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If you’re interested in Wrath analysis and in things shapeshifting, the Big Bear Butt Blogger has a very in-depth analysis and commentary on Bear tanking here.
Only avoid reading it in case you don’t want to be Wrath-spoiled, of course.
Looking through recent Blue posts, here are a few interesting tidbits regarding Tank design for Wrath.
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)
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)
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)
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)
As I mentioned previously, I’m currently leveling a mage on a new (for me) realm. I picked mage for its fast pace and ease of getting to 70, because for many other classes, having a little stash of gold to buy the best gear available at the AH can make a lot of difference.
Turns out it will be even more so, at least on the realm I’m on. Aside from a steady supply of spirit greens, the AH is desperately devoid of usable kit. Nobody’s really running Azeroth instances any more, and world drops still are heavily tilted in favour of the most useless leveling stat for anyone but priests.
I still believe Blizzard could provide a simple and painless remedy by replacing most of the spirit-based suffixes by the new BC-introduced stuff. That would actually help. It’s something I was thinking about a year ago, though, and I’m not holding my breath. But I digress.
In terms of cap level gameplay, druids and paladins offer the most versatile classes for the casual player who wants to join into group activities with a couple of friends. Groups will always require at least a healer and a tank, and these two can fit the bill. I loved tanking as a pallie, and didn’t mind healing as one either. But that toon is sitting on a PvE realm, and I’m currently playing on PvP.
I’ve never managed to stick to druids beyond level 21. Both classes are toons I’d love playing at level 70, but in both cases, leveling another one up all the way is something I just cannot stomach, at least not for the time being.
While my ideal scenario would be to have Blizzard actually unlock the option of rolling ANY class at level 55 with Wrath, it’s not going to happen in a hurry, because that would officially mean they are admitting old Azeroth is dead and done with. There’s an awful lot of content in there, and I just don’t see them officially putting a nail in its coffin (which they would be doing in that case).
So my plan is to have the mage provide the material support for the rest of my toons on this realm. Once she reaches 70 (assuming she makes it before wrath gets released), I’ll start up on another shammie to eventually have a healer handy.
And the DK? Pretty obvious, of course. It will provide me with a tank for those level 80 group activities. It’s simply going to be the most efficient way to have as many options as possible at my disposal, and starting at level 55 will remove 54 levels of grinding and redoing the quests I start being able to do in my sleep.
And I’m looking forward to it. I just hope the class will be well designed enough to hold its own in that tanking role from go-live onwards, instead of the 3 years of adjusting and tweaking it took for the druid and the paladin to be both viable and accepted as such.
Call it Welfare Leveling
Do you like writing WoW-ku? Are you a druid or able to harness the creative inspirational power of your inner treehugger?
Runycat at Unbearably HoT is running a druid-themed wow-ku contest. If you’re game, hop over and pounce up those rhymes!
A week ago, Stop replied to my short Death Knight post. Unfortunately, his reply got caught by Akismet, making it the first false positive I got.
To add insult to injury, I’ve been focusing a lot on my sandbox and remained slack in my administration of my live blog, of all things, so his comment has been stuck in the spam moderation queue through all this time.
While Stop and me have a long history of intra-blog arguing, he certainly never deserved to end up in a spam filter. Sorry for this embarrassing oversight. To make up, here’s his comment in full and my reply:
“So do you think DK’s will be like druids and be able to put out the dps with a tanking spec? Do you think Blizzard will modify both Prot Warriors and Paladins to add more utility, either through dps or healing, within the Prot tree for when they aren’t healing? Do you think a raid will have room for a DK if all they can do is tank a gimmick encounter?
If I had to guess, I’d say DK’s will be the new druids.
Also, I want to get rid of Rogues from my melee group pending no group buffs in Wrath. Thoughts?“
From the first reports, it sure sounds like the DK will hold aggro by producing a healthy amount of damage (with all the caveats about Wrath being in alpha). What I’m curious is how much DPS the class will be capable of when in DPS mode in terms of integrating them into a group / raid setting when not tanking.
Just going of on a tangent here, but for a moment I thought to myself “what if it turns out that the max DPS in some situation can only be achieved in the tanking setup?”. That reminded me of FFXI where one of the most efficient leveling party strats was using two ninja / warriors trading aggro. How did that work? Basically, the ninja job (class in WoW) aquired an ability to create shadows of himself. These would act as shield charges, each successful hit removing a shadow instead of dealing damage to the ninja. In the earlier levels, a ninja would get 3 shadows (4 later on), and you could actually do low to mid-level party setups with little to no healing capacities in your group with two competent ninjas constantly trading aggro as soon as their shadows were down, while dishing out respectable DPS themselves.
