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2008-08-12 17:28:59
Tanking in Wrath of the Lich King
Threads have popped up in several class forums that seem to be converging on a few of the same issues. So rather than cross-posting a lot, I thought I would start a new thread.

Tanking design:

1) Our goal in Lich King is for all 4 tanking classes to be viable.

2) We would like for tanking to be a little more fun. I'm going to leave this vague on purpose, but it is definitely a concern.

3) In 5-player instances, most warriors, druids, paladins and death knights should be effective tanks. The healing specs may have a harder time than the dps specs. Arms wariors, Fury warriors, Ret paladins, Ferals and most DKs should do fine.

4) In 5-player heroics, the expectation is that the tank has a heavy investment in tanking talents and appropriate gear. Arms warriors might have trouble tanking a heroic unless they overgear the instance.

5) For raids, we want all 4 tank classes to be viable. If your group has e.g. a Prot paladin and Feral druid as main tanks with appropriate gear and reasonable skill, you should be good to go.

6) This is a shift in philosophy for us. Previously, we sometimes tried to steer Ferals as being better off tanks than main tanks. We also expected specific classes to appear in the raid. Our new assumption is that you might have any of the 4 tanking classes as a tank. We are trying to achieve as much parity as we can among the 4 tanks without making them too similar. If nearly all guilds want the same class as their MT, we've failed.

7) This is a big one: the game isn't finished. We aren't spending too much effort yet to make sure mitigation, threat and tools are similar across the 4 classes at level 80 in blue or purple gear. Likewise, your talent trees and core abilities aren't finished. Tanking (and PvP) need to have a lot of other pieces of the game in place before we can really get the numbers right. It's fine (useful even) to point out when you feel a particular ability, talent, class or build is too good or not good enough. But please don't infer the work in progress as a reflection of our intent. If we end up changing our minds or if things don't work out, it will be posted here.

8) There are a lot of changes in Lich King that change tanking and raiding in general. I won't list them all out here, but keep in mind things like itemization changes, widespread raid buffs, consumables, UI changes, etc. Just keep them in mind. We're not in Tempest Keep anymore.

Concerns or feedback? This is a great place for it.
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Ghostcrawler
2008-08-12 23:15:52
Re: Tanking in Wrath of the Lich King
We would still like to have tanking "flavors" as you put it, but I want to be a little careful when I say that because some people have taken that to mean that their class won't be good enough to tank the content they want.

If druids had gigantic health pools but lower mitigation and avoidance than a warrior, that would be tanking flavor. It would mean you heal the bears a little different -- they might drain more mana, but the damage would be more predictable. In really long fights, the warrior might have an advantage. In a fight where a boss hit quickly for less damage per hit, the warrior might have an advantage. In fights with periods of really big damage, the druid might have an advantage. In magic fights where armor was less of a factor, the druid might have an advantage. This is just an example. Our overriding concern is making sure the tanks have the tools, threat and mitigation they need to tank. A secondary concern is making sure they don't feel too similar.
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Ghostcrawler
2008-08-13 18:05:31
Re: Tanking in Wrath of the Lich King
Thanks for all the feedback so far. I wish I could respond to every single comment, but rest assured I read them all.

Q u o t e:
So if Warriors are the best tanks for "bosses who hit hard for physical damage" (i.e., with the exception of elementals [where druids/pallies have no edge] and casters [again, no edge, although DKs have one], pretty much every encounter where the tank matters much), why not choose a warrior for every difficult encounter?


We've talked about this a lot, and I'll admit that it may not be the best way to go (designing tanks for certain bosses). Currently we are talking more about HOW classes tank, not WHAT they tank. Potential examples: The warrior tanks by having a shield, a lot of mitigation and avoidance. The druid tanks by having a huge health pool. The paladin tanks by using passive reactive abilities. That is a gross simplification, but perhaps you get the idea. This would naturally lead to some tanks being better at some fights, but it should leave more flexibility to the individual. Players won't count up all the bosses and say "Only 4 hit for magic damage, so we don't need a death knight."

Q u o t e:
I don't think this is too off topic, as it mainly concerns tanks - is there any thought going into rage generation (and to a lesser extent, heals = mana generation for paladins) through damage-mitigation shields (Power Word: Shield and so on)? I ask this because it seems like Discipline Priests are going to be one of the strongest single-target healers BECAUSE of all these shields, yet many tanks refuse or dislike to be shielded unless in an emergency situation because as said, they don't gain rage through shield spells (and paladins getting shielded instead of healed don't regen mana).


