Pyros

Your A makes sense, your B not so much since you say Blood or Frost then say something about Bone shield(which I couldn't really understand though) and C seems stretched.

If we assume warriors/paladins become uncrushable in Ulduar and block adds up as a direct mitigation tool, that doesn't make up for the fact DKs have the best active cooldowns. Whatever the spec, you're looking at 40-45seconds of cooldown usage, which does leave you slightly weaker out of these cooldowns(which you compensate by longer cooldowns, external or trinkets). They're definitely going to nerf avoidance because it's too good. My bet if they want to do it in a boring yet effective way is simply change blade barrier from 10%parry to a block-like buff that absorb hit based on whatever stat. It removes 10% avoidance, but give DKs block so everything is much closer to balance.

We'll see when it comes though, and discussing about DK's future when it's almost obvious they're going to nerf our avoidance doesn't seem very conclusive. Because else, A will definitely happen. They won't be able to balance boss dmg to not have DKs trivializing content without actually making all other tanks useless. Block is only good when all the blocked damage adds up to live an additional consecutive hit in a situation where you don't avoid anything, and due to current hp and current blocking value, I doubt that's possible if we assume hits big enough to take down a tank before healers react(so in under 3secs I'd say which is at most 3hits). In all other situations, block is a good mitigation stat, but if the tanks aren't in risk of dieing in 3consecutive hits, it's all about overall damage reduction and DKs win this.


As for the will of the necropolis stuff, I'm not sure I understand.
First VB doesn't make it worse, it increases both the region before it works and the region it works in, so it's a wash, and in fact increases the amount of damage a mob has to deal to kill you while in the wotn reduction. And makes it easier to heal back to full, but that's unrelated.

And it has no deadzone, it always reduce all damage taken under 35% by 15%. Even if the hits kills you, it will reduce it by 15%, which might or might not make your survive, but will always work. If the boss hits you for 55% every hit, the 2nd hit will be reduced by 15% anyway, and if you die well, blame your healers cause a tank hitting for 25k a hit probably requires a ton of healing, and other tanks will struggle just as much.

 

Qaenyin

Sorry my B:Was supposed to be Blood or Unholy being the only viable tanks, reason being that WotN is always up and avoidance increases the duration of Bone Shield indirectly. The reason is that BS only loses charges if attacks HIT, so the more avoidance you get the longer duration it has, until it becomes basically assured that you can have it or IBF up with a greater than 99% uptime.

And regarding a dead zone for WotN what I meant was if an attack does sufficient damage but not enough to drop you below 35% it means that you reach a point where WotN has no practical use as if you haven't gotten healed by the second hit you will die regardless of it and if you have gotten healed then it won't apply to that hit either. Meaning there's this kind of grey zone at the upper middle end of damage intake where WotN has no real effect on your ability to survive.


Edit:I'll use an example. Let's say you have 38k hp and a mob hits for 25k. That means that if you get hit twice you will die and WotN won't save you, and if you get hit once WotN will do nothing. That means WotN is rendered more or less useless and a waste of talent points as the only time where it will take effect is when you're half healed, making it a minor survivability increase at best.

 

teiglin

I can't imagine a boss where both (a) the boss hits for more than 50% of your health (actually 54% with WotN), and (b) there is insufficient time to guarantee some heals landing between swings. Such a boss certainly negates the effectiveness of WotN, but also means tanks have a chance equal to their chance to be hit to die on every other swing. The closest example to such a boss is patch25, as most tanks don't have enough health to take two hatefuls in a row, but you have two hateful tanks, effectively increasing the HP pool hatefuls have to beat through to kill someone.

In the real world, heals don't land consistently and you're not always topped off. While it is a bit frustrating a hit that brings you exactly to 35% will do more damage than one that would have brought you to 34% (maybe it should work like income tax and only affect the damage that goes past 35%?), it's still an incredibly powerful burst mitigation ability.

 

Qaenyin

My point was more just that a situational ability like WotN or Ardent Defender is intrinsically flawed by the fact it only works when A:A boss does enough damage that if you're at full health it applies or B:A boss hits soft enough you can wait until it applies to worry about healing. In most situations WotN is more or less without any use whatsoever.

