Dungeon System and LFG Channel
I don't think people queuing for an instance they don't really want to do is good for the LFG tool, especially if there are folks legitimately trying to run that dungeon. I realize it's a way to opt into the LFG channel rather than just having it be global for everyone, but it's a clunky way. With cross-realm LFG there is also a much higher chance you actually will find a group even for obscure dungeons.
I think there is some legitimacy to the players who want to just monitor what's going on while on an alt, but again the groups will typically get filled so fast that there is less need to do something while you wait, unless you're talking about raids, in which case you can sit on an alt and browse who is in the channel. Just remember that if everyone is browsing and nobody is listing themselves that it will be harder to form groups.
The reality that some players play many characters regularly is something we are trying to embrace more and more. We are putting more emphasis on your account and less on your actual character, so we hope to chip away at those moments where you feel punished for being on character A instead of character B (such as trying to find a group in this case). (
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Quel'delar
Quel'delar questline requirements
This comes from 5-player dungeons so it won't be as gargantuan as the shifting sands or as material heavy as the Hand of Ragnaros, but it will still require running a few instances and some dedication just to start it. (
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Quel'delar Stats
We will post details on the stats before the patch launches, but you'll have to wait for now - sorry, this is the only answer available at the moment. (
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Tanking / Chill of the Throne
Gear and Avoidance numbers going too high
Of course it was "our fault." We're not blaming anyone. I was just explaining why avoidance still got so high despite our best intentions. You may have scaled the gear down had you been in our shoes, but we picked the numbers we thought would be enticing enough to get players to try the hard modes while still allowing everyone to feel like they could upgrade their gear.
It wasn't inevitable either. We debated Chill of the Throne long and hard. We easily could have gone the other way. We think the encounters will be more fun with the current implementation though. (
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Chill of the Throne
1. Can we expect more unavoidable, devastating melee-based attacks in ICC? If so, what point do they serve from a design stand point?
1. Probably. They serve as challenges that your group needs to overcome by making sure enough healers are focused on the big damage spike and cooldowns (the tank’s or external ones) are used appropriately. If you could avoid those attacks they would need to hit for even harder to compensate. If you could avoid those hits, then sometimes you would just let lucky and make it through the encounter unscathed and other times you'd get gibbed. Believe me; you want those to be unavoidable.
2. Are we finally going to get away from the 2 hits back to back will gib the tank situation we are in now?
2. The idea behind the Chill is to lower boss damage per hit but keep damage per time the same overall. The reason I caveat that statement so much is I know that we’re going to see lots of tanks that die in Icecrown and then ask us to nerf the encounters or buff their tanks. The purpose of these changes is not to prevent tank deaths. You will die. Probably a lot. You are going into the Lich King’s home after all.
3. How are you going to handle Chill of the Throne when the pre-Cata patch comes out and we lose another ~18% avoidance when Defense goes away as a stat?
3. I dunno. I imagine we will just drop it. We’ll have a lot of fixin’ up to do before Cat is ready to go live.
Parry vs. Dodge
Tanks don’t stack parry because it’s more expensive to gear for parry than dodge (and usually gearing for armor and health when available are superior to both). The reason parry > dodge (which makes it more expensive) is because parry gives you a slight threat increase over dodge because of the weapon swing speedup. The “parry gibs” phenomenon you are describing was a much bigger deal in the age of crushing blows (which ironically you are nostalgic for). Today, the increased damage that a parry-stacking tank would suffer from parry speedup is pretty trivial. Besides, we turn it off on many bosses for which it would cause a problem. (
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Effective Health
Well, to be fair most theorycrafting tanks on Tankspot and other places who really understand the concept of EH won’t tell you it’s the only thing that matters, just that it is very important. The problem is that some players who perhaps don’t understand the theorycrafting as well try to take the notion to illogical extremes.
