VDH is 4 key levels above most tanks, 3 above 2nd highest

They’re not gonna change anything now that the new season has started and the end of the expac draws near. Just reroll DH till KSM and then switch back.

Agreed. But at the same time it is hard to know if it is miles ahead, or its just a bit ahead and then the best players flock to it - and away from the other tanks - creating even more disparity.

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So it’s absolutely impossible to complete up to a 19 with any other tank?

They’ll probably find time to nerf Keg Smash & Spinning Crane Kick again.

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This likely has less to do this Rdruid, and more to do with VDH. The meta comp usually needs a br, and hpal is still seen by many as weak. I main a shaman, and don’t see us as weaker. I think Rshaman gets pushed out because our strength (cc) gets mitigated by VDH.

That being said, I do think we need another defensive…

Except even when the meta is just one key level higher you still see these posts and threads pop up.

“OMG I can only do +32 keys on my Prot Warrior, I can’t get invited to a +33 without a Prot Paladin. M+ is broken and unplayable and unfair.”

This is usually the case, it creates a cycle, a self fulfilling prophecy in a way.

Let’s take Naowh, since a lot of key pushers know him. If he hopped onto a Bear and tan with his group they could get to the same key or within 1 level as the VDH.

But he’s practicing for TGP so he is not going to waste anytime playing the second best tank, it doesn’t matter if it’s a 1% difference he isn’t going to do it.

Go convince a really good player to try to match keys on another tank and I bet you they get within one key.

no worries , august will have new expansion

Squishvegan is one of the best tanks in the world, and for sure the best bear, and their best key is a 16.

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Checking out his highest, or most recent runs he seems to run with a Prevoker, an Aug, warrior and rogue a lot could that play a part.

Every high level team not only had a VDH but also a resto Druid (which are insane) and the same dps trio or at least 2/3.

Is he hampering himself because his group is also non-meta?

This is a cooperative MMO. You can play with or as a vdh to complete content. Nerfing vdh is effectively nerfing yourself. Why would you want to nerf yourself? The only answer is because you want to play something that is less effective, and/or you are unwilling to learn vdh yourself. You probably play prot warr or something and think nerfing vdh will permit you to continue to not step out of your comfort zone and learn some new characters.

Read what Rita wrote here:

You basically selfishly want to neuter something that helps millions of people enjoy the game more so you can play a brewmaster, or some other dogcrap tank, rather than just learning to play something else. I have some news for you, I’ll bet the reason you aren’t getting invited to the keys you think you should get invited to has nothing to do with you class.

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That comp is only meta when all the constituent parts are together. Without VDH shoring up their weaknesses they don’t perform as well.

Omg he’s posting this again!!! How original.

None of this is remotely relevant to game balance. It is also internally inconsistent and directly contradicts itself. You say people want to “neuter something that helps millions enjoy the game (lol millions, get real)”, and then within the same paragraph, say “the reason you aren’t getting invited has nothing to do with your class”. So which is it? Is VDH helpful for millions of people (lol) running keys, or does class have nothing to do with it?

It is utterly insane that VDH balance has not been heavily adjusted throughout DF, double sigils was a massive issue from day one of the expansion. Whether you bring other tanks up or VDH down is neither here nor there; both achieve a similar thing with the difference being a subjective call from Blizzard on where they want keys to fall.

VDH being 4 key levels above the next closest tank is beyond insane. That degree of imbalance filters down to every level of play, both reputationally and mechanically.

Your position on the matter, that people should just play the meta and bad classes should just deal with it, rather than fixing the extremely bad balance, is utterly asinine. Beyond asinine.

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Normally I would see your point, but both are true at the same time. Vdh does make the game more playable. And you are right, IDK what I was thinking with millions. I’d be surprised if there’s hundreds some nights. The class not having anything to do with it is the most prevalent issue, because 99.9pct of the time on here and the subreddit, it’s some guy that’s 5 item levels lower than he should be, with timed 7s blaming the meta why he can’t get invited to a 10. It’s literally an epidemic that hasn’t stopped for years.

