A Taste of Coming Masteries
Still Waiting
The highly anticipated Death Knight information is still forthcoming, but Bornakk did give us a juicy tidbit about the tanking masteries in the form of the Warrior preview.
Vengeance: This is a mechanic to ensure that tank damage (and therefore threat) doesn’t fall behind as damage-dealing classes improve their gear during the course of the expansion. All tanking specs will have Vengeance as their second talent tree passive bonus. Whenever a tank gets hit, Vengeance will give them a stacking attack power buff equal to 5% of the damage done, up to a maximum of 10% of the character’s un-buffed health. For boss encounters, we expect that tanks will always have the attack power bonus equal to 10% of their health. The 5% and 10% bonuses assume 51 talent points have been put into the Protection tree. These values will be smaller at lower levels. Remember, you only get this bonus if you have spent the most talent points in the Protection tree, so you won’t see Arms or Fury warriors running around with it. Vengeance will let us continue to make tank gear more or less the way we do today – there will be some damage-dealing stats, but mostly survival-oriented stats. Druids typically have more damage-dealing stats even on their tanking gear, so their Vengeance benefit may be smaller, but overall the goal is for all four tanks do about the same damage when tanking.
The Key Points
First, we know that Blood is going to be the dedicated tanking tree, so Vengeance will be the second tier mastery bonus. Judging by the other 2 bonuses that Warrior tanks got, it’s likely these will be purely defensive bonuses, Uber Parry or something. Though, dare to dream time… it might be something else, like dealing with our cooldowns since DKs are already CD intensive tanks and will probably be even more so after swapping talents with the other two trees.
What I find most interesting about this, is that it points to a real effort on Blizzard’s part to making threat a real part of the game again, shifting the focus away from Tricks of the Trade and Misdirect macros to the shoulders of the tank. Honestly, in most scenarios threat isn’t such a big deal, but crucial hard mode fights and the like… it can be, especially when DPS start getting upgrades by leaps and bounds. There’s also the bit about how this means they can pretty much do as they have been doing with tanking gear. This is a point that I’m more than a little interested in, especially with regards to weapons. I know how difficult it’s been for me getting hands on DPS weapons to tank with, I wonder how warriors and paladins are going to be affected by the stat changes in the expansion.
Likewise, as time goes on I’m thinking more and more of other things that will likely happen with the DK tank. If Blood is going to be the dedicated tree, it’s going to need an AOE Snap Aggro ability, you know … like Howling Blast. I’d certainly trade Dancing Rune Weapon for it… But we’ll see, I’m trying not to go nuts with the possibilities, but I really think there’s a definite cause for excitement, the class is getting overhauled and I think the focus of specific trees is actually going to be a good thing.
