[WoRBot]

DISCLAIMER: The following is informed speculation, based on the information given at Blizzcon and earlier public statements.

Introduction

Cataclysm is still a ways off, but the changes to tanking mechanics are starting to take shape. This article is intended as an overview of likely changes to tanking in Cataclysm.

The Great Avoidance Nerf

Tank avoidance was nerfed slightly in patch 3.2. At the time, Ghostcrawler stated that a much bigger avoidance nerf was coming. Cataclysm brings this nerf.

The first source of the avoidance nerf is the removal of defense rating as a stat on gear. In addition to the reduction in chance to be crit (which will now be provided by talents), defense provides a large amount of avoidance, around 15% for a tank at the defense "cap" of 540. With defense gone, so will this avoidance.

The second source is avoidance from talents. Warriors, for example, get 5% dodge and 5% parry from talents. These will likely be gone with the talent changes.

Finally, there are ways Blizzard can decrease avoidance further if needed. At 85, how much avoidance is gained from agility, dodge rating, and parry rating, as well as the severity of the diminishing returns curves on these stats, is still unknown.

Mastery

In compensation for losing most passive talents, characters will gain mastery bonuses. There are 3 mastery bonuses, 2 of which should be the same for all tanks: a reduction in damage taken and an increase in health. The damage reduction from mastery for a tank seems to be around 20%, though the exact number is unknown.

The third mastery bonus varies by class. The only one seen at Blizzcon was the Paladin one, which increases block amount. This stat (and only this stat) is also increased by the mastery stat on gear,

Druids and DKs do not have a dedicated tanking tree. How they will gain mastery tanking bonuses is unknown at this point; there are several ways this could be done.

Block

Block is currently an odd stat. It does almost nothing against raid bosses, but it can prevent all damage from softer-hitting mobs. As a result, raiding Warriors and Paladins avoid gear with block, while at the same time Paladins, who can block all the time, can easily run Heroics without a healer. In Cataclysm, both of these extremes will be going away. You'll no longer be able to block every attack or block all of an attack. But in return you'll block much more of a raid boss's attack, since you'll now block a percentage of it instead of a static amount. As a result, things which increase block amount (such as Mastery for Paladins) or block chance will be desired by raiding tanks.

Path of the Titans

Tanks will gain additional mitigation from the Path of the Titans. A first-slot glyph in the Path of Golganneth was previewed which reduces physical damage taken by 4%. There was also a weak cooldown for the second glyph slot, though that might only affect players other than the caster.

Given that there are six paths and Golganneth is not solely a tanking path, it seems like that several paths will be attractive to tanks. This may help create tank niches which are not dependent on the player's class.

Itemization

Defense and block value will be gone, while mastery will be added. Gone will be a large number of items which tanks do not want because they have too much block. This will also allow items with stats such as the following:

+75 Strength
+100 Stamina
Equip: Improves hit rating by 30.
Equip: Improves mastery by 50.

Such an item would be desirable to both DPS classes, as mastery will increase their DPS, and tank classes, as mastery will decrease damage taken.

While there will still be lots of dedicated tanking gear, the existence of this dual-use gear will increase the chance that bosses will drop gear tanks can use.

Conclusion: The Big Picture

In Cataclysm tanks will take damage more consistently due to lower avoidance and higher mitigation. This will hopefully reduce the focus on Effective Health (Stamina and armor, basically), which has been far too important in WoTLK tanking.

There has been a trend toward tank homogenization in WoTLK, with the threat, mitigation, avoidance, and cooldowns of the tank classes getting closer to each other. This has upset many people who don't want to see tanks different only in flavor. In Cataclysm, the main differences between tanks will likely not be due to class but instead due to which Path of the Titans the tank has chosen. Thus instead of a guild looking for a Death Knight tank to do a certain hardmode, they might instead look for a Path of Khaz'Goroth tank of any class. This means that if a tank's choice makes him or her weak for some content, he or she will not have to reroll but merely respec.

Itemization should be more fun in Cataclysm, with fewer undesirable items and no need to wear inferior items to hit the defense soft cap.

It's still early, of course, and things will change. But it seems now the Blizzard has listened to player concerns and is making significant improvements to tanking.

[Abijah]

I must say I am tired of Blizzard constantly changing the base mechanics of the game. We spend our time learning, farming, gemming, chanting, to juggle things as they are then some meatbag in Austin decides every few months to redesign the wheel.

Enough!

WTB new mmo vendor, thnx.

[lora]

Druids do have a dedicated tree, its called Feral Combat.

