WotLK Beta and Shield BlockFollow

Two items that immediately caught my attention in the beta announcement are:

Shield Block now increases chance to block and amount blocked by 100% for the next attack. Cooldown increased to 30 seconds.

and

Improved Shield Block (Protection) now has 2 ranks and reduces cooldown of Shield Block by 5/10 secs. It no longer increases the number of blocks.

To me this seems to indicate that how we gear for tanking must change dramatically.

After all, it's not white damage that kills us, it's the crushing blows, and the point of gearing for EH first and avoidance second is that with shield block, we can limit the number of crushing blows to the point that the spikey damage we do take is something manageable by our healers.

But with stated changes above that will no longer be the case. We'll have a very limited ability, that is based largely on luck, to block a crushing blow. This suggests that warriors will be much, much less viable to tank mobs that deliver crushing blows than druids. This is because druids, when equally geared, have significantly more hps than warriors, and are built to survive those attacks even when they land.

Warriors seem to be being relegated into an avoidance tank role -- as the only real thing we'll have going for us is our ability above druids to simply avoid that kind of damage by having avoidance numbers far above the feral druid. But since our HP values will still be lower, unless our avoidance gets into something like the 80% range, we're not going to survive a fight with a Boss who delivers crushing blows often enough to make us viable.

So, tell me where I'm wrong, because I can't believe we'd be gimped that badly, but from what I'm reading that's what it sounds like to me. . . .


Edited, Jul 18th 2008 9:37am by kingpatzer

Blizzard is reworking boss mechanics and removing crushing blows. To that end, it doesn't surprise me that Shield Block is getting changed. Also, have you seen the prot talents? They're crazy! Looks like we're getting a lot of threat increasing talents.

im not sure if they are removing old crushing blows, but they definitely arent putting crushing blows into new instances/raids.

If we're pushed to the off-tank role I'm going to be really upset.

Pallies can do 3 things really well: heal, dps, or tank.
Druids can also do those same 3 things fairly well.
Warriors can tank and dps. That's it.

People who become warriors want to do one of those two things. If we're relegated to a secondary role, I think I'm going to be hanging up my main.

I haven't looked at it in depth enough to know if that makes sense or not. However, if that IS what they are going for, then that will be a very good thing indeed.

One thing I do notice is the 5% dodge bump buff is for "friendly targets" or some such -- the same sort of language used for spells like flash heal, that are certainly self-targetable. So it may well not be that it is a buff for someone else, but rather a buff that can be used on one's self or someone else.

Heck, I'd have no trouble tossing it on our pally as he tanks the trash to the boss where I take over :)

Edited, Jul 18th 2008 3:22pm by kingpatzer

I hadn't checked the updated trees, just that I knew from the WotlK Wiki of like... two days ago there was no threat modifier. If that's true them I'm wrong. It will be useful to put on tanks in multiple-mob fights (think Karathress, HKM or the like, where there isn't really a lot of DPS pressure on the adds and sufficient time to build threat that it won't matter) but it won't push Warriors off the MT slot.

whats interesting about this skill, you can have 2 tanks Vigilance each other during a boss fight. Tank A builds rage while Tank B burns all of it, then tank A taunts (which will be up), and tank A now burns rage while tank B builds it. even though its down 10% threat, you get a 5% dodge bonus and all and all your tanks will build threat ridiculously fast.

with that threat modifier it will prolly be given to star dps at the beginning of fights.

seems pretty crazy that the 31-point protection talent would be one of the best dps buffs in the game, and that's prolly why it will get changed.