So... how would you fix block?

Oh man someone really needs to sit him down. Also why do I get the feeling that blizzard doesn't have anyone dedicated to tanking concerns and tank balance? I can't be the only who feels that so much of their poor tanking choices could have been prevented with someone whose whole job it was to keep an eye on tank imbalance?

luls @ the GC thread.
Im gonna enjoy snoozing my way through Heroics come 3.2... farming an obscene number of emblems.
Healers already keep me up with just renews.

Majiben wrote:Oh man someone really needs to sit him down.

Perhaps we should. Suggestions on how? He clearly seems to miss completely the reason that we feel Block Value is "useless" on hard-hitting bosses, and that we generally prefer EH and avoidance over blocking larger percentages of the hits that do land.

Perhaps hits will be smaller but faster in the Coliseum and Icecrown ... but that reverses the problem and makes our 2500 BV sets suddenly lol-tastic. Explaining why this is lol-tastic, and why we would go that route vs the current "Moar EH/Avoidance!", is something I think we want. Don't know how to do that yet.

GC seems to understand block fine from what I am reading.

1. avoidance and mitigation mechanics work to provide the best results from stacking one or the other. "polarization" is what I think it is being called.
2. BV is simply underwhelming in current content.
3. for paladins, block rating is a problem in itself; one that we are all well aware of.

Kelaan wrote:

Majiben wrote:Oh man someone really needs to sit him down.

Perhaps we should. Suggestions on how? He clearly seems to miss completely the reason that we feel Block Value is "useless" on hard-hitting bosses, and that we generally prefer EH and avoidance over blocking larger percentages of the hits that do land.

Perhaps hits will be smaller but faster in the Coliseum and Icecrown ... but that reverses the problem and makes our 2500 BV sets suddenly lol-tastic. Explaining why this is lol-tastic, and why we would go that route vs the current "Moar EH/Avoidance!", is something I think we want. Don't know how to do that yet.

IIRC GC or someone did hint that 3.2 boss will not be those 'burn your CD or die' type, and I think it means boss may be hitting lesser.

This is what goes wrong.

By nature, it is nothing wrong to design a boss which hit HARD. They are boss, they deserve to hit hard. If it is because of making block to be meaningful, this is the wrong direction. Boss hits hard is what we well accepted since paper RPG. Tuning the hit size of boss to make up for block will only limit future encounter design options.

Another thing GC is 'doing it wrong!!', like Kelaan said, continue to play with the BV number will eventually make us OP, and GC is reluctant to make Block a scaling stat. He further showed the devs do not want to merge the BR and BV, which in my POV will just continue the mess. Ask yourself, a BV set, if fully buffed, blocking 4K damage, and your avoidance is 30% something, will you dress this to maintank?

The best way to show him how BV fails in my opinion is to show the magnitudes by which stamina and armor are better for increasing a tank's ability to survive. Additionally, showing him how the armor off of agility! was practically as effective for surviving as the BV from str in the EH department alone!

Show him to my paladin, I've gone out of my way to avoid getting block value and rating.

I'm currently sat on somethign ridiculous like 19% parry and 29.25% dodge unbuffed, and thats without using on equip +dodge rating trinkets.

Essentially, taking BV out of the equation.. I bring the current tanking system down to two things...
1) make sure you can survive 2 or 3 hits in a row by stacking hp+armour/resistance.
2) reduce the chance of those 2 or 3 hits in a row being taken..

I feel that there is a sort of optimum in there somewhere, but block isnt a part of it.
Perhaps if block was enough that dropping 4k health was in fact equal to gaining 4k BV, it would make block powerful, but it isn't... it's more like dropping 4k hp for 2k bv, even with the 3.2 proposed changes and it isn't enough as the extra healing throughput needed to survive is just not available sometimes.

well some of the gear on PTR is avoidance + bv


which is nice



i would prefer them to up it to maybe 1str = 1bv, and then have agi crit % be like chance to crit the block mitigated...

steadypal wrote:well some of the gear on PTR is avoidance + bv


which is nice



i would prefer them to up it to maybe 1str = 1bv, and then have agi crit % be like chance to crit the block mitigated...

except agi isn't a plate tanking stat so it shouldn't have a significant/specific purpose.

