Tanks: No More Defense Juggling!

[Satorri]

So, this is pre-preliminary, subject to change, but no one has mentioned it, so I'm going to!

Current plans (for Cataclysm) are to remove Defense as a stat tanks have to juggle. All tanks will now receive crit immunity from talents, a la Bears.



I, for one, think this is brilliant and perfect for making life a bit easier. It is a non-negotiable part of gearing, and a hassle for gearing for tanks, in getting ready to tank at first, then for upgrading gear.

What's more it is (I assume) kind of a mess to balance as Warriors, Paladins, and Death Knights all want the same amount of defense, and share some/most gear slots, but have 2-4 slots that are variable class to class.

I say, cheers!

[Muffin Man]

Agreed. My biggest problem with defense and how it works is that there's nothing in the game to indicate that you're "safe" from enemy crits.

So unless you did research into the game or read other people's research you had no idea that 540/5.6%/689 was the magic number. So to a lot of people it was just arbitrary and really limiting on gear as a player and I'm sure for Blizzard (no one wants to see tanks with 600+ defense walking around b/c it's just silly).

We'll see how this works out, but I'm optimistic.

Edit: A little surprised that they're caving in on block... it's armor x 2. I suppose that will make it easier to balance around, but I liked the spikiness of the warrior block mechanism (I doubt my healers did though).

[sicness]

I'm not sure about it still, I personally found having to juggle my gear to optimize my stats while maintaining 'defense cap' a fun part of the game. Just kinda seems like they're dumbing stuff down. :/

[Valalvax]

So they're removing the mechanic of block and the best tanking stat in the game, besides stamina

[Wars]

They're making block a mitigation stat. I don't know exactly how it works, but block on your gear will either increase the % of the damage you mitigate, the % chance to mitigate damage, or most likely, both.

It could also be just a passive mitigation which never increases and just gets put on you once you have a shield and the skill. Talents(masteries) may also increase it!
I am very aroused. Anyone thought of how insane my new worgen warrior will look in full t10? I'm quite excited.

[Petninja]

This is all great news for me. The only thing that scares me is that I also heard they are removing a lot of passive buffs in favor of active abilities. My bars are already pretty cluttered. I don't know how many more abilities I can fit on my screen.

[Kensu]

I don't mind this change at all, but this raises another question in my mind.

Are they adding in a talent that gets rid of "required" hit rating as well?

There are very few exceptions in a DPS class that does not have to max out his hit rating. For melee its 8% and caster I believe its 17%. If they do add in a talent and remove it from items, are they going to make this available for tanks to be able to pick up the talents that let you get the "non-crit" and the "hit-rating."

If we are able to get both, what are we missing in its place, as we have to spend points in both?

It seems like they are trying to make it more fun and less technical, which is fine by me. But they are making a mess of it already. They are replacing one "must have" with another "must have." Only this time we have to spend valuable talent points to cover these as opposed to making a gear choice.

If I take this thought a step further and now we have a "must have" talent for a tank and a DPS class, but there does not seem to be one for a healer at present time. This gives them more freedom than both tanks and DPS and places tanks at the bottom of the totem pole as they need both of the "must have" talents.

It is a neat idea and I do like it. They just need to be careful about this as it can get unbalance very quickly. Just my thoughts at first pass.

[MugenPerenolde]

In regards to the talents what bizzard is trying to do is pull all the passive talents out of the tree and baking them back into the tree via another means. They are doing what they call Mastery and will talk about it more tomorrow but the impression I got was lets take the Warrior Fury tree for example. Instead of having Cruelty they will pull that talent out and once I spend say 10 talent points in the fury tree as a passive bonus I will get +5% crit.

[Thedom]

Ya the talent mastery sounds pretty sweet, more room for "fun" talents (I think that was their technical term) I'll be interested to see the differences in specs now that we have more points and more places to put them (I believe they said no new tier of talents just new talents in the current ones and to replace the passives).

Also excited about reforging stuff will make it easier to setup gearsets I think.

P.S. Heya Mug!

[Satrina]

No sir, I don't like it. I mean, yes, it's nice that there will be one less stat to juggle (well, more than one.) I think they are going about this business of critical hits backwards. Remove the druid talent completely and let the crits roll.

I mean really, why make it possible to effectively remove an entire game mechanic? That is my biggest beef with defense in general. Nobody should be essentially immune to critical hits. How much sense does it make for the tank to die from whatever non-crit event just happened and now the mob runs around critting everyone else to death? Not a lot, not to me anyway.

Of course, the hits in Ulduar+ are too big to allow crits through, but this is a whole new world coming. Rather than removing critical hits on tanks, why not use crits as spike damage? Lower damage output of mobs across the board, so that when crits land, they become part of the spiking damage intake. You can even adjust crit rates per mob. Have a big, slow hitter that doesn't crit very often, or a fast hitter that doesn't hit very hard but has a very high crit chance. Or a real tough guy that hits pretty hard and can crit decently often! Hard modes might include tweaks to the crit rate (amongst other parameters of course.) I would suggest that talents to reduce crit chance are a nice idea, but the ability to effectively remove them is more limiting than it's worth, in my opinion.

