Tanks need to be somewhat OP if you want people to play them again

Gameplay Dungeons, Raids and Scenarios
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It’s the most thankless role in the game along with healer. You had some goals in mind with all the changes you made going into TWW and in my opinion you failed to deliver on pretty much all of the points you made. All we got was more stress and misery when playing M+. Despite some small efforts being done in the dungeon pool for season 2, it doesn’t really fix the problem.
I’ll quote Yodatv, one of the highest rated tanks in the world, when he summorized how tanking feels this season: “You need to have a defensive CD rolling at all times, or you’ll randomly die.” Where is the upside here? Dying more often, causing a wipe and potentially a key depletion? On what planet is that an improvement over previous seasons?

Lead dev Ion Hazzikostas was interviewed recently, where he talks about how unpopular M+ have been this season. His intentions for improvements sound good on paper, but the fact that they did nothing major to address gameplay issues in M+ this entire season, gives me very little hope for the next one.

Hazzikostas said that making sure M+ is fun is a top priority for the development team. He was promoted late last year, and oversees both modern/retail WoW and World of Warcraft Classic.

“At the end of the day, it falls to us to create the conditions that provide everyone who wants to have a fun dungeon experience with the right level of challenge and a group to run with,” he said. “As we begin the [testing] cycle, the health of M+ is a major area of focus for our design teams, and for game leadership.”

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I know you don’t think much of my opinion, but I would say that tanking feels much better now than it did in Dragonflight. It makes me feel like that when I am pressing cooldowns actually matter and my performance is no longer judged by “how much damage I do”, but rather how much the healer must concentrate on me.
Which, if I play correctly and don’t pull with greed, is rather minimal.

That is only true at 12+ keys. Most pulls can be done with just one CD and pooling your resources correctly to the window outside that CD.

This is my tanking shoplist for season 2 (a man can dream):

  1. Make sure that when selecting tank (or heal) loot-spec, I can never get a trinket with a pure damage element on it. You nerfed it, now fix it.
  2. Delete magical damage (or bleed DoT) tank-busters from the game. You are 3 expansions late with that, but I know you can do it. I believe in you!
  3. Re-work the poor brew. From the juggernaut it was in BfA, you made it into the most stress-ful, least performing tank ever. It needs more reliable self-healing from both the orbs and the celestial brew. Do something with the Ox cooldown, it doesn’t help with anything for mitigation.
  4. Wish every tank spec something similar to Hand of Sacrifice. Such a dope spell. I also love Intervene, but it doesn’t affect spells and you have to stick close to your target. Would be nice if all spec had something like those.
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I don’t disagree with all of this. I think tanking is more fun if I can focus on staying alive and setting up pulls, rather than just pumping damage. The problem I have with TWW is there is just way more stuff that will kill you, while still having to deal with several specs ripping aggro (although I haven’t played after the latest threat modifier buff), and everything else you’d normally do as a tank. Then they added the interrupt changes which basically punishes people for using hard CC, as it might cause wasted interrupts.
If they just added the slight increase to required healer attention on tanks, it would have been fine. But they added so many other things on top of that, so there was a compounding effect where M+ became drastically more difficult across the board.

They doubled down on difficulty increase, and made it harder to get good rewards on top of that. Turns out that for the average M+ player, those things made the game less fun and people quit. Other than that, you have some good ideas on that list.

For me personally, I am leaning towards skipping S2. M+ went from having fun with friends, to dealing with immense stress for 3-4 hours, unless I am doing low keys around +8, but I don’t get any upgrades from doing that so it’s pointless.

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I don’t disagree, I think Blizz need to answer this question:

What will attract people to the role? (And what turns them off from it).

Put it in 2 columns, things they can do something about and things they can’t.
They can’t realistically do something about it being stressful and you having to know the route. They can absolutely do something to make tanks not feel like they are clenching their butts for 95% of a dungeon.

I genuinely think it would be good if some fresh blood came in and looked at things. Ion doesn’t listen and hes an expert at mealy mouthed platitudes that have little meaning.

5

Exactly. Routing/leading is out of their control, and that is part of the deal you sign up for when tanking. The changes they did for TWW had a huge, negative impact on the vast majority of players doing keys. I really wish Blizzard would stop using MDI players doing +20 keys as a reference for tuning and mechanics.

Yup, I think they need to bring in someone with fresh ideas. I’m getting sick of the Ion-cycle every expansion:
Make terrible changes that nobody asked for>double down on ignoring feedback>do an interview 3-4 months into the patch to address the same feedback and say “we agree”>collect praise from content creators making videos “bLiZZarD liSTeNed!!”>spend the remaining 2-3 seasons fixing their mistakes>repeat next expansion.

