Bring back fun trinkets in Cata!

(read more here)

I as a tank no longer feel like a tank, I feel like someone who just DPSes from in front of a boss instead of behind. Here is why (thanks kaz):

Our survival is rarely within our control, outside of standing out of stuff, and blowing our cooldowns on scripted fights, survival is all in the hands of our healers,

THIS needs to go. So in the comments either leave your thoughts on this idea or create your own idea on how to give tanks more "tank" buttons as opposed to "DPS threat only" buttons. While it is agreed this is a problem, where is the balance between having to many situational buttons (see below), avoiding the old shield block "spammy" scenario, and just making the 4 tanks carbon copies of each other (which actually may not be a bad thing, again see below).

Trinkets used to be a key part of tanking, especially during the days of spammed shield block, no barkskin in forms, and no last stand for druids, trinkets were one of the only real cooldowns we had.

I am sure this is something we can all agree on, trinkets with on use effects are being wasted in LK, especially avoidance trinkets. Back in BC, when you hit the use on Moroe's, you felt like a god, a true 15% dodge was so good for locking in kills when healers were on fumes and you were out of everything else. If blizzard wants to go the route of making healers choose between regen/haste/crit, and make tank average damage taken matter for healer mana, than things like trinkets are going to be a big part of that. Choosing an avoidance trinket over a stam trinket in today's game is just unjustifiable right now, and avoidance clickies are completely wasted making things like the 25 TOC trinket use so good. A trinket that is supposed to give me 10% dodge on use is giving me one, MAYBE two percent.

I propose remove rating from "on-use" effects on trinkets and make them straight %, thus giving the user the full effect from it and not the DRed value which is next to nothing right now, to make gearing more interesting. Older trinkets will still be kept in check by passive stats THAT ARE rating still for avoidance or stam or armor. Personally I have a love/hate relationship when I think that a drop from the first instance, a 10 man even, was still the best trinket in the game even on the last boss of the expansion. Love it because it proves that iLvl =/= best which in LK the only thing that matters for tanks is iLVL, but hate it because if it never drops you are left at such a huge disadvantage.

So hopefully blizzard can improve on trinkets in Cata because in LK they are just another armor piece that you pick whichever has the most stam or armor. And hopefully interesting effects can trump the iLvl=better mentality that LK has forced us into.

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After talking about this on tankspot for a bit I realized there is something I failed to consider, I am a druid, we hardly have anything to push, but some warriors already feel like they have to many situational abilities that another one would just be problematic, things like spell reflect, disarm, intim shout, etc that druids do not have equivalents of. After discussing it a bit I realized he was right, but we both agreed on the fundamental point of my post: tanks, regardless of class, are just people who stand in front of the boss and position it. Tanks are not tanks anymore, we are DPS who DPS from in front and do less damage. Bring some of the fun back to tanking, we as tanks have almost no control over our own survivability anymore and that is not fun. Obviously shield block was way to spammy but tanks want more tank buttons and less DPS buttons. We should be rewarded with increased survivability for pulling off a perfect rotation not simply just helping to kill the boss faster. Earlier I said there is no reward for doing a perfect rotation as a druid because maul is literally so much of our threat we could probably get away with hitting nothing but maul and still never lose agro. Well what if the penalty for not doing a perfect rotation was not a DPS pulling agro but instead we did not gain a bonus to survivability we could have gained by doing a better rotation.

Another thing that was brought up was homogenization. Making 3 than 4 viable tanking classes that operate in such a different manner really was bad for the game. Either go all the way with homogenization or get rid of the other tanking classes. First, it limits the encounter design team by making sure all fights are able to tanked by any of the 4 tanking classes. Things like shield blocking shears or spell reflecting deaden or even shifting stances to break fears are what made warrior tanking fun in the past. Sure it would be unfair to the classes that cannot do those things, but those things made you feel like a tank and not just a person DPSing from in front.

(credit Veneretio for his input on this)

Blue posts:

We do want to make sure that 10 player raids can get all of the major buffs a little easier. You should feel like most reasonable comps (3 warriors and 7 rogues is not what we'd consider reasonable) give you all of the major buffs and several of the more minor ones. There will be a little more consolidation than what we've described so far.

We are scaling back the magnitude of some of the buffs, as we did with Sunder Armor. We want you to feel awesome when you have strong good synergy, but we don't want the buffs to overwhelm say your gear or skill. We're also planning on getting rid of any talent that buffs a buff. Any buff that is earned solely by talent needs to have a selfish component thrown in so that you don't feel like you should respec if someone else with that buff comes along.

Obviously things like Rebirth can't just be handed to out to more classes unless we did something like a second exhaustion mechanic for battle rez or whatever. For now we're going to try the cooldown at 30 min again. In Icecrown's world of limited attempts, a 30 min cooldown likely meant you just cooled your heels until the cooldown was available again. In Cataclysm the hope is sometimes you'll have the benefit available but not every time, which scales back on how much of a game-changer it is.

I really really really what some talent trees are going to look like. At this point it seems like can spend every single point in some trees and not have enough to unlock the 51 point talent. But on a serious note I wonder if this extends to things like Feral Aggression, not having to spend 5 points to buff our debuff to be equal to a paladins would be nice, but at the same time "Any buff that is earned solely by talent needs to have a selfish component thrown" sounds like we are being punished because paladins do not have demo shout as a base ability.

And battle rez at 30 minutes is going to suck, 15 would be the most realistic option.