Tank & Healer Ability Tuning

In the latest Legion Alpha build, tanks and healers will notice significant changes to the tuning on many of their defensive abilities. These may appear to be “nerfs” at first glance, but are actually part of a widespread adjustment to improve overall tank (and tank healer) gameplay, that includes reducing the strength/frequency of defensive cooldowns, and adjusting creature tuning to compensate.

Over the course of Warlords of Draenor, tanks have been mostly self-sufficient, providing the vast majority of their own survival, with only minor direct assistance required from healers. Encounter design has unfortunately reinforced this, focusing tank damage into more and more bursty moments in an attempt to challenge tanks. This has made long-cooldown defensive ability usage more and more important, while also further trivializing direct healing requirements.

For Legion, we want to return the overall tank gameplay to a more stable environment. In that, we have laid out some specific goals that we aim to hit:

• Tanks will require more direct healing. This will also improve on healer gameplay, as it’s more engaging when there’s a mixture of the types of healing that need to be used on any single encounter.
• Active Mitigation abilities for tanks (such as Shield Block or Death Strike) should feel rewarding, allowing an experienced tank to meaningfully reduce damage taken.
• Healers should care about the time and mana required to heal tanks, so that taking less damage as a tank is considered valuable.
• Tanks and healers’ long-cooldown defensive abilities (such as Barkskin or Shield Wall) should feel like a valuable resource. These abilities should be strong, but not necessarily available for every danger during a specific encounter.
• Tanks should have much more survivability than a non-tank. However, they don’t necessarily need to be extremely more sturdy. If the difference in ‘tankiness’ between tanks and non-tanks becomes too much of a gap, we then risk having situations such that if any one add gets loose, it’s likely to instantly kill any poor healer or damage dealer they hit–as the damage that these creatures deal would need to be exponentially higher to offset the sturdiness of the tank. This also brings a risk that tanks would opt to ignore enemy abilities that are designed to be dangerous to non-tanks, just taking those relatively minor blows rather than trying to avoid them as intended.
• In raid encounters, tanks should spend more time tanking, and less time waiting for their turn to tank.
• Tanks should be able to handle solo content quite effectively. They need to do less damage than dedicated damage dealers, but that difference can be moderate. It doesn’t have to be a massive difference.

Looking at these goals, we’ve made the following changes for tanking in Legion. We hope that these explanations will help you understand the bigger picture, in that these should be viewed as an overall improvement to the style of tank gameplay, rather than nerfs.

• In order to ensure that tanks require direct healing from healers, we’re increasing the amount of damage that makes it past a tank’s mitigation. This will include reducing or removing passive defensive abilities, along with the below changes.
• We’re toning down how frequently you’re able to use Active Mitigation abilities. This change will generally affect the length of their cooldowns, and not necessarily the strength of the ability. We believe these abilities are important to tank survival; but, when the uptime on these abilities gets too high, skill in knowing when to use them strategically matters less.
• EDIT: Passive healing from healers (such as Beacon of Light) will be toned down, and other tank heals adjusted to compensate.
• There are many long-cooldown defensive abilities that will be able to be used less frequently, and, in some cases, these abilities may be weaker. Many of these abilities are currently either too numerous or usable too frequently, resulting in a strong cooldown for almost every threatening moment of every encounter.
• Encounter design will be adjusted to account for these changes. Overwhelming burst damage will be toned down, in favor of more steady and consistent damage on tanks.
• The damage of creatures that are intended to be tanked in group content will be reduced overall, in order to ensure that tanks can still perform their role just as well as before.
• Damage output by tanks will be increased, and their scaling with gear will be improved. This is being done so that tanks can stay in-line with damage dealers as a group gears up together.

Please note that many of these changes are preliminary, and we’ll be tweaking our changes based on testing and feedback. We’ll continue making adjustments as the Alpha moves along, until classes are in a more balanced state, and we look forward to hearing your thoughts throughout this process.

For more info on the latest Legion Alpha changes, see our summary thread: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/20420212939

01/13/2016 04:29 PMPosted by Peachpies

What about healer damage and how it feels to play a healer, it looks like, again, we are getting lots of stuff done for tanks but little for healers.

Healer damage is being raised substantially, but that's not related to the topic of this thread, so please start a new thread to discuss it. Thanks!

We agree that passive healing from healers (most prominently Beacon) is a huge contributor to the problem, and will be adjusted as well.

EDIT: Edited that into the original post as well.

A lot of great discussion here, and we share a lot of the concerns (even the cynical ones), and will be doing our best to actually meet the stated goals.

