one mage being garbage doesn’t mean there’s an overwhelming problem that needs to be fixed.
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First of all, everyone likes power fantasy. I have a strong suspicion that a lot of the “concerns” about tanking in this thread are based on bad DPS parses where the tank doing tank damage threatened the power fantasy of some DPS players who don’t think they should have to play their class well in order to do more DPS than a tank.
Past that, you and others are using this straw man argument and false dichotomy where tanks either do nothing at all but take damage and hold aggro, or they’re the god classes of the game where it’s more viable to bring 5 tanks than it is to go with the conventional group comp.
I don’t know who you think you’re fooling with that stuff seeing that no one does that.
Right now (most) tanks do OK damage and can survive any content they’re geared for as long as they’re keeping up their active mitigation and using their cooldowns correctly. (Most) tanks also have various different utility toolkits they can use to meaningfully contribute to the success of the group in other ways, also, whether that’s mob control, off-heals, external mitigation for other players, etc.
Considering that tanks have to be the most aware of everything that’s going on, including the pacing of pulls, routes, the capability and performance of the healer and DPS, mob abilities, important group cooldowns, positioning, etc. etc., I don’t think you need to make tanking as a role any more compelling by making them have to worry constantly about whether or not they’re going to fall over flat, any more than they already do.
Last season there was way more tank damage and dangerous trash abilities that made tanks constantly have to worry about their survival, and guess what? It wasn’t that fun, for anyone. Trust me, YOU don’t want to be worried about whether or not your tank is going to die at any given moment.
Making tanks less powerful is not going to make them more fun, it’s only going to make fewer people want to play tanks.
No one is even saying they need to do 100% of the damage of a DPS spec, so don’t even bother with that kind of strawman. Things are relatively balanced and fun in terms of tanking right now, no one is making 5-man tank groups to clear high content, and you would only feel threatened by things like tank damage if you’re bad at DPS.
“Everyone likes power fantasy.”
“If tanks are scaled down no one will play them.”
More people than you think refuse to use cheat codes in console games. The far side of omnipotence in the game is disinterest in the game.
Did you have some kind of episode in which you were deluded into thinking those are contradictory statements, or that you’re making some kind of cogent point? Because you’d be wrong on both counts.
Do you play a tank? I’m guessing not.
The game would be more fun for you if your main spec was less powerful, trust me bro.
Alright, I’m just going to discard your opinion from now on as well seeing that you are either unwilling or incapable of good-faith discussion that follows basic logic. Make as many hyperbolic statements and false dichotomies as you want, you’re just wrong and have no idea what you’re actually talking about.
I don’t like playing with immortals either. Delete tank role or combine them with healers.
This. I skipped out on most of DF S4 (got like 3-4 weeks in), and came back 2 weeks into TWW. Didnt even notice there was a “tank nerf”. Just figured it was growing pains of level increase.
But the forums were in an uproar about tanks being unplayable and being one shot. Coincidentally these claims were coming from lower tier content tanks.
I cant imagine being a 675 tank and wanting everything to feel like a +2. How boring. If im not apologizing to the healer after the run for things getting spicy at times, its not fun.
Tank is only 650 and doing 10s already starting to feel a little stale
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Yeah, tanking got quite a lot easier this season. Less incoming damage and less tank mechanics, think my bdk had his premier doing 10s at 636 ilvl.
Tww season 1 tanking was great, and I hope we can go back to that again. Just not forget to actually give challenges to DPS and healers too, as that season was a bit more lax for those roles.
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TWW S1 healing wise was fine, a bit below DF S1 in terms of having things to heal.
TWW S2 if we were at 639, think healing is quite engaging… but we’re not.
The main problems for all tank specs are threat mechanics. The tank AOE threat isn’t keeping up with the amount of funnel/enormous AOE damage this season. Dev Evoker, Enh, Ret Paladin, Havoc DH (best funnel DPS spec in the game), Unholy DK (Blood Beast and can funnel if they want), Arcane Mage and more.
As Enh main, I consistently ripped aggro from a tank on a big pull. LL/EB on target + 2nd set of wolves + Doom Winds + Primordial Storm (lot of WF/FT procs), I will rip aggro from a tank after 10 seconds of pull. Blizzard needs to do something about the threat mechanics because they’re unsustainable.
I like tanks in MOBAs, but those games are way easier to balance and are more balanced.
The tanks in HotS just have more HP and armor than everyone, they don’t necessarily run around healing and leeching and being mini BDKs, there are great limitations to how much they can sustain, but when they are sustaining they’re basically invincible.
