Thursday, September 1, 2011

Mitigations Future

Well for all of you that don't know and if you don't and play WoW I really have no clue how you don't, but Ghostcrawler has a blog, which he talks about future considerations for the game. He has gone through many topics and the most recent one is Mitigation. We all know how recently threat was changed to make it easier for tanks to keep their targets and have more of a focus on the actual job of tanking rather than spamming buttons while doing so. As I stated before if this was the intent and not to make things easier for lesser skilled tanks then I agree, because anytime something is more interesting it is in turn more challenging and exciting.

This leads us to Ghostcrawler once again and his current topic, Mitigation. The devs currently don't like how it is boring and not really working the way they want it to. If you want to read the blog you can see it here. But I will give my thoughts on each of the ideas.

Tank DPS Matters

This is not something that I think is really a good option. This basically puts the tanks back in the same situation as they were with threat except it would be a DPS rotation rather than a Threat rotation. This leads to the same issues as before with mobile fights and positioning. So why would they go through all that effort to change the issues from before just to bring them back to make mitigation more interesting.

DPS Buttons Provides Mitigation

This is a model I like. Because it makes the buttons you push matter and they give benefit. Ghostcrawlers example of shield slam activating shield block or revenge giving you a parry buff. I don't see the down side when you may be stressed when you can't keep all the buffs up at once, but couldn't they design so that this style would require skill to keep all of them up not just assume it will be possible for everyone? What would be the purpose of it being so easy.

DPS Buttons Build Resources

This would be kind of similar to the above option, but would let you bank them. Meaning the situation of not having all the buffs up at once could be fixed if you could bank them. Now this could be something I would be all for as long as it didn't lead to trivialization what I was talking above. Everyone should be able to do it perfectly. No one wants to be just as good as everyone else they want something that proves they are better or can be better than someone else.

So there you have it. I recommend reading the blog if tanking is something you are interested in. It goes into specific abilities and talks about what they would like to change them as well. It is a good read, and then maybe you will be able to form an opinion on some things of the changes that may or may not be coming.

1 comment:

  1. Anything to bring more tanks into the fold so my queue times are shorter

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