f13.net

http://www.mmo-champion.com/content/3597-Ghostcrawler-to-leave-Blizzard-Entertainment

And MoP is 10 bucks on sale. Wheeee!

 :awesome_for_real:

I guess this means a year down the road everyone will realize "I guess it wasn't all his fault after all" when Blizzard keeps tripping on the same old gopher holes.

(http://stream1.gifsoup.com/view2/4107879/ding-dong-the-witch-is-dead-o.gif)

Most of the big time complainers will just move on to the next guy.

No, they'll just bitch that the new guy is just as bad, but it was always GC's fault.

Depends on who's replacing him.  Since the X-pac is still under development, some of the changes will be in place and have GCs touch on them, but I suspect not a lot, based on the Blizcon "gee we haven't decided yet" fest.

I'm bummed that he's leaving. As Lead System Designer he was probably responsible for a lot of the better mechanical changes the game has seen in the past few years (active mitigation, better feeling damage/healing 'rotations', talent/spec revamps, etc.) It's (still) weird that people heap all the blame for anything they don't like in the game on him. I guess that's what he gets for being the only developer that was willing to talk with players. Doubtless the antagonistic playerbase was a factor in his decision to move on.

Guy got way more shit than he deserved, I hope he enjoys where ever he winds up. Healing as a paladin got fun under his watch (reluctant as he was to change it at first), so he's okay in my book.  :why_so_serious:

Despite what Ingmar says, he's one of those people I think deserved to be fired long ago. Not everything should be blamed on him, but the systems he put in place for things like tanking have now made tanking into something even old tanks don't want to do. Now we just need to get rid of Metzen and Chilton, and we're in solid shape.

Nah, Ingmar's right and you're just a  :mob:

Finally. To late for me to care but good on blizzard until they find another dickpunching autist to replace him.

https://twitter.com/Ghostcrawler/status/406133865258819584

 :grin:

Please let it be Brad McQuaid's thing. Pleasepleasepleaseplease.

Now watch as people, without taking a pause for breath, switch over to blaming everything on Mumper. :awesome_for_real:

E: ^^ I'm pretty sure he's said that he's not moving to another MMO because, well, what's the point?

I figure the hatred will just be doubled down on Metzen.

Metzen 100% deserves it.

He was class balance guy and he was shitty at it.

Looks like you're wrong.  :popcorn:

All I see there is "It's not my fault!"

But class design and balance was what he placed himself front and center on, all the way back when he started being the most visible public face of the dev team. To my knowledge he rarely, if ever, discussed UI and general game features during the time I played. It was all classes all the time with him.

If he was mainly a features/UI guy with only minor focus on class design, he sure as shit spent a whole slew of years talking about something he really shouldn't have been.

He's trying to dodge responsibility. There's a shocker.

Yep if I a Lead system designer skirt responsibilities with "its a team effort" BS. He was never the right person for the job. Maybe he is good designer - who knows , but if you are in lead role you have to have balls to do what is necessary AND take blame when it comes to it (and there always be blame as you cant make everyone happy no matter what you do)

The person to blame is still the evil Kalgan, he's the one with the 'yes/no' powers.

That's the name, yes.  I couldn't remember.

GC probably isn't blameless, but the idea that his leaving means the game gets better is likely ludicrous.

No matter how true I wish it were.

I have no doubt the game won't get better.  The ship has long since sailed for me either way anyway.  But I'm still glad Ghostcrawler is gone.

 :headscratch:

Maybe he's going to go help on TESO!   :awesome_for_real:

Maybe you should stop channelling the bnet forums then.

He was a willing scapegoat. He put himself out there front and centre so dumb fucking idiots could blame everything on him rather than sending two dozen pizzas to 'their' class dev because their dps was reduced by 0.1%. Judging by reactions in this thread, it worked out pretty well.

Maybe they should hire Tweety to do PR. An updated version of her "Try being a guide..." rant would be useful here about this point.

He wasn't being the virtuous scapegoat, Simond. You sound like his agent.

He enjoyed poking the playerbase with a stick. In many cases he was a common troll, but with a much more powerful megaphone.

Tom Chilton is still the guy to blame for the overall decisions at the very top, but Ghostcrawler wasn't sitting around going, "Gee golly guys I'm just a wittle ole systems guy, don't ask me."

(http://i.minus.com/ifgeupXMM2s7u.gif)

Ah yes, fall back on that old cliche as if you can prove your opinion that he was.

But then again, I guess trolls do stick together.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/868747/Cerdible%20Hulk.jpg)

I would like to know where he's going.

Maybe you just need to accept that when you're the team LEAD, you are responsible for whatever that team does.  In this case, that includes class balance.

Don't bother. I'm still trying to figure out if Simond adds anything to this site other than trolling and Bioware hate.

Where does the class balance hate come from anyway? The classes are as balanced as they've ever been. Every DPS spec is viable within a few % of each other in PvE. If you really cared about PvP balance you wouldn't be playing a game where power comes from gear.

Class design is where I could see people having legitimate complaints, but that's all really subjective. IMO they're as good as they've ever been.

Except for Tanks.  The drop in # of tanks is testament to fact that tanking in Cata/ MOP sucked and was inferior to every design prior to this generation.  Add on the sameyness now that they all tank the same way w/ active mitigation on top of their need to corral, time and manage mobs. Whee.

Not coincidentally, tanks were more common in WOTLK when they just had to be in something's face and then worry about the rest.  They all had different flavors, too.  Mitigation, block, evasion, self-heal.  There were problems to even-out or give additional tools for, yes, but they at least felt different enough to be fun. And while they were still scarcer than DPS it wasn't as pronounced as it was when I quit.

I can chime in here :

Started on Pandaria again recently and tanking suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucks.

Sucks.

It sucks.

It really, really sucks.

This from a guy who loves tanking and used to love that role above all others.

The only measurable "drop" in tanks has been in LFR for this tier, which says more about the content than the state of tanks. It isn't fun to lead a bunch of opinionated idiots through LFR, and the job still falls to tanks despite the "leader" checkbox in LFR (which people check off just for a faster queue). Flex raids and T16 fights that are more complicated than people want to deal with are what removed all the tanks from LFR. They're just as easy as they've ever been to find for 5-mans, and the active mitigation stuff doesn't actually matter until you're raiding. Until then, healers can cover for poor tank play just as they cover for poor DPS play in LFD/LFR.

During the first tier I did LFR as DPS on my monk and the monk tank kept dying on Empress. When I noticed his Stagger debuff was never being cleared, I whispered him suggesting that he use purifying brew more often in the fight to clear his staggered damage and stay alive. He didn't even know he had the ability. It's the core mechanic for active mitigation on monks, and it just didn't matter enough for him to notice until he got to raid content (and even then, he was still able to tank most of it without using his active mitigation). Monks are the tanks with the most active mitigation, where using the abilities matter most (since they have higher incoming damage than other tanks) so it's even more true for all of the other tank classes.


Those styles still exist for MoP, moreso than before really. Before MoP most tank abilities were very samey: they did damage and generated higher threat (which didn't matter after threat adjustments in Cata). Outside of threat+damage abilities, tanks had personal cooldowns to reduce damage every couple of minutes. DKs, the original active mitigation tanks, were the only exception with Deathstrike (and barely so). I think the differences now are more pronounced (http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/7924333197) than they've ever been, speaking as someone with 3 tanks at level cap. Warriors are the block/mobility tanks. Druids are the mitigation/evasion tanks. Paladins are the self-heals/mitigation tanks. DKs are the self-heal/anti-caster tanks. Monks are the evasion/self-healing tanks.

