Tanks in MoP

[sifuedition]

Looking for any information about how tank balance is in MoP Beta so far. I have all four and love my pally. The initial numbers look made it sound like pally was going to be noticably weaker than the others. Just looking for anyone who can give first hand opinions on it who has played more than one.

[Leucifer]

The initial numbers look made it sound like pally was going to be noticably weaker than the others.

.....For the first time in a long time. It's past due.

Edit: Yes. In all fairness, that's a less than constructive statement. I'll admit, I'm curious as between the classes, in Cata, they were homogenized to a degree. A fair example.... warrior, rend + thunderclap = DK diseases = druid bleeds on targets = consecrate + hor. Many of the talents mirrored this effort.

I'm curious as to how the new talent system will be employed as it concerns tank balance. will certain tanks once again shine as single target / MT roles? Will some be stronger for magic heavy encounters? I mean, Blizzard has been torn between balancing and homogenizing tanks.... which while a little boring, keeps the clases viable for many/all encounters..... versus playing to strengths and weakness of a class, and risking alienating a group of players. Which direction do they seem to be going?

[Fetzie]

.....For the first time in a long time. It's past due.

As if there wasn't all that stuff in DS that ignored our main mitigation mechanic...

[sifuedition]

I guess I just don't understand all the pally hate and never have. I've never felt like warriors were ever that far behind. I never liked that dks sucked for a large part of Wrath even though they were far and away the best at the beginning of it. I love the balance the tanks seem to have right now. As long as the gap from1 to 4 is not big, I don't care who is 1 and who is 4.

And I hope they don't go with "specialization". I hate the idea that "you, you're class x tank, you have adds" or vice versa. Just like spine, sometimes the more skilled tank needs a certain role on a specific fight, and I would hate to not be able to do that because I'm class "x".

The initial thoughts I was hearing boiled down to:

DKs - looking strong with both heals and shields, well equiped for most any fight and interesting to play

Bears - well, no real heals but sd plus having always been kind of a "soaking" tank, they are ok but still a little boring like they have always been

Warriors - losing some of the spammy fun-ness and taking away a chunk of the toolbox due to rage management but working

Pally - Just not possible to keep the mechanics at a high enough up time and not effective enough even when buff/ability x is up

Sound fair? Any of that fixed yet?

[Leucifer]

As if there wasn't all that stuff in DS that ignored our main mitigation mechanic...

Which was that? Shield block? If that's the case... then DK's and warriors were sitting in the same boat as warriors have a shield and DK's blood shield was only useful against physical attacks. Bears were/are just something else.

Hell, I still am laughing over the glyph that gave pally the aoe stun vs elementals and dragonkin. Could understand how that was a nod to the basic nature of a pally for Wrath, but then to pull that..... come on Blizzard.... stop sucking up to pallies.

[Tielyn]

Bear/Pally here.

Bear plays fairly close to live, but the main differences are you're generating Rage for different reasons (instead of for attack, now you're using it for defensive power -- a faceroller tank will be stuffed because they'll never have the rage to keep their SD up, so they're at 12% dodge the entire time) and some of your tools went missing (no more AoE taunt, no more Lacerate to 3, then Pulverize) and you are way more squishy at the onset. Expect Ulduar-level spiky stam-stacking bear tanks again. :|

Paladins are a struggle with initial threatgen in my experience. You don't get to use ShotR or WoG until you get to 3 Holy Power, and there's no way to hold any holy power without chain pulling. There are a lot of points where bad timing leaves you with all of your attacks on cooldown, and burst DPSers are going to give you a headache. I feel like I'm missing a lot of the Save versus Death tools that druids have, too, but I don't seem to need them as much either. I felt like I was fighting constantly to get 3xHoly Power just so I could keep threat off of the DPS.

-Tielyn

[Leucifer]

I guess I just don't understand all the pally hate and never have. I've never felt like warriors were ever that far behind. I never liked that dks sucked for a large part of Wrath even though they were far and away the best at the beginning of it. I love the balance the tanks seem to have right now. As long as the gap from1 to 4 is not big, I don't care who is 1 and who is 4.

The origins of pally hate were from playing DK/warrior (or bear) and having the raid go, "No.... pally is best/optimal. They're going to be the tank." When you have players of the same skill level, and one class has an edge.... well, there you have it. That's where I found myself in Wrath anyway.