 

nachrichter

Or make Blade Barrier 5% passive parry and change Forceful Deflection to be a chance (based on def) to deflect/block some amount of damage (based on str). If it was def skill / 5, that'd be 28% at uncrittable. (Would assume you'd want it to be based on def from gear for the same reasons IBF works that way.) Make it whatever percentage of str you think is appropriate. 100% of str would be something like 1400 or so for me, off the top of my head. Maybe it can partially block magic or maybe not, whichever seems more balanced. That'd be ~10% also, remove the current Blade Barrier mechanic, increase the value of def and allow DKs to gear for more block-specific stats when it made sense.

I would also think you'd want to change Unbreakable Armor to something more similar to Shield Block, if they went that way.

And WotN is active on any hit that can kill you. That's an important subset of attacks to mitigate, even if the talent doesn't save you from every attack in that set.

This thread is like a lich except his phylactery is the mind-numbing idiocy of every imbecile that walks the earth. -Slake
<Sappo> ARE YOU NOT MURGGRUGURGURGMRRMGRU?
<Sappo> ARE YOU NOT MORGRUGURGRMRGURGGRMGURGRMG?

 

Merogondinne

From my personal experience with Brutallus, as a warrior i could die with 2 hit from his main hand ( 1sec delay ) under stomp debuff.

Morrogrim in SSC was also able to 2 shoot any "not yet uncrushable mt" in raid progression.

Mother Sharaz Was not that strong but could kill you in barely 3 hits ( but every tank was over 80/85% avoid at this stage, but RNG ... )

Sarth 3D with 2D down can hit for 15k on a well geared DK wo +25% armor buff.

Azgalor melee+cleave was a big problem for avoid tank/low hp tank.

And before him Maghteridon was also very anoying with his cleave+mele combo.

What i'm trying to point out is that even with big avoid numbers there's some fight where it's not enough. And i think blizzard is working with that.
I can remember lots of avoid warrior having problem with Kalecgos because of the amount of magic damage taken and the 3 second stun.
There's a lot of fight where avoid is not THAT important.
How many fights where just tank and spank 's ?

There's certainly a problem with the amount of avoid a dk can get without DR and we'll see how blizzard will manage that.
In fact as it was already stated in this thread, I think it's more the insane amount of CD combined with avoid that make us too good. I personaly enjoy this aspect of the dk : launching cd after cd to manage to get less damage or be healed for more, but i still impressed by how good are theses cd and how big is the bufftime/cd ratio.

Note : I think it will be too "good" to change blade barrier to a flat +x% damage reduction because of its place in the skill three, maybe a cut down from 10 to 5 would be fine, at least it would lower the actual imbalance.


PS : As usual, sorry for my english.

 

teiglin

Well I was a bear in BC, so I don't think this was true for me, and I'm honestly surprised you were able to tank brutallus when two MH swings could kill you. I set my EH goal as "enough to survive MH+OH+Stomp" then stacked avoidance, but brutallus was a fight where if 1.2s (1s swing speed+TC) passed in which you neither received heals nor avoided any attacks you were going to die outside of big cooldowns. Healers got used to healing this and I don't think this fits my description of getting two-shotted with no opportunity for heals to land, though every once in a while we'd get bad rng in which the healers' casts all landed right before a pair of swings that all connected. Regardless, his swings had vastly different values and WotN would, in fact, greatly increase your effective burst against this type of boss, especially in the frequent case where you got hit for 20k, got some heals, then got hit for 10k more, etc.

Morogrim's a pretty poor example, though, as--you included this yourself--you would only get two-shot if you got crushed twice in a row. Crushes are gone; the RNG can no longer screw you on that front. None of those other bosses is particularly relevant to my point--you quoted me, but I was only talking about WotN and how it is quite powerful, despite some range of hits in which it doesn't save you.