I can respect that people don't want to relearn their class or see huge changes after 7+ years of playing, but you're deluding yourself if you think the pre-MoP tanking model was as awesome & distinct as you're claiming. It was easier, but MoP tanking doesn't need to be hard to get the job done. If you want to use damage/aoe abilities and run around like a WOTLK tank you can.

"I was the quarterback and threw five interceptions. I was hardly involved with the offense. But this is a team so we all share the blame for the loss."

Tanking is supposed to be easier. You are supposed to be able to do your job fairly simply because you are expected to position, lead, react, and know all the strats on any given fight.

Again, I'll reiterate something I've said, and something just about every other tank said when they quit, "If I wanted to worry about rotations, I'd play DPS."

If your game has one director and two leads the idea that one of the leads isn't really responsible for anything is more than slightly idiotic.

If decisions were all made via consensus there would be no need for leads at all.

Is it okay to say I don't like him because of his shitty "Ugh, stop being badsWow, dungeons are hard!" blog entry where he defended Cata's awful launch 5-mans before they were summarily nerfed almost every patch?

That's my only gripe with him.  It's a big one though.

Yes, considering that it happened right around the moment that the game peaked and started trundling downhill.

I blame Cata (not GC by extension, just the expansion in general) for basically signaling the death knell for 5-mans which were my favorite type of content.

Yep, I feel the same way. Also I hated the tanking changes.

I still think Vanilla had the best 5 mans. Even in WOTLK, most of the 5 mans I did were so faceroll easy that all I did them for was trying to get that one trinket, or grind for points. I don't remember them being interesting in any way. Maybe I don't remember them prior to overgearing them to the point where they were trivial.

For my money, I still want 5 man dungeons with more than one direction to go in. I miss the old BRD. I enjoyed going after a specific part of a dungeon and not expecting to clear the whole thing. I also miss those deep deep dives to kill the Emperor from time to time. Though, I'm probably in the minority because people hated the Onyxia chain and BRD represented that.

They weren't easy at release, but once the next tier from Naxx came out they were pretty simple to do.  You could still get a group of fail that made them overly difficult until ICC came out.

I liked the vanilla ones, but not having 2-3+ hours to devote to BRD or LBRS\UBRS was frustrating.  You could log in and wait for a group all night, only to have it *almost* there or get 25% of the way in before "sorry guys, I have to go."  Standing around the instance waiting or sitting in gchat bugging people all night was not fun.

Everyone hated Occulus until the bitter end.

It stands alone as the worst dungeon ever created in WoW. It's not even close.

Any number of vanilla dungeons were worse than Oculus.

This. Honestly, I didn't hate Oculus THAT much, even when pugging. Even before they nerfed it and improved the rewards, it wasn't that much of a bother to run as I remember everyone saying.

But then, I had fun healing and tanking Cata heroic pugs in blue gear, so what do I know  :why_so_serious:

It'd also rank every CoT dungeon under Oculus. The only thing more obnoxious than escort quests is slow heavily scripted escort quests.

I'll take UBRS over Occulus any day.

Upper spire was OK, if too long like nearly every dungeon in the game at release, but I hated Wailing Caverns and Sunken Temple just to give a couple that leap immediately to mind. Don't forget what the trash was like in Scholo/Strat before they got nerfed. Also in terms of gimmick encounters which is the main objection to Oculus, I saw far more groups crumble at the hands of the torch room in BRD than I did groups that couldn't figure out how to fly their dragons.

I don't really count the leveling dungeons though in Vanilla, since they aren't the same as something like Occulus, which was in the heroic rotation you ran over and over and over for points.

Scholomance, Lower BRS, BRD, Strath Live Side. All giant bags of dick.   Given a choice, I'd run Occ over those.

There are three kinds of dungeons.


Dungeons that are fun ONCE, then awful when you have to farm them.

Dungeons that are awful when you do them at the intended level/gear, but totally fun when you over gear it.

Dungeons that are fine when you do them at the intended level/gear, but just a frustrating waste of time once you over gear it.



The dungeons in Desolace and Feralas, those were really neat the first time I did them. They were really really long and bothersome when I had to do them again.

That one dungeon in the first TBC zone, Shattered something. It was stupidly punishing and frustrating at first, with its like 10 mob pulls that can insta gib non tanks and shit. Bring 2 mages or go home at release kind of dungeon. That dungeon when everyone is in full badge/sunwell gear? AE IT ALL LAWL GO GO NEW RECORD TIME!

Any of the Caverns of Times dungeons were the opposite. When you are killing at the intended pace, you don't really care about the escorts, they are helpful even. Once you over gear it, you spend a lot of time waiting and waiting and just hurry the fuck up thrall/arthas. Next Portal Plz

Occulus was annoying because you couldn't overgear it while doing it properly, and Z axis, and they tied a bunch of achievements to the fucking drakes.

My only issue with Occulus was all the babies who would drop group when it popped.  :why_so_serious:

Shattered Halls.  I think it's the only BC instance I never saw in its entirety, because our warrior tank refused to run it.  "Get a paladin because I'm not going to tank that!"

Arcatraz and Botanica could also be quite.. interesting to pug  :awesome_for_real:

Really, for all the BC nostalgia everywhere on the intarwebs, it had some of the worst / least fun dungeons in WOW history. (though to be fair, Magister's Terrace was pretty great.. and the dungeons were still better than vanilla dungeons as a whole)

I hated a lot of the TBC dungeons. Shadow Labyrinth was a pain in the ass, especially as a squishy. Arcatraz and Botanica could go suck a dick, and take Mechanar along with for giggles.

As for Shattered Halls, I always had more trouble finding a group actually willing to do it on my Priest than the dungeon itself. Then again, I never had to tank it, so...

I hated mana-tombs the most in TBC.

The fake arena fight in Magister's Terrace is still one of the most fun dungeon experiences I had in all of WoW.  Too bad I was apparently the only one who liked it.   :cry2:

It was fun as long as the group wasn't derps, that was the main problem. /drops earth elemental

I think we literally ran Botanica 40-50 times to get my stupid paladin shoulders.

I ran strat dead until my eyes bled for many people's sets.

I needed these shoulders so I could hit the magic number to stop crushing blows. There was a random assortment of paladin tanking pieces that allowed you to hit that number before raid gear.

AHh god, I remember the Defense cap.

Main one that sticks out for me was good old Naxx 40 in vanilla.  I was lucky enough to be in a guild that actually raided it, and during one of our runs down the spider wing, one of our tanks got a drop off of Anub (bracers i think) that he decided to equip on the spot.    Turns out, it put him something like 1% under the crushing blow / crit cap for defense.  We then get to the second boss, who, about half way through a really solid attempt, proceeds to 1shot said tank with a Critical Crushing blow.  I dont think he ever heard the end of that.

It was specifically the crushing blow cap, because paladins needed like 30% more avoidance/block then warriors, because Blizzard was retarded and refused to admit Druids and Paladins had tanking trees.


Druids got to tank with that level 40 staff because of how bonus armor was affected by Bear (and Moonkin!) form.  :why_so_serious:

And that's why we didn't really have tanks other than warriors back then.

