"Tank and Spank" encounters
We aren't trying to make the fights easy necessarily, but we are trying to challenge the tanks and the raid in ways other than just pounding the tank as hard as we can such that cooldowns (from the healers even) and big heals become the only things that matter. Those are fine for some fights, just as having a tank and spank once in awhile is fine. The problem with Ulduar is that too many of the fights came down to these huge hits such that other parts of tanking (and healing) became pushed to the side. For example, nobody is as worried about being a mana sponge these days because mana isn't generally limiting and tanks can generally be destroyed in two hits. (
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PvE design for Tanking
Nah. Too many of you are trying to solve the tanking puzzle in one of two ways: find the best class to tank to make things easier for you, or bring one of every tank so that you have the bases covered. Neither of those is our design.
Our design is that you can pick an MT and 1-3 OTs (depending on the content) and be able to beat the encounters, assuming those players have a reasonable amount of skill and gear. The balance has to be close enough that no matter which class you pick as a tank that you can still make progress. Generally that works out okay because players have beaten the content with all four tanks. There are some situations, especially on hard modes, where choosing one tank makes the encounter much easier than on others. We're okay with it being "easier," but we don't want it to be "much easier" and we don't want it to happen too often or always favor the same class. If we thought we had nailed tank balance we wouldn't still be tweaking numbers and talents.
For many of you though, learning the encounters, learning to coordinate better or getting better gear will improve your chances far more than picking "the best" tank class. That's not true of every guild, but it is probably true for most of them. (
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Tanking classes homogenization and tanking niches
We understand that there is a segment of the community that wants to see all tank numbers virtually identical to each other on all fights. We see requests for DKs to block and druids to parry and for every class to have an equivalent snap-aggro move for single target and AE fights, etc. That's just not the direction we want to take the game. We want your group to do things a little differently if you have a bear instead of a paladin tank. We want that if you've played a DK throughout LK to have to learn and adapt to class differences if you choose to reroll a warrior. We want the numbers to be close enough so that a group that runs with tank X doesn't feel at a serious disadvantage on specific fights. But we aren't trying to make everyone the same. (
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[...] I don't know that I would say we want tanking niches. I ultimately am agreeing with what you're saying, but once we say "tanking niches" players have visions of the DK who parks outside of Icecrown until boss 4, 17 and 31 (yes, IC is that big).
I totally agree that no tank can be the worst at everything. What you have to remember though is that "everything" is generally defined as the current raid content. Coliseum isn't a large raid. If there are 5 bosses and 4 tanks then it seems that even in the best case that someone might be "the best" on 2 of them and everyone else is "the best" on 1. (And honestly, we don't design raid encounters with that goal in mind -- they have enough constraints on them already.)
Again, the goal is "close enough" and the mushiness of that definition is intended. For some groups, having a tank that is "5% harder to heal" (whatever that means) is acceptable and perhaps not even detectable. We just need to avoid the extreme situation where the guild that feels gimp because their MT is a paladin (or whatever) and paladins have a lot of liabilities on the current raid content to the extent where that player is getting replaced on more than just a couple of fights. (And I should add by knowledgeable raid leadership, and not just the Naxx pug guy that read on the forums that bears are the best tank and so only accepts bears.) (
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Druid
Wild Growth Bugs
I was going to post that we fixed this, because we did. But I'm glad that I didn't because sometime during the 3.2 patch it broke again.
Sometimes when we don't address simple things head on, it's for reasons like this. We'll try to get it fixed (again) as soon as we understand what happened. (
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Mage
Arcane Mages
I think mana issues and talent tree bloat are quality of life issues. They are things we need to fix, but players would play Arcane without those changes if the damage was good.
Raid utility would help, I agree.
The problem with buffing Arcane's damage is that so many of the changes could be used to get big Arcane Barrage + PoM "something" back to back and 'splode someone in 2 shots again (or maybe 4 shots if you get another Barrage and Fireblast). We need to buff Arcane through other spells that can help sustained but not burst damage. That might mean going to higher stacks of Blast or something, but that could be a PvP nerf. (
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[...] Arcane could have a talent to make all of their Arcane spells 50% cheaper, but if its dps is far behind Fire, you aren't going to see many players choose Arcane except on say fights like Vezax. It might be true if you were purposely avoiding using a high damage, expensive spell in order to conserve mana. Realistically, I don't see that happening.
Now you can certainly have a model where Arcane did great damage for 2 minutes and then ran out of mana so that sustained damage was low over the course of a 4 minute fight. But that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about mages feeling like Arcane is a legitimate option to Fire, which it was pretty close to in the early days of Lich King. (
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Paladin
Prot Paladin healing in PvP / Touched by the Light
We are going to fix the specific scenario where a PvP paladin with a Prot build but spell power gear can heal for more than a Holy build in the same gear. We want to do this without messing up the Prot paladin trying to tank in PvE.
We will probably not make this change before the end of the current Arena season, but you can be thinking about your teams for season 7 with this change in mind. (
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[...] Touched by the Light helps to solve a specific problem which is that paladins do both physical and magical damage and Prot paladins need both for threat (and damage). It works fine when the paladin is in tanking gear, and in fact was designed so that paladins wouldn't need to mix tanking gear with caster gear as they did in the past.
It is not balanced for a Prot paladin who decides to wear spell power gear. At that point you're double-dipping.
We have no problem with Prot paladins in PvP, but they need to be there because their survivability is an asset, not because they can out-heal an entire tree dedicated to healing.
There is a fine line between creative use of game mechanics and something that goes against our vision for the game. It's always going to be subjective. If the Retribution tree ended up being better at tanking than the Protection tree, or the Shadow priest was a better healer than the Disc tree, or the Marks hunter had a more powerful pet than the BM hunter, we'd take similar action. (
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Balancing Holy and Prot paladins in PvP
As Affix said, if Prot paladins are impossible to kill because of their healing potential, the answer is not to make Holy paladins even more powerful than that.
We have no problem if Prot paladins are hard to kill like Prot warriors or bear druids are hard to kill. But I don't think that's really what we're talking about. (
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Originally Posted by peknoman
If a shaman tells you that he can't tank, he's just not doing it right.
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