In WoW, aggro trading is currently used mainly to swap tanks after they receive too many stacking debuffs, or because a boss regularly goes switches to the second highest threat target. An FFXI ninja-like setup where two tanks were to trade aggro for the purpose of shortening battles through high DPS sounds definitely interesting. There’s a big but here, however, in the sense that it would make a multi-class tanking corps an issue. But enough empty speculation, back to DKs.
There’s been plenty of virtual ink spilled on hybrids in WoW. If I were to state that one of the main issues with tank scarcity and burnout resides in the fact that a prot warrior or paladin in particular have it even worse than healers for soloing nowadays (except the ruins of Karabor for tankadins, I know, but compare the phase I SSO dailies between a tankadin / prot warrior and any other class for what happens outside Karabor for a second opinion), I wouldn’t exactly be able to stir up a raging controversy. I still hold that with four roles (tank, healer, melee DPS and ranged DPS) available and a relative ease to switch to at least one other role at the cost of a mere gear swap instead of a talent respec, druids are the most accomplished hybrids in the game at present, and should be the minimum standards to which other hybrids should be raised, and I include warriors as tanking / DPS hybrids in this (this doesn’t mean that druids couldn’t be improved, but merely that other hybrids have a lot of room for improvement).
If rearranging runes is somewhere between a shape shift and a talent reset as currently described, the DK will indeed be provided, from the get-go, with a better role fluidity than the other tanks. Considering the expected vast amount of DKs we should find at least to level 70 during the first three months after Wraths’ release, this is actually going to be more or less a necessity in order to keep the class group viable.
At the same time, I’m definitely curious to see what Blizzard has in store for prot warriors and tankadins in particular, the other hybrids in general. Failing to address the lack of flexibility (and lack of solo viability) will probably quite inevitably lead to the more pessimistic scenarios where you will find plenty of DKs competing for raid slots (DK becomes the new hunter rather than the new druid), and not enough bears / warriors and paladins to look after all the fights where they would be the immensely superior choice tank.
Regarding rogues in your melee groups, sorry Stop, but that’s not my place to comment on. As you know, my TBC raiding experience is extremely limited as is, and I’m definitely not competent to discuss the finer points of min / maxing for bleeding edge raiding.
As everyone will have found out by now, there’s a lot of WotLK info bursting out today. Gamespy’s report on Deathknight is particularly interesting.
In November, while arguing that each of the current tanks has its particular spot in the game, I wrote:
While details of how the Death Knight will fit into this are probably still several months off (I expect late beta before a reliable pattern emerges), a possible venue of implementation may be either a specialization against high magical environments, or perhaps an experimentation to create a parry tank (a current tankadin qualifies as a block tank) which would go pretty well with the dual-wielding or 2H tanking.
And in January, responding to one of Tobold’s periodic worries about warriors in the tanking corps with the introduction of DKs, again:
First and foremost, the DK’s proper tanking mechanism will determine which niche the class will occupy. Niches which currently remain largely unoccupied include, as others have pointed out, a proper magic resist tank. Alternatively and fitting to the shieldless tanking, the DK could be designed as a parry tank, holding aggro through DPS output and being at the top of its ability against fast-hitting bosses (and that would mean eating up one of the tankadin’s niches, but I digress).
And look what Gamespy reports on DK’s tanking mechanisms:
Death Knights don’t use a shield, so their primary forms of mitigation will come in the form of Parrying, and the inherent power of their Presences and rune abilities. Blood runes are currently being billed as the primary tanking abilities, so to speak, while Frost is envisioned as more of a crowd-control type of rune. Choosing the right tools for the job will determine your success when tanking, like activating the Presence that increases the Death Knight’s damage mitigation, as well as increasing the amount of threat that they generate.
(…)
The Death Knight’s particular niche will be in tanking magic-damage-dealing bosses. They will have an ability much like a banshee’s anti-magic shell, greatly diminishing the amount of incoming magic damage they’ll receive in combat. While the Death Knight should be able to capably fill in any sort of tanking role with some success, they should be ideal against bosses that primarily deal magic damage.
