Because by the fourth Cacaclysm raid instance, you're going to run into the same problem that plagued Sunwell and ICC, and have to introduce Cataclysmic Radiance to balance out boss damage vs. avoidance.

You want interesting and exciting? Bring building threat back to an art form like it was in Black Temple. Make damage reduction a function of "mastery" (which, along with making it "impossible to have a bad spec" should make things nice and accessible for the Donalds of the raiding world), and force tanks to think about aggro generation while, at the same time, giving them some way to be vigilant towards their own health (via smart cooldown useage perhaps). Coupled with healer skills, this would be more "interesting and exciting" than introducing some "radiance" band aid in the high end raids.

I think the way you end up with conclusions like this is by following a chain of logic such as:

1) I am a tank. It is my job to survive (among other things).

2) It makes it easier to survive if I avoid spike damage and otherwise make it easier on my healers.

3) I can avoid spike damage by emphasizing health and armor over avoidance.

4) Therefore I should look for health and armor wherever possible.

5) Since I don't really want avoidance, Blizzard should stop putting it on my gear or even in the game.

That last step is where you go astray. You make a leap from thinking like a player ("How can I survive better?") to designing like a player ("I can survive better if Blizzard changes the game to make it easier for me to survive better").

You'd be bored if there was no avoidance mechanic in combat. Bosses would hit you like a metronome for say 30K every swing. You'd be bored if there was no avoidance on gear because you'd only be choosing among say hit and expertise and maybe armor pen.

Random numbers are an important component for keeping the game exciting. I get that they can be a thorn in your side. That's largely why they are exciting. Without them, you'd be a better tank, but you'd also be a bored tank.

What we can do, and what we plan on doing, are making dodge, parry and block more attractive than they are today. I doubt they will ever be as attractive as armor and Stamina, but that's okay because we're never going to make a full set of gear that is just armor and Stamina. (And even if you assembled such a set, your healers would run out of mana trying to keep you up.)

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Q u o t e:
The same way they are planning on making dodge and parry more attractive, by making damage taken over time more meaningful than it is now.

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That's a good way to sum it up.

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Q u o t e:
Since we're on this topic, may I inquire as to whose idea THESE were?

http://www.wowhead.com/?item=45310

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The item in question is the infamous armor pen tank gloves. At the time, players were like "Um, is this an error?" Since then, a few tanks have asked us why there weren't some dps stats to choose from in Icecrown on tank gear.

Really though it's part of the same issue I mentioned above. We don't want every piece of gear to look the same. We don't want everything that isn't "best in slot" to be dismissed or sharded. I don't know that we can get to a world where we put crit and haste on tanking plate, but man, it would be nice for the variety, and dps stats are more useful on tanking gear than they are on healing gear.

When I tanked in BC, I used a dps tanking weapon for the threat. I can't imagine that is widely done these days (I at least never see it) because single-target threat isn't much of an issue, and even if it was, the risk of dying to burst damage is of greater concern. Maybe we have to make all tanking gear (save druid leather obviously) only focus on survival stats and the threat and dps just come for free (except for druids who would then be OP) but that's a little unfortunate.

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Q u o t e:
As long as avoidance is artificially deflated, tanks will not find it fun to stack. Stacking a ton of avoidance to go from 20% to 25% isn't something to be proud of. Yes, over the course of a boss fight, from the wide angle lens, it'd be important and effective, but simply put: IT IS NOT FUN.

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I just disagree with that. When I used Moroes' Lucky Pocket Watch and dodged a whole bunch of hits, I felt awesome. I don't think the same item would feel as cool today, but it was awesome in early BC. I can remember a few times when the healer was down but I managed to avoid several hits in a row and we beat the boss. Is that a great gearing strategy for beating a boss? Not really. But the nice thing about random numbers is how much fun it can be when they do roll in your favor (see Las Vegas).

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Q u o t e:
I agree random numbers keep certain aspects fun and interesting, i.e. doing big crits and reactive procs a la Killing Machine/Sword and Board/etc. But none of those explicitly determine your survivability the way avoidance does. Moreover, you're now talking about tank RNG affecting healers too.

