Machus

I've been thinking about the tank avoidance stats, Block, Parry, Dodge, and what Blizzard could do with them.

The problem, as I see it is that EH is almost always preferred. Block scales badly, so you can have too much for trash and too little for bosses, while avoidance scales badly in conjunction with it. If the boss hits hard, avoidance makes the fight too spiky. If the boss hits fast and lightly, avoidance would be interesting except that block would make the fight trivial....

The hard mode designs that we've seen so far from Blizzard, taking a broad definition of "hard mode" and going back to Classic, fall into a few categories:

1. Timed run: Clear part of the instance very fast and kill a boss before the opportunity to get a reward vanishes: Strat45, Shattered Halls, ZA bear, CoS drake, Arachnophobia, Thorim.
2. Brute force: Kill a boss while adds are up, ignoring some timed mechanics, or otherwise overwhelming the encounter: Faerlina and KT, Sarth 3D

...

I think that over the years Blizzard fixed a huge number of small issues about the game while making big conceptual mistakes about its direction.

In the classic game, leveling was fun, and the game looked big and interesting. The world had its own life and players were very free to enjoy it as they wished. The whole game appeared like it would last forever, and only get bigger. Raiding suited a wide range of abilities. Some things wrong with the classic game were as follows:
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So tonight, an hour before maintenance we went to Mimi. We promptly blew up the tank, sensibly ran around the gun while destroying it, straightforwardly dispatched the head, and carefully dismantled all the pieces again. And then it was dead and we got some loot.

Isn't it strange when a task that previously felt overwhelming and difficult suddenly comes through simply and easily?

The thing that helped a lot, for me, was the simplest tip from Cider's latest movie. I...

So I've taken a break at the end of BC, I've been back for three months now, my mage is learning Mimiron and my warrior is plodding through eastern Northrend killing beasts and gathering herbs.

Both classes are clearly more effective than they were at the end of BC, but they're boring! Well, they're not boring, they're OK, but they're less fun than they were at the end of BC just before the 3.0 changes.

Tanking has become slow. I get decent AoE threat and this shockwave...