[General] The future of block part 3 - long term fixes

The setup for this series is here, and the first (short term) suggestion ideas are here.

What about the long term solution to block? This has some more interesting design constraints, but we'll go with some basic observations first.

For starters, one of the reasons that mitigation is so good right now is because boss damage is so high. The last time that every boss could melee two-shot tanks was Sunwell; and even then, it was only Brutallus. While most bosses can't do that all the time in Ulduar, it's more true than not that a tank can just be pasted if unlucky.

But why is that?

Part of it is because avoidance is simply too high. Pre-Naxx geared tanks started at around 40% avoidance, and by the time they were done with Naxx they were near 60%. By comparison, TBC tanks didn't get to the 60% threshold until they were through with BT. What this means in practice is that if designers want to challenge healing, all the attacks that do go through must hit fairly hard.

This leads to healers being forced to spam heals on the tank regardless of what's going on. Which means mana regen can't be as much of a factor, and caring about whether a 20k hit is blocked for 2k doesn't factor into it. It simply doesn't matter because healers must heal as if you had zero avoidance and zero other mitigation.

Because if they don't, the tank can get unlucky and die.

Now, this has another annoying side effect - healing is really dull. Healers are rewarded not by casting heals as needed but proactively healing, and then they pretty much have to. There aren't rotations possible; they must heal their absolute worst case scenarios. It also means that whether they are casting or not isn't really a decision.

Then you have block coming into it. Block doesn't scale with mob damage, and mob damage is steadily increasing. It becomes less reliable and less relevant. Avoidance continues to increase, health increases, and because of this hits become harder and harder...and healers get more and more bored.

So how do we change block such that it's relevant and fix everything else? GC has a hint, today:

The problem I have with this kind of argument is you're basically saying that avoidance is awesome and mitigation is awesome, but something with aspects of both can never work. I would argue that no tank has a clue of how hard the boss can hit them because they can dodge 30 attacks in a row under a blue moon. However, because you are removing so much damage every time you avoid, we all still use avoidance despite its random nature.

A wise tank said to me recently: imagine the block coming at the expense of avoidance instead of mitigation. Now imagine you block a lot more often than the other guy can dodge. If anything, the block tank is going to be less spiky than the non-block tank.

Let's give an example of what he's talking about here.

The worst case scenario is no avoidance. Let's treat block as avoidance. In the above scenario GC describes, all tanks have exactly the same mitigation. Thus, all tanks have exactly the same worst-case TTL assuming their effective health was similar.

In the average case, however, you get the situation where you have the 'avoidance' tanks and the 'block' tanks. Here's how it works:
1) The avoidance tanks either take no damage (dodge) or fully mitigated damage (not dodge). We'll say that they avoid 40% of the time, so they take a full hit 60% of the time and dodge 40%.
2) the block tanks avoid 30% of the time, but block 30% of the time. So 40% of the time they take a full hit. 30% of the time they avoid everything. 30% of the time they block (say 33% of the damage).

In this situation, both tanks have the same worst case possibility. The blocking tanks will take on average the same damage over time. However, their damage will be much less spiky because of the avoidance issue; they'll take much fewer 'big' hits that aren't blocked, nearly half as many. 10% of the time the avoidance tank will take 0 damage ,or 10% less overall damage. 30% of the time the block tank will take 33% less damage, which is again 10% less overall damage.

Of course, this would require that block actually scaled with incoming attacks AND avoidance was heavily nerfed.

So what would this world look like? What stats would look like what?

Let's take another assumption: that on 'hard' fights the tank's basic time to live on average is around 4 melee attacks without heals. This means you can do nothing and be killed by the boss after four attacks most of the time. That's the baseline for 'hard'. Now, with avoidance at 50%, this means each attack must be (on average) at least 50% of your health - and that's where we are now. But at a 30% avoidance cap, the attacks don't have to be nearly so high, and 3-rounds are fine.

The obvious conclusion is that avoidance would be heavily nerfed and still be subject to diminishing returns. Instead of now, where the 'cap' on avoidance is set around 70% (and it becomes very difficult to get more than 60%), you'd need to set the cap closer to 40%. The goal would be that in the highest tier gear, you'd want to go for 40% at best. And that would be for the non-blocking tanks, remember. For the blocking tanks avoidance would want to cap near 30% in most cases. And admittedly, I'm totally making this up. It could be much, much worse than this. 40% as the high end seems reasonable though, but keep in mind that the primary reason I chose it was because it means bosses should not 2-round you (or can't really be designed to) - since the 'average' case would mean you'd die in two shots (if those two shots connected) more often than not. That's not really reasonable.