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Of course. Part of the challenge to you as a player is to overcome bad luck (or maximize good luck). When RNG is minimized, then it's just a math problem. A savvy healer could step into a fight and pretty quickly know if they are going to have the throughput to keep you alive hit to hit and the staying power to keep doing it throughout the fight. Nothing that happens during the fight is going to change that, so all of the decisions are made in the preparation phase (gearing and choosing talents) and not when you're actually up in front of the boss. There is a reason (nearly) all role-playing games keep what is essentially that d20 roll as a key part of the combat mechanics.

The opposite extreme is problematic also. When the effects of RNG are so overwhelming that it feels like the decisions you make are irrelevant, then you're not really playing a game -- you're just spinning a roulette wheel. I'd point to things like small chances for random stuns as an example where RNG had too large an influence.

What I am cautioning up above is sometimes players slip into the meta-game mentality of "I would be a better tank if I didn't have to contend with RNG, therefore Blizzard should remove RNG." RNG serves an important purpose.

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Q u o t e:
To add to this. Random stuff isn't necessarily fun OR boring. Random stuff just kind of happening is pretty meh, to me. REACTING to random stuff is more fun. Two hits and you are dead = no reaction => not fun. Random spikes that lower your health temporarily so the healers have to pump out a bit more, that should be more fun than the current system in Cat...for the healers, largely. Anyhow, I wouldn't mind seem more chaos and randomness with our abilities and tanking. I don't mind some chaos and randomness stay. What I want to change though, is that I'd like more of an ability to react to crazy and random things...to think quick in response to stuff. There's waaaaaay too little of that for tanks in the current environment, and I don't think what I've heard about Cat sounds that great from a tanking perspective (though it is better, don't get me wrong).

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Yeah, I agree with that first part. As to what tanks are supposed to do in those episodes, the intent is that's what the longer cooldowns are for. Some cooldowns happen so frequently that you might as well use them whenever they're up since they'll be available again soon. Others need to be saved for those known moments of intense damage (the Fusion Punches). But there should still be enough room to use a cooldown when things start to go bad. The healing equivalent would be something like Swiftmend. You use Tranquility for true emergencies and Rejuv as much as you can. Swiftmend though is generally used for oh snap moments. All the tanks need enough cooldowns that they can keep something in reserve for an oh snap moment. (Then again, deciding when you can afford to use say Shield Wall for an oh snap moment versus needing to save it for three inhales or frenzy is important too and will vary from fight to fight.)

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Q u o t e:
In BC avoidance was equal or better than stamina. In BC, dodge and parry got diminishing returns. A few months back, agility -> dodge ratio gets changed and increases the agility required to dodge. Out comes ICC and there's an automatic debuff that reduces dodge by 20%.

Stamina is more valuable than not getting hit because blizzard made it so that tanks get hit more.

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Did you gem dodge over Stamina as a general rule in BC?

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Q u o t e:
What you call exciting i call laziness. I could type all kinds of examples of why you shouldnt be using random numbers, but the simplest is that your devs are what?....lazy.

Your logic that the randomness numbers thing is what makes this game exciting is lame at best, a game based totally on gear, that has set dungeons, set encounters, and outcomes based on "randomness" with the kicker on the party side being gear tips the random number generator is simple laziness on your devs part. With the amount of cash you people bring in each month you figure you could make improvements to encounters, or at least the game engine that apparently has you people so restricted.

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It's not based on gear though. Gear is a great reward mechanic and sometimes allows you to handle encounters you couldn't do before. But when gear is the sole consideration that allows you to handle content, then I'd argue the content becomes pretty boring. Go back and run normal Utgarde Keep in your 232 or 251 item level gear. Nothing scary or remotely exciting is going to happen. You don't have to use your skill as a player or your knowledge of game mechanics or encounters to handle problems. Your gear just solves every problem for you without your input.

Fights where the outcome is a foregone conclusion (you cream the content or it creams you) aren't interesting from a game design perspective. The outcome isn't unknown. Those fights have their place, rarely, just to break things up a bit. But they don't compel players to keep coming back for more the way the tried and true method of having a random element to combat works for nearly all role-playing games. If you want to dismiss all RPGs (and even the wargames that came before them) as lazy, well that's your prerogative, but since you're challenging such a widely-used and accepted mechanic, you're going to have to defend your position more than you've done.