Tanks don't need taunts, right? Even when they gave paladins a taunt, it wasn't a taunt, it was a reverse psuedo taunt that you dropped on your allies.

Worst dungeon IMO is a tie between Mana Tombs and Shadow Lab. Shadow Lab might get the edge since it had some of the touchiest pulls in the entire game.

I was a warrior tank and I regularly ran Heroic Shattered Halls because I thought it was really fun to tank when I had a healer that was on point (or just a pally). This was before I overgeared it too. I get why people hated it though; the gladiator pulls where you basically had to wait for them to nearly kill eachother before pulling could be really fucking rough on spike damage and people just hated the gauntlet/time trial part.

A full BRD run was atrocious, lower spire was really bad, Dire Maul had some really touchy pulls, and original pre-all nerfs Strat was fucking ridiculous and almost EverQuestian in its hatred of the players but I hated no dungeons more than the Auchindoun (or whatever) series. I never maxed out lower city rep.

I rather enjoyed all of WoTLK's dungeons minus Gundrak. Great visual design throughout all of them.

Cata's were all terrible. The loot fountain bonus dungeons were tolerable, but fuck the reborn troll dungeons that gave shitty non-epic epics.

I haven't even seen all of Pandaria's, but I imagine I'd have a bad experience now since I'm prot specced and my gear is questing stuff.

We had to run Shadow Labs a ton for somebody's equipment (probably Fordel again).  We kinda got the system down for that one, and I kinda liked it once we got it figured out.  Mana Tombs, though, Mana Tombs was (and still is) awful.  Waaaay too many wandering yahoos.

I can't remember ANY of the Cataclysm dungeons.  They were so not-fun they apparently left no impression on me.

I remember Grim Batol; the only zone I hate more than Occulus. With a group who knew how to use the dragons it wasn't too bad, but the trash was just fucking awful if you had bads that didn't use the breath weapons properly.

I sort of remember (most of) the Cataclysm dungeons, probably because I tanked them a billion times on my paladin, but I could not for the life of me tell you any of their names, for some reason. There was the one where you had a bombing run on the backs of dragons in some sort of dwarf underground ruin, there was an underwater one that was mostly easy except for these two pulls that just crapped out a lot of damage and would startle the healer out of their stupor, there was the underground one with Milhouse, there was an Uldum one where I always asked if they wanted a speed run or a full run (you could skip like half the bosses), there was a different Uldum one that was sort of a city that was probably the only one I liked even after running it a thousand times, there was yet another one that I think was technically in Uldum that was all air elemental shit, I liked the end boss of that one ... oh, and that other one that had a boss where you had to dance in and out of beams that broke every single PUG I ever did that goddamn heroic in. Blackrock Whatever, I think?


edit: Oh yeah, Grim Batol was the dragon one!

Fake arena had the problem that you could run into matchups that were very difficult for your group comp.

That's a very good summation. Honestly, if you want people to farm a dungeon for points, create something like the missions in COX, AO, or LDON: a pseudo-random tile set with a bunch of stock critters to blow through. Don't create a "real" dungeon. Save the real dungeons as mini-raids. Make them hard, make them fun, and make them an experience. Nobody does this anymore though because WoW doesn't and god help us if we do something different than WoW.

Grim Batol was one of the only Cata dungeons that actually looked cool. WoTLK's 5-mans put pretty much all of Cata's to shame in the visuals/layout department.

I still love the music and the atmosphere of Wrath. Nothing since then has come close, especially since I'm not a fan of the Asian themes in MoP.

Thinking on the cataclysm dungeon visuals two problems immediately come to mind.  First the sky temple which should be all accounts seem cool, was so repetitive in it's architecture that it got bland fast.  Second was whatever the pyramid was called and for that matter anything having to do with titans in wow.....

You can't just slap magical gears and pistons in a dungeon and say "oh look titans built this"  this first couple times it's neat and you actually wonder what it means, what do these things do?!  Eventually you realize that the titans are just annoying steampunk fans that put gears and shit everywhere that don't actually do anything.

Time to post this again:

After playing MoP for the last two months, it's amazing how technically competent the environment is, yet also how utterly bland.  I can't even be bothered to care.

Yet flying around is awesome and there's a lot of hidden stuff in the environment.

I see what you did there!

What was the Avatar of Warish boss in Wrath?

Patchwerk. One of his lines: "Kel'Thuzad make Patchwerk his avatar of war!"

I think they went mental on phasing though.  Phasing was such a fucking good idea, but when it leaves your mates behind with no recourse it's suddenly NOT GOOD.

They never really thought about it and just ploughed on throughout, making more phasing.  Then Pandaria came and almost the whole fucking thing is phased.

Ah well.

Except for the bit where you can jump across phases when grouped, which was added in...early-mid Cataclysm I think?

Whut ?

If there's a loser in your group who is in a different phase than you, you can go to their phase.

Wait, WHAT ?

Since Cataclysm ?

Don't I feel like the fucking asshole.

No, Seriously, what the fuck ?

Where's that option ??

IIRC, the person who starts/leads the group sets the phase for everyone who joins.

I think it was mostly used for completing some of the more difficult group quests in Icecrown.

Ah yes, I'd forgot about ol Patches.

Don't feel too bad, it's not super obvious, if I remember right.

I've been struggling with that for years tho.

I can't stop giggling at what a dick I am.

Cata is still bad and it's still good Ghostcrawler is leaving, so we still have that.

And Paris.

I rolled my warrior slightly pre-cata with the sole intent on tanking. DPS being a fun bit of off-spec, but more as an excuse to carry two gigantic swords around. I learned my way to tank in Cata and did a pretty good job of it. When MoP came around, I stopped tanking, because it was un-fun, and annoyingly painful. I haven't played in 6? 8? months now. Just saying.

In Vanilla I tanked on my Warrior.

In TBC I tanked on my Druid and Pally.

In WotLK I tanked on my Druid, Pally, DK and Warrior and loved it because each and every one played differently.

In Cata I tanked on my DK and Pally.

In MoP I didn't tank on anything and quit because I loved tanking but just CBF'd with the new model that made every class the same.

So what if I could swipe/maul/lacerate tank on my Druid and soak up damage.

So what if I could mitigate damage and round up mobs as a pally.

So what if I could self heal/blood shield as a DK.

So what if I could smash-tank as a warrior.

Each was unique and fun.

And I miss it.

Fuck you Cataclysm and Pandaria.

New page, same rose-tinted glasses.


The difference in "flavor" between each tanking class is bigger than its ever been. Well, save maybe Vanilla where the difference between Warriors and non-Warriors was potentially bigger, but I don't think anyone is going to argue in favor of Vanilla tanking with a straight face.

You say that and can quote yourself as many times as you like :)

In those times I had fun tanking and well and truly felt the difference between classes. In fact, I just realised I did tank MoP instances on my Pally and DK - then quit.  You can talk to me about rose coloured glasses all you like, but I used to love tanking, all 4 classes - then quit.

It wasn't about changes to class or mechanics, I tanked Ragnaros and Deathwing kills for my guild. It stopped being fun. So I quit the game because no matter how you look at it, tanking in this iteration is generic and no fun.

In pre-Cata, tanking was enjoyable, I loved being a warrior tank throughout all 3 raids (except AQ40) in vanilla. Loved Pally and Druid through all raids including Sunwell (although we didn't finish sunwell before the LK released. Had a freaking ball with every single raid in TBC. To the extent that I'd log, farm, read over strats, look for additional tweaks to playstyle. Loved that DK tanks could tank (initially) in any aspect (I started unholy, moved to blood). Looked forward to trying another class out and feeling the difference.

