Q: Vengeance is a great tool to help raid tanks hold aggro over DPS, but in 5-man heroics it doesn't stack high enough to keep up with the threat generated by overgeared DPS burst damage. Are there any plans to address this? Are there any plans to help warriors put out more initial threat before Vengeance has been ramped up? – Nikelsndimes (NA), Cémanana (EU-FR), Arthur (TW), Mancake (NA), Migol (NA)
Note: There are fights with tank swaps or incoming adds, or similar mechanics, when threat may matter mid-fight. This is intended – encounter design varies widely. Q: Have you considered normalizing initial Rage for feral druid tanks? For example, when a warrior uses Charge, it generates 15 points of Rage, which lets them use another aggro generating ability quickly, something that Feral druids tend to be a bit short on. Why in Cataclysm was the bear bonus health pool was reduced, as well? Their survivability always depended on the amount of health since they don’t have parry or shield block. Do you have any plans to improve bear tanking in the future? At the moment, it’s considered to be the weakest tank. Have you considered giving druid tanks an additional tool to pull casters at range? It’s the only tank class that doesn’t have a talent or spell to help in those situations. – Pødêrøsø (LA), Вирко (EU-RU), Амелья (EU-RU), Condenacion (EU-ES), Whitewnd (KR)
Q: What are your intentions with each tank's mastery and mastery in general? – Migol (NA)
Death Knights: We’re pretty happy with how mastery has turned out. It does have the oddity that it scales down in value with your mitigation, but also up in value with your health. But it does indeed scale up pretty smoothly in value, and doesn’t have any unintuitive breakpoints or anything, so we’re happy with it. Druids: We’re pretty happy with how mastery has turned out. It scales well, doesn’t have any unintuitive or unfortunate interactions with other stats, and provides solid performance value. Paladins: Mastery is an attractive stat for paladins, but has some design problems. It scales very well, but due to the nature of our combat tables (and being able to “fill them up”), you can get “block capped,” which is a massive performance benefit. Worse, Protection mastery scales with itself, since there are no diminishing returns on block chance, and the amount of rating you need to block cap goes down as your dodge and parry improve, allowing you to put even more of your stats into dodge or parry. This sort of feedback loop is something we always try to stay away from, so we plan to change this in the future. We tried several alternatives for 4.2, but weren’t happy with the results. Any change which made mastery weaker (such as subjecting block to diminishing returns or changing what it does) would have required mitigation compensation for paladins elsewhere (with all the design risks inherent in making such changes), as well as asking many players to extensively re-gem or re-forge. We’ll ask players to do that when the need is great, but we didn’t think this problem crossed that line. The major risks are that Protection paladins become too powerful or too weak or that gear with mastery will at some point be rejected once characters are over the cap. We don’t think any of those problems will manifest themselves in the 4.2 content. Warriors: Warriors’ mastery is in a similar boat as paladins’, except that it still provides a notable benefit past the cap and scales much slower, making it much more difficult to “block cap.” That delays, but doesn’t remove the problem. Q: Will we see a tanking Legendary sometime soon? – Pedoso (NA)
Q: Are there any plans to teach players in-game how to tank when they are at an early stage, or at least at some point in the leveling process? – Romner (EU-EN)
Q: Do you plan to bring other tanks to the same level as Death Knights who have a lot of advantages over other tanking classes (easier to heal, quite a number of various safe abilities, etc.)? - Меланори (EU-RU)
Q: Is there any chance that we can see damage reduction numbers being used in the statistic UI, just like shield absorb amount of Discipline priest? – 首領先生 (TW)
Q: Have you ever considered adjusting DPS HP? Seems that while their large pools of health help them on "accidental" situations, a fair portion of the time they can take aggro and tank adds without consequence. – Jainel (LA)
Q: As far as I remember, about five tanks were required in a 25-man group in Burning Crusade. However, the number of tanks in raids has been decreased to one or two since WotLK. I think this is one of the reasons heroic parties suffer from lack of tanks. What if raids have required more tanks? – 명장한니발 (KR)
Q:Are there any plans to update the leg armor in 4.2 now that the plate tanks receive no dodge from agility? Maybe introduce a new leg armor patch that adds str/stamina, or a mastery/stamina? – Dariok (NA), Fredik (EU-ES)
Q: Can you make it so that taunt doesn't miss, just like you did for interrupt abilities? Doesn't feel as though it would be a complete upset to overall balance. – Madmartygan (LA)
Q: Are there any plans to simplify the impossible situation for tanks (8% hit rating, 26 Expertise but all defensive stats at max at the same time) somehow, either through stats on gear or through changes to the game mechanics? Have you considered giving tools to tanks to allow easier capping of hit and expertise to help with threat management? – Sunyara (EU-DE), Gilbey (EU-ES)
