Classes in this game should be getting more diverse, instead they aer converging.

We get a lot of "everyone is getting the same abilities" and we also get a lot of "why do my abilities play into strengths I already have instead of covering my weaknesses?"

It's okay to have strengths and weaknesses and it's okay to have roles and niches. We just don't want any of those to be too extreme. Some players think they are too extreme and some think they're not extreme enough, which probably means we're somewhere in the middle and thus pretty close to our target overall.

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Yes this preview isn't so much about fixing core issues with the paladin

This is an example of something I said just above. For many players "fix my core issues" means "I don't have to have weaknesses."

Pitting your strengths against another's weaknesses are one of the things that marks a good player. Understanding your own weaknesses and trying to play around them is another.

But this isn't even about that. This is about AoE tanking. Ghostcrawler said they were going to scale back the aoe capabilities so that it would be more like Warriors and Naxx. I want to know what happened to that goal.

That's still the goal. I guess I'm unclear of what part of the paladin preview you took to mean that we're keeping the same or even enhancing the ability for paladins to AE tank.

We tried to stay away from numbers as much as possible in the previews, except to give you a vague sense of the intent for some of the new abilities in terms of whether something has a short cooldown or a long cooldown.

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That new instant attack for prot paladins that does aoe damage and blind? And to be blunt, sounds superior to heroic leap for aoe tanking in every capacity?

That attack could have a 10 min cooldown. I'm pretty sure we didn't specify in the preview, so I'm not sure how you'd decide it's better or worse in any situation. Maybe it has a 5 sec cooldown but we nerfed the threat generation from Holy damage so severely that paladins are utterly dependent on it now. I just don't think we gave you the information necessary to draw that conclusion, and this is partially why we didn't provide that information. :)

Any elaboration on how you intend to separate the single-target and AoE tanking niches? I'd be happy with even vague generalizations, though I would understand if you preferred to avoid saying anything that might get used as a forum bludgeon later.

No, it's not really that. We just have a couple of different avenues we're exploring and we didn't want to have say models A, B and C in different large paragraphs. The ideas just need a little more time to bake.

And I'm not entirely sure how you're using "niches" but I am talking about wanting Prot paladins to use slightly different rotations against single targets than against groups. The addition of Crusader Strike (and maybe Holy Shock?) alone start to provide that.

GC said AOE threat being normalized between tanks > Previews don't make this extremely clear > GC also said the previews are just previews > there must be more coming down the line to make the first two observations align!

Ding. Ding.

I would speculate that this is an effect of perception. DKs felt / were perceived as weak for quite a time during the TOC era, which translates into people moving away from playing their DKs and into something else.

I think perception is huge in these matters, much greater than most players give it credit. WoW players generally really, really hate to be wrong. What I mean is, they don't want to think that they made a bad choice in their character class, their gearing or their talent choice. In WoW it's somehow less embarrassing to fail at something than it is to be caught being wrong.

"You wiped on heroic Saurfang? Yeah he can be hard. You had a paladin healing the raid? What, are you crazy? I don't care if it worked for you. It's just wrong. Ugh, and look at your glyphs." As a result, rather than basing decisions on noticing empirically whether something does or does not make a difference, many players would much rather someone tell them the right or wrong way to do something.

So we see the level 40 mage that I saw in Dalaran last night, spamming trade chat asking whether Fire or Arcane does more damage. (Answer: Dude, it doesn't matter if you're level 40 and probably doesn't matter if you're level 85 unless you're going into a really tough Arena match or talking about heroic raid bosses.)

I think players switch tanks sometimes when they think the forums are telling them that they're using the weakest main tank. "Well, I want to plan for success, so clearly I need a different tank," even when in reality that choice probably affects their chance for success very little. Switching tanks might give them a 3% greater chance of success. Not standing in fires might give them a 30% greater chance of success.

Likewise, I think players sometimes drift off to an alt when their class or spec gets nerfed, just because it sucks to get nerfed and they feel somehow less potent knowing that they were nerfed, even if the effect was imperceptible for them.

Perception.

The only logical reason then to bring about tank representation balance (assuming that this should be the goal of Blizzard) is to disproportionately make DK tanking attractive over Warriors and Paladins.

It's not a goal for us. There are a lot of things that can affect representation. Balance is definitely one, but as I mentioned above so is perception, and then you have tradition, play style (what's fun to play), utility when not tanking (including healing, but also dps and even PvP) and even art. It's complicated.

Now if you see a sudden shift in populations, then there might be something happening that you need to pay attention to. Something happened to upset the inertia and drive player behaviors in a certain way. It could be a lot of things. It could be perception. But it could be an actual survival of the fittest deal where raids using one class struggle and those using another class succeed, so gradually you see the latter increase over time. It's hard to separate out all of the various causes for behavior like that, but it's probably good to take notice when they do.

Now that you've gotten all of that vitriol and panic out of your system Orokusaki, feel free to come back when you're ready to have some sort of sensible discussion. If this is the manner you feel to be most effective for voicing your concerns, I can confirm that reading your posts will be low on our priority list.

DONT MAKE ME A PET CLASS..

Granted. You will not be given a pet.

Please reread my previous post in which I explain that this is not a pet, there is no pet bar, and it's life is but a temporary thing while it aids you.

There also seems to be some confusion about Critical Healing Effect which simply means a critical heal can do more than 150%. (Think of talents like Ruin for warlocks.) We wanted to keep some of the feel of Holy paladins getting big critical heals and caring about crit in general. This mechanic wouldn't really have worked in Wrath of the Lich King because big crits just translated into overhealing. In Cataclysm that shouldn't be the case.

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