I am not in the cata beta so I can't post there, but GC's latest post has me somewhat concerned.

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We just think at the end of the day that a warrior needs to look at their his talents and feel like they are making his survivability better. As an example, it's all well and good to have some fun or utility talents in the Disc priest tree, but if there also weren't some bread and butter talents to make you a better healer, Disc priests would feel cheated. Sword and Board is a fun Prot talent, but it doesn't improve your survivability directly in a very noticeable way.

Imagine a new talent that was a 30% chance to lower the cooldown of your Last Stand, or a 30% chance to proc an armor buff on you. It might be an exciting talent, but it could also be really frustrating every time it didn't proc. For the same reason tanks tend to gear for mitigation over random avoidance, they'd probably be really skeptical of a talent that had a chance of lowering their damage taken. There's room for some talents like that, and Critical Block is an example, but a whole tree of them might get frustrating. You might feel like your survivability was out of your control and really at the mercy of encounter specifics or even a random chance for a proc.

Put another way, we want players to have some choices in how they talent, but we don't want the whole tree to feel optional. A Prot warrior who chose to spend no talent points should feel like a really terrible tank, instead of just losing some utility or threat, in the same way an untalented healer should feel like they are sacrificing a lot of healing. Thus we think there is room for a few passive talents, especially for tanks, where having too many non-passive talents risks hurting consistency.

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From what I've seen, it's quite the opposite in Cata. All the talk and previews so far seem to focus on rage, making sure threat doesn't fall behind, AoE vs Single target, etc. Is it just me or have there been no real changes to the RNG nature of how much damage we will take, and how our talents revolve around block?

I'm not seeing any protection against big hits, (Like Will of the Necropolis or Argent Defender) or any semi-passive protection against all forms of damage (Like Bone shield and Blade Barrier). Druids seem to have little against magic too, as their talents seem to be all Armor and physical damage reduction.

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Q u o t e:
I definitely agree, though. The fact that the defining mitigation talent deep in the Protection tree is Critical Block is seriously laughable. There should be a few more talents that actually, you know, Protect you.

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You're viewing things through the lens of LK raiding, where getting hit twice in a row without heals landing can kill you. In that environment, the only things that matter are mechanics that can get you to reliably survive two hits in a row. When healer mana matters more, then anything that reduces damage -- even if it has a random component and even if it doesn't reduce damage enough to keep you alive sans healing -- becomes more valuable.

But really this thread is just supporting my point, that warriors (and all tanks) want to see some reliable mitigation (the original topic was the Toughness talent) to feel good about their trees.

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blizzard seeming to not understand what warriors want at all is making the warrior lose a lot of its shine to me

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Ah, if only. The day you guys elect representatives who can speak for everyone of your class is the day our jobs get a lot easier. :) The original quote came from a discussion where (some) warriors wanted more presumably unusual mechanics in their talent trees instead of something predictable like Toughness.

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See, this is silly, because of things like AD/WotN and the synergy with talents that allow increased healing at low %'s.

If healing mana is going to be so min/maxed, then you'll derive more benefit from just leaving the tank at half, so the heals are more effective, and the damage mitigation is more consistent.

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I'm not convinced healers will leave tanks at half health on purpose. That wasn't a popular strategy in say Black Temple or Sunwell when mana was more of an issue. You may not be pressured to immediately top off a tank constantly, but leaving a tank purposefully injured in order to prevent overhealing isn't going to be a sound strategy.

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Conversely, given that a boss hits for around 14% of the first tank's EH, the aforementioned tanks would be able to take seven and eight hits, respectively.

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Nobody ever takes 7 or 8 hits without heals though. That situation realistically never comes up. Once you have enough health that you aren't in realistic danger of constantly dying on the next hit then doing things that can lower healing required becomes a good strategy. In BC, "mana sponge" was one of the things tanks worried about. Relying on avoidance or any randomly based survivability mechanic, which is really dangerous when the next hit can kill you, becomes more tenable when it is reducing healing needed over time.

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I believe that you misunderstood him, A tank being held where a hit would consistently proc WotN would reduce inflowing damage, and inturn the tank would require less healing, saving the healers mana.

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Even if we left those talents in, I think it would be far too risky to leave a tank so low on health in order to maximize efficiency. Maybe if bosses hit for 10% of your health bar so that you knew you weren't in danger, but that's too extreme in the other direction. Why stack health at all in that world?

