How is the tank balance for M+ this season? I’m looking to get back into M+ and don’t want to start tanking again and end up with a gimped spec. I enjoyed all tank specs last time I tanked M+.
Same as last tier, the tank balance is very good unless you are pushing for top 100 world.
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So pushing 17-19 no spec/specs pull ahead drastically? I didn’t do M+ last season so I’m lost
No. In reality there will be greater representation because people follow the top players but as far as actual in game performance, in that range everything is very equal in contributing to your success. This goes for healers and DPS in this range of keys. Play what you love to play!
It’s frustrating that a lot of the powers are based on max health %, which means monks just benefit less from them. 20% of 60k HP is not the same as 20% of 85k HP (and our stagger naturally eats most of the shield anyway)
Also, siegebreaker’s stand. Monks are designed for high mobility and soft kiting packs. This power gives a huge damage bonus for standing still which is not as much of a problem for bulkier tanks.
When you get 3 stacks of SBS, you get 10% increased armor. We wear leather. This simply doesn’t give us the same benefit it gives other tanks.
Same with stygian King’s Barbs: when hit you deal 2% of your current HP in damage. We have less HP overall. When these are HP% based, monks just benefit less.
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Im not familiar with monk tanks and their synergy with the anima powers, however the world#1 tank is currently a monk, so it would be safe to assume that the anima powers are not the determining factor in timing keys as a brewmaster monk in the mid range (and apparently at the very top as well).
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No, it just means we have less of a pool of powers to choose form, and some of them are noob traps for new players that don’t understand how much less HP we have than other tanks. The world 1 might be a monk, but reading these powers, you can tell they were not designed with monks in mind.
Like, brew monks got absolutely 0 changes between 9.0 and 9.1 besides a single pvp talent nobody uses. Kinda feels like the person who was supposed to be developing our class the whole time was getting drunk, playing Call of Duty and crawling through cubicles…
And like… I am kinda worried about powers like SBS giving the wrong message to inexperienced monk tanks. Most of 9.0 we had a lot of baby brews coming to the forums like “Everything hits so hard, what am I doing wrong?” because they’re not using their mobility. Counterintuitive, y’know? Teaches bad form.
All classes and specs can do 20s. I’m a Paladin Tank that the community has labeled as “paper”, but already timing 17s while being 20 ilvls under max for the tier. Meanwhile face tanking with minimal movement.
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Have you messed around with seraphim at all?
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Naw, I’ve only ever used Divine Purpose. I can see Seraphim working well though with a 45 second cd.
I’ve been playing with it for weeks and I prefer it. Just wondering.
Might be worth checking out, but I honestly like having so little buttons to press haha. Definitely keeping Final Stand though, I use that in pre-planned pulls often.
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I love final stand for pugging. Especially when I’m not sure the pulls will go the way I see them in my head. Necrotic and raging or other big tank affixes and it’s a great time to use sacrifice on the weaker classes (like hpriest)
It’s not much better for paladins with the 2nd lowest HP pool. Tanking feels better this patch than last patch in general after multiple rounds of dungeon nerfs and buffs. I think the powers from the new affix go a very long way to assist tanks. The absorb shield and 5% verse / 40% damage reduction on pull go a very long way. It probably could use some additional fine tuning imo.
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I mean this is arguing an absolutely moot point. We were seeing every tank do +15s with ease around 230 itemlevel or less. BrM has the second highest representation right now with +20 keys, and they’re still mostly undergeared. Prot Paladin in their under geared state is the third most popular tanks right now in +15 ranges, and third most popular tank overall despite having the strongest healing spec in the game (most groups won’t run double paladin).
I mean to the point you’re both kinda sorta wrong with how SKB works, it works off the max health per the swing that you’re on. Even is a more realistic situation as a blood DK (most HP on a tank), I’m taking swings that are rapidly lowering my own health pool to heal them up. You might only have 60k HP compared to my 85k, but when 3 heavy swings drop my from 85k down to 45k, then 20k inbetween DS heals I’m barely getting more benefit than when you’re going from 60k to 50k to 40k because of how stagger works.
