Why would you envisage Sword + Board being a style of maximal DPS?
Even as a warrior who's primary training is in the area of engaging an opponent in combat and preventing himself from taking too much damage (aka Protection spec).
A shield makes sense as a tool for damage when your opponent has their defences out to parry your relatively lightweight weapons. Your heavy shield slams are a solid way through. However, once the Bad Guy is no longer targeting you and your swinging at the thing from behind, it's hard to imagine any sort of warrior who would try to maximise the amount of damage they could deliver by holding a shield in their off hand.
I think the current situation in game makes perfect thematic sense. All types of warriors will draw a shield will draw out a shield against the heaviest of foes. The Protection warrior just knows how to use that shield more effectively and can pull a few more tricks with it.
If people do want a DPS 'style' that is specific to a protection trained warrior, there might be a unique opportunity for some form of prot talent that gives a decent damage bonus of some form for not holding anything in the off hand (aka using a single 1H weapon only). This would be working under the theory that the Prot warrior doesn't put the time in practice and training into the difficulties of controlling a weapon in a hand that is more accustomed to holding a towering shield.
However, I don't personally believe that the Prot warrior needs a specific unique form of DPS combat - be that 2H, DW or S&B. The Prot warrior will just use what ever is best for him to do that role. His speciality comes into play when he is tanking - he does things that the Arms and Fury talent tree's down allow for.
Why would you envisage Sword + Board being a style of maximal DPS?
Even as a warrior who's primary training is in the area of engaging an opponent in combat and preventing himself from taking too much damage (aka Protection spec).
A shield makes sense as a tool for damage when your opponent has their defences out to parry your relatively lightweight weapons. Your heavy shield slams are a solid way through. However, once the Bad Guy is no longer targeting you and your swinging at the thing from behind, it's hard to imagine any sort of warrior who would try to maximise the amount of damage they could deliver by holding a shield in their off hand.
I think the current situation in game makes perfect thematic sense. All types of warriors will draw a shield will draw out a shield against the heaviest of foes. The Protection warrior just knows how to use that shield more effectively and can pull a few more tricks with it.
This is getting kind of silly, no? It really wouldn't matter what the warrior did when his opponent was turned, less than one pound of pressure is all that is needed to kill someone. Anyone who has fenced knows how silly Conan really is, there isn't such a thing as "maximizing" damage in real life.
When we speak of, or when the devs speak of a "vision", they are always envisioning the heat of combat...There are a million things that don't translate, such as collision, so the "personae" given always has to be a "general" one, IE, which "style" is used the most...Since protection warriors don't have collision to aid them, and there for can't tactically use their "toughness" to prevent access to their allies, they need a way to be aggressive enough to warrant their opponents attention. In PvE this is circumvented by things like taunt, agro ect..However, the fact remains, it doesn't work everywhere and so the protection "trees" for Paladins and Warriors are kind of left in an identity limbo in any aspect of the game except being the main target in PvE.
Which really, has been a core problem for both trees since their inception.
See, thats the problem with sword and board, its not a self fueling play style..Its utility can't be used effectively with just a....Sword and Board....
I'm not advocating more damage..I'm advocating more rage..There is a big difference there, unfortunately, its hard to give one, without the other.
Look, I dont disagree with the statement that fluid S&B playstyle is really dependant on rage flow you can't control (incoming damage vs outgoing damage in 2H/DW playstyles).
You're advocating a bigger rage flow when tanking. But where does one stop? To make everything "flow" you'd need loads of rage, almost to the point of making rage as a ressource obsolete. (once you cut the rare/management part out of the equation ... this should be obvious). So you stop at sensible levels when trying to enhance the rage flow. I'm not sure that the done changes to prot (higher personal DPS by AP scaling and STR as a major stat, incorporation of some rage retunr on avoidance moves, raid/grp wide buffs) do not already achieve that. We will experience if this will suffice on live ... as leveling on beta completely destroys your stats (it did so to mine)... and frankly I dont care what a class/role experience is when leveling up ... it's just a temporary thing.
