Tank gear, still needed?

So I know that on the class thread for the 5.2 ptr it was stated that tank gear isn't going anywhere for now and I'm really not likely make a change of opinion but I really wanted to dive into exactly why tank gear is an issue (will likely touch on int-plate as well).

So there are 4 different armor types in the game right now. Cloth/Leather/Mail/Plate. They really only serve to create a distinction between classes and separate the enhance shaman and hunter from the feral or rogue and the various healers from each other. Aside from that it doesn't do much mechanically.

The game has also expanded quite a bit over the years and we now find ourselves with 11 classes. Keep in mind that each faction only started with 8 (pally and shaman being exclusive prior to TBC). Back then with raids of 40 people loot distribution really only had to follow the class distribution, you also could expect 5 of each class, that means at the very least one of each spec. There would very rarely be gear that didn't go to someone.

These days it's a very different situation. The game has 34 specs, and the largest raid size is 25. Clearly we can't have one of every spec. So lets narrow it down to different types of gear. I'll separate it by primary stat since that's really the major difference between gear these days, spirit counts as a major stat and dodge/parry are a bit special.

Cloth: Spirit, Non-spirit
Leather: Agi, Int
Mail: Agi, Int
Plate: Str, Int, Tank.

So in total that's 9 different types of loot for anything with an armour class. For things without an armour type on them.

Healer, Int dps, Agi dps, Str dps, Tank.

So this is primarily for weapons/trinkets/cloaks/jewellery. So basically half the gear, this doesn't count tokens. That counts 5 different gear types.

Lastly lets check how many specs (yes specs, not raid slots just yet) are on each item type.

Cloth spirit - 3. Cloth non-spirit 6
Leather Agi - 7. Leather Int - 3
Mail agi - 4. Mail int - 2
Plate tank - 3. Plate dps - 5. Plate int - 1.

Couple things of note here. Seems a 2-1 ratio (roughly) is a pretty good setup for these low numbers. Especially since a lot of them are inflated by "pure" classes. Locks and mages would change cloth non-spirit to 2, counting holy and disc as the same would also bring that to 2. So lets do that since it seems pretty fair. Next up agi, I'll count rogues as 1 spec and it suddenly drops to 5. Still close to 2:1 but not too bad. Main is in the same boat, hunters inflate numbers. Lastly comes plate, and this is where it's a bit interesting. Both warriors and dks have 2 specs so lets drop that down to bring plate a nice even setup.

Cloth 2:2
Leather 5:3
Mail 2:2
Plate 3:3:1

As you can see just in terms of the class distribution there's obviously an outlier in plate int. Lots of leather agi wearers also. Otherwise everything falls under the umbrella of 1:1 while slightly above for leather and a lot below on plate.

Lets examine it another way, in terms of specs for the non-armour typed pieces.

Healer - 6
Agi dps - 9
Str dps - 5
Int dps - 9
Tanks - 5

Pretty even split there nothing special but this really doesn't mean much the same way that class representation doesn't mean much. It's much more important to see what raid comps are like and what you will actually see in a raid group. I'm not going to say that I'm an expert on all of this because I don't manage a raid but I do keep an eye on what we have and can think of a rough guideline of what to expect.

10 man raids, going to make some assumptions on dps mostly to reflect the available classes and what works. Primarily this means balancing ranged and melee:
2 tanks
2 healers (main spec anyway)
1 str dps (gotta be plate)
3 int dps (at least one cloth, maybe 2. Other would be moonkin on leather or ele on mail)
2 agi dps (one could be a hunter, if that's the case maybe one more of these and one less int, lets assume one mail one leather)

Looking at the dps shows us that roughly speaking, there's not too big of a problem. Sure there's not much wiggle room to optimize gearing choices for a 10m but that's part of organizing 10m. I have a hard time finding sympathy for trying to manage one when looking at 25m. That said I do understand that loot distribution is rough on them more so than on 25m.

