Protection and you! - Page 154

Mortehl · 09/24/08, 11:13 AM

Originally Posted by bellator

Multi hit AS isn't needed for control, i just find it a little easier. Going through naxx, it's just a little easier if you have a pack of 5 for ensuring all adds stick to you. Can open with this, judge/exo whoever wasnt his, then with HotR/cons, dps can attack whatever they like.

Yes I am a paladin, however this isnt the big difference. I am using the two insane JC stamina trinkets, with 3 +41stam gems. I also have most enchants as stamina. My gear however isnt that great. I only have 1 item from 10-mans(gloves) and 1 item (belt) from badges. When tier 8 comes, I think hitting 40k won't be much of a problem

I do really have 35k fully buffed, not lieing :p. As to how it feels, its a little tricky to say as i feel 10-man naxx is currently horribly tuned in terms of consistency (wont go into it here too much though). As you know the maximum damage throughput a tank can take can be no more than the maximum healing throughput the healers can do. With the mana issues etc coming with wrath the later isnt massive. What this means is that:-

1) On fights like patchwerk, maexanna, where the tanks are taking the majority of raid damage, having the high stamina helps with non-avoided string of hatefuls or a poorly executed web wrab etc.
2) On fights like 4HM where a healer has to heal a tank+marks+meteor it means the tank is only taking 2.5k damage per 2 sec in melee hits and 4k meteors every 10 seconds, then the HP is ridiculous, and you could tank it with 20khp.

Thus, personally, i would say it ranges from ok to too much. Personally i think around 30k would be more suitable, but then work needs to be done to tune up healers mana a little and in turn tune up damage output of fights like 4HM to create some consisteny accross the instance.

I believe you! I feel pretty good putting up a 25k pool right now with 3 crafted blues, a belt, both rings, and a trinket leftover from level 70 content (incidentally the trinket I'm using is the scarab as it had more raw defense then the shadowmoon insignia, though I have access to both). All in all, I am pretty sure I could ping 30k right now by replacing the level 70 crap.

I think we're both right on the Avenger's Shield thing. It comes down to style and I'm not going to knock yours.

Denogran · 09/24/08, 3:07 PM

Originally Posted by Oggie

I love that you equated HSH with Deadmines.

Not that you're wrong, and I agree with it. I love the TPS minigame and I hope they don't box it out completely, but I'm pretty okay with them doing away with it for 5mans/some easier 10mans- sure, it'll be harder to tell if someone's a good tank, but on the other hand it'll matter a lot less.

Edit:
Oh and it bears repeating, thank GOD ironshields are going bye-bye.

I ran them both this last weekend and the only real difference is that Deadmines doesn't require a healer. Going to be ridiculous with the changes to Blessing of Sanctuary though, right now the biggest downtime in either instance is the requirement to drink every so often.

I only really minded ironshields for two reasons. One was that ancient lichen was such a pain in the ass to farm. Basically, you could only get the stuff from dungeons or the trees in Skettis. And second, they only stack in 5s. I never have _any_ room in my bags (although carrying 3 sets of gear, 12 weapons and 4 shields certainly isn't helping my cause). If they had made Ironshield injectors with more readily available herbs, I wouldn't have minded them in the slightest (and would probably be far better about popping them on cooldown than I am now).

One last word on the TPS stuff. I don't mind tanks being threat gods for 5-man stuff. The more available tanks there the better, and if it's enough where I feel comfortable bringing my woefully undergeared fury warrior as a temporary prot tank and am not left with a feeling of complete ineptness, then awesome. But I do believe that raiding (whether 10-man or 25-man), should leave threat as a concern - for both the tanks and the dps.

Also, I'm glad to hear that health actually increases by a substantial amount. Gotta say it just makes me feel happy seeing the huge amounts of health I currently have - going up in life is a lot more rewarding than going up in say avoidance, even if the end results are very similar.

Cathela · 09/24/08, 3:48 PM

Originally Posted by Helot

Imo, Taunts are for trash. Most bosses cannot be taunted, So increasing your threat on a boss is better than having an unresistable taunt.

Right, but the flip side to that is that on those uncommon bosses that can be taunted, it's usually Really Fucking Important not to get a resist. Missing a taunt on Kalecgos means sitting around for 10 seconds (after 3.0 reduces RD cooldown), hoping that the tank you're relieving doesn't miss his portal, or worse yet die due to another stack of the debuff. Missing a taunt on Brutallus means basically saying "sorry guys, GG RNG, just die where you are so we can use our skeletons to position quickly for the next attempt."

