That’s a bit of an exaggeration to say that making other tanks more viable in raids and high end dungeons will change the entire dynamic of the game. There will be nothing stopping you from picking only prot warriors, but to the silent majority of players who don’t want their classic time to consist of AFKing in a group for several hours looking for a tank, it’s a smart decision.
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No, that’s not what I said.
I didn’t say “Making other tanks more viable is bad.”
I said “Making Prot Warriors non-essential isn’t a good change.”
I’m okay with the idea of making Hybrid roles better with legitimate Hybrid gear.
I’m not okay with Hybrid classes taking Warrior raid spots.
I’d like to see how you plan on making paladin and druid tanking work in raids using only tweaks as you put it.
That only happens on Pservers, AFAIK… I’ve never found a single person to be able to confirm it worked in any manner on real servers. Also, I’m not positive it’s related to spell batching itself, as much as mob pathing issues that where pserver based.
I’d add, that it’s still slower than just going combat, with a harder to find/attain weapon progression list, and only really brings the slowest leveling builds in the entire game up to someplace NEAR combat rogues, which where still one of the slower classes overall (because the only other way with daggers is either SS spamming or Gouge—>backstabbing), and even then it only is of benefit for completely meaningless leveling content.
TL:DR it’s basically one of those things that PServers specifically seem to have gotten wrong, and even then it’s not a big enough deal to actually get upset about, given the extremely limited impact it has. I personally wouldn’t lose sleep over it somehow being added to Classic, and it wouldn’t change my rogue leveling patterns beyond lvl 10 (when you can train 1handed swords at a weapon master). That being said, I’d be against it being added, on principle.
By that token one could easily conclude that non viable specs where “bugged” and prime for fixing.
but using 1.12 talents, gear, debuff limit, and threat generation for early vanilla progression IS A MASSIVE CHANGE, as the early raid tiers where already irrelevant by that time period. They aren’t balanced around the late vanilla changes for that reason, and it throws off the gear effort/progression
ratios that helped make those tiers a success…
For example, Ragnaros dropped 4 weapons of note: Spinal Reaper, Hand of Rag (the eye at least), Perdition’s Blade, and BoneReaver’s Edge.
Those items where 1ilvl away from HWL weapons in power value (HoR was just above them). Is it really a good idea for the raid that drops weapons THAT strong to be essentially puggable speed cleared from first week of launch? It sure as hell wasn’t that way in real vanilla. Later on in the vanilla era, when all the changes where done, it mattered less as there was already a pretty solid collection of comperable items making their way out to players, but it’s not like that, for release and the first year or so. It’s changing the itemization pools and the early game by making relatively rare weapons more common via more clears. These kinds of things have a major impact up and down the board with how the game is played, and it’s why I think leaving the early raid tiers undertuned relative to where they where (and should be) is such a critical issue that needs to be addressed/fixed.
I’m so grateful the devs are sticking to the Vanilla means Vanilla mindset. This thread is yet more proof that deviating from that principle would be disastrous.
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By nature of being a tank, warriors will never be non-essential. You can make the other tanks stronger while keeping warriors the best tanks. For example in retail right now, blood death knights are THE tank to use for all end-game content but you can still do high end content with a druid or paladin tank. It’s just always preferred to have a blood death knight tanking it instead.
If Blizzard would hire me I’d have a better answer for you, but unfortunately I don’t have all the mathematical data to give you a sufficient answer. The end goal would be to make non prot warriors the “second choice”. So warriors will still be the best at what they do, but if your raid group has their prot warriors call out sick or get poached, you can get by on other tanks for the time being.
Let me make it simpler. You can’t
You’d need to change talents.
You’d need to give paladins a taunt.
You’d need to give paladins some mana regen somehow.
Both would need gear added to raids.
In short you’re way outside of the realm of tweaks.
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Apoc I’m so sorry.
That’s not really the point I’m trying to make though.
It’s not… entirely… a matter of “having a best X”. It’s matter of Class roles.
Warriors entire gear sets are designed around making them tanks.
Hybrid classes have Hybrid gear intended to make them good in Hybrid roles.
Yes, Blizzard screwed up by not making the Hybrid gear good enough and then they scrapped the idea with T3, pretty much ruining the Hybrid classes forever.
^That… is the point I’m trying to make. Yes, Druids and Paladins should be better tanks. No, they shouldn’t be viable as Main tanks. That would totally defeat the purpose of the Class system.
They should be excellent Sub-tanks that can tank some smaller adds or temporarily tank a boss for 10-15 seconds through some defensive CDs (Divine Shield breaks threat and Barkskin doesn’t help, so fix those for starters) and they should be good healers in general, not necessarily with the full healing kit of Priests, but to aid healing during certain phases, and the ability to output decent DPS again during certain phases.
Has that been accomplished properly? No. So deal with the elephant in the room instead of trying to chase the rabbit down the rabbit hole.
Edit: And just to be clear here, I think that both Prot Paladin and Feral Druid should flat-out output more DPS than Prot Warriors as an example of Hybridization. Yeah, they aren’t Main tanks, but they should still be able to do a good job as Hybrid tanks.
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They’re just worried about dat slippery slope, which I can understand.
But for what it’s worth, I’m all for some small tweaks to fix otherwise broken specs for end-game. (better mana budget for boomkin, resto hots able to stack with whatever compensating nerf may be necessary, bear dr00ds not being such mana sponges, etc) I guess I happened to pull all druid problems, lol, but there are plenty of others.
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That’s fine, albeit irrational but I think reality will hit hard when the game comes out. The pragmatic decision is to make druids and paladins viable for main tanking, but still have prot warriors come out on top. This can be done and won’t be outside the realm of tweaking IMHO. It’s not 2006 anymore and a majority of players, including the #nochanges crowd, will simply not have the free time they did back then. There’s only so much nostalgia can compensate for.
and this is why I don’t like talking balance changes. You started with a few minor tweaks and have since moved onto doing what it takes to make it work in the name of convienence. You’ve moved completely sway from your initial argument. You’d be in favor of changing the game into not vanilla.
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Calling this thinking “irrational” is nonsense.
And calling the decision to change Paladins and Druids so that they can Main-tank “pragmatic”… That isn’t an argument.
I just flat-out disagree with you at this point. You’re generalizing, not making rational arguments, using fallacies, etc.
I’m talking about the system that Classic is based around and you want to fundamentally change that system. That’s irrational.
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Not only that he started with “minor tweaks” because minor should be enough to not totally upset anything.
And when proven it would take more then minor he goes full retail mode and basically says to do what it takes.
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I’ve consistently stated prot warriors should still be the best tank and there is no proof provided by you that paladins and druids will need more than minor changes (“You can’t” is not a reason. That’s plugging your fingers in your ears and refusing to believe anything else.). Your essentialism is still there. I have not advocated for anything else so please don’t jump to conclusions that I’mgoing “full retail” because it makes you come off as paranoid, and quite honestly, delusional.
You really would not need to change bears or pallys at all. Just undo the change to shield slam and put it back at 30. All better all 3 tanks would be wanted again.
Yes because paladin tanks and druid tanks were totally used before 1.12
Oh wait no they weren’t.
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I think the change happened in 1.11 could be wrong and yes they were used lots in dungeons and occasionally in raids before the change.
On the server on which I played, druids and paladins tanked dungeons and occasionally in raids just as effectively after the shield slam change as they did prior to the change.