Existing tanks are getting old and we dont have any real caster tank, some ability mechanics already could lend itself to such playstyle like empowered spells combined with damage resistance and immunity to knockbacks from tank tree, Aug evoker has buffs you extend by casting skills, same could work for defensives, it would feel good having a slower paced but rock solid tank that casts spells at lower speed than spammy melee and would get more people in tanking as many existing tanks have harmful levels of APM and some could use a rework to deal with bloat.
For example paladin would look awesome with light based aoe pull/taunt shifting power, maybe with size of aoe increasing like on aug and other light casts, or some completely new spec, mail doesnt have tanks while leather has, shaman could do some earth based spec, even mage could do some interesting mana shield version using mana instead of life.
Something like an Abjurer Wizard would be cool! They could even make it a “Void Abjurer”, if/when they give us a new race, which isn’t a damn dwarf!
“They created physical or magical barriers, negated magical or physical abilities, harmed trespassers, or even banished the subject of the spell to another plane of existence. The abjuration school had no subschools. A wizard who specialized in abjuration was known as an abjurer.”
The old warlock ability Metamorphosis was great, I remember saving a few dungeons from wiping with it back in the day. Something like that would be pretty cool.
Aug should be remade into a tank, they clearly don’t want to bother with the buff class path as they had to add buff specs to other existiting classes in order to avoid “class monopoly”, and are remaking Aug into a DPS class which we already have craptons of.
I could even see it as a caster tank, some of it’s abilities are already fitting for a caster tank.
The only problem with that is the amount of backlash this will bring. Remember when they completely changed surv hunters. It is never nice to get your spec taken away they started with the whole buff class thing and now they should keep that and make more of them
It’s all fun and games, till you have Enemys that interrupt you and all your DPS are Melee, you gonna have a fun time explaining why you couldn’t keep Aggro because you got kicked by a Mob.
one idea was using knockback+damage resist during empower, so you would use empower to absorb larger hits. so the difficulty wouldnt be facerolling keyboard at 420apm as blizzard seems to like for their tank design now, but timing abilities
Its not about caster tanks. You first need caster bosses.
And if you can imagine what a caster boss looks like, you will quickly find out why there are no caster tanks.
Il give you a quick tip : How would you make a dungeon where ANY tank can tank is capable of doing it ? Both melee tanks and casters ? How would those trash packs look like ?
Answer that question first. Then we can continue the discussion about caster tanks.
Same feeling, how would it work? Full of instant cast to ensure they can keep a pack in line while all dps start to press every cooldowns?
It’s a nice fantasy, but a caster tank would be a slow aggro builder or require to be able to cast while moving permanently, pretty sure this has been reviewed few times and was discarded as not viable on paper.
you can add cast protection on talent tree making you immune to abilities that knock you out of cast, also there are abilities like monk fists, warrior spin etc that dont get canceled
Yea but wiht all instants , what does it matter if its caster then? In that sense even DH or DK would be valid , as they use instant magic spells to tank . ( moslty)
Like u said , its a nice fantasy, but making it work is impossible
