Tanks + Exp + Hit + Ghostcrawler

[Loganisis]

@Contrevene - It's called hard modes.

Regarding Vengence - Vengence as a concept isn't bad, it's just that it doesn't seem to be designed in a way that accomplishes the goal. There's too little of it to start with and too much of it afterward. It seems more of a hinderance than anything.

[Kojiyama]

Vengeance as a rough idea of 'scaling threat based on situation' is a good idea. But, yeah, the implementation is pretty backwards and it really doesn't do what it needs to do. The fact that it fails to scale in any way proportional to DPS classes simply means threat is either way, way too easy or way, way too hard depending on the situation.

It really felt like something that was attempting to be clever but ended up as quite a blunt instrument.

Anyway, I don't feel like offering Hit as some kind of Mitigation stat will particularly help anything. I don't think tanks really need to think that way. Like the Vengeance thing, this feels backwards to me. I feel like a tank should get Hit/Expertise for other reasons without needing to stack them on gear.

If they are concerned about tank gear not having enough stats, I will question why the original tanking stat was removed from the game... But that's another issue, really.

[Dragaan]

Just the other day, I was thinking how boring tank gear/stats would be if blizz kept making avoidance/mastery less and less valuable. If they tweak the numbers between raid tiers, tanks could end up having exactly the same avoidance/block during each tier. The thing is, if they don't certain classes (warriors) will end up way too strong later in the xpac. I guess this is what we have to look forward to to keep things interesting... I really don't like the idea too much, though I'm sure I'll get used to it if it happens. At least I'll have an excuse for raising my dps stats, heh.

[Loganisis]

Just the other day, I was thinking how boring tank gear/stats would be if blizz kept making avoidance/mastery less and less valuable. If they tweak the numbers between raid tiers, tanks could end up having exactly the same avoidance/block during each tier. The thing is, if they don't certain classes (warriors) will end up way too strong later in the xpac. I guess this is what we have to look forward to to keep things interesting... I really don't like the idea too much, though I'm sure I'll get used to it if it happens. At least I'll have an excuse for raising my dps stats, heh.

Been thinking the same thing - if Pallys can hit the block cap of 97.4% in heroic gear (but they don't get crit block, do they?) and warriors can get to what, 93% (and have crit block), it does seem that they need to do something to prevent a case where it's back to ICC like damage intakes because there's so much mitigation.

That being said pretending to make hit and exp 'important' stats in order to do this sneakily (which is honestly, what it feels like to me) is wrong. If rebalacing is needed, rebalancing is needed.

[thecrazyman]

They talked about scaling the boss requirement higher - i.e. you need 8% to hit now for current boss but the next one could be 10% hit to connect to the boss upping the percentage by 2% for example. So they may do that for boss tables for our dodge/parry and maybe mastery as well.

[Stephanius]

While we previously had to balance between effective health, avoidance and threat, with EH being mostly static by ilvl and sustained threat being a non-issue it's indeed a bit boring.

With all the gear set merges (no more split between caster and healer mail and leather for example) I'd have hoped to see one gear set used for tanking and dps. In the same way as spirit works as hit for mail and leather damage casters, hit and expertise could work as dodge and parry. The only hitch are survival oriented enchants and gems, but that's a shared problem for the casters.

[Katzazi]

You're still arguing too generally.

Typically:

Melee classes grab hit/exp to benchmarks, then ignore it. <--- this is not interesting gearing, it's required gearing. Their stat priorities stay the same. Priority > Priority 2 > everything else.

[snip]

Tanks don't have that benchmark stat, unless you want to count stamina, but they do have 3 priorities (well, plate tanks). And they have to balance those priorities rather than DPS where P1 is always better than P2.

With tank gearing there are actual limits and balancing that needs to be taken into account.

I think we are speaking about different things. You are speaking about interresting and boring decisions. While I don't think that either dps or tanks have it easier or more interesting than the others at the moment, that's not the relevant point for blizzard.

Blizzards approach is that they have to give us better gear for every better tier. Up until now, they tried to give items more attractive stat selections the farther you got through the content. Items of the first tier nearly always had less attractive stat combinations than those of the last tier. There are two things Blizz wants to avoid: creating only BiS items and creating items that nobody wants. Tanking items have less demand than dps-items in most cases. So it would be bad to create tanking items, that every tank would pass on because items of a lower tier are more attractive.

Now look again at hit and expertise. They may not be "interesting" or "fun" stats for dps classes. And you only want them up to a fixed value. But the important point is, that you actually want to have them up to that point. So more or less every dps would want to have at least some items with hit and/or expertise. So items with those stats would be considered at least as a valid choice by them, or as a sidegrade to get the option to be able to switch some other items around.

As long as hit and expertise keep as unattractive as they are for the majority of tanks (those not doing the hardmodes where you need to have more) it's not the case for tanks. Items of a lower item-level that are BiS would not be replaced with items of one level higher with hit and expertise. Just because the differences in stamina and strength probably would not be able to compesate the loss of 60% of the avoidance stat. Only items with mastery/parry and mastery/dodge (and tier items) would be considered by the majority of the tanks. Mastery + hit/expertise would be ok, too, since they also can be used for dps. But items with parry/dodge + hit/expertise would probably never get a chance (at least if those stats would be somewhat balanced).

It get's quite boring if you only get BiS items with odd mastery + hit/expertise thrown into the mix. Blizz does not want to drop only BiS items, because it would remove most of the reforging.

