Zen of Design ;

A lot of people have pointed out to me this movie, which shows a rogue so pimped out on Dodge that he is capable of tanking Gruul’s, taking it down with a 5-man team.  For the non-WoW players, let’s just say that rogues were never meant to tank anything in a raid space.

Gruul’s complexity is that he grows in size every 30 seconds or so, with his attacks dealing more damage.  With normal tanks, this becomes untenable in about 10 grows, but if you’re being hit very rarely, you’ll survive as long as you don’t get one-shot.  Interestingly, they discovered that Gruul will reset to 0 grows after about 20 minutes - meaning the designers likely thought it was ludicrous to imagine someone lasting that long.  Mudflation makes all things possible: see also this Onyxia solo kill.

In related news, the most interesting part of the leaked WotLK notes is that one class appears to be given a severe nerf, whereas all other classes are getting wondrous new toys to play with.  Unfortunately, that class is my own class, the Shadow Priest.  But all is not what it seems.

A core part of the nerf is a reduction in the amount of mana given to the party for each point of damage dealt - previously, this was 5%, but it will be down to 2% once the expansion comes out, meaning the benefits of the shadowpriest is being cut in half.  But there’s a flip side of it.  The general consensus among the math geeks is that the Shadowpriest math breaks once the SP hits 1400 DPS, at which point he gets more mana back than he’s spending.  Which is a really cool threshold to hit (I constantly maintain about 1200 DPS, so I’m nearly there), but it also leaves little room for designers to advance the state of the art.  If you plan on kicking people up a bit at the start of the expansion (as they did last time), you have to figure out how the shadowpriests won’t be broken when the expansion launches.

As an added bonus, Shadowpriests have long cried for AoE attacks, which the powers that be were unwilling to give, I suspect largely for the mana return factor.  This nerf makes those possible.  So effectively the Shadowpriest class appears to be getting a mild reboot for the expansion pack.  I’m still ambivalent on the changes, but I find it interesting to reason through how they got there.