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The linked article is of quite a poor quality, imo.

Players are dropping out of World of Warcraft’s hardest dungeon mode in droves

Meaningless info, without putting it in context. So first and foremost, you want to see a decline in runs much larger than the decline of active players during the first season of an expansion. Then compare that data with other seasons, preferably while also taking the period within an expansion timeline into account.

That while also taking into account that this was partly on purpose, as the lowest keys are practically (intentionally) replaced by Delves. So all the “gearing up alt runs” are also limited…

This is just a bunch of confirmation bias. Because the week after that article hit, the numbers were exactly the same level as S2 and S3 in DF. So it may as well be a dip enhanced by a lack of overall content and a holiday period.

We quit the season early after hitting a wall at +12s and getting passed easily by groups that typically didn’t reach those levels, but had the “right” classes.

So they care more about being surpassed by others who previously didn’t do that content than actually overcoming a challenge. You know what Ion said:

Our goal is for M+ to be fun, engaging and rewarding for people who really enjoy dungeon gameplay and the difficulty progression.

Caring so much about being surpassed by others…yeah, no, then it’s not about the dungeon gameplay and the difficulty progression. They just want to compare their sausage.

Does M+ have issues? Sure. But for crying out loud…they don’t seem to be able to understand that their own bias is so thick that they can barely sit up straight anymore.

Just a :poop: article, partly just a promotional article for RaiderIO. Even the regular complaining forum post here is more insightful (which they even use as “support” for their claim that there is a lot of frustration…I mean…there’s a share of frustration about quite literally everything on here. It says na-da).

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S1 is where you’d expect the playerbase to be highest. Comparing runs in s3 of last season, where you’d expect player attrition to s1 of this season (where you’d expect a LOT less) doesn’t strike me as confirmation bias.

Runs are through the floor this season.

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First: DF S2 and S3 were regularly mentioned here as “vastly superior seasons”. Nothing indicates that.
Second: They purposefully pushed a bunch of players from M+ towards Delves. In other words, it was expected and per design that this season 1 would show lower numbers than previous seasons. Without taking this into consideration, any claim regarding popularity is void.

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Not really. You can take the start point and look where we are now. Now is less than 1/4th of the start of the season. Other seasons dropped off far less.

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Eh, don’t exaggerate?

  • DF S1, week 16, -63.8%
  • TWW S1, week 16, -70.5%

No idea what the exact starting value is for either, though. Which is also kind of relevant…

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I saw slightly different numbers where it was less than 1/4. It’s still a bigger drop and its from a lower base (since delves supposedly cannibalised some M+). All in all its not a perfect analysis but its giving the right picture.

You can argue the toss about methodology but its a terrible season with bad participation, low retention and a poor difficulty curve.

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I believe tank DPS should be drastically reduced so that tanks are no longer treated as both healers and DPS in one role. Instead of relying on DPS to generate threat, I’d introduce spells specifically designed to generate a high amount of threat for tanking purposes.

HPS should be the healer’s responsibility. Currently, most tanks can heal themselves effectively, except for extreme situations where defensive cooldowns run out, and the tank gets one-shot.

The massive imbalance between tanks is another issue. Paladin tanks are two tiers above the others, which discourages people from playing as tanks in general.

Because tanks can often survive pulls without a healer, tank-busters were introduced. I stopped playing my DH tank after repeatedly jumping into a group of mobs and getting one-shot. Of course, without tank-busters, you could theoretically pull an entire dungeon. Maybe mobs should stack a debuff to counter this?

Perhaps tank HPS should be reduced by 50–80%, forcing tanks to rely on healers. It might also be worth returning to the uniqueness of each tank. For example, Blood DKs could focus on self-healing, Guardians could serve as massive health pools, and Paladins could bring utility. Right now, even tank health pools are nearly identical, which makes tanks feel too similar.

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Sir, this isn’t classic.

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That’s a good idea, but they must have an aura/buff so if they are solo, they don’t take 7.5 years to kill a regular open world mob.

Eh. Not really. That is just a community perception. Because of the abundant utilities,off-heals and near infinite interrupts, people prefer them, but they are hardly the most rugged tanks. Their damage is too high, that is also true.

Paladin tanks are hardly the reason people don’t play tanks. If Prot Pally was D tier, I still wouldn’t touch my brew master with a 10 feet pole.

Tank-busters are good and necessary. They are the tank’s mechanics. But they never should be un-blockable, be magical damage or a DoT. Not sure how Blizz didn’t figure that one out yet.

Just healed a Veng DH in 11 Stonevault yesterday, doing double or tripple pulls. He had zero issues.

Yeah, no. Tanks are (with the exception of 2) are perfect the way they are right now. They are self-sufficient, but if they are greedy and over-extend, then they run out of CDs and they die. That is how it should be.