Also MOBAs have better mechanics to deal with mobs in my opinion, like in HotS you can Blind things and that turns off their auto attack damage. Evasion in a MOBA is Evasion, you dodge all auto attacks. Slows are actually extremely punishing.
WoW can’t have these things and hot take, it’s because of E sports. There are no good snares in WoW because they don’t want people kiting everything, they dunno how to get around being kited, something every other game dev has figured out by the way.
WoW has no good stun abilities anymore because that would be too OP in dungeons and Delves, so we can’t have it.
Basically tanks can’t have things because of the games design, it’s not a problem with tanks.
MOBAs literally cater to esports lol…
You hate WOW as if it was cool to do so, without actually thinking about a coherent argument.
MOBA balance is also horrible.
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DPS get to press a Big Button and they get a Big Number. This makes the brain go brrrr with the happy juice. Tanks have a problem where their job is to make the incoming numbers as small as possible, not make the outgoing numbers as big as possible. Additionally, hitting a ‘big tank number’ just means your health doesn’t do as much, whereas screwing up means it does, so it’s hard to connect what the tank is doing to some sort of reward for pressing the button.
I do think some things should be basically maintenance buffs at this point, but I don’t want that to be as widespread as OP. Ironfur is technically a 100% uptime thing, but it can also be ‘burst’ to high stacks for higher mitigation temporarily, so making one stack baseline just makes the second stack now the 100% uptime buff, and so on. So in the case of guardian druid, a little finangling would be needed to figure out how to make the tanking fit in more with this style of doing things.
Personally, I enjoy big self healing, big absorb shields, etc. This is partially why I like blood DK - it’s the tank where I feel like I’m most responsible for my health bar and can visually see the results (health bar go ZWWOOP). Similarly, I enjoy brewmaster because it has a unique stagger mechanic and I get to press a button and visually watch damage go POOF - there’s also a distinct ‘feel’ to it cause that damage was ticking my health very hard and now it’s not, which makes for good feels when I press the button.
Peronally, I think WoW should go in the opposite direction - not homogenizing tanks more, but really leaning into the unique mechanics. There’s so much Blizzard could do with stagger that they haven’t, though we can catch glimpses - there’s a node that heals based on stagger cleansed, for example, and a brew that gives an absorb shield based on stagger cleansed recently.
Disc priest has a node that makes damage absorbed by Power Word: Shield deal damage. Or at least, they did last I checked. Anyway, it is quite nerfed from what it was originally. I’d love to see an absorb shield tank that does utterly lackluster damage with its whacking skills, but deals reflection damage when its absorb takes hits. I think it’s unfortunate and not very good design that tanks are basically less damaging DPS with more beef - their damage output is only loosely connected to their mitigation - though, again, we do see hints of this that I like and wish Blizz expanded more on. The Ironfur change was an interesting one, if a tad flat, where a node was added that let Ironfur deal damage when activated.
Just my take, though. I don’t do super high level M+ or mythic raiding or anything, and my suggestions could easily lead to increased mental load for tanks that certain parts of the playerbase wouldn’t appreciate. Not that Blizz is gonna look at this and go “OH HECK YEAH LET’S DO THAT”, but I can dream >_>
Anyway. OP, you wouldn’t happen to be a FFXIV player, would you? Your description kinda made me think of that game’s tank design, which I despise because I found the tanking there to basically be DPS specs but with less damage, more innate durability you really did nothing much to upkeep, and then there were a generic assortment of big cooldown skills that did extremely, mind-blowingly interesting things like ‘reduces damage taken by 30%’ and that was the extent of it. Some of your suggestions remind me of that kind of design and I really hated it. Others, though, like the Paladin judgement one, I’d be down for. I love group support options and I’ve been taking the paladin node that heals allies for a negligible amount every time the pally uses a holy power spender for ages, plus the miniscule consecration heal HoT for funsies.
I think the active mitigation gameloop is fine in a vacuum, i think more encounter mechanics(not spec abilities like sigils or AMZ) designed where tanks can use their personal mitigation to mitigate for party members could be interesting though.
Mostly theyre just things like the mugzee soak line, but i think iterating on it and having mechanics that are an actual choice between tank cooldown, dps DRs or healer cooldown could be fun (not just always tank eat it cause everyone else gets oneshot if they dont, those feel like tank busters with extra steps).
If theyre bored could also up all their control or support abilities to be on par with pally/dh so every tank has other stuff they can do.
My dh with their grip, sigils, stun, imprison and dispel; ontop of the normal damage and mitigation gameplay, always felt they had something to do besides just be tanky and do damage.