Furthermore, you'd want to do the same thing for block. Block rating would need to cap around 20-40% in general. Under no circumstances would you want anyone to be passively uncrushable/unhittable either; if you did that, they'd immediately become the best tank choice by a landslide. However, block rating would still remain as a stat. And more importantly, it'd remain a fairly desirable one; it would be essentially as good as dodge rating is right now.

Next, you want to make sure that no matter what else, block was relatively as good as avoidance against hard-hitting mobs. This means that it must scale with incoming damage. The simplest way to do this (as shown in the short term solution list) is to make it increase armor. This can scale or it can be a flat value; I'd recommend that it scales with block value to some degree, but only some degree. Why? Because the goal is to have your total amount of damage blocked * the chance of block equal or close to the total amount of damage avoided by the 'avoidance' tank. It's hard to do that if you can have wildly fluctuating values depending on gear. Possibly a better solution in the long term is to make block value a second mitigation that multiplies, just like defensive stance/PotP do now. And have that scale with block value.

And actually I take it back; the easiest solution is to have a block always reduce damage by a certain percentage and remove block value entirely. It was already a confusing stat; this might be best. We'll just have block always mitigate a flat 25% damage. If you like, you can put in a static component that does something like 'blocks at least 25% damage or X damage, whichever is higher' so that heroics/trash is a bit more manageable.

The important thing is that the block % * the block rate should equal the extra avoidance that the avoidance tanks have, and it should do so at all tiers. This isn't that hard to balance either. In fact, the block tanks can have different percentages of damage blocked and blocking rates as well, differentiating them even further.

I'd probably have the four tanks look like this:
Tank A: 40% max avoidance, 60% unblocked hits, 0% blocked hits for 0%.
Tank B: 35% max avoidance, 55% unblocked hits, 10% blocked hits for 50% blocks each
Tank C: 30% max avoidance, 40% unblocked hits, 20% blocked hits for 50% block each
Tank D: 30% max avoidance, 30% unblocked hits, 40% blocked hits for 25% block each

So we've dealt with block and avoidance. Next up, health and armor.

Health and armor amongst all of these tanks should be roughly the same or similar. The important thing to note is that effective health should really be the thing that stays the same. Why? Because the worst-case TTL should remain about the same between the tanks. This is a lot easier to balance than it was before, however; instead of having to compare blocking tanks with armor and do static vs. scaling damage, you've got armor for all of them and that's all. Same with health. Some tanks can have higher armor, but will need to trade that for lower HP. Same in reverse. But this is pretty easy to manage overall, and as long as effective health remains pretty much the same (within a few percent) this will be easy to balance. If I were doing this, I would have one of the avoidance tanks be the high armor, one be the high health. Do the same for the block tanks. Each would have marginal advantages on certain fights, none would be advantaged for all.

And of course, the ones with high HP should have less magic mitigation than the ones with lower HP.

So what happens to SD? SD becomes something of the odd man out. I think that for this specific case, you'd just remove it. Because it doesn't deal with the hit table, balancing it against block (which does) is very difficult. It's hard to 'guarantee' a certain uptime given crit, hit, expertise values. And it goes away from having two tanks with shields, two without. That being said, it may stick around as exactly what it is - a way to mitigate static amounts of damage. That still has value, especially in lower level dungeons. It just won't be used as the primary mitigation balancer.

Now, this breaks a lot of things. This breaks the idea of paladins blocking every attack, for instance. It breaks block being so much better on trash...maybe. There are possibilities here. Think, for instance, that while holy shield is active all attacks are reduced by a certain static damage, and as long as holy shield has charges attacks are reduced by a percentage - and the amount of charges is small. That means against bosses, you'll get both static and percentage reduction. Against multiple mobs, you'll get that static reduction and only a couple percentage reductions. That might work, and it'd be similar to what SD would be like in this world.

So how do shields work? They function quite a bit on giving massive block value by themselves. Well, you could simply use that (and that alone) as the way to do the percentage reduction. I don't like that, personally. You could just remove that value entirely. You could make it solely a threat stat for paladins and warriors. I'd be in favor of removing it, but there is some value in keeping two stats around and making percentage reduction something you can scale with. It's still confusing though.