[Eulo]

lora said:

Druids do have a dedicated tree, its called Feral Combat.

Druid tanks go feral but not all feral druids are tanks
Can't just give all tanking masteries to the feral tree or the cats will be left out.

[osirisfrost]

I expect we will never see the standard "tanking sword" again once Cataclysm is out and they will draw warriors and paladins toward the standard death knights live under for using dps weapons for tanking. If it means my frost knight never has to equip a weapon with agi on it again I'm all for it.

[Xendrie]

Abijah said:

I must say I am tired of Blizzard constantly changing the base mechanics of the game. We spend our time learning, farming, gemming, chanting, to juggle things as they are then some meatbag in Austin decides every few months to redesign the wheel.

Enough!

WTB new mmo vendor, thnx.

this, i dont agree at all.

this is what makes an mmo fun. that the games changes overtime. the game got a fresh feeling all the time. players that haven't played for a long time wont come back and realize "oh, but this is the exact same thing i left".

changes are good, most of the time at least.

and as a tank myself, i like it.

[Deployed]

I couldn't agree more, Xendrie. MMOs can get very old very quickly if they're left static. Anyone being surprised that there will be another significant jump in rating requirements for level 85 simple haven't taken the time to understand how important it is to make players work towards something. Achievements are successful for that very reason. It gives people something to work towards.

Osirisfrost, a sword with Dodge and Parry rating will be very desirable. I know a lot of people are saying that mastery will replace the rating stats on gear, but I think that's a bit of an exaggeration, not that I have anything to back that up with.

[Abijah]

Xendrie said:

this, i dont agree at all.

this is what makes an mmo fun. that the games changes overtime. the game got a fresh feeling all the time. players that haven't played for a long time wont come back and realize "oh, but this is the exact same thing i left".

changes are good, most of the time at least.

and as a tank myself, i like it.

I agree constant content change is required to maintain sales for any lasting MMO, but my point is about these changes being properly placed. Foundational mechanics need to be left alone and not constantly changed every so often. Blizzard keeps redefining gravity and to me this is getting bothersome.

Example: The pally tank, they completely redesigned the paladin with wotlk. This did not make the game "more" fun. It added more "work" to the game. I have enough work irl. Every paladin had to to re-farm gear, lose all the cost for enchants, gear, gems, ect. The changes did not really change the class over all in terms of effectiveness or ability just how these goals were reached and how much time and gold a player had to spend to be re-designed. I understood the goal and purpose was to redo some of the math to make room for the Death Knight. Overall it worked out....but omg, again? IMO, this would be nothing for an burned out long since quit old school player to " return for ".

I come to play to relax. How many constant tweeks do we have to see. Every Tuesday I have to ask myself... ok what is next? Tails on Gnomes?

I would rather see more effort put into new content. New and various different looking gear, a better character customization tool, better graphics & game engine. Less existing mob re-use. The time spent re-inventing the tank could have been spent designing more diverse world content. Each patch we get the mobs we have seen from lower level instances turned into bosses. Hrm... I thought I killed that mistress of pain at level 70...what is she doing here in the ToC25? And omg.... not this big dumb bug again!??? I killed him in AN, Naxx and now here. He has more lives than a cat. Blizzard introduces new player races!!! OMG come back to the game!! ... er wait nvm... the new player races are basically the old races tweeked a litte. Give the tauren some tentacles, remove horns and change his tail a bit and tada lookie is a draenei? how original. ( /facepalm ) Next trick? lets turn a tauren into worgen. IMO, blizzard needs to stop recycling the same old models and get to new unique rendering. Leave gravity alone and add scenery.

I am sure that in the end it will all balance out again, at the players expense, after a zillion constant patch changes, gold and time wasted? all will be fine and well. I am sure that many burned out players will pop back in to try the new 80-85... for a while, but they will not stay if it just more of the same old rewashed content we have all already seen. At the time present, if you look around at the servers, people ( well hardcore raiders for one ) are leaving. They are bored. Blizzard needs to do some math of it's own and redesign the way they are spending their design resources.

That, imo, is change we call all use and pay for.

[Crusherix]

lora said:

Druids do have a dedicated tree, its called Feral Combat.

This is not TBC anymore
If you want to be able to tank high-end shit you gotta specc for tanking, and if you wanna dps you must specc for DPS.
I've tried doing both in the different speccs and indeed.. tanking in cat talents was fun!... NOT >.<

And Abijah... "focus on doing content?" how many times do blizzard have to shove it up your face that the team who do this and that has NOTHING(ok maybe a little but it doesn't work the way you think it does) to do with the other teams... pls go back to mmo-champion and whine there instead where the true whiners reside.

