Pre-80 dungeons tuning
As a reminder, we try to tune our pre-80 dungeons to be accomplished by players who are mostly in green gear from quests and with talent specs optimized for leveling. If initial reports were that it was a challenge or a really lengthy to those of you who are level 80, I'd think the tuning was actually pretty far off from our intended target. (
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Mana mechanics in Wrath of the Lich King
We haven't done much work on mana generation or sustainability in part because we were working on the massive buff changes and the mana battery mechanics in general. While managing your mana is something we want you to have to consider (else why have mana at all?), ideally we don't want to balance a class around "well this guy can do a lot but runs out of mana really fast." That's not a fun mechanic. (
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Beta Servers - Caverns of Time : Stratholme bugged and disabled
Ok, Caverns of Time in Tanaris is getting No Man's Land by tomorrow morning. (
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Beta Servers - Azjol-Nerub bugged and disabled
Level 77s will be able to go in without problem, the issue here is that I have temporarily disabled the zone. There was a bug with the first boss that was causing problems completing the dungeon. (
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Beta servers login issues
Of course, I see this theory posted a lot. I've got to say though, it's not the case. There have been clear issues with the log in process especially, and they have been investigated and are seemingly for the moment resolved. I say for the moment because there has been repeated log in issues throughout the beta and alpha, and if I was a betting man I wouldn't say there'd be no more to come. If and when they do, we'll investigate them, and I can only again repeat a request for people to remain patient and... polite. (
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Druid (
Skills List / Talent Calc. (8885))
Mother Bear
Mother Bear is there almost solely to give Ferals a choice to emphasize tanking over dps. It is hard to meet the goal of letting them do competitve end-game tanking or competitive end-game dps if they can do both with the exact same talent allocation. (
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Cat DPS versus Rogue / Balance Spec
If in fact cat dps is far below rogue dps, that is not the intention and it will be fixed.
I was one of those people who just couldn't stand playing Balance in BC. I'll admit that. But I actually do think it's fun now. Features like Eclipse change up my spells a bit, and historical groaners like Hurricane are buttons I look forward to using now. (
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Scaling in Feral, DPS / Tanking feral builds
You can see now I hope how we are trying to allow some choices between a +dps Feral build and a +tanking Feral build. Effective scaling (also for many classes and specs beyond druids) is absolutely something on our minds and I will admit an area that has suffered in the past.
We're getting the talents and abilities in place. The numbers will follow. It is not our intent that bears have poor mitigation compared to other tanks. (
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Bear Tank amount of armor
If warriors end up with more armor, it won't be by a huge margin. We still want bears to be able to tank Naxx and Ulduar, and we want as many talents and abilities as possible to scale with end-game gear. (
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Feral DPS on Live Servers
Cat DPS is terrible on live. Now I know there are some cats at the tops of their damage meters. It happens. But I also know a lot of players who got the best gear they could, learned their class inside and out, and then cried when they saw how far they were below other melee dps.
If you like the hybrid nature of the Feral and enjoyed switching from tank to dps at a moment's notice, we haven't really done much to take that away from you. And even if you try to max out your cat potential, you're still probably going to be a pretty effective tank in many situations. (
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Cat spec tanking and Feral flexibility
That sound about right. A cat spec'd Feral made an amazing OT for Karazhan and even Zul'Aman and for the larger pulls in the 25-player content. You were certainly better OTs than DPS warriors or ret paladins in BC. I suspect you will still be a little better than a dps warrior just because the difference between your +dps and +tanking specs is fewer talent points than the difference between a Fury and Prot warrior. But all talents are not created equal and you can't necessarily identify the best tank by the number of talent points they've spent.
