Posts Tagged ‘Defense’

Some Blue Posts on Tanking Design Philosophy for Wrath

Wrath Spoilers WarningLooking through recent Blue posts, here are a few interesting tidbits regarding Tank design for Wrath.

The Summary:

  • They haven’t yet a clear notion how threat handling / management will happen at level 80
  • They want to keep each tank with its own specialty but improve overall viability (ie blurring the difference between classes)
  • They want to make it perfectly possible and viable to raid without any one definite cookie-cutter tank spec
  • They want to look at any formerly “must have” talents and integrate most of these into core mechanics to foster more varied spec… flavours instead of one single cookie-cutter approach.

Generic:

It’s almost impossible at this stage to talk about which class can generate the most threat or has the most survivability at level 80. There are no level 80 characters in beta, and we haven’t done our own testing yet. We want to come up with mechanics we like, then we get the numbers in good shape. I’m not saying don’t talk about it — it’s very useful when someone can point out a potential problem, particularly if it’s one we hadn’t thought of. Yes, that happens–a shock, I know. Just don’t slip down the slope from there by declaring the class dead or breaking out the slaps to the face.

There are 4 tanks in WoW. They all are intended to tank 5-player, 10-player and 25-player instances. They all have their specialties, and the warrior specialty will probably remain as the best tank for single, hard-hitting bosses. But if you only have a death knight for that encounter, or you bring a warrior to a fight with a bunch of adds, you’ll still be able to get purps. This is a slight change in philosophy for us, but one we feel is necessary in a world with 10 classes and several specs getting a boost to raid viability.
(Source)

I also acknowledge that hit and expertise are great threat stats, and expertise can offer a little mitigation to boot. The point I was trying to make is that putting strength on tanking gear solves a lot of problems in the game — it can improve dps and threat (and mitigation if we build the talents correctly) without us having to worry about whether plate-wearing tanks are already capped in some other stat. Defense means something different for warriors and paladins than it does for death knights, and unless we build different gear for each class we can’t count on defense as always being desirable above everything else. The last thing we want is for some classes to feel that they don’t have access to the gear to do their jobs properly. (Source)

I know there is a tradition in BC of a prot warrior MT with perhaps another prot warrior or a paladin as OT. If we do our jobs right, there will be some gouprs that run feral MTs with unholy DK OTs in Lich King raids. Crazy, I know, but in the BWL days it was 5 prot warriors tanking, so we’ve already come a long way. :) (Source)

Warrior:

AE tanking is hard for warriors. This tends to mean that pugs in particular would rather have a paladin tank just for the consistency. I agree this feels broken. We think we can make it easier for warriors to AE tank, especially in 5-player instances, without displacing the paladin as the best AE tank. At the moment we are considering increasing Thunder Clap to 5 targets. We’ll see how that feels.

The old Shield Block wasn’t fun. We think we can make the new one fun. Numbers are the easiest thing to tweak if that’s all that’s called for. So we tend to focus on mechanics at this stage in development. Once we like the mechanics, we can massage the numbers. (Source)

Warriors need to be better AE tanks without eclipsing paladins. Thunder Clap is a good place to address that problem. If Shockwave becomes the ultimate tanking ability than we’re concerned nobody would want to run a 5-player dungeon without it. That’s not the goal. We don’t want to hand out Consecrate to every tank, but we want you to be able to tank groups better. (Source)

Druid:

The design is for bears to be viable, end-game main tanks. The design is for cats to be viable, end-game melee dps. In both cases you are going to need the right talents, good gear, skill and companions who can back you up — I don’t mean to imply raiding will be easy. :)

If you want to do a little tanking and dps, you probably won’t be as optimal at either, though you’ll probably always be better at switching between the two than other classes. In order to be as good at tanking as the other classes, you might have to give up a few talents that maximize your dps, and vice versa. This is a good thing — it lets you choose to actually be a main tank.
Don’t worry about your bears. The armor and other changes were done to fix itemization issues, not to nerf druids. You’ve already gotten the ability to drink pots in bear form and benefit from weapon enchants and windfury. We have plenty of knobs to turn to make sure you can do your job even better than you could in LK. (Source)

Paladin:

Like I promised, the paladin changes were more sweeping than most changes. As such, it’s going to take us some time to go through a second pass on the abilities and get everything polished up enough to evaluate the shiny, new paladin. I expect we’ll be a lot more active on this forum when that happens. (Source)

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Master Blogging and Altitis Birthsday

So after a significant slowdown to my posting activities, this is my 300th post on Altitis. Incidentally, the blog is also 1 year (and 10 days) old now.