As to your comments on avoidance, nobody's claiming that high avoidance is sufficient to make a tank good. You could have 99.9% avoidance but you'd be a horrible tank if you only had 1hp. The point is that, in addition to having comparable effective health to other tanks, DKs have a huge avoidance advantage that is not affected by DRs, which not only makes them better now, but that the avoidance advantage increases in terms of expected damage taken as gear becomes better.

 

Merogondinne

I've seen lot of people in this thread saying that block is not as good as Wotn, or at least hard to take in account.
But how many block value have a regular full 213 warrior actualy ? 2K, 2K5 ? In a Wow where warrior ( and palies ) have 102,... % parry+block+dodge+miss, and they're not far if not yet at this kind of value. You must account your block value to your EH multiplied by the number of hit that will kill you
A boss hit for 10k
You have 100% chance of at least block the attack with 2k5 block value
If you have 31k pv it means in the worse case you die in 5 hits where as you've said WotN Isn't up "all the time".
My numbers may be wrong or too high i'm no more intrested by shield classes but i'll prefer the ability to block than every Wotn or pallies equivalent.

Even if we have a too big avoid, and too long CD's we often die ( I ? ) from heavy physical spike damage : I often die in sartha 3D 10man if i got hit by the cleave and melee after a partial resist power breath ( RNG ? )
If you want to make good and objective comparison between the different tanks ( that's hard to do so ) you'll have to take more in account thant only raw avoid wich is important for every tank but absolutly not enough alone and depend a lot of the context.
What i hope is that we'll have to make a choice in the future between high avoid and high EH like it was more the case in BC.

 

KnThrak

Isn't the "fix" to this scaling issue as horribly simple as the problem implies then?
Sure, if we get more avoidance from talents and it all meddles into a single diminishing returns pool avoidance stats will be of much lower percentual value for us (per itemstatpoint spent on them).
Especially Parry, with a limit->44% and getting 10% from talents and 25% Str as Parryrating too will be even lower down the list.

However, unless I'm mistaken it'd remove the inherent disparity between the tanking classes here.

SQUEAK.
-- (The Death of Rats, Terry Pratchett, Soul Music)

 

teiglin

I don't know any warior tanks who have hit "uncrushable" though I can't speak for pally tanks (I bet many are with Holy Shield). My warrior in essentially BiS gear has around 1500 block value raid buffed and 15% chance to block (would be 18% in a progression raid spec). Certainly different gearing can push this over 2k, but naxx25 block gear tends to have much lower stamina than low-block alternatives, and such gear would also cut out a lot of avoidance. With 65% actual avoidance and 18% block, you're blocking just over half of the hits that actually land, mitigating (with critical block, average block value is around 2k) ~1k damage per hit. On a light 10k average swing boss, that's 10% mitigation. If the boss hits for 18k, it's 5.56% mitigation. Compare this to the 12% avoidance boost DKs are able to get, decreases expected damage taken by 34.3%. If the same warrior managed to keep high avoidance, get uncrushable (17% more block chance, or ~280 block rating), he'd be mitigating 20% of the 10k swings and 11% of the 18k swings, still significantly less on average than the DK. With a 40k health pool, the uncrushable would increase the worst-case number of hits he could take from four to five on the 10k swings but not gain any guaranteed hits on the 18k swings. However, the DK would have 280 more stat points allocated across his dodge/parry/stamina/armor, and while I realize it's not this simple, 420 more stamina would easily do more for worst-case TTL on a hard-hitting boss than guaranteed 2k blocks.

I rambled a bit there, but the point is that while block has become a decent mitigation stat, it doesn't even approach the average damage avoided from higher DK mitigation, and it a huge stat allocation to make it reliable, and even then it isn't much help in worst case against hard-hitting bosses. Maybe there will be a boss in ulduar that dual wields at .5 speed for 4k hits, but otherwise higher avoidance is better mitigation.

I didn't really intend to compare block to WotN; all I meant to say is that neither is trivial to account for when considering how much damage is mitigated over a range of fights.

 

Nal

I think internally this is the debate that's going on. Should DR be applied to all sources of avoidance? If so, this changes how (or if) you nerf blade barrier and the like. And this is why DK avoidance hasn't been nerfed yet.

There are a few reasons I think they will ultimately do precisely what you suggest they do.