This is because the players that play the top tanks simply play the best tank. Last season there was the one content creator whose name escapes me right now, that would run basically every tank in the game and make videos. Half of these were with meme DPS comps as well, and the dude still would do 30+ on these comps.

Lol.

I am already running M10’s and I need a healer, last season my M+ score put me somewhere within the top 4% of all M+ scores and I still needed a healer. You would be surprised to see how hard it is without a healer.

I ran an M2 and M4 yesterday with a part time healer and it felt so much harder than my M10’s with a full time healer. You may not think it, but having a good healer who knows how to heal does actually make a difference, aint no one but the top 0.1% of groups who are running dungeons without a healer at all.

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No, it isn’t. 4 keys is WILDLY futher apart than the normal discrepancy. Nobody is saying there isn’t a meta, or that that meta is not warped by reputation. But those alone do not allow for such wide discrepancies as this. When multiple tanks are good, people play multiple tanks a lot, and they are closer together than this. It has been the case multiple times in this expansion where a tank has started off popular, and another has caught up and even surpassed it.

I don’t think there has ever been a case where a tank max key is 4 levels higher than the next closest tank. Stop attributing the entirety of balance discrepancy to reputation, and realise that reputation has a source - it’s not from nowhere. It almost always starts as a true imbalance, which is then blown up by reputation, and the degree of discrepancy here describes how big that imbalance actually is.

It is indeed a MMO, that means that ALL classes/specs should be viable in all levels of content. People want to play the class/spec that they like, not be forced to play a spec because blizzard can’t take literally 5 minutes to go into a database and change 1-2 numbers. While absolute balance is impossible to achieve, the major outliers, both above and below, should be nerfed/buffed accordingly to bring them back into line with others. That of course assumes blizzard has the others where they want the baseline. If blizzard were to decide that VDH is fine, then all tanks need brought up to that level both in tanking, healing, damage, and CC. “Just play VDH” isn’t a solution, it’s not even in the same realm as a solution.

What’s selfish is not wanting one spec nerfed because it’s a major outlier while several other specs suffer. On top of that trying to force players of multiple classes/specs to learn a new class/spec? Do you not see the irony there? Why don’t we nerf VDH into the ground and then they can learn a new class and spec, less people would be impacted so that sounds like the better choice if we are playing by your logic.

Class/spec absolutely has huge implications on getting picked for a group, even in lower keys. Everyone wants to stack the deck in their favor so you think they will pick the Ultrameta VDH that everyone says is the best tank by a mile, or the underperforming prot warrior or brewmaster. Time and time again it’s been shown that all level of keys are heavily influenced by the meta. Heck I know back in shadowlands I played enhance shaman when they were awful, would take literal hours to get keys sometimes. Next season I did survival hunter since they were still OP and I wanted to see if it was just an issue with my score or spec. I got keys in under a minute, it wasn’t score it was entirely spec. Should it matter in lower keys? No, but it does, even moreso in high keys, and greatly impacts the game experience for those classes/specs that are underperforming. That’s why balance is so important. After that one season on a hunter I went back to enhance and if I ever need to go meta again to avoid 2 hours of refreshing LFG applying for groups I’ll just be done with the game because I’m not going to be forced to play a class/spece because Blizzard is too lazy to do any balance. I’m not sure why they balance at a glacial pace, but it’s absolutely hurting the game.

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I think despite vdh being egregiously over the line it’s important to remember this is also being overly idealistic. Balance will always taper off to a point the higher you go and that’s something people who want to push to that level tend to accept as either a handicap on themselves or a sign to be more flexible.

The problem is the handicap right now is too great, not that it exists at all.

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There is always going to be at point, a level in WoW where one spec can do what others can’t. Whether that gap is too early or too big is another thing.

But in regards to everything being able to do everything that just isn’t going to be true in any online game. In Diablo some classes/builds can breeeze through the highest content and some struggle slowly. In League there are characters that just aren’t going to be used at the top level.

Now the question is do you NEED to always be doing the highest, if so you’ll have to become a FotM reroller. Otherwise accept that some seasons you can do 20s and some seasons you’ll cap out at 18s… some seasons your spec will be the envy of everyone else and sometimes you’ll struggle to get picked up.