Another crack at this

So I've tried to do this before and life has usually gotten in the way. Should be better this time around since I've got the time, energy and drive to stick to it. Some better planning this time should help a whole ton as well.

To start, about what will I be writing? Primarily World of Warcraft. My expertise is primarily in the tanking world though I do spend a fair bit of time dpsing and very occasionally healing. I play other games and will very likely comment on those as well. I play LoL, will be playing Diablo 3 and I really like to try out the new MMOs and betas for other games. Right now MoP is around the corner and I'll talk about that a lot I figure. I love looking at the way games are designed, the choices that the devs make in how they set up the game.

Who am I? I often go by the online handle "Diceone" when it's available to me, picking other names as appropriate. I play tanks in almost every game I play as that's what comes most naturally to me. I currently play a paladin tank called "Surgat" in warcraft in [A]Adapt of US-Spirestone, we ranked roughly 115-120 US 25m for dragon soul depending on the websites you go to for rankings. I play other characters as well, especially for our alt runs so I've played many other classes/specs but not that frequently. Outside of the game I'm a math student focusing in number theory and the like, primarily probability, set theory, those sorts of things. I'm a pretty big nerd.

So where do we start?

Active Mitigation. What is it? Simply put the answer is using your resources to reduce the amount of damage you take. Death knights have this to a much lesser extent right now, or rather to a much different extent than is planned for the rest of us tanks. Death Knights have death strike, using their runes for healing and a shield. This is somewhat different than the plan for the rest of us but it's the same basic idea.

Guardian druids and prot warriors are going to have a straightforward model of building up rage to use it for mitigation. The expectation isn't to have this mitigation available all the time. This is a bit like the current implementation of holy shield except it wouldn't be on a cooldown and would cost resources. Us paladins are losing holy shield and instead getting something that functions similarly but is tied to our use of shield of the righteous. Beta currently has us taking 30% less physical damage for 3 seconds after hitting our shield slam. This is easy to model though makes things a bit complicated in that paying attention to the enemy swing timer could be very useful, and this essentially requires mods to track well and get the most benefit out of. This is just my gripe with the way it's currently implemented but the idea is sound.

I like having our defense abilities tied to our offensive ones and since our resource generation will be tied to our hit it makes 2 more stats relevant to tanks. This bring sus up from 3 to 5. This is a huge difference since we get 2 secondary stats on our gear it was simply a matter of picking our best two and reforging into them. Having more stats makes things actually interesting, while I despise having to deal with stat caps I can't think of another way to make other stats interesting since those are basically the only other stats (aside from haste and crit, which would make a mockery of being a tank).

So back to the idea of works. We have abilities that generate our resources. Crusader strike/Judgement for paladins, I think mangle for guardian druids, and shield slam for warriors. Since I know paladins best I'll try and model how we're going to work.

Crusader Strike: 4.5s CD (3 Globals, effected by haste by sanctity of battle)
Judgement: 6s Cd (4 globals, also effected by haste via sanctity of battle)
Shield of the Righteous: 3 Holy Power, 1.5s cd, 3s buff (at the time of writing this anyways, it's changed so much lately this is likely to not be the final version but works for example) Not on the gcd

Best modelling is done mid fight so lets assume we have just used our shield of the righteous and our buff is active for the next 3s. I'll count things off in terms of globals and loot at worst case scenario (No grand crusader procs meaning minimal holy power gains). This means it takes 6 globals to rebuild our holy power to the point where we can use shield of the righteous again. The buff lasts only 3s or 2 globals. Time between shields gets reduced slightly from judgement, but lets assume that we get 1 judgement in for every shield, reducing the time drastically depending on when it comes in. If we can hit shield and in 3 globals CS > Judge > CS it's still not fast enough to keep 100% uptime, which is very important. You can also see how low values of hit would drastically reduce uptime, a missed judgement or crusader strike is a large amount of lost holy power.

So in the best case scenario we can have one global, usually only one boss swing. Howveer as the fight goes on we're going to have varying uptime as the cooldown on our abilities is somewhat variable as well. Avenger's Shield cooldown gets cleared. So we looked at a best case from no holy power, and it's obvious to see that if we store up to 5 holy power with our shiney new "boundless conviction." We can set ourselves up for some lucky uptime on it with good grand crusader procs, the point is that we can't sustain 100% uptime even at extremely high skill levels but this way of preventing damage is interesting, engaging, and leaves a lot of room for skill differentials. This is also extremely easy to tune. Something as straight forward as 30% damage reduction is extremely easy to tweak. Increase or decrease the %age reduction would have a drastic effect. Increasing or decreasing the duration would be another easy thing to tweak. This makes it a fairly decent mechanic, one to be aware of but nothing you really have to actively pay attention to. Using it on CD wont make you a bad tank, but possibly holding on to it for maybe a global or two might pay off big time. This seems to be what the designers are going for, and GC said something recently along the same lines.

In short, bears, wars and pallies will all be functioning around similar active mitigation and while the specific numbers differ slightly the concept is the same and can be tuned equally. Bears get something that drastically increases their dodge chance and warriors had something concerning block the last time I checked (they're also going through a lot of changes right now so it's hard to nail anything down). This is a great start to the new approach to tanking. I feel like the one improvement I'd make is to have bear/warrior abilities be similarly tied to offensive abilities such as lacerate or revenge, but that is a topic for another time.

That's it for now, I'll have something each weekend and possibly some filler stuff that is time relevant though I'm not entirely sure how I want to handle something like that just yet. See you guys next week.