4.2: Psyche, psyche, psyche. Signed: Super Pysche.
Oh this is just stupid. On the official Tanking forums, a blue posts:
We are in the process of trying some different numbers for various talents and mechanics on the PTR, with the goal of making it harder (or impossible) to cap mastery. What we want to avoid is making mastery worthless or causing other undesirable effects.
If we are successful, we will adjust the other tanks to be relatively balanced with paladins again.
If we aren’t successful, we know what the fall back position is (basically what we have now).
And furthermore,
There are several changes we are trying, and the current PTR only reflects a fraction of them. Keep in mind that while we have a lot of changes we want to get in to every major patch, we also want to try and get builds on the PTR as frequently as possible so that we can test other things (like Firelands encounters). We tend to grab builds often, not necessarily when every single change is in place.
So much for my fervent hope yesterday that blockcapping was going to be accepted. Instead, they’re taking steps to make it “harder (or impossible)” to do so. Despondent sigh.
Here’s the thing Blizzard: maybe, just maybe, the problem isn’t that blockcapping is possible, it’s that we have a mastery that provides a benefit that — by its very structural existence vis-a-vis the combat table — has a built-in hard cap.
Ridiculousness. Are we going to nerf mastery for paladin tanks every patch, with ever increasing iLevels, because the specter of a legion of blockcapping tanks makes Ghostcrawler reach for the smelling salts?
Are they going to retool mastery to provide some block chance and some block value, in much smaller amounts than previously available? I guess that’d fix the problem in the short term. But, in the long run, as long as there is a component involving block chance we’re going to just have this crisis again down the road. This is the WoW equivalent of raising the debt ceiling without doing anything about the rising tide of debt. The outcome is already preordained.
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@CarinaKadow
17 May 2011 at 9:14 am #
Hey, it’s not a patch until paladin’s get nerfed, right?
By now I’m used to the up and down to my favourite class, just gotta roll with the punches, don’t wanna reroll.
Anyway, the thing *I* wonder about how we’ll compare to warriors, especially on higher gear levels. Will they nerf the Warrior’s block chance, so that the “pallys block more often but for less than warriors who can critically block” is still holds true?
Right now it seems we’re going to be the tank with the least survivability next patch.
@Rhidach
17 May 2011 at 9:23 am #
I don’t think they’re going to gut our survivability. However, I’m definitely annoyed by the idea that any “fixes” to this could possibly amount to just kicking the can down the road a little bit farther.
The problem is, at its core, very simple: Protection Paladin Mastery is very poorly designed.
The core problem with it, is that it can be hard capped. No other spec has a Mastery that has a hard cap. Every other spec gains additional benefits from additional mastery. While some may prefer other stats over mastery, they will still gain benefit from it, regardless of how much they stack. Protection Paladin Mastery doesn’t do that. There will always be a point where once you hit it, additional Mastery not only isn’t good, it’s actually a detriment to continue stacking it, as it wastes itemization. It shows further how poorly designed it was when by the second content patch the Mastery has been nerfed multiple times already to specifically avoid capping, and it s still happening.
The problem became exacerbated because of the high scaling of itemization in this expansion, and even the first tier of it, allowing Paladins to hard cap it (Or come extremely close). Then what would Paladins put the points into? Well, Avoidance is probably a poor idea, because of the extreme penalties and diminishing returns there. You could put the points there, but the result will be so miniscule its barely worth it, and you could put the points into threat stats, Hit and Expertise, but again threat is meaningless with Vengeance in its current incarnation, and all it does is provide superfluous tank DPS. That leaves Stamina, which they wanted to get tanks away from stacking, but there is no really good alternative with a hard capable mastery stat.
Also, for those that will bring up the “Boss Expertise” argument. Honestly, until I see it, it sounds like a brainstorming idea that won’t pan out. “Boss Expertise” sounds like a good way to keep tank itemization in check, but it’s a really bad end result, because it makes it so that no matter how geared a tank is, they perform exactly the same in the new tier of content. Imagine if, to handle over inflation of healing gear they had bosses put a blanket “All heals do X% less” aura out there, or if bosses all naturally took a fixed percentage less of damage than normal. It would be a similar situation. The biggest problem with this also, is that you don’t feel like you’re character is improving. Your avoidance and mitigation remain pretty constant; the only stat really changing is your HP total as Stamina scales higher, unless you are doing older content. Who really wants to play a character, that tier after tier isn’t really improving performance? No DPS would want to deal 10k DPS in the first tier of an expansion and 10k in the last tier due to passive boss abilities.