(Emphasis mine).
Now how this will all work out in practice will, as I stated previously, depend largely on how varied the bosses in Northrend will be, but beyond being right on the money with my speculations, I believe Blizzard has done the best thing they could to provide something sufficiently unique in terms of design to ensure that the DK will complement the tanking corps instead of replace it.
Oh, some of the fun in having mage or warlock tanks will definitely be removed, but on the other hand, it removes the need to build separate and specific sets for such tasks. I definitely like the way this is going.
I hope the warrior panic will stop now.
Well, Matt, I’m not suffering from writer’s block, but I take your challenge nonetheless.
Here are 16 Patch 2.4 changes and additions worth mentioning:
2v2 has, admittedly, several balance and synergy issues, but one which is more irksome is the queue time on heavily-populated Battlegroups. Due to the sheer number of people wanting to play 2v2, which, let’s face it, is the easiest to set up a team for and requires least coordination, queue times can exceed 15 minutes at peak time. Due to the low organizational requirements, 2v2 will always remain the bracket with the lowest barrier to entry for the most casual player, even if entering it as a brand new green level 70 player is going to be quite an experience.
Well, fortunately, Blue has recently posted that this will change for the better:
There is a change in 2.4.0 that will allow the servers to kick up more arena instances in a shorter amount of time, generally lowering the amount of time it will take to get into a game with an equal amount of people queuing. We want to avoid calling this a one time “queue cure” as we’re still not entirely certain how the changes will affect queue times under full load. Especially considering the increase in activity we see with any major patch release.
I think they’re guaranteed to have some effect, but if it isn’t an adequate impact we’ll need to make further adjustments.
Although I don’t have an arena partner or arena spec at the moment, shorter queue times = win.
Part of the current higher-than-average tension between “hardcore” and “casuals” (also in its side incarnation PvE vs PvP) is most definitely due to the fact that the top raiders have run out of content, some of them several months ago. While I definitely don’t like AQ-Style server-wide unlocking events, this one looks to be less mindless grind-focussed than its infamous predecessor. The Isle of Quel’Danas is probably going to be as packed as Hellfire Peninsula was during the first days of TBC’s release, and since I currently don’t play my horde pallie, I’ll give the whole offensive a miss.
Still, the whole Shattered Sun Offensive comes along with a huge amount of new content from solo to five-men to full raids, so people who more or less ran out of things to do will have plenty new stuff to keep themselves occupied for the coming few months.
Of course, the top catassing guilds may very well burn through the new content in two weeks like what happened with MH and BT, but designing content with these people in mind is, fortunately, no longer on Blizzard’s agenda. Either Tigole and his crew grew softer on the catassing part or the rest of the design team has been overshouting them for a couple of months now (in fact, Tigole has been very subdued since his ill-advised Welfare Epics remark). Whatever the reasons, this is full of win for the large majority of the playerbase, hardcore and casual alike, and the couple of sour apples who don’t find the game challenging or fun enough for their taste anymore will move on. Less lag for me, and probably 0.1% less QQ on the o-boards. Not that you’d notice any difference of course.
The new combat log is going to increase data collection accuracy for damage meters and for WWS alike. While the change will require all addons working with the log to change, the net result is more precise information from all relevant tools. For any player, hardcore or casual, striving to improve their playing skills, accurate measurement of their performance is a good thing. Always remember, though, that in a group or a raid, you are actually playing an instance, not “top-the-meters”.
Due to the travel time involved, getting to Caverns of Time is almost as much as a pain than going to Kara. Adding a means to teleport from Shattrath straight to the summoning stone is removes a lot of the wait, leaving more time for actually playing the instances.
While I don’t play any classes which rely on spirit and the 5-seconds rule as part of their normal routine, this will be huge for priests, druids but also mages. Other classes will spend less time drinking, which equates to less downtime. Now if it would only affect MP5 while casting too…
Anyone who ever had to skill up a neglected weapon by even a mere 100 skill points will immediately remember what a pain in the nether regions this is. Less mindless killing for skillups? Yes please. The only thing unclear to me is whether it actually applies to weapon skill below 295 or players below level 60. If it’s the latter, the change will be, unfortunately, not noticed by level 70 toons, which would immediately remove this paragraph from the sexy additions to the “badly thought out” list.
Not that I’d care too much since I rarely do more than 3 dailies (never managed to unlock Ogri’La on the paladin). Still, more choice is always a good thing in my book.
