Additional Defense Scaling Triggers

WoW Classic Season of Discovery
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For the most part I really like the system with alternate defense scaling (though the benefits class to class are pretty wildly uneven) but I am not sold on the execution of triggering the buff from class to class as some have multiple dead gcds dedicated to triggering it early in combat (during crucial threat gcds) vs other classes simply being able to slap it on for free before combat even starts.

I think shaman and pally (unsurprisingly) have been given the ideal version(s) of this with shaman being able apply with any shock effect giving freedom of approach in rotation and paladin simply being able to hit holy shield any time they want with it only being 10 second CD. Meanwhile rogue has to use multiple generators with no defense bonus before using a finisher to get it and warlock has to use shadow cleave in single target for no reason on 10% of their gcds.

I’m unsure what the balancing purpose of needing a trigger ability for the defense bonus is now that all the tank runes on hybrid classes have been tuned to reduce damage anyway- considering this feature hasn’t been touched since P4 they may have just forgotten about it. At this point im pretty sure they could just make it baseline to X tank rune(s) rather than an aura but short of that heres what it could be added to in order to make everyones lives easier:

  • Every Charge, shadowstep and horse included
  • AOE Openers (a la shadowcleave application): Swipe, Tclap/Swave, any rogue cape rune
  • Out of combat/pre combat short cd (holy shield equivalent): Demonic Grace, Enrage

Granted this is far from the most urgent issue in SoD I think its a pretty harmless and simple QOL fix

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If its going to be up anytime your incombat why not just make them alawys active

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Thats sort of my point, holy shield is literally at-will application so they wouldn’t really be power creeping anything by just making them baseline to rune

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Or they could just actually address the Threat Issue.

Instead of all these ‘Rube Goldberg Machine’ methods…lets make armor that deals damage back and armor kits that do the same thing, OH and a trinket…then we’ll make that damage do ‘double the threat’. - Like, my gods…there’s a good 420 damage (armor + armor kits; don’t think I included the trinket), and assuming Threat is 1:1 normally (so 1:2 with the “double threat”). That’s roughly 420 TPS (assuming 2 second swing time for mobs/bosses).

On top of putting in a damage buff when tanks use their ‘signature ability’ (ie Shield Slam).

Like…just fix the freakin Threat generation for tanks. - They’re still using the Vanilla threat generation while everyone got Wrath/Retail DPS generation (scaled down due to gear power).

We know it was to address threat because Dual Spec came in P3 along with this “Tank DPS buff” (WoWhead says P3). So it makes no sense for it to be a ‘so you can do solo stuff without respeccing’.

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You aren’t wrong this is just me trying to meet blizz where they are apparently at in mechanic consistency. Its often hard to read on SoD whether something is intended to be ‘vanilla imperfect’ or accurately tuned- if they put a 0 on the end of all the threat runes and no one ever had to worry again I don’t think there would be many complaints but its also very inconsistent with how SoD has dealt with tanking so far.

I think getting rid of having to worry about defense as an aura at least gets rid of 1 step of the rube goldberg machine and potentially 2 (Snap threat/on pull management) so that we can at least focus on positioning/mitigation considerations for the rest.

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