Before moving on towards 400, let’s take the opportunity to review some facts both interesting and trivial about this place:

  • Collectively, my Damage Meter benchmarking series are what interested most readers, attracting slightly over 10’000 pageviews over time. While I can’t make any promises, I intend to get back to these “soon” to check where we stand now that the landscape has stabilized and the new combat log feature is almost ironed out.
  • My Parrot review remains the most popular post not part of a series, followed quite closely by my CowTip review.

Interestingly enough, as the wow blogosphere always makes a point of mentioning this kind of things, none of the above have ever been mentioned by wowinsider, and for that matter, haven’t been linked to from other blogs. The readers all come in through search engines, 98% from Google.

A quick review of phpbb3 combined with a mention of wowdb comes next in popularity, although I suspect most visitors to that page leave disappointed. From the search terms used, visitors were mainly interested in phpbb3 wow themes, not my short review & ramblings. Well, for wow-themed phpbb3 styles, here’s a short list:

There’s likely to be more out there if you want to google around but the above sampling should give you a good starting point.

My two most popular rants are tied to the Ghostwolf nerf, and I have mainly Mania to thank for that, as most viewers to these pages come from her blog.

One of my oldest theory posts still attracts a decent amount of viewers every day, the second one in the Defense Theory series which explains how PvE defense works, in particular for tanks.

Now for some other interesting or odd stats:

  • Last week, Altitis ranked second in Google for clicked queries on wrath talent trees (in fact I’m still second as I write this). There’s definitely a hunger for information on the matter out there. Unfortunately for visitors looking for this kind of information, what they get here is my post on how I believe it is too early to engage in in-depth discussions about wrath talents.
  • Some people are apparently still interested in my clumsy attempts to write my own armory crawler in php.
  • To the three people looking for Stop the Warrior: although we both are frequently commenting on each other’s posts and sometimes shouting out (or at) each other, his blog is over there. And while we’re at it, his GM, who holds a (probably deserved) bad opinion of me, has her own blog as well, and if you’re interested in insights into how guild management works in a serious raiding environment, you should have her on your blogroll. No excuses, go subscribe now.
  • What gives honor in AV? Killing other people of course, but also burning towers, holding onto towers until the end of the match, killing the opposing Captain (that’s either Galvander or Balinda depending on your faction), protecting your own captain until the end of the game, killing the enemy general.
  • Armchair from treehugger: dunno what you were looking for, but it sounds hurtful.
  • Casserole FFXI: sounds tasty
  • Cheese Conspiracy Theory: Yes, the good old mystery about the Darnassian Bleu still hasn’t been solved.

While there’s a lot of additional sassy keywords in here, this is probably enough of self-congratulation for a single post. As always, allow me to thank everyone of you for reading and commenting on Altitis, it’s your silent or outspoken presence which gives this blog a reason to be.

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Revisiting Ramparts for fun

One of the guildies wanted to get an alt through Ramparts, so we assembled a PUG and went on our merry way.

Or rather, wanted to go. Doomhammer EU was afflicted by massive bouts of lag yesterday, and apparently (though this might have been all-European) Brewfest had been restarted in error on the server previously.

In fact, it was so bad that I took over 20 mins to hearth to Shatt from whatever I had been doing before, and one of our party members declared the whole venture useless and left. So we 4-manned the whole thing just because we could: level 60 rogue, 61 mage, and 70 full elemental shaman (and I mean full, 55/6/0)  healing yours truly.

It was quite amusing to 4-man the place. Last time I was tanking there was on my way to level 70, and it was some work. This time around, I was way overgeared and had to swap some mitigation pieces for pure stamina instead (note to self: consider getting some int heavy rings instead of your avoidance rings) just to actually conserve a semblance of mana.

The rogue and the mage took some time to grasp the goodness that is AoE tanking, they kept sapping and sheeping around after I told them not to bother (the mage had marks, and kept it up very bravely). Funnily enough, the shaman died to Omor about halfway without it having any impact on the outcome.

Very fun run, the two low level people both got something out of the run they could use. I re-learned the meaning of a shallow mana pool. Too much mitigation = thirst unending.

All that through bouts of massive looting lag. Still, I expect I’ll eventually tank the place as heroics, and tanking requires paying attention to the pulls, something I did not do while healing heroics. A refresher certainly never hurts.

