On cooldowns
In a thread on the tanking forums, Blizz is seeking opinions about tanking cooldowns: their durations, their effects, etc.
I can’t post on the forum from my phone so I offer my opinion, abbreviated, in this space.
For one, cooldowns shouldn’t be down for more than three minutes. Ideally we should be able to use them at least twice over the course of a fight. Moreover, glyphs reducing durations is a terrible idea. Glyph should add functionality or diversify the ability, never tinker with the length of time the cooldown is up or down.
Cooldowns also, I feel, need to move away from being just “reduce damage by x%”. That’s boring at best. Our cooldowns should have some flare to them. Give us a bevy of abilities that affect different types of damage–ie, physical or magical. For example one ability could give you temporary resistance bonuses to the last magic school you took damage from, another could boost your armor value.
Cooldown usage should require most thought than a binary “do I need an oh-shit button? y/n”.
And fer chrissakes, no more automatic cooldowns. I want buttons to push dammit.
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@Anafielle
19 March 2010 at 1:25 pm #
I completely, completely agree about shorter cooldowns. I really liked that the 4pc t9 bonus – I remember back when my guild first hit Marrogar and tank survivability was a huge problem. My MT and I were bubblewalling pretty much on cooldown. I really appreciated having 30 seconds chopped off the downtime.
I don’t like saving cooldowns for oh-shit moments – I want my cooldowns to be damage reducing abilities I can weave into a boss fight several times to improve my damage mitigation depending on what the boss is doing! I try to use bubblewall like this instead of being afraid to pop it lest it be down when I need it most.
Long cooldown “cooldowns” have their place, but some interesting shorter ones would be great.
As a final note… I seem to remember a promise of constant tweeting in exchange for less blog posting. >:(
Anafielle’s last blog ..The Fastest Way to ICC from Dalaran
I don’t know if I agree. I can’t imagine the added complexity of giving all 4 tank types 2-3 special snowflake CDs. That’ll leave each tank better for certain situations or all of us with exactly the same CDs.
Agreed with tankadin. Unless each CD is some variation of “armor buff,”dodge buff,” and “magical resist,” you’ll see more min/maxing, and, perhaps worse, you’ll see a lot of weekend warriors who aren’t on the bleeding edge, but whine about fights they can’t do.
It’s tough balancing around 4 classes for tanking, much less so than for healing. At least healing you have lots of other people sharing one job. In tanking, for each encounter its pretty much just one MT doing the work, and one OT picking up adds. I think encounters that encourage switching tanks mid-fight would alleviate that somewhat. So in P1, use that stam-soaking bear, but in P2 maybe parry is more helpful. Etc. etc.
Right now, if there’s a fight a disc priest is pretty gimped for (like Dreamwalker), I know that fellow healers can use their skills to succeed. If there’s a fight that gimped a prot pally in the same way, its harder for him to still contribute.
I am playing paladin tank and DK tank, and I love on my pala his cds for saving others (hand spells) which are great, but not many palas are using those. only thing what is missing here is HoP for spell attacks.
Hands spells are situational, not self – only based and requires some skill to use.
that should be the way to go per my point of view (healers heal tank, and tanks keep an eye about party)
what I would change on my pala is maybe to put some penalty if SoC is used for tanking (lower armor or similar) and AD – nothing cool about not being able to control it.
what I am missing on my dual wield DK is dps and threat, cmon I am playing hero class with 2 weapons and dealing less dmg than tank in dress :-)
so, more cds for heloing other raid members like hands, than tank has some choices like example:
mage which is doing 8kdps on boss is in fire but also healer which heals 6khps is in same fire (if casted on mage, he cant dps for 10 secs, and if on healer, he heals for lets say 50% for 10sec, and the boss is on 5%)?
whom to save with cd
Hero class only means you don’t have to start from level 1, and you get a unique starting area for a few levels.
@Rhidach
22 March 2010 at 3:39 pm #
@anafielle: I totally was going to, but then discovered that I had precious little time just sitting there that I could spend trolling twitter or blogs. It was a long week.