One of the interesting things to come out of the PTR is that the Paladin tanking tier set actually has some haste itemized in it (it's not a lot, I think only one one of the five pieces.) This seems to suggest that Blizzard has decided to fully enshrine haste as a key stat for Paladin tanks.
Now, I was all up in arms against Active Mitigation tanking, but thankfully the design of boss fights has mostly made it a gameplay style with integrity. The main reason I hated haste for Paladin Tanks was that it stepped outside of our traditional tanking itemization. That might not have been a problem if it were not for the fact that, due to LFR's automated loot system, we would never receive haste from any of the bosses as long as we were signed up as tanks.
Yet haste tanking has become very popular, and indeed, it seems (from my subjective perspective) that tank threat is balanced around the assumption that a Protadin is going to be stacking haste, even if the greater theoretical appeal to the faster rotation is the increased Shield of the Righteous uptime.
I am willing to adapt to the change, but here are some ground rules:
1. We've got to be able to receive this new "tank gear" with automated loot systems. If it's got some combination of hit, expertise, mastery, dodge, parry, or now haste, we've got to be able to get it without running as Ret.
2. If we start to see haste and avoidance stats appear together, it's got to be useful to the other plate tanks (DKs already essentially have Sanctity of Battle baseline, given how Runes have been affected by Haste since 4.0, but Warriors should benefit rather than finding themselves in the same situation as a Wrath-era Death Knight with a whole bunch of useless block rating.)
3. Mastery should still remain a good stat - I'm of the opinion that Mastery is the most interesting stat in the game, but also a great across-the-board stat for the tanking role. Melee has Agility or Strength, and casters have Intellect, but in an age where we're not getting slammed for 95% of our health pools every time a boss connects, Stamina isn't really as clearly beneficial as other base stats. I like the trend of having tank trinkets deal largely in mastery.
So all this is fine, but what picture does this paint for tank itemization in the future? Since both avoidance stats are basically reforge-aways (with two secondary stats per item, you'll always have either haste or mastery to reforge an avoidance stat into) it starts to make you wonder if the whole tanking paradigm needs another look.
An obvious step would be to consolidate parry and dodge into one stat. Certain classes (usually melee-capable ones) have parry in addition to dodge, while others don't. Oddly, Druids, a tank- and melee-dps-capable class, have always only had dodge. There's flavor to it, sure, but overall, given that both stats function identically (for players, at least,) it stands to reason that we could shrink it down.
Then, of course, there's the problem that avoidance is entirely passive. Active Mitigation has proven to be a more engaging way to tank for most people (and thankfully has been balanced more along the lines of "bonus for playing like a pro" than "penalty for playing like a noob," at least in LFR.) Yet there is something appealing to better gear making you simply harder to kill. Armor does this pretty elegantly, and avoidance is a lot like armor, except that by its nature, it is streaky. In a way, that's fine, because a little unpredictability can make the game more engaging (it's why procs are such a key to making a class fun.)
So perhaps the solution is as simple as making avoidance a single stat, thus lowering avoidance chances automatically, while of course balancing encounters around letting the classes survive if played well.
If Parry is lost, that makes Dodge the only strictly-tanking stat. That actually makes it unique among stats, being associated with a single role. Healers, after all, use the same stats as DPS casters, only with a different emphasis (stacking Spirit where non-Mage/Warlock casters only get it to a certain cap.)
I had proposed getting rid of Dodge and Parry altogether, and simply making Haste and Crit provide those benefits. Another option is to get rid of the secondary stats and merely boost the dodge and parry gained by Agility and Strength, respectively.
The point here, is that I think Blizzard needs to make a decision before the next expansion comes out. If they want tank gear to remain tank gear, they seriously need to do something about the avoidance stats. Currently, the "lipstick on the pig" approach, such as the changes to Grand Crusader, are a band-aid - acceptable given the difficulty of doing a major re-haul in the middle of an expansion. However, in the long run, these stats need to see a significant change, either in the way that they work or their emphasis in itemization.
The existence of haste on the Paladin tier 16 Armor, however, suggests that Blizzard is well aware of the issue, and I look forward to a clever and elegant solution.
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