I have a bit mixed feelings about this one, actually. It certainly lowers the skill requirements in instances and participates in the dumbing down of the playerbase. On the other hand, it also means less wipes when running with people who lack the most basic CC management skills. An interesting side-effect, though: people who no longer care how they position CC relative to tanks will actually find running with a tankadin more difficult than before if their CC ends up in the Constant Consecration area. Since the Flavour of the Month in terms of 5-men tanks remains firmly in tankadin hands, the dumbing down may result in a couple of unexpected and hilarious wipes. Then again, good tankadins don’t really need CC in the first place.
I don’t play a drood but from what they tell us, this is a very nice change, which actually gives them more variety in their spell casting rotations. As a recovering healadin, having just one single heal which makes up most of your casting routine (at least there’s cleansing and protecting to break the monotony) is something which gets pretty dull. More tools to keep your party or raid group alive, more varied gameplay? Yes please.
I love this one. Imagine the following pull: 3-mob group to the left, another group farther back on the right. The closest mob of the left-hand group stands at the right side of that group. Your tankadin positions himself and pulls with Avenger’s Shield on the closest mob of the left group, expecting all three mobs to have a good does of front-loaded threat on them.
Unfortunately, there’s a pesky critter sitting, unnoticed, between the left and right group, and Avenger’s shield actually bounces over it to hit the closest mob of the right-hand group. Your group now has to deal with 6 mobs instead of 3, 4 of them without any frontloaded threat.
Sounds familiar? Won’t happen again. Win.
Makes sense. Though why not Rank 1 and 2 escapes me. Then again, I think the last time I’ve ever used Turn Undead was on my level 26 alliance paladin desperately trying to survive an unexpected meeting with Morladin in Duskwood while bubble was on cooldown. And that was before TBC got released. So it’s a sexy but pointless change for the sake of consistency.
There’s been various abilities which would leave a rogue stealthed when using plain normal stealth but break vanish. Bug fixing is always nice in my book, and vanish has been plagued by bugs for a long time now.
I’m kidding. Shamans get little love in this patch, and one of the more jaded shammies out there once commented on a message board “it will be changed to a middle finger Blizzard is pointing at shamans”. ‘Nuff said.
There’s no more diminishing returns per kill until an opponent dies 51 times, and honour gets awarded on the spot. If it helps diminish the AFKing in the peace cave, I’m all for it.
This is a change for the better, and will help balance the map. In the same spirit, actually mirroring the whole map perfectly would definitely remove any claims of map imbalance and make it all about teamwork and tactical skill. This has been suggested for much longer than I’ve been playing AV and should come back.
In the same vein, joining AV as a group is something I have very mixed feelings about. If the group is 5 or 10 friends joining together, I rather like it. But with the extremely soft matchmaking happening, getting steamrolled by a 40-men preform AV for 0 honour (which you probably never will be allowed to join if you don’t have 350+ resilience, which you won’t be able to get in a hurry because the bloody AV premades kill you over and over for 0 honour) is going to be utterly detestable.
In a valiant effort to shorten the pat situations where both sides could have been hiding with the opposing flags for ages, Flag Carriers will now appear on the map within 45 seconds and will get a 50%/100% damage increase debuff after 10/15 minutes. I like it but I still don’t think it goes far enough. Add reinforcements like in AV, each cap and kill taking off from the enemy reinforcements, and you could pretty much guarantee much more action-packed games lasting 15-20 minutes tops, and perhaps even kill the mindless HK farming which happens way too often. One can always hope…
And that takes up to 16 changes. There’s actually more to be highlighted, but Cosmo said 16, so 16 it is.
Convergence. While not directly related to my benchmarking exercise, I read a forum post wherein a paladin states that in his Kara run, his meters show him doing up to 70% of the healing when running with a resto shaman and resto druid. He asks why the others are such slackers and what he should do.
The typical “first post” me too reaction was all-too-predictable: take them to task for it, take it up with the raid leader or the guild master.
Only several posts later someone started asking for more details, and recommended the OP to get more data before raising a fuss.
The question about whether a healer of a different class is pulling his weight, based upon your own damage meter addon (regardless of whether they actually are accurate enough or not, or whether there is some data synching between other players) is one which can be a lot harder to answer than just looking at a ranking.
