(Why it's not the level 15 talent, I don't know -- that would seem to make more sense. But maybe I'm missing the point of the talent? Possibly because tank damage sub-level cap is actually pretty good?)
Anyway, I wanted to ramble on about threat, tanking, and DPS balance for a little while. Care to join me?
A bit of preamble: we've seen lots of attempts to allow tanks to hold aggro while not totally blowing the DPS classes out of the water in terms of, well, DPS. There have been gear scaling issues, AOE damage issues, etc. The current mechanic is Vengeance, and it's been that way for a few expansions now. There's nothing indicating that Blizzard has any designs on introducing something new to the mix, and I guess Vengeance isn't a bad way to address the issue of threat scaling.
On the other hand, trying to do solo content as a tank is painfully slow. It's not as bad as rolling as a healer, but it's still kind of unpleasant. My monk, primarily a Brewmaster, can do about 30k when I'm soloing. When I switch over to WW, using the same gear, I pull 60 - 70k. About twice as much, which means I spend half as much time killing things. Good stuff, right? And hey, tanking (and healing) are dungeon roles, right? You're not supposed to solo with those specs, right?
Yeah. But I don't like WW. Or Ret, for that matter. (Kitty is okay, kind of a vaguely-less-interesting rogue.) I like Brewmaster, it's the most fun spec I've ever played. But trying to do solo content ... it's not as bad as it was now that my gear is approaching 500, but it's still a little punishing. When I was undergeared, it was a lot punishing.
So that's one reason why the status quo is less than ideal: there are players (I'm sure I'm not alone) for whom their tank spec is just the one they find most enjoyable. Since fun is supposedly the underlying philosophy upon which Warcraft is designed, I argue that this reason is compelling. But there's another: there is still, almost a decade into the game, a tank shortage. Having tanks not be quite so painful as soloing characters could only help that situation.
(And the benefits of getting practice playing your spec all the time, blah blah fishcakes. Also a good reason.)
Obviously I have some thoughts as to how this could be addressed. As an added bonus, Vengeance can go away forever. In my ideal world, tanks would do roughly 3/4 the damage of a DPS spec while soloing. Low enough that you couldn't stack a raid with them, but high enough that you're not really feeling the bite when you're trying to solo.
Idea the First: Vastly Simplify Threat
The entire reason Vengeance was introduced, as I understand it, is because tanks, since they focus on mitigation rather than dealing damage, tend to fall far behind the DPS as expansions wear onward. As a result, keeping threat becomes an issue.
On the other hand, Blizzard seems to have moved beyond the idea that keeping threat is an interesting mechanic. So why not just follow that line of thinking to its logical conclusion, and change threat to a boolean: if you have threat, you have it, period. The only way to pull aggro off another character would be to use a taunt.
This de-couples tank damage from the aggro mechanic entirely, and would allow Blizzard to handle the two things separately. Tank damage being irrelevant means that Blizzard could set it at whatever they feel is appropriate. Meanwhile, taunts would keep mechanics like tank swaps viable.
Idea the Second: "DPS Stances" for Tanking Specs
It might be that Gladiator's Stance is a test run for all the tanking specs to get some kind of special stance that turns them into tank/DPS hybrids. If that's the case, fantastic, carry on. But hey, Blizz, if you weren't already thinking along those lines, this would work too -- a stance in which your damage output is increased while your threat output is accordingly reduced. And probably in which you don't get Vengeance anymore.
Idea the Third: Scale Mob Health by Spec
I was doing a daily this morning, the one where you have to kill the giant crab in Krasarang for the Anglers. There I was, whaling away at it, watching its 780k health drop. Suddenly, a wild Frost Mage appeared! and attacked the crab, and suddenly its health like doubled.
We knew that mobs scaling to the number of players attacking it was a new feature of this patch (or possibly this expansion, I haven't really been paying attention). And that's cool and all, but hey -- if you're going to make the mob's health a function of the number of players on its aggro table, why not throw spec into the mix too? In other words, if the character's spec isn't a DPS spec, all mobs simply have lower health. This has the advantage of making soloing less painful for tanks and healers -- sure, they might do less damage, but the mobs have less health, so the overall time taken to kill while soloing is pretty much the same regardless of spec.
So there you go, three ideas to make soloing as a tank somewhat less painful while not making them absolute monsters in group content and keeping threat the joke mechanic it is right now. Of the three I think the first is easiest while the third is the most interesting -- so how about it, Blizzard?
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