Why have Prot palas not been nerfed?

[Nairobi]

This thread is more or less the largest assemblage of people who don't understand how to interpret parses in the history of the internet, saying the same tired superficial garbage over and over, seemingly completely unaffected by any of the 20+ pages of previous discussion. This thread is a Groundhog Day from hell for anyone with any understanding of damage input / mitigation mechanics across the classes.

I was really expecting you to follow up with "what you've just said ... is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this [thread] is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul..."

Still, 100% agree. I regularly beat healers on Skada on my DK as well, factoring in Blood Shield and DS heals/absorbs.

[underdogba]

I was really expecting you to follow up with "what you've just said ... is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this [thread] is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul..."

Still, 100% agree. I regularly beat healers on Skada on my DK as well, factoring in Blood Shield and DS heals/absorbs.

You're so right, I missed a great Billy Madison opportunity!

[Deleted]

Other tanks have comparable amounts of mitigation that are not counted as "healing" on meters.

To my understanding prot paladins active mitigation is Shield of the Righteous, their mastery further increases that.

Still, 100% agree. I regularly beat healers on Skada on my DK as well, factoring in Blood Shield and DS heals/absorbs.

If you're sitting at 40-50k hps that's 100% selfheal and that's all part of your *core* active mitigation mechanic. Sacred shield on the other hand is an optional talent (=avaible for all speccs) that simply scales to well with both haste and attackpower to pass up.

[Butler to Baby Sloths]

To my understanding prot paladins active mitigation is Shield of the Righteous, their mastery further increases that.


If you're sitting at 40-50k hps that's 100% selfheal and that's all part of your *core* active mitigation mechanic. Sacred shield on the other hand is an optional talent (=avaible for all speccs) that simply scales to well with both haste and attackpower to pass up.

What makes it better than ES or whatever the other talent is, is that Sacred Shield generates absorb shields. It is way better to absorb damage (i.e. prevent it happening) than to try to heal it up afterwards. Technically, ES would out-heal SS if you just compared numbers and nothing else. But SS prevents damage from happening in the first place. It is why people love Disc priests.

[crazymack]

The cap on vengeance should be low enough where they compete with dps, not out perform them. If a tank out gears a dps by 10-20 points then I have no problem with a tank doing more dps.

[Nairobi]

The cap on vengeance should be low enough where they compete with dps, not out perform them. If a tank out gears a dps by 10-20 points then I have no problem with a tank doing more dps.

I'd get on this bandwagon, as it's gonna get stupid next tier. Cap Veng at 1/3-1/2 max HP, there's really NO benefit to letting it go higher, and lots of pro's to keeping it in the realm of reality.

Should solve a lot of QQ as well, for those classes who scale better with AP than others.

[Lethora]

The cap on vengeance should be low enough where they compete with dps, not out perform them. If a tank out gears a dps by 10-20 points then I have no problem with a tank doing more dps.

Why is that the problem? You are not competing with the tank, but with the other dps.
Also, it's not like you can stack the raid with tanks and all of them will do amazing dps.
People's mentality is still stuck back in TBC/vanilla days when tanks did laughable damage.

[nightfalls]

Why is that the problem? You are not competing with the tank, but with the other dps.

At least when it comes to the boss, you're not "competing" with anyone. But there's several reasons why it's bad - 1) you basically play a glass cannon toon as a DPS that can't take a hit worth of shit (as in a single hit kills you). Now you also even do less damage than a tank, what's that make you feel? 2) think of relative usefulness to your raid group - the tank even when he is doing laughable DPS is seen as a really important member of the raid because after all, dead/no tank = dead raid. Him doing more DPS than the DPS just makes his importance way, way too high.

I'm not disputing that given two players, of course I would prefer the tank who did more DPS over the tank who did not. But we're talking balance here, not "stop crying since the boss dies faster."

People's mentality is still stuck back in TBC/vanilla days when tanks did laughable damage.

I think there is a huge difference between "TBC days doing laughable damage" and tanks doing double the DPS of any DPS in the raid.

I don't get why people keep fucking thinking that pointing out the latter is ridiculous and stupid somehow equates to wanting things back in TBC days.

[Pua]

At least when it comes to the boss, you're not "competing" with anyone. But there's several reasons why it's bad - 1) you basically play a glass cannon toon as a DPS that can't take a hit worth of shit (as in a single hit kills you). Now you also even do less damage than a tank, what's that make you feel? 2) think of relative usefulness to your raid group - the tank even when he is doing laughable DPS is seen as a really important member of the raid because after all, dead/no tank = dead raid. Him doing more DPS than the DPS just makes his importance way, way too high.

