Preach Ranks Legion Tanks. (Tanking in Legion is Bad?)

[Leblue]

The Legion style of tanking comes across as a sort of "correction" of community problems when it comes to tanking. The two main problems are

1) Tanks "don't require healers"

On current content in raiding tanks require healing. This usually crops up when tanks badly overgear encounters (exacerbated by item level upgrades). I know I pretty badly outgeared Xhul when my guild was progressing on it since I was ignoring my 4 piece and was using Mirror of the Blademaster instead of Warlords Unseeing Eye. That said, even now outside of stupid speed kills I still want that row of HoTs from druids, the paladin beacon healing, and disc priest absorbs. My problem with the attempt to "fix" this problem is that I think it should've been swung at from the healer end first and then worked from the tank side since you might've seen a close to 50/50 split during early progression when people weren't geared out to the teeth. You've also got to consider the massive amount of passive healing and absorb healing going on right now. Depending on tank and that specs style of tank I don't think that's a bad thing though and usually to get those long periods of "no healing needed" you'll need things like large cooldowns and external cooldowns anyway.

How "fun" tank healing is is pretty subjective, but unless you really like the idea of a designated tank healer in raiding (something they've been trying to yank holy paladins away from or at least make them more versatile) its the direction they're going. Part of this problem actually stems from there not even being enough raid damage to heal so when healers go for scraps they go to the one(or two) players in the raid that will always be consistently taking damage: the tank. When you've got several healers fighting over that competing with Beacon, Absorbs (which are a problem all their own), and just HoTs from every other healer its going to look like the tank doesn't need healing.

2) Tanks "do to much damage"

MoP you could do some silly things, I remember being the top dps by a good bit solo tanking our first (and only) kill of heroic 10 garrosh because of it. WoD reigned this in and I think the damage values in Highmaul were decent enough. Tanks had ways to dump resources or trade survival for more damage. This is a community problem in that you see the top tanks doing some great damage and then people start requiring their group's tanks to do the same when they may not be comfortable enough with the fight or even have the group/ability to do the same. Trading your resources for offense over defense insured that when you did use your defense it was more important when you do (you had larger periods of vunerability) and it had the added effect of making tank healing more relevant (passive or otherwise) because you were going to take more damage regardless.

Forcibly removing this obviously negates the ability for the community to force tanks who simply aren't ready or capable of playing to the level and coordinating with healers to go this next level. This is also somewhat subjective depending on what you are trying to get from the game as it could be argued this not only affects personal gameplay, but the team aspect of coordinating with your healers to make better use of their healing and external cooldowns (which for the record I'm not a huge fan of external damage reduction cds). They're obviously removing a problem (although others will crop up in its place probably), but you're also stripping some people of gameplay they enjoyed and reveled in. The aim is clear, but we won't really know the full results till later in Legion itself.

[Deleted]

If this is really how things will turn out then that gives me a lot of hope for Legion. The non-bossfight gameplay in dungeons really needs to improve back to a place where players other than the tank get to feel like they're doing more a bit more satisfying than just trailing behind to spam AoE spells.

The last time I can remember trash mobs in dungeons feeling interesting or engaging for a DPS or Healer would have been sometime in early Cataclysm before threat became completely irrelevant.

As Blizzard gradually evolved towards Active Mitigation gameplay for tanks, it became pretty clear that neither DPS nor Healers really made much difference when it comes to success or failure on trash mobs; if you get a tank who knows how to manage their AM, then your group is very unlikely to find any kind of danger in pulling a room full of trash mobs, and no amount of fail from the DPS or healer is really likely to make any difference to the overall success of the group, because a skilled tank ends up being pretty much invulnerable.

If the game's combat model is now changing so that tanks can/will feel overwhelmed as a result of pulling too many mobs, and as a result of Healers/DPS failing to handle mobs properly, then that's a great thing for a game which has always supposed to be co-operative multiplayer down to its core.