@Rhidach
17 May 2011 at 9:58 am #
Well said! Exactly my thinking as well.
@Anafielle
17 May 2011 at 11:40 am #
I couldn’t disagree more about Boss Expertise.
You’re conflating two completely different things. Yes, DPS would be pissed off if they did 10% less DPS or healers 10% less healing. But the amount of a hit, or of a heal, is NOT the same as the *chance of that to hit*.
Avoidance is a COMPLETELY different ball game because Avoidance is percentage. Percentages reach a cap in ways that pure hits will never reach, whether it’s boss damage or character damage. Avoidance getting too high is much better compared to DPS reaching unreasonable percentages of crit or arpen, although it’s still not a good comparison. And those unreasonable levels of crit were eventually dealt with, by the devs, when they rescaled.
And since we’re comparing DPS to tank here…. the developers did implement a scaling mechanic for hit. Remember this part? Players have to gear up to a different hit cap for every tier of boss now. DPS will need MORE hit rating to reach the SAME 8% hit.
Do DPS feel less like DPS because they need more hit rating to reach the same 8% level of hit with each successive tier?
I think not.
Tanks will not feel less like tanks, either, if we need to work harder to dodge/parry higher level bosses. It’s completely reasonable to expect that a higher tier boss will hit the tank more, considering they’re avoiding the DPS more.
In fact, it’s perfectly logical! The boss dodges the DPS more and hits the tank more. Them damn bosses just keep getting smarter. :)
@Rhidach
17 May 2011 at 11:57 am #
Have the devs recently said anything about requiring more hit for Firelands bosses? I haven’t seen anything recently regarding/confirming that.
There hasn’t been any mention yet (at least that I can find), and I sincerely hope it isn’t implemented.
The hit cap required by many DPS classes at the moment requires such intense itemization that it’s gotten a bit silly. Were it the same as before with the hit talents baked into the specs (And I understand why it’s not) it would be one thing, but to have to obtain the same caps without any assistance other than gear has a lot of people already quite upset. So I think they’re staying away from that at least for the time being.
@Anafielle
17 May 2011 at 12:50 pm #
Upset? The complaints I’ve been hearing about hit itemization have mostly been casters complaining about some casters cheating with spirit and others not getting to cheat with spirit. Casters do have it harder, and I’ll admit that I have no idea how difficult their plight is. But from the perspective of a melee, I don’t see why it’s such a big deal. Oh noooo, we have to cap something… QQ.
But I’ve been told by other people that hit scaling is unlikely to happen. That’s too bad; I thought it was an interesting idea and I agree with the methodology. But I guess the average wow player doesn’t agree with me.
@Anafielle
17 May 2011 at 12:19 pm #
Oh, I remember it being confirmed as a new Cata mechanic but I guess we haven’t seen much about it recently.
@Rhidach
17 May 2011 at 12:28 pm #
Aerial dogfights were also confirmed on the WotLK box, haha. Earlier confirmations are routinely not followed up on. (E.g., dance studios.)
I don’t entirely agree with all the complaining about the aforementioned hit cap changes, but I do think it warrants some concern and raises some questions.
I think the stress of many DPS boils down to many feeling it is an absolute requirement to cap one stat before being able to focus on another at all. While you can argue there are many specs that have to go about this, none of them feel quite as required as they do for DPS specs. Since DPS is measured literally in the sense of damage per second, I kind’ve feel that increasing the health pools already accomplishes this feat without forcing all roles of one type to focus on one statistic before being able to expand to other areas.
To put that into perspective, it would have been as if, back in Wrath, you were required to gain more and more defense every time additional content came out. It serves nearly no purpose for outdated raids and such (Though, you could argue it gave some avoidance, making it a bit different than hit but relevant in a discussion), but it’s more itemization used on one statistic. Is it really a nerf in any sense of the word? Not really, it’s rating that’s fulfilling its role, and you could say that instead of increasing health pools in 4.2, they could just implement the increased amount necessary to hit. Itemization isn’t really wasted in any sense, but it is when you do content prior, and something you must adjust to every time with every additional raidzone added.
All in all, the health pool is a rather simple solution. They could admittedly find more ways to make it interesting as a gearing process for DPS rather than hit, but I don’t feel simply upping the cap is the right way to go about it. I think that may be DPS’ biggest gripes about the possible change. They gain new gear to do exactly what they were doing before (DPS-wise). At least with larger health pools, they can see the increase themselves and maybe have a better feeling about it. It’s probably just mostly about perception.
