Tank Nerfs

Gameplay Dungeons, Raids and Scenarios
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“We want healers to play a key role in keeping the tank alive” - Blizz

I get that this is their design goal, but does anyone enjoy this in the competitive sense?

I don’t think the nerfs are that big of deal and are probably warranted, but this glimpse into the mentality of the nerf says we may see further tuning to this aim.

As a tank, I don’t want to live or die based on my healer not being ready to heal me. Healers rarely make a tank save and haven’t for years, their heals just aren’t good enough to solve a defensive emergency. (extra groups chain in with 0 tank defenses left, etc.)

As a healer, you’d expect healer externals to either be on pull/CD like iron bark or cenarion ward or saved for when the group is in danger like SLT and ascendance. Using these spells to help the tank survive is a feels bad all the way around.

The role of a tank is to survive. Not saying that healers should play no role in that, but the balance should be 80% tank pressing the correct buttons and 20% supplemental healing outside mechanics designed to test if the healer is awake.

We’ve also seen weak tanks before and it doesn’t fall on healers, it’s kiting.

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After seeing tanks survive and continue to solo bosses in 0s, I kinda get it. Not sure I agree with it being across the board though. Monks, for example, could have used their passive healing buffed if anything. It would have been nice if mitigation was buffed as an exchange. Not that the nerfs seem that extreme as is but if they continue down this path it’ll separate the good and the bad real quick.

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Yea, just to be clear, I’m not mad at this nerf. I’m afraid of the philosophy.

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I thought I was enjoying a new meta where heals where primarily on the healer and DPS with some casual GCDs spent on the tank.

Once keys get rolling pulling wall to wall and soloing bosses will be completely gone.

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Except that’s supposed to be the fundamental basis the game revolves around. DPS are supposed to kill the bad guys, tanks are supposed to keep the bad guys from murdering the party, and healers are supposed to keep the party alive. It’s that dependency between elements of the team and the trust you place in one another to do your jobs that makes this game compelling… at least, that’s a large part of it for me.

In the past couple years though, tanks have done more and more healing to the point where the healers job becomes less about keeping the party alive and more about covering for mistakes and doing rather pitiful damage. Honestly there were points in Shadowlands where it made me question whether or not I even needed to come as a healer. If my dps could just stay out of the bad, or find their dispel buttons, I probably could have just come as DPS and thrown out some very small spot heals. There were a lot of fights where I just went 100% dps and the tank just handled the healing because it was so strong. At this point, what does a healer even offer?

With all that said…

Don’t worry, I’m reasonably sure they failed here. My tank is a pally and going through mythics to gear up over the last couple weeks, he’d quite often just run ahead and pull half the dungeon, then proceed to tank it himself. On many occasions he would over pull (just because he could) and those of us without damage mitigation would die, then he would just slowly kill it off himself while we ran back.

Obviously things will be harder in M+, but tanks won’t be pulling half the dungeon there either. It doesn’t really feel like anything has changed since Shadowlands. If Blizzard was looking to make healers more relevant here, they missed the mark.

I think Blizzard forgot how to balance that trinity. So much of the game has become “don’t stand in the bad thing or you’re insta-dead. Execute perfectly and you win, make one mistake and you lose”. Which is a shame because they’ve got a great example of their original design intent sitting there and functioning just fine in Classic Era. If they want that kind of gameplay still, tanks need to have less (to no) self heals and be more about mitigation. Damage needs to be more steady and less bursty, and mana needs to be a resource that you have to manage. If too many mistakes pile up, you run out and you die, or you lose time to drinking.

And look, I get that some folks (yourself included) aren’t keen on that type of gameplay. That’s fine, the game hasn’t really embraced it in a long time and so it’s completely reasonable to expect that people have adapted and evolved their preferences with the game. However if Blizzard does want to downplay the role of healers in keeping tanks (and the party) alive, they need to lean harder into the role that healers can play as a support hybrid. They need to do more damage, or offer more abilities that amplify the damage of their DPS team members. Their role needs to offer something that’s justified over just bringing another DPS who can throw out spot heals here and there.

Basically, Blizzard needs to make up their damn minds about what they want to do here, then just do that.

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Main issue I have is it’s an indirect buff to warriors. It’s a big nerf to dk, dh and bear. I’ll still play DK but warrior currently barely goes into defensive stance and with how block works 5% is nothing to them.

No tank wants to rely on a healer to keep them alive because let’s be honest most healers can’t.

