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Feedback: Death Knight Updates
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The War Within Alpha - Warbands Feature Overview
The tanking changes have been updated, I compiled all the changes from the past and new posts in a nice list.
Here are a few additional changes we are making which will be applied in patch 4.0.3a:
Death Knight (Forums / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
Druid (Forums / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
Paladin (Forums / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
Warrior (Forums / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
- These changes are all slated for patch 4.0.3a when the shattering of Azeroth takes place, and are not currently implemented on live realms. Some of them may be active in the beta test – the Savage Defense change for example was applied via a hotfix to the beta realms recently.
Death Knight (Forums / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)- Icebound Fortitude -- Damage reduction changed from 30% to 20% (or 60% to 50% talented). Cooldown still 2 minutes. Duration still 12 seconds.
Druid (Forums / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)- Savage Defense is massively overpowered on beta and has been dealt with accordingly. Many of the reports of beta raid bosses two-shotting tanks were because that was how much damage the bosses needed to do in order to challenge Feral tanks. With less damage absorbed, the boss damage can be adjusted downwards. We've reduced the multiplier for attack power on the absorption effect (from 65% to 35%, still modified by mastery) and it no longer procs from periodic critical hits.
- Bear Form -- Stamina bonus lowered from 20% to 10% and Heart of the Wild health bonus from 10% to 6%. Bear health should be close to plate tank health with this change.
- Survival Instincts -- Damage reduction changed from 60% to 50%. Cooldown reduced from 5 minutes to 2 minutes. Duration still 12 seconds.
Paladin (Forums / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)- Holy Shield will be changed to increase block value by 10% (40% total) instead of increasing block chance by 15%. Since this will cause Mastery to become more valuable, the amount of block granted by Mastery will be reduced to 2.25% block chance per point of Mastery, down from 3%.
- Paladin tanks are not intended to go cap block as fast as they can. It’s fine if you want to do that, but we don’t treat it as “the new defense cap” and we don’t balance paladins assuming they have a 100% block chance. That is something the community identified as being not only possible, but likely, and one of the reasons we changed the way block works for paladins.
- Guardian of Ancient Kings -- Damage reduction changed from 60% to 50%. Cooldown still 2 minutes (talented). Duration still 12 seconds.
Warrior (Forums / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)- At level 85, the value of Shield Block decreases as block value generated by Mastery increases. To remedy this, we will convert overflow of block + avoidance that exceeds 100% into critical block chance instead. Along with that change, Shield Block will be reduced to +25% block chance (down from +100%), but this will still yield a net buff for most warriors. Also in response to this change, the amount of block and critical block provided by Mastery will be equalized. Finally, Mastery will now grant 1.5% block chance per point.
- The new warrior Mastery is 1.5% block and 1.5% critical block per point of mastery.
- Shield Block will spill over into critical block if any portion of the 25% would have been wasted because your block + dodge + parry is so high already. If you are somehow always over 100% (which will be pretty hard now), you only get the critical block when Shield Block is up. The intent is to make sure Shield Block isn't wasted, not to make sure you have mastery coming out your ears (or any other orifice in the facial region).
- Shield Block is not intended to be a magic damage cooldown (neither is Blood Shield, which also is physical damage only). We don’t want to duplicate the exact same ability on every tank when we can avoid it. Bosses generally don’t spam out a lot of magic damage on short cooldowns. On the other hand, Shield Block has a much higher up-time than Barkskin. We still believe the Cataclysm raiding environment is going to be a lot less centered around tanks dying to spike damage than players currently experience at level 80. Mitigating a lot of damage to save healer mana can be very valuable in Cataclysm.
- Vigilance -- No longer reduces damage by 3%, but will still reset Taunt cooldown and provide Vengeance for the warrior.
- Glyph of Shield Wall -- Now buffs damage reduction by 10% (to 60%), but only adds 1 minute of cooldown.
- Shield Wall -- Damage reduction changed from 40% to 50%. Cooldown still 2 minutes (talented). Duration still 12 seconds.