Which, by the way. I’m a blood DK. I do 20% less damage than BrM, and 50% less damage than kyrian prot right out of the gate. I might scale MARGINALLY better, but it’s not a huge deal. To even which point, tanks are STILL very well balanced.
Unfortunately you’re on of the more bulky tanks, and most tanks are/were kiting at high stacks of necrotic this week or during raging when they’re cooldowns drop. S2 mobs hit way less hard.
The grass isn’t greener for other tanks this season, it’s extremely balanced until you start getting to the +20 ranges, at which point it’s never balanced, and tanks have it way better than healers and especially DPS where they’re way more meta.
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3rd in 15’s atm and 5th in 20’s. Either way it’s a little to early to be looking at representation in 20’s so w/e.
3rd. But again same as before. To early to tell.
And everyone has been trying to argue that Blood should do more damage for a while. Since BFA bloods upfront damage is pretty poor. Playing Blood was no fun before strength of the warden or twilight dev for snap threat in BFA. It felt like skittish at all times until the new systems came in to save the day. I suspect at least somewhat similar issues today. A developer was literally told on stream that the incoming damage buff for BDK was not enough. A trade off being Blood without question does have much better self sustain and require less external healing than the previously 2 mentioned tanks. Some food for thought. If Blood did the damage of a Brew or Prot while having significantly better sustain they become the best tank by a mile in that 15-20 range.
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Honestly, I’m seeing a wide variety of tanks now. So at least there is starting to be a balance of tanks. Certain affixes still completely screw over some tanks, while others can just ignore it completely.
Either way, not a bad time for tanks overall.
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I’m bulkier in a meta where healers HPS are holistically extremely high, and incoming tank damage is drastically reduced relative to S1 values.
But that’s not fully how BDK works. If we were both 220, you’re going to have an easier time surviving than I will in a +15. If we’re both 235, I’m going to have an easier time surviving in a +15. I might be able to push higher keys at the tail end of the season, but add another 10-15 itemlevels where everyone is and the powercreep, and +20’s will be as easy as week 1 and week 2 +15’s.
Most DK’s won’t agree with the delta where BDK is a walking god and how narrow it is to them constantly being in danger, but it just is what it is. But there are other tanks that are just outright having an easier time than us regardless maintaining themselves in 20’s and higher.
And this is even going past the point where the skill floor (note: not ceiling) for BDK is by far the highest. I’m far more punished for missing a DS or misjudging the damage roll on an incoming attack than other tanks are. I’m far more cooldown dependent, and misusing them is far more likely that I will die compared to others.
I know exactly how BDK works. I played a BDK all last expansion up to 22 keys in S4. More than 300 keys at 15+ and 50 keys above 20 in S4. Admittedly things were a bit broken with stacking vers amps making things fairly easy. While I’m sure there are things that are different now, as long as you were not in danger of being 1 shot you could survive constant health damage spikes taking you from 100% to 20%. Your life was in your own hands and you needed 0 external healing outside of an occasional healer cooldown. From what I can tell things are not much different this expansion once you get some gear.
Also the highest key ran is by a BDK atm. They are doing just fine. The biggest issue you ran into as a BDK is on pull or the damage scaling becoming so high that you are outright getting 1 shot.
Healers I played with took a while adjusting. After they realized I needed literally 0 healing they stopped getting a heart attack on every pull. It’s what you signed up for by playing a DK. This is nothing new.
Representation is a hard thing to correlate because certain classes/specs are always going to be popular through innate appeal. Paladins have always been one of the more popular tank classes as far as I can remember since the initial changes in Burning Crusade - especially Horde side with Blood Elves. That has remained true through waves of balance. By contrast, Blizzard could make Bears and Cats overpowered as all hell, and the popularity for those specs would still be fairly limited.