Blizzard Round 9 Answered: El Tanqueo

Quote from: Katriedna (Source)

Welcome to the global Q&A on the development of World of Warcraft. These answers answer the questions from round 9, which can be found here: http://eu.battle.net/wow/es/forum/topic/2151756589

Q: Revenge is a great tool for helping raid tanks keep aggro on DPS, but in 5-player heroic dungeons it doesn't stack enough to deal with the threat posed by burst damage. Over-equipped DPS. Is there a plan to solve this? Do you plan to help the warriors come out with a greater initial threat before Vengeance is reinforced? - Nikelsndimes (North America), Cémanana (Europe - France), Arthur (Taiwan), Mancake (North America), Migol (North America)

A: We think Vengeance works well in general. Provides enough threat without causing the tank to deal higher DPS than DPS-specialized characters, and does not allow the tank to simply neglect threat-generating abilities. A full stack of Vengeance might create too much of a threat, but we didn't find it necessary to depower it mid-expansion. On a global level, we don't want tanks to have a 100% guaranteed threat in one hit, so we're not interested in benefiting from that Vengeance aspect, but we don't want DPS specs to have to cut constantly and in the middle of the fight. the DPS they can inflict, so we have to strike a balance.

Note: There are fights with tank changes or the addition of add-ons, or similar mechanics, in which the threat can be important in the middle of the fight. This is by design, the layout varies greatly from encounter to encounter.

Q: Have you thought about normalizing the Feral Tank Druids' initial rage? For example, when a warrior casts Charge, he generates 15 rage points, allowing him to immediately use another ability that generates aggravation, something that Feral druids are often in short supply of. Why was the bear's health bonus also reduced in Cataclysm? Their survival always depended on the amount of health, since they do not have a parry or shield block. Are you planning to upgrade the tank type of bear form in the future? At this time, it is considered the weakest tank. Have you thought about giving tank druids an additional tool with which they can attract casters from a distance? It is the only tank class that does not have a talent or spell to help it in these situations. - Pødêrøsø (Latin America), ????? (Europe - Russia), ?????? (Europe - Russia), Condenacion (Europe - Spain), Whitewnd (Korea)

A: Bears will receive a significant relief buff in Patch 4.2, and we are re-adjusting their damage so that it is a little easier to maintain agro at low equipment levels, and a little more difficult at high equipment levels. Although we do not expect the entire community to agree on anything at all, we have also not seen any signs that point to the widespread notion that the Druids are "the weakest tank." There are quite a few tank druids out there, dealing with everything from Grim Batol to Sinestra. Overall tank balance is in very good place. Players may be focusing on potential issues that could crop up in the future, but we'll have plenty of time to deal with them if they do arise. Gone are the days when we would throw a class into danger and refuse to tweak it until the next expansion.

Q: Are you planning to bring other tanks closer to the level of the Death Knights, who have a lot of advantages over other tank classes (easier to heal, a significant number of safe abilities, etc.)? - ???????? (Europe - Russia)

A: The Death Knights are a somewhat different style of tank than the others. They take significantly more damage than the other tanks, but afterwards nonetheless heal or return that extra damage (and sometimes more). Since they take the most damage, and that damage comes in spikes, they are also the most likely to be killed by an unexpected blast (such as when they don't have runes to cast Death Strike, have no cooldowns available, or fail to dodge or parry several attacks in a row). They also have a greater personal impact on their own survival and relief than any other tank, because much of their results depend on Death Strike (and especially on landing their Death Strike at the best time). So in the hands of a very skilled player, they can achieve great things, but usually not much better than other tanks. Truth be told, we'd like to follow that trend more with the other tanks - making their defense results more dependent on the use of their abilities - in the future.