As for rage drought brought up here several times by many tanks. I'm sure we all have experienced our share of these. But lets analyse further. I'd go as far as stating that most of these serious rage drought moments were a consequence of wrong gearing for that perticular encounter (the other rage drought issues are bad luck of avoidance strings which can be worked around by communicating with your raid).
"Wrong gearing"? I know that many here wish/think that having got the latests shiniest tanking tier set should suffice for tanking in ALL cases (no matter the encounter mechanics, be it 25 or 5 man). Just as overgearing is not a problem for other roles (healing, DPSing) it should not hinder tanks in doing their job.
And this is where I disagree. IMHO these roles are just not comparable in this simle aspect.
Once the DDer or healer has achieved the minimal health requirements for an encounter (for AE reasons eg), which is a ridiculous easy task, he can concentrate on his sole role ... healing/damage dealing. All of his stats are centered around this goal.
Not so for tanks. In a sense a tank is a two-way interacting linking part between the party and the mob. While healing/DPS roles usually interact in one-way fashion (just Damage the mob ... just heal your friends), the tanks need to achieve a balance between gearing towards the mob (how hard does he hit ..am I healable?) and the raid(what DPS do we have ... how strict is the enrage time ... are there snap aggro necessities ... etc). I'm writing all this just to elaborate why I think all these finger pointing to other classes (when mentioning that the wear their "best" gear in all cases) is moot. Our "best" gear is not the one we got last ... its the one thats best suited to an encounter.
And as such I have no problem to wear DPS/Arena/lower tier gear in cases where surviving is just not an issue ... but aggro holding is.
I'm sure some of you will say that's just me who got used to a faulty system. I cannot deny that and it possibly plays a part in my thinking.
It's just that I try to judge the consequences of a change thoroughly. What do we gain, what do we lose?
By gaining the comfort of not swapping gear around that much, *for me* the tanking playstyle would be dumbed way too much to be entertaining any more. Tanking for me is knowing every ability of the boss, knowing exactly what to gear in respect of the mob and the raid and *managing* your rage. Positioning the boss, doing the tanking routine and anticipating when to use my emergency buttons is the other half. Knowing the first part may be a hinderence to making tanking a "fire and forget" job (I'm sure we all agree that appointing a new tank to an encounter on average takes more time than subbing in a new healer/DDer), but losing half the tanking enjoyment just for comfort reasons does not entice me.
EDIT:
@Fellwraith: Do the changes (AP scaling, STR, raidbuffs) not already cover your concern? I think the direction to do so is clearly visible ... if it is enough remains to be seen.
Look, I dont disagree with the statement that fluid S&B playstyle is really dependant on rage flow you can't control (incoming damage vs outgoing damage in 2H/DW playstyles).
You're advocating a bigger rage flow when tanking.
EDIT:
@Fellwraith: Do the changes (AP scaling, STR, raidbuffs) not already cover your concern? I think the direction to do so is clearly visible ... if it is enough remains to be seen.
You might have misunderstood me, or perhaps you mistyped..I don't think rage flow when tanking is a problem..In those rage starved seconds, tactical choices have to be made, but thats good, as you said, it makes rage a resource. The thing is, when tanking, you can make those choices knowing that the fuel is coming, the decision is made for the now, or a few seconds in the future, not 10-12 seconds.
For example..As MS..In a BG, lets say..I can see a caster, intercept to him to stop a cast, pummel when he starts again and then intervene back to a healer to kill a rogue on them. I am comfortable doing this because my rage gain is such that I'm counting on a somewhat even flow. Now, I have to manage my rage still, I can't mindlessly blow WW, HS or Spamstring if I wish to do this "cool" stuff, but proper management does allow me to do it. As protection, this won't work..I can't be sure there will be enough rage after all this to maintain a proper DPS cycle, even a limited one. So, all that extra utility that is gained through the shield sits idle, because of rage concerns.
But I do agree, the AP scaling, and STR changes to shield block ect, are obvious steps in the right direction, if their goal is as ghost describes.
