What's your opinion on active mitigation? Do you think it was the right direction?

[Grinning Serpent]

With Mists now in beta, it's easier than ever to check on the differences between classes in Cata and Mists and it's really quite apparent that Mists is where the modern versions of classes got started - especially tanks, as that's the expansion where active mitigation started.

What are your thoughts on the decision to change WoW in such a drastic fashion? Even up into Cata, a majority of your mitigation was passive (through mastery, dodge rating, and so on) with each class having a few short cooldowns (typically anywhere from 30 sec to 5 mins in length) to amp mitigation as needed. Class resources like mana, rage, etc were spent primarily on damage or other things. Mists changes this to where resources will primarily be invested into mitigation skills, with passive mitigation being quite a lot weaker - warriors, for example, will gain the two charges of Shield Block that they still have today in retail and will gain Shield Barrier (which is largely just Ignore Pain), while Shield Slam transitions to something similar to retail where it's free and *generates* rage rather than costing rage.

I guess if I had to draw a halfway point where the separation between "classic style" and "retail style" class design lands, it would be between Cata and Mists. I'm still very much excited for Mists Classic, but I'd forgotten just how massively classes changed between Cata and Mists (and of course the new talent system is also quite a change!)

Oddly, I'm wondering if I'll end up being able to enjoy retail gameplay more if I've spent a year raiding and playing on "retail lite" Mists Classic :P

[Biomega]

I think it depends on how you look at it.

There's a certain appeal in making mitigation mostly passive, and focusing on active abilities being related to damage/threat - it tends to make tanks easier to play, for one. It also can make things more fun for tank players, because it makes them feel like they can spend their time contributing to actual damage. The downside being, of course, that it also makes them feel like they can control their survival less, and that consequently they need to depend on the healer more.

That's the big appeal of active mitigation, really: it puts control into the hands of the tank, allowing them to leverage their skill for survival a lot more. While in turn the downside is that their damage either needs to be automatic or has to compete with usage of defensive abilities (mostly a combination of both) which makes them feel like they're doing less once their gear gets to a certain point. That's a chief complaint in Retail: as you progress through a tier, DPS tend to have increasing amounts of fun as their numbers scale, while tanks tend to have decreasing amounts of fun as they barely need to do anything to stay alive anymore compared to early progression when they're relatively undergeared (along with the healers).

Both have pros and cons, and it's not as easy as going "clearly <insert one> is the correct way to design tanks!" especially when accounting for variegated content - solo play has very different demands than group play, for example.

I'm personally in the camp of allowing tanks maximum control over their own survival, but that's a biased perspective coming from the kind of content I (used to) do in WoW. In terms of new-player appeal and making tank play more attractive, it's possible that passive mitigation is a better route and letting tanks mostly play as damage dealers could potentially make the role more attractive to more people - at the expense of enjoyment at the higher end. It's a really tricky one.

[Stickiler]

With Mists now in beta, it's easier than ever to check on the differences between classes in Cata and Mists and it's really quite apparent that Mists is where the modern versions of classes got started - especially tanks, as that's the expansion where active mitigation started.

What are your thoughts on the decision to change WoW in such a drastic fashion? Even up into Cata, a majority of your mitigation was passive (through mastery, dodge rating, and so on) with each class having a few short cooldowns (typically anywhere from 30 sec to 5 mins in length) to amp mitigation as needed. Class resources like mana, rage, etc were spent primarily on damage or other things. Mists changes this to where resources will primarily be invested into mitigation skills, with passive mitigation being quite a lot weaker - warriors, for example, will gain the two charges of Shield Block that they still have today in retail and will gain Shield Barrier (which is largely just Ignore Pain), while Shield Slam transitions to something similar to retail where it's free and *generates* rage rather than costing rage.

I guess if I had to draw a halfway point where the separation between "classic style" and "retail style" class design lands, it would be between Cata and Mists. I'm still very much excited for Mists Classic, but I'd forgotten just how massively classes changed between Cata and Mists (and of course the new talent system is also quite a change!)

Oddly, I'm wondering if I'll end up being able to enjoy retail gameplay more if I've spent a year raiding and playing on "retail lite" Mists Classic :P

Technically, Active Mitigation started when Blood DK tanking became a thing. They were the first active mitigation tank, and that was a big draw for me when picking my first alt after I'd only played the game as a Mage up until that point. The idea that your survivability was in your control, rather than to the whims of RNG or your healers was very attractive, and I think Active Mitigation was an important step to making tanking feel fun.

[WowIsDead64]

Blizzard had no other choice. Cuz threat concept failed back in Cata. When tanks had choice between DPS (i.e. threat) and surviveability - they were always picking surviveability anyway. So Blizzard had to remove threat mini-game and replace it by surviveability one.