First, it mitigates the difference in gains each class gets from avoidance. When you start out at a higher level of avoidance before diminishing returns kicks in, this changes the actual practical value you derive from marginal increases in avoidance rating.

And one of the major problems with tanking thus far has been balancing the practical benefits each of the tanking classes derive from the various tanking stats. Many of the past and current druid changes are driven by this fact.

By putting all sources of avoidance on the DR, you close this gap enough for it to not be a major problem.

Second, it prevents the Sunwell problem from happening. DR on avoidance probably didn't kick in hard enough at a low enough %. You can fix this in one fell swoop by putting everything on the DR.

Third, putting avoidance from talents on the DR does not actually have the effect of changing the mitigation value of the talents themselves. Since the DR is actually less than the exponential increase in mitigation you get by stacking avoidance, it won't be the case that the value of these talent points diminishes as you add gear. So there's no real reason they should not be on the DR.

 

GrizleyCQ

This would be good.

If they wanted to flavor it a little differently the damage parried could be based off the damage of the weapon the DK is using instead of defense or the block value of a shield. That would officially kill off dualwield tanking unless it worked off some sort of percentage of combined damage though. That may or may not be enough of a concern to torpedo the idea.

 

GrizleyCQ

Assuming it had the normal DW penalty a DK could likely tank such a boss without any healing outside of runetap.

 

Heartborne

I prefer blade barrier stay exactly where it is as well. 10% is a huge buff but it does cost 5 talent points, and also requires you to be "thoughtfull" in your rotations to keep it up. This helps prevent the "i'm lazy and don't feel like casting anything" factor while not automatically giving us a base talent that is too powerful. If it was too hard to keep up then no one would spend 5 talent points on it to begin with. If it was dropped to 5% though I do believe I would still spend the points.

 

nachrichter

Anticipation (DKs, warriors and pallies) is 5pts for 5% dodge. Deflection (warriors and pallies) is 5pts for 5% parry. Feral Swiftness (druids) is 2pts for 4% dodge, but it's third tier. Natural Reaction (druids) is 3pts for 6% dodge in the sixth tier. Different things for different people have different value, sometimes, but in the face of a clear avoidance gap in favor of DKs it's hard to see a lot of justification for a 5pt 10% avoidance talent in the first tier or anywhere else. At 5pts for 5%, I'd rather never have to be concerned about keeping the buff active. Similarly, Forceful Deflection currently adds a lot of free avoidance and devalues parry and defense rating in the process.

We should probably be expecting somewhere around a 10% avoidance nerf and the addition of some form of blocking. Changing Bladed Barrier to 5% means everyone gets nearly identical avoidance from talents and they wouldn't have to get into any crazy rebalancing of avoidance. Messing around with converting talented percentages into ratings to diminish with the ratings from gear would affect everyone and require more effort than simply changing the one talent that is too strong, without providing any useful additional benefit. That leads to changing Forceful Deflection to be the source of blocking.

This thread is like a lich except his phylactery is the mind-numbing idiocy of every imbecile that walks the earth. -Slake
<Sappo> ARE YOU NOT MURGGRUGURGURGMRRMGRU?
<Sappo> ARE YOU NOT MORGRUGURGRMRGURGGRMGURGRMG?

 

Soulsbane

Part of this is that DK's are supposed to be able to tank in all specs. This short-sighted vision forces all "mandatory" tanking talents into the first tier so that they are always within reach for all specs. Deep tree tanking talents cannot be so vital that they are necessary, so Blade Barrier rather must be so easy to get.

Would Blade Barrier feel more balanced if it was 7 tiers into a tree?

 

teiglin

Personally, I don't see a huge problem with blade barrier's cost/avoidance ratio. There would be no huge talent imbalance if blade barrier remained unchanged but frigid dreadplate and anticipation were removed. The bear talents cited before provide 2% dodge per point, sure, but there are only five points total of that, so bears, like warriors and paladins, gain 10% avoidance from talents. Comparing individual talents across classes is silly; it's like people who look at HfB or 3.0.8 TG and say "that talent is way better than anything so buff my 51pointer." Even if Willy Warrior is frustrated he spends ten points on Deflection and Anticipation while Bob Bear gets the same avoidance out of his five talent points in Natural Reaction and Feral Swiftness, that doesn't make feral tanking overpowered. The problem is that, regardless of talent point cost, DKs have access to 18% avoidance from talents as well as 4% from runeforge that other classes simply can't access, not that one class has cheaper avoidance per talent than another.

