patch 5.2 ?

[Malthrax]

In any event, I'd much rather see them remove hit/expertise, and if they do that and remove dodge/parry then we're going to have very few choices on gear to begin with.

yeah... not really looking forward to looting a shield with some stamina and "+50 PVE TANK" on it.

A game with nothing but:

+PVE HEAL, or
+PVE TANK, or
+PVE DPS

on gear would be very boring. Much like PVP is (/hyperbole)

[Shoju]

DK tanks have short CDs? I thought everything was rune-based...

Well, I can't speak to what Cooldowns they have right now, but in Cata, we had:

Self Healing CD's.
Rune Tap - 1 blood rune - 30 second CD - A heal
Vampiric Blood - 60 second CD +health +Healing - no Cost (technically not a self heal, but still healing)
Lichborne + Death Coil Heals - 2min CD, No Runes. RP to fuel it
Death Pact + Raise Dead - 3 min CD - No Cost

Damage Reduction
Anti Magic Shield - no Cost - 1 min CD
Dancing Rune Weapon - 60 Runic Power, lots of parry + minimal DPS. 90sec CD.
Icebound Fortitude - 3min, standard Tank Cooldown - No Cost for Blood
Bone Shield - 20% Damage Reduction with Charges" 1 min CD. Cost 1 rune.
Army of the Dead (The Channel was used for DR as it reduced incoming damage by your avoidance) - 10min CD - No Cost

EDIT:
While I don't know if I like getting rid of Hit AND Expertise, having both seems a little redundant to me. Not a fan. For me, Dodge and Parry on gear is just not as big of a deal anymore, but mainly for what Theck said. They don't fill a purpose right now. For all the work they did to simplify tanking numbers, by getting rid of Defense as a number, they undid it all with the changes to Dodge and Parry this expac. And then to look at the values that I see people sporting, and then to look at the boss being able to ignore portions of your dodge/parry and all of your miss... It's just... What's the point? The stats don't seem to have much of a point anymore.

[Sagara]

Yeah, it would be pretty different for DKs like that. Maybe something like simply doubling the healing and blood shield gained?

[Worldie]

DK tanks have short CDs? I thought everything was rune-based...

Well, I can't speak to what Cooldowns they have right now, but in Cata, we had:

Self Healing CD's.
Rune Tap - 1 blood rune - 30 second CD - A heal
Vampiric Blood - 60 second CD +health +Healing - no Cost (technically not a self heal, but still healing)
Lichborne + Death Coil Heals - 2min CD, No Runes. RP to fuel it
Death Pact + Raise Dead - 3 min CD - No Cost

Damage Reduction
Anti Magic Shield - no Cost - 1 min CD
Dancing Rune Weapon - 60 Runic Power, lots of parry + minimal DPS. 90sec CD.
Icebound Fortitude - 3min, standard Tank Cooldown - No Cost for Blood
Bone Shield - 20% Damage Reduction with Charges" 1 min CD. Cost 1 rune.
Army of the Dead (The Channel was used for DR as it reduced incoming damage by your avoidance) - 10min CD - No Cost

Just updating you as I'm leveling my 3rd DK right now (already got 2 lvl 85 ones!)
Rune tap -> 1 min cd, 1 blood rune, 10% hp heal
Vampiric Blood -> Same as before
Choice: Lichborne (same a before), Anti magic zone (very bad right now), and Purgatory, a passive simil ardent defender (prevents a death, but you need to be healed for the overkill amount within 3 sec or you die)
Choice: Death Pact (50% heal, 3 min cd, no cost, requires a pet out (no longer kills the ghoul), also ghoul cd is 2 minutes), death siphon (costs 1 death rune, heals you for an amount dependant on AP), runic siphon (heals for 3% hp per second, 10 RP per second)
Bone shield -> Same as before, but no cost
Icebound Fortitude -> Same as before
Antimagic Shell -> 75% magic absorb, glyphable to 100%, 45 sec cd, no cost
Dancing Rune Weapon -> Same as before
Army -> Same as before, plus extra coolness cause army can now be composed of random undeads

[Sagara]

In short, no very short CD. Besides, the AM model for DKs revolves around Death Strike, right?