Would this fix or improve healing? Possibly. With a maximum 40% avoidance chance, a number of potential nice things come up. For starters, the real possibility of having ohshit buttons that do avoidance primarily becomes attractive, even if they're not 100%. This is because bosses wouldn't be hitting for half your health every time; they wouldn't need to. So something that doubled your avoidance would massively reduce the incoming damage, but could still be fair and useful. Damage could be cut in basically half and still threaten tanks, since chances are they'd take the same damage most of the time. All tanks would be significantly less spiky due to the loss of avoidance. Some reactionary healing (and less healer-stacking) may be possible. Healing spells could be reduced in size as well, to correspond to this healing. And mana regen might be able to be nerfed too; if the primary problem is just throughput of heals, not bursty scary 2-hit combos, that might work to help things.

At the very least, boss damage would not need to be consistently 50% of a tank's health all the time.

So this would all work. The question remains to me - would this be fun? The four tanks wouldn't be all that different from a healer perspective. The block/nonblock tanks would be especially close to each other by necessity. There wouldn't be a lot of advantages or disadvantages to bringing one over the other, especially if cooldowns were balanced. Sure, paladins would block more on trash, druids would have higher HP (or armor, whatever), but everyone would kind of want the same stuff and be about the same viability at any given tier.

Is that fun? I'm not sure. Honestly, I always felt that there should be niches for tanking (4), and that each of the four tanks should have a primary and secondary 'good' niche. I would like to see a diversity of tanks required in raids. My idea would be that each tank would have one main niche, one secondary niche, and they overlapped so that any two tanks would cover all four niches at at least a secondary level of competence.

Because I think there is definite advantage in feeling like your character is 'best' in something. And I think it's fun to try and min-max and get advantages in fights by using what you have. To me, that's part of the fun. But I admit, that's not absolutely the case everywhere.

This kind of plan I've outlined for the long haul would certainly balance things out, or make things close enough that there wouldn't really be any big deal on the survival side. Threat, cooldowns, special abilities - that's all another side. But this would bring them all pretty close together.

I'd be shocked if this was done in time for Icecrown. But I'd not be too shocked. GC seems like he's been thinking about this for a while and has some very definite ideas on how to get there, and if he needs to radically revamp everything, so it goes. It would be the single biggest change to the game during a release that had happened since..1.8, I guess, and I think they've got bigger fish to fry in the interim. However, I wouldn't have thought that druids would get something like savage defense in a content patch either. Each content patch appears to be doing a lot of rebalancing. 3.1 was very ambitious.

My prediction is that you won't see this for 3.2. 3.2 is going to come out fairly soon and be a quicker patch, I think. And it probably won't have tier 9 gear - it'll be a T8.5 type of thing. Then we'll get Icecrown, and it's quite possible we'll see it there.

[General] The future of block part 2 - short term fixes

Part one is here and establishes some of the rules and goals.

Let's first go with the short term fix for paladins and warriors gaining some traction. This is similar in thinking to Savage Defense; we know that an overhaul is in order and things aren't working right, but we assume they're not going to radically change two specs, multiple stat weighings, gear choices, mechanics, etc all in a content patch. Savage Defense is on the level of the kind of change we can expect: a minor mechanic change combined with an alteration of existing talents and skills to balance it out.

Here's the list again of the issues:

1. Block as a static mitigation fails against hard-hitting mobs. We knew that already.
2. Block as a scaling mitigation fails against soft-hitting mobs. Savage Defense was a great tool for upcoming druid tanks in heroics precisely because it mitigates so much more damage against heroic-level attacks. Expect this to stay fairly similar to what it is now, because most tanks don't go to raids right off; they tank in normal and heroic content first.
3. HP on the steady tanks should be lower than HP on the spiky tanks. This right now is a big deal and is very problematic. Druids are arguably the least spiky tank thanks to the higher armor and SD, and they also have the most HP of any tank. Clearly the less spiky tanks should have less HP, which would put paladins and warriors as the high HP tanks and druids as the low HP tank. That may be unacceptable flavor wise for druids.
4. Magic mitigation on the high-HP tanks needs to be less than the low-HP tanks. Because if you can't block at all and armor doesn't help, everyone takes the same damage - which means raw HP is key. We saw this with druids in Sarth3D. I don't think they want this again.
   
5. SD is in an odd state. I don't know what they'll do with SD. It has a high uptime but is similarly ineffective against hard hits as block. I expect two things to happen: SD to be dramatically improved and the HP of a druid to scale dramatically worse. The alternative is a reversion of SD and making druids and DKs the 'nonshield' tanks and paladins and warriors the 'shield' tanks. I'd actually like this, even though I like SD; it would mean that (similar to healers) tanks would have something of niches again. It would necessitate actually having some ability that scaled with DPS gear.
   
6. Avoidance on all tanks should be roughly similar. This is already largely the case (within a few % depending on build) so I don't see it as an issue. And avoidance stacking is not nearly the problem it was in TBC.
   