In Cata the changes were annoying but tolerable and I really concentrated on DK and Pally - it was ok. In MoP I tanked instances and didn't give a shit as it just wasn't fun.

I guess you can throw the rose-coloured glasses idea out there as much as you like, but if I liked tanking in MoP, I'd still be playing. But I don't and I quit.

I'm glad you like the game and all, it's great that you are passionate about the new model of tanking. But the reality is we hold different views and no matter how many times you tell me that MoP is better than WotLK I will choose to disagree with you every single time because in my experience and time playing the game, Cata and MoP were backwards steps from the fun I once had in the game :)

What I don't like is all the freaking busywork they added... and in many cases, the 'active mitigation' stuff is just that. As a prot warrior you better keep up shield barrier as much as possible or... else? That said, I play a blood DK, which didn't change much from Cata -- which is good, 'cos I honestly think the Cata design of DK tanks was a huge improvement over WOTLK.

Speaking of bad aspects of class design: fuck short-duration self-buffs that you need close to 100% uptime on. It started with rogue slice and dice, then expanded to cat druid savage roar in wotlk, and then basically every aspect of monks (all three specs) in mop, which eventually caused me to abandon an otherwise interesting class. I have no idea who enjoys this stuff!

Rokal, you're just not right.

It's not about enjoyment, it's about "proving whose 'leet."  Can't keep it up you just don't have the skillz.

Which is why it's such utter bullshit. .

I get that you liked the old tanking model more, and don't find tanking in MoP fun. Your reason for that shouldn't be "all the tanks feel the same now" when they are more different than ever though. That's where I claim rose-tinted glasses, not your opinion about tanking being more fun in the past (which is entirely subjective and may be completely true for you and others).

I think it has more to do with the whole "my tank is not good at tanking because of his gear, but because of his button rotation" now.   Take warriors (and paladins) vs druids for example.   Under the old model, Shield tanks were "block" mitigation tanks, and druids were dodge avoidance tanks.  Your basic ability to tank simply by being there got noticably better with gear improvements.  I mained as a druid, and it was VERY easy to notice a chage of around 15 to 20% dodge going from starting raid / dungeon gear to end of expantion tier gear.   Under the current active mitigation model, Your character no longer improves in a noticeably tanky way with an increase in gear.  It is now all about resource management to pop your cooldown as needed.  I think my bear has gained something like 3 or 4 % total dodge increase over my initial dungeon set through MOP.  The bulk of my defensive ability now comes from being able to push Savage defense every 6 to 8 seconds for 40% more dodge untill i eventually cant push it any more.   When, as a tank, I stop careing about "tank stats" and prioritise everything into stats that improve my resource generation so i can pop savage defense more, it starts to feel wierd.

I went from being a tank by virtue of my gear / what i was, to beign a tank by virtue of what buttons i push in my tank rotation.   A druid tank is functionally no different then a warrior tank, who is functionally no different then a monk than, who is functionally no different then a Paladin tank.    Chose tank damage mitigation model of choice (block / dodge / absorb), add model specific "must keep up" rotational ability, few strong / weak defensive cooldowns, bake in threat modifier so you never have to worry about it any more, crank out tank.    Honestly, the DK is the only relatively unique tank model since their active mitigation is the only entirely reactive one and revolves almost completely around managing blood strikes and the absorb shield, instead of keeping a rotational cooldown up.   Even monks are basicly just a badtardized dodge tank with a funky absorb mechanic (keep up stagger till the damage gets too high then purify off and begin again).

Essentially, under the current model, there is absolutely no reason why EVERY FUCKING CLASS in the game could not be given a tanking spec with the addition of 3 or 4 abilities.   When the only thing really seperating you and another spec in your class from being a tank is a couple of specific cooldowns, it really sort of cheapens the experience.  And that is really what bugs most of us who like the old system i think.

Us people who enjoyed our old school tanks liked it that our tank was tanky by virtue of the gear he wore and the spec he was in, not because of the buttons he pushed.  If we wanted that, we would have rolled a dk tank, because they were designed that way.

I think that's a good point. Gear plays a large part in why it's not fun anymore. Even if you don't care much about improving your tank, it's hard to improve it much with gear.

Pretty much.  Previously, gear had a HUGE impact in how well you "tanked".  Now, all it really does is make you hit harder and increases your stamina for most tanks, it doesnt really increase your "tankishness" any more, mostly just increases how easily you regen resources to spend on tank cooldowns.

In a way, it makes me wonder if they have deliberately attempted to push it that way, what with the planned removal of Parry / Dodge as gearable stats.

This pretty much says what I couldn't put into words and did much to make me realise why I don't like the new model. I wish I liked the game enough to come back and tank more - I missed the situational awareness aspect of it and the gathering of mobs. It's ironic that I enjoy GW2 more with its no-trinity model but there are times I strap on a shield on my warrior and guardian and pretend I'm tanking :).

Just so I make sure I've got this straight: people here have an active desire to return to the old Everquest tanking paradigm of "stand in front of mob and mash taunt, and as long as you've got good enough gear you win"?

Is that essentially correct?

I really, really, really don't get where you think they are different tho.  I play all the tanks and frankly they all play the same and it's just not fun.  Maybe it's gear, maybe it's the fights, maybe it's the people I play with, I don't know :  But it's just not fun.

And it used to be fun.

If these games are going to continue to refuse to implement any real skill based gameplay, then the least they could do is have the common decency to stop wasting my time with button rotations and let me tab out and read the forums or go get a sandwich.

There haven't been very many "stand in one place and hit taunt" fights in WoW from BC on. I'm trying really hard to think of one that isn't Patchwerk or the odd boss like the statue dude from Ulduar who doesn't move.

And as a tank you're responsible for positioning the boss, getting adds, etc.; in a raid situation tanks are often also raid leaders (I was, anyway) so you've gotta watch and yell at the rest of your raid. Having to juggle a complicated rotation on top of that is shitty.

I'd hate to imagine trying to do the firefighter achievement now with a proper raid group and the #'s autoadjusted like the challenge-mode dungeons. I guess the warrior absorb skill would be nice for the laser beam.

Or wait, Freya Hardmode. That'd be a gasser.

It's fun watching people trying to walk off the chessboard in Karazhan.

I'm really trying to remember any brainless tank and spanks from BC onwards. I think Brutallis ironically is one? I don't recall if the tanks needed to even move on that.

Void Reaver, Patchwerk, Loatheb, Supremus (pretty much for the tank, there is some kiting for others).

Those are the main ones that jump to mind.

The tanks were all "functionally" the same in the past too, just as the healers were. The differences in how they tank and what those buttons do (dodge buff vs. increased block vs. self heal) are what make the tanks feel different.


Your status as a tank is *still* determined by your gear and your spec. A Fury warrior that switches to defensive stance and taunts a boss is still going to eat dirt because they don't have the gear or the passive mitigation from spec that you are so fond of. Same with the Windwalker monk.

Honestly, you're telling me that every class in the game could be a tank, like that's a new possibility. Here is the Pre-MoP recipe for a tank:

Threat modifier to attacks + passive damage reduction +  long-cooldown defensive buffs = tank.

