Upcoming Tank Tuning in The War Within - Nerfs to Self Sustain and Survivability
Blizzard has announced tank tuning coming in The War Within, making reductions to tank durability and 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. Read more on wowhead.com