Talents can't be balanced in a vacuum; if class A has better avoidance than class B, it can be addressed by buffing B's avoidance talents or by nerfing A's, but the precise talent point allocation has more to do with how the talent fits into the class's trees and tanking builds than with their relative cost to other classes.

 

Flamingcloud

That would just make everyone blood instead of mostly everyone. Simplest solution is probably just to change blade barrier to 10% physical dr(or regular and then reduce the frost presence modifier). Of course this would require a rebalancing of spell deflection, and maybe even rune strike, but that is ok.

The avoidance really isn't a problem now, but it definitely will be in tier 9-10.

 

Heartborne

I see less blood tanks than frost tanks, and less frost tanks than unholy ones. But yes, that would force everyone to stick with blood.

 

Psy

And with recent changes on the PTR, Blade Barrier has been changed to damage reduction instead of avoidance, WotN has been nerfed (Cooldown added), and Vampiric Blood's uptime has been changed from 50% to 25%.

Following on the point of having a block mechanism added, it appears that the PTR version of Unbreakable Armor acts somewhat similar to block in that it's a straight physical damage reduction, rather than a percentage or any form of avoidance.

Imbalance rectified, all is right in this world again, happiness ensues.



Edit: Qaenyin, the odds of running into you here are mildly absurd. Long time no see.

 

Qaenyin

Yeah, nice to see you're still active Psy, wasn't sure anymore haha.

Anyways, the only problem I see with the new changes is that because forceful deflection is subject to DR, this now puts us at a slight disadvantage to other tanks unless frost specced, avoidance wise, and I believe a decent mitigation disadvantage on top of that when specced blood(despite the cooldown increase, UA and Bone Shield combined with IBF and our higher armor should be enough to offset block).

Frost has higher avoidance to compensate, putting them still ahead of warriors in terms of DR ignoring avoidance.

Unholy has access to bone shield, which gives them a nice mitigation boost over time.

Blood, however, I think needs something. I don't feel VB, now that it's uptime is halved, is enough to offset what the other trees have to offer, and WotN is even more unreliable now.

Maybe they should replace WotN altogether and replace it with something a bit more static, either for increasing healing intake or for mitigation/avoidance.

Or, alternately, perhaps they could simply reverse the effects of Improved Blood Presence, making it give increased heal intake in all presences, and more healing from damage dealt in blood presence. That would make Frost have good avoidance, unholy have good mitigation, and blood be mana efficient to heal(something that may become a valid benefit with the incoming spirit regen nerfs).

 

Psy

I still feel WotN is a strong talent, though it depends on how hard bosses hit. If MOST attacks by a boss will be bringing us under 35%, then it's quite lackluster. On the other hand, if only a few, special ability hits will be bringing us under 35%, then WotN is still very strong. It will vary based on individual boss fights.

The avoidance imbalance is gone, really. I mean, we're fluctuating by -1% to +2%, but that's really not a huge deal especially considering the uniqueness of the class in terms of cooldown use. I don't expect to see DKs having a huge problem in Ulduar. We'll find out though

 

sanddemon

So what would be the most avoidance tank spec in 3.1? Something like this? Is it worth even attempting something like this considering the lack of TPS generated?

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?deat...5&version=9658

 

Griefknight

The most avoidance from a tank spec is one that includes Frigid Dreadplate seeing as how everyone else should have Anticipation.

 

Moorokos

Perhaps they are trying to force DK tanks more into one tree, much like any other MT class is forced into one tree.

Doesn't seem balanced for DKs to be able to spec into any tree and still be solid MAIN tanks.. though I've yet to see any warrior OT combine fury or MS with basic tank talents and see what they could do.