Q: Compared to DKs, Paladins are weaker when facing mass magic attacks. A Paladin has no choice but to stack stamina in this situation. Is there any change coming to this for Paladins? – 新垣綾瀨 (TW)
Q: At the moment, tanks need to use addons to see threat levels and clearly see which mobs they have aggro with. With all the recent changes and updates being made to the UI, are there any plans to make seeing threat levels and aggro easier and clearer? – Castan (EU-EN)
Q: Protection Paladin is not only the most desired tank because survival abilities for groups and various utilities, but players also generally consider Paladins as an indispensable Class in raids. I know all tanking Classes are being equalized constantly, but survival abilities of Protection Paladins give huge advantages compared to other tanking Classes. Can we expect that other Tanking classes will see more survival abilities for groups in terms of equity? – 디아소르테 (KR)
Protection paladins do bring a lot of utility, but it is quite difficult to make a table comparing a paladin’s Divine Guardian to a Protection warrior’s mobility or a bear druid’s ability to cast Innervate or even Rebirth during lulls in an encounter. They are fundamentally different abilities that have greater or less utility depending on the encounter and your individual raid comp. We don’t want to just hand out a Divine Guardian equivalent to every tank class, just like we don’t think warriors or paladins need the ability to battle rez. It’s a fine line to walk. Homogenization really rankles some players (as it should), but being unable to tank (or heal, or DPS) an encounter because of lack of tools is equally unacceptable to many players. Q: Is there any plan to add a new tank class in the future? I think spell breaker in the Warcraft III is an awesome choice for that! – 聖淇淋 (TW)
Archive: Ask the Devs - Answers #1: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/2228225718 Ask the Devs - Answers #2: PvP http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/2267599521 Ask the Devs - Answers #3: UI http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/2301722463 Ask the Devs - Answers #4: Armor and Weapons http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/2353015977 Ask the Devs - Answers #5: Achievements http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/2369681189 Ask the Devs - Answers #6: Guild Advancement http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/2416158906 Ask the Devs - Answers #7: Professions http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/2522165843 Ask the Devs - Answers #8: Firelands http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/2580388888 |
|
This is as good a place as any to be reminded that the devs do not choose the questions answered. We've done nine rounds of these, and used the same method to gather and compile the questions every time.
In each region, a community manager locks their local questions thread, sorts the replies (by upvotes), and then copies out the questions that got the most upvotes (along with the names of the questioners). I then take all of the different lists of questions from each region and combine them. Since our goal is to get as many questions answered as possible, when I'm compiling the final list of questions for the devs, I try to find where the #7 most upvoted question from North America is very similar to the #1 question from Russia and nearly identical to the #8 question from Taiwan. There are several of those every round, and they become highly valuable questions in a list of already-highly-valuable questions. I also make sure that the list of questions going to the devs at least has numerous questions from each region. Because some questions can be combined, I often get to send the devs at least the top 3-5 questions from every region, and often the top 6-9 questions from most regions. In this round, that process resulted in 16 questions for the devs, but comprised 26 of the highest-voted questions across all the regions. The devs answered all 16 questions that they were sent. Would I have liked to send the devs 20 questions? Perhaps 120 questions? Of course. But I have to pick a reasonable place to end the list when I compile it. That cut-off usually presents itself, and as the compilation grows to 11, then 12, then 13 questions, there is a big dropoff in upvotes. With most rounds of Ask the Devs, that happens at around 12 combined questions. This round, it was 16 questions. I rather like this process, because ultimately, the decisions that really matter (what to ask, how to ask it, how important it is) are left to the players upfront. The single most upvoted question in the world this round was this one:
And while it isn't possible to satisfy every individual, every individual does have a say. That's a valuable thing. |
|
Among the interesting results of this round of Ask The Devs -
The question about Righteous Defense turned into an investigation of the code around Righteous Defense, and it was found to be bugged. It was unintended for Righteous Defense to miss, so the bug was tracked down. It is being fixed immediately. |