/Happy kitty

This post has been edited by Crusherix: 26 October 2009 - 08:25 AM

[Abijah]

Deployed said:

I couldn't agree more, Xendrie. MMOs can get very old very quickly if they're left static. Anyone being surprised that there will be another significant jump in rating requirements for level 85 simple haven't taken the time to understand how important it is to make players work towards something. Achievements are successful for that very reason. It gives people something to work towards.

Osirisfrost, a sword with Dodge and Parry rating will be very desirable. I know a lot of people are saying that mastery will replace the rating stats on gear, but I think that's a bit of an exaggeration, not that I have anything to back that up with.

Of course there would be rating requirement changes from level 80 to 85 but this is not exactly what is being suggested in this "unofficial change announcement " thread. Alleged is not a simple rating increase, but a full on and complete re-do. Blizzard used their mulligan on WotLK, imo. =)

also, imo, achievements are complete waste of time. Gee, my character barfed.... [out with it] whoopie.. can I loot it? equip it? does it somehow enhance my abilities? No. I was very disappointed when those came out, I had so looked for something to do max level/exp that would be positive and forwardly progressive. I think only a handful actually "give" any reward, and even these are non character improving. I do not play just to "expend" time, which imo, that is all the achievement system is good for. Instead of achievements, I think people should log off and do some RL achievements and raise their RL scores.

Game-wise: I am a raider at heart and enjoy the tactics and the battles. Scavenger hunt flower fetching for no reward is not something that appeals. I like teamwork, goals and rewards. Not necessarily rewards for myself, I am not pixel driven, but to see a reward given for work performed.

[Faladrath]

Seems it got alot of potential tho time will tell if it gets too streamed to have tanks feel indifferent to each other, guess it's all down to the paths

[Cath]

Take the paladin for example:

In Vanilla, the damn thing stood in the middle of 40 man raids and constantly buffed everyone around them. Not fun.

In BC, they came into their own as Healers and the MT role in raids. Constant improvement but Ret was broken, no one played it.

WotLK. The palis are tweaked again and now they are viable as MTs if they want to be, viable as dps if they want to be, almost required in a raid as the tank healer.

From a class built to support others to a class viable in all of its forms, seems like Blizzard is doing something right. Oh yeah, and what do you do every time you get a new piece of gear from a raid? That's right, you have to gem it and enchant it and regem your other gear to make sure that the piece fits in with the rest of your current make-up. You are spending the gold anyways, especially upgrading all your rare gems to epic, so what difference does it make to have to regem once every 2 months to make sure you stay at the top end of the game?

[Chrono]

Abijah said:

Example: The pally tank, they completely redesigned the paladin with wotlk. This did not make the game "more" fun. It added more "work" to the game. I have enough work irl. Every paladin had to to re-farm gear, lose all the cost for enchants, gear, gems, ect. The changes did not really change the class over all in terms of effectiveness or ability just how these goals were reached and how much time and gold a player had to spend to be re-designed.

As you said paladin tanks was redesigned with WOTLK and therefore you didn't need to farm much new gear/gems/enchants as you would level from 70-80 anyway and you would gain new gear regardless.

[Abijah]

Crusherix said:

This is not TBC anymore
If you want to be able to tank high-end shit you gotta specc for tanking, and if you wanna dps you must specc for DPS.
I've tried doing both in the different speccs and indeed.. tanking in cat talents was fun!... NOT >.<

And Abijah... "focus on doing content?" how many times do blizzard have to shove it up your face that the team who do this and that has NOTHING(ok maybe a little but it doesn't work the way you think it does) to do with the other teams... pls go back to mmo-champion and whine there instead where the true whiners reside.

/Happy kitty

1. I am not whining I am expressing my opinion to further flush it out for Xendrie, and others who may be maturely interested in this dialogue. We are people sharing points of view.

2. Thank you for making a point for me. If one team works on one thing without decent collaboration with the other you get Fish and Red wine for dinner.

3. lrn2play. My guild's main tank is a druid tank who can tank/dps in the same spec & gear. Yes his dps numbers are better toggled over but over all he scores very high in his tank set up. We are the top raiding guild on our server. First in everything. So you need to figure out what you are doing wrong.


4. lrn2spellcheck. I admit to having horrible spelling but I try to at least use a spell checker..

5. lrn2socialskills. No one attacked you, so why should you pop up with that lame and boring childish troll response. Grow up.