Granted, these situations would be less critical if we had a viable backup taunt mechanic like Challenging Shout or a glyphed Mocking Blow, and hopefully that's a flaw that will be addressed somehow (our nebulous 11-point talent?) but for now, we've only got the one taunt, and in situations where it needs to hit, it really needs to hit.

The value of the RD glyph is going to come down to:

(1) Does RD use the base physical miss rate (9% on bosses) or the spell miss rate (17% on bosses)? If it's the physical miss rate, then you can eliminate taunt resists just by hit-capping, which will be good for your threat anyway, so the glyph will only be useful if you're not hit-capped for whatever reason. If it's the spell miss rate, then you need the glyph and physical hit-cap to remove taunt resists -- and you'll definitely want the glyph for that because otherwise you'd have to stack a bunch of extra hit rating beyond what you need for threat reasoons.

(2) How much hit rating do we get on our gear? If there's copious hit rating just hanging around randomly on tanking gear, then hit-capping might happen more or less "automatically" as you gear up. On the other hand, if it's not so abundant then it may require an effort to specifically seek out pieces with +hit on them to hit-cap, and you'll have to weigh the value of that against the other benefits you could gain. Potentially this could involve a lot of tradeoffs and a lot of thinking to do (which is good!)

Originally Posted by Denogran

Ya, I mean this isn't even so much about me standing out, it's about me being bored. I'll give an example of my favorite fight to tank so far - M'uru.

(further good points snipped)

Well, you're right, giving everyone a crapton of threat makes that less of a skill factor. But we're not going to be re-doing BC content with the new mechanics, and if the content developers are smart they'll take advantage of the fact that threat is less of a concern and use that as a reason to add more difficulty (and different kinds of difficulty) to WotLK tanking roles. Two years ago one could have said that adding a ranged taunt to the game basically trivialized Sartura, which was a fun tanking encounter. And that's true, but it hasn't stopped the devs coming up with new encounters that were fun to tank for different reasons.

Don't get me wrong, I actually agree with you that it's kind of sad to see threat-generation reduced in importance as a way to show skill. But there will (hopefully) be other challenges to replace it.

And I think there's also something to be said for just changing the game around a bit for the sake of change itself; it's nice that the next two years of tanking will be different from the last two years, even if TBC tanking was a lot of fun.

Originally Posted by Oggie

Oh and it bears repeating, thank GOD ironshields are going bye-bye.

Yes. I really found it frustrating that we had to carry around stacks and stacks of consumables to pop every two minutes just to reach our steady full potential as tanks. I don't know that I like the new potion sickness exactly as it is right now (getting one pot per fight regardless of its length seems a little weird to me; if an encounter is going to last 20-30 minutes you'd think you could pot twice) but it's a lot better than the current situation on live.

Originally Posted by Oggie

I'm reasonably sure that warriors currently on beta do not have this version, and it's certainly not from the MMO talents.

Edit:
Okay, no idea what the state these talents are in. Warriors have two improved TC taletns, the prot pally tree is basically from 3-4 patches ago, this is just a huge mishmash.

MMO-Champ's calculator is usually more up to date than the official one; right now it's allegedly showing the changes from the incoming patch, and it shows +6% stam from vitality. I don't remember if I said this in this thread or the other one, but trying to balance a static health gap against a scaling difference is just a bad idea, because it guarantees an imbalance somewhere. Much better I think if they change one of our +6% stam talents to instead give a percentage buff to base health, and then we can have warriors and paladins scale up together all the way through the gear progression. (And it's fine if we have different health pools as long as it's balanced by mitigation differences or whatever, but it should be balanced all the way through the gear progression, not "You're 1000 hp low right now, but by the time you kill Arthas you'll be 1000 hp high, so it's balanced!")

Originally Posted by bellator

Multi hit AS isn't needed for control, i just find it a little easier. Going through naxx, it's just a little easier if you have a pack of 5 for ensuring all adds stick to you. Can open with this, judge/exo whoever wasnt his, then with HotR/cons, dps can attack whatever they like.

I can see the argument that instead of AS'ing a melee pack you can just stand in their way as they come in and hammer the group when one gets into range.