7. Blocking tanks must not be able to get 100% block uptime. This represents another drastic change to basically every single tank. Now why is this necessary? Because if you balance around the idea that half of the time, another class will take 10% more and half of the time they'll take 10% less, if you can skew that so that 100% of the time they'll take 10% less...that won't be balanced. Paladins mechanics will be completely changed (and likely to something near the warrior model with shield block). This means gear with block rating needs to be carefully looked at. It may mean that block% will have to have diminishing returns like avoidance does.
8. Block value must be completely redone. This seems obvious. At the same time, you can't have this scale too amazingly well. You might not want it at all or want it to be gamed at all; being able to dramatically influence your scaling mitigation is a pretty powerful ability. You run the risk of block value being like a TBC druid's armor stat, where anything without it is essentially pointless. And then there's the scaling BV with strength.
9. Threat stats will have to be looked at as well. Both paladins and warriors scale their threat with strength and block value, and have many mechanics built around these two values and how they interact. If they are changed dramatically, these things will have to be revised as well.

So what could they do? Let's take a look at a current protection warrior - Xav of Premonition. He's on the well-geared side currently, which is why I wanted to look at him since this change will likely affect people going forward from 3.2 at the earliest. He currently has 29k armor but has geared away from block - 12% block chance and 1400 block value after buffs. That's going to be on the low end, but it's not unreasonable anyway. Even if you have a warrior who stacks block, they're going to be on the order of 2000-2500 BV anyway.

By comparison, I personally have 33k armor. And that's all the time. Plus I have savage defense, which (when it goes off) blocks for more on a hit than the warrior, though the warrior has shield block and critical block to play with.

Remember, our goal is to get the warrior to the point where when they block, they take less damage than the DK or in theory a druid (I'll get to that point in a bit). But when they don't block, they take more damage. How to accomplish that?

Well, for starters as it stands now without any modifications they'll take more damage when not blocking anyway. Let's stick with that. That's easy.

So when they block, how about something like this:

Whenever you block an attack the attack's damage is reduced by your block value. In addition, your armor is increased by twice the amount of your block value for that attack.

That's it. Not very difficult, is it?


Now, Xav would have 32k armor, roughly, from any blocks he made. That's not good enough - but he's gone as far away as possible from getting any block rating or value. Plus, he has critical blocks that he can use, and he has shield block which gives him essentially 35k armor and 3k absorbsion for a 10-second duration. It's not quite barkskin, but it's getting much closer; he's increased his armor by almost 25%.

If this didn't prove to be good enough, having a 3x multiplier would likely be fine. Heck, a 4k multiplier might not be too horrible.

Of course, they'd still be the spiky tanks, so a warrior would need to get more HP. Blizzard is fond of giving 10% boosts. We'll go with that.

How does this fare with the 9 rules from before? It fixes 1,2,and 3 outright. 9 isn't an issue since BV isn't changing, nor is 8. 7 isn't that much of a concern since it's effectively impossible to get perfect uptime as it stands now. 4,5,and 6 don't apply.

Okay, that takes care of warriors. What about paladins? Paladins would require something of a nerf and a homogenization, possibly. The easiest solution is to turn holy shield into almost precisely the same thing as shield block.

But that's really inelegant. It also takes away from the very well-established ability of a paladin to deal nicely with many, many mobs via holy shield charges. Let's use one of our guild tanks - Vyre. A bit less geared than Xav, but still pretty decent overall. He has 28k armor and 1600 block value.

What I'd propose is making paladins the other 'steady' tank to complement DKs, and make druids the spiky tank. (again, I'll get to that in a bit). How do we do that? Well, we assume that they're going to have 100% uptime on their shield thanks to holy shield. If we need to, we can guarantee this by giving it even more charges. We only add their BV to their shield once, giving in this case around 30k armor. That sounds a bit low, and it might be - but it's something to balance out in the end. They'd not need any real changing; their armor would stay consistent around 30-32k, and their health is 'balanced'.

To go with the rules again, this is fine with 1,2 and 3, 7, 8, and 9. Magic mitigation might need to be addressed.

So above I said that I'd like to see druids be the other 'spiky' tank. And this isn't that hard to accomplish either, though it might be hard to do with all the other things that we'd like to fix floating around. The reason I'd like them to be spiky is simple: their HP. They already have huge HP multipliers, and HP has traditionally been a druid strength. Armor has as well, but you can't have both huge armor and huge HP in a world without crushing blows to counterbalance; something has to give. And I'm choosing to make it armor for now.