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Q u o t e:
That's not what he's saying GC. He's saying that due to overgearing, Blizzard always needs to nerf gear by the fourth raid.

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As players above pointed out, the ratings would have worked fine had we not introduced extra item levels of gear to support the heroic modes of the last three tiers. Now we could have nerfed your ratings then, and maybe we should have, but that would have felt pretty harsh. Maybe Icecrown Radiance felt harsh enough that we should have done that. You can also argue that we should have guessed or at least planned in the possible addition of extra tiers. Maybe we'll do that in the future. Our model though is that player stats stop advancing from level and start advancing solely from gear at the level cap. We need some target for our combat ratings because they are expressly for the purpose of preventing players from maxxing out every stat with enough gear. Having creatures in later tiers scale along with your gear is one way that we're exploring.

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Q u o t e:
The difference is that the numbers always went up. That's what progression is. Yes, each boss is harder, but your character is also stronger. Your mitigation isn't going backwards.

Are you familiar with the story of Sisyphus? He was cursed to constantly roll a boulder up a hill only to have it roll back to the bottom every time he got to the top. That's what GC's tank design is for Cata.

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Ni, I think you're just talking about a different kind of experience. The way RPGs traditionally work is that you defeat the monsters to get better gear to challenge more powerful monsters. The goal, typically, isn't to get so powerful that the monsters are no longer a challenge. Now I understand that seeing your dodge number actually go down might be a bummer, but that's because you're looking at a percentage and not the rating (which only goes up). If we expressed health as a percentage relative to the damage done by a boss, it would behave the same way -- go down with every new tier, then start to go back up again.

Currently, your health and armor go up, but the more powerful monsters in later dungeons hit harder. It's not that they are less of a threat to you than earlier monsters, and in many case the opposite true. It's more that you couldn't even have a hope of facing them without having amassed all of the armor you have. We're just talking about doing the same thing with other stats. It doesn't make sense that you avoid Saphiron 30% of the time, but avoid Sindragosa (who is supposed to be a much more powerful opponent and has the stats to prove it) 60% of the time. In the same way, the mage shouldn't be critting the more powerful opponent more than the weaker opponent. It just does strange things to the game, where the later bosses have to hit so much harder to make up for the fact that you're avoiding them more, which ironically (but mathematically) means that your avoidance is less valuable since it doesn't actually keep you alive.

Really all we're talking about here is the distinction between absolute and relative differences. Bosses in higher tiers shouldn't be relatively easier to avoid. In fact, the opposite is arguably true.

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Q u o t e:
I am skeptical that you'll be able to do this. nerfing mana regen enough to make this feasible is unlikely, since healers hate going oom.

What I imagine will happen is that most healers will gem/enchant regen until they can spam again, as this has been the case at every point in WoW's history. That their output will be lower won't matter as much, since tanks will continue to stack EH.

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We actually had a weak moment in the LK beta where we made spells cheaper because the mana costs felt so high. We shouldn't have done that. We'll be more vigilant this time around.

If healers gem for regen, that's awesome. They'll be trading regen for crit (mostly throughput) or haste (the ability to cast more heals per unit time). You could have a healer than can go indefinitely without gassing out of mana, but wouldn't be able to land heals fast enough to keep the tank alive through a burst phase. Or maybe you have the healer who can land big heals indefinitely, but can't keep two people up at the same time because you cast slowly. Ideally there isn't a perfect way to gear because all of the stats are useful, or at least if there is a perfect way to gear then the perfect-1 gear set isn't garbage by comparison.

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Q u o t e:
Btw, these are the discussions where your comments are the strongest, GC. When you talk about philosophy for future events and past events honestly and with strong statements.

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They are the discussions that are the most interest to me too. We're always looking forward, trying to decide philosophically when we're on the right track or the wrong track with something.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of players out there, who aren't interested in the big picture. They want to know *now* how we're going to fix their problem. The smaller the pie slice of players that I'm speaking to, I figure the less the impact my communication is going to have. That's not to say those players aren't valid customers or don't have a right to feel the way they do. It's tricky. Shrug.