What I would miss most about multi-target AS is being able to get opening threat on three caster mobs. This is useful if you're CC'ing them, because if the CC pops early they're aggro'd on you rather than on the mage/priest/whatever. It's also nice of you're not CC'ing, because the AS threat is often enough to stay ahead of healing threat for a long time, so you can effectively "offtank" a ranged caster for awhile even while you're doing something else, as long as nobody else touches it.

Still, every time I toss out an instant-cast AS and get a 3.4k crit without the glyph, I start salivating thinking about what kind of damage it would do with the glyph.

Interesting notes on the stamina (from both of you). Glad to see that we do get some kind of stam boost at 80; I guess a lot of the question of how much stam is "enough" will depend on where Naxx ends up after tuning. And if it turns out that 35-40khp really us useful, Jewelcrafting looks like a pretty sweet profession.

Halion · 09/24/08, 5:50 PM

Originally Posted by Cathela

The value of the RD glyph is going to come down to:

(1) Does RD use the base physical miss rate (9% on bosses) or the spell miss rate (17% on bosses)? If it's the physical miss rate, then you can eliminate taunt resists just by hit-capping, which will be good for your threat anyway, so the glyph will only be useful if you're not hit-capped for whatever reason. If it's the spell miss rate, then you need the glyph and physical hit-cap to remove taunt resists -- and you'll definitely want the glyph for that because otherwise you'd have to stack a bunch of extra hit rating beyond what you need for threat reasoons.

I've just assumed that it is using spell miss, the taunt glyphs all being 8% is just too much of a coincidence for any other explanation.

Has anyone tested this on PTR?

ZulazeeluIcecrown · 09/24/08, 7:09 PM

Originally Posted by Halion

I've just assumed that it is using spell miss, the taunt glyphs all being 8% is just too much of a coincidence for any other explanation.

Has anyone tested this on PTR?

I believe it has been tested on live and found to be on the spell hit table, and I think it is unlikely to have been changed in 3.0. And yeah, it doesn't make any sense for the glyph to be +8% otherwise; that works out to exactly the 17% you need to never, ever miss if you gear for the 9% physical hit cap.

Cathela · 09/24/08, 10:36 PM

Originally Posted by ZulazeeluIcecrown

I believe it has been tested on live and found to be on the spell hit table, and I think it is unlikely to have been changed in 3.0. And yeah, it doesn't make any sense for the glyph to be +8% otherwise; that works out to exactly the 17% you need to never, ever miss if you gear for the 9% physical hit cap.

Is there a firsthand source for this?

My only personal experience dealing with this has been learning Kalecgos, which involves a lot of taunting of level 73 mobs. About halfway through our learning process I started gearing for about +7% hit, where previously I'd had none. I didn't keep records of taunts and resists (in retrospect I wish I had) but it sure felt like the gear change reduced the number of resists to a tiny fraction of what they'd been before. Anecdotal of course, but it sure felt a lot more like a 9% base resist rate than a 17% rate (and you'd expect to notice the difference between 2% and 10% resist rates).

So anyway, I'd really like to see hard evidence before I believe that taunts use the spell table.

I agree 8% makes a lot of sense if it's a 17% base, but there's no rule saying it has to be a magic number that precisely fills some gap, and it's certainly possible that the people who design glyphs aren't that well-informed about the precise mechanics of the class. (They gave us a glyph to reduce the cooldown on Turn Evil, remember?)

If someone wanted to do a test on live, the best way to do it would be to spec out of Precision (just to remove any ambiguity about whether it affects taunt or not), and then get +8% hit and test it on a skull mob. It shouldn't take too long to see the difference between a 1% resist rate and a 9% rate.

What would be the best/easiest mob to use for this?

GSH · 09/24/08, 11:53 PM

Originally Posted by Cathela

Is there a firsthand source for this?

My only personal experience dealing with this has been learning Kalecgos, which involves a lot of taunting of level 73 mobs. About halfway through our learning process I started gearing for about +7% hit, where previously I'd had none. I didn't keep records of taunts and resists (in retrospect I wish I had) but it sure felt like the gear change reduced the number of resists to a tiny fraction of what they'd been before. Anecdotal of course, but it sure felt a lot more like a 9% base resist rate than a 17% rate (and you'd expect to notice the difference between 2% and 10% resist rates).