All it would have taken for most classes to be a tank was a buff that increased threat and reduced damage taken. Most of the damage classes already had the long-cooldown defensive buffs part covered. In MoP there is a bit more separating tank and non-tank specs in the form of all the active mitigation.


It's funny that you would say gear feels like it matters less now when I feel like the opposite is true. Pre-MoP you didn't "feel" upgrades, because each new piece of gear was a very minor increase to passive mitigation (and new bosses were balanced to hit you for the same % of health as the old bosses with old gear).

Now upgrades are easier to feel, and they do more. It's not just "more resources" (which is one stat, haste), it's "more procs of defensive cooldowns/buffs", "bigger numbers on my absorbs/heals", and yes still "more passive mitigation" (not just armor/stamina, but also mastery).

I definitely notice that my monk tank feels much different than he did at the beginning of the expansion. Yes, I generate resources more frequently, but my dodge cooldown is up more consistently (from higher crit %), I get more shield procs from doing more damage, and my shield/heal sizes are massive. If you have a tank in MoP and want to test this yourself, all you need to do is enter proving grounds and see how different your tank feels in 463-capped gear.

When you get a new weapon upgrade it's no longer just a new weapon model and a minor increase to stats. You can actually feel it increasing the size/frequency of some active mitigation abilities, and what's even crazier is that it's helping you survive better.


From a tank perspective, there were/are so many. People bring up Patchwerk like it's this one rare example of a really boring tank fight, but what they don't realize is that it was only an unusual fight for DPS. For tanks, standing still and doing a tank swap when the fight calls for it is like 90% of raid fights. It's not something they've gotten away from in MoP either, most of the mechanics that make each fight unique are still reserved for non-tanks. Fortunately tanks actually can make an impact on whether they survive now, so even boring tank swap fights are a bit more exciting.


Pretty much. Change is bad.

More like change isn't automatically good. They made lots of great changes to warriors over the years. "Active tanking" sucks, though. It stacks un-fun, DPS-style busywork on top of big picture fight management - which is the part of tanking that was actually fun. Lucky for me I have a game where I can play the way I want still.  :-P

I played a warrior up to this point when I finally dumped it for a DPS Shaman in MoP. I never alt, and since Cataclysm I just can't stand tanking on the warrior anymore. Hell I can't even stand dpsing on it compared to the bang for buck you get on a shaman.

Anyway my sub runs out against in late December, just in time for tax season. I liked this later part of the xpac a good bit, but the fact they don't plan on doing anything else until the next xpac leaves me with no reason to sub now that I've done basically all the LFR stuff I've wanted, and the guild is essentially no longer bothering.

Nah, status as a tank is currently defined almost entirely by your spec now.   Gear does play a role, but not nearly as much of one as it did.  In the current model, if you took a DPS specced character, swapped him to tank spec, and told him to tank stuff, he would do a massively better job of it then if you tried that under pre MOP rules.   In Pre-MOP, trying that would result in a tank with at minumum about 15 to 20% less avoidance / mitigation then one properly geared at the same gear level.   Post MOP, 90% of your ability to tank comes from the the modifiers and cooldowns baked into your Spec.   What we want back is when it used to be more of a 60 / 40 balance of Spec / Gear makeing you feel like a tank, rather then 90 / 10, where that 10% gear has more to do with looking for the right dps stats on your gear to support your tank cooldowns.    At least the DKs still got it right where them wanting mastery makes them feel more tanky because it directly contributes to their hugeass absorbs, instead of eveyrone else wanting haste or crit because it improves resource generation so they can pop cooldowns better.

Maybe that works for a monk.  But monk is the new class, so like the DK, they are going to be a bit more unique then the other tanks.

Like I said, I main a druid.  Gear does pretty much jack shit for us other then increase our HP / Damage.   None of our defensive abilities scale even remotely noticably with haste (that i am aware of), and it does not matter anyway, since our current stat priority is Crit >>> literally everything else.   Mastery?  It's useless, since it gives us bonus armor, of which we have way too much as it is.  Dodge?  Completely pointless, since now the only place to find dodge is on trinkets (where an agility or crit proc is far superior to a dodge one) or to reforge for it (which would be stupid as hell).   Since the bulk of our "dodge", our primary defensive stat, comes from Savage Defense, our main concern is more crit for more rage so we can pop it whenever we need it.   Frenzied Regen is kind of a joke.  Sure, it scales with AP, but since our HP scales along with our AP from gear, the effect is generally un-noticable.  Unless you are tanking a facemasher boss in raids, then vengeance pumps it up to a nearly Lay On Hands like proportion full heal. 

And i have been looking into gearing my paladin for Prot, which ends up looking very similar.   Except that you change the default stat priority from wanting Crit to wanting Haste.  Like I said before.  Something is seriously wrong when the active mitigation model forces you to design stat priorities that dont even LIST the classic defensive stats like dodge or parry

You just listed a bunch of different stats from gear that benefit you as a druid tank. Mastery, crit, dodge (when you get it), AP, and yes haste. I don't play a druid tank. My 85 bear druid was the only character I didn't bother to transfer to my new server because I hated every spec on that class in Cata. Still, haste provides more rage by causing you to make more auto-attacks, and also gives you more chances for Tooth and Nail (http://www.wowhead.com/spell=135288) procs. You also missed hit/expertise, which are hugely important with active mitigation. Remember pre-MoP where it didn't really matter that much whether your attacks actually hit as a tank because they did barely any damage and provided only additional threat that you didn't need? That was pretty dumb.


The reason you're stacking "DPS stats" (which are ultimately also defensive stats at this point) is because Blizzard is trying to cut down on amount of gear that is only useful for one or two specs out of the 34 in the game. As the original/only AGI tank as of Cata, druids were the first test for this. In WoD all specs will work on a similar model with primary stats changing depending on what spec you're in. Druid tanking may be boring (it certainly was in Cata!) but that's a failure with the design of druid tanks, not the stat design.

When I say rose-tinted glasses, this is what I'm talking about. People actually want the old tank stat model where you had to get to arbitrary and hidden dodge/parry/block thresholds to "push regular attacks off the hit table"? Madness. The old tank stat design was shit, and if you're arguing that tanking should be easier and more friendly to step into than it is in MoP, requiring people to have a very specific set of gear before they can even try it isn't the way to accomplish that goal.

You've stumbled into the problem. In a place where we can literally have our pick of gear from tokens, why not make gear for every spec? There's not a need to simplify when the RNG isn't a factor now.

Three reasons.

1) It would make it harder for tanks to solo or for DPS to ease into tanking since each would go back to requiring completely separate gear. Same argument against making healing/caster DPS gear too different. I don't know why anyone here would be arguing for this.

2) Tokens cover 5 slots of gear not 16. That would be a bit more of a mess and I think getting/winning loot would be a bit less exciting if you were just winning generic tokens for every single slot. Sets are where you see dodge for agi tanks outside of trinkets though, but it's not exciting to get which brings me to...

3) The old tank stat system sucked, so why would you want to go back to it? Again, what did you like about having to get to plan your stats around a hidden "boss hit table"? If Crit provides dodge (which it does in a round-about way for both Druids and Monks), why do you want dodge as a stat? It isn't doing to help your character outside of a very specific setting, and the old defense stats were a complicated mess.

1 - I like having sets of gear. The system itself lets you have a gear manager for this exact reason. Making all gear the same just means you have no reason to get anything else buy ilvl. Here's an item with 475 awesome on it, that will replace my 465 awesome piece. Done and done.