I’m not defending one way or another, I just think there’s a better solution to this than increasing health pools or increasing hit caps, but maybe there really is no other way.
I disagree with your (Selyndia) last point almost completely. In some sense, boss expertise is the most natural way to get the scaling right.
Short version: As gear improves, everyone gets better at their jobs. DPS goes up, healer’s throughput/longevity increases, everyone’s health increases from extra stam on gear (including tanks, to a larger degree), and tanks get more avoidance.
The game already has natural counters to most of these things to keep boss encounters difficult. DPS went up? Great, we’ll increase boss health. Tank health and healing throughput is higher? We’ll make the bosses hit harder, both on the tank and on random raid or AoE damage events.
What the game DOESN’T have a natural counter for is tank avoidance increasing – i.e. the boss’s success probability going down. You can increase the amount a boss hits for, or how frequently he attacks, but those are both indirect solutions that are accompanied by different problems – namely they make it more likely to get a bad string of RNG and die to a larger-than-intended boss spike. This is exactly what happened from Naxx-ToC in Wrath, which is what prompted the changes in 3.3.
No, the natural counter to a tank’s avoidance increasing is to make the boss more likely to hit you. And that’s only possible by suppressing some of your avoidance somehow. It doesn’t matter what you call it: boss expertise, Sunwell Radiance, Chill of the Throne, or Deathwingcrown Throniance: Electric Boogaloo; it’s the only logical way to counter increasing avoidance without introducing side effects.
The one part I will agree with is that this is NOT best-implemented as a debuff. A debuff feels like we’re being nerfed. You can bet that DPS players would complain loudly if they got a -10% DPS debuff in each tier of content. But nobody complains that boss health goes up each tier, despite having EXACTLY the same net result as far as encounter balance.
Instead, it should be a buff on the boss that reads, “BossName’s attacks ignore X% of their target’s dodge and parry.” That way you don’t feel like you’re being nerfed, but the game still raises the bar for each successive tier of content. It’s semantics, of course, but I think that the buff vs. debuff issue is one of the primary reasons players hated Icecrown Radiance so much, so it’s obviously a significant issue.
I agree on the whole psychological idea between the buffs and debuffs with regards to avoidance. Everyone complained about chill of the throne, no one complained about Twilight Precision.
Maybe they should have realized something from the get-go:
Parry has diminishing returns
Dodge has diminishing returns
Mastery? linear.
Now I get that Mastery having dimishing returns would get all kinds of hell thrown at Blizzard from DPSers (where neither haste nor crit nor hit nor expertise have diminishing returns), but maybe, just maybe it would be worth the idea to implant DR in more stats than juste Dodge and Parry…
@Rhidach
17 May 2011 at 9:58 am #
Oh I hope not.
Keep in mind that they could easily implement diminishing returns on only *our* mastery, without affecting those of DPS. Instead of y=m*x (block=m*mastery), they just implement y=m/x+1/C and change the tooltip.
(Obviously they would have to do the same for warriors too).
I don’t understand what is so terrible about reaching a cap? I remember a blue post saying how they wanted to make gearing more interesting (read complicated) and not just about stacking one stat. As things stand we stack mastery as it is the best stat, if we then capped and had to USE ALL THE TOYS THEY ADDED IN CATA ie reforging, to eek out more benefit surely this is more interesting than just stacking mastery as though it were WotLK stamina?
Also if they nerf mastery doesn’t that mean that pretty soon they’ll need to nerf dodge and parry to keep mastery ahead? Or is that just handled by DR?
@Rhidach
17 May 2011 at 9:56 am #
Exactly. The biggest disappointment for me, I was looking forward to capping mastery and then using reforging/intelligent gemming to squeeze every drop of additional survivability out of my gear. It was going to be fun.
As for dodge/parry, I don’t think they’ll end up worse than mastery. Even with the tweaks. Just because it’s so cost-inefficient to stack it with DR.
@gameldar
18 May 2011 at 12:48 am #
I’m guessing the value of mastery over dodge/parry will end up being a break point scenario instead. This is already the case for warriors (in theory, I found the calculations behind this a bit fuzzy but maths isn’t my strong point) – it’s something along the lines of you end up with better overall/average damage reduction from dodge/parry up to a combined rating of 5400 for all three, once past that the value of mastery is greater. Now it may be the case that moving into another tier then that breakpoint is already reached by default so the point is moot.
That said I’ve never understood why mastery wasn’t on a diminishing returns scale – because it would then end up being the go-to stat at least at some point because its effectiveness doesn’t decrease. Although in terms of simple gear comparisons it’s much nicer working without diminishing returns!