[NerdAssassin]

What are your thoughts on the decision to change WoW in such a drastic fashion?

It was what kept the game alive. "Systems" in WoW were pretty outdated by the time we got to Cata and they had to modernize and keep the gameplay "fresh" and interesting in response to competition that started to pop up. Blizzard, to their credit, realized the key that got people hooked was the visceral feel of the combat, instead of some silly piece of lore/writing that people here always complain about (and Mists did pretty well on that front as well).

At the same time the old guard (Tigole, Kalgan, Pardo etc) took a step back to Titan so new people (Ghostcrawler, the EJ crew) got a chance to make improvements that should have been done years ago.

I'm glad they did this, don't think WoW would be a thing otherwise anymore.

[misternoxxnoxx]

Technically, Active Mitigation started when Blood DK tanking became a thing. They were the first active mitigation tank, and that was a big draw for me when picking my first alt after I'd only played the game as a Mage up until that point. The idea that your survivability was in your control, rather than to the whims of RNG or your healers was very attractive, and I think Active Mitigation was an important step to making tanking feel fun.

Was gonna say this too, haha! I've been a DK main since Cata so been using active, or I prefer to call it reactive, mitigation for yeeeeeears. It's why I also chose a BDK main, all the other tank classes are boring, I like how we have to pay attention and run a lil calculation in our head for the best time to Death Strike, plan ahead etc. :3 So yah active mitigation is definitely the way to go, it's way more fun and engaging! XD

[Biomega]

Cuz threat concept failed back in Cata.

Threat is an inherently broken concept the way it has been implemented in WoW. It was too much of a discriminator, where skilled DPS paired with a lesser skilled tank made DPS feel like idiots, while skilled tanks with lesser skilled DPS felt like they had nothing to do. The sweet spot where the tank had to work just enough not to lose threat but DPS could also just go all-out without pulling aggro was way too small and way too fast-moving with every power shift. Plus of course the idea of DPS sitting there doing nothing because of threat was SUPER feelsbad gameplay.

The game is better off with threat being a near non-issue. WAY better.

[WowIsDead64]

Threat is an inherently broken concept the way it has been implemented in WoW. It was too much of a discriminator, where skilled DPS paired with a lesser skilled tank made DPS feel like idiots, while skilled tanks with lesser skilled DPS felt like they had nothing to do. The sweet spot where the tank had to work just enough not to lose threat but DPS could also just go all-out without pulling aggro was way too small and way too fast-moving with every power shift. Plus of course the idea of DPS sitting there doing nothing because of threat was SUPER feelsbad gameplay.

The game is better off with threat being a near non-issue. WAY better.

Yeah. But everybody knows, that Cata suffered from many misconceptions and "meaningful threat" was just one of them. Next broken thing was vengeance or how it was called? Blizzard said, that it was for better gear->threat scaling. Obvious lie. You want threat to be scaled better from DPS? Why scale DPS then? If threat = K * DPS, then just increase K factor and that's it. You had tank shortage, wanted them to see big numbers in Recount, be good in PVP? Ok. But why lie then?

[Dezolacer]

With Mists now in beta, it's easier than ever to check on the differences between classes in Cata and Mists and it's really quite apparent that Mists is where the modern versions of classes got started - especially tanks, as that's the expansion where active mitigation started.

What are your thoughts on the decision to change WoW in such a drastic fashion? Even up into Cata, a majority of your mitigation was passive (through mastery, dodge rating, and so on) with each class having a few short cooldowns (typically anywhere from 30 sec to 5 mins in length) to amp mitigation as needed. Class resources like mana, rage, etc were spent primarily on damage or other things. Mists changes this to where resources will primarily be invested into mitigation skills, with passive mitigation being quite a lot weaker - warriors, for example, will gain the two charges of Shield Block that they still have today in retail and will gain Shield Barrier (which is largely just Ignore Pain), while Shield Slam transitions to something similar to retail where it's free and *generates* rage rather than costing rage.

I guess if I had to draw a halfway point where the separation between "classic style" and "retail style" class design lands, it would be between Cata and Mists. I'm still very much excited for Mists Classic, but I'd forgotten just how massively classes changed between Cata and Mists (and of course the new talent system is also quite a change!)

Oddly, I'm wondering if I'll end up being able to enjoy retail gameplay more if I've spent a year raiding and playing on "retail lite" Mists Classic :P

I don't know what retail style design lands are you talking about but with MoP they've added so much unnecessary gimmicks buttons to every class that they ended up removing straight up immediately with next expansion. If you call a bunch of toggles and gimmicky utilities a massive class change idk dude... it all was just all over the place and didn't felt like anything you can call a design to be honest with you.

Here on 1:50 we are getting report on "design" status by devs. I don't remember anyone kicking and screaming about that.