2 - With reforging, this doesn't matter. Say I get a piece of gear with something on it I don't like? I can still rig that back into something I do. When they remove reforging, they need to add more gear anyway.

3 - The old system didn't suck. You had defense cap, you had parry, dodge, and block. It wasn't that freaking complicated. Then they removed block and defense in Cata for reasons I'm not sure. Probably PVP, or just because they wanted to move towards this active model that's terrible. But instead they added expertise, which no tank actually wanted. I don't see how you can say that the Cata changes to talents made any of this better. Who cares about soloing as a tank? I HAVE TWO SPECS.

This is all utterly pointless.

1) I liked this. I pally/druid tanked my way through levelling in TBC in tank spec and DPS gear switching to tank gear for instances. Later on I carried 2 sets of gear because it wasn't hard to do that. DK was even easier to level as first undholy, then blood tank and in fact I had a hell of a lot of fun seeing just how many adds I could take on at once... as a tank.

2) Tokens were a case of 1 set for tanking, 1 for DPS and were not hard to get. Again I had both. The rest of it never seemed to be an issue, I ran dungeons to get me started and it got better from there. It added to the game for me to get the 2 (sometimes 3) gearsets I wanted.

3) I liked the invisible caps and got a real sense of satisfaction when I got to them or as close to possible as I could for that tier of gear. Balancing the stats was fun as well and at the end of the process, I felt like a tank.

It keeps coming back to what you say is not fun, others see as fun.

Rokal's been wrong so many times, you think he'd be used to it by now, but no. It's always the same tired ROSE-COLORED BURNOUT garbage instead of recognizing the game sucks as designed now. Cataclysm literally ruined everything, from removing stats, to adding shitty stats, to completely redesigning the difficulty curve.

The whole defense cap thing was annoying, but otherwise I really prefer having tanking gear that does tanky stuff.

It must take some amazing mental dissonance to claim that tanking has become too exclusive in MoP and then turn around and argue in favor of requiring a specific gear set of gear to tank and requiring out-of-game knowledge of the combat table again.

Do you also think healing gear should be useless when switching to a caster DPS spec again?


You're misremembering it. There was a magical hidden value you had to reach for each of the stats in order to avoid taking a regular or critical hit. You've even admitted to hating Defense rating on these forums in the past, so I'm not sure why you're advocating it now.

This is what defense stats resulted with in Cata, which was after they had already been simplified by removing defense rating.



I won't argue that these stats weren't fun for you, but I hope you can at least agree that they weren't intuitive and made tanking more exclusive.

Defense may have been complicated, but it at least made sense that you'd want it on your tanking gear, calculations be damned. You'd see that stat and go, AHA! That's a tanking piece.

I don't think tanking is too exclusive in MoP. I think it sucks. Anybody could do it, but they chose not to because it's a giant damn headache in addition to the other headaches. I'll reference Wrath, yet again, when there were so many people tanking that I had to quit doing it in my own raid group so I could accommodate the roster. These systems you think suck were all in place then, and there were never more tanks than at that point.

Also, yeah why not have two sets of gear for healing and dps? They are two different jobs with two different specs. Also, from a game retention standpoint, that's a great move for Blizzard. It gives people more to search for.

Man, I just love the argument that because of the massive amount of EVIDENCE, I'm actually having fun and tanking every night.

Dude, you're not right.


I'm glad it works for you, but holy fuck tanking is awful at the moment.

See, Rokal, the thing you are missing (and maybe I am not conveying it correctly) is that the "feeling" of gearing "tankishly" is gone.   Yes, I totally get it that picking up DPS stats like Haste, Crit and Mastery improve how my character tanks, but it really does not feel like a tankish way to outfit.

Maybe I am crazy (but evidence here suggests otherwise), but I LIKED the defense caps.  I liked needing to gear for Dodge, and a higher expertise cap.    There was a point where DPS geared one way (Hit / Expertise to cap, then go for your class / spec best DPS stats), and Tanks geared a completely different way (Hit / Expertise even higher caps, gear for tank specific stats (not DPS stats that affect your tanking, but actual TANK STATS)).   Now that everyone tanks with DPS stats, and cooldowns that boost their "Tank Stats", it all feels samey.   Maybe it is just me being an old fart who is too used to many many years of the previous model, but the new one has lost some of that flavour that set things appart.

To use what is probably a terrible analogy, It is like the old system was : DPS is a sword:  Use it to attack your opponent.  Tank is a Shield: use it to defend yourself / others.  Two completely different objects with completely different purposes.   Now the new system is:  DPS is a sword: Tank is also a sword.  Same object, you just wave it around a different way depending on if you are attacking or defending.

Nonono, Cata was perfect!  I loved how all the flavor of the old zones were replaced with theme park rides.  I loved how mobs in a zone would gray out before I was done with the ride there.  I loved how goofy and fake the world became.  Every quest had a HILARIOUS pop culture reference! 

Dude, pop culture is fine and even for most of Cata was not bad.  It was just when you got to "lawl see this zone is ALL indiana jones, wink WINK" is when it got bad.

Yeah, MOP tanking is just ugh. The only 'active tanking' that works is the one they basically left alone: blood DKs and death strike timing. For all other tank classes, 'active tanking' is just self buff uptime busywork.

That said, I do agree with Rokal on the 'defense cap is bad' thing. I have always been a non-raider, and getting the defense cap in BC (and early WOTLK) was an absolute PITA that either involved massive amounts of gold or praying for the right dungeon drops while running the same heroics until my eyes bled. Oh yeah, and an almost-mandatory Sons of Hodir rep grind to get the last few precious points. Fuck that!

Was this supposed to be in green?  I wasn't even sure I was playing WoW anymore in Cataclysm.  It was more like a pop culture reference that a game revamp was built around.  I was trying to come up with something that wasn't mentioned in the game, but all I could come up with was 2 legit 2 quit.  Then I remembered Hammertime Orc dance...

Vanilla WoW, for better or worse, was a drastically more serious game in tone.  We were starting to get that back in Wrath, but Cata was a misstep in more ways than one.

This was the same Vanilla WoW that had an ENTIRE ZONE devoted to BLATANTLY OBVIOUS Nintendo Game Homage Quests and NPCs? :oh_i_see:

Don't talk shite.

WoW's always been bad in that regard and every expansion just found new pop-culture references to add.  Not hard when they have a few years between to gather new ones.

Cata still fucked everything up.  The problem was hidden caps, not that they existed.

What zone was that? I remember a lot of pop culture stuff but not a Nintendo zone.

Alliance side Ungoro Crater (or whatever its called) has one giant Legend of Zelda quest, or had, I have no idea if that survived Cata.

Nah, look at the original north east continent.  Plaguelands, Aeirie Peak, Southshore, Arathi.  There wasn't really any silly content there.  For the most part it was a fairly serious affair.  Kalimdor was pretty serious stuff, too. 

And yes, I totally forgot about the Zelda quest.  At least that was fairly contained to a zone.  The problem was when people liked it and Blizzard devs overcompensated after Vanilla.  Harris Pilton was BC...

FAKE EDIT:  You know what? I'm going to go ahead and prove myself wrong here.   The Vanilla list is a LOT longer than I remembered.  :awesome_for_real:

http://www.wowwiki.com/List_of_pop_culture_references_in_Warcraft

You have to keep in mind how OLD WoW is, so a lot of the original references probably aren't anymore.