This is getting kind of silly, no? It really wouldn't matter what the warrior did when his opponent was turned, less than one pound of pressure is all that is needed to kill someone. Anyone who has fenced knows how silly Conan really is, there isn't such a thing as "maximizing" damage in real life.
Getting wildly off topic I know ;-)
If we were attacking an elephant from behind I'm guessing a larger axe or sword would be preferred to an epee and a half pound of pressure. I'd imagine if we scaled that up to a dragon or giant with plated scales, the choice of weapons would be very important - much like WoW.
When comparing Paladins and Warriors with respect to shield block it seems like it'll cause a lot of issues now. While Block Value isn't likely to be significant in high end raids; its really important in 5-mans; and likely the starter 10-man raid.
With paladins still being able to block almost every single attack; and warriors only being able to block maybe 20% or so when starting heroics/raids it seems like Blizzard would need to give warriors a lot of extra avoidance/armor to compensate; or Paladins would simply be too good at reducing incoming damage compared to warriors. If they didn't Paladins would likely be able to start heriocs and raiding at a much lower gear level and not be a too big drain on healers.
Of course if they do give Warriors extra avoidance and armor somehow to compensate then Paladins would likely be a dead end for the high end raids when block value isn't significant compared to how much the bosses hit for. This is assuming warriors and paladins will still share the basic mechanics and gain similar avoidance, etc, from gear (and use identical gear).
It seems like either they give warriors a way still block as many attacks as paladins; or they'd need to chose to balance for one specific part of the game and drop the other.
So either balance for raids with mobs that hit for a lot more than your block value, and make paladins overpowered in lower tier content where block value more important, or balance for the lower tier content and give warriors more avoidance/armor but then you'd overpower warriors in high end raids (regardless of if paladins get 16% stamina and warriors 5% likelty).
Of course if they are sensible Blizzard would likely make sure Paladins and Warriors are balanced for Heroics and the starter raid (since thats there the majority of the player base will stay). Game balance is a pretty big 'fun factor' and I'd guess it would suck to hear that this class can't be good now because if it was it would be overpowered later because of crappy scaling mechanics. In particular if said player have no intention to move onto the higher tier content.
Perhaps Blizzard will tweak Shield Block again but really worried that by letting paladins block everything more or less and letting warriors block significantly fewer attacks they'll create scaling problems that will be tricky to solve. In particular if warriors and paladins are still supposed to share the same game mechanics.
Not sure what to do though. Hitting the old shield block every 5 seconds really wasn't fun (and just macroed it to trigger off some other skill really).
Perhaps make Shield block a passive aura you can turn on and off? If they still want to give us an extra emergency button perhaps have a shield block button that doubles the amount blocked for 5 seconds or so with 1 minute cooldown? Or similar.
Or change shield block to be more like the paladin version. So it lasts 30 seconds and blocks more attacks. So you'll press it every 30 secs instead of every 5?
They have to balance Paladins with DKs and Druids anyways. Why to make Paladins and Warrior equals in every aspects ? Might aswell merge the classes. They'll probably come up with something else than copy every talent / skill from Paladins to Warriors. Paladins seem to be all about block, DKs are all about parry, druids are all about dodge ... they just have to find something for warriors. As long as each class as good enough mitigation / avoidance for any raiding tier, it seems fine to me if each class specializes in one particular aspect of tanking.
There will always be a tanking class that is better at tanking something - be it 5-man, 10-man, or high end 25-man - unless they're all the same. But as long as each class CAN actually tank each instance / raid of the game then what's the problem ?
Or to take all of the useless and counter-productive stuff out and build it into the class/stances. I.E. removing the defensive stance penalty lessens the necessity of one-hander spec, allowing it to be safely cut down to two or three points along with a commesurate reduction in power if it is needed.
I will have to disagree with this. 1h spec is a global aura that is active regardless of stances so it should not get nerfed even if stance penalties go because it adds to our DPS in DPS gear as much as it adds to our tanking threat now with the defensive stance penalty.
