I agree with Aerona, I love my warrior, however will go with whatever tank is the easiest in any given encounter, right now that seems to be the DK.
Im am a Bear, Will Always Be a Bear. Let Blizzard do what they will with tanking. I will still tank it... even if I die. At this point it isnt wise to speculate, the oil companies did that with speculative trading, and look what that did to gas prices.
I would have to see it cost 10g/100 stam. Id have to just tank naked instead of putting my gear on. FIGHT THE SYSTEM!!!!
To me, the strange thing is a well-played warrior can be a bad tank, because he has less health then a run-of-the-mill druid. This is not because the warrior player got better or worse, it's because the game was changed. More and more what determines tank choice is the changes Blizzard made in the last patch.
Along with the most casual-friendly expansion requiring 70 old-style levels, this is the weirdest thing about wow.
If glyphs are required to FIX an ability then the ability needs fixing. No glyph should be required even for min/maxing purposes...not even the block glyph.Originally Posted by Tomba
Former healbot now a Disgruntled protection warrior.
Interesting numbers. No real surprises though in my mind.
As a Warrior, I think if they resolve the AoE threat issue and the vs. magic damage issue, we will be fine.
In line with this, spamming Heroic Strike simply must go. I think Spell Reflect should be reworked or changed as well as it has such limited worth. A truly affective vs. magic ability would be much more appreciated. Likewise, I find the need to spec into Deep Wounds to get an additional boost in damage and threat a bit silly. That's stuff the 40+ point Protection talents should facilitate.
Devastate needs to work with a 2h as well.
I'll be interested to see how the new Glyphs affect all of this.
I'm worried alot of people now are just looking at numbers and saying, "oh this class is better than that class cause their number is higher."
The point of the test wasn't to prove that one class is better than another, or one class needs nerfs and another needs buffs. It was to show the ridiculousness of chain CD's. I almost think it was a bad thing to post WWS for all 4 classes, simply due to the fact that people will think it's meant to be a comparison between them.
I'm really pleased to see this data. Great work. Hopefully there is more to come...
On one hand, as a DK tank myself, I'm glad to see DKs are performing so well on certain fights, and perhaps further in Ulduar, a more general, positive consensus will be formed on DK tanks.
However, DK tank performance on this degree is... maybe too much?
I don't know, it's too early to say with all the testing perhaps.
However, I do have a question for Preomintion's DK tank, Devium: I see that Devium was a Blood tank for that, using the Monarch Crab, Nightmare seed, etc. to survive. Progression stuff.
How would a Frost or Unholy tank preform with similar gear, in a similar group (player skill and so on)? Obviously neither Frost or Unholy can get their HP quite as high as Blood can. There is also WotN, which any DK in another tree will be sad to be without once they've seen what it can do.
Would either of these specs have survived as long? The short answer is likely "no", but I wonder what the numbers would be like.
This is how my guild is going to operate, a lot of us are leveling alts now to run Naxx until Ulduar comes out, since our mains are pretty well geared out of 25 man raids and we are only short 2 bosses in Naxx 25 anyway. Otherwise I am leveling my DK for tanking and using as a Naxx farming character if I am not doing Ulduar.
The measure of a life is the measure of love and respect. So hard to earn, so easily burned - Neil Peart
World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> Patchwerk Tank Testing 2nd Trials
Link to the second set of testing. I wish that these guys didn't have to go through this much hell on stuff that isn't even fully changed yet. Like the hinted at stance changes, or savage defense for druids.
Informed readers will understand the true purpose of this thread and people who can only look one way when crossing the street will get hit by a car, what can ya do?
There is something so appealing about backhanding someone across the face with a shield.
One thing I haven't been sure of is whether the new glyphs are minor or major. I have 6 glyphs vying for the major slots, but still have useless minor ones like Battle Shout and Enduring victory, simply because there's not much to replace them.
I thank Xav, Premonition, and all the others that put in the time for both sets of data. It tends to be a thankless job. I also tend to believe that the proposed SW glyph was not the answer to problems of EH or MEH. I would have taken it. Its potential was to good to pass up just never thought the answer was a similar tool as IBF. Saying that there are a few observations I noticed.
First, this was a straight phyiscal damage test. Second, I was reading Prem's DK, Devium's posts and they were saying that yes at the high end DK's could survive better but in the 8k damage level warriors/pallies preformed better. And I've read many posts here saying that warriors/pallies would be ok for Ulduar because this is our niche. Lore even suggested that maybe they'd have a boss that hit for 1k x 10 per sec (it was just an example). My observations of bosses so far in Uldauar is that none of that is in the design. Of the bosses now for progression, DK's are the favored tank.
Going off of MMO's site, Hodir hits for 25k, plus after acquiring "Frozen Blows" 70% less physical damage but increases frost damage by 40K. Thorim does start out hitting at 8k but has two more abilites - 1) unbalancing strike (think Raz) -200 defense for 15 secs + 250% weapon dmg and 2) Lighting Charge (Nature dmg), casted every 15 secs with increasing damage. The Iron Council has 3 members that you can look up there abilities and if you see its a ton of magic damage and lastly Freya which is the more again a magic damage fight. There is physical dmg for the Council and Freya but I don't have those numbers yet.
