The audacity of HP
I wrote in my post yesterday that I hit the 40k unbuffed mark on Wednesday, which is a milestone in many ways, and a sad commentary in others. Think about it: I have eight times more health than I did at level 60, and that’s only twenty levels ago. That’s how out of control stat inflation has gotten.
Tanks running around with this much health does not lend itself to balanced boss design. To make up for such vivacious tanks, raid bosses need to hit that much harder to actually create any sense of danger for the healers (hence most Uld25 bosses and folks like Gormok the Impaler).
So then tanks can get two- or three-shot in progression raids and suddenly healing has ramped up to constantly healing the tank (even if they don’t need the heals at the moment) lest the boss fires off too many hits in a row and gib them.
And then this boss design cascades down into an arms race of sorts. Because tanks have too much health bosses hit harder, so tanks stack even more health. Instead of Pershing Missles, we’ve got dual stam trinks in our arsenal.
So avoidance be damned, full speed ahead on EH. Which then, of course, cascades down into the worth of a tank being solely determined by their effective health. Any EH advantage is perceived by the roiling, screeching masses as a huge disparity because in this brave new world of raid buffed tanks with 50k+ hitpoints all that matters is your raw effective health number. Utility is thrown out the window, avoidance ignored, and cooldowns discounted. All we care about is how many hits can you take before finally dying.
This is a huge fault in the design process right now because there are so many different flavors to each of the different tanks–strengths and weaknesses that makes each class unique. And each and every one of those differences is being discounted completely save for EH. It’s a huge betrayal of the concept of BTPNTC when a specific class might not be deliberately favored, but a particular aspect of boss design is, which then ipso facto divides the tanking classes into those that can compete on the sole basis of this one criterion, and those that have fallen behind.
To be fair, I don’t think Blizz anticipated how bad it was going to get. GC already admitted they hadn’t even dreamt of hard modes when designing Wrath, and because eventually hard modes had to provide better loot, the designers were forced into cranking out gear with iLevels that weren’t expected until much later into Wrath’s patch cycle. Maybe even not until Cataclysm. They now publicly regret that some dps is running around 70%+ crit chances and tanks are boasting 50%+ avoidance, though obviously not much can be done about that now.
But how will they approach this in the next xpac? Well, same thing they did at the stat of Wrath. Ratings diminishing returns will be jacked up so as soon as you ding lvl 81 you’ll suddenly have much less crit/dodge/etc. than you did at 80. That’s all well and good, but you know what else they expect to do? Jack up everyone’s health pools. That’s right: more stamina.
What do you think the upper level of raid-buffed tank health is going to be at Patch 4.3? 75,000? 100,000? Who knows–the sky is the limit!
… and that’s the problem. Blizz needs to take the opportunity of Cataclysm to tear the system down and rebuild it anew. Tone down the iLevels across the board, removing the huge jumps from vanilla greens to TBC greens to Wrath greens which are no longer necessary. Smooth it out so rather than wearing iLevel 200 gear after dinging level 80, you’re wearing gear that has an iLevel of 80. Then, of course, tone down mobs across the board so you can survive a level 80 mob in iLevel 80 gear.
Moreover, rather than letting the arms race continue, redirect tanking towards a more balanced experience where avoidance is more than just a necessary and random evil that would actually be worth gemming for. Make it so EH is no longer the only criterion for a successful progression tank.
Stat inflation is only beginning to get out of hand. Imagine how much worse it will be at the beginning of the next expansion when we’re all in iLevel 400 gear and rocking health bars that would make a vanilla instance boss jealous.
Armory Feed
The flip side (equally frustrating) is balancing healing up such a huge tank HP pool. Nothing like bombing my best heal on a nearly dead tank and not even bring him close up to 50%. Makes me feel like less of an undead man.
@AvengingWrathy
18 September 2009 at 4:14 pm #
I think it is an interesting downward cycle, however you really don’t have to stack HP as much as most tankadins think. I don’t remember the last time I died before a wipe was called. My health pool is about 3-5k lower that the top end tankadins but my avoidance is almost 3-5% more, as is my armor.
It will turn around on us and become a balancing act, where healers mana will become a problem and we will need to learn to mitigate and avoid damage in stead of just soak it up IMO.
good article. 40k unbuffed is lots of hp.
but very easily obtainable in toc/tier 9 gear
I agree with you. I think Blizz has gotten out of control and the players are running with it. I remember back in BC when my brother’s guild was running SSC and BT, and their main Tankadin was a dodge build. I can’t remember the specifics, but he gemmed himself incredibly high in avoidance, especially dodge, so that on most boss fights, he rarely got hit, PERIOD. People on his server in various guilds commented to him that he was gimping himself with the low HP he had and his high dodge, but the healers in his guild backed him up by stating that they had to heal him less than other thanks, simply because he wasn’t taking damage to heal, and the damage he’d take from a hit would be easily healed. From what I’ve seen in Wrath, as a Tankadin myself, is that if you had high avoidance, you tend to have more flexibility with getting healed, as opposed to having high HP and low avoidance. Some healers can’t heal you, as noted by another comment. I think Blizz needs to really work on tanking in general come Wrath. Get back to where it mattered on player skill, not gear and stats.