So the way to make a druid 'more' spiky is to reduce their armor yet again. In fact, let's just remove the sotf bonus completely. Insane! But that drops a druid to 26k armor. Yes, that's right - I want super spiky. Now they're the lowest-armor tank of the lot.

Then we supercharge SD. SD will get the following changes:

1. 1. Can stack to 3 charges
2. Increases armor by 100% of AP when active
   

So when SD is up, the armor (say on me) would go from 26k to 33k. And it would be up a fair amount of the time too. And here's the neat thing - polar gear and pvp gear becomes way less useful. With the huge armor multiplier reduced ilvl isn't as special. With the big bonus from AP going to armor, polar gear loses almost 500 armor by itself (and that ignores agility).

And if that's not enough, make it even mightier - 200% of AP. 39k armor when it's active! Suck on that! That's probably a bit high, but it's adjustable. It's another level to move. And with SD's relatively high uptime on single boss fights, it might be fine at 100% AP simply because it should be working so often.

This might require that druids get a health boost, but I doubt it. They're already doing pretty well on that end. It also might require something of an avoidance boost. Nothing drastic, but something close to a 5% improvement overall.

How does this meet the rules? 1,2, and 3 are still okay. 4 isn't addressed. 5 is the dramatic improvement. 6 might need to be improved. 7 through nine are fine.

Finally, DKs. DKs are the baseline model to work off of, since they have no shield mechanic. The only thing they would need to be balanced, I think, is a slight nerf to their HP. Since they're taking the least spiky damage of any of the tanks, they need less HP to counterbalance that.

I'll answer folks questions and comments here shortly.

[General] The future of block part 1

This comes from a very long thread about the weakness of block in the current game, and how warriors and paladins are decently behind druids and especially DKs in content.

Think about it this way.

Avoidance is good because it removes a lot of damage. Avoidance is bad because it is unpredictable. If you stack too much avoidance, you are likely to give your healers coronaries.

Mitigation (armor and straight damage reduction) is good because it's consistent. As you all point out, you can start to learn how much a blow will actually do to you. Mitigation is bad, from a player's perspective, because it can't save you. If you have 10 health and dodge, you might live. If you have 10 health and hope your armor will save you... well, it won't. You become the dreaded mana sponge because you are never avoiding damage completely.

Mitigation also has a risk from a design-perspective that when fights get too predictable they become too easy and unexciting. Imagine a tank with 75% damage reduction and no avoidance. You could calculate from the moment of the first attack whether you will survive the encounter. Heck, you might be able to not even heal the tank and know you'll survive depending on the specific abilities used by the boss.

Block as a mechanic is somewhere between avoidance and mitigation. Ideally it removes a fair amount of damage (vs. all damage) reasonably often (vs. rarely). If block is up 100% of the time it just becomes armor that you improve through a different stat. We have let block chances creep up frankly because the amount blocked is pretty trivial when bosses are hitting for 40% of your health pool every swing. If this still strikes you as too RNG, imagine abilities like Shield Block and Holy Shield that could guarantee 100% chance to block for a short period of time.

We don't think block is cutting it as a mechanic, but the direction we are likely to take it is probably more of a change than you are considering.

We also don't think it's necessary that every tank rely on avoidance, block and mitigation in equal amounts. They can't get too far apart or someone will come to dominate for certain encounters, but we don't think the tanks need to be completely homogenized to get what we want either.

If (to make up numbers) the DK and druid get hit for 20K every swing that hits, but the warrior and paladin get hit for 24K half the time and 16K half the time, then that seems like it would work. When the boss emoted that his big hit was coming, you could make sure you had your cooldown ready to guarantee a block.

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Take my examples with a grain of salt. I think some of you are trying to plug them in to today's encounters without changing anything else.

I agree that nobody wants to be the tank that avoids, avoids, avoids and then gets hit for 4X normal damage. (Then again, part of the problem we had with DKs last patch was their avoidance was just too high.) In my example, the shield-using tanks get hit for 4K more damage 50% of the time. If you're calling that "spike damage" and saying it's unacceptable, then I'm afraid nothing can be done to salvage differences among the tank classes.
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Yes, this is why I said not to assume everything else stays the same. We are in a world where almost any healer can heal a tank to full health in just a few GCDs. When healers can heal half your health pool, then bosses have to hit very hard. The test of survival for a tank is whether they can survive two hits or so without a heal landing. Health pools probably just need to be higher. Currently being the mana sponge tank isn't very scary because healers don't realistically run out of mana on most fights and the only real threat is whether you can get the tank back up to 100% before the next hit lands. Mitigating damage isn't seen as something that preserves healer mana. It is seen as something that might let you live through one more hit.