Sorry my yes isn't more solid. It's hard to get into the realm of "You can be a 5% less effective tank if you spend 10% fewer talent points but maintain 15% superior dps" or whatever. Part of the Feral design is flexibility. We don't want to lose that. (
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Warrior (
Skills List / Talent Calc. (8885))
Philosophy behind tanking and Overpower
The problem with the old philosophy of tank A is better at boss A and tank B is better at boss B is that if your group has A but not B then you either hit your head against a wall or end up swapping people out fight to fight. To some extent certain classes will probably remain better at certain fights, just because we're still trying to have different class mechanics. Probably the cleanest way to say it is if you have a druid MT (with a good build, gear and skill) you should be able to tank every boss in the game. You shouldn't feel like you have to recruit a paladin MT for certain fights.
The fifty-one pointers (for any tree) are tough to design because we want them to be compelling or even exciting while still leaving open the possibility that you go halfway down two trees or something. We don't want the last talent to be the best one in the tree and everything else just filler to get there. Shockwave is particularly tricky because we don't want it to be the only way warriors can AE tank. It also gets a little more complicated than that because we don't want to make trees too similar to each other -- oh tier 4, that's the mitigation talent, and then here in tier 5, that's the uber PvP talent.
Briefly, what we're trying to do with Arms is get Overpower into PvE and make getting enraged something that feels like an actual system -- something you work towards. (
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Protection Tree in Build 8885
While we like to poke fun at the term "bloated" if there was ever a tree that was truly bloated, it was Prot warrior IMO. I say that because so many of the talents were so mandatory that variation in builds came down to decisions like whether that 6% spell damage reduction was really, really worth it, or who was going to get Imp Demo Shout if the dps warrior didn't have it. (To be fair, other talent trees do have this problem.)
Sooo many of the talents just improved mitigation. Useful? Sure. Fun? Not really. In an ideal world, there would be very few "mandatory" talents period (though I am sure Cruelty will always have its special throne). Instead talents could be more about customization.
Is charging in combat necessary to handle Patchwerk. No. But what if you could take it without having to give up Shield Mastery or Imp Shield Bash? What if the choices were X vs. Y not X vs. survival?
I know it's natural to compare yourself to other tanks, but the goal is that all 4 tanking classes will have roughly similar numbers when it's all said and done.
One of the designers mentioned the movie Gladiator the other day. Watch how Maximus uses his shield -- he isn't cowering behind it -- he's bashing people in the face with it. Shields should be a viable form of combat, not the option to avoid combat. It would be awesome if some day Arms was the 2H tree, Fury was the DW tree, and Prot was the sword and board tree. Prot has a long way to go before it's more PvP viable, but maybe, just maybe there could be a tree where control and survivability were an alternative to just bigger damage. It may not happen this expansion, but it's a step in that direction.
In the mean time, it would be awesome if we heard fewer conversations like: "Man, once I tanked as a druid, I never went back to warrior" to which the other guy says "Oh yeah, wait until you try paladin." We think part of that is tanking is a lot of work for a warrior and not as much fun as it should be. (I'm not saying any chowderhead should be able to tank Naxx -- tanking can be less work and still require a lot of skill.)
Our mitigation got gutted (1 min cooldown on shield block? Really?)
If there are tanks out there that thought mashing Shield Block was a fun, challenging and interesting decision, please speak up. We thought giving you some choice about when to hit the button might make tanking more enjoyable.
Our survavibility got nerfed
That's a legitimate concern but also a trivial fix. We could make Defensive Stance grant 90% damage reduction and then just about every talent in the tree would be optional. I exaggerate but I hope you get the point.
Our aoe tanking tool got nerfed (thunderclap's cooldown)
We don't want AE tanking to be mind-numbing either. We want all tanks (you too, paladins) to do something besides hit the same button over and over. We want to make Tclap hit hard when it's up.
Our devastate rage cost got increased
That was a consequence of trying to have fewer points in the tree, not an intentional attempt to make Devastate weaker.
Our scaling is still lackluster
Totally agree with you here. However several abilities (Hi Revenge) either now do have scaling or will get them in the near future.