And I hope they don't go with "specialization". I hate the idea that "you, you're class x tank, you have adds" or vice versa. Just like spine, sometimes the more skilled tank needs a certain role on a specific fight, and I would hate to not be able to do that because I'm class "x".

Yeah. That kinda sucked. DK did shine on a few fights in Wrath, but otherwise, we trailed the pack. Like I said, there's an upside/downside to both. I'm curious to see where it goes.

The initial thoughts I was hearing boiled down to:

DKs - looking strong with both heals and shields, well equiped for most any fight and interesting to play

Bears - well, no real heals but sd plus having always been kind of a "soaking" tank, they are ok but still a little boring like they have always been

Warriors - losing some of the spammy fun-ness and taking away a chunk of the toolbox due to rage management but working

Pally - Just not possible to keep the mechanics at a high enough up time and not effective enough even when buff/ability x is up

Sound fair? Any of that fixed yet?

Interested to know. Definitely.

[Fetzie]

It seems the focus for threat gen has been moved away from ShoR. AS and J are both doing quite a bit more damage than ShoR for me.

And btw, that HW stun glyph is still in the game in MoP

[Leucifer]

Paladins are a struggle with initial threatgen in my experience. You don't get to use ShotR or WoG until you get to 3 Holy Power, and there's no way to hold any holy power without chain pulling. There are a lot of points where bad timing leaves you with all of your attacks on cooldown, and burst DPSers are going to give you a headache. I feel like I'm missing a lot of the Save versus Death tools that druids have, too, but I don't seem to need them as much either. I felt like I was fighting constantly to get 3xHoly Power just so I could keep threat off of the DPS.

-Tielyn

Sounds a bit like a DK in a way.

[Tielyn]

One other thought I neglected to add earlier. The thing that bears and pallies have in common is a 'Pick One or The Other to Cash Your Resource In' stunt now.

Bears have: Savage Defense (+45% dodge for 6 seconds) OR Frenzied Regen (a big whopper heal that is based on your Vengance - mine heals for 82K). Both of them take you out of being able to do so again for a number of seconds, as they both cost 55 Rage, and you will be constantly working to refill your rage bar -- you get no rage from being hit, only from hitting the boss, plus a bonus from hitting with Mangle (+5 Rage , +7 if talented), plus 15 for every melee or Mangle crit, and Mangle is on a 6 second cooldown that gets magically refreshed some percentage of the time if you have stacks of Lacerate and a Thrash debuff on the target. (12% per, for a max of 48%, by the way).

On Live, bears have Savage Defense on an auto proc based on crit, and Frenzied Regen is a long cooldown.

Pallies have: Shield of the Righteous OR Word of Glory as their 3HP cash ability - one is a damage ability that also gives you an absorb for a few seconds, and the other is a heal that only gets powerful after multiple ShotRs in a row (each ShotR adds a stack that increases WoG heals, but as soon as you cash your WoG, the stack gets reset to 0). The 'stronger' heal of the two if you don't have any stacks is probably Holy Light, which has its crit chance increased if you took the Sacred Shield talent (though I just checked the calculator, it looks like they just changed that to WoG instead of Holy Light... so this part may be out of date from Sunday before last when I was pally tanking...or the calculator is out of date. Will try and verify tonight.)


You only get Holy Power when you hit HotR, Crusader Strike (4.5 second cooldown), or Judgement (6 second cooldown) with the occasional lucky Avengers Shield proc. Inquisition is no longer available to pallies. The level 75 talents each give you some form of free HP generation, but either at the cost of a long cooldown ability or only having a 15% proc chance. This makes your rampup time to do anything at least 9 seconds, which is a very long time when the DPS is in there spamming AoE abilities....

Oh, and one more thing -- you only have one, one target, 8 second taunt now (Hand of Reckoning). The three-mob, target friendly taunt is gone. So is the AoE bear one. So if your DPS gets overzealous, you can only save one of them from themselves every eight seconds.

-Tielyn

[Fetzie]

ShoR now reduces physical damage taken by 30% for 3 seconds, mastery is supposed to increase the damage reduction, the bonus to WoG and your block chance

[Leucifer]

The first part of the quote was interesting Tielyn. I mean, what you describe shows another level of "homogenization" in a sense. Really sounds like similar (not identical) abilities that are used in similar (not identical) forms of mechanics. Choice A or B... with similar effects.... and both drawing on a not insignificant amount of resources. It's interesting in that it's like having two different flavors of chocolate or vanilla ice cream. They're both, at heart, to be used for similar functions, but go about it in slightly different ways.