PS m0 balancing should never be done. Start of sl I was doing similar pulls on my dh. M0 is not a balancing point and considering tanks were struggling to live in +20s in beta (except Warr). It’s a little worrying.

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Healers haven’t pulled their weight in M+ since at least BFA. It is by far the most “get carried” spot to play in for M+. They need to do this, healers need to matter.

Edit: And for the record, tanks kiting should never be a thing. Whoever thought that was a good idea should probably find a new job.

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That hasn’t been true since MoP. It may be how other MMOs are designed, but it’s not how wow is or has been.

Correction: decade. Not couple years. The party isn’t just the tank. There are plenty of places to add group damage. The healers responsibility should be group damage. Like every boss of SD. That should be the role of the healer. Not fails, not babysitting a tank player, group damage.

Again, I’m not concerned about this nerf. If tanks become squishy again, we will kite and you’ll never find a balance where we rely on healers by default or are even comfortable relying on healers. I generally play with healers I know, but I still have never felt like there’s a healer player who is actively engaged in the dungeon. You’re asking the tagalong player type to suddenly show some accountability for knowing the hardest hitting tank portions and you’ll only be punishing tanks by doing so.

Pretty much no one who chooses retail is looking for that type of gameplay. Healers aren’t excited to suddenly be the determining factor in success and tanks aren’t willing to give up that responsibility to them either.

Stop lumping the tank into “the party”. There is plenty of healing that could be done to the healer and the dps who aren’t designed around the idea of taking constant damage. Mechanics could be designed around rotting the party without nerfing the tanks ability to do their primary responsibility: surviving.

Tell me about it, but the more they move toward a kite meta, the better paladin starts to look since they are the cd tank now. They also are the best “ranged” tank.

Then it shouldn’t be the most efficient strategy. Nuke the dps constantly and make the healer relevant, no healer should feel the need to spam any tank under normal circumstances.

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Are you kiting in M0? Were you kiting last season? Are you worried about a kiting meta returning?

Hilarious take that will never happen lmao. You think that won’t incur a rage mode that will be forced into a change inside 2 weeks? DPS being obliterated won’t end well, for anyone.

There is always the BDK.

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No.

Depends on how large I decided to pull. LK had some kiting because I’d pull 12% count at a time.

Yes. I don’t like kiting and the only way to keep tanks in the pull is to allow them to be the masters of their own survival.

This is how raids are designed and no one bats and eye. They shoehorn damage auras into rooms that just constantly rot the party the whole encounter. I see no reason why they couldn’t do something like that in dungeons where every 3-5s everyone in the party takes 15% of their health for some reason. It doesn’t have to be a defensive check. Again, think SD bosses. Each had some mechanic that you’d struggle with if you failed to bring a healer. (At relevant levels).

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The bulk of your response feels like you nitpicking over minute details that you don’t think were specific enough, or correct enough, to your liking. That feels a lot less worthwhile to talk about than the actual intent of gameplay, which is whether or not it’s supposed to be the tank’s responsibility to deal with damage, or the healer’s.

You can have your preference and I can have mine, but at the end of the day, Blizzard needs to pick because it’s just not well defined and that lack of direction is evident in the gameplay.

If you don’t want to have to trust and rely on your team mates to succeed, I can’t help but wonder why you’re playing a team-based game. I understand how one could develop this lack of trust, but everybody in a group has a responsibility and if they don’t do it, the group as a while fails.

Personally, I like having an actual job to do and I like it having stakes. With healer usefulness being so downplayed, everything ultimately lands on the tank. You may like this, and while I can’t speak for DPS, it’s not a whole lot of fun for me as a healer. So from my perspective, if me failing to do my job in knowing, and mitigating, a mechanic means you die… well that’s just good gameplay.

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That’s hardly the only way. Healers have to either matter or not exist. You aren’t going to solve a complex problem with a simple solution and have everyone walk away happy. I quit tanking for a number of years and did some at the end of SL to just check back in (pretty much didn’t M+ most of SL) and what I saw and experienced from healers was atrocious. I was amazed at how little most healers used CDs as DPS players died to unavoidable damage. It has been that way since BFA, healers have been getting walked through content since 2018 at least in M+. It is time for them to show out for once. Make healing matter, and yes, matter to tanks.

Raiding is the lowest form of content in this game and I don’t want to use that as a comparison to anything. The last thing anyone wants (at least of M+ fans) is for M+ to turn into “raiding light”.

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It’s not, but if your take away is that I completely disagree with your opinion, good. That was my intent. I did you the service of responding to your points so as not to be confused with my rebuttals for each of your assertions.

