Getting the Touchdown

So the developer chat on twitter was the other day. There's a few relevant questions that caught my eye, but this was the biggest one:

Q. Why is it tanking or healing that makes an encounter hard or easy? There isn't much other than high dps to consider for damage dealers.
A. There are berserk timers that usually rest on the shoulders of the dps to beat. There are adds that need to be burned down, etc. Tanking and healing aren't that hard on Deathbringer IMO (for example). Managing the adds is the key.

Aside from the fact that healing can actually be pretty brutal on the fight and looks like it'll be terrible on heroic, the question itself overlooks an important fact about healing and tanking intensive fights: It's up to the DPS to bring the encounter to a conclusion before they become unmanageable. Heroic Anub'arak is a stressful fight for healers in phase 3, but the onus is entirely on the DPS to burn the boss's health before healers just run out of options. Vezax was another fight that stressed healers, but DPS was the limiting factor. Phase 3 of yogg-0 is the biggest strain your tanks are likely to see in current content, but it's a DPS check to beat that fourth beacon.

Any sports team consists of several positions with distinct roles. A game can stress different positions differently depending on who you're facing, but it still comes to one position to take the ball across the goal, and in raiding, that position is the DPS. Maybe it doesn't feel so stressful because the stress is always there - even when fight design removes it, we put it back there ourselves, taking the opportunity to push ourselves to the highest numbers we can get. Healing and tanking sees radial swings from fight to fight, but DPS always has a red bar to cut through.

We'll see what Valithria does to that design, though. More twitter clips in the break.

Q. You mentioned pet scaling being added for patch 3.3 but due to time constraints, was delayed. Will this be in the next patch?
A. We'll try to do what we can. Technically it's just more challenging than you might think. For Cataclysm, we have on our list that 100% of stats scale. If they don't then certain stats just won't be as valuable for pet classes. At the very least, we can do stuff like convert your X into damage for the pet so every stat is valuable. Getting everyone to scale with every stat better is a major goal for the class team for Cataclysm.

Not much to say, but it's the first real word since Blizzcon on this. I expected this all the way back during Blizzcon, the balance ramifications of pet crit and haste scaling would be immense. It just makes more sense for them to be left for the big overhaul that marks every expansion.

An interesting side note, a lot of people were excited for pet crit scaling because of empowered imp... It's actually not a net gain. 30% is a typical pet scale transfer - so let's say your imp gets 30% of your crit. Your crit goes up to 1%, and you get 0.3% more empowered imp procs, but 1% more of the procs you get would have crit anyway. Meaning you're actually getting less effective crit from empowered imp than you were before increasing your crit. Now haste... that's another one altogether, and there's some real potential for runaway scaling there.

Q. You added Armor->Strength talents to discourage Plate from wanting DPS leather. Are there any plans to stop non-clothies from wanting Cloth?
A. Yes, we do have some plans.

I've never been a HANDS OFF MY CLOTH person, I know the itemization craphole that elemental, balance, and sometimes even healers are handed. Cloth makes an abundant and diverse pool to pull spellpower gear from, and the difference in armor doesn't matter to any class that actually uses spellpower anyway. Some incentive to stay in your armor class has honestly been needed for quite a while, particularly now that the random heroic loot system makes it so difficult to get lower class armor.