The War Within Tank Tuning and Fortified Affix Change

With the introduction of the Dragonflight talents system and season-over-season changes, tanks in World of Warcraft have become extremely durable relative to non-tank characters. Their active defenses can mitigate high percentages of incoming damage and they have strong self-healing. Today, in the hardest content in the game, many tanks can sustain themselves without much assistance from healers. In some cases, we’ve seen it become optimal to do group content without a healer at all.

World of Warcraft is an MMO, and its multiplayer aspects are a major strength. Group content is extremely rewarding when players performing different roles come together to overcome a challenge. We want to reinforce the importance of the healer role and work towards gameplay where tanks and healers collaborate to reduce the damage the tank is taking and to restore the tank’s lost health.

Tank durability can cause some other problems as well, especially in challenging endgame content, that we want to work toward improving.

• Enemy damage has increased to challenge tanks, but if it’s increased too much, it gets spiky and puts tanks in significant danger if their defenses ever drop. This can lead to tanks getting killed rapidly, seemingly out of nowhere. We feel this is unsatisfying and would prefer tank damage to generally be evenly distributed, but still threatening over time.
• If tanks are not threatened enough, then the most challenging part of endgame content can become keeping DPS and healers alive, often against high burst damage. Making tank survival a more involving element of group gameplay could give us some freedom to ease up on the threat to other group members.

To address the above, we’re making reductions to tank durability and self-healing. This will allow us to smooth out the damage tanks and parties take while retaining the challenge of keeping them alive over time. We’ll take those changes into account in encounter tuning as well.

Tanks will take more damage overall, but shouldn’t die significantly more often.

To increase the overall damage tanks take and their reliance on healers, we’re primarily increasing the percentage of damage they take, after mitigation, from steady damage sources like physical attacks. We’re making fewer reductions to each class’s defenses against burst damage or other threats that are currently most likely to be lethal to them. Encounters will be tuned with this in mind so the character of tank damage changes, but the lethality of it doesn’t significantly increase.

Tank damage intake should be steady and not too fast.

One of our goals for these changes is to smooth out the rate tanks take damage to reduce surprise, spiky deaths. Healers should have time to respond to tank health and tanks should have time to use self-heals like Word of Glory or Celestial Brew. For some classes, we’re increasing their passive defenses to compensate for decreases to more active or reactive defensive mechanics. Tankbusters will still create challenging moments that reward tanks for planning and smart use of cooldowns.

Tanks will still have strong answers to threats or periods of danger, but less sustained self-healing.

Tanks should have autonomy over their own survival and will still have cooldowns or emergency self-heals like Renewal or Impending Victory. But the healing of continuous effects like Elune’s Favored or Indomitable are reduced, so tanks must have more of a partnership with healers to restore their missing health once it’s lost.

Healer gameplay should not be dominated by tank healing.

Healers play a critical role, and keeping tanks alive is part of what they bring to the table. However, healers contribute to the success of groups in many ways, especially in dungeons. They sustain the group, dispel harmful effects, and respond to burst damage, all while doing mechanics. Tank healing should not demand so much that it interferes with their other roles. It may take some iteration to get the balance right on this, where healers feel essential to tank survival but with their attention not overly demanded by it.

Tank gameplay should not significantly change or require actions like kiting to survive.

We’re happy that more players are enjoying playing tanks with their friends and in pick-up groups. There are a lot of demands on tanks, such as learning M+ routes, leading groups, and knowing what trash abilities are particularly dangerous. The gameplay of standing toe-to-toe with groups of enemies and the tactics you’ve learned to survive should continue to be effective.

Your Feedback Please!

We’re excited for you to get ahold of these changes and share your feedback on playing with them. Because there are so many factors to tanking, the most valuable feedback will be descriptions of your experiences playing with them. What does it feel like to play with the changes, and what’s different for you and your allies? Here are some questions to give you ideas of things you could share:

• How durable do you feel before and after the changes? What makes you feel that difference?
• In what ways did you change how you play?
• How did it change your builds?
• In what scenarios were you getting into trouble?
• For healers, how much more of your attention went to tanks compared to before?

We’d also love it if you can share what content you played and its difficulty level (M+ key level, Delve level, Heroic vs. Mythic raid, etc.), what difficulty level you and your friends normally clear, and what your experience level is with a class you tried.

Thank you!

In this week’s beta update, we will be reducing the damage modifier of Fortified from 30% to 20%. Our goal is to reduce the overall damage to the group to offset the fact that tanks will likely need a bit more external healing. Your feedback is greatly appreciated, and we will be keeping a close eye on dungeon and raid testing and will further adjust individual abilities as needed.