My bear couldnt do much but toss out the occasional cleanse and knockback/disorient adds occasionally, so it was kinda all on the mitigation and damage rotation to keep them interested.
Tanks only have threat problems on pull. After the first few seconds are established, threat is never even remotely a factor.
I’ve said for years now that what Blizzard “should” do is give all tank specs a passive 5 second MASSIVE initial threat gen the FIRST time a target is damaged by a tank and this threat is temporary and vanishes after the first few seconds.
Or ALL tanks need “avengers shield” + sigil of grip type of utility on a 1 min CD…because THAT is what is causing the “threat issues”…in keys we very often need to do a 4+ pack pull which means trying to do piddly amounts of threat to hold off the initial healing aggro trying to round up all those packs are going to burst damage us for and DPS are itching to pop off.
In raid it’s never a problem because raids are already stupid mode easy where the extreme vast majority of them are single target bosses where you can funnel your own damage into and IF some DPS is somehow capable of out threating you in the first place (they aren’t unless they pull before you), you simply taunt and GGEZPZ
Mythic+, as always, is the harder content and the only place tanking has any kind of moderately difficult skill expression demands not only on surviving but in how to effectively round up and hold a bunch of packs initially.
Blizzard already does that. Many fights have some variant of “damage not mitigated goes to the raid” type of checks. Sometimes it is a massive tankbuster and sometimes it is a group soak.
The problem is ANY kind of tank “mitigation” check is actually just a healer problem. Odds are the tank won’t die anyway, because again raids are stupid easy and especially for tanks, but also because it isn’t the tank that is going to heal the group up so however shoddy the tank was, the healer is the one left dealing with it.
And we already had what was called active mitigation checks back in MoP and WoD that actively punished tanks (and raids) if the tank failed…and those were largely done away with because half the tanks, DK and monk, suffered unfairly for it since their AM button was reactive in nature. Blizzard “tried” to fix it by giving us credit for pushing something like marrowrend early…but DKs, shockingly, don’t want to burn 2 runes on refreshing bones when we don’t need to just to pass a mechanic check inherently designed to work with a shield tank at the helm.
Tanking gameplay is already more or less fine as is. Go do a key with a prot warrior or a bear who thinks all their rage is best used on revenge/maul and see how immortal they are…or a DH who think spikes is a waste of a GCD and all souls are meant to be bombs…or a monk who thinks they may actually get the drunken vision/movement effects if they dare ever drink their brews or even a DK who thinks marrowrend is a waste of not only a GCD but 2 runes and heart strikes all the way baybee…those groups aren’t getting past the lower/low mid tiers of keys without a lot of party blood soaking up the floor.
In raids they can actually probably decently get away with it tbh.
This reply is a lot more hostile than the one you’re replying to. They were simply stating their opinion, just as you did over 9 paragraphs in the original post.
“I am neither right or wrong.” Well, yes you are. You’re wrong for this assumption and jumping on this person like you did. I disagreed with your post to begin with, but have also completely lost any respect for your opinion.
Even tanks do 15M DPS on packs, and still lose threats to DPS. Enh, Devoker, Unholy DK, Ret Paladin and more waiting for 5-10 seconds, they would still rip aggro off tanks.
That won’t solve in M+ because many specs have funnels and frequency AoE burst. Enh will just LL/EB on target and try to get a second set of wolves with Doom Winds, then PStorm. Enh will still rip aggro after 10-15 seconds on packs.
Nah i already know about those, they fall under tank buster with extra steps to me.
I mean mechanics that actively target other party members but tanks could physically intervene instead if they choose too.
Like if the tank could stand between the first boss of priory and its lynx maul target to get hit instead when it choose a dps who doesnt have a defensive kinda thing, or the bee-zooka in cinderbrew stopping at them if a tanks steps in instead of it just piercing everyone in a line.
The few times i do tank its usually me at full health fine, watching dps or healers pingpong from damage and not really being able to do anything to help besides focus more on myself and hope thats enough for the healer to pick up any slack. I want to instead have the option to put more of that damage on me and use the mitigation tools i already have to make it less of a burden.
Last time i can really remember doing stuff like that was tol dagor and choosimg to just eat all the last boss shots when all but 1 dps died and it just chain targeted them. Instead of letting it kill them i popped everything to eat 4 stacks of the damage increase. Boss died and we still timed cause the final dps being alive meant he didnt take 20 years for me to solo kill, even if it meant my health was low and my CDs were stretched thin. Something like that, but intentional.
I owe you an apology.
I thought I was on the PVP discussion forum.
Deleting it seems weak, so I ask you to disregard.
My bad.
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Are you afraid of any backlash? Your post was perfectly reasonable.