Representation is a poor indicator of balance. The top will take every advantage they can find (chaos brand included) and the 15-20 tier balance doesn’t matter (because they can all complete the content pretty easily). If you watch the top tanks, most of them gravitate toward a certain strategy and that determines the most common tank.
Then there’s Tomoboar, who plays bear at equal levels and uses completely different strategies. He’s the only one playing bear at the top in most tiers. That doesn’t mean bear is weak.
I never said that popularity meant balance. Which is supported by the example you just gave. What I am saying, is that more tanks are starting to become popular again and that’s a good thing.
That is a surprising statement to me… that the community would have that outlook on prot pallies.
The tank I normally run with (and have for quite some time) is anything but. The constant interrupts via Holy Shield near trivialize a lot of mechanics and the healing power is insane. He’s also pretty tanky… requiring minimal babysitting. I just throw hots up and can do a bit of kitty weaving. I heal in M+ but in raid I’m the OT (bear) and even popping CDs I can’t match his threat.
I think Paladins are pretty solid. So maybe that’s one of those perception things mentioned above?
Druids pair excellently with prot paladins. That said, I think the “paper” meme comes from people not understanding how paladins work. Most healers don’t understand dks will cover their spikes, even fewer know that paladin spikes are going to be covered by the paladin.
I’ve spent longer than I’d like waiting to use my free WoG because I’m being constantly over healed. My least favorite healer is the one that thinks 80% is an emergency.
There is nothing quite like watching a paladin WoG on every spike or a Druid wasting their swiftmends when I’m sitting at 80+ RP and claiming “you’re weak”, meanwhile I’m sitting at 2k HPS and around 6-7k HPS overheal.
With a good healer, I have 3-4.5k hps. With a bad healer, I have 1.2k. I’m not trying to say paladin is as dramatic as dk, but we’re in the same school.
There’s a lot of plaladin tanks in the fish bowl. It’s approachable and an easy entry into tanking. With a fish tank this big, there will also be a lot of unskilled players that I’m sure reinforces the paper meme. Some of the players I run with pugged another paladin tank when I wasn’t available and he was unable to do any multipulls and had difficulty staying alive. Paladin tanks have a high skill curve once they push to higher keys.
This is a good point, I tend to see that in good groups, the healers HPS struggles a lot and ours as prot pal shoots up to 2.5k or more.
Their 3-5k dps as heals is obviously more worthy than the healing at that stage.
For the time being , all tanks are very capable of pushing somewhere to like 20 now with the average gear levels of people. Higher keys will depend more on how good the DPS are rather than the tank right now. Paladins are in an OK spot then again I haven’t touched 19+ keys yet, but things are not hitting hard in 18s even fortified.
Except Halls. Fk that place. Wicked bolt Casters need to lay down and rot.
nobody care about tank balance so top streamer / WoW influencer will spend 2 week talking about night fae boomkin VS venthyr boomkin while brushing off tank issues.
Everybody will claim that tank are mostly balanced but good luck pugging your way past 20s on anything other than druid or VDH.
Also, people still don’t understand that your BDK need 3-5 GCD to build up threat as opposed to a VDH who can pre-cast kyrian sigil for a massive burst, or people just don’t know that druid god-mode is a 3 minute cooldown, not a all-the-time thing.
And as usual, DPS can’t be bothered to interrupt a caster that’s out of the pack because that would cut down on their AoE damage… nevermind if you need to spend an extra 30 second after the pull to kill that single caster who did not get cleaved with the other.
we don’t have corruption pushing us to ridiculous haste values paired with vers allowing us to death strike for half our health every 3-4 second all the time… when venthyr mist fade, runic power generation is kind of low ( will it change at the end of the expac? probably. but we’re in S2 for now).
Also, BDK snap threat suck big time… an issue that people don’T seem to understand since they got used to S1 VDH ridiculous snap threat.
Also the highest key ran is by a BDK atm.
pushing team are still raiding. see the previous S1 champ Nerfclap’s team.
And it has since last expansion*. I did not disagree there. Not sure what you are trying to argue.
It was mostly vers stacking. However even before S4 they were fairly self sufficient. S1 BFA you were borderline a god on big pulls due to bonestorm having no cap. Somehow we misremember. Will of the necropolis and armor was nerfed. Bonestorm had a cap on it’s healing as it was impossible to die unless you got 1 shot while it was up on large pulls. Even after they were not in a horrible spot with the exception of snap threat being an issue. They needed little to no external healing. Many DK’s ran Strength of the Warden when it came out for snap threat. This is all before S4 corruption stacking.
This is not because of imbalance, it is because of player perception. OPs question was in the mid key range if any tank is more viable then another and the answer is no. If his question was “what is the meta that everyone is going to invite blindly because of what the top players run?” Then there will be a different answer. Quite frankly, if you tank on anything at this point you will have no issues pugging at all as tanks are scarce and the community will always follow the good players over the good class at that role.
You keep referencing nerfclaps team, which is ironically exactly what I’m talking about. Nobody on these forums should make a decision on what they are playing based off of content they will never see. The requirement to time keys at that level vs what you will be doing are night and day. At the very cutting edge there will ALWAYS be a better comp/meta to time these keys because of infinite scaling. This does not reflect in the slightest what is viable in mid range keys.
you know, meta’s don’T arise because someone prefer X transmog over Y transmog.
And nobody pretend survival hunter or mistweavers are balanced just because a handfull of them peak up in the higher keys ( and nobody base balance around content that’s 4-manned)
VDH are meta because of their premier kiting ability and large utiltiy toolkit. snap threat is a bonus.
guardian are meta because they are unkillable gods for 30 second every 3 minute.
pretending BDK-prot pallies are just as balanced is the politically-correct yet factually wrong answer. you’ll work twice as hard to get the same result.
go have fun with your venthyr BDK during this necrotic week. see how it fare VS a kyrian monk, kyrian DH or guardian. See how much harder you have to work to get the same result.
If they were going to make any sort of change to necrotic it should have been that it does not impact self heals. It gimps lower mitigation tanks that rely more heavily on self healing. Only impact healing received from other players. Just my opinion.
From a prot paladin perspective necrotic is not to terrible since most prots are Kyrian with multiple other ways to clear stacks (bubble, bop). You do gain stacks faster though compared to tanks with higher dodge/parry or cd’s that increase those. For those that are Venthyr I still feel for them. Either way if they refuse to delete necrotic from the game I would make it not impact self heals.
That would make the affix essentially non-existant for BDK but I get your idea.
the ideal balance likely involve looking at every dungeon, every pack on an individual basis instead of ‘‘every 61+ mob apply less necrotic’’.
necrotic wake soliders / blight bag? attack super fast, keep jumping around making any kind of slow useless, stack necrotic faster than any other mob even if they are mostly a non-issue any other week; actually really dangerous during necrotic.
Shards of halkias in HoA? spend so much time casting stuff necrotic reset by itself. surrounded by caster who also don’t stack particularly quick… unless you are adding the stone smurf / bunch of other mob on them, necrotic is pretty much a non-issue for those.
but altering necrotic behavior on a per-mob basis is something blizzard will never take the time to do.