome to tanking back in Wrath, which I loved. I didn't have to worry about building resources for mitigation. I could concentrate on boss location, raid status, adds, boss mechanics, etc. Now AM is on demand instead of having a separate resource to be built up which is a welcome change for me.

What is fun for you has caused me to not tank for years. First it was "fighting for aggro" back in Cata. Thankfully they toned it down a bit. Then it was "no passive mitigation" in MoP. Because of that I was done with tanking. How is it meaningful to have to press one button to reduce a large % of dmg when the mitigation doesn't stay on long enough to refresh it? You are no longer fighting the boss, you're fighting the keyboard.

So what your saying is you enjoyed tanking when there was less to manage and therefor easier. You still have to manage all the things you want to "concentrate on" plus extra layers ontop of that. Maybe it's too much for you to handle? That's fair enough, but most of us enjoy extra layers of complexity to enjoy the role we play

[Deleted]

What is fun for you has caused me to not tank for years. First it was "fighting for aggro" back in Cata. Thankfully they toned it down a bit. Then it was "no passive mitigation" in MoP. Because of that I was done with tanking. You are no longer fighting the boss, you're fighting the keyboard.

Sounds like you don't really enjoy playing a tank, friend. What you seem to want is to be afk, while having a boss stick to you, and be able to stay alive.

[celinamuna]

Welcome to tanking back in Wrath, which I loved. I didn't have to worry about building resources for mitigation. I could concentrate on boss location, raid status, adds, boss mechanics, etc. Now AM is on demand instead of having a separate resource to be built up which is a welcome change for me.

What is fun for you has caused me to not tank for years. First it was "fighting for aggro" back in Cata. Thankfully they toned it down a bit. Then it was "no passive mitigation" in MoP. Because of that I was done with tanking. How is it meaningful to have to press one button to reduce a large % of dmg when the mitigation doesn't stay on long enough to refresh it? You are no longer fighting the boss, you're fighting the keyboard.

Heh guizzz, wotlk tanking was so gud, i didn't even need to press keys to tank, we should go back to it : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7ifTSkSeVk

[Gephyrophobia]

Yes, when you zoom out that far, all of the tanks have to wait some amount of time between hitting their AM. Replace AM with DPS CD's, and you've described the core DPS gameplay loop as well. The very big difference, however, is that the specs that have to pool resources actually have gameplay to earn those CD's. Prot Pally in the current alpha has no meaningful gameplay in between those CD's. You just wait. Yeah, you can hit some buttons in between, but they don't impact the core gameplay loop of the spec in any meaningful way. You don't play the spec, you wait to play the spec. That's not engaging or fun, which ultimately is what any of us really wants from the spec, to enjoy playing it.

How about, you play one of the tanks you find interesting in Legion? I'm INCREDIBLY stoked for Legion Prot Paly and looking to reroll because I don't like the Guardian changes. If I can switch because I don't like changes, so can you, and everybody else. That's why there's more than one tanking class. I've been waiting for a tank without an arbitrary resource system for years.

[Proof]

one of the tanks you find interesting in Legion

Top kek /10char

[Reghame]

Heh guizzz, wotlk tanking was so gud, i didn't even need to press keys to tank, we should go back to it : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7ifTSkSeVk

i dont think ANYONE wants that playstyle back, i think his argument was now it was so punishing otherwise that maybe there was no middle ground for tanking but a do or die in both mechanics and every other aspect which i think is kind of why tanks in general ( and good ones) are so rare. Right now there is only bad and really good tanks and this means unless your guild or friends or w/e content you do is saturated with good tanks, doing any content will be hard.

As for our problems right now is that you feel very unimportant in between using your CDs ( lets face it, SotR and our heal are now like short cooldowns instead of AM) if maybe there was room to do some dps in between or maybe gain some haste to our next CD or even strengthen it, i would see no problem and this would eliminate the variation of only good and bad tanks and maybe add that middle ground which does not exist at the moment.

Overall, i think prot is very fun to play otherwise. many cool flashy spells and the like and lots of unique utility once more.

[Deleted]

Welcome to tanking back in Wrath, which I loved. I didn't have to worry about building resources for mitigation. I could concentrate on boss location, raid status, adds, boss mechanics, etc. Now AM is on demand instead of having a separate resource to be built up which is a welcome change for me.

What is fun for you has caused me to not tank for years. First it was "fighting for aggro" back in Cata. Thankfully they toned it down a bit. Then it was "no passive mitigation" in MoP. Because of that I was done with tanking. How is it meaningful to have to press one button to reduce a large % of dmg when the mitigation doesn't stay on long enough to refresh it? You are no longer fighting the boss, you're fighting the keyboard.

So you dislike Threat and Active Mitigation. Maybe playing a Tank as a Meat-Shield is fun to you. However many people dislike being exactly that. It's boring and positioning is not that hard. Maybe as a keyboardturning Clicker yes. But you do not balance for the worst kind of player. At least as a sensible developer.