Tanks will indeed have much more health than DPS; apologies if that was unclear. It's just that their total effective health can safely be in the 5-15x of a DPS range, doesn't need to be 50x. 50x is kinda silly. Raid bosses will still 1-shot DPS, and that's fine.

Healers are being adjusted with tank healing in mind.

The comments about tanks spending less time waiting for their turn to tank isn't an indication that they'll be expected to run around more, just that they'll have more engaging encounter gameplay.

We especially look forward to more feedback based on playtesting; thanks for what you've given so far! This is going to be an iterative process, and we'll keep adjusting based on it. It surely isn't perfect yet, but we'll keep reading, responding, and tweaking!

01/14/2016 10:26 PMPosted by Totalchai

Are encounters going to be tuned to have longer time-to-kill for tanks as well?

I ask because in a world where tanks need to be actively healed, dying so quickly that they must be spammed all of the time (read: less than 3 or 4 seconds for 100-0) just leads to a WotLK situation where one person gets to spam the tank forever and everyone else ignores it and nothing is really any different.

Absolutely, yes. It's very important that this is the case.

01/14/2016 10:52 PMPosted by Amp

I'd like to note that "use Active Mitigation to avoid X ability" isn't usually engaging gameplay. How about I use AM because it helps me survive a powerful attack, not because I get a debuff if I don't.

Binary AM checks like you mention will continue to be extremely rare. They're still an interesting mechanic to see everyone once in a while, but will not be common. Sorry if what I said gave the impression otherwise.

01/15/2016 06:18 PMPosted by Disparity

In regards to tank healing, I am very much a fan of "Many hits to be killed, many heals to be healed." This adds variety and allows the engaging task of healing prioritization (i.e. what makes healing fun).

Most of the posts on here have pretty much already spelled out the problem which is scaling. Once you start scaling these heals more than you scale the HP pools, you run into near instant top offs. Then this begins the slippery slope of competitive (raids) top offs, and the trivialization of mechanics. Then the mechanics become more bursty to make healing more engaging and the cycles repeat.

More attention needs to be paid to ensuring that the gear scaling doesn't lead to instant topping off, so that encounter design no longer needs to keep ratcheting damage to extremely bursty levels. Exponential gear curves work great for DPS, but terrible for healing and tanking. We are of a symbiotic relationship in this regard.

We generally agree with this thought process. The fact that tank healing gets spikier as ilvls rise is a huge problem that we're making some significant changes to help address. Most notably, Spirit's removal, and the changes to how secondary stats scale with ilvl will help. The % of a tank's healthbar that you can heal per second went up over the course of Warlords, by a massive amount (probably about 3x). We don't want it to not go up (it gives a good feeling of progression), but it should only go up a little (probably to 1.5x).

01/16/2016 06:16 AMPosted by Breathìng

I echo the sentiments of other tanks in this thread regarding the removal of active mitigation abilities. Being responsible for accurately recognizing and appropriately responding to potential threats is fun, is engaging, and does not need to be changed. Requiring active responses to incoming damage increases the skill cap, and is one of the things that allows good tanks to outshine other more mediocre players.

We agree with your sentiments; perhaps my wording was not clear. We are not removing active mitigation abilities; we're making them more active. Apologies if my original post was unclear about that. Currently, you can maintain 70-100% uptime on most rotational active mitigation, making them rather passive-feeling. By making them 40-60% uptime, the choice of when to use them becomes more skillful.

On the topic of tank offense, we see lots of discussion about how tanks need to have ways to trade defense for offense, such as choosing to use resources on defensive abilities or offensive abilities, what choices they are for that, how effective they are, etc.

We actually completely disagree with that whole premise, because it leads to a lot of un-fun cascading effects. You may focus more on damage, and frustrate healers with needing more healing. You may focus on your assigned role of tanking, maximizing defense, while doing meager damage. While there are definitely upsides (it can certainly be fun trying to ride the line of not giving up too much defense, while maximizing offense), there is a better way.

Instead, we think that how skillfully you play your class should affect both your offense and defense. If you're trying hard to play your character well, you should be performing well at all of your jobs, and that includes both survival and damage dealing for tanks, not sacrificing one for the other. You shouldn't have to give up your mitigation in order to deal respectable damage. You shouldn't have to accept doing trivial damage if you want to really make sure you survive and minimize healer assistance. Both of those goals should be aligned, and you should be rewarded for playing well with great damage and survivability.

We won't be removing absolutely all damage/survivability tradeoffs, but the few that remain will be significantly toned down.