Avoidance and HP in Cataclysm

Obviously this is just grasping at tea leaves for now, but Ghostcrawler commented a bit on a thread about Mastery and divulged some design philosophy about how they plan to approach tanking stats in the next expansion pack.

Some choice quotes and thoughts:

I’m not sure a strategy of trying to force tanks to gem / enchant other stats is ever going to feel good. That said, tanks used to worry more about being the mana sponge. The way to alleviate being the mana sponge is to take less damage and a great way to take less damage is to dodge more.

Personally, I wish tanking would go back to this. I like it better when there are more dimensions to tanking than just sitting there and getting punched in the face.

The relative value of dodge vs. parry is something we’ll have to play with. My gut reaction is that parry needs to be cheaper since avoiding 100% of one hit is more valuable than avoiding 50% of two hits, but I’m not sure how much cheaper. Avoiding spikiness (which dodge will contribute to) also has value, and if the second hit after a parry is dodged instead (such that you lose the parry “charge”) that plays into the cost as well.

I suppose this answers the question of if you would lose that second-swing 50% reduction after parrying by dodging or being missed. By cutting parry’s avoidance in half they would definitely have to compensate by lowering the ipoint “price” of parry rating. The new parry intrigues me greatly and I want to see them do the change right.

The passive talent tree bonuses for tanks will probably be something like 1) reduces damage taken, 2) increases damage done, 3) reduces damage taken in a way unique to your tree.

The 8-Ball says “3) increases damage absorbed by a successful block.”

If tanking gear had thousands and thousands of Stam, tanks would still socket Stamina because it’s reliable. If your health is low, then even if your avoidance is 99% that means sometimes you’re just going to die and no healer can save you.

Yes, exactly! It boggles my mind why some tanks think there is virtue in gemming for threat or avoidance. We don’t stam stack for the epeen, we do it because stamina offers the best return on investment when it comes to gems. Take for example, this thread on the tanking forums.

The original poster has completely missed the point: avoidance is all well and good for heroics where the hits are generally small. But WoW at 80 isn’t doesn’t endless heroics farming, people are gearing for much more than that. In the raid environment your first responsibility is always to survive the worse case scenarios, to maximize your time to live (TTL). That’s ethos behind effective health.

Gemming for hit and parry and dodge maybe activate all those pretty socket bonuses, but in the end (thanks to the realities of WotLK raiding mechanics) you’re gimping your survivability.

Now, if healers can generally heal you through damage but then eventually gas out, then avoidance becomes more attractive because it lets healers heal you longer. Does that mean you gem it? Not sure, but at least a trinket with all avoidance might be pretty exciting.

I hope this is the case with Cataclysm. I want boss fights to be less about short-term perfection and more about a steady performance over the course of an entire fight. I want to see tanks rewarded for properly balancing TTL to damage reduction. I want to see healers forced to be strategic about healing, and not just being forced into dumping constant, strong heals into the tank, mana bar be damned. Bosses in Cataclysm have the opportunity to be so much more complex. I hope they take it.

We also think we figured out a budgeting scheme to let tank gear have the same basic Stamina as dps gear. It’s not a huge balance concern either way, but it does look weird when dps plate has more.

That’s a relief. I was expecting a wave of bad tanks taking dps pieces to “maximize their EH.”