Yes, Freya has adds as Thorim and I guess that's what block is suppose to be for but as far as I see all of the fights for the named boss in the encounters favor a DK. All the fights have serious magic damage. I have heard that you can SR the Frozen Blow from Hodir but the 25k hits are the high end of physical damage which favors the DK. As for the other 3 fights, the magic damage alone favors their spell mitigation. I also think that "unbalancing strike" could favor short CD's. I'm just stating that I don't understand the design philsophy for giving one tank high EH and MEH then designing encounter with a ton of magic damage or magic damage with physical damage.
What I don't see yet is any direction that they are going for shield-wearing tanks in this patch so far. I've read the posts that Satrina and Xav have posted and believe they had well reasoned and documented arguments. As of this time, I don't see blizz even addressing the inbalances forthcoming.
Well it is fairly important that all tanks have roughly the same survivability. It doesn't matter how each tank's survivability is achieved, and by corollary how it's bounded. So it could be that one tank has more basic stats, another has more abilities they can use, and the third has better damage reduction factors. A fourth tank may survive as long as they do because of good synergy with the healers or raid buffs. If they survive a similar length of time they are balanced. So this type of test is a meaningful test. Of course each test applies only to the type of encounter being tested.
Some issues that the tests might uncover that are broader than the obvious "class X is more survivable than class Y" are:
- Some design parameters, like damage reduction or synergy with the healers, may turn out not to matter, when designers possibly wanted them to matter.
- Tanks may have similar survivability but radically different raw stats. This is not a problem for raiding, but it may be for perception or other balance in the game.
The strange is: the data that Xav post (thank you!) and what I saw/read (videos and comments about the new encounters in Ulduar) doesn't fit with the Blizzard idea of "bring the player not the class" or "balanced fights and any can be MT".
Course, I can be wrong and we know, it's a PTR, will keep changing and isn't a final version (never be).
But I have the same question of Whitegold: the new glyphs are all major one?
[PVP-A] Baiakin Warrior Prot
I'm Brazilian, sorry for any bad spelling!
Keep in mind we are still fairly early in the PTR/testing cycle and things will change between now and patch release. The sky isn't failling and I would submit they are still open to change if they are setting up a test scenario like Xav described.
Obviously, Blizzard is aware of the concerns of tanks of all classes. That said, I'll work with what I've got and myself and another prot warrior will continue to be the tanks our guild relies upon. Any other class of tank has a tall mountain to climb to surpass our ability, experience and reputation.
your hat may be nice, but I have the little white tank top that says Legendary right across my boobs. I win. (or more correctly, H wins)
I spent an hour on the PTR as well playing around with these two on Sunday. The DPS tank test was interesting, though I'm not sure what it taught me other than I need to learn to manage my (and raid) mitigation cooldowns more effectively, if this is the type of boss attack style we will see in ulduar or higher-end raid content. Though IMO this type of stacking damage modifier makes it more a DPS race than how-long-can-the-tank-last, such as loatheb or sarth3d.
The DPS test patchwerk dummy was no sweat in 10-man, easily downed (though we found out the hard way he does hatefuls). Overall, the raid instance is fairly pretty, though we only got to explore a tiny part of it.
I don't know if Premo went back and redid the tests but a quick glance showed they had a different grp makeup for each test. Like the warrior test had fewer healers while the deathknight one had more. For the sake of any comparison (which people will make) the tests should be as close as possible, especially # and type of healers need to be the same since the only benchmark seems to be how many buffs patchwerk can get.
The only thing I have to add is remember tanking topic #3? how HP was the biggest and only difference in progression content? what happened to that, I would hate for us to have gotten druids nerfed for no reason by an untested theory.
Thats a very good question. Looks like dk's cd's and healers new abilities have changed the way health was superior to everything? The way i understand it they did not do these tests to compare classes, but to show how chaining cd's could possibly break the game/boss encounters?
What AoE threat issue?
Please guys, read the thread, especially when it's only a couple pages long. The link to the second round of testing is up, they redid the tests to control for variables like type of healers and debuffs. The results were not much changed, although the pally tank did better, but the blood-spec DK tank did unreasonably well once again.
This is in part a much worse problem than it was when Wrath shipped; the original idea behind chained CDs was that certain (if not all) DK tank specs couldn't survive without them, so you had to learn to play yours CDs. When this apparently became too challenging for some first time tanks, Blizz responded by baking in a ton of survivability into frost presence and the new tanking rune, with the resulting buff providing them with competative levels of armor, HP, and avoidance in addition to their CDs.
This also made the tank DPS balance worse, since now DKs can spec into just the tanking CDs and a couple of basic tank talents and survive any encounter in the game, which means the rest of your talents (and a lot of gems thanks to the tanking rune) can be devoted to dps/threat stats.
Blizzard needs to go with one of the other; if they aren't going to make DKs CD dependent, then they need to both nerf the CDs and make them longer so they can't be chained. If they want to keep them CD dependent (which I actually think is an interesting playstyle) then they need to make them squishy enough that there's a serious threat of dying when the CDs aren't put up correctly.
With the druid stam nerf, I think druids will be in an ok place once their bear-block comes online, but if not they need to get an avoidance buff rather than have some more EH thrown their way (they'll still be at the top of the EH heap, and that's fine by me).
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