First, there is the matter of knowing, in details, how the other classes heal. I currently write from a paladin’s perspective, my other healing toons’ highest level is a 29 shaman I haven’t touched since twinking became rampant in BGs… over two years ago. Oh, theoretical knowledge can help bridge the gap, especially if you have been playing and discussing with the same dedicated people for a long time, but first-hand experience is a different beast.
Then there is the matter of role repartition and how well your group / 10-men functions: if you have an excellent tank and the raid only takes little splash damage, the shaman for instance may be underused. The resto druid may have miserable effective healing scores and if you were to look into more detailed information than just your e-peen-boosting healing meter, you might see that he sits at 50% overhealing. And if you were using tools allowing in-depth analysis, perhaps it would suddenly appear that most of that overhealing (and loss of status on the healing meter) is actually due to you capping the tank spamming Flash of Light while he has Heal-over-Time spells ticking for nothing and going to waste.
Beyond that, you’d also have to get a good understanding of what exactly your Healing Meter addon records and how it gets attributed – A shaman’s Earth Shield for instance is usually recorded as healing done by whoever it is cast on instead of the shaman. Priest have heals suffering from the same loss of attribution. Paladins have it easy in this regard as we only offer single-target direct heals, which means we tend to miss the whole picture and how other classes are measured.
In short, regardless of whether any in-game Healing Meter is actually accurate in recording data from other players in your group or raid, I would definitely caution anyone from using just the top layer of information to pass judgment on how other classes perform. No matter the context, you won’t merely need detailed information on what is happening in the raid, what data is recorded and how it is being recorded and attributed, who was assigned to what healing duty, but also a keen understanding on how the other classes perform and what their own performance benchmarks should be. Meters are only a tool, and one which we should learn to use with the right dose of caution and grain of salt, lest we get caught up by ego and e-peen instead of the drive to become a better player.
I was leveling my mage in Southern Barrens a bit last night, and there, right before my horrified eyes, I had another sample of that sorry excuse for a huntard, the sadly still-too-common Melee Hunter.
Now while I have a whole complement of hunters spread across 5 servers (I had to check) all sitting around level 24 and 43 (go figure), I haven’t really put in any serious playtime on my latest one, the mandatory Altitis hunter on my new server. In fact, the poor orc is still sitting in Durotar at level 6, waiting for me to tire off leveling my fishing or my mage. He’s been there since I PCTed in, two months ago.
I made him a couple of days after taking the mage to level 10, and while I fully appreciate that the pet changes everything for a hunter, right after the mage those first early levels feel dreadfully sluggish to get through. Of course, that experience isn’t unique to the hunter in comparison to our little fireball-throwing apprentice, but I digress.
Thinking about it (which you know is almost of tectonic swiftness, what with my limited brain power, read: 2.5 years in the game and I just realized the bleeding obvious), those first 9 petless levels are probably to blame for this aberration of a ranged class, the melee hunter. Indeed, until you get your first animal companion turning you into a potential duo of death and destruction, most fights end in close combat with a raptor strike and a couple of sword or axe swings (which is the part making those early levels so frustratingly slow).
Design induces melee hunter behaviour, something which may follow players around through their whole career. Hunter is one of the two classes (the other being druid) who don’t get their class-defining traits before level 10, whereas all others have the key elements of their gameplay available at level 4 at worst (unless you count bubble-hearthing as class-defining for pallies, which would leave them deprived of core elements till level 6). A not-too-clumsy warlock for instances gets his first pet at level 2. Warriors, Paladins, Priests, Rogues, Mages get their class-defining gameplay elements right at creation. Shammies have to wait until level 4 until they can plant totems.
Aside from the fact some starter zones obviously can’t support a young hunter’s need to tame three different kind of beasts, and the fact that you have to travel to your racial capital in order to learn how to feed and train your new companion, there doesn’t seem to be any compelling reason to have 1/7th of the class’ progression path made melee like it is. In a similar way, druids get access to shape-shifting too late in their career (and unlike hunters, take until level 20 to start leveling at a decent pace). Melee hunters are a design-induced aberration, perpetuated by players who don’t know or don’t believe better.
A fatality? Unfortunately yes. With more than three years after the Go-Live, a reworking of something that low on a class’ progression is about as likely as me killing Kil’Jaeden. However, next time you meet a melee hunter, just remember that his 10 first levels induced that behaviour, and that you’ll have to prove him with hard numbers that shooting at things from a distance is actually much better for him.