Trash mobs in Dungeons throughout MoP and WoD have been incredibly dull for a Healer or DPS. Even the trash mobs in Challenge Modes and Mythic dungeons were bland, and the root of the problem has been the ability of tanks to pull the entire room whilst barely taking a scratch; never requiring DPS or Healers to do anything other than chase the tank and burn everything down with mass AoE.

Now sure, the ability to pull the entire room and survive might be fun for the tanks, but it sure isn't fun for anybody else in a party of 5 players. I can understand that tanks are going to feel nerfed, but something badly needed to change to ensure that the other 4 people in the group were having fun too, and not just a spare part trailing behind the tank.

I just hope that Blizzard don't back aware from trying to make trash mobs feel more engaging again. If they need to nerf the normal-mode dungeons for LFD, then that's a lot better than going back to a place where DPS/Healers do little more on trash fights than keep on mashing buttons.

[Blur4stuff]

putting number balancing aside...

After this last patch BrM got better, but is still the least fun. I find DH and War to still be the most interesting. Druid is still basically a huge pile of meat with some claws sticking out after the nerf.

For some reason they just can't take what makes the War fun and translate it to the other specs at the same level.

[Jinpachi]

I never said old tanking>new tanking I simply said that tanks were not meat suits with threat back than. btw congratz you made the list again 2/2 mate

The hell they werent. That's ALL tanks were vanilla/tbc

- - - Updated - - -

The problem falls back onto how Vanilla raiding was I think. If you make it so the tank is more or less doing nothing but holding threat with little damage, and the healer is healing with little damage it becomes incredibly boring just as much as having less buttons you're pressing. Not to mention it affects the way those specs/classes are leveled and makes it difficult or much slower for them to actually gain levels so the majority of them will spec DPS until max level. Which in turn will cause there to be less tanks in leveling dungeons (not that most previous content dungeons need a tank) and will mean these people have far less experience with that role.

Of course this isn't always going to be the case, but it was some of the main issues that caused the current field for healers/tanks (tanks especially. Also having to constantly watch your threat is one thing, but speaking as someone who raided as a belf Ret and Rogue in BC, it was a nightmare for one spec while the other got away with doing whatever they wanted for free without worrying about pulling off the tanks. So you would then have to give every spec some sort of threat dump or transfer to help alleviate the issue otherwise you just have the boss running around doing things constantly while the tank tries desperately to hold threat and that's just not fun for anybody.

While i can see your argument, i would counter that fun is subjective, and ive raided plenty in vanilla/tbc without the dps/healers constantly needing to dump their threat. If they were doing that, they were doing it wrong. Tank pulls, dps gives 30 seconds for threat buildup before touching boss, and generally no mishaps occurred. Every now and then shit would go haywire, but that's what was engaging about the encounters. There was an element of the unknown, an X factor so to speak. You tried to minimize it as much as possible through practice and playing with the same group on a regular basis. Now its ALL faceroll. So to bash tanking at all in Legion is pretty irrelevant unless they've overhauled the system to a point where its unrecognizable. Im sure that's not the case. But people are cancer and are going to bitch about anything you set in front of them.

[goblingirl]

I both heal and tank and have done so all through since Classic so here's my take.

Tanks have been "too much" in MoP and WoD. If you can save yourself, what do you need a healer for? As a result, we've ended up with a lot of really bored healers who do not much more than raid-heal for aoe damage. Priests bubble or pray, druids slap regen on everything, shaman sit around spamming chain heal, etc.

Tanks have been able to play with utter disregard for the needs of the group.

So it's back to the days of:

1. Make sure your healer has mana before you pull
2. Stop overpulling
3. Use the CC your dps brings to the run

Why look... it's Classic.

[Deleted]

IF tanks will require healer and do very low damage who will carry noobcakes in dungoens ? I often get 3 dps that can output <10k dps on boss. While i do like 30k and often i have to carry them as tank. Also often healer is "less cappable" and i have to heal my self just so i can carry them and get my own reward. Why tanks have to be punished for low dps output of random people. Also Tanks now in WoD overgear content by a lot, often by 100 ilvl so god mode is expected. Anyone remember WoD first week and Train ? Train was super hard and required people that know wtf to do. CC on technicians etc... but now it doesn't because everyone has +100ilvl.