Ascendant wrote:

steadypal wrote:well some of the gear on PTR is avoidance + bv


which is nice



i would prefer them to up it to maybe 1str = 1bv, and then have agi crit % be like chance to crit the block mitigated...

except agi isn't a plate tanking stat so it shouldn't have a significant/specific purpose.

Bit confused here.

I disagree that agility isn't a plate tanking stat, while it is obvious from gear design that Blizzard don't consider it useful for plate wearers I would show the number of people sporting agility enchants and gems to be a very firm indicator that it is used frequently by plate wearers.

However if you mean that because of a lack of it on gear and as such it would mean more things to gem/enchant and therefore it shouldn't be able to crit the block then yes I see what you mean.

Barathorn

Personally I don't see many ways a boss can be designed in a way that block is a great stat, where it wouldn't be more managable for a DK or druid.

Even if you have only 8k hits after armour and talent reductions where3 or 4k BV is fantastic, and a boss hitting every 0.5 seconds, deathknights and druids are having enough armour and avoidance to reduce those 4k hits for us paladins while blocking to nearer 6k or so for them, and if this is so, it would become a boss where throughput healing is all that matters which is what they said they wanted to specifically get away from.
The only thing I can think of which would work is a boss who gains a buff and taking unmitigated damage while that buff is active gives you a debuff increasing damage taken by X%. This way block being partial mitigation wouldn't count, whereas druids and dks who would have to rely on the RNG to not take those hits would be in a worse position. But even so, the debuff couldn't be that strong that DKs and druids couldn't tank the fight with the debuff as they dont like relying on the RNG for encounters..

Leave the block as it is atm (double the value from items) but 3.2 items to contain block value in them as well with pref dodge / parry. But blizz was already ahead in this and released the tier 9 that actually does this and it's really nice. No more crappy block rating in tier items.


This will leave in really nice itemization for pally, warr the two classes that actually uses shield (and block value).

I think things will be fine, or at least not so far unbalanced one way or the other. With the changes to Frost Presence, and the proposed 3.2 changes the DK HP and Armor edge will not be so great. From my initial calculations, a Blocked hit will once again be less damage than a hit on a DK. This means we'll get hit lighter, but more often as the DK still has an avoidance edge. Its just a matter of fine tuning the differences. However, this is also dependant on how the fights are tuned.

Avoidance tanking while taking less damage overall, but bigger hits, is not an optimal choice in the current content. Healers don't run out of mana and damage is so high that all heals are proactive on the tank. So it comes down to EH tanking and if block is thrown in as EH at block cap then Paladin's will be the better EH tank versus a DK. If fights and Mana regen are tuned to make mana an issue and healers become reactive healers then avoidance may be the better path.

I don't see it as a problem with block. Its a problem with the way boss fights are tuned and how healing is done.

Barathorn wrote:

Ascendant wrote:

steadypal wrote:well some of the gear on PTR is avoidance + bv


which is nice



i would prefer them to up it to maybe 1str = 1bv, and then have agi crit % be like chance to crit the block mitigated...

except agi isn't a plate tanking stat so it shouldn't have a significant/specific purpose.

Bit confused here.

I disagree that agility isn't a plate tanking stat, while it is obvious from gear design that Blizzard don't consider it useful for plate wearers I would show the number of people sporting agility enchants and gems to be a very firm indicator that it is used frequently by plate wearers.

However if you mean that because of a lack of it on gear and as such it would mean more things to gem/enchant and therefore it shouldn't be able to crit the block then yes I see what you mean.

Barathorn

paladins are a bit of an odd case. look at warriors and DKs and you will see with more certainty that agi is not an ideal tanking stat. the plate tanks aren't designed to benefit from agi the same way druids do. while strength benefits us more than druids. I am not trying to say, though, that the 2 stats are mutually exclusive.

the reason for my comment was about the "crit from agi" comment that I quoted. our agi shouldn't change very much from it's base value, which would result in a stagnant mechanic.

after giving it some thought, I am failing to see why avoidance and mitigation don't work well together. with proper diminishing returns in place on both stats, they should work fine. Can anyone aid me in my plight or have I had the wrong idea from the start?