A few ideas about the current tank meta, Hard enrages, stacking str gear, etc.

[Bashum]

Hello all, I had a few ideas pop into my head, and I was wondering what everyone else thought.

Currently as we all know, tanks are expected to stack STR accessories for the harder fights, and push DPS, otherwise run the risk of running into a hard enrage, and not meeting dps checks.

What I would like to see, is far less hard enrages, and more soft enrages in raid encounters if you will. For some reason, I have always detested the hard enrage mechanic. It really seems like a lame way to say "sorry, you've played perfectly up until this point, but you've failed the gear/dps check, and not beaten this fight the exact way we've intended."

This especially puts the hurt on the Paladin, as they currently have no real way of matching the dps of the other two tanks.

Rather than a hard enrage mechanic, if at say, 12 minutes, the boss begins gaining a 10% stacking damage buff every 30 seconds, or every minute after that, you may well see a case where a raid that has optimized for survivability, with a bit less dps, may still be able to complete the encounter. On the flipside, your tanks could still gear for dps, and beat the encounter before the soft enrage begins. This just offers more options on how to play.

I know the developers have indicated they want to change the damage formula in some way, many of us theorize that it will somehow base your damage partially on your Vitality. Thematically this doesn't really make sense to me, and seems like a bandaid fix.

Instead of that, how about the following:

War: Fell cleave potency reduced slightly. However, additional potency is added based on the amount of health you are currently missing. Perhaps up to a cap of 50%. So fell cleave would hit the hardest when you are at 50% health. Thematically this just seems to fall in line with the overall vision for the warrior, as a facetanking berserker, who just takes the hits and keeps dishing out the pain.

This would mean that a warrior with 16,000 base hps, who is missing half of their health would do less damage with fell cleave than a 24,000 hp warrior also missing half of their health.

Keep in mind, these are just rough ideas, the actual formula would need to be worked out based on what theoretical max health is achievable with current gear.

DRK: I'd love to see their high damage ability also cost them their own health. In this vein, you would not want to avoid vitality, as you need enough to safely use this ability without dying. It would need to do enough damage to be worth stacking up the VIT to safely use it.

PLD: keep them as the lowest damage, but make them the highest mitigation, hardest to kill tank. When this is paired with the idea of a soft enrage, rather than a hard enrage, a paladin becomes a perfectly viable option, as he would likely be the only tank able to survive several minutes into a soft enrage mechanic, and complete the fight.

Thoughts?