If we buffed DK parry to 99% and dropped their health 5K then it would be a huge EH nerf but they would probably be the best tanks by a wide margin. Now that's a very contrived scenario but you can't argue that just because tank avoidance happens to be close right now that avoidance is irrelevant as a stat when determining survivability.
[...] This thread was yet another “my EH is too low, please buff” thread. I wanted to point out why there was a disconnect between many of the threads on this forum and the developers. The disconnect comes in too many attempts to convert cooldowns as different as AD and VB into EH, stack rack the tanks based on that questionable estimate, and then complain about the order.
The discussion got distracted a little with the “GC says avoidance is better than stamina” nonsense, but the above was my original intent. (
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Avoidance and Spikes
I think what you are comparing here is a tank with high avoidance to one with lower avoidance. Your definition of "spiky" here is just that the tank with lower avoidance gets hit more often. That's usually not what players are talking about though. If you compare a tank with 50% avoidance to a tank with 0% avoidance, then the latter guy is taking a ton more damage, but he is taking the same damage every hit. For every unit of time, the incoming damage is the same, which is generally easier for healers and the tank himself to plan around.
When people say high avoidance causes spikes, what they usually mean is that a tank who chooses avoidance over mitigation (armor) will avoid some damage completely but then suddenly get clobbered. That's a spike. By reducing the amount of attacks that a boss fails to land (because of dodge), we can lower the amount of damage that a boss does per hit while still keeping the same boss damage over time. We need to keep the same damage over time because that is scaled to healing over time. If we just nerfed dodge without adjusting boss damage, then we'd just be killing tanks more often. (
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Bosses in Icecrown Citadel and effects of Chill of the Throne
1) Bosses won't swing faster. More of their swings will hit.
2) Tanks that avoid less are generally easier for healers to heal (provided the numbers aren't just too great).
3) Tank healing was fun in Sunwell, IMO. Sunwell was challenging. That's what a lot of players are looking for in the final raid tier. If you don't like the challenge of healing a tank then I'm not sure why you'd want to be a healer. Now as I've said, we're not saying Icecrown is only for the Sunwell crowd. But I am pretty convinced there are going to be a lot of "Icecrown is too hard because my tank died" posts here when it goes live. (
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Paladin
Paladins too defensive in PvP
I'll add it's also a problem where paladins as a whole are too defensive and not just the Protection spec ones. You see people describing fighting a Retribution paladin as a three phase boss fight. You might get them down, but then they can reset the fight with Lay on Hands. You get them down again and they bubble and heal. Compare this to an Arms warrior -- do they do great damage in PvP? Yes. Are they invulnerable? No. It's cool for paladins to care more about healing than do warriors, for I hope obvious reasons. However, if you are up against a Holy paladin, you should know that one of your greatest challenges should be dealing with their capacity to heal. If you are up against a Prot paladin, you should be concerned with their capacity to take hits. If you are up against a Ret paladin, you should be concerned with how much damage they should deal. You should not, generally, be nearly as concerend about the Prot's ability to self-heal or the Ret's ability to tank you.
I said this recently, but to reiterate, for most of the other hybrids, picking a role in a fight is much more of a commitment. Sure the Arms warrior can go Defensive Stance and put on a shield, but that doesn't turn them into a Prot warrior. Nobody is super concerned about Feral druids shifting out to heal. We had big problems with DKs earlier being able to tank and deal damage with the same set of tools, but that's in a better place now. Shaman maybe the only other class besides paladins that are able to shift on the fly from dps to healing, but with their mail armor and lack of major defensive cooldowns they just don't feel as hard to kill. (
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Don't nerf me bro!
This is just “don’t nerf me, bro” talk. We have been so gentle with paladin nerfs because we’ve been so concerned with returning to lolret, that paladins as a class are still very powerful in end-game LK in both PvE and PvP. Yes, it’s not fun to be nerfed. We get that. There is very little evidence we have over-nerfed paladins at any time in the past couple of years. There is plenty of evidence that we haven’t nerfed them enough. (
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