[Shoju]

DK tanks have short CDs? I thought everything was rune-based...

Well, I can't speak to what Cooldowns they have right now, but in Cata, we had:

Self Healing CD's.
Rune Tap - 1 blood rune - 30 second CD - A heal
Vampiric Blood - 60 second CD +health +Healing - no Cost (technically not a self heal, but still healing)
Lichborne + Death Coil Heals - 2min CD, No Runes. RP to fuel it
Death Pact + Raise Dead - 3 min CD - No Cost

Damage Reduction
Anti Magic Shield - no Cost - 1 min CD
Dancing Rune Weapon - 60 Runic Power, lots of parry + minimal DPS. 90sec CD.
Icebound Fortitude - 3min, standard Tank Cooldown - No Cost for Blood
Bone Shield - 20% Damage Reduction with Charges" 1 min CD. Cost 1 rune.
Army of the Dead (The Channel was used for DR as it reduced incoming damage by your avoidance) - 10min CD - No Cost

Just updating you as I'm leveling my 3rd DK right now (already got 2 lvl 85 ones!)
Rune tap -> 1 min cd, 1 blood rune, 10% hp heal
Vampiric Blood -> Same as before
Choice: Lichborne (same a before), Anti magic zone (very bad right now), and Purgatory, a passive simil ardent defender (prevents a death, but you need to be healed for the overkill amount within 3 sec or you die)
Choice: Death Pact (50% heal, 3 min cd, no cost, requires a pet out (no longer kills the ghoul), also ghoul cd is 2 minutes), death siphon (costs 1 death rune, heals you for an amount dependant on AP), runic siphon (heals for 3% hp per second, 10 RP per second)
Bone shield -> Same as before, but no cost
Icebound Fortitude -> Same as before
Antimagic Shell -> 75% magic absorb, glyphable to 100%, 45 sec cd, no cost
Dancing Rune Weapon -> Same as before
Army -> Same as before, plus extra coolness cause army can now be composed of random undeads

Thanks for the update. I think if I were a tank, I would probably go with a talent set up of

Roiling Blood
Purgatory
Death's Advance
Death Pact
Runic Empowerment
and Remorseless Winter

as my "default" setup, maybe switching to
Unholy Blight when there were predictable Add Phases
Lichborne when I knew that I could pool RP and there was a Occuthar's lazurs of doom attack (massive attack with little chance of death, but massive healing afterward)
Gorefiend's Grasp if I needed to swap a group of stuff to tank, or a fight where there were adds that needed rounded up, and could plan on someone to pull from.

I haven't looked deep into the talents, but there are some of those talents that just don't appeal to my play at all.
Plague Leach
AMZ (because the little I have read all agree it's awful)
Asphyxiate (that's a PvP/Soloing thing if I've ever seen one)
Conversion (seems cool, maybe it is, but it interests me the least out of the three on that level)
The New BLood Tap
Desecrated Ground. Seems more PvP to me.


And yes Sagara. AM for Dk's is Death Strike, and Blood Shield that it creates.

[theckhd]

So give us some baseline hit and exp, so we dont hog all the hit/exp gear?

No, I mean get rid of hit/expertise entirely. For everyone. To paraphrase a really good point Hamlet made on twitter a few weeks ago: Reforging was added to help improve the hit/exp system, because otherwise loot that wasn't ideal got ignored. So you have two systems in the game (reforging and hit/exp) designed to make sure you hit the boss 100% of the time.

Is that really very interesting? Or is it just cumbersome? If everyone just loads their character up in AMR or another utility and hits an "optimize" button after every item upgrade, it's not really very interesting.

I think GC (or another blue) has hinted that they're not sure if hit/exp are still interesting stats. I wouldn't mind if they just got rid of them and adjusted rating conversions appropriately. But they'd still have to do something to make dodge/parry more attractive, in any case.

[Flex]

GC has stated that reforging and item upgrades doesn't play nicely with hard cap stats like hit and expertise with in game tools.

[Newsom]

I'd be surprised if they keep hit and expertise as is for the next expansion.