I'm not disputing that given two players, of course I would prefer the tank who did more DPS over the tank who did not. But we're talking balance here, not "stop crying since the boss dies faster."

An interesting tidbit to throw in the bag here is the argument behind the nerf to the Death from above glyph. Essentially, Ghostcrawler stated that the extra damage to Heroic Leap was gratuitous and that the glyph was still good. He was right, it was a perfectly legitimate nerf.

But why isn't this appropriate to Vengeance?

Tank DPS is, essentially, gratuitous. If tanks did zero damage and only dealt in TPS, you'd still need them. I'd also argue that active mitigation has had the desired impact of making tanks care about hit and expertise again (as well as other DPS secondaries in some cases), so we can cross that off the list. In 4.2.2, assuming I recall correctly, Defensive Stance/Blood Presence/Righteous Fury/Bear Form all got their threat modifiers buffed to the heavens, so TPS is no longer an issue.

So what's Vengeance for? That's my question. What does it do? What's its point?

It doesn't have one. It just inflates tank DPS. We could argue that Vengeance is tacked onto our toolkit (such as Shield Barrier), but there are better ways of doing that which don't include all of the problems Vengeance brings with it.

I've still yet to hear a single valid argument for Vengeance being in the game, either from the developers or the community. If anyone wants to take a stab at it, feel free.

I think there is a huge difference between "TBC days doing laughable damage" and tanks doing double the DPS of any DPS in the raid.

I don't get why people keep fucking thinking that pointing out the latter is ridiculous and stupid somehow equates to wanting things back in TBC days.

This is the Internet. People deal in extremes.

[Lethora]

So what's Vengeance for? That's my question. What does it do? What's its point?

To separate PVP and PVE. A lot of tank abilities (including self-heals) scale with AP.
Without vengeance, Blizz would have to make base damage/healing for tanks high enough to avoid making their dps (and self-heal) meaningless. And that would cause problems in PVP. I hope you all remember the OP state of Blood DKs before vengeance was removed from PVP.
Also, dealing damage as tank is fun. Did you play tank before vengeance was introduced? It was not even nearly half as fun as it is now.
Anyway, I like the way it works and can't really understand your problem. Raids are balanced with tank dps in mind. Also, you can separate good tanks from baddies more easily now, since good ones manage to stay alive and dish out good damage while baddies can just focus on staying alive. It's not like you get rewarded with extreme dps just for doing your usual rotation.

[Libertarian]

To separate PVP and PVE. A lot of tank abilities (including self-heals) scale with AP.
Without vengeance, Blizz would have to make base damage/healing for tanks high enough to avoid making their dps (and self-heal) meaningless. And that would cause problems in PVP. I hope you all remember the OP state of Blood DKs before vengeance was removed from PVP.
Also, dealing damage as tank is fun. Did you play tank before vengeance was introduced? It was not even nearly half as fun as it is now.
Anyway, I like the way it works and can't really understand your problem. Raids are balanced with tank dps in mind. Also, you can separate good tanks from baddies more easily now, since good ones manage to stay alive and dish out good damage while baddies can just focus on staying alive. It's not like you get rewarded with extreme dps just for doing your usual rotation.

I would argue that monk tank needs to be toned down in terms of dps. Currently 13/13H and monk tank just makes lei shen and ra-den so much easier. But otherwise YES, tank dps is fun. And it only works if you're actively tanking / taking damage. It's not like groups can bring 5 tanks.

[Pua]

To separate PVP and PVE. A lot of tank abilities (including self-heals) scale with AP.

They don't need to scale it the same way. With a tweak or two, Armoured to the Teeth/Bladed Armour would have been a far more consistent way of upping tank DPS throughout an expansion, while self-heals or active mitigation could scale from something else; probably mastery.

Without vengeance, Blizz would have to make base damage/healing for tanks high enough to avoid making their dps (and self-heal) meaningless. And that would cause problems in PVP. I hope you all remember the OP state of Blood DKs before vengeance was removed from PVP.

There's far more room than you're implying before something becomes "meaningless".

Also, dealing damage as tank is fun. Did you play tank before vengeance was introduced? It was not even nearly half as fun as it is now.

Purely subjective. The most fun I ever had when tanking was as a Protection warrior during WotLK; where I also did meaningful damage, I might add.

Anyway, I like the way it works and can't really understand your problem. Raids are balanced with tank dps in mind. Also, you can separate good tanks from baddies more easily now, since good ones manage to stay alive and dish out good damage while baddies can just focus on staying alive. It's not like you get rewarded with extreme dps just for doing your usual rotation.

