Posts Tagged ‘Warrior’

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)

On Similar Matters

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.

On Similar Matters

An Apology to Stop, and a Reply on Death Knights

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.

On Similar Matters

Death Knight Tanking Unveiled

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.

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Reader Question: Best Moments in WoW?

One of our regular readers would like to continue verifying how deep the often stark contrast between my favourite hardcore blogging antagonist Stop and me is running, and wrote us both asking to define our best moment in WoW (but would rather not be cited by name, so we’ll keep that under wraps).

The thing is, in three years of playing, defining the one single best moment in the game is something I’m hard pressed to do, so instead, I’ll recall a couple of highlights:

Group Quest

My first quest group was on one of my first toons in his 20ies, joining up with two other guildmates to complete several quests in Darkshore and Ashenvale. There was nothing really remarkable about the whole thing, except that the three of us would soon end up top brass in that guild, and later on transition over in one of the few successful guild mergers I’ve seen for level 60 activities. Over time, all three of us also ended up on the officer roll in that guild.

We all still play today, we are all still in the same guild (OK, me not too often since I have a dozen of horde toons wanting some playtime too).

Battlegrounds

My very first venture into WSG, at level 30 (don’t gasp, back in these days the brackets were 21-30, 31-40 and so on) on a rogue. One of the people, a pallie, queuing up at Silverwing with me (back in the day, you had to be in Ashenvale on alliance or the Barrens on horde to queue up, no fancy battle masters in the capital cities), gave me the pep talk and ran me through the basics. When the gates opened, I remember having an adrenaline rush, heart pounding, nervous like hell. I don’t remember whether we won or lost that first game, but it was definitely fun.

In late Summer and up until September 2005, I played in what I like to call the golden age of WSG – the brackets had been retooled to what we know now, and the game was still too fresh in Europe to have many level 60 toons with spare money to spend. In this relatively short timeframe, twinking was almost non-existent. I spent a lot of time on an orc shaman perfecting the twin shaman cap runs: basically ghost wolf and then rush along the Eastern edge of the map, up the ramp to the ally base, both jump down together. Two earthbind totems, two frostshocks, healing – it was a massively unfair advantage for horde, and the only time this could be stopped was when we faced three smart hunters who understood that owning the midfield was the key to victory. With Improved Concussive shot, they simply stopped anyone from passing (their team mates moping out in close quarters), and edged out a very impressive 3-0 victory in times where the best alliance could hope for was usually losing 2-3.

But then I got involved in a chat with the alliance guildmates, and we came up with a two-hunter counter to the twin shaman runs – one trap upstairs, a shadowmelt nelf hunter there, the pet hidden out of sight, and the twin shamans were separated and killed cleanly without being able to support each other. And suddenly the almost impregnable horde domination of WSG faltered, at least in that one single bracket.
The fun eventually stopped around the end of September, when suddenly every single game had at least three or four undead rogues with Fiery Weapon enchants and more HP than a blue-decked warrior (soon followed by an equally impressive army of gnome rogues). It basically removed most of the competition and fun in that WSG bracket.

Much much later, when leveling my belfadin, I stopped by in the 30-39 brackets, mainly in AB, and realizing that even without respeccing or regearing for the task, my healing definitely made a difference in the outcome of the game was definitely another highlight. It culminated with AV at level 70, where my personal pride was to sit both at the top of the healing done and HK meter, not only knowing that healing helped the team, but also certain that I had won most honour from these games.

Arenas

I joined up with my buddy Steptoe during season 2 for a lock / pallie duo. When I joined the team, it was at 1440, and we promptly proceeded to tank down to 1323. But then, the steady progress we made, week after week, while our duo started to act as a functioning, well-oiled team, was definitely one of the other highlights in the game for me. We ended up just shy of 1700 rating. That’s of course still massively in the scrub range by all standards, but for us it still meant steady progress and an improvement week after week. I still miss arenas with good old Steptoe, bless his black rotten forsaken heart.

Raiding

The first time Stoney dragged me through ZG was an amazing moment. It was just a short two-boss run and my lock was level 53 at that time. I felt utterly useless but still, the scale up from 5-men to 20-men play was definitely an impressive experience, along with the unique jungle atmosphere of good ole’ Trollville.

