Tank Specs in PvP

Historically, tank specializations have been somewhat problematic for PvP balance. Taking a character designed to soak massive hits from raid bosses and putting them in front of other players poses some very difficult challenges. If they’re able to put out enough damage to be a threat, they become unstoppable. If not, enemy players can just ignore them. We’ve seen some limited success with tank specs as flag carriers in Rated Battlegrounds, but even that has proven problematic.

However, the class and systems changes coming in Warlords of Draenor are giving us an opportunity to try a different approach. With Vengeance gone, tanks are able to deal much more damage than previously. It’ll still be a little behind a true DPS spec, but thanks to the increased player health pools and healer changes, PvP is much less reliant on heavy burst damage. Sustained damage output can still be quite threatening.

We feel that that increase in damage will make tanks quite dangerous in PvP, but as they still need to survive those massive swings in PvE, their ability to soak damage would be too much. To that end, in an upcoming beta build, we’ll be trying out a debuff that increases tank damage taken by 25% from other players. It’s important to understand that this is not an attempt to make tank specs inviable in PvP. Quite the opposite – it’s just one part of an overall strategy that, if successful, will make tank specs a reasonable choice, even in situations where there isn’t a flag to carry or node to defend.

Our hope is that we can get tank specs to a point where they take a little less damage than other specs (but not so much less that it’s problematic), and, as a tradeoff, deal a little less damage than other specs (but not so much less that they’re not a threat). It’s definitely an experiment, and one that’s going to take a lot of iteration and testing. We may even decide to take a different approach entirely. But we think it’ll be pretty cool if it works, so we’re going to give it a try. Let us know what you think!