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Getting the Galoheart Kind of Tanking Experience

Logged on tonight, and wanted to go and tank something, anything. The LFG channel was the in-game equivalent to the Gobi desert though, nobody seeking, nobody needing a tank.
So I go out to quest a bit in Netherstorm, since I have a couple of loose ends there. And after another scan of the LFG list, I decide to wrap up and call it a night. Early sleep is something I could do with for a change after all.

Just at that moment, I get a whisper asking me if I was prot and free. I was both, and they were in SteamVaults, stranded because their tank left, one trash pull away from Kalithresh. A quick summon later, an even quicker trash pull, a blink of an eye and a dead naga boss kindly surrenders nothing else but the Breastplate of the Righteous, along with some mail gauntlets the shammie who invited me wanted.

Needless to say, the chest piece was a serious upgrade over my previous green quest chest, and of course I was more than happy to help one of the group members who apparently joined too late to get his Kara key fragment.
Everyone was happy, friend lists were added to, I had the time to place Shorsha’s CC= Constant Consecration motto during the trash clears to the fragment. Very nice, quick and dirty. Just like Galo‘s positive tankadin PUG stories.

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Assessing my Prot Gear

Since our Arena warlock Steptoe is currently bogged down by real life and no games will be happening for a while, I decided to go back to tankadin spec for a while, at least to look what the different parts I had picked up left and right would amount to. And it’s surprisingly better than what I thought.

When I switched to holy early last summer, I was at 430 defense and 74% combined crush avoidance (vs 102.4% needed). After respeccing and rebuilding a useable kit, I’m now at 474 defense (but without spell damage at all, not good) respectively 468 with some holy damage and 82.4% towards uncrushability – not that I’d need the latter, seeing how it’s unlikely that I’ll ever tank Kara. The guild is, oddly enough, bursting with tanks at the moment, and when you log on after they have been in there for almost 4 hours, it’s unlikely they’ll need an extra trash tank. Still, it was quite good to go to Karabor, grab 8-10 demon supplicants and AoE them down for signets, tomes, cloth and cash.

Of course, on the LFG side of things, it’s the same old story: until last night all groups were desperate for tanks. The moment I had finished buying the new spec’s skills, tanks came out of every hidden closet while the groups were desperate for a healer. Oh well. My respec costs had dropped down to 25g, so I’ll keep looking if I get some tanking action until Steptoe is back.

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Defense Theory III: PvP Defense

In PvP, the situation is quite different.

As mentionned in the Attack Table post, the attack table in PvP has neither Crushing Blows nor glancing blows:

Miss
Dodge
Parry
Block
Critical Strike
Normal Hit

Contrary to what happens against PvE bosses, however, the Critical Strike range isn’t a fixed range, oh no. Through gear and talents, an enemy has the means to increase the base 5% chance against an equal-level opponents by several orders of magnitudes. For instance, with the proper talent build, a rogue can get 65% crit chance on Ambush before even factoring in bonuses from his gear.
PvP fights are mainly a mobility affair. A normal opponent will usually not stand around waiting for his foe to beat him up, so decreasing Normal Hit range is often pretty moot. As for ranged attacks, you cannot dodge, parry or block them.

Due to these factors inherent to PvP, improving your Defense Rating becomes pretty useless in the sense that the only practical benefit lies in broadening your chance to be missed by a small percentage – getting out of range, CC, breaking a caster’s Line of Sight (LoS) are other means to achieve the same results. In terms of gearing, your focus will also be different, mainly a mix of staying power (health) and offensive power (or healing power).

That’s where Resilience fits in. Resilience not only narrows an opponent’s Critical Strike window, thus diminishing the chance your health gets suddenly bursted down by a sizeable chunk (most DPS classes also have talents which boost their crit damage significantly, another reason to focus on getting critted less often), it also diminishes the amount of damage a crit will inflict to you. In the next patch, Resilience will even mitigate part of the damage generated from DoTs (which is a bit counterintuitive in terms of what Resilience was normally meant to do – reduce your exposure to burst damage- but come on, would you really have wanted that Blizzard introduce yet another Combat Rating to address DoTs? Let’s not go there please).

As a conclusion to this series of posts about Defense Theory, we can break Defense Ratings down as follows:

  • In PvE (mainly for tanking), Defense Rating first, then Dodge, Parry and Block rating are what you should be after. Resilience is essentially pointless (with the caveat on T5+ Druid tanks due to itemization issues) because its focus is way too narrow.
  • In PvP, however, Defense Rating falls short in preventing the kind of damage which can fell you within a mere couple of seconds, Critical Hits. This is where Resilience shines because it is the gaming mechanism put in place to address that precise problem.