They really need to do two things: Give us more DPS/Tanking hybrid talents like DKs have them (Unbreakable Armor - Spell - World of Warcraft maybe?). In any case, it's not like this would be something new because we already have good hybrid talents with Focused Rage, Vitality, Devastate and 1h spec; these talents already help DW Prot DPS to be competitive. Secondly, they need to up our DPS with a shield equipped so we can actually do something after we are done tanking in a multi mob encounter and also for those that prefer the 1h/shield sort of DPSing (I don't, I am already scared off the aggro this playstyle is going to cause).
Serennia posted a Titan's Grip vs Dual Wield Arms video, with,surprisingly Arms pulling out ahead, mainly due to the non-stop Sudden Death procs I imagine.
When comparing Paladins and Warriors with respect to shield block it seems like it'll cause a lot of issues now. While Block Value isn't likely to be significant in high end raids; its really important in 5-mans; and likely the starter 10-man raid.
With paladins still being able to block almost every single attack; and warriors only being able to block maybe 20% or so when starting heroics/raids it seems like Blizzard would need to give warriors a lot of extra avoidance/armor to compensate; or Paladins would simply be too good at reducing incoming damage compared to warriors. If they didn't Paladins would likely be able to start heriocs and raiding at a much lower gear level and not be a too big drain on healers.
That really depends on the itemization. I would think that even with the new shield slam, that pallies need to stack +spellpower, which means less block value then your average warrior. So while a pally blocks more attacks, they block for less.
That really depends on the itemization. I would think that even with the new shield slam, that pallies need to stack +spellpower, which means less block value then your average warrior. So while a pally blocks more attacks, they block for less.
Really? I thought the jury was still out on what was better and if I remember correctly, Strength was really looking great because of their Shield Slam and Hammer of the Righteous (and I mean, really really good). Even if it ends up being a slightly worse threat stat, that won't mean that they will not go for Strength anyway. Strength is a hybrid stat because it adds BV and threat whereas Spell Power only increases your threat.
* We will not need to stack spell damage. Or rather, even if we wanted to, it simply won't be available on any Northrend gear. Our mechanics have been changed to scale with AP and spell damage. The AP we can get from the STR on tanking gear, while the spell damage we will get from a STA to spell damage conversion talent. Explicit spell damage on tanking gear will no longer exist.
* We will not be able to block 100% of all attacks. Holy Shield has a 10 second duration with an 8 second cooldown, that is true, but only adds 30% block, meaning we will have to scrounge up another 30% avoidance from gear to completely eliminate normal hits (what we would call uncrushable in TBC). However, given the stat spread on so-far-discovered tank gear, it seems highly unlikely that we will be able to form an unhittable gear set at 80.
In effect, Paladins will have 100% Holy Shield uptime, but will still receive normal hits, while Warriors have a non-100% Shield Block uptime, but cannot get time whenever Shield Block is up.
Warriors can talk about 'uncrushable' state only when wearing raid gear. We know next to no raid gear itemisation in wotlk.
Warriors and paladin share the tank gear, unless there are specifically 'class:Warrior', 'class:Paladin' labels on it. A 50% avoidance is a relative modest goal to achieve in raid gear, and from there getting the rest from buffs, pasive block rating and 30% Holy shield modifier does not seems so difficult. You might want to hang on your block rating Libram, as many warriors still used the Block value/rating trinket from BWL, untill late in TBC.
The end result is what you try to deny. Paladins will block every single attack from the boss (1k+ block value in raid enviroments with all the buffs around), while warriors will block double that value for 10 sec, then take full dmg for 30 sec.
It is easy to see what is superior mitigation on what is not.
Talented charge in def stance, combined with the new "movement speed decrease" , cc break, and stun/fear reduction in arms, seems like it might make prot warriors amusing in battlegrounds at least, but blizzard is missing one thing, warriors caught out of bezerk stance are fear fodder.
The charge talent should just be "charge and bezerk rage are now usable in defensive stance" or something to that effect.
As for uncrushable, blizzard has stated that avoidance was out of control in late BC and they will be avoiding that again so getting to 100% avoidance "uncrushable" may be unreachable for pallies. It sure does seem like they are a better tanking class at the moment though.