Yes, that is something we talk about. The design for the Discipline priest in PvE is using shields and similar damage prevention techniques and it sucks (and is unintuitive) that those are bad to use on warrior and bear tanks.

Q u o t e:
Given those niches, and this comment in your OP, "If nearly all guilds want the same class as their MT, we've failed. " I think you are setting yourself up for failure. The problem is, niche number one, is not a niche, it is pretty much the definition of being an MT. Something you yourself somewhat admitted to by referring to that niche as being the majority of encounters in a post on the warrior forums. If the game is being designed that way, and even worse, blizzard posters are saying that, then why would the community choose a non warrior tank?


You shouldn't feel like you need a warrior. I wrote some of those comments trying to reassure warriors that the changes they saw weren't an attempt (on purpose or accidentally) to phase them out of being awesome tanks. But in retrospect I see my comments were a little misleading and just made non-warriors more concerned. Making all tanks viable needs to come first, and the flavor / niches (while still important) need to be second.
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Ghostcrawler
2008-08-15 11:56:36
Re: Tanking in Wrath of the Lich King
Flipping these, since the second answer is longer.

Q u o t e:
2. Are paladins and druids getting "oh crap" buttons like warriors have, such as shield wall and last stand? Now, I didn't do all that much raiding for for TBC, but my understanding is that warriors were chosen as the MT for high end content partially because of those abilities.


We used to make the prot warrior niche having lots of oh crap buttons. In retrospect I think a lot of people feel that it is too hard to tank without them. Accidents happen, as do strings of bad rolls.

Q u o t e:
1. Are warriors getting abilities to hold aggro constantly on several targets at once? One of the reasons people preferred paladin, or even druid tanks over warriors was because they make life less difficult in heroics (shattered halls, for instant).


This is an interesting topic. First, what we do NOT want to see is players, especially in pugs, looking for paladin tanks only because they can't trust a warrior (esp. one they don't know) to tank a 5-player instance.

On the other hand, if a paladin or any tank can pull the room and have everything stick to him like glue, it really removes the roles of classes with good crowd control. The ideal encounter is probably one in which the tank (of any class) can hold all of the mobs except one (or sometimes two), and that one (sometimes two) get crowd controlled.

If you have run many of the Northrend dungeons, you'll see that there aren't many of the Shattered Halls style 6-7 mob pulls. And if we add those, they need to be non-elite or otherwise weak enough that they can be AE'd or zerged down without the expectation that the tank has to hold them all for a long time.

Players sometimes ask for Thunder Clap (or fill in your favorite ability) to affect more targets, and in Thunder Clap's case, that is probably a good thing. But really what we'd like to see is these abilities hold the number of targets they are supposed to hold effectively. It's unfortunately typical that when a tank is tanking say 3 targets that the first one dies quickly, the second one is tanked effectively, but somewhere near the end of the fight, the third one breaks free. If Thunder Clap affects 5 or 6 targets, those targets need to be effectively tanked by Thunder Clap (and the rest of the warrior's rotation).

Likewise, we don't want to reduce the cooldown of Thunder Clap to zero. That means a warrior could just that ability to tank and no other. We'd rather see a Thunder Clap, followed by Cleaves, Mortal Strikes, Shield Slams and whatever else, and then another Thunder Clap. To make that work however, the threat of Thunder Clap needs to be high enough to survive the cooldown and I don't think that is happening enough now.

The trick is to let a Prot paladin still be useful in tanking large groups as on Morogrim or Hyjal without letting them trivialize the 5-player content that other tanks have to work at tanking.
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Ghostcrawler
2008-08-15 18:54:12
Re: Tanking in Wrath of the Lich King
I didn't mean to imply paladin tanks will only be good for tanking raid adds. I added that comment because I feared that if I did not, the paladins might say "Look, warriors can tank groups as well as we can and then go do the main boss too. Protadins need to reroll!"

The truth is we want 4 viable tanks for all content. I think the issues of niche and flavor keep getting emphasized because they're important to players, and rightly so. But our concern is how to keep niche alive while achieving our main goal of having 4 tanking classes in the game.

We know the tanks will have some different abilities. They may have more overlap than they did in BC, but they are still pretty far from being identical. They will likely all have slightly different stats or at least different ways of achieving their goals in mitigation and avoidance.

