First, a little history on who I am as a player.
Been playing with my wife since vanilla. In vanilla we didn’t really understand the game and spent our time leveling various characters just questing. I did MC with a guild for a couple of weeks, got an obsidian edge blade, felt like a good. All was well with the world.
TBC->Legion I tanked both dungeons and raids and had a blast. Life was good. M+ in legion was a little adjustment but I managed just fine. Then, kind of overnight, the mentality around the dungeon pugging community did a 180. Suddenly any extra mob pulls were the end of the world, any deviation from the meta route was met with catastrophic complaining. My desire to tank cratered. Since the I’ve been the type of player to buy a new expansion, mess around leveling some characters through the campaign, and bail until toward the end of the expansion when there’s catch up galore and I finish leveling all classes to cap to prepare for the next expansion. The only “endgame” I do is LFR and world content so I get bored quickly.
Blizzard obviously noticed an uptick of players doing the same thing, so they announce TWW is going to come with an awesome new endgame pillar for us - delves! Now I can do dungeon-lite content either solo or in a duo with my wife. I also needed to switch to playing with a controller, so my desire to jump into group content was at an all time low. We hopped in to the expansion, had fun in the campaign, and bounced off pretty hard because delves just weren’t a hit in this household. Not sure what the issues was, just wasn’t feeling it.
Decided to come back for season 2. There’s a Tank Brann now! Maybe delves will finally be fun. Ended up really enjoying delves week 1, both on my tank specs and my healer specs. Wow hasn’t been this fun in years! I can play Resto druid with controller and not bother anyone else? Praise be to Blizzard!
I’m disabled, so I have tons of time to play when I’m feeling it, and last week I had so much fun that I did 8 tier 8 delves on:
VDH
BDK
Resto Druid
MW Monk
Holy Priest
Preservation Evoker
4 delves on
Prot Pally
Prot Warrior
I had a genuine blast. Haven’t had this much fun playing WoW since legion.
This week I decided to start with my Resto Druid, the character I had the most fun with last week. I knew about the Brann nerfs, but was hopeful it was at least doable. My plan was to pick 2 tanks and 2 healers to “main” this season and blast my delves every week on them. Here was my experience doing delves this week on my druid.
Enter delve. Slowly make my way to hobgoblin pack. Brann gets one shot. Try again. Brann gets one shot… sigh, tab to wowhead - copy a delve build for guardian, proceed to finish the delve without issue as guardian.
Yay! I’m back to the only “fun” option for soloing delves being tank specs. So much for having role variety in my play this season. I’m a better Resto Druid than guardian druid, even on controller, but the difference in how fast/easy I can plow through delves on the specs is absolutely night and day. I don’t even want to log into my other healers at this point.
Was Tank Brann doing too much damage? Maybe, probably, sure? Did he need to take 60% more damage and just get one shot by any remotely challenging pull? I really don’t see how. Why is my lesser geared guardian spec significantly, significantly, monumentally easier than trying to throw my head against the wall as Resto? Why bait and switch us with healers actually being a compelling and competitive choice compared to tanks for delves?
The worst part is I was actually looking forward to trying to heal low M+ keys once I got a couple more weeks of delve loot to get started with. I gave up tanking for dungeon pugs years ago, the juice just ain’t worth the squeeze with the community these days - but healing where I’m not responsible for routes felt like it could be manageable. So much for that plan. Back to tanking delves and doing no group content other than LFR for me. Most likely? Back to bouncing until pre-patch for the next expansion like usual.
Please, please consider re-evaluating the Brann tank nerfs. Do I think he needed some adjustment? Sure! Did he need to be deleted from the game making tanking delves the only way for me to enjoy getting through them? Absolutely not.