Another memory which stands out was when we quickly assembled 16 people to have a quick go at Kurinnaxx after an MC run – it was far from an optimal setup, it was getting late-ish, but we just went in there, cleared the trash methodically and downed the boss without any fuss. Oh, the kill itself was nice, but it was actually the pride in the guild chat that we were able to simply get job done despite not having the optimal setup (most of the guild was still in ZG kit at that time, it’s not like we were 16 full T1 or T2-clad warriors) which stands out most in my mind. Oh, and remember the two guys I mentioned in my first group quest memory? One of them was running on a dorf priest alt, and won the Vestments of the Shifting Sands. When his white-bearded and dignified elder dwarf character donned these, hilarity ensued.
I’ve always thought of him as the pink plush pocket healer since.

Tanking

Long time readers will remember I had issues with Shadow Labs early on, in particular finding groups which would be able to pass Vorpil. After Steptoe quit the game earlier this year, I respecced my belfadin to protection just so that I could go back to tanking and test out the various odd pieces of gear I had assembled in 7 months as a healbot. Well, going in there with your random PUG, I didn’t expect too much but that flawlessly executed run still stands out as one of the great moments I’ve had in the game.

Exploring

The first thing which really impressed me when I started playing WoW after two years in FFXI was when I noticed a wolf killing a squirrel in Dun Morogh. I watched this happen in awe and this simple bit of coding to improve the atmosphere of the world made a huge difference for me. Suddenly I felt like I was playing in a world which felt “real” in the sense that it conveyed the impression that it was existing for itself. FFXI always had a certain artificial quality to it, a bit like those horror rides you can find in theme parks where the various figures and effects only spring to life when a visitor (or his cart) passes by. WoW had that unique quality that it was a “living world” functioning regardless of whether a player was present or not, and other elements only reinforced that feeling. In FFXI for instance you could cross an entire zone chased by a train of monsters (back in the days you had to zone out in order to have a mob return to its spawn or patrol area, they simply never gave up), reach the gates of the city with a sliver of life and watch, with your final breath, your blood splatter the armor of the totally impassive guards who simply ignored what was happening at their feet (not that the goblins chasing you would be bothered by them witnessing your murder either). In WoW, at least at the lower levels and around factions you’re in good standing with, a guard means salvation instead of stony indifference.

In general, even years later, WoW never ceases to amaze me with little details I hadn’t noticed before. Rhoelyn’s little Azerothian picture quiz was really fun in that respect. Just a couple of days ago, while leveling my latest little belf mage in Eversong Woods, I noticed, for the first time, that behind some troll village where you are sent on one of those nice extermination quests, there was, just out of reach, a burning tower.

Well, there we go. Those are definitely among the highlights of my three years in WoW, and among the reasons why, pre-WotLK depression or not, I keep enjoying the game. Is this specific to a casual player? I doubt it. I am however quite curious to read what Stop will come up with, if he decides to answer our reader’s question as well.

And you? What are your own highlights in the game?

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And while I’m complaining, let’s talk about Repair costs

Talk about a Non-Sequitur: Poster Veemon raises some valid points (unfortunately presented under a whiny layer distracting from the issues) on the matter of repair bills for tanks when put in perspective with their overall poor farming capabilities.

Blue poster Tharfor responds with this little gem of corpspeak:

Each class has an upkeep cost, which includes things like purchasing reagents, food & water, etc…

While a cloth wearer may spend less in repairs than a plate wearer, he’ll likely spend more money on things like reagents.

Note that it’s not important for all classes to have completely equal upkeep costs. The goal is simply for each class to be fun and burden free.

Yeah, right. Because the non-tanks spend 20g on spell reagents per raid (not even talking about tankadins who have the same repair bills as warriors AND blessings to do).

Look, Blizzard, you admitted healer burnout was in part tied to their lack of soloability, and fixed it somewhat in patch 2.3 with the added free spelldamage. You also acknowledged that tanks suffer from similar problems, and go as far as introducing a new tanking class in WOTLK.

