Bring the player, not the class.
Blizz has states they don’t want any mandatory classes in a raid. They have supported this with overlapping buffs from different classes as well as reworks of a few mechanics.
Tanking was the “sort of” focal point of the mechanics changes in WotLK. Crushing blows were removed, Deathknights were added, (protection) Paladins were completely reworked, among other things. Any time there are drastic changes, habits and patterns often get opened up to change. However, peoples choices are not always 100% pure and unbiased. Many people still hold what was true in The Burning Crusade, and even back to Original content as true today. Paladins and Druids have gained huge buffs since those days, and some people are beginning to accept some of what new information is out there, while others cling to old concepts and refuse to open an eye to see what’s out there.
In Wrath of the Lich King there are four tanking classes, Warriors, Paladins, Druids, and Deathknights. Now that crushing blows have been removed, the line between the classes has been blurred to a certain degree. Paladins and Warriors can use shields, while the other two tanks cannot. In WotLK Block Value has shot through the roof. At the peak of my (boss) gear, I might have been a bit over 300 BV in TBC. Now in Wrath I am just shy of 1,400 BV completely unbuffed, and in a raid setting I can reach up to 2,000 BV. Additionally, WotLK did not bring with it a “huge” stamina jump like we saw in The Burning Crusade. Therefore boss damage numbers haven’t scaled quite as fast, and blocking a hit can significantly up your overall damage mitigation.
Druids compensate for this with very large health pools, and larger than normal armor ratings. Bringing their mitigation almost up to a Warrior or Paladin. However their high HP pool is there simply because they take much less consistent damage. They have dodge, miss, or full-hit on their incoming combat table. Deathknights have a similar situation, however they add parry to the list.
Paladins and Warriors can shave off another 1-2.5k from those hits. Warriors can also get a “critical block” for two times their block value (albeit not very frequently). Paladis are the only class that can (with a little raid gear) consistently block every I coming hit (that isn’t avoided). This brings their (physical) mitigation to the smoothest of all tanks.
People that raided pre-BC still have it stuck in their minds that Warriors are the end-all tank. However I feel the playing field is much more even, if not slightly leaning towards paladin MT’ing. I’ve gotten into several raids and been designated to OT duty (damn pugs), until the warrior (who has less health and avoidance) gets smashed by the boss.
Wrapping up, anybody reading this, please try to educate people that the scene has changed and sometimes there is a better choice than what worked in the past.
PS – maybe “Bring the player, not the class” is true, and I am just that leet. LOL!
Death Knights
As I promised, I’m following up my previous post with a bit of rambling about DKs.
So far I’ve grouped with 6 death knights, two of which were on my paladin. One was played my an acquaintence of mine, second was a random pug. The other 4 were in a 5 DK group I ran on my DK Deathridden. For this post I’ll stick to the experiences from my paladin (the others were a group of power-leveling raiders that rerolled).
I understand that the Death Knight is a new class, deemed a “hero class” by Blizzard. This combined with several other factors have absolutely ruined the DK class for me. My conclusion of the issues:
- Previously mentioned, Hero class
- They wear plate armor
- Stated to be able to tank utilizing any talent tree
- The class is only a few weeks old
So Blizz has said DKs can tank as any spec. This doesn’t mean that every tree is a tank tree. It means every tree has tank talents. 9/10 people take the dps talents because they are much more fun than the mitigation/utility talents. Additionally people seem to think they are gods because they are THE hero class. I have run into an abundance of problems grouping with Death Knights and I’ve really only run with two “average players”.
Just because these stars have seemingly aligned does now make you the gods of WoW. You’re just another dos in my group that will kill the boss while he pays attention to me. I don’t want you to dps frost presence, out of marked order, claiming you’re offtanking. I don’t want you to Death and Decay in FP either. It’s your job to kill things, not make our healer freak out because they don’t know who’s going to get the next big hit.
So now I’m done with my rambling. Maybe I’ll go play my DK to try and put one more good player closer to the level cap.
Almost there!
I busted my ass this week and went from 70-78 playing Monday to Thursday. I took the weekend off, as my eyes were about to explode.
Additionally, I set up a guild on the Sen’jin realm, Fury Untold is the name. We’re gonna stay in 10 man content initially with a 2 night a week raid schedule. This being the 3rd guild I’ve started in my ~3.5 year WoW career, I can definately say, recruiting your initial player base sucks. Once you get enough people to get a group together (with enough room for an unguilded pug or two) it’s not too bad, but damn.
WotLK: Updates and opinions.
Personally, I’ve been taking my time leveling my paladin. I didn’t pick Wrath up for a few days after launch, and have been working my way across my 3 70′s as well as my upcoming (63 atm) shadow priest, and my Deathknight (currently 61).
I’ve only knocked out a few quest hubs in Howling Fjord so far, but I’m liking the layout and style I’ve seen so far. I worked my way through the Utgarde Keep quest line as fast as possible and ran it. I have been ret since I headed up here and tanked UK just fine. Although my TPS was horrible due to Divine Storm and Crusader Strike being nerfed to physical damage (was holy).
Now that I’ve gotten the feel for the Deathknight class, I can return my focus back to my paladin, and hopefully ding 80 in the near future.
