Guardian Druid. Something not incarn related.
I'm begging, just not incarn related.
Please, please pick something else.
For the Forsaken, for Lauderon, for the Kieran Tour, for
Pandaria. For calendar to the.
Burning region for Gilnaeus, but has not done for the Lich King,
for the Sindori, for the Alliance, for the Horn, for
Azeroth. Hello and welcome to a very
special episode of For Azeroth. I am of course Manny AKA to
Trueville. Manny and I am joined by the
Indomitable Wall Tactics. Hello tactics, how are you?
Good, good. Excited to be here.
I appreciate the invite. Always happy to talk about all
things tanking. So yeah, it's I'm excited.
Yeah. So for those of us who may not
know the pedigree that you're coming from, tell us a little
bit about yourself. Yeah, so I've been playing Wow
for a long time, I think since like Burning Crusade when I was
in like middle school, I was kind of on and off.
I've been playing consistently since Siege of Orgermar and I
started being a bit more competitive in like Battle for
Azeroth, like the end of Battle for Azeroth in Season 4 with all
the corruption stuff, Nyalotha. And then I started like
seriously mythic raiding in Castle Nathria.
And since then I've kind of worked my way up.
I've gotten like every single point 1% title on I think 5 out
of the six tank specs. I've gotten cutting edge Hall of
Fame on four or five of the of the tank specs in the game.
And I currently raid in like a Guild that hovers around the
world 50 rank. Yeah, in fact, this last tier,
you guys got a world first, if I recall correctly.
Yeah, yeah. Not usually something we we go
for by any means, but it was, it was cool.
It was cool to get for sure. Definitely.
So like, I guess you weren't going like you said, you don't
go for that, but like how did that happen?
How did you get into that world? First kill?
Yes, I mean, we, we do only two splits total.
So we have we have two groups usually and a lot of the top
guilds, they'll have many, many groups especially look in the
race world first, right. Like they don't really care
about the first bosses, they care about the last boss and
that's it. And so they do like 40 splits,
but like the normal human guilds in the top 100 usually do
anywhere from 2:00 to 4:00 splits.
So we're on the lower end of that, right, with, with two
splits. And so we finished all the
splits except for heroic dementias.
We hadn't done heroic dementias yet.
And we looked and we saw no Guild had gotten below 60% on
the first boss. And we're like, what's going on
there? So we, we went in, we were like,
hey, what, what is actually so tough about this boss?
And on our first poll, I think we had like a 2% wipe and you're
like, OK, so this is just people pulling this, this boss without
gear. We, we went back and looked
like, so no one had tier bonuses, no one had anything
outside of like the season 2 stuff.
It's like, OK, well, we'll just kill it real quick and and move
on. Get a world first.
Put that in our, our cap. And yeah, it was, it was funny.
But yeah, definitely not. We are, we are not delusional in
thinking that we are world first Raiders.
You know, I, I promptly retired, I think shortly after that.
Go out on top. That's awesome.
So then with that as well as casting you've, you've had like
a good amount of experience with the War Within and with tanking
and how it's been. So that's kind of what we're
here to talk about today about tanking in the War Within and
how it's looking like going into Midnight and what we might like.
So give me like a little bit of background on your tanking.
So you do splits. Is there like a favorite tank?
Are you playing all of the tanks?
I think historically at least I'm I'm pretty well known for
playing Guardian Druid. It was like the first tank I
started playing competitively back in Castle Nathria and it
was actually the tank spec that I 1 tricked all the way through
getting mythic plus titles and through getting into a Hall of
Fame Guild. That's a tank player, which is,
you know, that's there's only two tanks boxed in a Guild.
So it takes a bit of a bit of time and effort to actually get
one of those, you know, coveted spots.
And so I one tricked guardian Druid to actually do that.
Since then I've been more of a multi class tank player.
As you know, again, the higher you go up in the the Guild
ranks, the more important it is that your tank players
specifically are multi classers. And so that's something I've
taken on, but Guardian Druids always going to have a a close
spot in my heart. OK.
And so as you've moved away from being a 1 trick and as you've
gained that sort of flexibility, we've moved into the war within.
And so like in general, how have tanks been?
Has the like, let's say the delta on how viable tanks are,
Has that been fairly narrow? Have all tanks been like
somewhat viable or or like how's it been through through the war
within? So I think it always depends on
the content, right? Like I think a lot of people's
think in my weekly 10 keys I need the meta tank In my weekly,
you know, get my keystone ledge and need the meta tank or
whatever. That's definitely not true.
