“We want to reinforce the importance of the healer role and work towards gameplay where tanks and healers collaborate to reduce the damage the tank is taking and to restore the tank’s lost health.”
This is the exact opposite of what you should be doing. Let healers worry about anything and everything else; Tank HP should be the responsibility of the tank. I don’t care what theories of human behavior lead to this weird triumvirate group composition but the more independent and strong tanks are the more fun they are to play.
My predictions:
If these changes go live you’ll see a reduction in people playing tanks.
This reduction will lead to an increase it queue times and waiting, especially among DPS players.
This will cause growing discontent among the playerbase.
If it gets bad enough to Shadowlands s1 levels of fragility then you’ll see Vengeance continue to be dominant due to their mobility, which means when the situation is finally fixed Vengeance will be left behind and take an entire expansion cycle to get fixed… even though they are perfectly enjoyable to play right now.
Tanks rely on healers to keep them alive
healers rely on DPS to kill things before their mana runs out
DPS rely on tanks to make sure the mobs don’t murder them.
each role relies on the others, none are entirely self sufficient.
And then tank damage scales to a point it can’t be healed and difficulty is capped before any of the other roles feel like they’ve been challenged, and the healer ends up spending most of their time bombing heals into a tank’s yoyo health bar while everyone else rots out.
I don’t even play tank and I can see this is going to be a problem.
Based on the design goals, this really shouldn’t be the case once the tuning is established. They’re specifically intending to reduce the speed and spiked nature of tank damage to let healers actually do their job again.
Ok but group damage taken doesn’t scale on 1 axis. It scales on 3.
1: Damage of melee swings and tankbusters.
2: Damage on the group from avoidable and unavoidable mechanics.
3: Number Melees on the tank from pull sizes increasing to increase damage efficiency in order to beat the timer.
Damage taken per second scales extremely quickly as more is demanded from the group. Making the bottleneck on difficulty raw HPS is not going to be fun.
That is just the perfect encapsulation of the attitude that’s led to the rise of so many terrible tanks. Who just barrel ahead without a care, ignoring their party.
It will probably be fun for the healer. More fun than healing is now, anyway. I remember loving my resto druid back in WotLK when everyone was taking damage and I had to constantly keep an eye on health bars to ensure nobody dropped too low, including the tank.
I stopped caring about healing within the past few years when I kept emptying tons of heals into a wounded DK only for him to instantly heal himself to full without my input.
It’s not fun to be a healer to a tank who doesn’t need you.
Wow…imagine having to actually help people out in the group while doing group content. No tank is entirely self sufficient and bad enough we already got people who’re demanding healers deal damage rather than heal but now this toxic mindset of a healer shouldn’t help the tank survive… really now? Talk about a toxic mindset that you’re trying to make healers even more scarce than they already are
The healers doing damage thing is a red herring these days. Very few people are failing to time their keys because the healer did 50 million damage over the course of the dungeon instead of 250 million damage; the DPS meanwhile are often doing 1 billion damage in that same key.
Just look at logs in high keys - healer damage is basically cosmetic. You only need it to time on the very highest keys when you are actually limited by damage output, and not just your mistakes.
