I'm sorry, did anyone say we should be tanking things that can one shot us? No? Then stop using that as an argument against it!

edit: And if we aren't being one-shotted, 30% mitigation with 75% *avoidance* compares quite favorably to 75% mitigation with 30% avoidance.

Beef,

Going back to the itemization for a minute. Based on what you said, druids want Armor, Stamina, Strength, Dodge and Agility (to a lesser extent). Rogues want Stamina, Defense, Agility, Dodge, and Parry. I'm not super smart about ilevel formula, but I'm assuming leather pieces with higher than normal armor (i.e. Bloodfang vs. Ghoul Skin) are using part of their budget on armor.

So how does this look as a hybrid piece?

Demon Skin Tunic
300 Armor (Leather)
+43 Stamina
+21 Agility
Equip: Increases your chance to dodge an attack by 1%.
Equip: Improves your chance to hit by 2%.
2 Sockets

Sockets would let druids go +armor/strength, while rogues go +defense/parry or more agility.

You are completely right, but it is nice to guess how a Rogue tank would work out.

Wish warriors would tink the opposite :P

That's funny. I could swear I just looked at Redemption and there is zero strength, agility, or spell damage on it.

Tier 1 and Tier 2 are mainly healing-itemized, with a small nod to allowing paladins to solo.

Druid tier gear is itemized for healing. If they want to offspec (i.e. tank) they get non-set gear.

Priest tier gear? Healing. If they want to offspec (DPS), they get non-set gear.

Warrior tier gear? Tanking. If they want to DPS, they mainly use non-set gear.

The problem is Blizzard adjusted to paladins' role slower than players did. Hypothetical rogue tier gear wouldn't get tanking stats - it would get DPS stats, and hypothetical tanking rogues would go looking for non-set gear for tanking purposes.

Fun and different idea. As far as history is concerned, it had a basis in both FFXI with the War/Nin, Nin/War, and the random Pal/Nin, one of those being the single best tank in the game in most situations. utsemi:ichi, utsemi:ni meant constant absorbtion 90% of the time.

I remember PvP on my Tankazon in DiabloII. Max avoidance, dagger, shield, 65% crushing blow and a bag of poison charms. It was rare that I ever even took a hit, and coupled with a good barbarian and his shouts, I was unkillable to melee.

It's painful that one would need to spec so poorly to pull it off, but it would be a neat idea none the less.

Other precedents for it: Anarchy Online's fixer class with proper pointspend and Grid Armor (pre-expansion, obviously).

It's not actually that poor of a spec; for DPS purposes, hemo with AP and agi boosts will do okay. Obviously it won't do as much DPS as a DPS-optimized spec, but it should hold up reasonably well.

Actually the only case it compares favorably is when you're getting one-shotted anyway. It's the same amount of damage, and the less spikes the better.

That being said, it doesn't mean that rogues couldn't be better tanks in TBC in some situations than they are now. Generally avoidance tanking doesn't work though. (Unless you get 100% avoidance.)

Regardless of whether or not rogue would be better in some situation than others, what is the harm in changing the mechanics to allow it? As we have said, rogue/druid itemization and +threat is all that is needed. After that, smart players can give it a try and see how it works out.

I posted about this in the WoW forums, but the Rogue Tank would be characterized by the reactiveness in response to spike damage. In response to a spike, you can ghostly strike, evasion, cloak of shadows, etc, all in an attempt to allow heal to full time. Will these be enough? Maybe. Perhaps another 30s or so cooldown ability to 'shield' yourself for 4-5s would be enough.

Having been a functional avoidance tank before (in another game, but nonethless) - you're full of shit. It compares just fine so long as there's an interval in which heals can land on you - spikiness isn't that big of a deal with proper healing. Although less spikiness is better, it's easy enough for an encounter to encourage avoidance tanking.

Here's a hypothetical for you - if I can hit 30% mitigation and 85% avoidance (and I assure you I can), while optimum warrior tanks are looking at 75% mitigation and 30% avoidance, I am a *better* tank for an encounter where I'm being hit rapidly, many times, for small amounts of damage. I'm a better tank for any encounter where being hit twice in a row does > 2X damage, where X is the damage of the first hit. There are many circumstances where avoidance tanking is superior to mitigation tanking; they're only minimally used in the current raiding game, but partly that's due to the fact that no one's capable of doing it, so why design an unbeatable encounter.

The simple fact is: rogues can conceivably be solid offtanks and occasional maintanks, the same target as seems to be being aimed at for druids and paladins.

Is that an endorsement that it would be a good hybrid tank piece for both druids and rogues then?

General game mechanics of WoW do not favor avoidance tanking. And if you were able to consistently get very high avoidance rates, I'm quite sure Blizzard would do something about it.

Why? Given the one-shot problem, if they decide they don't want avoidance tanks, all they need to do is make sure most raid mobs hit hard enough to one-shot a rogue. And in PvP, all the physical mitigation in the world won't save you when a mage decides to nuke you into ashes.

(And considering rogues with existing talents and itemization can hit consistent buffed full mitigation rates on the order of 70-75%, with controllable 15% and 50% boosts on top of that, I'd think they'd have done something about it by now if they wanted to).

Nezralix: Way to ignore the encounter design. If spike damage isn't an issue, which by design it wouldn't be in stated situation, total HP buffer is meaningless, because you're getting healed.

Why would you expect rogues in tanking gear to have half the HP of a warrior? Most rogue now are optimizing for DPS, not stamina. While abilities like last stand and lifegeming gem are not avialable, with proper itemization rogues could have the same HP as warriors.