All in the spirit of Winter’s Veil, of course.
Despite the general difficulty finding tanks in the game, on most WoW-related forums you will see the TBC-old war about class tanking superiority (or alleged lack thereof) erupt every so often, akin, for that matter, to the similar perpetual arguments you’ll find amongst healers.
This is, often, fueled by the world’s top Catassing Few achievements and vids, who, for all their speed and efficiency, also contribute to keeping classes, in particular hybrids, pigeonholed into just one narrow specific role – something which is probably systemic to how their own well-oiled machinery operates, but causes its own lot of grief to said classes – after all, if Death & Taxes doesn’t use pallies as anything but healers, they’re bound to know best, don’t they?
(Sidenote: This, among other things, why I disagree with Rohan and Fate about seeing Nihilums and Curses and D&Ts and all the other top Catassing Few as important to the game. I’m utterly convinced the publicity and aura surrounding them, beyond concentrating top raiding on fewer and fewer servers, brings more cons than pros to the game. But I digress and this can’t be helped anyway).
The problem with the notion of the Main Tank as too many guilds and players see it is that it’s a one-size-fits-it-all monolith. Too often, the designated MT will tank a whole zone from instance door to clear, with a certain amount of backup tanks intervening on a couple of fights. As MT is in this context equated with Boss Tank, the prestige of holding the boss and keeping the raid out of harm’s way may just be the biggest factor hindering a more subtle yet much more efficient approach to raid tanking.
No matter how you slice it, the three tanking classes are quite well differentiated and each have their strengths and weaknesses. A short (and necessarily limited) summary :
While details of how the Death Knight will fit into this are probably still several months off (I expect late beta before a reliable pattern emerges), a possible venue of implementation may be either a specialization against high magical environments, or perhaps an experimentation to create a parry tank (a current tankadin qualifies as a block tank) which would go pretty well with the dual-wielding or 2H tanking. But again I digress.
The three current tanking classes are sufficiently specialized in their capabilities and limitations to allow, in return, breaking up the monolithic MT role into situational specialization, like:
And probably a couple more I’m leaving out. My point is, for each of these specific tanking duties there is one class ideally suited to the task and which will, all things being equal, have an easy time, one class which is going to have a hard time no matter how, and one in-between. Using the right tank(s) to address the right situation will make things simpler for the whole raid, as the requirement to have one single very highly skilled player with a good connection and outstanding gear lessens (not to say that you can take talentless e-Bayers in greens instead but you get my drift), merely good players knowing how to play to their strengths will do the trick.
With that in mind, using a warrior to clear up trash pulls without discrimination is needlessly slowing down the raid – a paladin could do the trick faster and safer on multi-mob pulls for instance, or, if none is around, a bear would still be more efficient than a warrior – to put it in 5-men perspective for my non-raiding readers, compare for instance the first hallway in Shattered Halls between an average warrior tank and an average bear or tankadin – in the first case the successive orc lines are needlessly difficult, in the latter cases painlessly easy.
Equally, aside from the prestige tied to boss tanking, having a tankadin on adds instead of the boss for a slow heavy hitter is making thing easier on the raid. A properly geared Bear might be your best choice for an enraging boss or a fight where burst DPS must be applied in a short time frame.
Undoubtedly, this type of reasoning is being used successfully by several raiding guilds, and the above is nothing new to them. There are, however, still plenty of players, including otherwise competent raid leaders, who will scoff at the notion that any raiding instance will have fights where a specialization-driven approach is much more efficient than a monolithic MT-oriented bullheaded mentality.
There is today ample video-supported proof demonstrating that any tanking class can overcome any challenge in the game. In terms of overall progression, a specialization-driven approach to tanking may, however, bring faster results to your raid, keep repair bills lower, let people who have a passion for tanking no matter their class have more fun, and perhaps more importantly, create a proper Tanking Corps. A pure old-school MT is the loneliest job in the game, but a team of specialists sharing duties towards a common goal may diminish tank attrition and burnout.
Caveat Emptor: My regular readers will remember that I’m not even attuned to Kara yet, so yes, you can dismiss this whole thing as the ramblings of someone theorycrafting out of his belf arse. If you do not and disagree with my points, though, I’d love hearing your reasoned objections.
A special thanks goes to Of Teeth and Claws author Karthis, who was kind enough to provide me with the insight into the specific strengths of the Bear tank.
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