Blue Posts: War Banner, PvP tanks, MoP press tour

We made it a banner for a couple of reasons.

We thought the demoralizing and mocking mechanics were more useful if the warrior could place them somewhere else. For example, imagine a warrior (and not just a tank) using the Mocking Banner to direct incoming adds over to where the tank is currently standing. Now Skull Banner doesn't strictly have to be a banner, since the warrior will probably want to benefit from it most of the time, but we left it as a banner for one pretty cool reason: since the banner is an ally, you can Intervene to it (!). That opens up some cool gameplay options.

Ultimately, we wanted to try and expand the design potential for warriors a bit. Increasingly, it seemed that any new ability had to be another type of movement, a weapon strike, or shout, or it wouldn't feel like a warrior ability. We wanted to try something new, and we're hoping that warriors will give them a shot once we're in beta and let us know how it feels.

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I know a lot of you are concerned about the 30% crit increase from the Skull Banner.

It's a number we're iterating on, and the ability isn't even finalized yet. Our hope is that the duration is short enough that it doesn't have the impact of say Bloodlust and the radius is small enough that it might be used to hit melee only. Another variation we're trying is a 10% crit group buff, but and a 20 or 30% buff to the warrior, so that it doesn't feel anemic to the warrior but doesn't feel mandatory for the group.


Yep. The banner can be targeted and killed, but it has about 33% of the warrior's health, so it can't be easily "stomped" as a totem would be, and may not be worth attacking at all, given how long banner durations are.

Anyway, we don't want banners to feel like totems. Perhaps categorizing "anything I place in the world" as a totem is a slightly narrow perspective?

We've always wanted players to PvP as tank specs, and that can be a lot of fun, but tank spec PvP should be effective via an array of defensive and control abilities, not because of damage-dealing potential. It is our design intent that, overall, tanks have to sacrifice some DPS in order to make use of all their other strengths.

For comparison, many players would cry foul if healing specs did as much or more damage than DPS specs in PvP, and we want the same situation for tanks. In Battlegrounds, tanks often carve out a very interesting role, such as running the flag, or teaming up with a healer and capturing a node, or tanking an NPC. In Arenas, it is much harder to provide tanks with a compelling role, since the typical arena match often boils down to which team better executes a strategy of focusing fire on enemies. A tank is ultimately a target that nobody wants to focus down, who also can't contribute as much to focusing down others.

The press event occurs over several days. This allows us to schedule developer interviews (with press and fansites) as well as give everyone we invite the time to get on our demo stations, talk with the developers, and (more importantly) process the information they learn so they can post it in a way that they are happy with. While we could just tell people they're free to start posting as soon as they get in and see things, it puts pressure on them to do just that, and many media outlets appreciate having some time to craft their stories. It also makes it unfair to other media outlets and fansites that aren't scheduled to attend the event until the second or third day.

In short, it's not as easy as opening the doors and saying, "Here you go everyone!" These events take a lot of planning not only for us, but for those we invite to attend, and we want to make sure that we give everyone the best opportunity possible to get everything they can out of the event.