I can right now practically hear people now thinking OMG NO THE RNG WILL FREAK OUT ON YOU AND CRIT YOU 5 TIMES IN A ROW AND GIB YOU! Yep, that is exactly what can happen. Odds are extremely low, but it could and will happen someday. That just adds to the excitement, unpredictability and risk of the encounter. This is what cooldowns should be for!

[Wars]

Well I think Satrina is because the raid game is about execution. If we add in sporadic but inevitable 1.5% hits then its going to go insane. I am also all for it but I think the raid team is just over the subject.

[Hypatia]

I always got the feeling that tanks-stack-defense-until-they-can't-be-crit was an unintended thing. Not that they totally hated it when people realized it could be done, but that they didn't build the game with that possibility in mind from the beginning. Personally, I think it would be fine to bring back crits and crushing blows both, with them just being a proportion of normal hits taken, perhaps. These "bigger hits" aren't a bad thing, just so long as they're part of the expected amount of damage everybody is taking. It's when you have abilities that allow you to sometimes or always prevent them from happening that the damage of *normal* hits has to scale way up, which makes the "big hits" practically unsurvivable.

[TomHuxley]

I also have mixed feelings about this. I liked balancing stats with gear (heaven forbid there should be math involved in an MMO) and never found it a problem to hit the crit removal minimum, but otoh it should make it easier to balance tanks. On the gripping hand, the vaunted tank class "flavor" gets reduced even more with this change.

It'll probably be ok, but I require convincing before I'm thrilled.

[Muffin Man]

In the speculation thread I figured tht based on GC's past comments, we would be taking crits as part of the equation.

I do like the excitement. And in GC's world (where tanks just take half as much dmg with unpredictability thrown in). You could use a cooldown when low on hp and survive. Currently... most likely you can't, that cooldown has to be preventive.

That was the other way to go about it I suppose, and part of me would have prefered it. But I also can't help but think crits have to be removed for part of the population otherwise why do you need a tank again? I suppose we could just have more health than anyone else (other people wear plate too) but it seems that this is a decision to head off unintentional tanks cropping up. Although, I don't see the problem if they do (but then again judging by how people reacted to Void Walkers tanking Sarth3d and Steelbreaker...).

[Maelstrom]

Sounds cool, my only other observation would be that if you have no defence rating, you'll be down a lot of the avoidance that you get from the process of reaching 540 defence anyway. Maybe this is intended though.

[Wars]

There will have to be larger scaling along with statistical conversions off the base stats(str/agi/stam) to get the avoidance back. Along with future progression we'd need these scaling effects.

I hope we get more info on masteries tomorrow, I'm quite looking forward how these will work. Also path of the titans!

[Vindicatar]

is this a joke? i will probably quit wow if they do this. it was/is not hard to reach 540 def, nor is it hard to balance stats. its part of the game. if u cannot balanced stats, u need to L2Play srsly

[Hypatia]

Not hard to reach, Vindicatar--but also really not obvious. If somebody is just starting to play, they have no idea they need to do that. Sure, they can learn with a little research, but there's nothing in the core game that tells you to do it.

Also, having to watch defense when swapping gear around, frankly, rather sucks a lot. At low gear levels, you can't equip DPS items for more threat, even if you want to. As gear improves, you have to watch out for "oh, that sub-par piece I want to replace has a ton of defense on it, so I can't actually replace it." That's just frustrating.

Taking out that hard requirement for tanking gear means tanks will have a *lot* more flexibility in terms of threat/DPS vs. survival. Gear choices that are actual choices are always better than gear *requirements*.

[Wars]

Its not about balanced stats. Its about uncomplicated and more focused ilvl displacement. This allows less variables to to initially matter in the choosing of how to distribute these variables.

I will say this for emphasis. I should never have to think that the next tier of gear is a downgrade/sidegrade due to the fact that they had some terrible itemization distribution and didn't come out with the best EH/Threat/Avoidance values.

All stats should stem off the things that all the items can have and all the other statistics can scale off of. These stats are the base stats. The way they scale? I don't care as long as I can do my job properly.

Masteries, Reforging, and Path of the Titans should have a profound effect on the differences between tanks and those players of all classes If you don't know what those are, you will soon.

[Robstar]

is this a joke? i will probably quit wow if they do this. it was/is not hard to reach 540 def, nor is it hard to balance stats. its part of the game. if u cannot balanced stats, u need to L2Play srsly

This isn't a joke; however, that's a pretty poor attitude you have. Let me get this straight, you will probably quit World of Warcraft because they are technically eliminating a defense cap. So one could say, the only reason you sign on, is because you can look at your 540 number?

It's a very confusing mechanic to begin with, Blizzard has made a good choice by simplifying it down to simply a talent. This isn't to say fury warriors and holy paladins are going to be running around crit-free though. You need to drop the elitist tone you hold, technically you're calling the next average Joe who doesn't fully understand the mathematics of defense (which aren't readily available in-game) a failure, for not understanding what you know.