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Q u o t e:
Again, you're thinking from the spreadsheet. For the player, seeing higher HP and taking bigger hits is more fun. Even if the TTL numbers are the same, the feeling of progression is there. What you're proposing through boss expertise is going to remove that. The player's actual experience is what really counts.

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The problem is many players disagree with you when the discussion turns to avoidance. For them, seeing higher avoidance and taking bigger hits (to compensate for the higher avoidance) is less fun.

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Q u o t e:
You've developed yourself into this corner.. because in the pursuit of balance you've taken all of the interesting effects off of gear. The only pieces you allow to do anything other than "add X to y stat" are trinkets, and an occasional weapon(bryntoll..). You want to see gear that is not sharded? Add an on use, or static effects. It really should be OKAY if a specific piece of gear from the previous tier of items was still in our inventory!

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Heh. I see your point, but you're also going to have a lot of players who strongly disagree with you. They get offended when the new tier isn't an unambiguous upgrade from their current gear. It's possible we can turn that perception around, but it won't be trivial.

In the olden days, we didn't drop much gear and it was fairly expensive to get. If there was Spirit on your tanking plate, well, it was still an upgrade over the dungeon blues you were wearing. If the Drillborer Disc dropped in Molten Core, you took it because what were the alternatives? (I kept the Draconian Deflector forever with its awesome 7 Stamina, but you get the idea.) Now days gear is easier to come by (a direction we like overall) so it's more possible and realistic to shoot for the best piece instead of just the obtainable piece.

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Q u o t e:
As a former DM (and current player) of version 3.5 D&D this discussion is fascinating.

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I should credit some of my “is the encounter interesting?” discussion to Monte Cook, who was responsible for a lot of version 3. He argues, insightfully, that an interesting encounter is one in which player resources are taxed but that they ultimately have the potential to overcome. Turkey shoots aren’t interesting because the outcome is never in doubt. Having the boss destroy you with little chance to recover isn’t interesting because it’s entirely out of your hands. (Now, to add even another level of complexity, both of those encounters, especially the former, do still have their place for pacing and diversity.) But it’s those fights where it could have gone either way -- but your preparation, skill and a little luck pushed things in your favor -- that tend to be the most memorable (and hopefully fun). We tend to remember those battles that are history's great upsets, not the ones where the heavily favored guy dominated. Insert your own Superbowl analogy or whatever.

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Q u o t e:
These changes will make hit, expertise, dodge and parry much more confusing than they are today. How is a user supposed to understand the real impact of these ratings if they are constantly in flux based on their location?

"Oh, sweet, I have 500 parry rating. The paper doll shows me that's 5% parry in a heroic, but I'm not really sure wat that ends up being for Raids A, B, C, and D. Time to whip out the spreadsheet, I guess."

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They’re confusing today though. Most raiders just learn what the magic numbers are and gear accordingly. If the tooltips on your stats showed you what the magic numbers were, then it wouldn’t be very hard to grasp. Players learn pretty quickly, if not intuitively, that mobs in later tiers hit harder and can absorb more damage, so the concept shouldn’t be intrinsically unintuitive. I think it’s mostly a UI problem.

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Q u o t e:
Personally I would like to see tanking go back to a more active model for mitigating damage. I loved to tank as a warrior in BC, mainly because I thought shield block was fun to use. It felt like I was actually fighting something blow by blow. With the changes to shield block I just slowly drifted away from tanking because it started to just be less fun.

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I understand your point, but I hated old Shield Block. It was always the right button to push whenever it came off cooldown. It wasn’t an interesting decision – there was no point in saving it for the right moment and no penalty for using it at the wrong time. It’s okay to have some relatively spammy buttons, but old Shield Block crossed the line (and current Heroic Strike still does).

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Q u o t e:
Threat is not limited in current WoW for three reasons:
1) so unskilled players in poor gear can succeed in tanking Heroics, without bogging the group down more than they already do and further excacerbating the tank shortage with their failure.
2) because of lack of threat scaling with gear in high-end content, when tank threat scales linearly from one dps stat while dps threat scales polynomially with four different %-based multipliers, and without the cushion of easy threat even skilled tanks would be threat-limiting dps in raids without a hunter/rogue.
3) differences in threat generation of different tanks would lead to even more cries of imbalance both by tanks, and by the dps that are limited by the tank's threat and their lack of threat reduction abilities.