[l33t]

I always thought that tanks being able to outheal incoming damage is absolutely absurd concept as it effectively shuts down the need for another role (healer). Tanks should be able to absorb damage, to mitigate damage, to avoid damage, but not heal damage. So, IMO this is a step into right direction.

Absolutely idiotic ability pruning which destroys 1/2 of specs is a completely another story though.

[Delimit]

I both heal and tank and have done so all through since Classic so here's my take.

Tanks have been "too much" in MoP and WoD. If you can save yourself, what do you need a healer for? As a result, we've ended up with a lot of really bored healers who do not much more than raid-heal for aoe damage. Priests bubble or pray, druids slap regen on everything, shaman sit around spamming chain heal, etc.

Tanks have been able to play with utter disregard for the needs of the group.

So it's back to the days of:

1. Make sure your healer has mana before you pull
2. Stop overpulling
3. Use the CC your dps brings to the run

Why look... it's Classic.

That's what healers have always done. You've never needed 5 healers to keep a tank alive. This isn't Everquest, where you need a Complete Heal cast rotation from all your healers just to keep tanks alive. Tanks aren't capable of keeping themselves alive without help from healers in mythic raids. The only thing wrong with the current WoD model, is that healers are too strong.

Alpha:
Healers rarely ever need to stop for mana still.
Pulling isn't an issue.
There's rarely ever a need to CC anything. I've done every heroic on every tank, no CC required.

[Leblue]

As Blizzard gradually evolved towards Active Mitigation gameplay for tanks, it became pretty clear that neither DPS nor Healers really made much difference when it comes to success or failure on trash mobs; if you get a tank who knows how to manage their AM, then your group is very unlikely to find any kind of danger in pulling a room full of trash mobs, and no amount of fail from the DPS or healer is really likely to make any difference to the overall success of the group, because a skilled tank ends up being pretty much invulnerable.

I'm going to set aside the fact that the period when even heroic dungeons are "relevant" is so very short. We're talking a few weeks into an expansion outside of any new dungeons released (so MoP and WoD being the first few weeks of their release) and the rate we outgear them is incredibly rapid. Dungeons haven't been the difficulty of cataclysm dungeons at launch because the audience they were intended for had a difficult time finishing them to the point of frustration. That said, a lot of these chain pull "pull the room" that you see in things like challenge modes isn't limited to "loltankop", but a lot of it comes down to coordinating the massive number of external cooldowns, personal cooldowns, and mass stuns/silences that are in the game right now. If you outgear the content (which once you get any amount of raid gear you outgear it pretty nicely) you'll be able to chain pull unless blizzard puts in a bunch of cc on the mobs which you can then avoid by chain stunning the group. The problem of "pull the room" in harder dungeon content like CMs can be more attributed to how many tools the group brings to the table to nullify anything potentially dangerous in a trash pull.

If the game's combat model is now changing so that tanks can/will feel overwhelmed as a result of pulling too many mobs, and as a result of Healers/DPS failing to handle mobs properly, then that's a great thing for a game which has always supposed to be co-operative multiplayer down to its core.

This happens when your CM group fails to execute a pull properly (didn't prepot, cooldowns weren't up, or you simply went too ham). Its not like this never happens ever outside of a tank who's clearly undergeared or even properly geared simply pulling more than they're capable of without heavy support from the group.

Trash mobs in Dungeons throughout MoP and WoD have been incredibly dull for a Healer or DPS. Even the trash mobs in Challenge Modes and Mythic dungeons were bland, and the root of the problem has been the ability of tanks to pull the entire room whilst barely taking a scratch; never requiring DPS or Healers to do anything other than chase the tank and burn everything down with mass AoE.

Again, this is a problem with the tools available to the group as a whole whether you're talking external cooldowns to layer on the tank or mass stuns and silences to lock mobs down and prevent any dangerous mechanics that some trash mobs do have from actually going off. I'm not saying trash can't have a few more interesting things and I wouldn't mind it, but there's limitations based on an instance of what you can do. Sure they could stun the tank more so they're more vunerable, but that's not exactly fun sitting there and not playing the game either because every 5th mob in the dungeon stuns the tank.

