The Block Nerf

When the Beta began, the floodgates opened, and while there's a lot of new information, I think we're at a point where the shocking reveals are mostly either already revealed (Siege of Orgrimmar, for one) or they haven't been discovered/put in the beta yet. Personally I'm probably most excited to hear about what Jaina will be up to - though that's probably something for another post.

No, what I'm here to talk about is the Block nerf.

Taking a trip to the past, there was a time where most tanks slung a shield in their off-hand. (Granted, given the current popularity of Paladin tanks *puts on Hipster Glasses* which I was totally playing before it was cool *takes off Hipster Glasses* this is still probably true.) In fact, if we look at Vanilla, the actual design intent was that only Warriors would make decent tanks, with Druids and Paladins sometimes getting to play in dungeons, but basically being forced to respec if they wanted to raid. This evolved into the three tank roles of Burning Crusade: Warriors were main tanks, Druids were add tanks, and Paladins were AoE tanks. Finally, in Wrath, it was decided that rather than create an entire new tanking niche for Death Knights (which was going to be "anti-caster tanks,") they just decided that everyone should be able Main Tank or do any of the other roles.

Let's also talk about the way that Block used to work. Before Cataclysm, all shields had a "block" value below the armor value. Additionally, pieces of gear sometimes had Block Rating or something that described the fact that it raised the Block Value of your shield by such and such amount. You would also gain a small amount of block value from strength. What this block value meant was that every time you blocked an attack, you would subtract that amount from the strike. As enemies hit harder in higher tiers, you either needed higher block value or block was going to get less and less significant. It also meant that in Wrath, some tanking gear sucked for Death Knights, as they gained no benefit from block rating or block value.

It also meant that a warrior or paladin tanking a huge swarm of creatures that would be weak on their own would take next to no damage if they blocked all those attacks. On the flip side, if you had only 1k block value and a boss was slamming you for 10k, it made all that block rating seem pretty pointless - which is part of the reason why in Wrath tanks stacked Stamina and Armor over everything else.

Cataclysm did a couple things regarding block. The biggest was the end of a "block value," simply determining that a shield block would reduce the incoming attack by 30%. The other was the elimination of Block Rating as a thing on gear. It was replaced by Mastery, which as we all know, does a different thing for every spec. As a result, all tanks could now benefit from the same rating, but in different ways. DKs no longer had to groan when a nice tank piece dropped with totally useless stats.

The problem with the new way Block worked, however, is that, given a huge amount of Mastery, a Paladin (or an even better-geared Warrior) can eventually hit a point where they are block-capped - that every incoming attack that isn't dodged or parried (and doesn't miss) is guaranteed to be blocked. So that's a flat 30% physical damage reduction guaranteed - more so when you take into account Holy Shield and Critical Blocks.

While theoretically effective incoming damage might be equivalent to a Death Knight or a Druid's mitigation, this flat damage reduction means a much smoother intake of damage, which makes block tanks (particularly Paladins) much easier to heal.

Blizzard is taking this very seriously, but we're getting into a territory that reminds me suspiciously of the infamous old "Nerfed to the ground" announcement. Blizzard is doing two things to combat this: first they're putting block masteries on diminishing returns. What this means is that the more Mastery you have, the less effective each further point is. This is the way that things currently work for dodge and parry.

The other thing is that blocks will, in the future, be calculated as a separate roll than the hit/dodge/parry/crit roll they've always been part of. The effect of this is that as your dodge and parry (avoidance) increases, you will effectively get a lower block chance.

Let's say you have 50% block.

If you have 20% dodge+parry, that means that there's only an 80% chance the game will even check if you're going to block (ignoring miss chance here.) So that 50% really translates to 40% block, in the final calculation.

Later on, you have a combined avoidance of 40%. With 50% block, and a 60% chance to check for that block, you have effectively 30% block.

So, in order to get up to a reasonable block chance again, you now have to get significantly more Mastery, which is now on diminishing returns. Really, Mastery will probably become totally worthless after a certain point.

I think the big problem here is the double nerf and the way that those two interact with each other. I don't know how the math will work out, but assuming that none of the other tanks are getting nerfed, this could wind up an overcompensation that severely punishes shield tanks.

It seems that we should try one or the other. Each has its own flaws and strengths.

Diminishing returns would mean that unlike anyone else, Protection(s) has a Mastery that gets worse the more you have. Is this the end of the world? Maybe not. It's somewhat elegant, and a tried-and-true method Blizzard has for dealing with caps. It also allows Block to scale linearly with incoming damage. Because we're looking more at damage left over, rather than damage reduced, going from, say, 85% to 90% block is not as big a reduction as 90% to 95%, because the 15% is only one and a half times as much damage as 10%, whereas 10% is twice as much as 5%. Diminishing returns effectively allows you to scale it to the damage you take, rather than what you reduce.

The two-roll method is a bit awkward, and might in fact require more complex computations that would, over the course of a fight, cause some lag. It's also just weird, and punishes a player for having decent avoidance. On the other hand, the current implementation of Death Strike kind of works the same way. Because it's based on damage taken (unless that damage was insignificant - there is a minimum heal,) a DK with tons of dodge and parry will get less healing, and thus a smaller blood shield when they use Death Strike. Similarly, because the Druid's Savage Defense is based on damage, and their Attack Power is driven by Vengeance... wait, what the hell is going on with Druids? No wonder their Mastery is getting redesigned.

Once again, I don't really know how the math works out, but the Diminishing Returns solution seems far more reasonable.

There are a couple other solutions, though. One is just to nerf Mastery numerically. We (Paladins) currently get something like 2.25 block chance per point of Mastery. If they're so worried about us Block-Capping, why not just nerf it down to 1.5 or wherever the calculations land it? Make it impossible to cap with gear, and if you find that you can't, nerf it some more.

If that gets the value so low that it's worthless next to dodge and parry, here's another thing you can do: make Divine Bulwark more interesting, like Critical Block. Warriors trade block chance for effective block value - the Mastery gives them a chance not only to Block, but an equal chance (before the base block chance) to get a Critical block, doubling the block value.

Paladins could go down a similar road, perhaps gaining straight block value (though that could cause even bigger super-scaling issues,) or work in a bit of Paladin-flavor appropriate healing, like a HoT that triggers every time you block, proportional to the amount of damage you blocked.

You might even chuck out a Block Rating-style Mastery entirely, giving Warriors and Paladins abilities like the new Shield of the Righteous that would give you on-demand or rotationally-maintained boosts to your block chance, but ones that would not become more frequent with gear, and then allow you to improve the effectiveness of those blocks via Mastery.

Ok, I'm getting long-winded here, but here's my proposal for new Masteries that would let us set aside all this absurd redesign:

All shield-bearers have an innate let's say 10% block. Paladin and Warrior tanks use abilities like Shield of the Righteous or Shield Block or whatever to allow them to maintain something like a 50% block chance (maybe less.)

Prot Warriors get Critical Block as their Mastery, but it no longer affects block chance - only the chance to block for 60% instead of 30% (values are open to change.)

Prot Paladins get a redesigned Divine Bulwark, where rather than any effect on the Block chance, you now gain Block value. If you were to pour all of your stats into Mastery, you could theoretically make a Block as powerful as a Parry, but you'd never do so 100% of the time. And you would need the same amount of Mastery a DK would need to make his Blood Shield equal to the total damage of the strikes that powered it - something that would be impossible unless there were like 20 tiers at the same level cap.

That's my solution there. Not sure if there's some glaring mathematical problem that would ruin us all, but it really seems like it could work a lot better, and wouldn't require some crazy two-roll system.