Community Spotlight: Kalons reply to GC

You did not honestly expect me to pat blizzard on the back without a rant shortly after did you?

We want to get out of the business of needing to offer 2 types of weapon for a single tree of one class, given that we already have to itemize Balance and Resto druids somewhat differently. It is just not our design to make two-handed tanking weapons, and we have attempted to design DKs and druids so that they don't need them.

The classes and spec have grown so divergent that even with Ulduar offering something like 800 items (which to be fair, counts 10 vs. 25 and normal vs. hard) some players still feel like we aren't filling their niche. We don't want to have to offer 1000 or more PvE items in one patch, so we need to handle things at the class level so that there is less of a need for those items.

If you want to focus on tanking as a Feral instead of dps, you should do that mostly through talents, gems, enchants and the jewelry and cloak pieces. We have fit two fairly different roles into the Feral tree and you can even hybridize them to a degree, but we want to stop short of having to itemize the druid as four classes.

Kalon (of thinktank) said it best in a reply that echoed my thoughts almost exactly:

And that would have been a fine design decision at the start of WotLK.

But then you came out with the Enraged Feral Staff.
And staff of shrouded mysteries.
And Origin of Nightmares.
And if that weren't enough, you came out with a tanking staff with armor from the Argent Crusade vendors.

I understand that your vision is that you don't want DK and druid tanking weapons. What I don't understand is why you keep undercutting your vision. It's this duplicity that is problematic (though hardly surprising). It's that duplicity that causes the quality of life issue that druids aren't happy about.

Simple fact is blizzard you already opened the door, you thought about putting in 2 DK blacksmithing tanking weapons, AND YOU VERY VERY SWIFTLY removed them before they ever went live. If this was truly your design philosophy than none of the current weapons in game would have armor.

If you do not remove the armor from Origin of Nightmares then it will continue to be the best tanking weapon well into the next instance, you simply cannot compare with 700 armor unless you have the levels of agi that exist on the currently bugged pvp weapons.

Also, @ kalon, have you run the numbers on the pvp weapons with their new agi levels? Is the 1850 one still better than OoN ?