So long as time in CMs (which obviously not as important come Mythic+) is the driving factor, the name of the game is mass pull and AOE using the tools to keep the tank from getting gibbed because you've got the whole room on them whether that's because they're all stunned at the same time or you're layering enough 30 - 50% cds to make it like the tanks getting hit by a smaller amount of mobs and your dps is on point enough to kill them before running out of those precious utility resources.

Now sure, the ability to pull the entire room and survive might be fun for the tanks, but it sure isn't fun for anybody else in a party of 5 players. I can understand that tanks are going to feel nerfed, but something badly needed to change to ensure that the other 4 people in the group were having fun too, and not just a spare part trailing behind the tank.

Now YMMV on dungeons, but I more often than not get asked to pull more in dungeons because dps are bored or healers are bored so maybe not everyone wants to sit there and kill the couple of mobs in a pack and think its a lot more fun to blitz through a dungeon? I personally find the bosses the fun part of a dungeon and know a lot of other people do too, but I don't mind the trash being interesting so long as it doesn't cross into the realm of tedious.

I just hope that Blizzard don't back aware from trying to make trash mobs feel more engaging again. If they need to nerf the normal-mode dungeons for LFD, then that's a lot better than going back to a place where DPS/Healers do little more on trash fights than keep on mashing buttons.

Everyone mashes buttons? I'd argue that if your class is boring in an aoe/single target situation classes need them to be more interesting than just spamming blizzard/hurricane and have a bit more to them rather than force them to only do their single target most of the time because that's the interesting gameplay and not an interesting aoe rotation. That's not something I'd lay on the tank and their gameplay though unless a tank is literally going through and one shotting the instance while they're ilvl 610 in a heroic dungeon.

Tank pulls, dps gives 30 seconds for threat buildup before touching boss, and generally no mishaps occurred. Every now and then shit would go haywire, but that's what was engaging about the encounters. There was an element of the unknown, an X factor so to speak. You tried to minimize it as much as possible through practice and playing with the same group on a regular basis.

I'm curious as to why in anyones' opinion this is "fun/good/engaging" gameplay because at that point this literally does gives the tank complete and utter control over how much the dps role can do and how much "fun" they can have. I mean, I'm probably just weird because I started playing in Wrath myself, but I'd hate bosses if I always spent the first 30 seconds just sitting there counting to 30 Mississippis. I think an argument could be made for threat being important so far as if a dps goes full ham on an add or something that a tank is basically doing enough cleave/aoe to keep off the healers, but I don't think you the tank in whatever gear you have vs your dps' gear should dictate when they get to play the game in even a single target situation.

Tanks have been "too much" in MoP and WoD. If you can save yourself, what do you need a healer for? As a result, we've ended up with a lot of really bored healers who do not much more than raid-heal for aoe damage. Priests bubble or pray, druids slap regen on everything, shaman sit around spamming chain heal, etc.

I think tanks might've been a bit overboard in how they scaled overall with incoming damage in MoP with Vengeance, but not so much WoD as I vividly remember requiring the healing from paladin beacon, disc priest shields, and HoTs/splash healing from other healers. If you want to play the "healers are bored" card I think it would be better directed at beacon of light, absorbs, and a lack of raid damage in a lot of fights. I know a lot of people were excited about Beast Lord Darmac in his original incarnation because of how much damage there was...then it was mostly gone and he became the fairly dull fight that he is now. Adding a few more scraps to fight over in the form of tank healing isn't going to address this unless you make healing a tank like healing Ysera or Tsulong relative to heals going out.

1. Make sure your healer has mana before you pull

General tank 101 in dungeons outside of you badly overgearing it and not caring. At that point, why care? In raids obviously never an issue.