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- I suspect there will eventually be an EH "take the burst" fight in cata - its just one of the mechanics, and a very valid one.

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It's fine if class mechanics give one tank a slight edge in some fights over others, so long as the edge is slight and the same mechanic doesn't give them an edge on a whole lot of fights (which was the case for DK cooldowns in early Ulduar). The alternative is that the tanks are all identical and we don't think that's good for the longevity of the game.

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In 6 hit environments for a warrior/Druid, a DK is in an 8 hit environment. Do you not see why that is a problem?

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I just think it's irrelevant how many hits you can go without a heal beyond two or three. The two to three range is relevant because that can occur within the cast time of a spell. If you have healers that let a boss clobber you 6 to 8 times without a heal, your problem isn't with your tank.

The cheat death part of Ardent Defender is what is so potent these days (pre-Cataclysm), since a tank may suddenly die before you can react. The risk in the "mana matters" world is the decreased damage taken at low health. When the healers run low on mana and the warrior is gravely injured, the warrior dies. When the paladin is gravely injured, the healers buy a few more seconds of healing time, possibly enough to win. That's why we will have to change those talents. (In the current beta build, you get 8 sec of efficient heals on the wounded DK). I don't think it has anything to do with whether you can take 6 hits before dying.

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Q u o t e:
Btw, that chance that in 6 hits, a warrior would not block once (assuming 10% block rate)? 48%

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Critical Block isn't designed to save your life on the last boss hit though. It's designed to let you take less damage (and therefore healing and therefore mana) over the course of a fight. If the boss fight lasted for only 6 hits and you never got a crit block, then yeah, you got unlucky. Fights aren't that short though (unless you're using the healers who refuse to heal from the text above). Over the course of a typical 6-8 minute boss fight, critical block will proc around as often as you would expect it to (since the number of boss hits has a decent sample size), saving as much mana as you would expect it to.

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Q u o t e:
It's just starting to sound like the status quo. We will remain the RNG dependent tanks, hoping for some crit blocks so we take similar damage to our counterparts, who can RELY on their auto damage reduction talents to kick in at the crucial moment.

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You're trying to compare Critical Block to Ardent Defender here, which of course will leave the former wanting. Your response to being on death's door should not be to hope for a crit block. You should use Last Stand or Shield Wall, which are 100% under your control. Crit block, like dodge and parry, are generally there to make healing on you require less mana.

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I thought this was funny, because the post before, GC was accusing us of being in a WotLK mindset, discussing how important these talents are (and how lackluster Crit Block is) and then in the next post, he says that how many hits you can go without a heal isn't relevant beyond two or three.

Which is it, GC? WotLK mindset is outdated, or all that matters is the damage that can occur within the cast time of a spell?

My point was that if we're going to be in a state where the tank is wounded constantly, then AD and WotN are more powerful than they are today--and they are incredibly powerful compared to Crit Block today.

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I'm saying whether you can survive 2-3 hits today without healing is huge in the LK world. Talents or abilities that let you take that extra hit are very powerful. In Cataclysm, everyone will be able to survive 2-3 hits without healing so talents and cooldowns that let you survive 2-3 hits are less of a big deal. In neither LK nor Cataclysm is the ability to survive 6-8 hits without healing important at all. It just never comes up.

The reason 2-3 hits are the "magic numbers" is because those hits can come faster than the cast time of a big heal. When a healer can't be sure that you'll still be standing at the end of their cast, it pushes them towards fast or instant heals and it also pushes them to just cast constantly, whether you need the heal or not, because they can't afford to not have the heal ready at the moment it's needed. Make sense? No healer worth their salt is going to stand there and watch you take 5 or more hits without queuing up a heal, expect in very rare or contrived circumstances (say a boss like Loatheb or something like Gruul where healers are running around a lot).

Critical Block and block in general (and dodge and parry for that matter) don't have a lot to do with how many hits you can survive without healing. Oh, once in awhile you'll get very lucky and dodge 3 hits in a row that would have killed you, but nobody is going to stack dodge for that once in a blue moon scenario. Instead, of all of those mechanics let you take less damage over the 6-8 minutes of a boss fight. If you just were hit every one of those times, healers would run out of mana trying to keep you up. Yes the incoming damage would be relatively constant and predictable, but you'd still be dead.