I don't know, none of that stuff ever bothered me. A lot of that list are really minor like names of achievements and such.

 :oh_i_see: :cry:

You were old before WoW existed, it's fine.

Ahh; I only had a few Alliance toons and never did Un'goro. That's where Linken's Sword of Mastery (or whatever it was called) came from, I'm guessing? Saw it linked a lot back in the day.

I think the Linkin quest was actually faction independant.   Could be wrong though.   But there was Linkin and his questline.  There were the Muigron / Luigron NPCs that were having some kind of fight involving one spawning plants out of a pipe that would attack the other (they were completely dressed like Mario / Luigi too).  There was the Kodo named after a Zelda reference, the cave and the power crystals I am pretty sure was a zelda reference also.  That was also the first place you encountered monkeys that dropped empty barrels as a vendor trash item.  I think like 40% of the zone was veiled nintendo references.  The rest was random dinosaur related kill quests and one that was some Beetles reference?  (rescuing Ringo from the volcano area and having to keep him cool).

I don't remember that, but I played Horde and it was a lot of Land of the Lost references.

Ahh yeah, The land of the lost guys were the people who gave you most of the dinosaur related quests down there.

I wish I understood tanking enough so that I could follow the arguments, but what I seem to understand is that Ironwood and Paelos say tanking isn't fun anymore and Rokal says "yes it is what's wrong with you." In other words, hello 2 years ago (3?).

I started an undead warlock on a new to me server. My warlock is fun, leveling is a breeze what with dungeons and bgs popping constantly. I haven't hit the MoP content yet, though (no heirlooms). Hunters seem OP again in the bgs like they were just before Wrath launched, and I'm wondering if Blizz is going to do what they did again when whatever the new thing is called launches.

I played a monk to 15 and don't get it. Since I'm not a tanky type, I might switch it over to healing to see if I get that. Maybe I just don't like being a panda.

I want to play either a troll druid or a bloodelf priest next as a healer.

And to what Merusk, Paelos, and some others said about Ghostcrawler - agreed. It's not very seemly for him to try to duck responsibility at this point for decisions he argued for and points of view he espoused that were just plain fucked up and wrong. I'm glad he's gone. Whether anything changes, who knows, it really depends upon who he's replaced by and whether any changes are desired by the team's management.

I'll just repost this to show what a huge cockholster Ghostcrawler was about Cataclysm. "We hear you don't like this, now STFU and listen, because here's what we want."

I remember that piece. It still pisses me off. They listened to the forum whiners way too much prior to Cataclysm, then had the audacity to say everything was fine, and then ended up dialing it back anyway. I really hope they don't again because the crap that people want on MMO-Champion is absolutely ridiculous.

Nah, we stopped talking about active mitigation a while ago and the thread took a weird turn when people started arguing in favor of bringing back complicated defense stats that require out-of-game materials to understand or use correctly and saying that we should return to making healing/tank gear useless for anything besides healing or tanking.

It was like stepping into a twilight zone episode where everyone besides me on the forums argues the game has become too easy/flexible.

I've levelled a monk to 90 as Mistweaver the entire way - dungeons & pet battles! It's the least favourite of my 4 healers. I think I know what they were trying to do with it - a healer with melee ability - but the implementation simply doesn't fit very well with the dungeon & raid mechanics that WoW has. Being in melee range to generate Chi to heal is a pain in the cobblers! It's so much more complicated and annoying than other healers, for no good reason that I can see.

The most useful thing about monk healing is the 3 min cooldown, Revival, which heals for a massive amount raid-wide. That ability alone often puts me in the top 1 or 2 of healing done, and frankly that's a poor way to make a class useful.


My two least favourite Horde races! All druids should be taurens, sorry!  :why_so_serious:

I'd forgotten that Ghostcrawler post.

Conspiracy theory: Maybe Rokal IS Ghostcrawler :D

BTW: You're still wrong :D

Man, that post really brought home the Elitist Cuntbag Stench that he actually brought to the forums.  Bravo.

As to the rest of this crap, I'm not arguing about this stat, or that stat, or this gear or that def stat or BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH FUCKING BLAH.

What I'm saying is that tanking, on all the tanks I have (one of every type) feels the same and not fun.  It's just 'hit this dude, mitigate that spike, listen to the raid being cockgobblers, oh look too many stacks of That debuff, beg the other guy to taunt, wank, wank, wank, wank, wank.'

I used to love tanking.  Leaping in.  Stunning.  Pulling.  Chucking Silences to bring 'em rushing.  Shocking packs.  Blasting Packs.  Healing myself or having panic moments.  Shield Block !  Last Stand !  STUN.  STUN.  Shield Smack !  FUCK YOU, I'M INVINCIBLE, GIVE ME ANOTHER ONE, Shit, Not THAT Many !!!

It was great.  It's not now.

Again I'll say :  if it's fine for you, bravo.  Fuck Off.  Go Play rather than SHITTING ON MY HEAD.  But I'm here to say it's not fun.  I heal now.  I HEAL, FFS.  HEALING IS MY WIFES JOB AND IT'S WHAT I DO NOW.

That's just not right.

Does she tank instead?

The part where subscriptions plummeted and he was forced to cave utterly was just so, so, so sweet.

No.

 :heartbreak:

All those abilities still exist in the game, and all your complaints about tanking have always existed. Getting tired of tank swaps? It sounds like you're just tired of tanking in general, not the new model for tanking specifically.


Sexist.

Let's spin the Rokal Wheel of Excuses!

Sounds like you're just tired of ______
Really, I think you're just burned out
That's just rose-colored glasses
It didn't really happen that way at all
You can still do all that right now
That's not really the problem

There is really no other way to interpret Ironwoods post, which is mostly (understandable) complaints about aspects of tanking that have always existed.

Also, only half of those are approved catch-phrases. And it's not a wheel.

 :facepalm:

Your post couldn't possibly have been more timely. Now that Ghostcrawler is gone the devs can finally move towards the dungeon design you all wanted that he had been holding the game back from!


:popcorn:

But I thought every decision like that was solely the result of Ghostcrawler's personal vendetta against Paelos?

I reiterate. This shit was bound to still happen with Chilton at the helm. GC going is just part 1 of a 3 part deal I want.

Okay let's be fair, Panda heroics weren't just easy, they were laughable. There's a lot of room to toughen them up without going overboard and they seem to know that.

They've given Vortex Pinnacle pre-nerf as the example of the difficulty they are shooting for, so Cata-level difficulty is about right.

They're crazy if they'll planning on allowing LFG for heroics again or making it a regular part of the gear path.

Hear that sound?  That's the sound of my wallet trying to close itself even harder.

I'm going to regret asking this ... why?

I preferred running dungeons to get gear. Even LFG was fine ... as a tank.

Because they already performed this experiment in Cata and it failed. Randomly formed groups aren't usually fun/ideal to deal with content that requires coordination. Allowing a random matching service for a type of content sets the expectation that the content will be feasible with the average random group you get. Making it part of the normal gear path (as opposed to having it be an alternative to LFR/Flex raid gear or something) makes people feel like they're supposed to do it and for most players that means they're going to want to use LFG.

Honestly, I loved the Cata dungeons, but if I was running them in LFG and had to explain fights to random strangers I'd never see again every single time I ran the dungeon I would have pulled my hair out.

I don't think they'd make the same mistake again, which either means it won't be part of the normal gear path to get into LFR/Flex/Normal raiding, or they're over-stating the difficulty.