Stat inflation in linear stats like Stamina does not matter so long as encounter design scales with it. A tank with 100k health getting hit for 50k is the same pressure on a healer as a tank with 10k health getting hit for 5k. The problem is inflation on percentage based stats such as avoidance. In order to make things difficult for healers, there are two mutually exclusive paths to take in encounter design. There’s the threat of more damage to the tank, or the threat of inability to heal. Just like at the end of BC, and now, towards the end of wrath, excessive avoidance has rendered physical damage to an almost non issue. We essentially cut boss dps by 50-60%.
Now, a lot of people make suggestions like, make the bosses hit weaker but faster, that’ll stop the stamina stacking. Blizzard tried, but every time they release a fast hitting DW boss, the answer is the same. We stacked stam for Brutallus, and we stacked stam for algalon. We stacked stam for Yogg+0 phase three, and if it weren’t for a massive block glitch, we’d be stacking stam on H Anub’Arak. The only difference that fast vs slow makes is a slight prediliction towards or away from tanks with the block mechanic. But the overall DPS on the tank is the same, and healer treat it the same.
As you increase avoidance, you essentially reduce the incoming DPS on the tank by an equivilent percentage. What this creates is that the encounters are designed to produce the same amount of damage to the tank, but the damage becomes confined in smaller and smaller windows. A tank might be taking 100k damage every 20 seconds on H Gormak, but the problem that becomes very annoying is that the tank isn’t taking any damage for 19 of those seconds, but get’s trapped in a situation where if they do not avoid a melee hit that comes within a few 10ths of a second from an impale, they go from full health to a fine pink mist before a healer even notices you’ve taken damage. This was certainly the road that blizz took for Ulduar, where tanks getting two shot by normal physical blows was routine in the early weeks of attempts.
The other option is to limit the window in which healing is available. This was kind of the road that Blizzard tried to take in ToC. Snobold on Gormak, Toxin on the worms, Arctic breath on Icehowl, Incinerate flesh and legion flame on Jaraxxus, the entire Faction Champions fight, portals and orbs on the twins, and permafrost on Anub. Pretty much every fight will see your healers stunned, CCed, running for their lives, or otherwise not healing.
The problem is that excessive avoidance trivializes both types of encounters, and excessive stamina trivializes limited healing fights. This is why people are complaining about ToC being easy, because they’re geared towards fights with a much higher damage output. The problem comes when they combine the two.
Look at, for example, the two most egregious examples of extremes in one catagory or another. Loatheb and Patchwerk. Imagine if they added loatheb’s Necrotic Aura onto the patchwerk encounter. Spontanius tank death would become a very real issue as hateful tanks who don’t get lucky enough to avoid 3 out of 5 hatefuls would die without the healers having a chance to save him, even with continuous cooldown coverage.
This is what you run into on the two most complained about fights in HToC, Gormak and The Faction Champs. On Gormak,particularly pre nerf, if he throw his Snobolds on the majority of your healers the raw damage output would kill your tanks. On FC, if more than two of the mobs aggro onto someone, and they don’t have their own cooldown available, they will die. These fights become heavily RNG dependent, which people don’t enjoy.
Tanks will never stop stacking stamina, because it’s the only garuntee out there. Excessive avoidance lead to situations like at the end of BC, where the best tank for Mother Sharaz was a rogue.
that was a very thoughtful post. thanks!
Have you guys noticed the brew fest tank trinkets ?
There 2 trinkets that both provide 170 stamina each !! so that equates to 340 stamina !!!
I was crying tears because this week i had lost the roll for Heart of Iron until i got hold of these 2 new puppies.
I’m like 40k + using my own self buff (Sanctuary).
well i will not be replacing either my jc trinket or the black heart for those trinkets. i prefer them both for almost any fight, though i may use the brewfest ones for fights like malygos and KT and heigan and such, but for maintanking i will be keeping my trinkets for ToC/ToGC/Ulduar.
however, they definitely beat out essence of gossamer since the gossamer proc maxes out at 4k for a fight iirc and the stam gain from the brewfest trinket greatly outweighs that.
had the tank trinket drop for my dk but lost to a priest who rolled on it….
=(
@ Reinassance Man: Very ilustrating post. Thank you.
@Rhidach
21 September 2009 at 12:21 pm #
@TRM: Excellent, excellent comment. Thanks for your thoughts on that.