Oh, and one more thing -- you only have one, one target, 8 second taunt now (Hand of Reckoning). The three-mob, target friendly taunt is gone. So is the AoE bear one. So if your DPS gets overzealous, you can only save one of them from themselves every eight seconds.

-Tielyn

So, did they remove the AoE warrior taunt then also? Just curious. Bear and Warrior had similar abilities. This kind of puts those classes on the same footing with DK's for AoE taunts and single target taunts. I'll admit, I like it as it forces the dps to have to pay closer attention to what they're doing.... but on the downside, you "know" the tank will still get blamed.

[Tengenstein]

Warriors still have their 3min AoE taunt in the from form of Mocking Banner, the only limitation on it means we can't ahve it up at the same time as other banners, putting it up will replace the previous banner.


Also what this about us losing our toolbox? we've lost a fair whack of mobility, and we've lost the multi taunt aspect of vigilance but out tool box has grown, we no longer need to stance dance fore shattering throw, or hamstring, or execute, Yes we've lsot colossus smash and rend, but we've gained Raid wall, and raid crit buff, and deadly calm, and a barkskin clone RC and LS no longer share a CD, we have the option of a knock back, and we can choose between fixed amount damage absorbs and %based block models.

Prot warriors will need a few more keybindings come MoP

Pally hate comes from "lololol i nearly died lay on hands woop back to full health, lololol i did die auto ardent defender proc, back to 30% health, oh and i has better effective health you ragemosnters on and lololol i has a 1 button macro for my rotation and lolol we're wiping, better DI someone so i don't have to pay for repairs, and isn't my hair is fabulous BTW" and most warriors where grumpy from the carpal tunnel syndrome they got from having to press HS so bloody much.

[boogi]

Warriors still have their 3min AoE taunt in the from form of Mocking Banner

Mocking banner is not a taunt, it's a 6 second focus same as Challenging Shout has always been. Warriors have NEVER had a an AoE taunt.

[Tengenstein]

Mocking banner is not a taunt, it's a 6 second focus same as Challenging Shout has always been. Warriors have NEVER had a an AoE taunt.

My point was we still have Challenging shout, just by another name.

[sifuedition]

Also what this about us losing our toolbox? we've lost a fair whack of mobility, and we've lost the multi taunt aspect of vigilance but out tool box has grown, we no longer need to stance dance fore shattering throw, or hamstring, or execute, Yes we've lsot colossus smash and rend, but we've gained Raid wall, and raid crit buff, and deadly calm, and a barkskin clone RC and LS no longer share a CD, we have the option of a knock back, and we can choose between fixed amount damage absorbs and %based block models.

Prot warriors will need a few more keybindings come MoP

Pally hate comes from "lololol i nearly died lay on hands woop back to full health, lololol i did die auto ardent defender proc, back to 30% health, oh and i has better effective health you ragemosnters on and lololol i has a 1 button macro for my rotation and lolol we're wiping, better DI someone so i don't have to pay for repairs, and isn't my hair is fabulous BTW" and most warriors where grumpy from the carpal tunnel syndrome they got from having to press HS so bloody much.

I haven't played my beta warrior (damn D3) but the first feedback I heard was that prot warriors couldn't hit half the stuff they were used to due to rage, idk. That may have only been true initially or just poor feedback. It's kinda why I was asking.

Pally hate comes from "lololol i nearly died lay on hands woop back to full health, lololol i did die auto ardent defender proc, back to 30% health, oh and i has better effective health you ragemosnters on and lololol i has a 1 button macro for my rotation and lolol we're wiping, better DI someone so i don't have to pay for repairs, and isn't my hair is fabulous BTW" and most warriors where grumpy from the carpal tunnel syndrome they got from having to press HS so bloody much.

See. I don't see this as accurate. Sure, those abilities were present and usable. The truth of it is, though, I used LoH to save someone else 99% of the time. Which comes back to a different kind of utility than warriors. My pally watched raid frames like a hawk to HoP, HoS, LoH, etc people. My warrior didn't watch raid frames so much. He was a pick-up / stun monster which was awesome on LK. I did hate it when I saw someone going down on my warrior and couldn't do anything about it, but I also hated it on my pally if I couldn't get to adds, w/e in time. Generally, I'm saying I heard a lot of that type of pally hate but never felt it was really accurate to what actually usually happened in raids.

