Why Paladin block capping is bad for the game - Part Two

We got some more replies from Blizz so it's time for another Blog post. The sources for all Blue posts (and further discussion) can be found here: Why Block Capping is Bad - Forums - World of Warcraft

Read my previous Blog post for further details.


The problem with this argument is that sometimes you will not get heals except for HoTs. A lot of encounter mechanics require healers to move so there will be gaps in your healing coverage so a scenario where you will go for ~3 seconds without healing is feasible. And that is really all it would take to kill a Death Knight that does not land a Death Strike in a world where Death Knights can be 2 or 3 shot (it takes 3.6 seconds for 3 swings to land with a 1.8 swing timer, the first hit occurs at 0 secs).
Now the other counter-argument was the lack of self-healing. Why would DKs run into scenarios where they cannot self heal?
Here are a few:

1) Your Death Strike got avoided, possibly twice in a row (I am at 8% hit and 28 Expertise right now and it still happens for crying out loud but atleast bosses will not kill me even if it does happen). Note that missing a DS once incurs the GCD of 1.5 secs. Missing it twice and it goes to 3 secs. Does this number look familiar to you? And before you ask, no, we cannot Death Strike after taking the first hit because we'd have to use Death Strike roughly every 2 seconds to keep this up which is not possibly with a 8.3 sec Rune regen. So if you seriously Death Strike after one hit you not only devalue your mastery (going from an ideal 3 swing timer coverage to 1 swing timer coverage) but you also open yourself up to some massive burst. 6 seconds without Death Strike in a world that stresses EH will get you killed, simple as that.

2) You do not have the Runes for it. Because you applied your Diseases (haha!). You fool. <_<

So yes, it's a game design issue (unless of course you do not consider encounter AND class design issues to be part of the game design).

The first part of the quote is something I can agree with. Damage that bypasses block is not an issue because you cannot just ramp up the damage by 30% to compensate for a block capped Paladins. Such scenarios are fine as long as they don't go overboard with the melee damage.

The second paragraph is more interesting though: We seem to agree that tanks dying in a GCD or two was no fun so I am happy to see that this sentiment is shared. What I however do not agree with is that there is nothing hypothetical about making encounters that test EH. Healer mana does not matter and you can only make so many encounters where you challenge your healers with increased raid healing until it gets boring. A boss that threatens a tank will happen and should happen - these are fun to tank after all.
So where is the issue? The issue is that you cannot design a boss fight that threatens all tanks equally if EH values are all over the place. Either block tanks will not be threatened and make superior tanks (~4-5 swing til death without healing) for these encounters or they will be threatened (~3 swings til death) which in return means that such a boss will absolutely destroy a DK (~2 swings til death). I already explained above as to why.

True, managing Worship stacks is part of the encounter and if you get too many you didn't play well. However, some tanks give you a bigger cushion to make more mistakes in before the attempt fails than others. This is a problem.

I haven't killed Sinestra yet but have gotten to P3 often enough to know that this is a really terrible scenario to tell us that DKs are fine with hard hitting bosses. The haste buff effects DK tanks as well so you end up with a 4 second Rune regen - this is a huge boost. This effectively doubles your Death Strike frequency and increases survivability by a lot. What's more is that Sinestra cannot parry (so no RNG messing up your day). So you can Death Strike every second swing and your Death Strike will always land if you are hit and exp soft capped.
So again, how can you say DKs will be fine if you use a heavily skewed scenario as your basis to judge from? Are you going to drop DK Rune regen to 4 seconds at base now and make DS unavoidable? No? Then don't use such a silly comparison.
(And FWIW, I don't want 4 sec Rune regen either. 8 second is fine as long as you get the block crap under control. I do however want bosses not parrying my DS. <_<)

There is nothing wrong with that model. Really, there isn't as long as EH doesn't become the deciding factor for tank survival. It should be glaringly obvious why a tank that needs to survive a minimum of 3 hits to pull even with other tanks and then actually land their Death Strike through retarded RNG would not be happy with such a scenario.
Furthermore, you can still retain the model of having Death Knights taking the highest damage without outright killing their EH: A higher stamina scaling for example. Yes, this may have consequences for some magic heavy boss encounters but if you are seriously telling us that you won't design a boss fight that tests EH then and refuse to deal with Block capping then this needs to happen because I don't buy it. It should be obvious that a world where Block tanks cannot cap is preferable so we could save us all this hassle though.