It’s not the tanks responsibility to deal with the group damage. It’s the tanks responsibility to deal with the tanks damage. There’s a distinction there. Melee strikes are the tanks responsibility, casts are the tank/dps responsibility and group wide unavoidable damage is the healers responsibility. What I’m saying is that they could add more groupwide unavoidable damage and it doesn’t have to be 90% bursts (these are usually pretty unfair), they can be the equivalent of an affliction lock or spriest who deals moderate oppressive damage that forces a healer to not only heal, but prioritize.

The stakes will be any time the healer falls asleep at the wheel, everyone will harass the tank.

Completely disagree, unless you want to link healer health to tank health. So the moment the tank dies, so does the healer, as in on the same frame.

Adding a rot aura to certain trash enemies isn’t the same as making m+ “raiding light”. I agree that raiding is mostly scuffed, but the answer to healer uselessness in the game as a whole is big bursts or constant rot. Right now, m+ only has big bursts. Hell, you could simulate the rot with archers, just make them move so they can be stacked up.

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No, you didn’t, you bypassed the larger issue and focused on small, unimportant details that you felt you had to correct when my overall message was clear. Which is that wherever you land on what a tank and healer’s job should be, things are out of whack right now.

Except not really, not anymore. Tanks have so much healing, especially paladin (and now guardian) tanks that they can, and do, take care of the healer’s job for them. The only way to make the healer actually required is to make so much unavoidable damage that the tank can’t keep up, and that’s not very fun at all. I’m not really contributing anything as a healer at that point, I’m just a notch in a punch card to get past a mechanic. More unavoidable damage is exactly the opposite of the direction Blizzard should go. Healing should be the healer’s responsibility, holding aggro (remember when this was an actual mechanic?) and damage mitigation should be the tank’s responsibility, and damage/interrupts should be responsibility of DPS. Clear, defined roles, each one required to be executed successfully or the group fails.

How is that even a stake? What does this even mean? If the healer stops doing their job and DPS fails to move out of the bad, then they harass the tank who can just do the healer’s job for them anyway? That doesn’t sound like healing has stakes at all. Healing is borderline irrelevant.

This is effectively how it’s been since WoW began… when the tank dies, the entire group dies. Except that was true for all points of the core triangle that WoW was built on. If you lose your healer, the tank dies due to the damage and the group wipes. If you lose DPS the healer runs out of mana, then the tank dies and the group wipes. If the tank didn’t mitigate the damage or pulled too much, the healer can’t keep up and the group wipes.

Now the only critical role remaining is the tank. If DPS dies, who cares? The tanks do enough damage and have so much survivability that the fight can proceed anyway. If the healer dies, who cares? The tank has enough self/group heals that the fight can proceed. The only role that can’t die is the tank because DPS/heals can’t take the hits, unless you’re at the end of the fight and can manage CDs.

Every member of the group should equally share responsibility for the group’s success and that just simply isn’t true anymore.

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No competitive healer wanted that

Nope

Healers already matter going into S1. There’s some hefty group-wide damage that will become a serious healing check at higher key levels. Tanks being self-sufficient take a huge burden off the healer’s plate.

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Competitive healers play arena and can handle mechanics.

Great. Finally.

Run this thought process out in your head and tell me what you come up with. I’ll give you a hint…

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tell me you never did high enough keys without telling you never did high enough keys

kiting is not bad. its one of the way to put more skill into the roll. another way is to add stronger tank busters.
also, kiting wasn’t that much necessary as people pretended it to be.

tanking and healing in classic is so mind numbing boring, its crazy people want this for retail.

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Miss me with that PvP nonsense.

You can’t just fork over 90% of what I said and then tell me to think about it. It came from my head you oaf.

In high level-M+, healers are going to face pretty steep healing checks. Making tanks squisher makes healers’ jobs more difficult. Is that difficult to understand?

I’m also not making excuse for bad healers. Bad healers will be bad, just like bad DPS and tanks will be bad. I don’t feel personally vindicated by healers being less, uh, “carry-able,” I couldn’t give less of a f.

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Unskilled players hate arenas, I get it.

I can when you directly contradict yourself. Such as when you said…

This. Miss me with this “I’m competitive but please don’t make my job hard or matter” nonsense. Don’t tell me how competitive you are and then complain that you aren’t good enough in the next sentence.

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There were plenty of keys over 20 where my tank easily handled things and I just spent the entire fight smashing my dps keys. So tell me you’re a bad tank without telling me you’re a bad tank?

See how I flipped it?

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