So since dps is pretty malleable, there's no difference between a warlock or mage or in most cases an ele shaman for that matter. Remember that belt, boots, and bracers are the only pieces that have an armour type not on tier sets. Not to say that alleviates anything but it does have an impact in giving people choices. Doesn't help that gear is going to get DEd.

There's still an alarming problem here. You have 2 types of gear that are going to drop that have no representation really. You have 2 main spec healers. What are the chances that one of them is a holy pally? Assuming that you're randomly getting your healers, there's a nearly 10% chance of this happening. Knowing that you don't randomly select your healers, and no one is going to want to take 2 pallies to heal. Pallies are also strong healers in a lot of ways that bring utility. I have no way of actually knowing what sort of representation they have among 10m guilds. I'm not a healer so I dont' know.

So lets take another gander at your dps class because maybe he's got an off-spec for healing. Well he'd have to be a prot or ret palladin in that str dps or tank spot. Tanks almost never have healing off specs because there's never been a fight to my knowledge that required you to both drop a tank and bring a healer. It's far more likely that you just have to drop a tank. So lets assume it's a ret. That's a 1/5 ish (I think ret has lower representation lately so maybe even as low as 1/10) chance of you having a ret. Sure that's a lot of guilds with rets out there but that's even more of them without one. This means that no matter what, you're going to not use that piece of int plate that drops just because you don't have a raiding pally with a holy spec.

Same thing goes for tanking gear, though there's an easier fix for it. Chances are, you have 1 block tank (warrior/paladin) and one "face" tank (the other guys). Your tank gear drops will go to someone, and your str dps probably has a tank offspec. That's not a huge deal, but I'd bet there are guilds out there running guardian/brewmaster or double of one of those classes, quite rare I'd imagine though.

Again this really isn't an issue for the non-armour typed pieces since they've got good representation. Even in a 10m the only thing you're in danger of with dps is the str dps pieces. You're not always going to have one, and it kinda falls into the same category but I think that most 10m raids will have some of these and it's a fair assumption that their representation is relatively high. It could still potentially be a problem.

I could give numbers for 25m but I'll stick to the relevant ones. The dps stuff is mostly covered by sheer numbers. We have 4-5 str dps, roughly the same amount of agi dps and maybe closer to 10 int dps in the raid. These aren't hard numbers just rough ones since we like to keep rosters in the low 30s. The healer issue is also *mostly* alleviated since there are other specs that will use the healer gear and again the larger amounts of players will combat the problems mentioned earlier.

So we're down to tanks this time. Int plate is in a similar situation, in fact I'd say almost the same. You're highly likely to have 1 tank or holy pally. You're somewhat likely to have 2 holy pallies or 2 plate tanks. You're not going to have 3 holy paladins, you're not going to have 3 main spec tanks since the game doesn't support that. You're also really unlikely to have neither a plate tank or a holy pally.

In a 25m raid these numbers get exaggerated in the other direction. You are dropping so much loot that a good portion of it is going to get DEd, or your tanks are going to be missing gear if the drop rates are slightly lower for that gear, same goes for pallies.

That said tier tokens make a lot of this less of an issue, in fact they nearly remove the issue. The problem is people need to have alternatives to their tier sets. You can't offer only one piece of gear for a slot in a given tier. People don't like that, it's not good for the game. I think the case for plate int has been made in other places so I'm going to leave that alone. I'm going to stick to plate tanking gear for now.

I've tried to make an argument for the down-sides of plate tanking gear from a raid comp type perspective. There's one more way I'd like to approach it, so lets look at secondary stats for various classes/specs.

Str tanks - 5 (not counting the "dps" stats)
DPS - 5
Healers - 4

Pretty fine so far, basically everyone takes either hit/expertise *or* spirit. They take haste/crit *or* dodge/parry and everyone benefits from mastery. So we're back to tanks and dodge/parry. Our leather wearing cousins don't use it because previously there were so few of them (2 str tanking classes, then 3 compared to the 1 back then) and I'm not entirely sure they were "supported" by the game design back then the same way shaman tanking isn't supported now and to a lesser extent pally tanking wasn't even really supported until tbc and even then they made sure warriors were still the tanks.