Whee. Finished at last, after a long RL hiatus. There you go.

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Defense Theory II: PvE Defense for Tanks

With the Attack Table basics covered, here are the details for PvE defense – applied to tanks, because they’re the most focussed on mitigation here.

First things first, when tanking raid bosses, these are level 73, and this lowers your defense values seen in the paper doll in favour of the boss.

Now let’s go back to our PvE attack table and look what values we can play with and how:

Miss
Dodge
Parry
Block
Critical Strike
Crushing Blow
Normal Hit

Critical Strike is a simple calculation of attack skill vs defense skill, and from a raid boss you have a base 5.6% chance of getting critted. The interesting part here, though, is that by raising your defense skill, you will (among others) be able to narrow down this 5.6% chance to nothing.
For Warriors and Paladins, that’s 490 defense you’ll need, at that point you will have become uncrittable.
Druids have a feral talent called Survival of the Fittest which immediately narrows the Critical Strike gap by 3%, down to 2.6% – which means Druids will only require 415 Defense Skill in order to reach uncrittable status.

That’s the most dangerous damage source taken care of. Now some will ask why not use resilience as a means to become uncrittable. This is simply because stacking Defense Rating instead of Resilience will not only help you towards uncrittability, it will also at the same time raise your chance to be missed, to dodge, parry and block. So stacking Defense is immensely preferrable in terms of benefits offered in order to address those 5.6% crit chance, for warriors and paladins. For druids, the matter is less clearcut, since they cannot parry or block. While purely in theory Defense remains more beneficial (as it raises dodge and chance to be missed along with uncrittability), high end bears suffer from big itemization gaps, and may be forced, past T4 content, to resort to PvP gear to maintain uncrittability.

Crushing Blows is a different story though. As explained previously, Crushing Blow chance is a set number based upon the difference in levels between you and the mob you’re tanking. Contrary to the Critical Strike chance which can get narrowed down to 0, you cannot “compress” the Crushing Blow range on the attack table.

We’ll leave this on the side for a moment, and look at how Normal Hits behave. As we’ve seen, Normal Hits simply take up whatever space there is in the Attack Table between the sum of all other entries and 100%. The higher the sum of the rest, the less room there is left for Normal Hits. Once the other entries added together reach 100%, there’s no room left at all for Normal Hits, only Crushing Blows and Crits will get through (provided you’re not uncrittable yet), the rest will be either blocked, parried, dodged or simply missed. You will have “pushed Normal Hits off the Table”.

And once you’ve done that, if you raise total miss plus dodge plus parry plus block chance any further, you will effectively start pushing Crushing Blows off the Attack Table as well. How’s that? Simple. Remember, we roll a /random 100. If the other entries add up to 90%, the Crushing Blows range is 91-105%, which means the top 5% are outside of the range of the results our die roll can reach.
So once the sum of all other entries reach 100%, we will have effectively pushed the entire range of Crushing Blows off the Attack Table, and become Uncrushable. To be more precise, we need to account for the level difference with a level 73 boss, which means your total Miss + Dodge + Parry + Block has to be 102.4% instead of 100%.

How to get there is a different story though, and it varies by class.
For a protection Warrior, it’s most straightforward. With Shield Block up, you add 75% to your Block chance for 2 hits within 5 seconds. So the sum of your Miss + Dodge + Parry + Base Block needs only to be 25%, something you have already when you’re uncrittable. There’s a caveat on fast hitting bosses though, accounting for lag, any boss with faster than 2.0 speed may land a Crushing Blow every now and then.

For paladins, it’s a lot tougher – pallies get (improved) Holy Shield, which adds 30% Block chance for 8 hits over 10 seconds. There’s also a libram (Libram of Repentance) around which grants another 5.3% chance to Holy Shield. The rest has to come from gear bonuses, either by stacking straight Defense Rating (preferred choice as it will boost all other values) or individual ratings, with preference for Dodge and Parry, or any viable combination of everything.

For Druids, it’s a different story altogether. They cannot block nor parry, so there is currently no gear combination in the game which allows them to become uncrushable. What Druids will strive to do instead is to load up on stamina in order to soak up those Crushing Blows when they happen, and on armor in order to mitigate whatever damage gets through.