Thank you Xendrie and Deployed for sharing your thoughts pleasantly.

[Abijah]

Cath said:

Take the paladin for example:

In Vanilla, the damn thing stood in the middle of 40 man raids and constantly buffed everyone around them. Not fun.

In BC, they came into their own as Healers and the MT role in raids. Constant improvement but Ret was broken, no one played it.

WotLK. The palis are tweaked again and now they are viable as MTs if they want to be, viable as dps if they want to be, almost required in a raid as the tank healer.

From a class built to support others to a class viable in all of its forms, seems like Blizzard is doing something right. Oh yeah, and what do you do every time you get a new piece of gear from a raid? That's right, you have to gem it and enchant it and regem your other gear to make sure that the piece fits in with the rest of your current make-up. You are spending the gold anyways, especially upgrading all your rare gems to epic, so what difference does it make to have to regem once every 2 months to make sure you stay at the top end of the game?

I sure hope you are right.

[Abijah]

Chrono said:

As you said paladin tanks was redesigned with WOTLK and therefore you didn't need to farm much new gear/gems/enchants as you would level from 70-80 anyway and you would gain new gear regardless.

valid point, however I was fully purple at 70 and the new greens and blues were not really upgrades until about midway. I did have to clean the closet and re-tool at the onset. Not a huge deal, just annoying to think of having to do it again.

overall, I guess I am just getting tired of seeing us fully re-made. I think the wotlk tank set up is pretty good as is.

oh well, time will tell. =)

Cath said:

... you have to gem it and enchant it and regem your other gear to make sure that the piece fits in with the rest of your current make-up. You are spending the gold anyways, especially upgrading all your rare gems to epic, so what difference does it make to have to regem once every 2 months to make sure you stay at the top end of the game?

I am fully epic gemmed now and the difference is having to do it slowly as I gain new items versus all at once because blizzard changed the rules. I do hope at the very least we will all get an raw epic gem refund.

This post has been edited by Abijah: 26 October 2009 - 08:50 AM

[Intie]

Abijah said:

I do not play just to "expend" time, which imo, that is all the achievement system is good for. Instead of achievements, I think people should log off and do some RL achievements and raise their RL scores.

So what you are saying is that to waste time by moving some purple pixels on your screen to increase some numbers on your character pane is OK. But wasting the same time by moving other pixels on your screen to increase numbers on your achievement pane is just horid and those people should get a life. Right... You don't see anything wrong with that statement? Really?

People play the game to have fun. You do it by getting gear, others do it by doing achievements. BOTH of them are purely virtual and do nothing for you in RL except it helped you relax, occupy some time or whatever.

If you don't like achievements than don't do them. It's that simple. Nobody is really forcing you to do them. And this is done by *exactly* the same thing you hate about achievements so much.

Because achievements don't offer any "real" reward that would improve your char in any way they remain completely optional to everyone. If there was some real reward be it piece of gear or increased stat or whatnot people would feel obligated to do them. It would be almost mandatory. And then you would whine why, oh why, do we have to chase these stupid easter bunnies to get part of your tanking set. Why do I have to throw moronic pumpkins on other people's heads just to have same dps as my fellow hunter.

Got it? By not offering any reward achievement system found a perfect niche for itself. It offers something to do for people who wants to play the game and have some goals to work towards to. And by playing game they don't mean only "to raid to get better gear".

Some people love achievements and are very grateful it's been added to the game.

Abijah said:

Game-wise: I am a raider at heart and enjoy the tactics and the battles. Scavenger hunt flower fetching for no reward is not something that appeals. I like teamwork, goals and rewards. Not necessarily rewards for myself, I am not pixel driven, but to see a reward given for work performed.

Again, I have to ask: what is the difference between reward given in form of gear and reward given in form of "you did something" badge? (assuming you are not purple pixel driven as you claim)

This post has been edited by Intie: 26 October 2009 - 10:09 AM

[Abijah]

I apologize. I did not mean to demean or infer that anyone who enjoys the achievements is "wrong". At least that was not at the heart of my writing. Even if the text reads that way. I was only trying to explaining my point of view on the matter.

as to the other, again, to me, there is progress in gearing up. The toon becomes something more than before. There is what I conclude to be tangible gain. I do not see any tangible gain in achievements. They do not help in instances or raiding.

I respect all players and all play styles, I am speaking only for mine and me, I am not trying to judge others, only detail how I view achievements. Some of my best in-game friends are "achievement hounds" and more power to them. They paid to play the kind of game they enjoy.


p.s. I loved the Easter Bunny referral =)

[Shadoweric]

Abijah, I think you're missing the forest for the tree.