So we know that non-tank stats can work for a tank. We have great examples of this in the form of druids and monks. I think the monk system where crit and haste actually give you defensive benefits in the form of elusive brew and more energy with which to either self heal/guard/shuffle is wonderful and could be applied to other tanks without feeling homogeneous or awkward. I'm less familiar with guardians but I do have a druid so after looking at their tool-kit briefly they do scale with both haste and crit in the form of more rage for each.

Those are the types of tools that are neat. Going back to plate tanks, we have to worry about dodge and parry. For the most part you either gear for dodge and parry and ignore everything else like the plague, or ignore dodge and parry in lieu of mastery (or in the paladin case haste and mastery). This leads many to feel as though dodge and parry are stats that make them bad. Strictly speaking this isn't true, those aren't bad stats as theck has pointed out several times but for skilled tanks the arguments have been made that haste/mastery (haste specifically) just give us more bang for our buck.

Lastly, dodge and parry are not exciting stats. They are completely 100% passive. They do not encourage cleverly using your classes mechanics. Now I'm sure some could argue that the other stats don't change how you play your class but I guarantee you that someone with almost no haste would approach their holy power very differently than someone with full hit/expertise and maybe 25% haste. The other argument for dodge and parry is that they *feel* like tanking stats. This is important in this game. Feeling awesome is about as important, if not more than, being awesome. I'm not convinced that many people feel awesome seeing a dodge or parry pop up on their screen. Dodge and parry are also not really noticeable as stats. The random nature of them means that you could gain dodge yet still get hit more often the following week simply by "bad rng."

Crit is a bit different in that you can see more crits, many specs (lookin' at you fire and balance) really let you feel the increase in crit rating. I'm not saying that every spec has to have this but it's not the same as dodge or parry. Warriors get things like revenge and so you might feel it but I'm not convinced that just changing it to some type of crit benefit would feel any different, maybe even less random.

So lets say we get rid of dodge and parry on future gear, and do some design around making crit and haste attractive to the plate tanks. Simple things like critting with ability X gives you Y chance to dodge and/or parry for the next Z seconds. Maybe warriors could get crit rating applied directly to their crit block chance (at an appropriate rate to avoid scaling issues). DKs could crit heal themselves on death strike and perhaps pallies could get something like sacred shield or SOI critting, maybe even crits make your next shotr buff do X% more damage reduction. These are the sorts of things that I don't think would require too much changing, I can imagine adding crit chances to sacred shield might be a bit harsh but you get the idea.

I know I already said "lastly" but there's one more thing I'd love to address. If you want tanks to scale with crit/haste as it's fairly obvious you do want by making hit and expertise attractive to us, then we're going to have to be taking dps gear from dps classes in some slots. Hit/mastery gear we can both get. Hit/expertise gear we can both get etc. The argument I've heard from other dps classes is that they are upset that we have other options but are still taking the dps gear. From their perspective, it's not fair that we have access to more gear than they do and aren't letting them have the pieces they want since we can be just as effective with the other gear. If we don't have other gear then I'm sure after a short transition period people wont feel estranged anymore. It'll also help new players by keeping them focused on the same stats as they level up. Introducing dodge and parry just to the tanks can get a bit confusing for newer players.

I think something I want to do is take a look at some proposed BiS lists this coming tier (5.2) and compile a list of some sort, do some analysis on the data in my spare time and try to come to some conclusions. If anyone has a way of getting better class representation numbers for raids please let me know, I'm not even sure if that data is readily available since I haven't found anything on the major progress tracking websites.

So that's more than I had intended on writting and I feel like the more I type the less coherent my arguments are getting so I'll end it here for now. I think I have to complain about vengeance again later but that'll probably wait until there's no more content for my to progress on since I'll be focused on that starting tomorrow.

Enjoy the patch coming up and I hope you're as excited for the new content as I am. Until next time, keep being awesome.