Heh guizzz, wotlk tanking was so gud, i didn't even need to press keys to tank, we should go back to it : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7ifTSkSeVk

This made me laugh. Then I realized there are literally people who want that to be the Tanking Gameplay.

[Templar 331]

Arguably the current iteration of tanking has all of the aspects of Wrath that you 'loved', and I would say arguably the amount of boss mechanics adds and movement has only increased since then.

Thank you for give a constructive reply, unlike a few here.

Essentially, tanking's become more involved, complex and skill demanding. What I get from your post is that you do not enjoy having to play a tank to a level above "place face in front of boss." All of your examples given, and I don't wish to attack you personally, simply screams "I don't want to play better or improve! Give me back braindead tanking!"

It's not so much as "I want to just sit there and take it" it's "I have so much to worry about already and I don't want to miss click or screw up one GCD and then die." With the way heals are in WoD I can't trust a healer to cover my mistakes. And when I make one, I make many.

Fighting for aggro in Cata? Perhaps not the most engaging iteration, but it was an attempt at bringing back the earlier style of tanking that required you to manage your threat well, and form a relationship with your co-tank in order to maximize output while keeping the boss under control.

But it wasn't you that was managing aggro, it was the DPS. I am a casual that likes to do LFR and LFG. To have a geared DPS come in and blast trash while I tank was enough to make me give up tanking at the beginning of Cata. And the vote kick option back then was worst than it is now. I also didn't have a guild so yeah. >.>

"How is it meaningful to have to press one button to reduce a large % of damage when the mitigation doesn't stay on long enough to refresh it?"

Let me break this down into a few things. First, having pure mitigation passively requires no effort and is completely without meaning, you are playing a DPS that stands in front of the boss and none of your abilities outside of cooldowns make any difference at all.

I can understand this argument but in Wrath we weren't DPS. We couldn't hold a candle to them. It wasn't until Vengeance did we start to keep pace. That was our role, to take dmg.

We also had an active mitigation that was tied to our mana regen ability. Can't remember the name of it but you had to keep it up for a 10% (I think) dmg reduction and was refreshed by judgement. It lasted 15(?) sec. That system was good because you had to know how to play. If you didn't use the ability you'd take more DMG and you'd run out of mana. Took me a while to figure that out I'll admit. That made a lot more sense than AM for 3 seconds.

You have a finite amount of resources to work with. Some of that have to be used to mitigate in order to keep you alive and sometimes you have less resources available than you need to stay alive. Because you are dealing with a limited resource, both your ability to generate that resource adequately and spend it efficiently heavily impact your performance as a tank. The current system allows for resources to be spent elsewhere, adding another layer to tanking: maximizing resources spent on throughput (damage) while having just enough resources to mitigate damage in order to survive.

The current model for Prot Pally is spend Holy Power on SotR(mitigation) or WoG(heals). I'm not against us having a self heal, but why does it need to be tied in to HP? Take less dmg or heal yourself while missing the AM to do so? Makes no sense.

Because of the way resource management and active mitigation work at the moment, there is a lot of room for pushing performance as a tank, as explained above. Resource expenditure on mitigation is meaningful because there is a trade-off (small as it may be) that can be made, exchanging mitigation for throughput. It is meaningful because you can't get it to 100% uptime, or refresh it before it wears off. There will be times when you don't have it up, and how you manage those times and where you aim to have them is meaningful gameplay.

I understand that was how things were done in progression raids since vengeance buffed tank dps, but what about now? We get an increase to heals based on dmg taken.

Tanking has all of the aspects of Wrath that you enjoyed, but it now has a few layers on top of that. These layers require skilled play to manage effectively and appeal to skilled players aiming to push their performance. Again, it is not my intention of attacking you personally, but you've basically just stated that you're not able to step up to what the role demands and want to bring it back to an era where it required significantly less attention from the player to be effective, that you don't have the ability to manage resources, mitigation and tanking mechanics.

That is what I am saying and I take no offense. I'm not saying make all tanks like this, it's just that when I started tanking this was how it was and made sense. Warrior tanks were for pros, bear tanks were dmg sponges, people were still trying to figure out DK's, and Pallies were good AoE tanks. I don't see why we can't go back to this since so many people complain about "class homogenization."

- - - Updated - - -

So you dislike Threat and Active Mitigation. Maybe playing a Tank as a Meat-Shield is fun to you.

I'm all for threat being a thing to keep up. AM not so much. Lose threat, dps dies. Lose AM, healer OOMs and everyone dies.

[Deleted]

<snip>

An awful lot of what you're saying sounds like you just don't like tanking/don't have the required skills for it. Which is fine, but the alternative you're speaking of is such a huge regression there'd be even fewer tanks then there currently are.

Warrior tanks were for pros, bear tanks were dmg sponges, people were still trying to figure out DK's, and Pallies were good AoE tanks. I don't see why we can't go back to this since so many people complain about "class homogenization."

