Prinsesa

If you're willing to maintain a PvP spec for the outside world, I think you should have the advantage of being great at world PvP.

I know it wasn't uncommon for Rogues in PvP servers to play around with a Mutilate spec right after TBC hit - it wasn't the optimal leveling spec, but they could participate in world PvP at the same time if they came to blows over quest mobs against the opposing faction.

*Yes, I also acknowledge that we know now that Mutilate isn't necessarily a stellar PvP spec either, but that was not exactly known at the time, and I'm merely going off their INTENTION to remain PvP specced, rather than the actual spec used.

http://armory.mmo-champion.com.nyud....63815BffMm.png

 

PSGarak

That was specifically in response to the idea of having a separate PvP talent tab that only goes into effect in BGs and arenas. Something that separates world PvP from the other types of PvP would never fly, especially since making a world-PvP-viable spec would have to come out of your raiding spec in such a consideration. You could of course have different world than instanced specs, but that's just starting to get ridiculous, and once again rather destroys the point of having a spec in the first place.

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GSH

Okay, what about the flip situation. Instead of a PvP-only spec, let's have a PvE-instance-only spec.

I mean, you can do pretty much everything in solo/5-man questing in the outside world in a PvP spec. About the only things this doesn't cover are outdoor bosses like Doomwalker and Kazzak, which really, are special random occasion things.

For PvP servers, you're always in your PvP spec, which maximizes the world PvP possibilities. PvP specs are fine for soloing, levelling, and grinding cash (maybe not optimal, but good enough).

As well, this would be great for warrior tanks, who would probably have an MS build for their PvP spec, which would have the side-effect of making farming much easier for them.

 

Linnet

Let's not. Some people don't PvP and would want 2 PvE specs instead (like, switching a warrior between prot and fury depending on whether a group needs a tank or dps, or switching a druid between healing and tanking).

 

Nezralix

The situation still often arises where people want to tank things in the world...

Frankly, Blizzard isn't going to implement some kind of weird "Spec X automatically engages in Situation X" thing. It's far too arbitrary and would lead to too much awkwardness and thus complaining. It's just not going to happen. I don't exactly know how Blizzard views all the parts in their game, but I know they don't look at the game like that, where every different slice of the game is welcome to have its own little game mechanics (even though, yes, they do occasionally implement minor loophole fixes in things like Arenas).

 

Hypatia

This may be true, but at the same time specs should not be nearly as cut-and-dried as they are now. If you want to tank end-game bosses in BC as a warrior, you really need to be deep protection. If you want to do end-game raid DPS in BC as a warrior, you really need to not be deep protection (one of maybe two or three styles).

I don't want every talent tree and spec to be amazing. But I do want there to be options. As it is right now, there's "works" and "doesn't work". There's no middle ground at all—it's not a matter of "non-optimal", it's a matter of "no damned good".

I guess my feeling is that roles should be attached to a class, not to a spec. Specs should be able to take a given class in a given role from "okay" at the role to "great". They should not take it from "piss-poor" to "magnificent". The down side of changing this is that it means that each talent point has less impact on your over-all performance. The up side is that the secondary effects of talents (the part that isn't directly boosting your damage, healing, or tanking potential) become much more interesting.

Does this mean you can't min-max? No. There are still going to be certain specs and styles of play that outshine others. There will still be an evolving situation in which abilities are buffed and nerfed over time and the optimal specs and styles change. However, it will be possible to play reasonably in end-game content without having to min-max everything. For example, you'll have a choice of "We're light on healers tonight. Do we ask our paladin tank who has healing gear to go respec healadin to get a bit more healing power, or do we go with the healing she can do as a protadin?" Most people will be specced optimally for their roles, but when you need someone to go outside their chosen role, it won't be absolutely necessary to respec to do it.


Anyway, that's my theory. Whether it's possible or not to make the game more like what I would like to see? Hard to say. People definitely get grumpy when they're not able to wtfpwn quite so much.

 

frber

Would be easy to accomplish though.