[Klaudandus]

Ok, this made me lol

Are you on some sort of cheap drug when you make choices. Tanks care about these things dodge parry block armor HP. Thats all that should matter. It has always been this way in every game ever made. It is the D & D way and the correct way. When you take this focus away you lose your ability to be a lead developer and deserve to be removed from the team.


The answer to your first question is yes. My answer to the rest is: have you seen all of the paladins begging us not to change the way haste works for them because it is both useful and fun? Are they all wrong too? Nah, never mind, don't answer that.

[Newsom]

rofl

[benebarba]

Ok, this made me lol

Are you on some sort of cheap drug when you make choices. Tanks care about these things dodge parry block armor HP. Thats all that should matter. It has always been this way in every game ever made. It is the D & D way and the correct way. When you take this focus away you lose your ability to be a lead developer and deserve to be removed from the team.


The answer to your first question is yes. My answer to the rest is: have you seen all of the paladins begging us not to change the way haste works for them because it is both useful and fun? Are they all wrong too? Nah, never mind, don't answer that.

I was almost expecting a response like "I'm sorry, you'll need to phrase your answer in the form of a question."

[Darielle]

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic ... ?page=3#57

Ion "Watcher" Hazzikostas saw this thread, and wanted share his thoughts on some of the issues you guys have raised:

We think it’s worth noting that many players began their Mists of Pandaria raiding experience with an average item level in the low 460s. Over the course of the past four months, Heroic raiders have seen their average item level climb by as much as 50, while normal mode raid groups that are just getting to Sha of Fear for the first time likely have an average item level that compares to what the cutting-edge guilds had when conquering Heroic Heart of Fear. Getting raid loot along the way has likely felt like a meaningful progression, and the overall damage and healing output of a raid group grows measurably from week to week with each piece of gear looted from a defeated boss. We like that, and we want Throne of Thunder to give players a similar sense of progression.

We could have taken an alternative, more conservative approach, where Throne of Thunder Raid Finder awarded ilvl 496 items and Normal awarded 509 items. A guild that has only done the current normal mode raids, but no Heroics, will then walk into Throne of Thunder with an average item level around 500 (lots of 496 items from Heart of Fear and Terrace, some of them upgraded to 504 with Valor). That doesn’t leave much room to grow – it means that players would only be a few percent stronger when facing Lei Shen at the end of the instance than they were facing Jin’rokh at the start. It also means that when raiders run into a roadblock halfway through the raid, there wouldn’t be much hope that a bit more gear from the next clear would have a significant impact.

Ultimately, we think that raid progression works better, and is more compelling, when there are meaningful increases in power from gear. The effort of downing a boss for the first time is properly rewarded with loot that is attractive to all members of the raid, and the steady increase in player power over the course of progressing through an instance allows us to scale the challenge accordingly. For example, we can now design Lei Shen around the expectation that the average raid group that reaches him will have an item level of nearly 520. The cutting-edge groups that tear through the zone in the first week or two will be comparatively undergeared when they reach him. Without any other changes on our end, item progression means that the same encounter can pose a stern test to a top guild when 5.2 comes out, while still being doable by the groups that only reach the same encounter a couple of months down the line. For example, Heroic Gara’jal was a brutal test of DPS for raiders who faced him last October, but now he feels like part of a smooth progression for groups that are just graduating from normal modes and beginning Heroics.

We’re confident that our planned item levels are not going to skew class balance or degenerate gameplay, and we’re monitoring the performance of all classes and specs in the new gear that will be available in 5.2 and going forward. Stat “inflation” was probably most out of control during the Wrath of the Lich King, but that was an issue with how powerful the gear was that was available as the expansion began perhaps more than any other factor. As a point of comparison, the item level 213 warrior set breastplate that was available in Naxxramas gave a level 80 player 2% critical strike chance; the item level 496 warrior set breastplate available in Heart of Fear gives 1.32% critical strike chance. We’ve learned from the past and carefully left ourselves a lot more room to grow this time around.

[Klaudandus]

not sure if I buy it.

[theckhd]

What part? Ion's a pretty smart cookie, and the logic in the ilvl choices is pretty clear.