The View From Down Here

My.. uh.. Shield is like a Shield of Steel!

Finally, the Reliquary of the Lost (yes, that’s its name. No idea who came up with “Reliquary of Souls” but whoever they are, they were wrong. OK, pedantry out of the way).  It’s an encounter which places unique demands on pretty much the entire raid, and is a lot of fun. Not that I’ve seen phase 3 of the encounter yet – having had our first two or three serious goes at it yesterday, we got health down to 13% on phase 2, and probably would have got further if people were able to stop interrupting Deaden.

The encounter, however, brings a lot to the fore, in particular with respect to what’s coming up in the not too distant future with respect to Shield Block and Block Value. At the moment shield block is twice every few seconds, and blocks a small amount of damage. It’s changing to once every 20s (at most) and blocking a lot more. This is important for Reliquary, because for the first phase (2 million damage or so) you get no healing, apart from Last Stand (if you think that counts – it definitely helps). With the incoming changes to block value (you get 250% of block value from strength compared to TBC), suddenly if you have a high block value you’ll take loads less damage from every blocked hit, even if you can’t rely on the blocks happening as often. The entire first phase will suddenly become so much easier.

And it’s here that a thought occurs. What we currently call “passive uncrushable” will be hugely desirable for tanks in Wrath of the Lich King. Every block will block a huge chunk of damage, even more so given the itemization of warrior gear in the expansion toward Strength. I’ll coin a term now – passive defense. As your passive defense (ie what we used to call block plus parry plus dodge plus miss) tends toward 102.4%, the amount of damage you take will fall off rapidly. I won’t go so far as to say that every unblocked attack will have the effect of a crushing blow today, but a slightly lesser version perhaps. Effectively the crushing blows have been removed from the combat table by making every blow crush. Ouch.

And in case you were wondering, yes, all bosses including WoW classic and TBC will lose their ability to crush too – the mechanic is being changed so that only adversaries 4 levels above or more can crush. Bosses are fixed at 3 levels.

One last thing – Blizz, if you’re listening, can I please have a new shield that doesn’t look just like my old one?