I remember seeing it in an old EJ thread. I think what the testing showed was that bosses which needed to be taunted as part of the fight such as Nalorakk were more susceptible to Taunt than other bosses. I believe the testing was done on old ZG bosses. I think they determined that Venoxis (Snake) had a 17% miss chance, but Nalorakk only had 9% or so.

Edit: Here we go: 2.3: Miss rate vs Boss mobs?

♦ Oggie · 09/25/08, 12:17 AM

My search-fu is failing, but didn't someone actually do that on the 2nd boss in ZA? If memory serves they came up with 'affected by +hit (melee) but seems to be greater than 9%'. I wouldn't be overly surprised if it was 17% normally, there's certainly something weird on Brut's taunt table and I have 'felt' (pure anecdotally) that there's something funky on Kalec too sometimes.

If you do go out and test this, mind testing with a warrior? JoL should keep you both going strong for most of it, and with enough test data we can also see if they work the same.

I am also kind of curious if it's possible that precision is double dipping for taunt resists- 3% melee (added in a patch note) but also 3% from spells (never removed, since +spellhit was how you used to decrease taunt resist for warriors/druids/pallies till....2.3?).

Could be some really interesting data.

Cathela · 09/25/08, 1:17 AM

Originally Posted by GSH

I remember seeing it in an old EJ thread. I think what the testing showed was that bosses which needed to be taunted as part of the fight such as Nalorakk were more susceptible to Taunt than other bosses. I believe the testing was done on old ZG bosses. I think they determined that Venoxis (Snake) had a 17% miss chance, but Nalorakk only had 9% or so.

Edit: Here we go: 2.3: Miss rate vs Boss mobs?

Ah, okay. That does seem pretty rigorous. And it would make sense for Kalecgos to be a special case (since it's such a taunt-heavy fight), which would explain my experience.

♦ Oggie · 09/25/08, 9:04 AM

Obviously we don't know how the spellhit table will work in wotlk, but with that 1% totally removed, it'll probably become a lot more of very, very active interest.

Edit:
Not the least of which is warriors/druids/Dks don't seem to have the same, which lets pallies taunt hit cap comically easy compared to all others.

• Chicken · 09/25/08, 9:17 AM

Originally Posted by Oggie

Obviously we don't know how the spellhit table will work in wotlk, but with that 1% totally removed, it'll probably become a lot more of very, very active interest.

Edit:
Not the least of which is warriors/druids/Dks don't seem to have the same, which lets pallies taunt hit cap comically easy compared to all others.

Glyph of Taunt - Item - World of Warcraft
Glyph of Growl - Item - World of Warcraft
Glyph of Dark Command - Item - World of Warcraft

All four tanking classes have a glyph for it now. Precision has also been removed, so we can't double dip on that either.

Cathela · 09/25/08, 11:55 AM

Originally Posted by Chicken

Precision has also been removed, so we can't double dip on that either.

Oh, has it been confirmed that both spell and melee hit apply to taunts?

(I guess I really don't have a clue what my Kalecgos impressions mean.)

-----

In another vein, all damage seals except SoR got about a 20% nerf in the new beta patch. I think this probably brings SoV and SoR fairly close in terms of damage/threat, and we might be at the point where which one is better depends on Reckoning. I'll do the math a bit later today.

bellator · 09/25/08, 11:59 AM

Completely anecdotal, and statistically insignificant atm, but so far (with taunt glyph and next to no +hit), I have probably used taunt on bosses 20-25 times (gluth, anub and 4hm). I have yet to see a resist. Will keep doing naxx and keep taunting and let you know if i see one

♦ Oggie · 09/25/08, 4:56 PM

To be fair, my concept of the double dipping came from inside my crazy, crazy head and have about as much proof as anything not supported by anything other source than one single person absently noting something.

It makes a 'sort of' logical sense and vaguely explains some differences in taunting resists with my other tanks when I know the level of +hit I run with and the +hit they run with, but it was intended much more as 'something to test since you're testing stuff anyway' rather than 'something known'.

Those other glyphs I had no idea existed, thank you.

Halion · 09/25/08, 6:05 PM

Originally Posted by bellator

Completely anecdotal, and statistically insignificant atm, but so far (with taunt glyph and next to no +hit), I have probably used taunt on bosses 20-25 times (gluth, anub and 4hm). I have yet to see a resist. Will keep doing naxx and keep taunting and let you know if i see one

You mention raid bosses, have you had any taunt resists on anything (instance trash / world mobs / etc)?