ShoR now reduces physical damage taken by 30% for 3 seconds, mastery is supposed to increase the damage reduction, the bonus to WoG and your block chance

Whoa. This is the kind of "fix" I was talking about but this seems like too much. I mean, it balances the warrior ctc with shield block but this seems too strong. I guess if they are designing around this being present, then it should be balanced, but...

My biggest concern is that they decided that SB on cd in TBC was bad design because just hitting it on cd was not compelling or truly interactive. It just becomes upkeep hassle. Now, instead of truly Active Mitigation, we are going back to SB on cd.

[Tengenstein]

On beta feedback:Almost every prot warrior ability has no rage cost. SS, dev, Rev, TC, SW, Spell reflect, all of the talent abilities, the only things that you really will use regularly that have a rage cost are shield block, Shield barrier, HS and Cleave, and mostly you only use HS/Cleave when you have an ultimatum proc to make it free. I'm finding i don't always have the rage to hit SB on CD.

On pally hate: i saw alot of gormok insta gibs warrior, paladin lives, or Paladin CBA to move form Icehowls charge, oh well, and paladin doesn't need to be taunted off after soulreaper, whilst all the while being piss poor at keeping holy shield up. and in ICC paladins had almost as many stuns as a warriors with HoJ and HW. I saw alot of mediocre players faceroll content as a paladin were warriors had to work a fair whack harder to achieve the same results.

On Active mitigation: I don't really understand how pallies is meant to work, HP seems to come somewhat slowely, we're still sing about 9secodns for 3HP so only looking at a 33% uptime on Bastion, seems kind really spikey. As for warriors, SB was on a cd in wrath, its on a CD in Cata, and its still on CD in MoP. it doesn't feel any different to how it feels on live, the only difference is that you're now hitting you buttons and hoping they come off CD faster so you have enough rage to press it again when it comes off CD. I think the real mark of a good warrior tank is knowing when to dump with Sbar instead of SB, Sbar with full venagence is looking to be about a 100k absorb shield if you put 60 rage into it @90, that about 20-25% of your health, thats a pretty serious dent in some of the HC bosses special attacks. the SB mechanic is boring as hell and can probably be macroed into SS, Rev, And dev and you'll do just fine, timing it weel and knowing when to put Sbar up instead could be seriously overpowered.

[Fetzie]

On pally hate: i saw alot of gormok insta gibs warrior, paladin lives,

wrath mechs.

or Paladin CBA to move form Icehowls charge

wrath mechs

, oh well, and paladin doesn't need to be taunted off after soulreaper,

wrath mechs

whilst all the while being piss poor at keeping holy shield up.

holy shield was only worth keeping up to keep the 969 rotation going. It didn't actually do anything for your survivability.

and in ICC paladins had almost as many stuns as a warriors with HoJ and HW

sounds like fairness to me.

The only really strategy changing thing that a paladin can do in Cataclysm is AD staghelm's Scorpion Slash.


It actually works out at about 3 Holy Power every 6.5 seconds.

[Tengenstein]

Yeah most of the pally hate comes from Wrath, now its mainly becuase you share all our loots, and have better hair, such fabulous hair.

You're gonna need to update your guide Fetzie, I have no idea how you manage to build HP that quickly. Even with 3HP every six seconds i still see it as as being 50% awesome mastery boosted damage reduction followed by 50% of squish which seems really spikey to my unenlightened warrior mind, and then you have the wog buff too, is that jsut icing on the cake or are you regularly meant to use it?

[Fetzie]

Don't forget that you can buffer 2 extra holy power, so if you know you won't be hit for a few seconds (think blackhorn when he is casting his shockwave) you can save the holy power, and then use ShoR back-to-back to get 6 seconds of 50+% reduction. As for WoG, that comes down to encounter design. We are only just seeing the first 5 man heroic instances for mechanics testing, raiding should become available within the next 6 weeks so we will know more then, as more people get in to the instances when they open up level 90 premades.

As for holy power generation, it goes something like this:

0.0 J +1
1.5 HotR +1
3.0 AS
4.5 HW
6.0 CS+ShoR +1 -3
7.5 J +1
9.0 cons
10.5 CS +1
12.0 HW
13.5 J+ShoR +1 -3
15.0 CS +1
16.5 AS
18.0 cons
19.5 CS +1
21.0 J+ShoR +1 -3

Assuming no GC procs making it faster, or any Divine Purpose procs should you take that talent.