This is part of the problem with Vengeance. The erudite will literally have just heard the trap snap shut over your head.

You cannot say that a tank is a "good" tank because he does lots of DPS.

How much damage does he take? How much do his healers have to spam him? Is he positioning the boss correctly, interrupting what he can, taking control of the situation, using major cooldowns proactively, keeping up necessary debuffs, reacting to emergencies and using his resources for mitigation? You don't know. You don't care. You see his DPS is high and you think he knows what he's doing.

THAT is what Vengeance is doing to the game and its players. THAT is why top guilds aren't recruiting tanks any more. THAT is why the art and science of tanking is falling by the wayside and new players aren't picking it up.

You think doing DPS is fun? Roll a DPS class. I think controlling an encounter, taking responsibility for the safety of my raid and mitigating as much damage as possible is fun.

That's why I'm a tank; anything else is just a deepser with a shield.

And on top of that, you've still not come up with an objective reason for Vengeance to be in the game. If you remember, PvE and PvP were just fine prior to it arriving in Cataclysm; it could be argued PvP was better.

[Deleted]

Why is that the problem? You are not competing with the tank, but with the other dps.
Also, it's not like you can stack the raid with tanks and all of them will do amazing dps.
People's mentality is still stuck back in TBC/vanilla days when tanks did laughable damage.

Now that you mention... it could be possible to stack extra tanks on some fights, and use /sit macro + taunts to rotate boss agro around keeping high vengeance on all those extra tanks, and making everyone of those tanks top dps in raid also. Bonus points when those extra tanks use pure dps gear etc. Do bosses still have diminishing returns on taunts? And how fast it comes problem when chain taunting?

[Lethora]

You think doing DPS is fun? Roll a DPS class. I think controlling an encounter, taking responsibility for the safety of my raid and mitigating as much damage as possible is fun.

I played rogue for 3 years, and I have warlock alt aswell. Got bored since DPS rarely have high responsibilities in a game, and decided to roll a tank. Never looked back since then.
I didn't mention the things you listed just for one reason: if a person can't do that, he can't be called a tank at all. He's just a punchbag for bosses (just like my bear co-"tank" in a guild who does those things rather terribly).
I just enjoy trying to dish extra dps while continuing to do all my normal tanking stuff.

---------- Post added 2013-05-15 at 02:26 PM ----------

Now that you mention... it could be possible to stack extra tanks on some fights, and use /sit macro + taunts to rotate boss agro around keeping high vengeance on all those extra tanks, and making everyone of those tanks top dps in raid also. Bonus points when those extra tanks use pure dps gear etc. Do bosses still have diminishing returns on taunts? And how fast it comes problem when chain taunting?

I'm pretty sure if that was a viable strategy, top guilds would use that. Since they don't, you can be sure that it yields far worse results than bringing normal dps to the raids.

[Nairobi]

Now that you mention... it could be possible to stack extra tanks on some fights, and use /sit macro + taunts to rotate boss agro around keeping high vengeance on all those extra tanks, and making everyone of those tanks top dps in raid also. Bonus points when those extra tanks use pure dps gear etc. Do bosses still have diminishing returns on taunts? And how fast it comes problem when chain taunting?

Aside from the fact that you'd spend more time ping-ponging the boss around than actually doing the fight:
1) Vengeance is calculated based on dmg BEFORE mitigation. Aside from NOT applying the WB debuff, there is no way to inflate the boss dmg for extra veng. Artificially inducing a crit (I believe) adheres to this as well.
2) Taunts give 50% veng on successful cast, so you'd have to let the taunter stack up more veng from getting hit multiple times to be back where you were with the original tank.
3) Veng lasts only 20 sec, so while waiting for issue #2, the first tank only has a few seconds of veng left (and it is decaying)
4) Based on #3, you can surmise that trying to introduce 1-3 MORE tanks will only further degrade any value of ping-ponging the boss aroung to try and exploit keeping high veng on them all. Even if you chain-taunted, you'd see the 50% rule degrade vengeance to trivial levels after 2 swaps.

Back on topic: @ Zellverin - You make it sound like tanks cannot do all of the normal "position, interrupt, debuff, survive" roles while simultaneously performing their damaging abilities. It's not one or the other, you can (and should) do both. Blizz knows it's possible, and as pointed out, balances heroic encounters around the assumption that it is the norm. Most anyone worth their salt at tanking can do the "put boss in right place, don't put self in wrong place" activities. They then only have to worry about not dying themselves. After that is attainable/achieved (which is even earlier this tier than normal, since Blizz decided to make this more about mechanic mastery than overall brute force of boss power), all that you have left to "improve" is damage throughput.

