Logic of: "Since you aren't being replaced"

Q u o t e:
It has absolutely nothing to do with how good, bad or balanced the tank classes are.

That's not entirely true, from my POV. Wall O' text incoming.

It's hard to talk about "typical" top guilds because to get to that level you really can't be typical. But in my example, I will use a warrior MT and a DK OT.

Let's assume the warrior was the MT through BWL and the original Naxx. Maybe the DK used to play a warrior and was the OT -- in other words, dude has experience too.

The guild goes to Ulduar. The MT warrior tries to tank everything because that's just how the guild does things. They're willing to wipe a lot because they're on the cutting edge and the encounters aren't entirely understood and they don't have strategy sites to go to and the mods aren't great yet at giving you key warnings in the fight.

So they hit say Mimiron hard mode and wipe and wipe and wipe because nobody really knows how to do the encounter and at this point they have no idea what is stopping them. Heck, it's possible the encounter itself is overtuned.

At some point the warrior MT suggests letting the DK OT have a go. Suddenly everything clicks and the DK beats the fight. The group might be a little frustrated because they like having the warrior tank, but whatever, a kill is a kill and the warrior goes back to tanking the rest of the raid.

That's a little bit of a red flag for us because in this case the guild and both tanks are experienced. The guild and tanks are used to wiping, so they are going to give it many attempts and not give up on their MT until they have exhausted most other reasons for why they might be wiping.

Now, maybe the group comes back next week and the warrior MT does fine, or a similar guild comes along and even without a DK they nail the fight pretty easily (perhaps based somewhat on the experience of the previous guild). We tend to relax at that point, stand back and see what happens next.

Typically one of three outcomes happens:

1) Players generally accept that tank class choice has little bearing on the fight.
2) Player suspect tank class choice has a small bearing on the fight, but it isn't usually worth the hassle of swapping out.
3) The typical way to do the fight is to swap out for the class that makes the fight much easier.

Now even #3 isn't too big a deal as long as groups still manage without the swap and as long as there aren't a lot of fights in that tier where players want to swap to the "right" tank. After all, the raiding community tends to find a strategy that works and sticks with it. Why risk wiping when there is a proven strategy that gets the job done?

For Sartharion and for Vezax (to name just two encounters) it felt* this way with DKs. Enough* guilds seemed like they were swapping to DKs for those fights because they made the encounter just so much easier. In fact, they made a lot of fights easier, so the conventional wisdom seemed to be just tank everything with a DK. (As another example, the conventional wisdom in BC heroics and Mount Hyjal seemed to be to use a paladin tank because of their huge AE threat advantage.)

I understand that a lot of players who post here think that paladin tanks are in that situation now and DK tanks are in the reverse situation where they struggle with a lot of fights. But they are not in that situation, at least not yet, because we don't see the widespread swapping. That suggests that perhaps the advantages concluded from theorycrafting aren't so massive that tank swapping conveys a huge advantage. It could very well change over time to get that way, but it hasn't happened yet.

We've been talking about potential DK buffs for 3.2.2 and we even know how we would nerf Ardent Defender when and if we think* it has gotten out of control.

* - Asterisks explained after the break.

* - I used these wishy washy words on purpose because I want to reiterate that this is VERY SUBJECTIVE. There is not a magic number beyond which the tank imbalance klaxon goes off at Blizzard Entertainment HQ. There is not a specific threshold of guilds nor a critical skill level for those guilds that warrant them being included or not included in the test.

We want to see more paladin and druid MTs, and part of that includes raiders accepting them as legitimate tanking classes, and those players feeling that if they go through the effort to gear up that we're not going to banish them down to OT status again. Similarly, we wanted to slow down the number of groups that appeared to be swapping to a DK for their MT, seemingly permanently, because they were convinced they would just always be the best tank. We have no problem with warriors being the most popular tank (and they still are) because there is a long legacy there and a lot of those characters have been around awhile. But we also want the other 3 tanking classes to feel legit.

I know some players will be offended by the notion that psychology can play a role in game balance alongside math. But this is a game. The emotional response is a critical part of the experience.

Q u o t e:
So you're avoiding balancing tanking classes to solve a population imbalance? A tank doesn't need to be "banished" to the OT status to be balanced.

Nope. It's not a population issue. I hope that's not what people take from my post. There are more warrior tanks and there always have been. We see no reason to try and nerf our way to 25% of all tanks being warriors.

What do look at a lot are trends. DKs seemed to be taking over the MT role for challenging encounters. On the other hand, paladin tanks seemed to be dying out. They didn't seem to bring much to Ulduar and a lot of them looked like they were going Holy or Ret. We wanted to make sure paladin players felt like were going to stick to our commitment of making them a legit tanking class.