This one really tickled me. We can't go back to this because then you start bringing the class, not the player.

[Templar 331]

An awful lot of what you're saying sounds like you just don't like tanking/don't have the required skills for it. Which is fine, but the alternative you're speaking of is such a huge regression there'd be even fewer tanks then there currently are.

I feel it would be the other way around in that there would be more tanks since it would be easier for casuals like me, but that' just my opinion.

This one really tickled me. We can't go back to this because then you start bringing the class, not the player.

Yeah.

We're screwed either way.

[Deleted]

I feel it would be the other way around in that there would be more tanks since it would be easier for casuals like me, but that' just my opinion.

I disagree. 90% of the time people express why they don't like to tank, it's not because of class complexity - in fact, tank classes are all pretty simple. Instead, they simply don't like the 'leadership' role that is placed upon the tank. They feel stressed by being the one who controls the group essentially.

[Deleted]

I'm all for threat being a thing to keep up. AM not so much. Lose threat, dps dies. Lose AM, healer OOMs and everyone dies.

Which is why being the tank is a position of high responsibility. Always has been.

Bad Tanks always just complained and/or died. But I do not think taking away the toys of the good players to make the less skilled players feel better is the right way of doing things. Bad players will always be bad. Doesn't matter how easy you make the class - they will always perform even worse.

The system they are throwing in is not only bad. It is backwards. Meat-Shield-Gameplay is something (for example) bears complained about. This new prot feels even worse than Guardian. Hell, Guardian still has a ressource.

This is not WotlK anymore. I remember people loving DK because they were the first and only AM-Spec back in those days. Having a tool to reduce a lot of damage was something (almost) new at the time.

Giving Prot Holy Power was kind of weird back in Cata. MoP made the system so much better - WoD improved on it (Seraphim gameplay was the most fun I have had in a long time). Just throwing it out is a bad idea and imo will always stay a bad idea.
HP worked for Ret and Prot. Imho those Specs should be able to keep it.

I agree however on the note, that there should have been an alternative for new/casual Prot Pallys (the ones who have problems keeping their Mitigation/Smoothing up even with Holy Shield - trust me, I know those kind of people. Its frustrating to no end.) to at least not suck as hard as they currently do if they try the ... meat-shield-kind-of-gameplay.

I feel it would be the other way around in that there would be more tanks since it would be easier for casuals like me, but that' just my opinion.

No, people tend to not tank not because it is hard to play. They just don't want the responsibility. Which wont ever change. At all. There are tanks that are easier to play and still people tend to prefer DPSing. I wonder why. jk, I know already. :P

I disagree. 90% of the time people express why they don't like to tank, it's not because of class complexity - in fact, tank classes are all pretty simple. Instead, they simply don't like the 'leadership' role that is placed upon the tank. They feel stressed by being the one who controls the group essentially.

Damn, what he said!!!

[celinamuna]

I'm all for threat being a thing to keep up. AM not so much. Lose threat, dps dies. Lose AM, healer OOMs and everyone dies.

That's just in, shitty play on content that actually requires you to be awake is punishing.
Who would've guessed.

[Deleted]

I don't understand the argument even. You claimed you didn't like the "fight for threat" design, but now you're saying you're all for threat being "a thing". Which one is it?

Is it that you want some like token threat play, where technically somebody could rip aggro if they go all in during the first 2 seconds, but it doesn't actually ever happen if you have your hands on the keyboard, or do you want it to be "proper" threat play like TBC, where you have Prot Warrior-like caps on AoE skills and have to tab around to maintain aggro? Do you want it so that a good DPS can stay on your heels throughout a fight?

[Templar 331]

I don't understand the argument even. You claimed you didn't like the "fight for threat" design, but now you're saying you're all for threat being "a thing". Which one is it?

Is it that you want some like token threat play, where technically somebody could rip aggro if they go all in during the first 2 seconds, but it doesn't actually ever happen if you have your hands on the keyboard, or do you want it to be "proper" threat play like TBC, where you have Prot Warrior-like caps on AoE skills and have to tab around to maintain aggro? Do you want it so that a good DPS can stay on your heels throughout a fight?

I want to be able to pull aggro off a DPS who can't wait more than 3 seconds but also lose aggro if I'm not doing anything for more than 3 sec. I hate the people who would only press two buttons in Wrath and whine about how easy tanking was while I was doing my full rotation. The only time I lost aggro then was to a fully geared Heroic ICC Frost DK. It was Forge of Souls and he had to throttle back a bit just to not pull off of me. At the beginning of Cata I'd throw AS and before I could get a second hit off, ranged DPS pulled from me. They were not heroic ICC geared.

[Deleted]

So it looks like the flail actually "flails". The clipping is real sometimes, but I don't mind much.

[Fiskyh]

I like the idea of the flail, but the spikes on it bother me. It looks dumb, but that's just me disliking spikes on armor/weapons in general. I hope they make a flanged mace head flail variation, or simply a 1h mace. It's nice that they're giving us variations though!