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Maintankadin

Warrior Blocking Mechanics: Posting to Beta Forums

Tybalt
Sat Sep 20, 2008 3:49 pm
The problem lies in the fact that being a block tank, and tanking a hard hitting raid boss, do not go hand in hand. Hard hits chew through blocks, regardless of your block value. So unless they implement some form of super block for paladins, that acts like avoidance (dodge/parry/miss), then paladins as "block tanks" will be at a significant disadvantage when it comes to tanking the big bad dude.
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Tybalt
Sat Sep 20, 2008 3:54 pm
Knaughty, you are only taking into account fights where the spike damage occurs from a flurry of medium hits. We've gone over this, time and time again, ever since Prince Malchezzar. Our block works for us in these situations, because it mitigates damage on *every* hit. However, spike damage also happens due to large, single hits, and in these cases block value is nearly insignificant.

I'm not saying that there isn't a discrepancy between the blocking mechanics, but the larger problem is in overall tank survivability. Until that gets fixed, our block issues are but a fly in the ear.
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ProtPally: The Other Main Tank - http://protpally.blogspot.com/
moduspwnens
Sat Sep 20, 2008 5:10 pm
I guess if I had to sum up the post in a paragraph, I'd say that:

Based on our tier gear and developer statements, it seems clear that Paladins are meant to mitigate more damage through blocks as a way of making up for having lower avoidance. This isn't the case currently, and it will get worse as gear gets better. Here are some ways of working toward fixing that.

The rest of it is supporting material and thoughts. Does that not appear broken?
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baghead
Sat Sep 20, 2008 6:17 pm
Hmm.. don't you guys feel that being a blocking tank is broken by design?

Because block value doesn't scale with dmg/hit you are stuck between two hard decisions - too much BV and pallys will make trash trivial and too little and they end up taking too much dmg on boss fights.

PerhapsBV needs to be changed to a percentage value. This then avoids situations where pallys can trinket up and become immune to incoming damage, whilst still letting them scale in boss fights. There's obviously downsides to this approach as well.

NFI but I just don't see how they'd balance abilities to provide us both increased sustained block value (given our lower mitigation/avoidance) enough to scale with increasing dmg levels from bosses.

Alternatively, I guess they could simply speed bosses up. BV scales with swings/sec, not DTPS or dmg/hit. (ie. if bosses were simply sped up rather than have their swing dmg increased, scalar BV is still ok).

Edit: I've noticed that fridmarr posted on page 2 pretty much exactly this - I fail at reading.
Majiben
Sat Sep 20, 2008 6:24 pm
That would be interesting. A seal of the crusader for mobs without the attack power bonus. If we both debuffed mobs with this negative SotC and TC/TJ/druid debuff then what we have in effect gotten an AP debuff through new mechanisms. Would also lead to faster/steadier rage/runic power/mana regen especially with BoSanc.
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Majiben
Mavrix
Sat Sep 20, 2008 6:31 pm
I assumed Modus' work was in direct response to GC saying that we block more so that makes up the mitigation difference. (EDIT: actually what she said was we block more so that makes up for the Avoidance difference . . . since we block less and have an avoidance difference, it's a bigger issue that blizzard thinks what they think).
What Modus has shown is that it is not at all the case that we mitigate more damage than warriors via block. We're behind in block mitigated damage as well as the other discrepancies.
I don't see how this is not a problem to some people.
Here's the quote:
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html;jsessionid=AE3D3AE1E77E4964CF901553B3C223DF.app05_05?topicId=10043318054&pageNo=1&sid=2000#17

We have a lot to be thankful for in the changes that have been implemented, esp. once the HoJ spell interrupt goes in.
We still have a long way to go.

It also occurs to me that some paladins seem to be wearing rose-colored glasses about our situation in Live and in Beta. Being capable of doing something while still not being as good at doing it still means we're not as good at doing it and therefor not as good a choice for the job. This seems especially true for pushing progression where every thing counts even in small amounts.
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Mavrix
BE Tankadin
Dalaran

http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Dalaran&n=Mavrix