Block isn't very sexy today because it absorbs a small amount of relatively constant damage. Healers don't care if they overheal, so how much mana your blocks are saving them is inconsequential. The blocks aren't big enough to actually keep you alive in the 2-3 hit danger zone, so it isn't doing anything there either.

When mana matters, anything you can do to preserve healer mana is a big deal. Think of a successful dodge as a priest getting a proc that says "Your next Greater Heal is free" or a block as "Your next Greater Heal costs as much as a Heal." It's not quite that simple, but that's the right mindset.

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It's why talents like AD and WotN are so good on live currently. That's why I'm so confused . . . because your stated paradigm is that tanks be wounded more frequently rather than kept at full health.

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They'll be wounded more often in that they won't be at 100%. That doesn't mean they will always be at 30% for WotN to kick in (and it only kicks in for 8 sec). It could be that 20% health for the talent to kick in makes sense too.

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The numbers seem strangely low (both on block chance and critical block chance) for it to feel like an effective mastery

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We haven't provided any numbers for block chance or critical block chance. All we've said is you shouldn't count on getting to anywhere near 100% uptime on block.

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I guess in my head, what I had it worked out to was two ways tanks could die:

1) OOM healers - In this scenerio, it's because over time the tank has just taken too much damage and the healers had to use too much mana to keep them up. In THEORY this could be a place where Crit Block (and savage defense, and the DK healing/shield, and paladins blocking 'more' often) could shine.

2) Big damage special - This is what you'd use cooldowns for. Be it a breath, a plasma blast, or even just a below 30% enrage, it will be a time when you KNOW the damage is coming that you have to be prepared for. This will not be good for Crit block, but I don't think it's meant to be. I think this is where last stand, shieldwall, AD, Bubblewall, etc are meant to be used for. This could also be where the warriors having lets say 5% more stamina could POTENTIALLY even up with Paladins having 8% more EH from AD (if nothing else changes)(yes, I know those numbers don't balance equally).

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Yes. Exactly. In today's tanking environment, situation number one never happens, so reducing damage isn't a consideration unless it would reliably save your life. In Cataclysm (as in vanilla and BC) it will.

If you believe it won't ever happen and you're arguing from that viewpoint, well then I can understand why you'd only focus on number two. But at that point we're not really debating design -- you're just saying you don't believe us.

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Q u o t e:
Pop shield wall and last stand, bro.

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If you guys don't believe in the power of Shield Wall and Last Stand then I'm not sure how you manage to tank anything. :)

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There has never been any point in the game where the only reason tanks died was due to healer mana.

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We just disagree on that. It happened pretty regularly before this last expansion. We have even seen it happen on heroic Halion today.

Back in Molten Core raiding, healers installed mods to help them cancel heals. They did that to conserve mana.

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In that environment, where it would ludicrous for me to die by accident, all the Wrath rules of tanking are tossed out the window. Healer mana and throughput become the important factors. Our role as tanks changes from avoiding death, to helping the healer as much as possible. Blocks, and crit blocks are a huge help to the healer. Mitigation and avoidance really matter. EH is still important too, it provides a nice cushion, permitting the healer to leave you alone for a short time if needed.

In cata it might be that the measure of a good tank is in measuring how little damage they take. Not a simple yes / no to 'did the tank survive?' like it is in wrath. Efficient use of cooldowns such as shield block will enable a prot warrior to excel in this area. If I were a bear tank I would be a bit concerned about being the 'mana sponge' tank.

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Well said.

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Q u o t e:
I would agree if GC's response to "Our EH is really a lot lower than everybody else" isn't "Well if you don't think Shield Wall/Last Stand are important, I don't know what to say" or "Critical Block isn't supposed to help keep you alive, it's supposed to save your healers mana."

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Assuming you are defining Effective Health as armor x health, then it isn't and never has been our goal to have effective health be identical among all the tanks. Cooldowns, avoidance, emergency buttons and other class mechanics are all part of that package for us. What matters to us is whether or not the four tanks can tank the content with more or less the same chance of success. That's the metric we use, not a single number.

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Q u o t e:
is the new tank model going to be designed so that tanks with more self healing take more damage making the self healing required for them to be competitive.

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Our intent is that DKs take more damage to compensate for all of the self-healing. As Regill points out, Blood Craze is accessible now and we want Enraged Regen to be more attractive.