[Loganisis]

I think you've got 2 contradictory points.

1. Blizzard doesn't want to create BiS
2. Blizzard wants players to grab higher ilvl pieces.

Also, I think there is a severe disconnect between the stated desire to not create BiS and reality.

First - gearing for DPS.
1. Is it higher item level - yes? Take it.
2. Is it the same item level but better itemized? Yes? Take it.

Now, gearing for tanks:
1. Is it higher item level - yes? Almost always take it if it has tanking stats (because while stamina isn't king, it is still going to be very good and you're not going to 'lose' much mitigation/avoidance).
2. Is it the same item level but better itemized? Yes? Take it.

I think from the macro stand point, this is a pretty decent description of the status quo when looking at tanking gear (or even hit/exp + mastery gear with DPS socket bonuses). At least outside of trinkets.

If you agree that this is the macro design, than any change to exp/hit to make them 'defensive' stats will have zero real world impact because, as in the status quo, you'll take (Master>Parry/dodge)/(hit/exp) gear if it's higher item level (typically) in the status quo, but you'll always replace same item level gear with better itemized (Mastery+dodge/parry) gear when the chance occurs.

The only difference, in reality, would be reforging. Instead of reforging into dodge/parry/mastery to max survability, you'd reforge into expertise (likely not hit unless they roll back the taunt/interrupt changes) unless the 'minimum needed to survive' is set high enough you need all the itmeization from gear you can get.

****

In any scenario, unless hit/exp somehow trumps dodge/parry/mastery, whether they are survival stats or not, you're always going to pick the better itemized gear, which will still leave tank gearing more involved than DPS gearing, at least for plate tanks, because plate tanks have 3 high-value stat priorities while DPS almost always has 2 clear high value stat priorities.

****

I can see the arguement for wanting to 'diversify' tank gear, but I think this arguement is flawed as tank gearing is actually more complex than DPS gearing since it's more of a balancing act and BiS fluxuates until you have BiS everywhere due to DR and interplay with talents.

I think a far more interesting way to 'diversity' tank gear, and all gear to be honest, is to add a 3rd rating to gear.

For example, instead of a hypothetical piece of gear having:

200 str
350 sta
2200 armor
120 dodge
120 parry

It would have
175 str
325 sta
2000 armor
110 dodge
130 mastery
100 expertise

And it would be compared against other gear (I'm not trying to balance, just show an example)
150 str
400 sta
2400 armor
100 dodge
150 mastery

Right now Blizz more or less holds stamina and armor and to an extent, strength, in lock-step by item level and # of sockets. If they really want to spice up gearing, they need to break this lock and let the stats that are attractive fluxuate within an ilvl.

Will this fix anything? I don't know - I doubt armor, unless there's loads of it, will really become attractive from the simple fact that 90k armor is the 75% cap I think, and tanks are in the 35-45k armor mark depending on gearing and even with a couple of tier, unlikely to hit 60k, so I don't know if armor would be 'valuable enough' to make a more floating system work. But in terms of making players think and choose, this is a far better design than establishing 'minimum hit/exp' levels for tanks.

[Kojiyama]

The other thing to point out here is that the dynamic between Parry/Dodge/Mastery/(Bonus Armor) is pretty complex. It's already a bit difficult to choose optimal mitigation gear at a glance, honestly. Using tools or spreadsheets is almost a requirement for this.

Why do they want to make tank gearing more complex? I think they would really need to simplify Mastery in order to better facilitate eyeballing if they want to try adding two more strange 'damage as mitigiation' convert mechanics in some way. It almost certainly would just require additional support of tools to figure out what to use.

[Leverage]

Vengeance as a rough idea of 'scaling threat based on situation' is a good idea. But, yeah, the implementation is pretty backwards and it really doesn't do what it needs to do. The fact that it fails to scale in any way proportional to DPS classes simply means threat is either way, way too easy or way, way too hard depending on the situation.

It really felt like something that was attempting to be clever but ended up as quite a blunt instrument.

Anyway, I don't feel like offering Hit as some kind of Mitigation stat will particularly help anything. I don't think tanks really need to think that way. Like the Vengeance thing, this feels backwards to me. I feel like a tank should get Hit/Expertise for other reasons without needing to stack them on gear.

If they are concerned about tank gear not having enough stats, I will question why the original tanking stat was removed from the game... But that's another issue, really.

This really seemed to sum up the issue. I thought the idea of cata was to make stats and specs more clear, easier to use etc. Most people feel vengeance is not working how it was designed... just remove it. Alter base prot threat to compensate. Make taunts missable while your at it, tanks have to cap hit again. Nerf boss damage a little to compensate for the hit capping, or just increase armor on tank gear a bit to compensate.

[Fetzie]

If they are concerned about tank gear not having enough stats, I will question why the original tanking stat was removed from the game... But that's another issue, really.

Yeah, I agree. They take away "the tank stat" on the grounds that it provides a barrier to beginner tanks starting to tank stuff. Then they want us to end up balancing 5 stats, and maybe even haste and crit too. Judging by the amount of "HALP" threads on this forum alone that are basically asking "how do dodge, parry and mastery work?", (and there are bound to be thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people that never pluck up the courage to ask and give up tanking before they realise how awesome it is) I absolutely do not believe that tanks need more stats to balance. Make certain mechanics less clunky/more intuitive and add in nuances that make things interesting/slightly more complicated for the highly proficient tanks, but making the role even less accessible to the layman as it is now is the wrong way about it.