2. Stop overpulling

You can still overpull now and end up dying, particularly in an uncoordinated pug group that isn't ready for it but its rather rare in heroic dungeons because everyone and their grandma outgears it outside of a very new player who hasn't been to tanaan yet and just dinged 100. Even Time walking WotLK dungeons I've seen and heard of tanks pulling like they do in dungeons they over gear and biting it because now that they don't have over 100 ilvls of what the content was tuned for they suddenly stopped being immortal and mobs didn't die in 3 seconds.

3. Use the CC your dps brings to the run

People do CC in the form of mass stuns and mass aoes. I mean, I remember cc'ing a few things really really early on in Heroics and CMs when WoD first launched because we were in quest gear still. Once we got gear it again became less of an issue and we returned to mass pull, chain stun, dps down (which if you have crap dps not doing their job won't happen quickly enough).

[Deleted]

How will these changes affect tanks doing solo runs on old raids?

[PrairieChicken]

The absurd ilvl iinflation seems to be the problem not the tanks.

I mean DPS able to do bazillion dps or healers solo healing in mythic gear is ok, but tanks requiring less healing is not?

[Daffan]

Uh, wut? Dude, did you even play this game in TBC? TBC had Isle of Quel'Danas and Magister Terrace, that literally gave everyone purples, making all content before this point pointless, that's not even counting the PvP Tokens that gave free gear. In Vanilla WoW there was Ruins of Ahn'Qiraj, that made a lot of stuff irrelevante, that's not even counting the fact that Grand Marshal gear became free in late Vanilla. In both cases is wasn't a snooze fest for the lack of tools to just join a random something with a single click, but to anyone that wasn't an unsocial basement dweller, it was as free as gear can come.

It may have gotten worse in Pandaria, with the introduction of the Isle of Free Loot, becoming even worse with the Super PvP Gear in end of Draenor, but it has always been there, new patches end up making other content irrelevant.

Isle of Quel and Heroic MGT did not come out until the very end, and yeah - it was stupid too. But it wasn't even full sets either. Nothing like LFR, Timewalking, Blue PVP gear or baleful today - NOT even close.

You can literally get baleful and pvp gear that is better then 2/4 difficulties of the current raid tier in 24hours, and 100% better then profs(5/6 stage)/world content/dungeons/2 earlier raids/everything else.

You are seriously talking about Ruins of Ahn'Qiraj? You couldn't just skip into AQ20... you had to do ZG/MC and Ony on the sides too. It was just another raid that came before/was weaker then Tier 2/2.5 to help gear up, it wasn't exactly a cake walk for the average player like any of the catchup I've mentioned above, I don't even rate it as catchup at all.

[Grandork]

Isle of Quel and Heroic MGT did not come out until the very end, and yeah - it was stupid too. But it wasn't even full sets either. Nothing like LFR, Timewalking, Blue PVP gear or baleful today - NOT even close.

You can literally get baleful and pvp gear that is better then 2/4 difficulties of the current raid tier in 24hours, and 100% better then profs(5/6 stage)/world content/dungeons/2 earlier raids/everything else.

You are seriously talking about Ruins of Ahn'Qiraj? You couldn't just skip into AQ20... you had to do ZG/MC and Ony on the sides too. It was just another raid that came before/was weaker then Tier 2/2.5 to help gear up, it wasn't exactly a cake walk for the average player like any of the catchup I've mentioned above, I don't even rate it as catchup at all.

I don't feel like typing this again, so I will just Ctrl C it.

"Vanilla is the only one that had huge patches with little change, but it was still there, since there was 9 major patches, introducing ZG in patch 1.7 and AQ in 1.9. In TBC there were a lot less, with BT in 2.1, ZA in 2.3 and MT/SW in 2.4, MT/SW being the game changer and making a ton of stuff irrelevant. WotLK has even less, but more proeminente irrelevance, in 3.1 there was the introduction of Ulduar (much like BT), in 3.2 we gained Trials of the Champion that gave huge loot, but much like MT, didn't make the whole of the Heroics irrelevant and that all went down hill in 3.3 with the introduction of FoS/PoS/HoR. No reason to do the other heroics when these 3 gave the best gear. Cataclysm had ZA/ZG in 4.1, and this already destroyed most of the Heroics, ED/WoE/HoT made everything become irrelevant in 4.3.