In a world where taking a little less on some hits and a little more on others doesn't translate into scary spike damage, then we think the block mechanic described above world work in some form, especially if you could force a block for those times when you did get a string of unblocked hits.
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Crushing blows hit for 150% of normal damage. So a 20K hit normal hit would be an unpredictable 30K crushing blow. If crushing blows were 120% of normal, but you also had an equal chance for an 80% of normal hit, then it would even out in the end... provided that the spikes were not too big.

It may also be that the blockers would need to take even less damage when blocking because there is some merit to the argument that the tank with the lower variance on damage is easier (or at least more attractive) to heal even if the averages came out the same.

However, we are still just going to reject the notion that anything with an RNG component is unacceptable (provided you have the tools to occasionally get by when you get unlucky). I can totally understand as a player why it's in your best interest to minimize the RNG when tanking. You can also understand, I hope, why it is not in our best interest.

As I said above, once you can totally math out how much damage you're going to predictably take at the start of the fight, it will absolutely be an easier fight to tank... probably to the point of boredom. Imagine the 0% avoidance, 90% mitigation tank in a land in which bosses can never crit or crush. Is that going to be an effective tank? Yes. It it going to be fun to play? I doubt it.

Sorry for the long wall of text, but I wanted everyone to be on the same page.

First off, what's the actual state of affairs right now? Well, right now the example is more like this:

Druids & DKs take around 18k a hit, and sometimes (if a druid is lucky) 16k.
Paladins and warriors take around 24k a hit, and sometimes they'll take 22k.

Clearly that's not reasonable. And yes, this is with all the relevant factors of mitigation thrown in. The fact is, with things hitting as hard as they do block at a static component is not useful compared to armor. I showed this in the SD math post a while back; SD is great against small hits and weak against big ones.

So the situation is that warriors and paladins take both more incoming damage overall and more spiky damage. Some of this is offset relative to druids with slightly superior avoidance, but even that's more spiky. The big worry about block being too good is clearly wrong. Block isn't too good. In a world where blocking isn't required because crushing blows don't exist, armor is king.

The thing is - we already knew this from BC. We knew that on any fight where the boss couldn't crush and where there wasn't some inane 'must block' mechanic, a druid was going to be better due to armor. Well, druids have less armor than ever before but they still have more than any other tank, and most everything else is equal. Is it a surprise that this rules the roost? Same goes with DKs - it shouldn't be surprising that they're better off in pure mitigation on the boss fights in Ulduar.

And I'm not alone in saying this; it's been talked about on the forums, at TankSpot, in a really good overall article by Allison Robert at WoWInsider, etc.

So. Block is broken. GC recognizes it. It's pretty clear when there are a lot of comments by GC that changes are upcoming, even if they've not been finalized. We have seen this before with things like druids being able to use all weapons and get FAP no matter what, or with the trinket armor being a problem, or with savage defense. This is the first stage - sounding ideas off the community to let them know that something is coming down the pipe.

I suspect that we'll see an actual mechanic change here in the next couple of weeks. The question is, what will it be?

A lot of people on that thread are saying that it's unfair that the 'spiky' tank has less HP than the other tanks, and are upset that GC isn't commenting on this. I think that this is just because Blizzard hasn't solidified a design for all the tanks in this 'block is good' world. Why not? Because there are a LOT of things to consider. Let's go through some of them and see if we can figure something out.

1. Block as a static mitigation fails against hard-hitting mobs. We knew that already.
2. Block as a scaling mitigation fails against soft-hitting mobs. Savage Defense was a great tool for upcoming druid tanks in heroics precisely because it mitigates so much more damage against heroic-level attacks. Expect this to stay fairly similar to what it is now, because most tanks don't go to raids right off; they tank in normal and heroic content first.
3. HP on the steady tanks should be lower than HP on the spiky tanks. This right now is a big deal and is very problematic. Druids are arguably the least spiky tank thanks to the higher armor and SD, and they also have the most HP of any tank. Clearly the less spiky tanks should have less HP, which would put paladins and warriors as the high HP tanks and druids as the low HP tank. That may be unacceptable flavor wise for druids.
4. Magic mitigation on the high-HP tanks needs to be less than the low-HP tanks. Because if you can't block at all and armor doesn't help, everyone takes the same damage - which means raw HP is key. We saw this with druids in Sarth3D. I don't think they want this again.
   