What ridiculously larger health pool? Hypothetical roguetank has 5000 unbuffed HP. As an example of a supremely well-geared warrior, Vestige is sitting at 7k. There's no "double the health" going on here.

A rogue in that profile can boost their mitigation via stoneshield consumption to almost 50%, while a warrior caps their mitigation at 75%.

The mana efficiency gain is actually bigger than you'd think, because healers will be continually cast/canceling large heals - a strategy basically like healing Patchwerk OTs.

You're approaching it from the angle of "it can't work". It can.

As long as not avoiding a strike doesn't one-shot you, then yes, avoidance tanking is in many ways superior. Any ability which will two shot a rogue, but would also two-shot a warrior, is better served by avoidance tanking than mitigation tanking.

Nezralix, have you looked at all the new talents in the subtlety tree? The talents are there. Its just the itemization and the threat that needs work. I think the threat is fine for offtanking already, but obviously not for maintanking. If there is a good amount of leather gear similar to stuff in AQ40 then the gear will be there too. Especially if socketing allows you to customize things to fit the leather wearers playstyle (druid or rogue).

I also don't understand a lot of your points. You say they can't give rogues health unless they take away avoidance. But then you say that warriors already have equivalent avoidance. So umm they must be able to do that. If warriors have gear that gives them good sta as well as dodge/parry than rogues can get that too. Add in that rogues have many abilities and talents that give them more dodge, parry and enchanced dodge/parry for limited time.

The point about itemization, depending on how well socketing is done (which sockets types can be made, how much of it is available, how much is stacking allowed) Rogue tanking can work as a OT duty.

The Leather chest that was presented earlier (with 2 sockets and agil/stam/dodge/hit) was a good start.

But the items have to be open enough that sockets can fill in the holes of that the potential Rogue tank will have.

Warriors won't have anywhere near the same avoidance. A top-geared tank right now sits around 65% armor, 40% miss/dodge/parry, 7k health. A rogue sits, with poor itemization, at around 80% miss/dodge/parry, 30% armor, and 5k health.

Whether or not Blizzard *will* add the necessary items/threat is unknown, and really unlikely. However, don't try to argue it isn't doable; I've shown time and again in this thread that it's 90% done already.

Let me outline why warriors can't match rogue avoidance:

14.5 agi per dodge instead of 20
5% dodge from talents
4% increased miss rate from talents

Warriors parry talent is matched by rogue's parry talent - they get 10 defense, but we get -2% critical chance, call it a wash in the end. They have shield wall - we have evasion. Shield Block vs. Ghostly Strike - GS is *almost* at the point of making a rogue untouchable while it's up as is.

It's down to itemization to make it viable, and it doesn't even require much in the way of itemization changes, especially with the potential of socketed items.

I'm not talking about Cheat Death - Cheat Death is a "in case of screwup" talent for a rogue tank.

10% mitigation is absolutely a buff. Of course, so is 40% avoidance.

You're sticking your fingers in your ears at this point - as long as I'm not getting one-shotted, a rogue with the stats posted is a *very* effective tank, since they can controllably boost avoidance high enough to give healers time to get them out of death range (via GS or Evasion in an emergency).

Who cares that they'll have armor and block? If a warrior has 10k HP and a rogue has 8k HP (7000 unbuffed for a T3 geared tank, 5000 unbuffed for Dodgy McRoguetank), and incoming hits are at a base of 15k (buffed mitigations are 50% for rogue, 75% for warrior, so incoming damage is respectively 7.5k per and 5k per) - in both cases, a second hit pre healing will kill the tank.

At that point, all your mitigation advantages are essentially worthless, because you HAVE to heal them above the danger zone prior to next incoming attack anyway. Avoidance becomes superior.

And I think that with sufficient itemization, you'd be wrong. My math supports it. Where's yours? (BTW, Patchwerk can't crushing blow the MT - given *12* more defense than my profile can come up with, a specced rogue could effectively MT Patchwerk as a result. He hits a 75% mitigation MT for ~2000 if I remember right, so a 50% mitigation - Stoneshields! - rogue is looking at ~4000 per hit, which means he's out of one-shot range, and potentially out of twoshot range with a flask/consumables. So it comes down to threat and that 12 defense gap, which was the point originally made. And, ya know? That's *Patchwerk*, not exactly a trivial mob. And you'd be cutting MT heal burden significantly, since 80% avoidance on top of 50% mitigation >>> 40% avoidance on top of 75% mitigation.)

Take a serious look at the profile I've presented. Think about what consumables and buffs can do to that profile. Think about how close it is as is.

12 defense and some threat is what stands between a 1.12 rogue being able to tank Patchwerk or not.

Not quite. Warriors need 3 stats to get avoidance, damage and hp. Agility, Strength and stamina. Rogues need 2.

Gauntlets of Might
468 Armor
+22 Strength
+17 Stamina
+7 Fire Resistance
Equip: Improves your chance to hit by 1%.
Equip: Increased Defense +5.

0% avoidance. Now consider a rogue equivalent.

Blademaster's Gauntlets
125 Armor
+22 Agility
+17 Stamina
+7 Fire Resistance
Equip: Improves your chance to hit by 1%.
Equip: Increased Defense +5.

Rogues get about 1.5% dodge from thier item, while warriors get none. Same exact ilevel. Plus rogues need much less defense then warriors, since Sleight of Hand is roughly equilavent to 50 defense (for purposes of reducing crits).