We’re deploying some tuning for tanks with scheduled weekly maintenance, as we feel that tanking has fallen behind our intentions for keeping up with the incoming damage in Mythic+. We’re focusing on two goals.
Increase passive mitigation to broadly reduce damage for tank specs that underperform in higher keys.
Increase uptime and effectiveness on some cooldowns. This should help underperforming specs to better cover periods of heavy damage.
We’re hopeful that these changes will help bridge the gap between tank specs, and we will continue to monitor and tune as necessary.
Classes
Death Knight
Blood
Developers’ notes: We are looking at smoothing out the damage intake of Blood outside of their cooldown window by increasing the consistency and uptime of their Apex Talent. To further help these windows of high damage intake we are also increasing their Health and Death Strike healing.
Dancing Rune Weapon grants 25% Parry (was 20%).
Blood Fortification grants 40% Stamina (was 35%).
Improved Death Strike healing increased to 15% (was 5%).
Dance of Midnight grants Dancing Rune Weapon for 8 seconds (was 6 seconds).
Dance of Midnight chance to proc increased to 12.5% (was 10%).
Demon Hunter
Vengeance
Developers’ notes: Vengeance Demon Hunter’s baseline defenses are its most lacking, while cooldown availability and values are currently serving the spec well. As a result, we will be primarily targeting core values for Health and damage reduction, with an additional smaller increase specifically to Armor.
Demonic Wards now reduces all damage taken by 12% (was 8%).
Thick Skin now grants 55% increased Stamina (was 50%).
Effectiveness of Mastery: Fel Blood increased by 20%.
Void Reaver now causes Frailty to reduce damage taken by 5% (was 4%).
Paladin
Protection
Developers’ notes: With these changes, we’re aiming to improve baseline durability for Protection Paladins by increasing passive effects which contribute to effective health. We’re also addressing on-demand survivability with adjustments to defensive cooldown coverage and strength.
Blessing of Dusk reduces damage taken by up to 20%, increasing as your health decreases (was 10%).
Sanctified Plates increases stamina by 7/15% (was 5/10%).
Ardent Defender duration increased to 12 seconds (was 8 seconds).
Ardent Defender now reduces damage taken by 30% (was 20%).
Sentinel duration increased to 20 seconds (was 16 seconds).
Warrior
Protection
Developers’ notes: Protection melee damage mitigation is quite strong, but is a bit behind for magical attacks and damage-over-time effects. These changes are aimed at strengthening those areas as well as making it easier to maintain healthy Ignore Pain values.
Fight Through Flames reduces magic damage taken by 6% (was 4%).
Phalanx reduces damage enemies deal to you by 8% (was 5%).
Any plans for fixing the circus that is Guardian gameplay?
Not being required to use Maul, Raze, Ravage is one thing but actively not having to Mangle for Rage is plain stupid because you only need “so much” resources before you cap out on armor benefits from Ironfur, which because the lack of Thorns of Iron doesn’t have to be mindlessly spammed with a scroll wheel.
You’ve destroyed what little fun was left with the barebones class design. Now sure if you’re even aware but the Echo nerf has further reduced or removed all attractiveness from the Apex Talents because it affects Ironfur and Frenzied Regen as well.
Delete this ugly Apex talent and buff instead our active DRW, e.g. buff its duration to 18 sec and reduce its cooldown to 45-50 sec.
San’layn hero talents are heavily reliant on active DRW window, because your fake buff from the Apex talent doesn’t trigger what true DRW does, nor do general talents like Blood Mist proc from this fake buff.
2.5% proc chance increase is too small to make any feasible difference. whether we live or die will still depend on RNG, that is not a healthy approach to a tanking playstyle!
But I do appreciate your efforts of breaching the gap between tanks via buffs, despite them being a bit lackluster.
Also fix the trinket situation just check the trinket tier list per class and spec on wowhead and look at current trinket balance, dungeon trinkets are actually underperforming bigtime, honestly hate that the best trinkets are all from raid, i do not enjoy raiding at all it takes to much time compared to m+ always been this way.
Well at least they realize that paladins without active CDs are as strong as… a wet cardboard box.
Although not sure if the proposed tunning alleviates this issue much…
It goes beyond poor Thrash tuning, which with bonus arcane damage talents does almost as much damage as an empowered Raze. Ursoc’s Guidance and Elune’s Favored need to be retuned and made mutually exclusive if arcane Thrash damage is to stay.
It’s a complete mess and all because of AOE aggro concerns.
Mangle talents + DOTC + Apex made the class interesting; slowing down gameplay but at the same time allowing for more Rage generation which then enables you to even alternate between offensive and defensive rage dumps while maintaining a reasonable stack of Ironfur.
Sounds to me they should’ve just buffed aoe threat on abilities that where lacking while keeping guardian druid in its current position or well move it in line with other tanks, while getting all the tanks at brew monk levels.
Yes. My concern isn’t that bear had been nerfed. Now it probably does at minimum some 5-10% better on AOE than before, all while being allowed to completely ignore signature and core class abilities. A small single digit aura buff along with increased threat modifier would have achieved the same without turning bear into a disco clown.
Blood DK: Change DoM proc rate to 18% minimum. Your changes will barely help half a key’s worth of help to BDK atm.
I’m relatively clueless on DH, but if they’re so bad, I’m guessing these changes won’t help their survival that much And mastery is poopcrumb for VDH since its inception, either give a better mastery to it, or don’t insult people’s intelligence by buffing mastery.
Prot Paladin looks good on paper, I’m cautiously optimistic. Sentinel change looks good.
Prot Warrior: Ignore Pain effectiveness needs to be upped by %25-30 range, not %8, either you can spell reflect or you can’t, so IP needs to be a hell of a lot stronger, and an important side note, no one in their right mind takes magic damage taken talent over armor.
Thank God I can now go into +19 nexus as a prot warrior and receive 2% less magic damage from seer while still not being able to do a sh*t about debuff with millions of health absorb.
It is too complicated for Copilot to handle. Micslop needs time (years) to cook it, but of course we need to pay to fund it for Blizzard to continue using the alpha version asked by suits.
There was a post in WoW US forum basically predicted how the bear change would play out. Pretty sure none of Blizzard employees play their game when balancing classes or looking how to make classes fun and plays good.