5. SD is in an odd state. I don't know what they'll do with SD. It has a high uptime but is similarly ineffective against hard hits as block. I expect two things to happen: SD to be dramatically improved and the HP of a druid to scale dramatically worse. The alternative is a reversion of SD and making druids and DKs the 'nonshield' tanks and paladins and warriors the 'shield' tanks. I'd actually like this, even though I like SD; it would mean that (similar to healers) tanks would have something of niches again. It would necessitate actually having some ability that scaled with DPS gear.
   
6. Avoidance on all tanks should be roughly similar. This is already largely the case (within a few % depending on build) so I don't see it as an issue. And avoidance stacking is not nearly the problem it was in TBC.
   
7. Blocking tanks must not be able to get 100% block uptime. This represents another drastic change to basically every single tank. Now why is this necessary? Because if you balance around the idea that half of the time, another class will take 10% more and half of the time they'll take 10% less, if you can skew that so that 100% of the time they'll take 10% less...that won't be balanced. Paladins mechanics will be completely changed (and likely to something near the warrior model with shield block). This means gear with block rating needs to be carefully looked at. It may mean that block% will have to have diminishing returns like avoidance does.
8. Block value must be completely redone. This seems obvious. At the same time, you can't have this scale too amazingly well. You might not want it at all or want it to be gamed at all; being able to dramatically influence your scaling mitigation is a pretty powerful ability. You run the risk of block value being like a TBC druid's armor stat, where anything without it is essentially pointless. And then there's the scaling BV with strength.
9. Threat stats will have to be looked at as well. Both paladins and warriors scale their threat with strength and block value, and have many mechanics built around these two values and how they interact. If they are changed dramatically, these things will have to be revised as well.
   

That's a lot of juggling to do and a lot of problems to solve. Tomorrow I'll post some of my thoughts on how to actually balance some of this in the long term, and what will likely be done in the short term. If you'd like another opinion, Honor has written up a piece too. I think he's on the same track as me, but you should read it and see what is basically an opinion with a bit more paladin focus.

[Druid, Warrior] Upcoming changes in 3.1

Some of you have seen the news on the changes to priests, shamans and warlocks. That's cool and all.

But they're not tanks.

They released the info on druids and warriors today over in Euroland. Let's take a look:

As many of you know the next major content patch will include some very exciting things, such as Ulduar, a new epic raid dungeon, a wealth of new items, and much more. We thought players would especially enjoy reading just a few of the class changes we're currently planning. Please keep in mind, that this list is not at all comprehensive, and more importantly subject to change.

• Savage Defense – this is a new passive ability. When a druid in Dire Bear form deals a melee critical strike, the druid gains a damage shield equal to 25% of their attack power. The next hit completely removes the shield regardless of how much damage was done.


• Survival of the Fittest has had its bonus armor reduced to compensate for the above increase in damage mitigation.


• Faerie Fire (and similar debuffs) now reduces armor by 5%. See Sunder Armor in the warrior update below for additional details.


• Thorns and Nature’s Grasp can be cast in Tree of Life form.


• Survival Instincts now works in Moonkin form.


• Replenish – to avoid confusion, this talent has been renamed “Revitalize.” It now also works with Wild Growth.


• We are also looking at increasing the sustained (not burst) damage of feral druids in cat form.

There's no math here; there's no way to tell what kind of mitigation numbers we'll be looking at for savage defense. If it's based on buffed attack power, however, it's going to be close to 1.5k static absorbing, and doing that once every 3 attacks on average. That's pretty nice. What I'm really curious about is how it's going to work with swipe and multiple mobs. With multiple mobs you can assume you're going to have one up per swipe, but will you get multiples if you get multiple crits? Will it stack? That's what's going to make it or break it as a defensive tool against adds. Still, this is a great conceptual ability: a defensive ability that scales with two different offensive stats that are common everywhere.

Wonder what the drop in armor is going to be, though.

Feral cats are getting buffed, which is kind of amusing to me since I've not topped the meters in a long while...yet I am doing so now in that anti-tank set. I suspect that melee across the board is going to be getting buffs; it's not quite reasonable that ranged gets to do predominantly so much more damage.

Onto warriors!

As many of you know the next major content patch will include some very exciting things, such as Ulduar, a new epic raid dungeon, a wealth of new items, and much more. We thought players would especially enjoy reading just a few of the class changes we're currently planning. Please keep in mind, that this list is not at all comprehensive, and more importantly subject to change.

• Changing stances now has a much reduced cost: you lose a maximum of 20 rage (10 with Tactical Mastery). For example, if you have 100 rage and change stances, you will have 80 rage remaining. If you have 10 rage and change stances, all of your rage is lost. In addition, we may change the penalties associated with some stances.


• You now gain rage when damage done to you is absorbed, such as through a Power Word: Shield.