I’ll be watching the changes with interest, some of the theories behind the rest of the change will be moving the protection paladin and warrior ‘themes’ towards each other – i.e. paladins block more often while warriors block less often but can block more.
@CarinaKadow
17 May 2011 at 2:41 pm #
Well, I think Blizzard learned its lesson from the defense debacle:
If it’s POSSIBLE for pallys to reach cap (without gimmik gears), it’ll soon be MANDATORY to do so. And soon we’d be balanced around having hit said cap and tanking without it will be unthinkable
Freshly dinged pallys would feel as if they couldn’t start tanking BEFORE they’d hit said cap, putting even more pressure on people starting out to tank.
Juggling the defense cap was one of the worst things in wrath, especially shortly after my pally dinged 80. Any dps worth their salt got to hit cap, true, but even if they weren’t hitcapped they still could put out decent damage – the expection was that they still could do their job, just not as good.
That was different with the defense cap, the expectation here was: A tank not defense capped ain’t a tank but a piece of paper – how true that expectation was I never found out. Because when I hit 80 nobody wanted to come to dungeons with me until I actually got to cap, no matter how much stamina I had to give up for that because I had to start out gemming for defense even with the crafted gear.
I’m actually glad Blizzard tries to avoid a repeat of that scenario with mastery instead of defense.
I agree wholeheartedly, Ironshield. One of the biggest issues I had with switching from ret to prot paladin was how stagnant gearing felt as a tank. In WotLK, it was Stam>everything for prot pallies; in Cata, it’s the same beast, but it’s wearing a new name – mastery. When I played Retribution, however, it was much more engaging.
Sure, certain stats did better in different situations or when applied to different individual’s playing styles, but there were SEVERAL stats to choose from, and the name of the game was finding the perfect balance that suited your personal playing style.
As the block cap becomes easier to reach, it suddenly becomes possible for Cata tanks to seek out other stats to maximize survivability, and I think it’s unfortunate that Blizzard seems to view tanks block capping as a bad thing. The only issue with block capping (as I see it), is that it starts to feel like the defense stat did back in WotLK (this is coming from a person who was off-spec tank at the time, so take that with a grain of salt).
Nehmen\’s last blog ..Gaming and learning
[...] a good mechanic Posted on May 17, 2011 by Theck This is an extended version of a reply to a comment on Rhidach’s latest blog entry. The poster (Selyndia) suggested that boss expertise, which [...]
@Orthien
17 May 2011 at 4:53 pm #
I don’t think having Block Capping becoming “mandatory” is a bad thing, sure it makes starting out as a tank harder and more difficult to learn but I remember back in BC when I first started tanking and having to spend all that time running Heroics e.t.c. trying to hit that 102.4 to knock those Crushing blows off the CT.
I enjoyed that, it gave me a sense of having worked to earn that roll as offtank in Kara.
The game has definatly gone away from that by strides and its not a bad thing ether but with Defense gone any body can just grab some tank gear and head off to tank, and Its lost some of that “reward” in knowing ‘I am at this mark, I have done the work, now I can tank’.
I think the best way to solve this is to drop the Block chance from Mastery a bit and add a Block Value to it. Blizzard should then assume that at endgame level Paladins will Block cap and then balance out their Mastery and Avoidance.
Anything short of that runs the risk or dropping us heavily down to the bottom of the mitigation poll and possibly drag Warriors down a few pegs with us.
I would be more than happy for my end game gearing to be about maintaining the ‘Block Cap’ while balancing Dodge and Parry DR’s as well as added Block Value from additional Mastery.
Orthien\’s last blog ..Catch up and the long absence
Does anyone else see this a prelude to them changing hit and/or expertise to affect our block in some way, as Ghostcrawler earlier alluded?
I found this data mine on MMO champion today interesting.
“Protection
Holy Shield now increases the amount your shield blocks by an additional 10% instead of increasing your chance to block by 5%.
”
Makes me wonder if this is them hitting the “reset button” on the changes or if they are just trowing stuff at the wall to see what sticks.
Apparently this change comes with a revert on the Block Meta gem as well. It’s been pushed back down to 1% block value.
hey guys, short question
do cooldowns like DP + Guardian stack?
@Rhidach
20 May 2011 at 11:16 am #
My understanding is they do, but they stack multiplicatively, not additively. So, if you pop DP and AD at the same time, it’s a 36% damage reduction (.8 x .8 = .64), for example.