The issue is more that its a lot more valuable to always block 1k/hit in heroics, where mobs don't hit for more than 2k maybe and perhaps bosses for 3-4k, compared to blocking 1k in a raid where the mob hits for 10-15k. Block value quickly becomes much less important when damage goes up.
So if the balancing is done for Heroics/Early raids (which is the most relevant balance) then you need a totally different balance for higher tier raids that depend on totally different stats.
Just going to assume that this is going to lead to the game being fine the first few months and then getting more and more broken later on as newer bosses hits for ever increasing amounts. Possibly with fixes that screws over the majority of the players that don't even do the high tier content.
I have to withdraw my earlier statement regarding unhittability. I was able to throw together a tanking set that had 29.75% avoidance. Add in 30% from Holy Shield and another 10% from Deflection and Anticipation, and it should theoretically be possible to become unhittable as a Paladin tank.
I will have to disagree with this. 1h spec is a global aura that is active regardless of stances so it should not get nerfed even if stance penalties go because it adds to our DPS in DPS gear as much as it adds to our tanking threat now with the defensive stance penalty.
They really need to do two things: Give us more DPS/Tanking hybrid talents like DKs have them (Unbreakable Armor - Spell - World of Warcraft maybe?). In any case, it's not like this would be something new because we already have good hybrid talents with Focused Rage, Vitality, Devastate and 1h spec; these talents already help DW Prot DPS to be competitive. Secondly, they need to up our DPS with a shield equipped so we can actually do something after we are done tanking in a multi mob encounter and also for those that prefer the 1h/shield sort of DPSing (I don't, I am already scared off the aggro this playstyle is going to cause).
The problem is Unbreakable Armor is on an active ability on a cooldown. We don't need too many more of those currently. I don't think they want to exaggerate our "oh snap" buttons than they already have. More passive abilities would be nice (using the dk comparison even) like blood aura or abomination's might even if it invokes the RNG. Conceptually those might not be the best examples but I'd much rather have some passive boosts that can help lead the raid to victory or protect the raid.
Paladin tanking and the Paladin Protection tree hasn't really undergone any sort of revision except for BoS changes in light of the raid-buffs redesign. It's not clear at this point that Holy Shield will be sticking around in its current form. If it stays, pallies will block too much (not necessarily 100%, but still too much) that block value will have to be tamped down in some way. If they change it, and I hope they do, blocking will be allowed to make you invincible if you gear for it since it's not better than a dodge or a parry. We need to wait until paladin tanking gets an honest "polish" pass before we can tell what's going to happen with blocking.
The end result is what you try to deny. Paladins will block every single attack from the boss (1k+ block value in raid enviroments with all the buffs around), while warriors will block double that value for 10 sec, then take full dmg for 30 sec.
It is easy to see what is superior mitigation on what is not.
Actually, no, it's not. The warrior's block chance doesn't drop to zero when Shield Block's not up, and Critical Block will bring the average up further. Damage to the warrior will be spikier than to the paladin, but that's true now.
Back of the envelope math says that at zero avoidance and without any further tools (glyph, set bonus, whatever) to increase Shield Block uptime, a warrior would need about 35.9% block to get the equivalent of 100% normal blocking. Whether that's achievable or not is up to Blizzard.
What? What numbers for block value and mob hits are you using for your "back of the envelope math"?
The closer a normal block is to fully blocking an attack, the less value is derived from critical block. If you fully block an attack with your normal block value, then critical block (and the doubled block value derived from having shield block on) simply represents wasted talent points.
Granted on harder-hitting boss mobs this won't be the case. But it's also true that the harder a mob hits, the less relevant block value becomes in general, making Shield Block's "well, you won't block as often as paladins, but you will block when it counts" design somewhat questionable anyway. Presumably their plan is to have block value scaling at such a rate that double or triple (or quadruple, if critical block + shield block stack multiplicatively?) block value still represents a significant chunk of mitigation. Anyway, what will make the real difference here is the actual numbers in the game -- your "back of the envelope math", even if it's accurate for 5-mans, almost certainly won't be accurate for 10 or 25-mans.
