Monday, March 26, 2012

Leather, the other tank armor

Druids were always a little unique in that they were the one class that could tank without being able to use plate armor. While Warriors, Paladins, and later Death Knight had to cover themselves head-to-feet with thick plates of metal, Druids would wear their customary leather armor and turn into a bear (and as we all know, if you swing a sword at a bear, it will block it just as well as a steel breastplate.) Interesting that there will now be two leather tank classes, but no mail-wearing tanks. Demon Hunters some time in the future? (Though they also seem like a leather-wearer class... damn it! We need a new mail class.)

Back in Burning Crusade, bear tanks would have to get special gear that had a combination of bonus armor and strength, rather than agility (though it would often have both, providing attack power from strength and dodge/crit from agility.) This was of course back in the days when they made a lot of different armor types for specific specs. Imagine, essentially, that many other specs were in the position that Holy Paladins are in today.

Tanking gear also used to be a lot more complicated. In addition to dodge and parry, as well as hit and expertise (which you actually needed to maintain a decent threat ceiling for your dps - and back then it wasn't the tank's fault if you pulled off them, it was yours,) there was also block rating, block value, and Defense Rating, which worked to improve your defense skill (back then, you had to use a type of weapon a whole lot before you got good enough to actually hit anything with it, and you had to take a lot of hits before you built up enough defense rating to not get crit all the time. Cataclysm seriously streamlined a whole lot of stuff.)

In BC, druids simply took the crits, because they couldn't gear for Defense without plate armor. In Wrath, they gained a talent called Survival of the Fittest, which in Cataclysm was given to every tank, along with the elimination of Defense rating (and weapon/defense skill entirely.) The huge innovation in Wrath was that Druids of the Cat or the Bear persuasion would both use the same basic gear, which was also the same as for Rogues. This was all pretty much decided because only one spec would use tanking leather.

Cut to Mists of Pandaria. We're getting a new tanking class, and like the druid, Monks use leather armor. What does that mean? Well, it appears that Monks are going to have a number of defensive abilities to compensate for their low armor. While Bear druids will just soak things up with their big armor (which improves with Mastery) Monks will apparently use their variety of abilities to avoid and mitigate the damage.

This actually makes it seem like tanking on a Monk is going to be freaking difficult. If you are forced to constantly use abilities to stay alive, a couple-second lag-spike would mean a near guaranteed wipe - or at least a tank death.

The other interesting issue that this raises is that it isn't so weird to imagine leather tanking gear. After all, caster mail will only be for Elemental and Restoration Shamans, and caster leather will only gain one more spec that finds it useful. And of course Holy Paladin gear is still one-spec only.

It wouldn't be all that crazy to see dodge rating show up on leather armor, then. Druids still won't be able to parry, and Monks have class-mechanics that I assume will allow them to parry without making parry-rating gear too attractive.

Actually, it would even work out with armor models. With the introduction of Death Knights, Blizzard often goes with the convention that Healing Plate looks like Paladin tier gear, Tanking Plate looks like Warrior tier, and DPS Plate looks like Death Knight tier. One could imagine Caster leather looking like Druid gear, Melee Leather look like Rogue gear, and Tanking leather look like Monk gear.

It's very early in the Beta, and I'm sure the Monk has a lot of iteration to go through (let's remember how wildly the DK changed... even though it kind of changed back in Cataclysm, though Blood and Frost switched roles.) But if Blizzard decides to take one step back from its gear consolidation, I think that Tanking Leather is a definite possibility.

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