Tanks: Egos and Epeens.
One of the original posts I wanted to write for this blog was a discussion about the different kinds of people that make up particular classes.
I think the two most prevalent cases are tanks and dps. In general, dps accepts damage meters such as recount, are the end all of who’s doing the best, but tanks are a little harder to sort out. This leads to tanks boasting about gear, stats, avoidances, and all other things they might be able to bring to the table.
In a world that is as unquantified as tanking, its often very difficult to match up exact tanks against other tanks, especially when the 3 (soon to be 4) classes have varying degrees of differences. Additionally, most of the fights that blizzard designs, have 1 target to tank, and if there are more, they are often clearly designated as “off tank” style mobs. Trash usually requires more than one tank, but when you get to the boss (read: important) fight the other tanks are sidelined. This causes a bit of an inferiority complex in the additional tanks.
This will be alleviated a bit when Blizzard implements the “dual-spec” system, as dps/tanks will be able to switch back and forth, and the tanks won’t feel like such a lame duck when they are attempting to dps for boss fights.
You can’t dodge the nerfbat!
Rohan (BoK) and Cathmor (E4aE) have both commented on the incoming nerfs to paladin seals and retribution talents.
First and foremost I will say that retribution in it’s current state is fucking OP. While ret was in dire need of some nerfs, these nerfs were a little uncalled for. The stem of the problem is that ret has a few high burst instant attacks, and every other talent just increased their dps.
I know Blizzard’s “vision” for the paladin is very bursty, but their actual implementation fails.
TBC ret dps was sub-par. Fact. Post 3.0 the tables have turned. Sustained PvE dps is a little higher than most classes, but the issue is that in PvP they can dump all their normal dps abilities in a matter of seconds, all while keeping the opponent stunned. Now that would lead us to believe that whatever changes they made in 3.0 were the culprits.
However, they instead nerf class-wide abilities, our seal and judgements. They were hit hard in the most recent beta push, which will likely go live in a week or two. This hurts everybody, holy can’t solo as effectively, and it’s a protection DPS (and therefore TPS) hit.
In my opinion, the major culprit in this problem is Sheath of Light. It increases spell power by 30% of their attack power, and crit heals place a HoT on their target for 60% of the crit. The intent behind this is to make non-holy paladin (prot has something very similar), more capable healers in a pinch. However, it’s +straight spell power. This, along with all paladin spells having AP and SP coefficients, makes them extremely powerful. If Sheath was changed to only boost healing spell power, that would fix most of retribution’s scaling problems.
Achievement System: First impressions.
After a week or so to really play with the achievement system, I firgure it’s time I go ahead and give it a run down.
The thing that really sparked my interest to write about this was the comments made by Rohan, about the difference between the WoW achiement system, and the similar concept in Warhammer online.
He does go over them pretty well, the WoW achievement system (shortened to AS in this post) is pretty transparent. All of the achievment point rewarding goals are listed before you. You can see your targets and work towards those goals. However, in the Warhammer equivalent, all achievements are “hidden” in the fact that you can’t see what they are, or what it takes to accomplish them.
Now while I do like the idea of being surprised by a unexpected/random achievemet, if it were not for the visibility of the goals, lots of the developers efforts would have gone in noticed.
Now, like I mentioned all of WoW’s AP awarding achievements are listed, but there is an additional category that has no reward at all, the “Feats of Strength”. These achievements are hidden to the user, in that they cannot see them before they have accomplished them. They are a little different from the normal goals in the AS, and I’ve only gotten about 3-4 of them (most retroactive from past accomplishments).
I like the direction Blizzard has taken with the AS, it’s definately brought a new aspect to the game, as well as given us high level characters something to do until WotLK drops and we get to level our many alts again.
New Build
They released a new build on the beta servers. A few updates for every class, but most important to me is the 3% mitigation buff they put into Shield of the Templar.
With the 30% hp nerf that was in 3.0.2 dungeons and raiding have become a joke. The guild is making an attempt at Hyjal tonight. I really wish I could be there. The Heart of Kazrogal would be nice, as well as T6 gloves.
3.0 is here! And random bitching…
Blizzard will take the realms down for a
To divert the happy feeling I’ve got here, there is one thing that has been bothering me about the class changes lately: Taunts.
It seems Blizzard was more than ok to give the other tanks AoE ability like paladins, but in general they have always pulled the “homogenization” card when talking about changes. I understand this point, but so much has been given to warrior, and I’m not going to lie, we have received our share of buffs too, however, one thing paladins need is a RELIABLE taunt.
Righteous Defense is nice in certain situations, but it’s downfalls out weigh the benefits. As many paladins have suggested, I would love to see RD switched to 2 ranks, one that taunts the mob directly, and the other that taunts the mob directly as well as two addition enemies attacking their target.
This change would eliminate many annoyances in 25 man raid scenarios. Several occasions during BT trash, I’ve had to get a mob off another tank, however, I don’t really have an ability that just pulls a single target from another tank. Every other tank has (or will have, regarding DKs) a single target taunt. Blizzard has responded that they don’t feel it’s needed. If it’s not needed then why doesn’t one of the other tanks have a “alternative taunt”?