There's one concern here that I think paladins and warriors should share. Blocking in general looks extremely sensitive to scaling going from 5->10->25 man encounters, let alone going through various tiers of raiding content. It's easy to imagine a situation in which paladins, with their ~99% block uptime, are nigh-unto invulnerable in 5 mans while druid/dk tanks require significantly more healing (with warriors falling somewhere in between)...and several tiers of 25-mans later, suddenly the hit size is large enough that block value plays no factor and death knights/druids pull way ahead of the pack, since presumably (if they're going to be balanced), they'll have avoidance or mitigation advantages to make up the difference in tank survivability that blocking gives. For example, warrior Shield Block might be balanced as roughly equivalent to Unbreakable Armor as a short-cooldown "oh snap" tool for a given size of mob hits, but scale the mob hit size up enough, and Unbreakable Armor inevitably begins to pull away.
Balancing blocking with other forms of mitigation across multiple tiers of content and group/raid sizes strikes me as remarkably challenging.
It seems like descrepancy is trying to balance non scaling mitigation (block) with scaling (Armor, parry, Dodge, ect)
This seems like a great time to get away from the "Blocks 1500 damage" mechanic and simply roll it into a percentage "Blocks 30% of damage" still based on strength.
Of course the numbers would scale similar to armor in that the more addition to block percentage you have, the less effective it is i.e. 50% to 55% would take significantly less strength than 55% to 60%.
If they want block to be useful throughout the whole game, this is the only way i can think of doing it without A) making it useless against raid bosses or B) making 5 mans trivial.
Of course the numbers would have to be adjusted and I do not claim to know what percentage would be good when and also Holy Shield would have to be tuned down some to not make them OP at mitigation (which I believe needs to be addressed anyways even if it stays a set amount of damage off the top or Pallies will destroy 5 mans).
What? What numbers for block value and mob hits are you using for your "back of the envelope math"?
I was assuming the mob hits for at least 4 times the character's block value, which I think is a fairly safe bet for raid bosses or other challenging mobs.
The point in question is the effectiveness of a paladin blocking most attacks for 100% of his normal block value versus a warrior blocking some hits at 100% of normal block value, others at 200% (critical normal block or normal Shield Block), and others at 400% of block value (critical block on Shield Block). I just estimated what block chance the warrior would need for normal blocking + imp. Shield Block, with Critical Block, to block the same amount of damage over time as a character blocking every attack for normal block value. I don't actually know for certain that Critical Block + Shield Block = 400% normal block value, but it's how similar mechanics work in the game. Has anyone in the beta tested it?
I don't know what block values will look like at level 80 or how they'll scale with WotLK raid tanking gear. I suspect that it probably won't change too much from how it works now (which is, what, about a 5-10% damage reduction against most bosses the tank doesn't outgear?). Blocking will probably scale a bit better relative to raid size in WotLK than it does now since it'll be more strength-based, and the availability of strength buffs will be higher in larger raids. It's also likely that, just as it is now, block value will go up dramatically with raid gear, and smaller group instances will be balanced for the levels of block value that can be found in the smaller instance progression tracks.
One interesting consequence of the Shield Block changes is that for large groups of very short-lived mobs, warriors will block better than paladins, since Holy Shield charges will run out and Shield Block uptime will be a high percentage of mob lifetime.
One interesting consequence of the Shield Block changes is that for large groups of very short-lived mobs, warriors will block better than paladins, since Holy Shield charges will run out and Shield Block uptime will be a high percentage of mob lifetime.
Yes, but it doesn't help us at all. Theoretically, we can block a full zone's worth of mobs for 10 secs completely but it doesn't build threat. While being able to Challenging Shout + Shield Block is a nice way to give your DPS some breathing room in addition to giving your healers quite some time to react to it because you will take no/low damage. If they would fix our AoE threat properly (maybe if they tweak Shockwave) then I could see some nice synergies inbetween Shield Block, Shockwave and possily CS.
09/02/08, 3:39 AM
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