Here is active mitigation for you. Press buttons = neurons activated.

[Flame6]

It was a good one. Tanks #1 job is to survive. Putting more control of that to the player is a win. It allows skilled tanks to shine. Otherwise the only measurement of a tank is damage done, and if I wanted to DPS race, I'd play DPS.

[Caprias]

vanilla-wotlk style tanking was so fun where you had maybe one emergency button but otherwise are just praying your healer didn't lag and miss a gcd on harder hitting progression bosses.

Wtf are we even talking about, of course more player agency is best, who cares about the shitters.

[Grinning Serpent]

Technically, Active Mitigation started when Blood DK tanking became a thing. They were the first active mitigation tank, and that was a big draw for me when picking my first alt after I'd only played the game as a Mage up until that point. The idea that your survivability was in your control, rather than to the whims of RNG or your healers was very attractive, and I think Active Mitigation was an important step to making tanking feel fun.

Kind of? You could argue it goes back to vanilla where Shield Block made you briefly immune to crits and crushing blows largely regardless of your other stats. Blood DK in Wrath and Cata is definitely the most "active" of the tanks but keep in mind that most other tanks had a moderate mitigation buff on either a 15 or 30 sec cooldown, though in Bear's case it's a passive proc rather than an activated skill. I don't doubt that Death Strike is where they got the idea of active mit from, though.

I always wondered if they couldn't have kept some tanks passive while others are active, but I guess that'd create too many balancing headaches.

- - - Updated - - -

Yeah. But everybody knows, that Cata suffered from many misconceptions and "meaningful threat" was just one of them. Next broken thing was vengeance or how it was called? Blizzard said, that it was for better gear->threat scaling. Obvious lie. You want threat to be scaled better from DPS? Why scale DPS then? If threat = K * DPS, then just increase K factor and that's it. You had tank shortage, wanted them to see big numbers in Recount, be good in PVP? Ok. But why lie then?

I don't remember pre-launch Cata very well but Cata was the expansion that largely removed threat as a concern wasn't it? As long as the tank is attacking something, it's not going to change targets.

I'm not sure what your complaint about Vengeance is. It was hilariously OP in PvP and I miss it (Vengeance + Tenacity in Wintergrasp will forever live rent free in my mind) but I wasn't aware people disliked it in PvE. Without Vengeance you would still have trouble holding threat vs a well geared DPS - you can test this right now in Cata Classic if you go into heroics with a baby min ilvl tank and pair them with LFR+ (i390+) geared DPS. The tank can still reliably hold a single target but anything not getting constantly cleaved *will* get pulled when the 40+ ilvl advantage DPS start AOEing.

It was an attempt to bridge that DPS gap, also because tank gear has all of its substats dedicated to defense (because becoming "unhittable" was a core element of tanking and you need a ton of dodge/parry/mastery to achieve that) and also generally has lower Str/Agi than DPS gear does.

- - - Updated - - -

I don't know what retail style design lands are you talking about but with MoP they've added so much unnecessary gimmicks buttons to every class that they ended up removing straight up immediately with next expansion. If you call a bunch of toggles and gimmicky utilities a massive class change idk dude... it all was just all over the place and didn't felt like anything you can call a design to be honest with you.

Yeah looking at ability lists, there's some that are going to feel awkward to use. Warrior Banners, for example, are a cool idea but it probably should've just been a single banner whose effect varies based on your spec (Arms: crit dmg, Fury: haste, Prot: party mitigation) instead of three separate abilities that IIRC share a cooldown anyway.

[wowuser12]

With Mists now in beta, it's easier than ever to check on the differences between classes in Cata and Mists and it's really quite apparent that Mists is where the modern versions of classes got started - especially tanks, as that's the expansion where active mitigation started.

What are your thoughts on the decision to change WoW in such a drastic fashion? Even up into Cata, a majority of your mitigation was passive (through mastery, dodge rating, and so on) with each class having a few short cooldowns (typically anywhere from 30 sec to 5 mins in length) to amp mitigation as needed. Class resources like mana, rage, etc were spent primarily on damage or other things. Mists changes this to where resources will primarily be invested into mitigation skills, with passive mitigation being quite a lot weaker - warriors, for example, will gain the two charges of Shield Block that they still have today in retail and will gain Shield Barrier (which is largely just Ignore Pain), while Shield Slam transitions to something similar to retail where it's free and *generates* rage rather than costing rage.

I guess if I had to draw a halfway point where the separation between "classic style" and "retail style" class design lands, it would be between Cata and Mists. I'm still very much excited for Mists Classic, but I'd forgotten just how massively classes changed between Cata and Mists (and of course the new talent system is also quite a change!)