Not everyone has played since launch, or played a tank for a long time, or raided seriously a long time. I get that. But I have, and so have a lot of other folks doing heroic clears/progression now. Positioning, cooldowns, interrupts, etc are all second nature by now. Literally. The introduction of meaningful damage and the advent of active mitigation saved the tank population (for the experienced tanks, anyway) from extinction as ANYONE who has been tanking since Vanilla or BC will tell you that the meat shield, dodge/parry stat bank method of tanking was neither fun nor engaging. There was no skill cap, there was no reward for playing well, and you were still subject to the RNG gods of avoidance.

Vengeance gives this. If you can't see why it's needed in order to keep scaling appropriate in both PVE and PVP, then you don't even deserve an answer to the question. It's obvious; every tank's self heal/absorb mechanics HAVE to be based on AP scaling to prevent glaring imbalances in PVP making them immortal (or, on the other extreme, making them so frail in PVE that boss damage is laughably low). Sure you can draft up wild theories of making new scalars from mastery or crit or spirit to "fix" something that isn't inherently broken, but you have to know that it sounds ridiculous.

Vengeance should be toned down, to cap at about 25-40% of what it does now (so, 25-40% of max HP, or ~200-300k AP). This keeps absorb/heal values in the realm of sanity, keeps tank damage meaningful without being all consuming, and still allows for a modicum of skill required to min-max raid effectiveness as a tank.

Paladins are strong now. Monks are too. Warriors are amazing offtanks, who need some damage tuning. Ferals are in the same boat as warriors, with less of a damage issue. DK's need raid utility and better/any veng scaling on their AM.

[Pua]

I didn't mention the things you listed just for one reason: if a person can't do that, he can't be called a tank at all.

Except that the game is telling them they can, and Vengeance is the prime culprit. There are some horribly bad tanks in LFR and LFD but, because they're getting the job done, they're assuming what they're doing is fine. If it was abundantly clear that tanks are not in a raid to do DPS, they might start thinking about their more legitimate (traditional?) role.

I just enjoy trying to dish extra dps while continuing to do all my normal tanking stuff.

So do I, and I did so long before the advent of Vengeance. The problem is that a lot of tanks in half-decent guilds are now foregoing their defensive role so that they can pump out more DPS.

I'm not necessarily disagreeing with your view here, or what you're saying, I think it's fair enough - I'm ranked multiple times without trying to pad in any way shape or form. What I am saying, however, is that you've still not managed to come up with an objective reason for Vengeance to be in the game, and it's having some pretty nasty side effects.

That said... This is now going widely off topic. I'm more than happy to discuss this further via PM if you like.

[Simulacrum]

I've still yet to hear a single valid argument for Vengeance being in the game, either from the developers or the community. If anyone wants to take a stab at it, feel free.

It increases the depth of the tanking classes, by making you care about more than just your active mitigation now that threat is a non-issue.

Lets tanks do damage without making it make sense to bring actual tank specs to dps instead of tanking.

It separates tank damage in pve from tank damage in pvp.

It's fun.

Just off the top of my head. Personally I'm not a big fan of vengeance, but it beats having no vengeance, and it doesn't look like they've been able to think up any good ways of making tanking not boring without overpowering them in some other way outside of the context of actively tanking. You either need to let tanks do damage, or make threat matter again - and if you ask me, making threat matter again is worse for the dps than making tanks sometimes do more damage than them. At least now, all you get if you have an ass tank is a tank that does ass damage. If threat matters, then what you get when you have an ass tank is the entire raid's damage drops.

Or you make neither matter, which means that to make being a tank not insanely boring (because honestly it's pretty boring right now even), you need it to be even more possible for the tanks to die because they failed at mitigating damage properly than it is now, which sounds to me like it would be much worse for the raid than seeing the tank do a lot of damage is. It also makes tanking insanely boring since there's no progression to the preformance.

Tank damage taken isn't really a big part of the total raid's damage taken these days, and the tank's job is mostly about maknig sure he doesn't die so fast that the healers are unable to respond to keep them alive. As long as you can do that, you'll survive, and that's the end of your progression as a tank. It basically stops there, since any further improvement won't really be detectable. Boring. At least now, when you know you can survive, you can start prioritizing doing more damage rather than pointlessly mitigating unthreatening, trivial damage that nobody cares that you're able to mitigate.