First off, you're right that continuously changing mechanics causes whiplash for players. GC himself has said it before. So why are they going back to the drawing board (the why of it a question you haven't asked yourself), since they know many players don't like it?

Well because quite frankly, the current system has become unmanageable. Rewind the clock to about a year ago. Blizzard's announced objective was to make every spec of every class viable in both PvE and PvP, and maybe even make cross-tree specs viable. That hasn't happened. Calss balance is light-years better than it was in BC, but they couldn't get to that stated objective. They haven't come out and said that openly, but read enough posts by GC, and you'll get the hint. This was most obvious with rogues (Assassination tree completely locked down because of PvP) and DKs (making Frost the DW spec after giving up on making all 3 trees viable for both 2H and DW).

So fast-forward back to now. They have an expansion coming out, another 5 levels, new talents, new skills, new headaches for balance. Meanwhile, they constantly have to tweak classes patch after patch (sometimes more often).

It's no wonder they're trying to change the system.

Eliminating passive talents, simplyfying stat allocation on gear (a point that the WoR acrticle doesn't make clear is that those stats will still exist, just not on gear. They'll be derived from other core stats)... etc. It's not just to make it more fun or easier to pick gear, no matter what they said. It allows them to tweak classes very quickly and easily by modifying the multipliers on what stats Mastery will affect for each tree. It's 2 or 3 stats per tree, compared to god-only-knows how many talents now. I suspect we'll have more balance issues because of bad stat allocation on gear (e.g.: too much +Mastery on this or that piece) than because of talent trees. And that's a lot easier to fix than talents that interact with each other.

Blizzard is still learning how to run an MMO, even 5/6 years down the road. A system that worked then may not be good anymore. This is exactly what's happening after 2 expansions worth of talents and skills added to the game that all interact with and affect each other, and all need balanced.

This upcoming change is actually needed to lower the amount of patches and changes to classes in the future. At least, that's what it looks like to me. And remember that they're aware of the point you're making and have said as much.

A point about achievements... in Cata, you'll have the Paths system which will give you exactly what you're looking for: something to work for at high-level that actually improves your character. Achievements are the opposite of that. There's nothing wrong with either of them. And just as you complain that achievements don't improve your character and are therefore useless, some will complain that Paths are required because they improve your character. Wait and see, it'll happen.

[Deployed]

Abijah said:

as to the other, again, to me, there is progress in gearing up. The toon becomes something more than before. There is what I conclude to be tangible gain. I do not see any tangible gain in achievements. They do not help in instances or raiding.

Directly helping with raids and instances, yeah, you're right, they offer very little, but, depending on the instance and the group of people, they do help indirectly with co-ordination.

Now, I'm not going to pretend that this is by design, it certainly wasn't for 3.0, but in 3.1, achievements actually gave guilds direction and incentive. Safety dance, for example, helps to direct people to learning that encounter properly, and because it's something your group has to achieve (not just the individual), it promotes teamplay and gives some players the incentive to read up on boss mechanics instead of just sitting there and saying "not done this one" over and over.

In 3.1, very obvious use there was that it explained how the hard modes were activated. Admittedly, what ones were hard modes and what ones were just fun weren't always completely obvious, but it worked for THAT raid. It's unlikely we'll see hardmodes in that vein again though.

After that point, yes, achievements have no impact what-so-ever on raids, and to be fair, the ones mentioned above only worked on casuals, not hardcore/fulltime raiders.

HOWEVER, we need to both digress on this matter. My comment was based on psychology. The in-game achievements offer the same sense of "getting somewhere" or "purpose to the time spent" as gearing up. How they affect your character was not where I was going with that statement. It's goal-orientated gameplay. Admittedly, making raids more attainable for casuals AND adding the achievement system basically gave us two answer to the problem of "all I can do is grind rep and run dungeons that only last 30-90 minutes", which frankly, is all that non-raiders use to have.

Shadow has a good point. What's being done is being done for a reason. Blizzard have mentioned many times that the Sunwell aura was a "druid fix", done because unbalanced scaling was coming to a head at that point. The same has been said with WotLK's itemisation. Avoidance, health and threat generation across the tanking classes is close to a breaking point. The gear range in ToC hasn't helped even though Ulduar's almost sideways "upgrades" did help.

If they keep things as they are, Warriors and Paladins would just stop using shields for boss encounters. Blocking needs to be made attractive. That can only be done by revisiting mechanics.