Stun and Quel

Gravity August 17 2009 11:53 am 3 Comments

Not for DKs

I found this interesting further reading on the change behind ghoul-stun (and Paladin’s hammer stun too).

The second blue is about dual-wield tanking, and basically more bad news for DW-tanks. Most 1H tank weapons are too fast (and therefore creating too much parry-gib risk), and the blue mistakenly refers to the upcoming warrior/paladin tank weapon as something we might want. Actually, we can’t even wield it. I wonder if the blue poster will correct himself… it’s Ghostcrawler.

Blue posts below:

Design philosophy behind the stun damage reduction talents

Ghostcrawler
Before we made the Balance druid change, we discussed a lot about the stun damage reduction talents. If we could do it all over again, many or all of them would be 15% as well. We aren’t going to make that change for 3.2.2, but we might make it eventually.

Please keep two important considerations in mind. First, these talents were designed to make stuns less brutal, not to make it a mistake to stun someone. When someone laughs when they get stunned, then the survivability is too much.

Second, and more importantly, we have changed our philosophy a little on many of these countermeasures. If stuns are too important (we’re largely talking about PvP here), then the solution is to make stuns less powerful or less frequent, not to give everyone essentially passive ways to withstand the damage.

I’ve called this the “arms race” before. We give a stun to a class. Then the other classes get a “stuns aren’t as bad for you” ability. Then the original class gets the super stun that can penetrate those defensive abilities. Next you want to add the super defense that works even on super stun. And so it goes. (You can replace “stun” with silence, disarm, damage reduction or anything else). I’m not saying that countering abilities is a bad idea — it’s very much a part of PvP. But those counters work better when they are active decisions that require a little skill.

Put another way, if offense gets 10 and defense gets -5, why not just set offense to 5 and be done with it?

Again, I am talking design philosophy here. These are long-term changes not patch notes.

Source.

Stoneskin Gargoyle for Dual Wielding DK tanks

Ghostcrawler
Keep in mind that quote was before we decided that Frost could be focused towards dual-wield. We have no problems with Frost DKs tanking with two weapons.

The original logic behind Stoneskin Gargoyle remains though — there generally are not two-handed tanking weapons, so hitting say the defense cap can be harder. A DW Frost DK can use two tanking swords. Grab one of them Quel things. :)

Source.

Spread the DK:

3 Comments »

kamon said:

Maybe Dk will get a differnet type of sword as they also need str which helps their parry and i do hope DK will get stoneskin for 1H :D

# 18 August 2009 at 2:31 am

Shoul said:

Considering DK is a common tank, it would make sense, and be easier for blizz to just add DKs to the list of classes that can use the sword.

I’m more worried that they’re going to super-nerf our only stun. I hear it’s doubling the CD from 30s to 1min!

A 1H stoneskin would probably work similarly to swordbreaking vs swordshattering for 1h vs 2h so my GUESS for a 1H stoneskin (if it comes :/ ) is:
Increases Defense by 12 (or 13) and total stamina by 1%

# 20 August 2009 at 12:08 am