The figure below illustrates all of this:

PvE Combat Table vs raid bosses

These mechanisms also position the inherent strengths and weaknesses of all tanking classes. A druid will stay crushable and will require heavy healing when one gets through. Hoever, they have the most stamina in order to ensure they can survive any crushing blows while the healers get them back up into shape.
The paladin is currently in the worst situation in regards to Crushing Blows: where a warrior is uncrushable “by default” and can start stacking stamina, complete avoidance (Miss, Dodge or Parry) or resistance on his gear, a pallie will have to cover the 40% (45% without the Libram) gap to uncrushability. On top of this, the pallie will also require some spell damage, as his threat comes from holy spells.
What’s holding a paladin back in terms of raid boss tanking isn’t skills or aggro generation, it’s simply that itemization values on current gear leave him at a disadvantage vs both a Druid and a Warrior.Does that mean pallies are unfit for the job? Nope. By many accounts, uncrittable and uncrushable pallies do the trick in Kara, in Gruul, and apparently even in SSC. But beyond that, the itemization problem becomes, at present, unsolvable for them. On the plus side, for all the instances where pallies can tank, be it heroics or the first raids, they bring 8 blocks over 10 seconds of uncrushability, which leaves them less open than a warrior to an unlucky Crush going through at the wrong moment.

There are of course other elements in terms of comparing the three tanks but that’s the scope for a different post, on some other day.

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Defense Theory I: The Attack Table and You

Whenever someone or something performs an attack, a single /random roll is performed by WoW – for simplicity’s sake, let’s assume it’s a /random 100 roll. The resulting number is then checked against the so-called Attack Table.
This Attack Table lists the various outcomes versus a certain percentage range. When a NPC attacks a player, the Table looks like this:

Combat Table Boss vs Player

Miss
Dodge
Parry
Block
Critical Strike
Crushing Blow (if the NPC is at least 3 levels above you)
Normal Hit

Miss chance is a base 5% plus the difference between the attacker’s attack and the player’s defense rating. For simplicity’s sake, in our example, if the /random 100 roll’s result is between 0 and 5, the boss will simply miss you.
Then, in order, your Dodge, Parry and Block ratings from the paper doll will come into play. Let’s say you have 15% dodge, rolls between 6 and 20 will be a dodge.
Critical Hit chance is a fixed number, a base 5% plus 0.2 per level difference – that means 5.6% from a raid boss.
Crushing Blows happen if the boss is three levels or more above the player. The chance is the difference between base attack skill minus base defense skill times 2%, minus 15%. A level 70 player’s base defense for this calculation can never exceed 350, whereas a boss’ attack is always considered maxed. So a level 73 boss has 365 attack skill, which gives us [(365-350) * 2%]-15% = 15%. If you’re entering Kara with a level 69 tank, it gets a lot worse, as the crushing blow chance is now 25%.

Finally, Normal Hits will fill up whatever’s left after adding all previous percentages and 100%.

A player attacking an NPC cannot perform any crushing blows, however, he risks performing glancing blows. So a player’s attack table vs a mob looks like this:
Combat Table Player vs NPC

Miss
Dodge
Parry
Glancing Blow
Block
Critical Strike
Normal Hit

When a mob attacks you, in terms of defense, you have means to avoid or mitigate part of the damage by working on your defense stats (defense, dodge, parry, block and resilience ratings). If you are attacking, you can impact your damage by working on your offensive stats (hit and crit ratings, AP, and for magic users, spell crit, spell damage and spell penetration).

In PvP, there are no Glancing Blows, so the Attack Table gets shorter:

Miss
Dodge
Parry
Block
Critical Strike
Normal Hit

As said above, any melee hit performed is a single die roll checked against the Attack Table. At first, people (myself included) often imagine that an attack result is calculated through a series of forking paths (eg: roll once, if the result is between 0 and 5% it’s a miss, if not, roll again, if it’s between 0% and 9% it’s a Dodge, else roll again etc). But it is not so, the percentages you have in your defense paper doll vs mobs of the same level as you are taken over one to one into the attack table (or adjusted if there’s a level difference).

Pretty simple so far, eh? In the next parts, we’ll have a look at how to change the odds for the various results.

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Defense Theory: Introduction

Last night, another pallie on our server asked me whether stacking resilience was worth it for PvE. While the short answer is “no”, things are actually a lot more complex beneath the surface.

In order to explain the reason behind the short answer, we’ll need to delve into defense theory a bit at first. As the topic is pretty broad, I’ll break down the explanations into three segments:
Part I: The Attack Table and You
Part II: PvE Defense for tanks
Part III: PvP Defense

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