“We will be watching class balance closely, and my perspective is we should just let it be, unless a class is pushed out entirely and the community says ‘this class is complete junk, we don’t even bring them anymore’ and then I think we should take a look at it” - Kris Zierhut
Recently in the Wrath Classic Developer Interview with Community Council the above quote was suggested as a step that may be required to resolve some outlying class problems to do with scaling.
This also plays inline with the quote “In a way, bringing the item level down on gear will actually help with class balance in general.” from Kris that has been discussed in this forum the past few days.
So the question is to Blizzard devs and to get the feelings of others, would it be a reasonable request to have Protection Warrior & Feral Druid looked at and modified in their scaling values to have better raw mitigation in order to make up for the lack of talents such as Will of the Necropolis - Blood Death Knights & Ardent Defender - Protection Paladins, with potentially a minor tweak to their threat scaling for as well?
While Bears are considered barely viable by the community and the influence of hardcore ex-private server players the meta is heavily pushing that Bears should only ever be a flexible off tank and DPS due to the fact that we don’t get armor from rings or weapons anymore and a heavy penalty to bonuses. This pushes the meta especially in Heroic modes to not even include a Bear or Protection Warrior in your roster line-up going into Heroic ToC, ICC and Hardmode Ulduar fights with the majority of the community unlikely to even accept Bears as pug Normal Mode tanks for ICC. This brings us to the sad point that due to lack of consistent tankiness we find that anything but experienced healers who can predict incoming damage are capable of carrying Protection Warriors through the content and as we’ve seen it is already going to be not viable for the average player to roll a Protection Warrior even in Naxx 25 man because they will get 1 shot by Patchwork who can hit up to 29k in a single hateful meaning if the encounter hateful strikes the warrior twice, they’re dead and as a result the community refuses to allow Protection Warriors to even participate with Bears being the barely viable and low threat producing tank that will begrudgingly used if there is not a spare DK who can’t respec to Blood on the spot.
With dual talents a lot of issues are solved in terms of bringing certain classes but it also exaggerates the current issues that will cause a toxic meta of people pulling out the tagline 'We’re struggling so can we just have the Paladin or DK tank it?" resulting in the Protection Warrior being benched and the Feral Druid forced to remain as a Cat DPS due to following the path of least resistance that players love. Further this is LK and any class Tank should be able to participate and tank viably every encounter in the game which at the moment is not the case. Unfortunately due to Private Server experiences where Protection Warrior balancing was even more inconsistent there were fights like Algalon that were bugged and never fixed or talents bugged and never fixed that made the already under performing Protection Warrior the considered ‘unviable tank’. The public opinion is already out there and a lot of pug groups have resulted in dead Warrior tanks on the Patchwork encounter. This situation is only going to get worse and needs to be resolved.
To this extent we know Bears are going to be barely much better and due to Faerie Fire not proccing ClearCasting for Ferals kitty DPS, they’re on the chopping board next because they just don’t ‘bring as much as stacking more Death Knights or a Ret who can respec Prot as your 3rd Tank’. Who knows, a Fury Warrior might replace a Feral in a raid comp in ToC & ICC forcing guilds to drop their Ferals in the later part of the game.
Not only is the concern mitigation and the ability to survive encounters due to not having a free save as it were but also in the later part of the game less ability to produce effective threat due to DPS scaling so high late game which might mean tweaking to threat multipliers or just a increase to damage done by Prot Warriors and Bears especially when Bloodlust / Hero will be used on every fight in this new Classic Meta. There are many Private Server commentators who have informed many players that Bears have terrible threat and won’t be ideal as is the situation with Protection Warriors as the gear and expansion expand. With many old posts on forums discussing the problems that existed back in the day to the threat ceiling issues with Tanks and DPS.
So what do you think? Is it reasonable to consider some minor scaling improvements for Protection Warriors and Bears so they can fairly participate in what was suppose to have been the “bring the player not the class expansion”?