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While I don't agree 100% with all of that, you should mention point 4) Misdirect and Tricks of the Trade can make up for almost any deficiency on the part of the tank. In many cases it’s not you that’s maintaining threat – it’s the hunter and rogue. While it’s nice utility for those guys and we don’t want to throw the abilities out the window, it can feel crappy as the tank.

If you don't think Shield Block is interesting enough today, that's a fine discussion to have. I'm a little surprised to see any nostalgia for the old model though. Hitting a relatively common dps button that plays into other talents and abilities is one thing. Having to constantly mash "make me slightly more survivable" is another. I'll grant you that it was fun on Illidan, but it took that mechanic specifically to make it fun.

Imagine how you'd react to this scenario:

GC: Good news, everyone! We lowered the cooldown of Shield Wall to 5 sec and balanced assuming you hit it every 5 sec.

Tanks: Um.... Thanks? Could you maybe just make it a passive at that point?

GC: But hitting buttons is fun!

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Q u o t e:
Right now tanks (basically all the tanks) spend their resources on encounters on one thing: generating threat. This goes for GCDs (basically every survivability tool is off the GCD at this point), rage/mana (DKs are actually a little bit of an exception here), and everything else. Almost every survivability choice from a resource perspective is made before you pull the boss.

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Yeah we think this is a problem. It makes sense that a tank need to spend some percentage of button presses on the "staying alive" component of tanking and not all on the "boss control" part of tanking. We just need a "staying alive" button that doesn't feel very maintenance-y. There is kind of a sweet spot between pushing something on cooldown and never ever pushing it because you need to save it for an emergency that might not ever come.

We've also kind of let tanks (except DKs) opt out of having to manage their resource, and threat by and large isn't hard to maintain on single targets, at least 10-20 seconds into a fight. Tanks always have a lot of responsibility for positioning the mob and everything but that probably still leaves some bandwidth for making decisions about staying alive that we aren't really filling at the moment.

Shield Block (and Holy Shield) will be more meaningful in the Cataclysm block model too.

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Q u o t e:
Why not just increase the boss level in the final dungeons?

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Mob level means some pretty specific things to the game engine. Your glancing blows and resists would go up a lot for instance. Now that is something we could consider changing, but really that's just the same thing as saying that later bosses need to be tougher (have expertise etc.) and the UI needs to clarify that these bosses are more poweful than others of their same mob level.

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Q u o t e:
I don't think "boss control" needs to just be done only via threat. There doesn't have to be a sharp divide between abilities that make threat, modify boss behavior, and help keep you alive. There'd be plenty of justification, for instance, to have things that mitigate what the boss is doing to cause threat.

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Just wanted to point out that I used "boss control" specifically instead of "maintain threat." Tanks are asked to turn dragons away from the raid, kite dudes across the room, swap with another tank, get out of the fire without failing to do any of the previous, maybe interrupt (on 10-player raids) and so on. On some fights this is a pretty small piece of the puzzle. On others it's huge. If juggling cooldowns and managing threat take a lot of your attention, then boss control becomes overwhelming on some fights. If doing all of the above is too simple then on say Patchwerk (Festergut?) you're not doing much.

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Q u o t e:
I generally tend to agree with most things you say - but, this one is sort of viewing the same thing that happens with every other class, too. Rogues have to keep slice and dice up all the time, and you balance assuming they do... Why not make it permanent. DK's are balanced assuming their diseases are up all the time... Why not just make them apply on auto swing? The same sort of argument used for why Warriors shouldn't have to press shield block could, realistically, apply to every other effect in the game. "We balance around assuming you're going to push Fireball every time Brain Freeze procs". Why not make it work like lightning overload, then?

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It's just a matter of degree. Slice and Dice isn't too bad used as every other finisher or so (though even then it's such a game-changer that having it fall off is devastating). Slice and Dice as something you had to do every other attack would be masochistic (and yeah, Hunger for Blood might be close).

Brain Freeze doesn't proc all that often to where you're literally doing Frost Bolt / Fireball / Frost Bolt / Fireball.

