Everything is “strategic” until the sum of options it causes is fewer and less diverse than would otherwise have been the case.
Point in case: the kiting meta.
It’s not far off, and I like that kiting has a place (especially as it requires more team coordination), but it could easily be far more ‘strategic’ (and allow for broader tank spec competitiveness) with even mild tweaks.
Which has existed in boss encounters for over a decade: see pit of Saron and Scourgelord Tyrannous or Krick and Ick. This has just been extended to trash mobs as a result of the harder difficulty of them in some M+
This is why tanking in Shadowlands feels horrible.
It’s a strategy to defeating an encounter that would kill the tank. What tweaks could they make that wouldn’t trivialize the encounter?
I suppose there could be buffs attained in the dungeon itself, or certain gameplay mechanics that only existed during times where we currently kite: eg fortified necrotic.
But what tweaks can the developers make that doesn’t neutralize the difficulty of the encounter?
Oh, boy is the MMORPG genre starting to die for me haha. Glad others like M+ but man I hate how it is changing the game.
This is so true. I was tanking a key last week and the healer kept yelling at me to kite out my stacks when I didnt have a potion up to drop them.
I kept telling him well ask the fire mage to find frost nova, and ask the shaman to drop earthbind… I am a slow paladin with one mobility button…
They just expect you to teleport around the room like Goku I guess.
Threat degradation over range or time since last direct-damage action, greater damage throughput parity among tanks, and address to tank kits’ largest incidental pitfalls. Those are just some spitball possibilities, but the point is merely to feel like one’s kit isn’t merely something that protects for the relatively brief moments of necessary threat generation before keeping out of range again; kiting should feel like a choiceful tactic, requiring prior investment, rather than the default even for the most mobile specs.
It’s essentially a matter of balance. At present, kiting is so strong that relative mobility matters more, over time, than the more iconic parts of “tanking”, deemphasizing those previously core parts without making the replacement feel any more interesting (merely, more necessary).
M+ doesn’t remove or even water down roles. It merely requires you to actually make use of your kit, as any Tank, Healer, or DPS already should have been doing if they wanted to milk their role, let alone class, fantasy…
In a world, where tanks have to actually do more then smash their faces into their keyboards.
Good points, but this proposes limits on the ability of kite-tanking, but I don’t think it’s addressing why it exists in the first place. It would also make for some interesting comps if kite tanking was deemed necessary for certain dungeons/affixes with these threat reduction changes you mention: misdirect and tricks, trees, etc.
On the flip side, I can see a push for more CC and mob control that limits the incoming damage a tank receives thus reducing the need to kite. Because ultimately my argument is that kite-tanking is a product of damage intake. The more damage the tank is subjected to - or will be subjected to - increases the viability of kite-tanking.
It is usually preferred to plant the mobs in one spot for easier dps over kiting them, and risk disconnecting dps from their targets, so kite-tanking doesn’t carry any benefit there. Just as a means of survival.
And sadly, the dps 9/10 doesn’t care about anything but their number’s. So as a tank you find yourself trying to cut corners to not die.
I watch people just blow all their cc cooldowns on a necro week before I even need to kite. Then when I actually need to move everyone’s watching me panic run 100 feet away and has nothing to help.
I see dps constantly neglect kicking or using their cc and things of that nature as well to prioritize the damage meter which has little relevance at all to actually completing the key.
Had a run the other day in a +12, so relatively hard content. Had a UH DK with 4 kicks and a MM Hunter with 2 kicks over the coarse of the entire key. Meanwhile I’m sitting there with like 47 kicks… panicing trying to stop us from dying every other pack…
There is a difference between kiting as a specific response to specific mechanics, and kiting as a default response to every single enemy group regardless of creature type or abilities.
Sounds like the early days of Diablo 3. If you weren’t kiting, you were dying.
Agreed. And if the tank is always kiting, that just doesn’t make sense to me. That seems more about trying to rush the entire dungeon and less kiting for the sake of survival.
To me, kiting, active mitigation, etc are tools that make tanking more active and less passive/RNG based. All as a product of survival.
These are already largely our meta picks as is, though, which the kiting meta has already made damn near necessity, just from how unavoidable kiting has become.
At present, relative mobility isn’t a kit power one traded ‘steadfast’ holding power for, but rather a baseline feature one can only waste through lack of burst threat generation or poor burst mitigation.