Oddly, I'm wondering if I'll end up being able to enjoy retail gameplay more if I've spent a year raiding and playing on "retail lite" Mists Classic :P

I think it's dumb as fuck, to be honest.
5 or 6 second buffs with 12 second CDs that have 2 charges or talents to reduce their CD when you take X amount of damage is just dumb as hell.

[Ielenia]

What are your thoughts on the decision to change WoW in such a drastic fashion? Even up into Cata, a majority of your mitigation was passive (through mastery, dodge rating, and so on) with each class having a few short cooldowns (typically anywhere from 30 sec to 5 mins in length) to amp mitigation as needed. Class resources like mana, rage, etc were spent primarily on damage or other things.

It is a good thing that tanks now have to worry about spending resources for active mitigation. You're a tank, your role is to be the face the mobs slap to keep them from slapping your party member's face. You take the damage so that they don't. So to have most (if not all) your mitigation be in the form of passives feels like the game is doing your work for you and you're just basically another DPS class with less overall damage output.

Giving active mitigation abilities to the tanks and having them worry about their own survivability gives them a different gameplay experience than you would have as a DPS or healer. Which is a good thing.

[Tziva]

Players need to have stuff to do to find gameplay interesting, and they need to feel like they have agency over their character's performance in some level. For tanks, finer control over their survivability is a vastly superior choice than threat IMO. I find the concept of threat management to be frustrating and unfun, both from the tank's perspective but also from the DPS side of things. Survivability through activate mitigation is the best place to put it back to me.

That doesn't mean that every ability tried for active mitigation is fun or well done and that there aren't occasional missteps in the details, but I think the concept as a whole is solid.

[Grinning Serpent]

Players need to have stuff to do to find gameplay interesting, and they need to feel like they have agency over their character's performance in some level. For tanks, finer control over their survivability is a vastly superior choice than threat IMO. I find the concept of threat management to be frustrating and unfun, both from the tank's perspective but also from the DPS side of things. Survivability through activate mitigation is the best place to put it back to me.

That doesn't mean that every ability tried for active mitigation is fun or well done and that there aren't occasional missteps in the details, but I think the concept as a whole is solid.

Yeah. When you consider threat vs active mit as a solution for player agency, it's really clear that active mit is the way forward. I'm sure that was part of their brainstorming.

[WowIsDead64]

I don't remember pre-launch Cata very well but Cata was the expansion that largely removed threat as a concern wasn't it? As long as the tank is attacking something, it's not going to change targets.

I'm not sure what your complaint about Vengeance is. It was hilariously OP in PvP and I miss it (Vengeance + Tenacity in Wintergrasp will forever live rent free in my mind) but I wasn't aware people disliked it in PvE. Without Vengeance you would still have trouble holding threat vs a well geared DPS - you can test this right now in Cata Classic if you go into heroics with a baby min ilvl tank and pair them with LFR+ (i390+) geared DPS. The tank can still reliably hold a single target but anything not getting constantly cleaved *will* get pulled when the 40+ ilvl advantage DPS start AOEing.

It was an attempt to bridge that DPS gap, also because tank gear has all of its substats dedicated to defense (because becoming "unhittable" was a core element of tanking and you need a ton of dodge/parry/mastery to achieve that) and also generally has lower Str/Agi than DPS gear does.

Again. It was WotLK, where players stopped caring about threat. Cata tried to mimic Vanilla and therefore we had "meaningful threat" concept on release. It was fixed in later patches. In 4.1, I guess. One of few problems, Blizzard admitted and fixed in time.

Again. If threat scales from DPS - you don't need to scale DPS to scale threat. You can scale threat directly. It was made-up problem. Tank's DPS > DD's DPS - is thing, that breaks "role specialization" concept. Same as healer DPS. There is only one reason to implement it. Because you have tank/healer shortage and you want "borderline" DPS players to switch to playing tank/healer, cuz, well, they can also DPS, but their queue times aren't so long.

[Nymrohd]

The problem is it fairly simple to almost always have it up. Does any tank these days not have active mitigation up 90%+ of the time? Oh there have been times that some specs struggled with AM uptime (like Tankadins) and invariably when that happened they were dead last in survivability. So they design choice was to steadily move to it being rotational, not an active choice.

[fazaim]

I feel like MoP was the last version of original classes, not the beginning of the modern design. In WoD we had the big ability pruning then in Legion several specs got identity revamp or emphasis, and new core rotations.

[WowIsDead64]

I feel like MoP was the last version of original classes, not the beginning of the modern design. In WoD we had the big ability pruning then in Legion several specs got identity revamp or emphasis, and new core rotations.

What do you call original? Each xpack since WotLK changed so many things, that nothing could be called original. I don't remember everything. Only the most iconic changes. Like Paladin revamp in WotLK. Cutting talents and things like Druid Tree form in Cata. Int nerf in MOP, that made healing boring. And I don't even talk about D3 talents.