Summary of Basic MoP Info?

[Feanorion]

So it is considered "engaging" to not hit AM while the boss is turned away casting/moving/etc? Be still my racing heart.

Are you mistaking us for designers? I thought you wanted analysis.

Complaints with regard to design decisions should probably be addressed to the game designers.

You are correct, and my apologies. Darielle seems intent upon browbeating me into actually liking the changes, and I allowed him to derail me again.

[Darielle]

1) Glyphed Divine Protection is a 1-minute cd. Using it initially to bank 5 HoPo is likely not going to be any issue at all. If a specific fight mechanic requires a CD before its back up, I'll have my 5 HoPo and SotR ready.

That would still be put you in a worse position. You've used DP at the start, and "used up" your Holy Power bank. If you simply staggered your Holy Power banking, you would have DP to use later, and still have your Holy Power bank on hand, so you can use both if you wanted to, or only use one, and then have the other on hand to still use whenever. As a cycle, this exists every time you use Holy Power, so if you were to use all your Holy Power, you'd be back to the start where you're building it up, without DP.

Its still just hitting buttons as the need arises.

Everything in the game is just hitting buttons as the need arises if you generalise it that badly.

None of that has a bloody thing to do with precise timing of SotR in normal content. In the absence of healing, mitigating 2 attacks prior to, one attack prior to and one after, won't make a whole lot of difference in most cases.

We're not talking about absence of healing, we're talking about suboptimally timed healing. In an ideal world, the heal would already be being cast to land within 0.3 seconds of the breath hitting you. The healer that you have on normal-mode content might just not be that good, so you're going to have to power through a breath and possibly a melee hit or two before the heal actually lands. And even there, you as the tank are guaranteeing at least X healing done before that melee hit after lands. Do you heal and pray you dodge/parry, or hit SHoR and pray that you dodge/parry but knowing that at the very least you can only take Y damage? The heal gives you X health up front and you know that - the ShoR changes your worst case.

In a sense, you're oversimplifying the options that you do have. If you're unkillable because content has been nerfed to 30%, then sure whatever. But even normal mode content for a "casual" tank with a "casual" healer healing him will be "threatening".

Whether you like the changes or not isn't really relevant here. What is relevant is that you understand the full scope of the changes, and how they apply to tanking in general.
Yeah, if you never tank anything threatening, having more control of your survival isn't going to be as exciting, but that's not what tanking is about anyway.
25-man raid testing has bosses hitting upwards of 250-300k.

[Feanorion]

1) Glyphed Divine Protection is a 1-minute cd. Using it initially to bank 5 HoPo is likely not going to be any issue at all. If a specific fight mechanic requires a CD before its back up, I'll have my 5 HoPo and SotR ready.

That would still be put you in a worse position. You've used DP at the start, and "used up" your Holy Power bank.

How about a big "NO" to that. As soon as I hit 5 HoPo, I'm using SotR, then building back to 5, lather-rinse-repeat. I said nothing about using up the 2 banked "emergency" HoPo. In any case, you are attempting to derail this thread yet again. Knock it off. Please stay on topic, or out of the topic. We can argue and sling mud in the regular Forums.

[Koatanga]

I am not sure your attitude is quite consistent with the rest of the community. I think your aggression is better suited to the main WoW forum.

[bldavis]

1) Glyphed Divine Protection is a 1-minute cd. Using it initially to bank 5 HoPo is likely not going to be any issue at all. If a specific fight mechanic requires a CD before its back up, I'll have my 5 HoPo and SotR ready.

That would still be put you in a worse position. You've used DP at the start, and "used up" your Holy Power bank.

How about a big "NO" to that. As soon as I hit 5 HoPo, I'm using SotR, then building back to 5, lather-rinse-repeat. I said nothing about using up the 2 banked "emergency" HoPo. In any case, you are attempting to derail this thread yet again. Knock it off. Please stay on topic, or out of the topic. We can argue and sling mud in the regular Forums.

i fail to see how that is attempting to derail the thread
it was a simple misunderstanding of how hte HoPo was to be used
no need to get bitchy

[Weebey]

Actually, my logic works perfectly in this case. In your scenario, that other 20% was designed to be fatal (or nearly so) without popping a cd. In the case of AM, it is mostly only going to be mitigating ordinary melee swings not designed to need a cd to survive.