I opined above (or perhaps it was in another thread) that druids might benefit from having large health pools. This makes some sense since the warrior is clad in plate from head to toe and has a large shield, so maybe their mitigation and avoidance would better while the druid health buffer would be higher. But I didn't mean to imply the druid would have 30,000 health and 2000 armor. I do understand effective health theory. :) I am hoping slight differences in stats will keep the depth of the raiding game while providing more flexibility in what specs you bring.

I do sympathize with all the prot warriors out there who only ever wanted to be tanks and are now worried other classes may be moving in on their turf. Totally legit feeling. But whenever we add a class, that is going to be a risk. The dps classes will also have to compete for their spots, and not just against death knights. Several specs that were not common in raids before have some of their limitations fixed now and can bring a lot to a group. You may not run with 4 warlocks or 3 hunters any longer (don't hate me because I singled you guys out -- it's just a math problem at the end of the day). We figure the best design is to allow you to be flexible. If your guild has traditionally had a lot of great casters, you should still be able to work those in. If your guild has a great bear and warrior but could never attract a competent prot paladin, that shouldn't keep you from raiding.

Keep up the thread. It is very interesting.
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Ghostcrawler
2008-08-16 10:52:42
Re: Tanking in Wrath of the Lich King
Q u o t e:
What's interesting to me, is: we WANT our tanking more interesting. We want to feel like we have more than 3 buttons. I don't want to feel like I can safely alt-tab after the second consecrate w/ no issues.

So you're not gonna hear many complaints from pallys, really. Make our job more interesting, dammit!


This is awesome to hear. So please help us remind paladins of that. :)

Shockwave is a cool ability, but if it is the ultimate AE tanking ability, that isn't really going to let dps warriors tank Utgarde.

I also know plenty of warriors and bears that can get a large pull to stick them like glue even today. But it takes a lot of tab-targeting and a lot of skill. Skill is always going to be a component of tanking, but since you can't always gauge the skill of someone you don't know, we'd rather give everyone good tools to tank a 5-player run.
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Ghostcrawler
2008-08-20 14:49:59
Re: Tanking in Wrath of the Lich King
Q u o t e:
It seems that every time you refer to druid tanking all you say is "big healthpool". Do you realize that in live, well geared warriors and paladins already come fairly close to our pools? Currently druids rely on health, capped (or near) armor, and very high dodge. Your comments lead me to believe that you are looking at us in a very one-dimensional way. I assure you that no healer wants to deal with a tank that is just a pile of hitpoints with no real mitigation/avoidance to speak of.


I totally get this. Druids won't be popular tanks if everyone knows them as the OOM tank. When I say "big health pool" I'm not talking about 30% more than a warrior, and I'm not even sure that's the route we'll go. But since the "big health" idea generates a lot of discussion, I'll walk you through our thought process.

Druids are going to have a harder time hitting the armor cap in Lich King largely because there is no leather tanking gear, and virtually no bonus armor at all (except on a few pieces like rings and necks). Now we can't just make druids do without armor, or they won't compete with other tanks. We can't just bake the armor into Dire Bear Form though, or we risk making resto druids even better in PvP. So when I have mentioned big health pools, that is partially because we're trying to solve the problem where druids need armor but can't get it. Big health is a way to do with less armor, but it's not a total fix for the situation, it definitely has drawbacks, and it doesn't mean 30% more health and 30% less armor. If I had to guess, all of the tanks will end up having pretty similar endgame stats, minus obvious things like block.

Keep in mind how good a well-geared druid tank would be in live if we hadn't added Sunwell Radiance. It is surprisingly easy to make bears too good or not good enough. We have to tread carefully.

But we haven't changed the design of wanting bears to be able to MT. And that doesn't mean technically they can MT but all the healers complain and as soon as the warrior logs on, you eagerly swap him back in. MT means MT.

[ Post edited by Ghostcrawler ]
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Ghostcrawler
2008-08-20 23:42:40
Re: Tanking in Wrath of the Lich King
Q u o t e:
"Why aren't there tanking leather pieces?"

I'm not quite able to wrap my brain around this, especially since you're trying to make us as good as any other tank. Why wouldn't you give us access to the tools to do it?


We *will* give you the tools to do it. We just might not give you those tools the same way another class gets them. There are no two-handed tanking weapons, yet I suspect 50% or more of DKs will use two-handed weapons. Neither DKs nor druids have shields. Druids need defense less than other tanks because they can achieve crit immunity. We can do something similar for your damage reduction (bake it into bear form, or put it in a talent are two obvious choices). Now, when you get your leather though, we are assuming you gem and enchant it as a tank would.