I don’t mind the idea of a tank to whose toolkit kiting is integral, but I’d prefer it be part of the larger power equation, so that there’s at least a place for tanks with less kiting capacity.
Again, these are largely meta already. And if specs like Frost Mage gets further damage bonuses, and Boomkin and MM avoid further nerfs, it may push such to a necessary default.
If tank survival weren’t a factor, sure, but how long does that last for? To +13s, maybe, and only if neither Fortified or Necrotic, and there’s no Sanguine to already force out similar movement? The costs are trivial and the benefits immense.
Above that, if you don’t have (typically multiple) CDs to burn, you’re kiting. It’s not a default state for speedrunning alone.
Agreed. And I think this sums up the debate for me from your perspective:
I don’t know how this is reconciled without making the encounter trivial or more “meta-y” in another way (e.g. since we can’t kite tank as effectively, we need strong and reliable cc classes to mitigate damage intake). The latter seems much more palatable.
But can you elaborate on this for me, I think I’m missing something important here probably because I’m too dumb to really grasp it:.
Are you saying that there currently exists no in-game mechanic that would promote holding your ground over moving?
I know in D3 as an odd example there is a gem that increases one attribute when standing still but decreases it when moving, to promote variability in gameplay and tradeoffs. Are you thinking that we could have some kind of passive tank mechanic that stacks “toughness” while stationary, but bleeds this off when moving?
On bfa you didnt use to kite things unless you were doing 20+s
I’m not sure why they thought it was a good idea to start that from 10+ onwards depending on the group and gear.
Sorry for the unclear wording. I feel like (can’t exactly break out the WoW devs’ design logs, but if you look at average mitigation over time and the like, this is the conclusion I arrive near) the tanks were balanced without the kiting expected, with mobility (relative or true) instead being a feature meant for responsiveness in grabbing attention, interrupting, repositioning the mobs themselves, etc.
So, barring already well-discussed undertuning here and there which amounts to surprisingly little overall, they’ve all about the same defensive power when standing their ground.
But now, what happens when we add kiting? Suddenly true mobility turns into a whole lot larger defensive advantage. And it’s not part of that defensive equation. The difference between the relative mobility of an Avenger’s Shield and the true mobility of an Infernal Strike or Heroic Leap becomes huge in terms of defensive benefit. Yes, AS via First Avenger has tremendous defensive benefit, too, but it’s accounted for, while the gap in the ability to gtfo doesn’t seem to be.
No, but come to think of it, there are very few, if any—not to say that I’d want those either, as it’d just force the opposite end of the mobility spectrum if they were prominent.
If you, say, had a bunch of powerful slimes that’d leave long lingering sludge as they move, that’d be something, but… I’d honestly rather avoid that kind of thing except as a novelty of a particular trash pack or boss add. And I certainly wouldn’t want to tie throughput perks into standing still. BfA’s ‘standing still’ bonuses were trivial and yet still annoyed me.
To review, I just want to reduce the defensive benefit of mobility so that competing forms of defense don’t feel as watered down or deemphasized by comparison. I still want mobile tanks (I’d even prefer that Prot PLD, for instance, have a bit more mobility); I just want it to be a less sustainable mode of defense.
Do I have to explain this? I guess I might…
Tanks running away from the enemy isnt actually tanking, it goes against everything a tank means.
But sure I guess some people enjoy it and glorify it… I prefer the old days where the word had actually meaning.
Because they went too far wanting to nerf m+.
In BFA m+ was capped to +10 for first 2 patches, now it’s +15, huge difference.
In BFA, it was heroic ilvl, now it’s below.
In BFA, gear titanforged/warforged, now it doesn’t.
In BFA, it dropped 3 pieces, now it drops 2.
The change is too drastic, it’s hard for most to get used to it.
I’m glad titanforging/warforging is gone, nerfing drops is bit extreme for people who can’t play much, I got 100 runs or so, so gearing was no issue for me, wouldn’t do it on any alt tho, screw that.
And lastly +15 being goal. It’s not fun. +10 and +11 runs are fun and casual, +15 is just tryhard boredom. Sure, you can time it if you study the dungeons and routes and all, but I’m not having fun in +15/+16 runs.
I have much more fun joining my guildies for their +10/+11 keys for their weekly.