Q: Compared to Death Knights, Paladins are weaker when faced with mass magical attacks. A paladin has no choice but to accumulate Stamina in such a situation. Do you have any changes in this regard for paladins? - ???? (Taiwan)

A: We're not trying to balance tanks when it comes to magic damage reduction, because we rarely assault tacks with continuous magic damage. What we do often do is intersperse physical damage with a burst of magic damage, usually matching the cooldowns available to all tanks, and we consider this to be balanced. If we were ever to do a fight like Hydross again, in which there is almost no physical damage, we would have to try other alternatives.

Q: Is there any chance that the damage reduction figures in the stat UI will be used, such as the amount absorbed by the Discipline priest's shield? - ???? (T.W.)

A: The default UI should show damage reduction against a creature of the same level. We'll see if it is possible to also show the reduction against a monster of level +1, +2, + 3 / boss, as we do with hit and expertise. Beyond that, there is usually passive damage reduction from your talents / presence / attitude etc., which should be relatively easy to combine with armor to figure out your damage reduction.

Q: Have you ever thought about adjusting DPS health? It seems that although their large amounts of health help them in "accidental" situations, much of the time they can accumulate agro and tank with the aggregates without consequences. - Jainel (Latin America)

A: Overall we are happy with the quality of the DPS tank feature (which is not very good, by the way). We like that they are able to take a hit or two (depending on content) before dying, and that the penalty for something like that is a massive drain on the healer's mana.

Q: I think I remember Burning Crusade required five tanks in a group of 25 players. However, the number of tanks in the bands has been reduced to one or two since WotLK. I think this is one of the reasons why groups for heroics suffer from the absence of tanks. What if the gangs needed more tanks? - ????? (Korea)

A: To tell the truth, we don't recall that there have been many fights with more than four tanks in Burning Crusade, and that includes fights like His Majesty Maulgar's, where non-tanks could also take on the role of tank. While we find a certain elegance in a layout where the structure of a group of 5 players can be perfectly maintained at a group of 10 or 25, that also presents several problems. It could spread to the gangs the tank shortage we see in 5-player dungeons (in fairness, it is also possible that needing more tanks for the gangs would lead to more tanks for the dungeons). A bigger problem is that we don't want to over-restrict the design of the encounters so that they always require 4 or 5 tanks. Sometimes it's nice to have a fight that's resolved quickly, without the need for a tank swap or a Meteor-force Rajar. Almost all gang fights in Cataclysm ask for two characters with tank specialization, and a few others ask for one or three. We will likely continue to use that model. If we wanted a fight with many tanks, we might choose to let several of the characters with DPS specialization play that role.

Q: Are you planning to upgrade leg armor to 4.2 now that plate tanks are not getting dodge with agility? Or maybe introduce a new leg armor patch that adds strength / stamina, or mastery / stamina? - Dariok (North America), Fredik (Europe - Spain)

A: We have. You've probably seen it by now, it's called Drakehide Leg Armor, and it provides stamina and dodge rating.

Q: Can you make taunts not fail, like you did for interrupt abilities? It seems that it would not suppose any important alteration for the general balance. - Madmartygan (LA)

A: Yes, definitely! And we actually did it in patch 3.9. The provocations of the tank classes have not failed since. We realize that tanks almost always prefer to choose relief stats over threat stats, and it is especially frustrating to have to hit a hit limit to ensure taunts or interrupts don't fail, which is why we removed this requirement.

Q: Do you plan to simplify the impossible / unbearable situation of the tanks in any way (8% hit rate, 26 expertise, but also all defensive stats maxed out), either through equipment stats? or with changes in the game mechanics? Have you considered giving the tanks tools to make it easier for them to hit the hit limit and expertise to help with threat management? - Sunyara (Europe - Germany), Gilbey (Europe - Spain)

A: At this time we are not looking for a balance based on the assumption that tanks have a hit or proficiency limit. Although we are certainly looking for ways to make reliable hits more attractive to tanks in the future. Now, failing is only part of the problem discussed in another question. One possible solution would be to make the tanks worry about the threat stats, not for the benefit of the threat itself, but for the benefit of relief. For example, Death Knights want to make sure their Death Strikes hit for the relief buff. Druids value critical hits, for Savage Defense. At one point we speculated on the possibility of making Shield Block (and now Holy Shield) require a successful hit to do its job. We are not sure if we will go in that direction, but it is an idea. Of course, we would compensate the tanks for any foreseeable potential loss of relief.