Just add 2 and 2 together. Stop penalizing tanks who get a higher death tax every single time they improve their gear (and hence their usefulness at their task). Rethink repair costs so every upgrade doesn’t become more expensive.

On Similar Matters

A Plea for a Specialization-Driven Approach to Tanking

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 :

  • Warriors are good at holding slow-hitting single targets over a long period of time, come with the best means to mitigate magical damage and bring the highest avoidance scores to the table. Their primary weakness is multi-mob tanking, which takes immensely more effort than for a druid or a paladin, and on fast-hitting bosses they remain open to crushing blows. Further, a full protection warrior has, unfortunately, little practical use when he’s not tanking.
  • Druids excel in soaking fights, having both the highest HP Pools and the highest armour – for obvious reasons, as they cannot become uncrushable, their goal is to outlast whatever else happens. Druids also have the best single-target aggro generation, are much better at tanking 3-4 mobs at a time than warriors. In exchange, they are weak against magical damage and in general resist fights put them at a disadvantage.
  • Paladins in turn are second to none for AoE tanking, can front load a ton of threat for early damage and provide complete crushing blows immunity against fast hitting bosses. Their trade-off is a lower health pool (patch 2.3 will help here), the least tools for reclaiming aggro, and lower single-mob threat generation than their druid and warrior peers. Silencing mobs are particularly challenging, the lack of charge / intercept type moves makes it harder against spread out ranged opponents, and their itemization headaches provide no room to help in resistance fights. They also make bad Offtanks, as much of their threat requires them to be hit, which usually doesn’t happen if you’re only second on the threat meter.

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:

  • Resistance Tank
  • Soak Tank
  • Heavy & Slow Hitter Tank
  • Fast Hitter Tank
  • Caster Tank
  • AoE Tank
  • OffTank
  • Aggro-Regain Tank (meaning fights where aggro dumps are frequent)

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.

On Similar Matters

Global Cooldown 2.3 Revisited

OK, so after going through a couple of spreadsheets here are my conclusions:

  • People not using stopcasting on spells with casts longer than the GCD will either see no change or actually improve their DPS if they happen to hit the next spell button within the Quartz red zone
  • People currently using /stopcasting on spells with cast times longer than the GCD will see no change if latency remains constant or rises. If however the latency drops by less than 50% of your initial latency (the one you had when initiating the previous cast), the penalty will be at worst up to twice your initial latency. In exchange for that you remove the risk of cancelling your pending cast which occurs today in the exact same situation
  • People using instants with a GCD cooldown or longer will suffer from the same penalty if latency drops by less than 50%. This affects, among others, Holy Shield for tankadins.

The real issue is that it impairs your ability to adjust, especially in PvP. If for the time being a warrior goes for a hamstring too early but suddenly gets a notification that his opponent has dodged, he can switch to mashing overpower, which will proc as soon as it gets through. Under the new system, it will get denied and delayed for twice the current latency at worst. Big deal for warriors mainly, but also rogues who can no longer mash keys in order to keep a stunlock going.

For tankadins, assuming a latency of 100ms (you probably shouldn’t be tanking if it is more than that, you’re putting your group at risk otherwise no matter how), that means up to 200ms of crushability between recasts. A problem warriors will face with renewing Shield Block as well for that matter, on top of their issue about more risks to be crushed on fast hitting mobs.

With that in mind, it will become more important than ever that the rest of the melee DPS do not give the boss any additional parries (as it shortens the delay to the next swing, increasing the risk that a crushing blow goes through during the HS gap). To that effect, all melee DPS including hunter pets, an off-tank, felguards, treants, shadowfiends and melee elementals should be behind the boss.
As I once mentioned a couple of months ago, the simplest way for the tank to optimize their and their raid’s gameplay may be to make turning the boss away from the raid a habit which should become the norm whereas another orientation becomes the exception, not the other way around. If you do and it constitutes a change of your habits, I’d advise making sure your rogues know about it beforehand though.

Based on all this, I can only keep my recommendation not to mash in 2.3. Unless they adjust the mechanisms again, of course. Remember, a PTR is a test realm, things may yet change.

On Similar Matters

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.

On Similar Matters

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.

On Similar Matters

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