For warriors drop Rage cost of Bloodthirst and Mortal Strike to 20 while using a shield. Scale the threat of Sunder Armor to match Devestate exactly (including the damage part from Devestate) while letting warriors get significantly more block value/point of strength; and you have a working x/y/15 tank that is close to as good as Protection Warriors. While not making anything else imbalanced. Warriors just were like that before the expansion. Must assume that Blizzard intentionally broke warriors to make room for feral and paladin tanks. There is no reason they couldn't change it back. Must assume they don't want to for some reason. Protection warriors are already perfectly passable as DPS. Perhaps some threat issues if DPS'ing mainly with Devestate but they could give Devestate reduced threat if not in defensive stance or something.

I also play a priest. Don't think those would be hard at all to change. Holy has exactly one talent that is really game changing; the reduced casting time on heal spells. If they move some the reduced threat talent early in Holy; while reducing the pure healing power of some of the other high end holy talents they could easily make it so you are a perfectly passable healer with 15 Holy talents. Who might need to have a little more gear to heal an instance/raid compared to a Holy priest. But once again they have chosen not to. Must be because they don't want to.

Not sure but sometimes I get the feeling they intentionally make the game suck and be painful to play. I guess since it should feel like a sacrifice to play a pure tank or healer. I guess some people like feeling they make sacrifices for the good of the group or something.

 

Anedris

The problem with making sunder give the same threat as devastate is... what's the point of devastate? Warriors complained for a long time that devastate was a lacklustre 41-point talent. Now it's finally a solid capstone to the tanking tree. There's a fine line between "Everyone should be able to tank as good as a deep protection warrior" and making deep protection actually worth anything. (Incidently I think that warriors from a DPS perspective are very well done - two viable DPS trees and a tanking tree that nonetheless has some very good deep DPS-synergistic talents.)

Similarly for priests, if all it takes to make non-holy priests viable healers is to nerf deep holy, then non-holy priests are already viable healers. (In fact they are - I healed every normal instance as shadow wearing greens when I levelled up and then completed all my solo quests at 70, and I've since healed heroics as shadow, although by now I and my groups tend to outgear them enormously.)

In sum, if I can be as good a healer with 15 points in holy as I would be with 41 points in holy, why should I gimp my solo ability for no purpose? What we need to hope for is a careful balance whereby deep talents aid other roles, but someone specced for the role in question will still be superior at it. (For holy, I think pushback resistance on smite would go a long way to making holy grinding bearable.)

 

Nezralix

The only thing that's really changed about Devastate is that it was made to apply the Sunder debuff as well, thus making it a replacement to Sunder instead of an awkward corollary to it. Its core threat is the same as it was before, once the five Sunders are applied.

The threat difference isn't particularly important; it's the much lower rage cost (as compared to Arms/Fury Sunders), minor scaling with damage, and ability to crit that set it apart.

Frankly, I'd be happy if they ditched Sunder altogether, for all the reasons listed above. Too much rage for what it does, too little fixed threat, no scaling, no ability to crit, and requires too much time to get a full stack going. It's terrible that it's persisted for so long as the core "non-Prot" tanking skill.

But it's abundantly clear that they have no good ideas for how to make a class have a "tanking tree" without completely nullifying the tanking capacity of players in other specs. You just can't pack a tree full of "increases threat by X%" talents without neutering trees that don't have them.

 

Anedris

I don't think it's a lack of ideas, I think it's an insoluble problem given:

- You want the tanking tree to be worth speccing into (and thus to noticeably improve one's tanking ability)
- You want content to be challenging (and thus must assume that the tanks attempting it are tank-specced - if you balance for offspec tanks it's going to be easy with a properly specced group)

If you accept these two goals, you're stuck.

The "way out," such as it is, is to strike a balance between making it worth speccing deep prot and still giving enough tank-related synergies in arms and fury to make tanking the occasional instance as those specs not an exercise in eye-gouging. Given that the position of deep prot is essentially secure due to raid content (i.e., you're never going to go into a progression raid encounter with a tank who hasn't taken every bit of survivability and threat boost he can get) I would agree that arms and fury need a boost (notably in the threat department).