Really though one of the biggest differences is the role. If dps specs don't have some kind of rotation or priority system, they become boring to play. With tanks and healers, they have a lot going on in addition to using their abilities. We do ask dps specs to sometimes do really important things in a raid, and they often have to move out of the fire or whatever, but then again, so do the healers and tanks.

I'm not saying tanks shouldn't be hitting buttons often. They need to in order to be fun. But there are two extremes that both sort of suck. One is you have to hit a button constantly that has very little depth to the decision. The other is that you never want to push the button because you're saving it. Cooldown plays into this a lot. On a 15 sec cooldown, any time you're saving the ability, you're probably wasting it. On a 60 min cooldown, any time you use the ability you feel like you're wasting it. Somewhere in the 2-3 minute timeframe you can feel like it's okay to use the abilities often, but you can also hold them on occasion for those scary periods where the boss is bursting damage on you or the healers are repositioning or whatever.

I don't think we're horribly off with the cooldowns today, but I think we are off.

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Q u o t e:
Pushing shield block every 5 seconds to increases your tanking to an ability that you're balanced around is no different than pushing Shield Slam every 5 seconds to increase your threat generation because you're balanced around it. The only difference is that one is an ability used by a tank to increase your tanking ability, and the other is used by a tank to increase your DPS/Threat generation.

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I think they are different though. You are probably not going to die from failing to push Shield Slam, except possibly to a raid wipe very early on the pull when threat is dicey and healers or casters get creamed (and today, even that is unlikely.) The other problem is the resource issue I mentioned before. Back in BC (especially early), warriors had to prioritize rage a little more. If you hit Heroic Strike so much that you lacked rage for a Shield Slam (or a Shield Block), then you were doing it wrong. In today's environment, many Prot warriors might as well take the rage bar off their screen. (Caveat: This does not mean being eternally rage starved is fun. It just means that choosing which ability to use is more fun than hitting them on cooldown.)

To go back to a few discussions on this forum lately, you (and I mean y'all plural, not Devium specifically because he gets into that a little in his post) have to ask yourself what you like about being a tank. For some players, they just like getting the attention and if being a tank is trivial, no biggy. Others like to have some kind of challenge, whether that means competing for threat, staying alive, positioning the mob, or all of the above. To have a challenge then there needs to be some penalty (even a small one) for making the wrong decision. The potential to screw up needs to exist. For a rogue that might be letting SnD fall off. For a priest that might be using Guardian Spirit when you didn't need it (or ideally running OOM by overhealing way too much.) For a warrior it might be not using Shield Wall when you needed to use it, but I'm not sure those decisions roll around often enough.

Edit for some confusing sentences.

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Q u o t e:
I'd like to point out that is not true. To be blunt, a player that always used shield block on cooldown was not playing their warrior anywhere near their full potential. You are either lying to us or you fail to understand the depth it added to the game, which is disturbing and rather telling being the lead systems designer. I will give examples where there were penalties.

One time I took my warrior alt to Kara that was in full Kara gear and some badge gear. On Curator I spammed shield block when it was not needed and my threat was horrendous since he hit me for next to nothing. As the fight went on I eventually lost aggro and some dps members died.

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Early on in Karazhan you could get rage starved, and then letting off of some of the buttons for Shield Block or vice versa if you needed threat was a decision. I disagree with you that it was a major problem past that point. In the raids that followed you pretty much had enough rage to do whatever you wanted because the bosses hit so hard, unless you just got unlucky and had a string of avoidance or something.

If you look at parses today of good tanks, you'll see them convert a great deal of autoattacks to Heroic Strike. Some of them can hit 100%. That implies rage is never an issue and they would have been able to hit the old Shield Block as often as they wanted... perhaps macro it even.

Now if rage was a little harder to come by, then yes, you might make the decision between threat and survivability abilities. However, as a counter to that point, consider that MD and ToT combined with tauntable bosses and a lack of threat management fights like Voidreaver or Vael probably make threat rarely matter, so you lose the decision again.

If we nerfed tank rage income in Cataclysm as well as nerfing the threat of MD and ToT, then I could see warriors and druids maybe having to manage their rage so they have enough for both threat and cooldowns. It's tricky though. If we went too far, then you'd feel continually rage starved, which is pretty frustrating. Having to manage a resource can be fun. Never having that resource to manage would suck.