Blue Posts
Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
Raid Heroic Mode
You will have to complete the Normal mode of a raid dungeon once before you can switch to Heroic the next week. (Source)
Beta Raid Difficuly
Normal mode raids are currently too easy (with few exceptions). You'll likely be seeing substantial buffs across the board in the next beta patch. (Source)
Removal of the Zul'gurub instance in 4.0.3a
We feel Zul'Gurub will serve the updated old world much better as a new questing area (and potentially a space for future dungeons), rather than an irrelevant instance. We understand there are some cool flavor items there, but that alone just wasn't justification enough to keep the place walled off so a very tiny fraction of the playerbase can continue farming endlessly for these items. One day maybe these items will make their return when the timing and implementation feels right. (Source)
Is it possible to increase the droprate of ZG mounts before it's removed?
No. (Source)
Tanking
Dragons damage / Magic Tanking
If Deathwing is anything like our current dragons, he'll do 60% physical damage and 40% magical damage. Dragon breaths never take you down to 100% of your health, so if the tank dies during them, it's probably because she wasn't topped off before hand (from all the physical damage before hand).
We got rid of the magical tank niche early in LK development because it wasn't a strong enough niche and it wasn't fun for groups to have to swap MTs. All four tanks are tanking Lich King and all four tanks will be tanking Deathwing. (Source)
RNG Deaths in WotLK
I agree it worked that way in Lich King. Tanks were often at risk of dying within 2-3 boss hits, often faster than a heal could land. In that environment anything that can prolong your life at all is very valuable, and by extension anything not related to reliably prolonging your life (parry for instance) is not attractive.
This is also something we have set out to change. I understand that you personally don't believe we will change it, and since your vision of what the world will be like is at odds with our vision, it is unsurprising that the changes we make to bring about our vision might not make sense to you.
But if healer mana doesn't matter, our whole combat design collapses. Healers won't value cheap heals. Since mana won't constrain them, overhealing will be common, so they may start devaluing crit as well. DPS specs won't value talents that help them stay alive. And the only way to challenge raids will once again be to clobber tanks so hard that any missed heals will result in tank death. It doesn't have to be this way, and in fact it wasn't this way for much of the game. We were watching the new Nefarian fights and recalling the old Nefarian fights where, in the absence of a berserk timer, the fight could really last for a long time -- maybe 20 minutes or more -- if you had a lot of deaths. The tank wasn't in much danger of RNG dying, so as long as the healers didn't run out of mana, the raid could keep the fight going nearly indefinitely.
As we said above, in the beta raid tests, druids were easy to keep alive and the other tanks were dying in two hits. That wasn't the design we were going for, so we brought the druid down to the other tank levels and adjusted the damage accordingly. (Source)
Druid (Forums / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)Vengeance and Savage Defense
Vengeance isn't a problem with Savage Defense in our minds. In fact, it works out well because it lets Savage Defense roughly scale the same way blocking scales, rather than being overpowered for 5-player dungeons or underpowered in raids. When you're getting hit the hardest (hard enough to stack Vengeance a lot), you're also blocking a lot.
Savage Defense was just mitigating too much damage in raids though, which is why we have nerfed it. (Source)
Warrior (Forums / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)Shield Block
When those scary moments come, you use Shield Wall. Or Last Stand. Or both. They are often telegraphed far in advance, so you can also get Guardian Spirit and all the other healer cooldowns lined up as well. You don't need Shield Block to withstand those big magical hits, in the same way you didn't need it to survive Fusion Punch. That's not what it's for. It is for reducing damage taken over time so that healers expend less mana over the course of the fight and don't run out. Very few bosses hit for only magical damage, so in that sense Shield Block and block and armor for that matter are what allow your healers to make it through an encounter.
We could consider adding a Shield Block glyph in the future that removes the block but adds magic damage reduction instead, but overall I think you guys are way over-freaking out about this. (Source)
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