[Nairobi]

Except that the game is telling them they can, and Vengeance is the prime culprit. There are some horribly bad tanks in LFR and LFD but, because they're getting the job done, they're assuming what they're doing is fine. If it was abundantly clear that tanks are not in a raid to do DPS, they might start thinking about their more legitimate (traditional?) role.

But then they'd just go back to being little Timmy the mage who's doing 10k DPS @90, and getting carried there. Don't get me wrong, I HATE bad tanks (and avoid LFR at all costs, since even when I tank on my alts, a bad co-/off-tank can ruin a run) and would love to see less of them, but less tanks means less/longer queues, means more frustrated players. Blizz has kinda painted themselves into a corner with our current system of "queue up for a MMO experience!" moving away from a community. In BC, tanks on the server were well known (and oft bothered/sequestered to tank heroics for Hand of Adal etc) because they were a commodity (the good ones, anyway). Obviously, that model has its own set of problems and limitations, and perhaps I'm just longing for the glory days, but I don't see how reducing the number of tanks will help the current system, even if I would agree with you.

So do I, and I did so long before the advent of Vengeance. The problem is that a lot of tanks in half-decent guilds are now foregoing their defensive role so that they can pump out more DPS.

Ehhh, I feel like this is largely semantic; it's not like those tanks are keeling over dead or teetering on a razor's edge. Most of them have just seen that the mechanics this tier are VERY survivable if you have half of a brain and a boss mod, and quickly discover/learn/read how to use/abuse them to get more vengeance, since the abilities themselves hold no real threat to survival. If tank deaths were more common, prominent or imminent, I highly doubt we'd see so much of the "stand in fire for damage" model we have now. Tank damage may be just as high, though, due to higher incoming damage = more AP. (hence my suggestion to lower the veng cap!)

I'm not necessarily disagreeing with your view here, or what you're saying, I think it's fair enough - I'm ranked multiple times without trying to pad in any way shape or form. What I am saying, however, is that you've still not managed to come up with an objective reason for Vengeance to be in the game, and it's having some pretty nasty side effects.

That said... This is now going widely off topic. I'm more than happy to discuss this further via PM if you like.

Same, I usually parse in the top 50 and rarely ever flask/food buff/glyph for damage, or go out of my way to abuse stacks higher than "intended", but I feel that the burden of proof for "removing vengeance" is on those of you who are requesting its removal, not those of us who are happy with it's implementation. That's how it works in the legal world anyway. But, on that note, I think that just a downscaling rather than a removal of the system, would be far better for the long-term of the game.

And yes, but this thread has been off-topic since jump street, with most people in here throwing around more misinformation than a creationist meeting.

Insightful post

Plus, every. single. thing. this guy said.

[Deleted]

Aside from the fact that you'd spend more time ping-ponging the boss around than actually doing the fight:
1) Vengeance is calculated based on dmg BEFORE mitigation. Aside from NOT applying the WB debuff, there is no way to inflate the boss dmg for extra veng. Artificially inducing a crit (I believe) adheres to this as well.
2) Taunts give 50% veng on successful cast, so you'd have to let the taunter stack up more veng from getting hit multiple times to be back where you were with the original tank.
3) Veng lasts only 20 sec, so while waiting for issue #2, the first tank only has a few seconds of veng left (and it is decaying)
4) Based on #3, you can surmise that trying to introduce 1-3 MORE tanks will only further degrade any value of ping-ponging the boss aroung to try and exploit keeping high veng on them all. Even if you chain-taunted, you'd see the 50% rule degrade vengeance to trivial levels after 2 swaps.

One crit gives you double the vengeance of a normal swing. Taunt and sit gives you instantly the vengeance you would get of 15, 20 secs of the boss pounding at you (one more reason to support vengeance, a nice and fun mechanic that you can cheat to separate tanks and... those tanks)

The reason it doesn't work is because any raid damage will refresh the vengeance to a much lower level, so any boss with aoe damage is out of the question to do this. Also, melee damage alone doesn't give the vengeance required to outdps the dps. Then, there are tanks that get a good chunk of dps for being pounded on, regardless of having vengeance, that won't do the same not having the boss on them (then again, we all know what tanks you would stack for this, don't you all?).

It they ever put a one-million-hits before mitigation patchwerk, feel free to go with 10 tanks, though.

[Nairobi]

One crit gives you double the vengeance of a normal swing.

Hmmm, TIL. I thought they would have seen the abuse potential of this when coding, buuut I oft forget who we're dealing with.

It they ever put a one-million-hits before mitigation patchwerk, feel free to go with 10 tanks, though.

It'd be like Naxx40 4Horsemen, round 2!