Counterargument: http://mop.wowhead.com/spell=132007

We obviously won't know until it goes live, but Heroic Sha of Fear looks like it could be one of the most challenging tanking encounters Blizzard has designed. A single Dread Thrash without your AM up is likely a wipe (they are too frequent to CD), and there are a number of other mechanics to distract tanks and make induce rotation errors. Even on normal, I suspect errors of AM usage could get very dangerous, at least until the fight is outgeared.

This is just one example, but it illustrates a larger point: now that every tank has some sort of AM, Blizzard can design encounters that specifically test your skill in managing it.

[Darielle]

It's a discussion on how best to use Holy Power, which is relevant to what you can do with AM since AM for us is literally all about Holy Power usage.

5 HP is only relevant in terms of actually using two sets at once. If all you want is the freedom to use ShoR whenever you want, you would never need to hit 5.

[melisandyr]

It's quite difficult to envisage how much this changes without tanking some bosses on the beta. It's a shame that they haven't made lvl 90 premade characters available for more people to get used to this, but I'm guessing they believe that all the tanks that need to sample the AM model for 3rd week hard modes will have ground their character up 5 levels.

From what I have seen, read and experienced, the AM model goes quite a long way to replicate the bowel-clenching nervousness and difficulty of healing in the current hard mode model - I think both Theck and Meloree have questioned how much, and whether things have gone far enough, in separate discussions in the forum. If you are far ahead of the rest of your group, and feel you don't need x% buff, then it probably isn't going to make much difference to you, as you'll be doing all the right things anyway.

But at 0%, then as suggested above, if you aren't doing the right things, then you could be killing yourself (and your group). It's a little bit of theory, but let's assume that:

1) Big boss damage events come faster than you can hit all of your cooldowns at once for - perhaps every 20 or 30 seconds
2) Normal boss damage is big enough that you are worried about how much % you are mitigating before and after that big attack. This is why physical damage mitigation is so important to interweave with magical damage mitigation.

I think the assumption we all need to review is just how often actively managing your holy power will be required. On the harder encounters, it appears to be very frequently - perhaps 33% of the time you will be spending your banked holy power, or planning to spend it. And that's before taking time out of the 66% for tank swapping and boss positioning. Until you've had a chance to tank some of the hard mode encounters, don't underestimate just how big a change to the tanking model this is.

[Darielle]

It's quite difficult to envisage how much this changes without tanking some bosses on the beta. It's a shame that they haven't made lvl 90 premade characters available for more people to get used to this, but I'm guessing they believe that all the tanks that need to sample the AM model for 3rd week hard modes will have ground their character up 5 levels.

It's less that and more that they still want people testing levelling content; if they offered lvl 90 premades, that population would dry up.

As I mentioned earlier, from 25-man raid testing, bosses actually melee for 250k+. You can imagine the effect that sort of thing has when you add it onto the mechanics, even if you haven't experienced the fights. Of course, that might go down if they tone down Monks/DK's a bit since those two are slightly ridiculous atm.

[melisandyr]

I read that the same way too - that by not giving people pre-made 90's, they hadn't got the testing of the levelling experience that was required (and presumably they are getting enough data on raids to fulfil their needs).

But that doesn't really help most people in learning what tanking will be like at 90 - you can't get a decent experience from levelling up.

I can imagine in theory what those hits are like, but I'm mostly an experience learner - I'd dearly love a sophisticated target dummy that let me replicate some of the boss mechanics to learn a few of these things - which I should get in 5.0 too.

[daishan]

Slightly silly question, does hard casting a spell like the new MoP repentance stop you from dodge, parrying, or blocking a bosses attack?
I know casting resets your melee swing hence part of the reason it's a dps loss to hard cast exo as ret, but I'm unsure how it effects our damage intake.

[Fetzie]

They disabled the dodge/parry/block removal for the Warrior's Bladestorm channel.

[theckhd]

Slightly silly question, does hard casting a spell like the new MoP repentance stop you from dodge, parrying, or blocking a bosses attack?
I know casting resets your melee swing hence part of the reason it's a dps loss to hard cast exo as ret, but I'm unsure how it effects our damage intake.

In general, you cannot dodge/parry/block attacks during a cast. They disabled it on Bladestorm because it was an ability that was expected to be used while tanking. I doubt it's disabled for Repentance.

[daishan]

Ah thx, so unlikely that we'll be specing repentance very often, unless we have the worst cc raid comp ever.

[Feanorion]

Ah thx, so unlikely that we'll be specing repentance very often, unless we have the worst cc raid comp ever.

In 5-mans I'll absolutely spec into Repentance. Aside from guildies, I have been conditioned to never trust anyone but myself and maybe the healer to do anything important.