If my experience is anything to go by, crowd control has gone the way of the dinosaur. And I have to say, as dps with limited options, this makes me do a jig. But as a healer with less than impeccable reactions and a spiky connection, it gives me the willies.
What's going on? In BC, you couldn't get a pug without two solid cc options. Wasn't that the reason Blizzard buffed roots and repentence, introduced hex? Now you run through heroics and you'll be hard pressed to even spot a sheep or trap.
Do mobs hit for less now? Can tanks hold that much more threat?
To be fair, the tanks don't seem to mind, although the rare feral drood I've seen struggles more than most on group pulls. Swipe's great as long as the mobs all line up nicely in front of you. And how often does that happen?
Still, I quite liked crowd control. It was an added dimension to the dps role and it made life easier for the healer.
I guess it would take a substantial increase in trash difficulty or a huge nerf to tanking to change things now so it looks like we're stuck with it. But it makes me a little sentimental. Am I the only one pining for the old oh-shit-a-five-mob-pull-we're-all-doomed days?
6 comments:
At the moment the state of play from my point of view is that tank threat is through the roof. So much to the point an averagely geared tank can go in and take a beating on trash and emerge the other side intact with the skills of a good healer.
From a healers point of view on most trashs packs the tank should be the only one taking damage so it's stand and cast 14K gheals! A Naxx geared tank in a heroic and you are looking at POM + renew and the odd flash heal (I heal heroics shadow specced the odd time and thats the extent of it).
Another interesting point is that AOE healing has also become the norm, you can spot the n00b healer by looking at who dumped 70% of their mana pool on a trash pack by needlessly spamming AOE heals.
With future patches nerfing CoHaxx and Wild Growth you will see less chain pulling and AOE tactics in raid environments especially when mobs themselves have AOE abilities. As for 5 man's I cannot see CC ever coming back in as people will outgear them instances horribly. I personally like this as i despise heroics something wicked :P
My alt is a tankadin who has maintanked 10-man Naxx once. I can say that mobs hit about as hard as they did in TBC relative to average tank healthpool. In heroic underbog I got hit for ~4k unblocked on 16k hp, in stratholme I'm hit for ~6-8k unblocked on 28k hp. While CC'ing would probably make my healers life a lot easier it will also make the run a lot longer with me having tons of mana problems from not getting enough back from blessing of sanctuary or spiritual attunement. Also, if you have a pack of 3 mobs and one get CC'd then that pretty much doubles the time it takes to kill the pack, possibly more when people can't use aoe freely.
Tanks have a lot of "oh shit" buttons nowadays and I can survive for quite a long time against many mobs with little to no heals if I use them all. I'd say in general trash is much bigger problem than most bosses in terms of damage done.
In terms of threat, there is zero problems with that. Shield+hammer gives me roughly 30k threat on three mobs, shieldslam hits for roughly 10k threat every 6s. I've yet to see people pulling from me, even some crazy shaman doing 4k dps on 5-mans couldn't out-threat my then lowbie tankadin when I wasn't abusing threat-increasing bugs.
Sure, having to use CC would add more interesting stuff to the game but for now I prefer being able to complete almost any heroic in under 30 minutes :)
As a tanking bear, I have to agree they don't all line up nicely. And with this new tendency of dps to just lay in before I even touch the mob, much less all of them, it can be frustrating. My hubby gives me grief for "wiggling" around too much when he has healing duty, but if that's what it takes to get swipe to hit them all, that's what I am going to do.
you can always choose to use CC. No one says you have to AOE everything.
I guess it depends on the group. I'm running in heroics with 2 DKs, 2 hunters, and a disc priest. Do we have to trap? No. Most of the time we death and decay/disease dot/volley everything. But we like to trap, so in certain instances we trap almost every pull. (I <3 freezing arrow)
As far as the subject of your previous post, I'm glad to hear you're enjoying disc. My buddy switched from his druid to disc priest and loves it. As for me...well, my priest is only level 41, so he's staying shadow for now.
As a former moonkin and elemental shaman that could never get in a heroic magisters group because I didn't have CC.. I'm glad it's not mandatory anymore. I agree that there was no reason to buff the CC and then kill it's purpose altogether but I do enjoy knowing that I just need to kill things to have a spot in the group.
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