I just wish they would use some brains when designing tank busters.

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Agree, the same as for healers so they don’t have to switch to DPS to make quest.

How can the community see them otherwise when, as you mentioned, they have tons of utility, interrupts, off-heals, are just as tanky as other tanks, and deal disgustingly high DPS? Compared to other tanks, that’s basically the definition of being two tiers above the rest.

All the data supports this: Warcraft logs, DPS/HPS numbers, and the highest completed keys all point to Paladins dominating. That didn’t happen by accident—it’s a direct result of their toolkit and performance.

In most cases, dodge, parry, and activated cooldowns allowed me to survive pulling 2–3 packs on such keys while doing twice the HPS of the healer. However, there are moments where, jumping into a single pack of mobs, I’d die in the blink of an eye due to a brutal combo.
Yesterday on second pack in Grim Batol 11 I died from 16.5mln in 3 secs - no luck with parry/dodge https://gyazo.com/9fd64fc7d2e4866359fc2c93645f9c96

Yes, that it should be. Unfortunately, this highlights yet another imbalance. I often play as a Resto Druid, and I’ve healed various tanks. With Monks, Warriors, or DH tanks, I need to keep a very close eye on them, often ending a dungeon with 50% of my healing focused on them. In contrast, when healing Paladins or DKs, I’m practically just a support player.

While DKs have always been designed to take more damage but heal themselves back up, Paladins in their current form are almost entirely self-sufficient.

If a healer’s only role is to patch up DPS players from uninterruptible mechanics, Blizzard is forced to introduce more and more such mechanics to keep healers relevant—and that’s something no one really wants.

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From my perspective as healer warriors seem to be the most tanky. Paladin has a lot of utility though including options to safe someone else and a battle res. And they do the most damage. But in tankyness i do not really see that much difference. They flop over on pull just like a bear. Talking about bear, they are very self sufficient too.

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Not just Paladins. Guardians aren’t any worse in that regard, those are absolute beasts if played right. I’ve also seen Warriors barely needing any heals. Even Brewmasters in 10s do mostly fine just on their own.

Self-sufficiency of tanks is for the content that 90% of the players do not an issue. If it is, then it’s a player issue.

This is probably an interesting issue, and one that’s hard to tackle. Take a decently coordinated group, and what you describe is already the case. A healer’s job can be made very, very, easy (other than unavoidables).

But then join the average +6 pug, and you need to push numbers way over what you otherwise need in a +10 or +11.

Finding a balance in all this, isn’t very easy.

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Well, first of, it is not tankier than Prot Warriors or Guardian Druids. Also, nothing is as independent as a Blood DK.

The biggest advantage that Prot Paladins have over other tanks, are the utilities (needed to avoid certain one-shots) damage (needed to avoid running out of time) and handling big pulls with permanent +25% Parry. But Prot Pallies are far less able to tank bosses and single/dual mob packs as other tanks.

The key here is damage, utility and big packs. That’s why Paladin is S tier. But not because it is the tankiest.

Bloody Hell. Is that the tripple pack pull with the Enraging Bruiser? I admit, I can only tank it 12+ with Incarnation in Bear, then it’s running time.

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Of course, it’s not about whether the paladin is tankier or not—they’re practically the same as other “tanky tanks” :slight_smile:. However, the amount of DPS, interrupts, stuns, dispels, the bubble, and even combat res make them stand out.

If we have a choice, for example, between a warrior (even if they’re tankier than a paladin), whose utility amounts to just a smile, and a paladin, then if both can survive equally long on a pack of mobs, but the paladin does almost two times more DPS and has such utility options, the choice is clear.

DH is decent as long as you still have cooldowns—in this season, its gameplay is quite frustrating due to the need for extremely precise cooldown management.

This was pack number 2: https://gyazo.com/51cc08acd1da7376ae4ce0b8bc4fe42a

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Yea, tanks seeing themselves even further down the meters will really make more people want to play them!

Thats not the case. It’s a decent split between healers and tanks sustaining themselves atm. In your scenario healers would then have to babysit the tanks which would make their hard role harder.

This makes no sense? Were the tank busters coming in the second you jumped into the pack to obliterate you? (Hint: They don’t.) This means its not quite as easy as you’re making out to “theoretically” do big pulls.

In summary, I think you’re better at playing the game than commentating on tanks.

This is simply false. I did a 12 GB last night. For reference I took 1.62B damage and healed 1.05B (555k HPS so not slacking). Thats just over 60% of the damage I took healed up on my own and thats probably pretty representative.

I think paladins give them impression of self sufficiency because when the poo hits the fan (and they have buttons available) they can last a ridiculously long time.