I'm sorry we are neglecting paladins on the forums. None of the tanking trees are very far along yet, and ironically the DK ones are probably the most stable. The paladin ones may be the least stable since the class changed so much, so it's hard to offer a lot of comment on specific talents right now. I mention druids a lot because we are talking a lot about them right now. The Arms and Fury warriors recently got some really nice work done on them, so hopefully Prot will follow. (But again I stress we won't know if the talent trees offer all of the threat, mitigation, survivability and tools they need to until we compare endgame tanking more.)

As far as what the Prot warrior brings to a raid, it is true that all tanks bring some ammount of target debuffing. But more importantly, we are in the middle of a pretty big analysis of raid buffs and debuffs. It is a large enough topic that we probably shouldn't muddle up this thread too much of that discussion, but in brief:

The overall goal is that you should want to bring raiders because they are your friends or because they are very good players, not because their buff is so awesome that you can't live without it. We would like you to be able to get all of the big buffs and still have some remaining slots that you can fill how you want (you know assuming you have enough healers and CC or whatever). We would like to get things to where no single spec always justifies a raid spot because their buff is impossible to replace or live without.
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Ghostcrawler
2008-08-21 16:08:32
Re: Tanking in Wrath of the Lich King
Q u o t e:
This is a question I am asking specifically for my Husband who is currently a Protection Paladin progressing through council in BT currently. Our guild has a Warrior for a MT.

My husband does not feel that the roles given to off-tanks in general are dynamic and interesting enough. There is always alot of talk about Main Tanks and who can MT what but there is very little talk about the core game design where you need 4 tanks to get to a boss and then only need 1 of them to tank.

Currently in Live in order to really not be a strain on healers my husband must spec pretty much full protection to be able to handle his off tanking duties. This severly criples his ability to be a competitive healer on bosses which is his religated role.

Is there anything you guys are currently doing on content we have not seen in raid settings to involve more ofthe people who you require to be present to get to bosses but that are traditionally not really neccessary once you get there?


I definitely agree this is a problem. We don't want to have to constrain encounters (or even parts of the same encounter) to always requiring the same number of tanks, because that just really limits how creative we can be in offering you a fun fight. We are specifically trying to improve tank dps and / or healing to make you more functional when not doing the tanking part. We are also looking at the tanking trees a lot and trying to remove must-have talents (e.g. Defiance), and trying to combine some of the mitigation talents. Ideally, a tanking tree would have some mitigation and threat, but also a lot of tools and just, well, some options.

When I talk about talent trees (and the state of the game in general) I am almost always talking about what I see at my desk. The beta builds are done with data that are several days old, and it's hard to keep track of exactly what has gone out the door or not. Tanking trees in particular are going to be late coming. I wouldn't eagerly download the beta each update in hopes of seeing brand new tanking trees there. There is a build going out right now (Aug 21) and I don't think there are any changes to Prot, Prot or Feral.
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Ghostcrawler
2008-08-21 23:02:55
Re: Tanking in Wrath of the Lich King
Q u o t e:
In TBC, avoidance levels in five mans hovered around 40-45% unbuffed, and scaled up toward 60-65% unbuffed in late BT/Hyjal. However, in Sunwell, the Sunwell Radiance debuff took away a flat 25%, leaving most Sunwell tanks with 35-40% avoidance (unbuffed). This, most certainly, didn't go unnoticed by Sunwell tanks. Was this simply a fix to ensure there was no gimmick "untouchable" tanking in Sunwell, or can we expect avoidance not to reach 60-65% (unbuffed) again?


I can't give you exact numbers, but you are correct that Sunwell Radiance was added simply because we let tanks get crazy high avoidance. It does feel like a bit of a band-aid, but when you think about the alternative we would have needed to balance those encounters (dodge, dodge, parry, dead), lower avoidance was probably the right call.

We've learned a lot about itemization since then and certainly have no plans of going back to Sunwell Radiance. But don't expect to get 100% avoidance any time soon. :)
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Ghostcrawler
2008-08-22 00:09:20
Re: Tanking in Wrath of the Lich King
Q u o t e:
If we're in warrior gear, we get no int. If we outgear a place, we don't get hit. No hit = no mana = dead party.


Although the mechanics are different, warriors (and sometimes even bears) can get into a similar situation, and it's not fun. It's something we need to work on.
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Ghostcrawler