Zorbrix
I know a lot of you have expressed concerns that you haven't gotten much time in game to test; totally a fair point, I completely understand where you're coming from. What's important to keep in mind is that at this point in the testing cycle, some of the most important testing that you guys provide is in automatically generated crash reports and such.
We do a lot of testing in-house, but we can't easily replicate either the sheer number of testers, nor the various amounts of hardware types all logging in from across the globe. When we create new builds, we hop on immediately and start testing through various methods. But in order to get a really good feel for the overall quality of the build we rely on you guys logging in by the hundreds or thousands. If/when you crash, we gather that data automatically and immediately, and gives us a really good insight into things. Same thing for server crashes, disconnects, world server down issues, etc.
The good news is this stuff happens more or less automatically. So even though it feels that you're not personally able to put in a lot of hours testing, you're still giving us critically important data as we work to get a stable build ready for release.
I don't want this to discourage any of you from entering Feedback or Bug Reports (either in-game or through the forums), that still is still valuable as well. But I just want to let you know why we're pushing a lot of builds and what it means to you all.
Celestalon
Tanks for all of the feedback.
Warning, the following is complex and techy; you don't need to know this in order to tank in Warlords.
As we've described, the design of Resolve is intended to maintain a balance between abilities that use percentage effects (such as Shield Block) and those that use flat amounts (such as Shield Barrier). In the below I'm just going to refer to "Barrier" and "Block" as examples, but this applies to all tanks' active mitigation and healing.
An important factor there is where the balance is at with no resolve. Obviously, if you're fighting a critter that's doing 10 damage to you, Barrier is going to win (and that's fine). So, we have to choose a starting point for Barrier with no Resolve. At that level of incoming damage, Block vs Barrier is balanced; beyond that, Resolve kicks in and starts bringing Barrier up.
When we implemented this version of Resolve, we chose that starting point as being a hard-hitting outdoor creature (or pack of creatures). We chose that so that you'd see Resolve taking effect as you learn to play in solo content. In order to achieve that, we had to bring the static abilities like Barrier down much lower, so that with no Resolve, they were balanced with Block against the hard-hitting outdoor creature (which is still pretty weakly hitting, in the grand scheme of things). We implemented that by making Barrier (and similar) 60% weaker at baseline, which is the right balance point against that hard-hitting outdoor creature.
However, that has some downsides as well. It feels negative, and it also means that for tanks with heals, out of combat healing yourself up after a fight is quite slow. So, we're going to revise that starting point up to be a hard-hitting dungeon creature, which makes the abilities balanced at their natural effectiveness; no 60% reduction needed. This means that Barrier will be stronger before that point, but Resolve won't kick in at all until you're being hit by a hard-hitting dungeon creature (or equivalent). To reiterate, this has no functional difference above that; self-healing will be unchanged against a raid boss, for example.
Again, thanks for the feedback on this, and for following along through our iteration process. It helps!
P.S. For theorycrafters, the 8.5 changed to a 3.4 in the Resolve formula.