Can you see the trend? The higher the gear scalled, the worse it became. It can no longer be stopped, ilvl scalling is off charts and will remain so for ever. But my point still stands, the father into the expansion we are, the more irrelevant everything else becomes, it may have been mild in Vanilla, but it was still there, thus, never in the history of WoW has old content remain relevant throughout the expansion."

Essentially, stuff started going south when scalling became an issue, when the difference in ilvl of gear is over 40 from one raid to another (it was about 5~10 in Vanilla), the catch up mechanism are that much worse. Of course with all the casualisation of the catch up mechanism, it became much more evident, but there always has been these type of things.

[Synadrasa]

Preach is a moron. You can't say all tanking sucks just because your main class warrior got gimped. Vengeance Dh, Dk, Guardian druid look all really good. They're changing up brewmasters and prot pallies and as far as i'm concerned they can leave warriors in the dumpster where they belong.

[Felfaadaern Darkterror]

Looking at it from point of a healer in instances i still think that there are good and bad tanks. Sometimes its just boring as healer and i go to dmg and some tanks eat dmg like there is no tomorrow. And this goes over all classes and dungeons. I cant say much about the rota needed for taking less dmg but some players are doing it wrong.

Some tanks use their CDs; others ignore those buttons and dps while letting the healer worry about keeping them alive.

[Deleted]

I see a lot of people bringing up tank damage done as an issue?

A silly question popped to my mind and I just have to ask it from you guys:
The goal of PvE-combat is to down bosses, right?
And you down a boss by bringing his/her/it's health pool to zero, mkay?
Tank doing a nice amount of damage makes the fight smoother does it not?
So the fact that a tank does somewhat decent damage seems to only butt hurt some dps'ers?
So is that then just a symptom of everyone running with ReCount, Skada or Details!?
Perhaps combat logs should be hidden, or just make them count the groups total damage done, instead of showing individuals out going damage?

No it doesn't make the fight smoother as whatever damage the tanks have is taken into consideration when balancing the boss fight. As such it doesn't matter if it's 30 % of a DPS or 70 %, the boss will go down in the same amount of time anyway.

Personally I don't think tanks should be thinking about their DPS at all, same way healers shouldn't need to think about it. Our job is to protect the group and make sure nothing attacks them, to that end we need to focus on mitigating damage and staying alive, not dealing more damage to the enemy.

[Dezminion]

No it doesn't make the fight smoother as whatever damage the tanks have is taken into consideration when balancing the boss fight. As such it doesn't matter if it's 30 % of a DPS or 70 %, the boss will go down in the same amount of time anyway.

Personally I don't think tanks should be thinking about their DPS at all, same way healers shouldn't need to think about it. Our job is to protect the group and make sure nothing attacks them, to that end we need to focus on mitigating damage and staying alive, not dealing more damage to the enemy.

That is actually one of the problems at Legion, no matter what buttons one is going to push as a tank, it has little to no difference to the outcome.

[Felfaadaern Darkterror]

I miss MoP tanking for all 5 of the tank specs. Hated WoD simply because they nerfed the overall power of tanks. Legion is further nerfs to tanks, and complete reworks of everyone but warriors. It also crushed my hopes for Dark Apotheosis warlock tanking. If Legion does not have more content then MoP did, both in PvP and PvE, I'll be done with WoW, since it means that the developers of the game would be unable to make even a C-rank game if they didn't have all the resources at Blizzard behind them.

Wow I didn't play in MoP, but if Legion nerfed tanks by comparison, then tanks in MoP must have been ridiculous!

[Vestig3]

As a tank im happy we go back to be more dependend on healers then on ourselfs.

[Dezminion]

As a tank im happy we go back to be more dependend on healers then on ourselfs.

But they made all AM so weak and so "fixed" to the rotation, that you will be feeling like playing a dps, a dps who just happens to have threat O.o
That can't be fun?