Friday, March 6, 2009

Crushing blows for tanks back in 3.1?

I was taking a look over at MMO champion this morning before coming to work and noticed a little blurb on crushing blows. It spoke of a "new" kind of crushing blow. Obviously they can't make it completly random like they did before if they do decide to bring crushing blows back. The shield wall ability has been changed since then, and Warrior tanks would be at a severe disadvantage considering all of the cooldowns other tanking classes have to combat these (as well as higher health pools for Druid and DK tanks).

The way it sounds is that it would be more of announced type event (possibly thru raid warning) that would have you use one of your defensive cooldowns. I really do not understand this line of thinking at all. The reason crushing blows were deadly in BC is that they were not announced. If you are going to announce the crushing blow, what is the point of it? It becomes just another boss ability that you have to plan for.

The last paragraph may have sounded like I want crushing blows back. I don't. It was annoying having to spam shield block every single time it was up. It was also irritating that Paladins were able to do the same thing but with a lot more charges on it and basically 100 percent uptime.

I really do not see any reason to bring crushing blows back. If they do in fact come back, we may very well see the hard encounter that everyone was whining about. Only instead of tanking skill, they will take gear. Gear because a higer health pool means less likely to get insta-gibbed by a boss with back to back crushing blows after an unlucky parry. Remeber Prince in Karazhan when you got there in blues and a few epics? Those phase two crushing blows were lethal. Once you geared past it, it was not nearly so bad.

If they really want people to bring the player, they should not bring back crushing blows. It is a mechanic of days past and needs to stay in the days in the days of no thunderclap in defensive stance. Leave crushing blows in the graveyard where they belong.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

They were referring to large amounts of incoming damage, like Sartharion's breath on 3 drake attempts, specifically regarding DK's current advantages concerning mitigating those.

Unknown said...

^What baseball said.

They shifed the spike damage away from a 15% chance on melee swing, to specific abilities that can have their frequency controlled, and be predicted/announced.

The problem being, these abilities often are completely coverable by a DK tank's own personal cooldowns.

Darraxus said...

Yeah, I dont mind them being actual abilities, I have just never been a fan of the whole random crush thing. The article I read was fairly vague, so thanks for the insight.