Players are sometimes quick to say paladins and / or druids aren't fun and that's why there aren't more of them as MTs. Fun is always an issue, but I have spoken with plenty of players who love both of them and others who can't stand warriors or DKs.

In BC, Balance druids and Retribution paladins weren't taken seriously as damage dealers (overall - your mileage may vary). Sure they brought some nice buffs, but lots of specs did. We want to make sure we see both of those specs in raids. So far they are doing okay. We want Feral druid tanks and Protection paladins show up as tanks, but raids need far fewer tanks than they need damage-dealers, and the tank position also requires a lot of responsibility, commitment to showing up and sometimes even leadership potential within the guild. So it's a little more work.

Q u o t e:
Now, with your stance, it seems like you're saying that you're going to wait and wait and wait till 90% of the hardmode kills with anub a few months down the line are using feral tanks, and then finally nerf the bears or more likely the encounter to be kinder to the other tanks.

No, I specifically said that there is no number. This is why.

Ferals look very good on Anub'arak, but very few guilds have killed him yet in heroic. We don't need 90% of guilds to kill him, but we do need more than a couple, and we need to analyze what happened on the fight. For starters, Holy Wrath seemed to happen on the fight. :)

Q u o t e:
So basicaly you are saying that, "its ok for Paladins and druids to be strong, becuase we want the community to view them as tanks".

So when i said you didnt want to change things, becuase you want more pally and druid tanks, i was right.

At least you finally came out and told us why it is being allowed to go on like this.

If we wanted them to be indestructible, we would have made them indestructible. They're not. But we want to be very careful when nerfing a spec which is already in a minority. We want to avoid the perception that some tank classes are designed explicitly or accidentally as OTs only.

Q u o t e:
This seems like a strange response to this thread, since it's essentially seeming to argue against what you've been saying in the past: that guilds are fairly stable with their MTs and that people aren't likely to be replaced just because X tank has 5% edge on Y fight.

They aren't likely to be replaced. So when they are, it's a red flag for us.

When I try and remind players that progression-oriented guilds aren't likely to swap tanks, it's to counter silly comments like "DKs and warriors are being benched right and left." I suspect the player who says stuff like that doesn't really mean that (because it's not true). I suspect they mean "The community has concluded that DKs and warriors don't have the survivability" or possibly even "We noticed a difference on our attempts." But when you pile on the hyperbole like that, you're only making the situation worse because then groups that aren't even on the heroic encounters yet think that they're doomed because they picked the wrong tank class. Players don't always draw their own conclusions when there are so many threads that say "Tank balance is horribly off" (which also isn't true).

Q u o t e:
Oh and I guess GC missed the thread / post where some tank (warrior maybe?) was having trouble with the beasts, logged on someone else's prot pally, and they downed it easy. A class they had never played before.

This might be happening, but the degree to which it's happening is vastly overstated, at least today. These sort of things become self-fulfilling prophecies.

It happened more on Sarth and Vezax, but even in those cases it was not unskilled DKs being played by people who had never tanked before. (And even in those cases, which did cross the line for us, the other tanking classes still could beat the encounters without having to ridiculously stack the deck in other ways).

Q u o t e:
This is sort of off topic but how do you deal with people blatantly misconstruing what you say and morphing it into whatever the want to further their agenda?

Do you just scream and curse at your computer screen?

I slip a little something special in my coffee mug.

It's just the risk you take with forum posting. A certain percentage of players will understand what I'm saying, even if they don't agree on a philosophical level, so in this case I'm mostly talking to them. A smaller percentage will take everything the wrong way and they are more likely to be the ones who post a response.

One of the risks with trying to make yourself somewhat accessible to a group of gamers is they try to game it. Players know by now that if they make a compelling enough argument we might change our minds, so no doubt for some players part of the way they overcome the challenges of WoW is by trying to get their class buffed through the forums. I don't think a lot of players do this. I honestly think a lot of them just appreciate the communication.

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Q u o t e:
By the time a tank swaps, especially a long term tank--the damage is done. I have had no less than 2 warriors quit over the past 4 months because they felt like they weren't being given a fair shake by the development team. They were tired of me almost instantly choosing a druid over them as the off tank--they weren't mad at me, they knew it was best for the raid but they were upset.

I'm sympathetic to this. I really am. But we have a storied history of players quitting their classes because of real or perceived inattention or imbalance, yet 5 years later and WoW still has all of their class and with a couple of exceptions (shaman and warlock tanks), we have only opened opportunities for classes instead of closing doors. After being the top dog for so many instances, it's a little frustrating to see any warrior tanks quit. This is absolutely NOT what we are doing, but if we said "Look, we're going to let the paladins be the MTs for the next couple of years," that seems like a defensible position given how long the paladins had to wait for it. We just don't want to be held hostage by the risk of players rerolling. Players reroll for lots of reasons, and wave the threat of it in our face a lot to try to get what they want. :(

Q u o t e:
You can say there are a lot of variables, but come on--your QA dept has a modeler, they can equip all the same Ilvl gear and run through this stuff with relative ease. You guys *know* the numbers and you know its out of balance, you trying to draw a line and say "not far enough for us to act" is silly.