Our goal: you get to keep your mitigation but have more fun talents. (
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Protection Tree in build 8885 #2
1) I have strong suspicions that death knight dps is completely OP, but I think we can tame that without redoing their trees.
2) We are trying to combo some more of Prot's mitigation talents so that you have room for some of the more optional ones. I realize to some extent there will always be mandatory talents and there will probably always be cookie-cutter builds. But the more we can improve that situation I think most of you agree the better the game will be.
3) Well what did you use the Decapitator for?
4) We are trying to have more viable tanking classes but it would be a travesty if we ended up pushing tanking warriors out of groups. That is not our intent and if we see it happening, we'll take steps to correct it. It pained me to see people say in BC 5-mans "Let's just get a paladin. The run will go faster." That sucks and we're trying to improve that situation, not make it worse in 10 and 25 player runs.
5) I know I tend to neglect healing and dps classes specs in the interest of tanking discussions. I apologize for that. I can't be everywhere at once and to some extent we think tanking needs the most help. We know some classes and specs (in various roles) are relatively pleased with how they look for LK and some aren't. We're not done yet.
6) As you can see, making Protection viable for dps and / or PvP is controversial. Some people would love to see it and for some it's a wasted or misguided effort. That's the reason we want to continue to explore the issue and take baby steps without totally burning down the warrior trees and starting over. (
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Death Knight (
Skills List / Talent Calc. (8885))
Death Knight DPS too high ?
My hunch is still that a lot of death knight dps is too high, and probably the result of talents that stack too well together. It is the gigantic crits for Frost (and more recently Unholy) that get a lot of attention. The death knight's eventual damage on Live will probably feel a lot more like your sustained dps and not the big crits (though big crits are always fun).
Like I said, just a hunch though. We'll let the actual numbers decide. I might be wrong. (
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Questions for Blues
Why was taunt removed from Death Grip?
Death Grip is a very powerful ability and we feared that the day might come when we have to increase its cooldown. Long cooldowns are terrible for taunts.
Why was Dark Command given to us when we had two great taunts?
As above, we changed Death Grip. Blood Boil was also starting to feel like a better AE DPS spell than a multi-step taunt. We want all 4 tanks to be viable and came to the conclusion that some abilities just need to be standard. We don't want DKs to be worthless or even really hard to use on boss fights that require taunt rotations for example.
Is there any plans to increase Death Knight Base Mitigation? If Yes, Can you give us a clue?
If it ends up being too low, we'll adjust it. Death knights do have high parry rates and have a good number of oh snap abilities on short cooldowns. If you look at other forums, some other tanks are worried they don't stack up to DKs at the moment.
Why do i have so many buttons to push and so many CDs to keep track of? (DG, DC, IBF, AMS, LB, BB, HoW, Diseases, to name a few)
We wanted DKs to play differently from other classes. Runes, somewhat like energy, is an infinite resource. DKs are not dependent on being hit, which is a first for a tanking class. To balance that, there are more cooldowns.
Is there any plans to give us spam able Aggro-generation skills back?
Abilities that add too much straight threat don't scale well. Paladins would have been far and away the best tanks for threat in Sunwell if more gear had been available to them. Part of the reason is because their threat scales so well with their dps. We'd like to get away more from +threat abilities for all classes if we can.
Are we supposed to be hitting the Armor Cap? Or an Avoidance cap? Because right now i do not see that happening either way and leaving us kind of… lacking mitigation.
No class should be close to either in Lich King. That was actually a problem in Burning Crusade -- witness bears being unable to improve their tanking gear because of the armor cap and the introduction of "Sunwell Radiance" to work around excessively high avoidance values. We think it's fine for tanks to reach the uncrittable mark, and being uncrushable is no longer an issue. Beyond that, we want you to always have a reason to improve your gear... and always be a little scared of those bosses. (
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Originally Posted by Boubouille
Build 8885 - Professions Update
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