• Blood Frenzy now causes 2/4% physical damage done.


• Sunder Armor (and similar debuffs) now reduces armor by 4% per application, and is now a single rank. Creature armor has been globally reduced so that debuffed targets should take about the same damage from physical attacks that they did before this change. The net effect should be that this debuff is slightly less mandatory in PvE and is not disproportionately more powerful against cloth targets in PvP.


• We are also adding increased damage to Arms, possibly through Overpower or Slam.


• We are also looking at granting rage when the warrior blocks, dodges or parries.

The rage generation and ease of rage makes a lot of sense; reading in the tanking forums and talking with warriors that appears to be their #1 concern, and they don't like being so dependent on BoSanc to operate reasonably. I would hope that they'll be getting more of a buff for their threat too. I also hope that the shield allowing rage generation via absorbing is also given to bears; it's damned annoying otherwise.

[Druid, Warrior] itemization, scaling, and back to mathiness

After the bloat of subjective opinion and joy of the holidays, let's return to the mathy work that you've come to know and love from this site. Or know, at least.

On the official tanking forums I recently did a comparison between what a warrior and a druid can expect from their itemization scaling come T8. This assumes all sorts of handwaving crap that kind of sucks, and I'm not proud of it; this is basically useful for a talking point, but not all that useful for, you know, actually proving a point. But that's okay; I'm mostly speculating.

The basic idea is this: given the itemization we've seen from Naxx-10 and Naxx-25, what can we expect in terms of gains from Ulduar-level content? The methodology was as follows:
if it has a tier piece, compare the two directly. So T710 helms compared directly to T725 helms.
If it doesn't, average all the pieces in that slot and use that when it made sense.
If that doesn't make sense (like something having a TON of parry on it) convert that stat to another for easy comparison.
Both druids and warriors compared the same cloak, rings, and amulets.
I assumed a druid would be using DM:Greatness and Essence of Gossamer, and assumed there'd be a new version of both in T8. Same went for a warrior, save that they'd be using the strength version of the DM:G.
I converted hit to expertise when I could.

No gun was used in the comparison, as I figured there'd be no new thing for warriors.

The spreadsheet is over at google docs, if you want to check it out.

The results are:
Druid:
Stam: 199.75
Agility: 70.25
Strength: 48
Defense: 61
Dodge: 30
Expertise: 20
Total itemization points: 429, or 326.4 for normalization of stam.

Warrior
Stam: 201
Strength: 133.66
BV: 50.66
Def: 119.1
Dodge: 61.16
Expertise: 48.5
Parry: 26.166
Block Rating: 44.33
Total itemization points: 684.6, or 617.6 for normalization of stam.

The warrior gets nearly double the itemization points from gear a druid gets. This is even deceptively high, as we were counting strength in for the druid as well as counting defense fully. Take those things into consideration and the value is more than double for the warrior.

This is one objective reason for the feeling that druids have a ton of 'wasted' stats. If bears are to scale at the same rate as warriors, they need to get double the value out of these stats. Currently, they really do not. What's interesting to me is that stamina for warriors and druids is basically the same, but druids scale much better with stamina. That HP gulf that druids have currently is only going to increase as gear improves. At the same time, druids are losing out heavily on the avoidance side of the equation, at least in terms of itemization, and given that the diminishing returns from miss are very small, that high defense that warriors get is going to increase the avoidance advantage they have.

Does this mean that druids are going to suck in T8? No, clearly not. This doesn't take into account any of the scaling factors that druids or warriors have, or how they improve with these stats or how good they even are. This doesn't factor time to live, survivability, mitigation rates, overall damage reduction vs types of bosses...it's very limited.

At the same time though, it does illustrate exactly how many stats are essentially wasted for a druid when they go for that rogue gear, and how much better warriors have it in that regard.

I do think that without any changes, this is going to be a problem for blizzard and for bears. Having only a few stats to scale with means those stats must scale insanely well. When that happens, it creates a very unbalancing state where weird things happen. We're already at that state now in some ways; stamina is kind of insane and it's to the point where a bear can wear polar gear and be a good tank (or even an optimal one). Giving more stamina may only exacerbate that issue. More stats that give smaller increases is a naturally more stable situation; it means that you cannot find that one broken item (right now: defender's code) and make yourself ridiculous. Diminishing returns fixes that to a degree, but that only goes so far. What I don't know is whether this is going to make bears ridiculously bad or good. But I do think that it's going to be an issue come Ulduar without a change.

That being said, GC has already said they are looking into more offensive->defensive conversions in the future. That would go a long way towards fixing issues like this.