(As an aside, if your DPS actually knows what they're doing, you only have to out-threat the healer. I remember when heroics were actually hard it was extremely common to not even tank the kill target but kite it instead and burn it down that way while the tank built aggro on the rest of the pull. Obviously, these kind of work-arounds are not often going to work in PuGs, and the kind of group that is going to be comfortable using them is probably the kind of group who can each fork up 10g to let the tank spec for tanking.)

 

Nezralix

I think you're right that it's an impossible catch-22, and a very good argument in favor of more fluid respecs (unless something is done to somehow turn into DPS-oriented warriors into an alternative model of tanking, ala avoidance tanks, which pretty much won't happen).

Regardless of what they do to specs, presumably they want DPS-oriented warriors to remain a passable off-tank in scenarios where there isn't a major issue, in which case they're still going to need to offer much better multipurpose talents. While they've occasionally remarked that Arms warriors should function as an off-spec tanking benchmark, they've done relatively little to make that really work; they still suffer from major rage efficiency and threat generation issues, and there's not much in the three that has anything to do with that, unless you consider talents that affect very rare PvE scenarios like Second Wind.

By comparison, Fury synergizes fairly well, given some substitution of tanking gear for DPS gear to leverage Flurry, Sweeping Strikes and Bloodthirst, and of course the hit chance and dodge reduction talents are never a bad thing.

So in this case, you've got a PvE tanking tree that offers passable damage, a PvE DPS tree that functions moderately well as a PvE tanking tree, and a PvP tree that is essentially mediocre at every PvE role, with the exception of bringing a decent raid debuff to the table. So in effect, we've got another factor driving a wedge between PvE and PvP roles, with no particularly good way of bridging the gap.

This might be Blizzard's intention, but we've gotten this recent acknowledgment that the devs aren't happy with this divide (and they shouldn't be). It seems more likely that they're just not able to cleverly reconcile all of these competing motivations, and I certainly can't blame them, because it's a staggering challenge when you look at the the variety of options.

And I think with more fluid respec options, they have a lot more flexibility in creating trees that *don't* have to fill every role, and *can* afford to be more unique (although this isn't to say that they shouldn't still considering cross-purpose talents a second or third priority). They can reasonably expect players to specialize deep into a tree without feeling that they're losing out on major parts of the game.

The only real argument I've seen against more fluid and frequent respecs is the concern that players won't identify their character with a particular role. That argument doesn't hold water when you consider how many players obliterate their attachment to their primary character by being forced to roll alts to engage in the parts of the game they miss out on. And beyond that issue, there's a mountain of other problems that just happen to get resolved by fluid respecs.

 

Grungo

What they could do with warriors is balance it so that arms/fury warriors have enough threat generation to sufficiently hold aggro against real DPS -- basically, give them the TPS potential that deep prot has now. Then sprinkle some talents into deep prot that increase the ability to do damage while tanking, but still not reach the levels of damage done by DPS specced warriors in DPS gear. Leave the survivability as prot as is.

What this does is create a situation where a DPS warrior can throw on tanking gear and go defensive stance and hold real aggro, but completely gimp their damage in the process. A prot warrior would still be the preferred tank in all situations. They'd generate the same amount of threat, plus do maybe 70% of the damage of a real DPSer while doing it, so heroics/instances will be noticeably faster with 3.7 effective DPSers. They'd also still have the boost in survivability that makes the pure spec necessary for progression content.

Something that might be tough to balance around would be that prot warriors, with their survivability and now boosted dps, might become unstoppable grinding machines. Prot warrior are already capable of some crazy soloing. Then again, this might do nothing more than make them as capable of solo grinding as prot pallies already are. It might even make them playable in pvp (playable, though certainly not ideal -- not good enough to oust the MS warrior's spot on an arena team, certainly)