I thought so.

I rarely ever had a problem with PUG/LFG groups and liked gearing up that way. If I had a retard or 3 in the group I'd just leave, log another tank and be back in a new dungeon in no time. It's not like dungeons to date have actually been hard, even heroics. In the supposed too-hard TBC days I was steam rolling the heroic dungeons each night and had cut and paste macros for each boss. I actually loved these dungeons and the WotLK dungeons even when gearing up, Cata was a step backwards. I can't believe people think Cata heroics were hard - any of them - even Grim Batol was a cake walk with a maximum of one retard per group. Panda heroics were a joke.

I'd rather run a dungeon or 3 than get into LFR to gear up.

Vortex Pinnacle was the other really shitty Cata one for pugs, in my experience. You had trash that could fling you off the edge, the wind dragon boss who was very unforgiving pre-nerf, and those trash pulls in the grounding fields that required a rogue or hunter if you wanted any kind of CC.

Trying to convince people to slow down and CC in a pug isn't fun.

I do LFG almost exclusively. Most of the people I know either aren't playing anymore or there are too few to form a solid group to play. If the dungeons are as difficult (for a PUG) as they were for Cataclysm, I will not be playing. I like LFR to see the content, but as a means to gear up? Fuck that. After WoTLK, did they not say "we hear you, heroics were too easy, we'll make them harder". How did that turn out?

I cancelled again. My entire guild has basically given up because they don't have any new patch for the next 5 months planned, and I geared up most of my shammy in LFR and got several lvl 25 blue pets.

If you couldn't queue for heroics in Cataclysm, I would've quit during that expansion (like the bulk of the people I did shit with) instead of ditching when SWTOR came out (and I was out of shit I wanted to do in WoW). It helped that I mostly tanked in those (sometimes healed), so I could be a huge controlling asshole about the pace, though. I also got really good at spitting out the strategy if we had someone new to the instance.  :why_so_serious:

Content difficulty at the start of an expansion is not the same as at the end of an expansion.

5-man heroics now are in the same place that they were at the tail-end of WOTLK - completely trivial due to gear. I only do them occasionally for some valor, and they are just a mindless zerg now with most groups not even stopping for trash but simply gathering them all up and taking them down with the boss.

Now, if that difficulty were to somehow scale throughout the life of an expansion, would that make them better or just make them a PITA?

Honestly, I think people would lose patience with it. WE'VE DANCED THIS DANCE A MILLION TIMES, LET US FACEROLL, if you will. Sometimes you just want to brain off, loot on.

Well, the Diablo 3 expansion is coming.   :why_so_serious:

I think I understand now. Thank you.

Ironwood has such a way with words.  :heart:

After the 'Rokal Proclamation' I went back.  I tanked with every tank I had.

Nah.  It's still not fun and any utility that you had is raped.  The only fun you might have is choking someone as a Death Knight (seriously, that lifting/choking animation is awesome).

I stand by my post.  There's never, ever, ever any sense of urgency.  There's never and highs or lows or 'My God, my skill as a tank just scraped us through that.'  It's all 'I didn't get a heal, I didn't have enough mitigation, I got hit by spikes, my thing worn off before my thing ought to worn off, so sad too bad, damn I need better gear.'

Blandy McBland.

In before Rokal tells Iron that his opinion is wrong.

A) You're tanking dungeons that are over a year old and were never hard. Are you surprised they're faceroll now or something? This was one of the defenses I used for the new tanking model, "you don't need to use active mitigation outside of raiding if you don't want to because the content is so easy".

B) "I need better gear" would have been a more valid complaint pre-MoP since your mitigation was 99% passive. If you die in MoP, you can default to blaming your healer as par for the course, or you can wonder "did I use my active mitigation abilities as well as I could have?" You have more control than ever before of your own survival.

Again, you're just complaining about tanking, not the MoP tanking model in particular. Each classes tanking style is more different than ever and none of the "fun" tanking abilities you called out in an earlier post have been removed or neutered.


This paragraph could be describing how a Prot Warrior plays in any MoP dungeon.

Well, FWIW I find tanking in MOP less fun and more of a chore than it was in WOTLK or Cata. There aren't any memorable moments like managing the trash in heroic Halls of Reflection, doing the 'dance' for Ozruk in stonecore (or heck, even jumping to avoid the quake from the giants), or doing any of the gauntlet-style sequences... do MOP dungeons even have those? Everything is just 'push buttons in sequence for optimal damage/mitigation' and 'avoid obviously telegraphed predictable AOE'. Only that the 'push buttons' part is actually more of a pain since I have to push more buttons without clear feedback (ok, so I'm pushing shield barrier because it's lit up on my UI... now I'm mitigating 30k damage in the next 6 seconds, yay!).

So MOP dungeon design sucks or MOP tank class design sucks. Take your pick!  :awesome_for_real:

Oh now. Can't it be both?

Also, not gaining rage from being hit.  I mean, for fucks sake.  That was the most immersive thing they had.  You got whaled on and you got angry.  When you got angry, you got abilities to use.

Now they can sit beating on your ass and unless you hit one of your wee buttons, it's like you just don't care.

Also, I never said it was a 'faceroll'.  I said it had neither highs nor lows.  Even when I'm getting the fuck kicked out of me, I know it's fuck all to do with my skill and more to do with either gear, things on cooldown, or and this is sad, shitty healing.

 :oh_i_see:

But we could go round and round and round and still no-one would give a shit, so I'm just gonna stop.  What I find most amusing is they gave me a 'practice' area where I can go in and confirm, yup, tanking sucks.   :awesome_for_real:

Kind of? There are still mechanics like that in MoP dungeons, but they pose so little threat that most people ignore them or never even realize they exist. Stormstout Brewery has a gauntlet on the way to the hopper boss, but it's not an intimidating one. The last boss of Mogu'shan Palace has a "dance" of sorts as you try to avoid all the shit on the ground/weapons flying around, but standing on the shit on the ground can be healed through. If you do challenge modes you start to encounter more memorable trash packs or abilities, but they still aren't great.

I still can't do this.  Someone help me out.

IIRC you have to right-click on their picture and it's under there.

Yeah, it wasn't.   :heartbreak:

If you are trying to play with a friend cross realm, then whoever invites will be the anchor and pull the rest of the party to their realm.

Worth noting that it didn't work in Orggrimar (probably due to number of players) but once we got to isle of time it worked perfectly, with us phasing between realms rather seamlessly and killing rares on both.

Fake Edit: Oh you are talking about phasing. Yeah, theoretically, just have the person do the inviting who is in the phase you want. Maybe wow just hates you?

From what i understand, no Phazing / Xrealm stuff at all works inside major faction cities.  Orgrimmar / Stormwind et al are supposedly server specific only, and even when grouped with other people you will never see them in those cities unless they are from your home realm.

Ghostcrawler landed as a "lead designer" at Riot games.

League of Legends players deserve no better. lmao

I still can't find any evidence that this feature exists either. WTF. I can tell you for a stone cold fact that group members aren't automatically pulled into the same phases. I've run afoul of this too many times too recently.

I wonder if they'll ever get around to "Game 2" or "Game 3" or however many other games they have in development since I last toured the place. League of Legends sort of ate all their time and effort.

PS I enjoyed Cataclysm Heroics more than any MoP heroics, for what it's worth.

LoL players are already blaming him for everything, so it must be like home away from home for him.