Q: Tanks now have to use addons to see threat levels and clearly see which creatures they have aggro with. With all the changes and updates that have been made to the user interface recently, is there any plan to simplify and make the visualization of the threat and agro levels clearer? - Castan (Europe - England)

A: We would definitely like to better integrate the threat into the UI, especially for tanks and for multiple targets. We tried to keep the default UI from being too invasive, so that players can see the battlefield, but we are aware that this design goal may conflict with players' need or desire for large amounts of information. onscreen. We're constantly struggling to find the right balance, and it's one of the reasons why UI changes tend to be slower than, say, class design changes.

Q: Not only is the Protection paladin the most desired tank for its party survivability abilities and other utilities, but players generally also consider paladins an indispensable class in raids. I know that all tank classes are constantly tinkering for balance, but the survivability abilities of Protection paladins bring huge advantages compared to other tank classes. Can we expect other tank classes to feature more group survivability, for the sake of equality? - ????? (Korea)

A: Like Druids, Paladins have the great advantage of being able to fill all three roles in a group. Paladins also have a variety of useful perks and abilities from the original game, in which they (and shamans) were more of a support class meant to have low self-performance and make the rest of the classes in the party shine. . Little by little we have been moving away from that design to avoid that the class was disadvantaged and to promote the philosophy "the player matters, not the class", but it is difficult to make changes of this type in an accelerated way (to give a small example, during the In the development of Cataclysm, we removed Laying on of Hands for a short time, and a general outcry even arose within the team.) As they can fulfill many roles without diminishing their great usefulness, we are not surprised that so many druids and paladins are seen in raid groups. We have worked hard to find a way to make no particular tank class mandatory, and we believe we have succeeded in Cataclysm. To date we have not seen any encounter like Sartharion or Anub'arak, in which it was considered, and it is likely that it was true, that a certain class of tank was necessary in order to advance.

Protection paladins are very useful, but it is very difficult to make a table in which to compare the divine Guardian of a paladin with the mobility of a Protection warrior or the ability of a bear druid to cast Stimulate or even Reborn during calm moments in a meeting. They are completely different abilities, more or less useful depending on the encounter and your specific raid composition. We do not want to simply provide a Divine Guardian equivalent to all tank classes, just as we do not consider Warriors or Paladins to need the Battle Resurrection ability. We walk a fine line. Some players are bothered by the homogenization (unsurprisingly), but many players also find it unacceptable to be unable to tank (or healer or DPS) in an encounter due to a lack of tools.

Q: Do you plan to add a new class in the future? I think the Warcraft III spell buster would be a great option! - ??? (Taiwan)

A: We will add new classes when the time is right. WoW doesn't strike us as a game that can support an unlimited number of different class types (and the various talent specs these days almost behave like classes on their own!), So we want to be sensible about when to add classes . One of the challenges of tanks in particular (and of other roles) is this: on the one hand, there is a main set of abilities that every tank needs to be able to do its job, and with more reason in a 5-player dungeon in the one that you cannot count on other players who play the same role as you to fill your gaps. On the other hand, having so many similar abilities - a taunt, a short cooldown, an efficient heal - requires a certain level of homogeneity between classes. But what gamers (and designers!) Want to see is a new class that has something exciting that no one has seen before. Adding another class with a tank function, such as a warrior, would not add much value to the game; it would not lead to the creation of large numbers of new tanks or encourage a veteran tank to try a different class of tank. However, adding the Death Knight, with a rather different tank role (although some players might argue not enough) was a huge challenge and the kind of change that we will continue to test in the future.