As you would say, the math isn't that difficult (with a couple of exceptions). Playtesting the fights isn't that difficult. Trying to extrapolate that to what real players who aren't intimately familiar with the encounters (or perhaps even raiding) and who don't necessarily know what is going on behind the scenes is pretty challenging. You can't simulate a guild by getting 25 strangers together and you can't simulate how a new encounter will feel to experienced testers. Even if we tested a raid 100 times, that number would be trivialized by the actual attempts once the patch goes live. If we were 100% for predicting what players would do, then we would have needed very few changes since WoW launched. I was a scientist for long enough to know that observed results sometimes turn predicted results on their head (and that you can nearly always learn something by trying to understand the delta).

Q u o t e:
Is it to have the numbers close enough that no tank has a huge advantage on a large number of fights in current content?

Is it that all the tanks have a strong suit and a weakness but that these flavors don't hinder the overall class balance of tanks?

Is it to get all the tanks at a relatively even representation?

Or is it so that new guilds can pick any tank and feel that they're fine simply because, "He's a good player/friend"?

Bullets 1 and 4 are the most important.

Bullet 2 is also important, but I would spin it more as you have to approach the class differently. If you played a warrior, then you shouldn't be able to just pick up a DK and not even switch your key bindings. Class differentiation is one of the strengths of WoW -- it's one of the reasons the game has such depth and why rerolling is at all interesting. When you say "strong suit and weaknesses" though, players tend to hear "Good at adds fights" or "Good at magic fights" and then which tank becomes the best is based entirely on whether the raid has 3 "adds fights" or 3 "magic fights." Niches aren't great for tanks, assuming that you need 1-2 for 10-player raids and 2-4 for 25-player raids.

Bullet 3 is not particularly important, though we like to try and understand why the deltas in population might exist. Often it's something as simple as "I always play the mage in RPGs" or "I don't know what a warlock is."

Q u o t e:
I see the same old statement is still being used. People are still using prot warriors therefore they must be ok. Once upon a time I thought I might visit GG on a trip to L.A. and discuss this with him. I realize that would be a waste of time as he seems to have a mental block.

No, it's because you didn't offer to buy me dinner.

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Q u o t e:
Anecdotal evidence. If the dam isn't strong enough to hold the water, then it would have broken.

Becaues the dam hasn't broken, it's strong enough to hold the water.

Everything is O.K.. *If and when we think the dam has broken, we will consider reinforcing the dam.

If we're trying to develop some kind of leaky dam analogy to the community detecting problems that the developers aren't willing to fix, then judging from the role forums, Azeroth has been buried under twenty feet of water for years. :)

Q u o t e:
If population balance is "low" on your priority list, why have you been emphasizing it today?

Asked and answered. The question was whether getting all tanks to equal representation was a priority. I said no. That's not the same as saying we no longer support the druid and paladin as tanking classes.

In 3.0 and 3.1 it seemed like every guild in the world was headed towards a warrior MT and a DK OT, and gradually it seemed that the DK was becoming the MT. We didn't want this to be the only accepted way to raid. We didn't want to read boss kill strategies that said "Put your warrior tank on the adds and your DK tank on the boss," assuming you always had those two because, heck, everyone did. We didn't want to see paladin tanks fade away the way (I'm going to regret saying this) Demo locks or Frost mages have for raids. (But since both of these classes have alternative specs that fill the same role, it isn't as dire as losing a tanking class).

We want to see more guilds that are capable of doing hard modes tank with say a druid MT and paladin OT. We want the paladin currently at level 74 to feel like she's going to be able to fill a tanking role by the time she's geared out. We want that for warriors and DKs too, but since warriors were the MT for years and since the perception has been in LK that DKs are the hero class that can dps, tank or PvP better than the existing classes, we were less worried about the perception that we might let those roles go away. They are fairly well established and we have a history of supporting them. (DKs have been supported for a shorter period of time, but it's hard to argue they didn't get an awful lot of developer time and attention.) I can totally understand how paladins and druids might feel like the stepchildren of the tanking role, and we are trying to address that.

Q u o t e:
I've seen this debate rage for quite some time, and I too am amazed that Ghostcrawler comes back to it after (seemingly) intentionally getting misinterpreted by quite a number of people. It would be akin to having a dozen crazy girlfriends all at once.

/need?

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