Ghostcrawler
One of the reasons we don't always announce changes before they happen is that things can move pretty fast in beta. Even though I mentioned some Protection changes above, they are already out of date. :(
Overall, the goal is to mix up Protection's rotation a little more. Prot warriors are used to lots of buttons, and we don't want too much waiting around. (For Arms and Fury, we can just flood them with rage, but with Protection the risk is that we hit 100% uptime of
Shield Block, which turns it from being a short cooldown to a managed buff like
Thunder Clap.) We also want to make sure tanks who execute their attacks with more skill are rewarded with better mitigation. To make this compelling, we think it needs to tie into Rage generation.
- As part of this, we're going to try Vanguard no longer generating Rage from auto attacks at all. Instead we'll have nearly all Rage come from special attacks while in Defensive.
- In addition to Shield Slam, we'll try Revenge and Devastate generating some Rage. Devastate will do so by once again being the ability that procs Sword and Board. For Revenge, we agree that the more rotational version has lost some of its old excitement. Revenge will generate Rage outright. It will no longer proc from blocks but will also have no cooldown so you will sometimes get multiple Revenges in a row.
- We're going to try Shield Block using the charge system that we've tried for a few abilities, such as the monk Roll. This one may feel too different, but we'll see. What it means is you can use Shield Block twice in a row, but then pay a 15 sec cooldown. (The first use will start its cooldown as soon as its used.) This mechanic should let you chain together two Shield Blocks but not keep it up 100% of the time.
- We think this rotation feels better and more traditionally Prot, but let us know how it feels to you.
But two hours times eleven classes turns into a huge time commitment pretty quickly (and that's on top of reading all of the posts in the first place). Believe me -- you want the design team spending time designing the game, not debating players on forums.
We are all very passionate about our designs, but we're also professional game designers who know better than to get too attached to any particular implementation. Stuff changes. Ideas that seem great might not pan out. We've all seen ideas we were really excited about being greeted with indifference by the community. That's just part of the job.
Passion also can come across as being defensive ("they're stuck on their pet feature!") or impartial ("he likes priests better!") when read on forums.
I know I participated in it, but really these discussions would be more useful if we kept to class feedback. I have found as a rule of thumb that any time the discussion strays from the design to the designers, then it is probably off course.
No, you are correct. The way paladins were playing with lots of
Word of Glory was closer to the new design. We said at the time however that we didn't think it would work for tank balance to let paladins convert resources into mitigation while warriors could not. I think we even said at the time that we'd like for all of the tanks to play more like that, but it required a whole sale design.
That happens a lot in this gig, where class A is working the way we'd consider ideal, while class B, C, D and so on do not. The "pure" design is to keep A working the right way, but the right decision is usually to change the single outlier until we have time to fix everyone.
I'm curious how exactly this is going to work. Does it just consume as much rage as it can (Up to 60) and give you a decent sized absorb based on that? I do like the change though, it makes the move much more interesting.