If you're not Protection-specced (Warrior or Paladin,) you've probably never thought much about shields. Sure, Holy Paladins, Elemental Shamans, and Restoration Shamans have historically worn a big dinner plate on their backs (the expectation was was so strong that they had to give The Silver Hand a 30% boost to your armor in addition to its other effects,) but these guys are too busy casting to pull their shield out and block an attack.
And honestly, if you're not a tank, the only times you'll really worry about defensive stats are when soloing or PvPing - and the former generally tunes things so that you're not going to worry about it too much while the latter encourages myriad defensive gameplay styles like kiting or stunning in addition to straight up damage reduction.
The point is: if you don't play Protection, this is going to be wonky about something that really doesn't mean much to you.
Ok!
Way back in the day, Shields had a value called "Block," typically followed by some number comparable to the armor that it gave you (I think generally lower, maybe half or something.) This was your block value. What it meant was that when you blocked an attack with a shield, the damage reduction was subtractive, rather than multiplicative (by a less-than-1-factor - so arguably divisive.)
Your Block Value was then further altered by two things: you would find block value on armor (you'd also get Block rating, which would increase your chance to block,) and you would gain block value as you increased your Strength, which makes a certain logical sense, as it's as if the stronger you got, the more of an impact you could absorb by holding up your shield.
The interesting consequence of this was that, depending on a fight, block could be enormously powerful or not very powerful at all. I started tanking raids in Wrath, during which this system was still in place (I suspect that the introduction of the Death Knight, as a tank that wore plate but couldn't make use of any of these block-related stats, might have been what convinced them to get rid of them, as DKs had to either search high and low for gear that only had defense/dodge/parry/hit/expertise - all stats that don't exist anymore - or just use gear with useless stats.) Fighting the Scourge, one often found oneself fighting off large swarms of weaker minions - skeletons and ghouls and the like. When the main source of damage is not the power of the hits, but rather the frequency, blocking shined, as you might only take some small percentage of the actual damage of the strike.
However, a block value of a 1,000 was not all that impactful when you were getting hit for 30,000 by some powerful raid boss. You had to rely on other forms of mitigation or use a tank with very high "effective health" (a kind of value determined by max HP and total damage reduction) like a Blood Death Knight or a Feral (what would become Guardian) Druid.
Anyway, in Cataclysm, they changed the way that shield-blocking worked: Instead of a set value, blocking would reduce an incoming hit by 30% (raising to 40% in Warlords.) Paladins got a mastery that increased their chance to block (by the end of the expansion, Paladins' main goal was to get a 100% block chance) while Warriors got a mastery that increased that chance by a lesser amount, but also gave them a chance to block for 60% instead. They got rid of block value on gear because it no longer had any meaning, and they got rid of block rating because the only specs that would care about that stat could simply go for mastery instead.
Then, I believe in Mists, perhaps concerned about Paladins' ability to hit 100% block chance (meaning any further mastery was useless,) they made some changes. First off, they added more effects to the Paladin mastery, tying it into self-healing (initially something called Bastion of Glory, which would buff your next self-applied Word of Glory each time you used Shield of the Righteous, stacking up to 5) but they also changed how block was calculated: While previously you would put dodge, block, and parry all together to kind of push regular blows off the table (in Wrath and earlier, you also had to worry about crushing blows from raid bosses, which required getting crit-immune from defense rating and then getting sufficient avoidance/block to get rid of these as well,) the new system would first check if you had dodged or parried, and then within the circumstance of having been hit, they would then apply your block chance.
Of course, what this meant was that as your pure avoidance went up, your block chance would effectively go down: consider if you had 20% parry, 20% dodge, and 40% block chance. Originally that would have meant that you only had a 20% chance of getting hit. Under the Mists-and-later system, that 40% block chance would only apply to the remaining 60% after dodge and parry would apply, meaning that it was more accurate to call it a 24% block chance.
And so has it been for nearly eight years. And now it's back... but here's the thing:
Blizzard has started to change the wording of certain things on gear - you never see anything called a "rating" anymore. While something like Strength increases your attack power by a flat amount (if you use Strength,) ratings would scale with level, becoming less effective (and thus requiring more) as you got to a higher level.
But while gear used to have special green text that would say "increases your haste rating by 374" they now tend to just say +374 haste.
And as it turns out, when I started writing this very post, I didn't think about that change in terminology. And it appears that block on the shield isn't a value - it's a rating.
So block rating is back: but it does not do what it used to. To increase your chance to block, you'll still focus on Mastery.
Block on your shield will increase the damage reduction of a block.
I think you'll only ever see block rating on shields now, but this now becomes a very important stat for the shield. My Paladin on the Alpha has a block rating of 1716 - all coming from his shield. That translates to a 35% reduction in damage when he blocks. We can probably assume that as one progresses at the level cap, one will be getting fancier and fancier shields with higher block ratings. I wouldn't surprised if, by the last raid tier, shields will be blocking for as much as 50% (maybe more?)
This could push shield-wearing tanks to really favor mastery, because blocking becomes a more and more effective means of damage mitigation as they get better shields. By contrast, mastery might be undervalued in early tiers like Uldir, as we might have shields that aren't blocking for all that much at 120 when we first hit the level cap.
It's really wonky, and I'm sure a lot of theorycrafters will be furiously working out the relative value of these stats. I think what's interesting about this is that just as weapons are becoming less important, with ability damage now being determined entirely by attack power, shields are playing a much more active role than they have previously, when they've basically just been a nice chunk of armor and a prerequisite tool you needed in order to take advantage of the block ability.
No comments:
Post a Comment