AureliusSir wrote:
One of the biggest problems Blizzard has had with bear tanks is their potential to scale out of control. That's what happens when you take a leather wearing class and try to give them stat boosts that bring them in line with plate wearers for one tier of content and then watch as successive tiers of raid gear skyrocket their stats.
I won't be surprised if we eventually see some kind of alteration to frost presence on DKs because of this. I'll come back to this.
Horsemouth wrote:
Quote:
If you look at the big picture, Blizz has no idea WTF they are doing with bear tanks.
Fixed that for ya.
I actually have to disagree - I think Blizzard realizes that there's a serious scaling problem here and Savage Defense is their first go at fixing it. This isn't the typical scaling problem that classes complain of, where they don't improve comparative to other classes - feral druids, and I'd imagine DKs soon enough with what frost presence does to their armor, were going to be the class compared to.
Druids were already hitting or getting very close to the armor cap in the first tier of gear in LK. If it continued at this rate, itemization would start to become a huge issue. Where the other tanking classes have a variety of stats to improve in, we were too focused on stamina and armor. If we don't need any armor, where do the ilvl points start to go? Armor will be completely wasted, so bears will need more stamina - at some point this will also just spiral out of control given how HotW scales stamina. More and more points need to be allocated to other stats, and frankly the only other extremely important stat was agility. But we don't really get much off of that other than dodge - which also becomes less and less important after a certain point.
Savage Defense fixes a lot of this by opening up other stats as beneficial to our itemization, and also requiring an armor nerf so that we can stay in line with other tanks. In reality, SotF should really have never gained the bonus armor effect. This was just a lazy band-aid to Druids before they added Savage Defense, but it very quickly became something that we found far too important.
In all honesty, I don't think this skill is going to become the end-all be-all solution to our problems, and that at some point we're going to see any additional armor given by SotF taken away as well.
As a final note - not every boss from now on is going to have large magical burst damage. I can't find an exact quote of it now, but GC has pretty much continually said that it's unfortunate that two of the current endgame bosses do, because they won't always.
And, of course, at this stage of development, Death Knights are really just too good, and I think the developers are truly struggling to keep all three trees viable for any role, yet keep them in line with the other classes. Whenever I see someone complain about a buff or a nerf, it's usually because Death Knights can do better and they are the class being compared to. The dev's ability to learn from their past mistakes with other classes was honestly just too good when designing DKs, and this'll probably be a problem until at least the next content patch.