I think every single tank is more than viable to do that kind
of level of content. Even cutting edge getting,
beating the hard response, automatic difficulty is doable
by all 6 tank specs. So I don't think like viability
wise that's an issue. Obviously you're going to see
some things excel and you're going to see some interesting
trends. If you look at like season 1
meta tank numbers, Season 2 meta tank numbers, it's heavily
skewed in One Direction. But I think that is almost a bit
of a symptom of high end tank players often being multi
classers, right? Like there are obviously still
high end 1 tricks, but a lot of tank players are just happy to
play the tank role and they will just reroll to the strongest
tank that is in the role currently.
And so I think that probably plays a a bit of an influence on
why you see like 90 plus percent representation of like prop
Paladin season one title range, for example, or or similar
number for season 2 in Vengeance Team Hunter.
I, I think I've said that multiple times on this show
where it is one of those self fulfilling prophecies where it's
like, Oh yeah, this is like able to do the exact same thing, but
a little bit easier. And so like the best players
shift over to that, that makes it look like it's performing
even that much better. And that causes that like, you
know, trickle down or cascading effect.
So I'm glad that they're that they're all viable at least for
for everything but the cutting edge of players or the bleeding
edge. I don't want to call it just
cutting edge. Is the same true relative to
raid and mythic plus? Or is there a little bit more of
a schism for different content? Yeah, I mean, I think, I think
it's especially early on in the in the expansion and it had a
bit of a rough start, right? Like going into the the beta of
War Within there was the whole tank nerfs, right?
It was a it was a big topic because like they kind of
Blizzard kind of came in and they're like, listen, tanks are
too powerful right now. We want them to have some
reliance on healers. In exchange, we're going to give
you a less bursty damage intake. And and that's kind of what
their initial stated goals were going into the expansion.
And it didn't quite work out in season 1, as we saw right?
There was a ton of bursty magic damage intake and most tank
specs had problems dealing with it.
And then we saw Paladin kind of get buffed.
And specifically in Mythic Plus. Again, I will maintain that raid
is very diverse and has been diverse all expansion.
But specifically in Mythic Plus, if you look at some of the high
key routes, like if you're pushing for the .1% title, a lot
of those routes could not be lived by other tank specs.
You had to run something entirely different, usually a
lot more conservative because of the whole 100% spell block
shenanigans that pro paladins could do, allowing them to
basically on demand fully mitigate any kind of incoming
magic damage. Of which there was a lot of
incoming magic damage bursts in season 1.
And so that was a bit of a problem that was peeled back a
little bit in season 2. It was almost entirely removed,
I think magic damage intake from the tank spot it entirely
instead of replaced by melee swings.
The bulk of your damage was just pure melee swings.
And so that that gives things, you know, there's a lot more
balance in that. We saw Vengeance kind of rise
up, but I maintain that's a mix of not only them being the most
durable tank, but also a tank that is entirely
self-sustaining, right. You could play with a prop
warrior and they could survive very similar poles in season 2.
Like we saw brewmaster as well appear in a bunch of high key
comps, but they needed more attention from their healer is a
is a main thing. Whereas vengeance was entirely
self-sustaining, something that Blizzard had talked about.
Hey, no, we want we want tanks to rely on the healer and then
just vengeance on its own kind of didn't do that.
Lived the same or bigger poles and then buffed all the DPS that
were doing magic damage at the same time.
So that was kind of, you know, it kind of skewed it in
Vengeance's favor a bit, but we did start seeing with them
removing magic damage, more tanks appear in the high end.
Like I said, there were there prop warrior comps, there were
room master comps, and I think season 3 they've struck a nice
balance where they've kind of peeled back on that a little
bit. They've added more caster mobs
in that actually don't hit the tank, but they still have caster
melees. So they're a little weaker.
And they also have a lot more debuffs and Dots in the pool.
And then on top of that, we're seeing them kind of be like, OK,
you know what, we'll let tanks be strong again.
You don't need to rely on the healer.
Prop warriors are popping off. Brewmasters got the defensive
buffs. What prop paladins are looking
better with the changes even of course Avengers team hunters are
like all all the tanks. Most of the tanks.
I mean, I think blood decays are still a little sad, but I think
most of the tank specs this season are looking quite good.
And obviously it's early, but you know, Ameda is Ameda is
going to evolve at some point, but it's looking a lot more
balanced this season than the previous two, which is good to
see. And and a good omen for
midnight. So before we look directly at
midnight, sort of looking at this season, where do you see
the meta developing or what do you think's going to influence
the meta for Season 3 right now? So I, I think, I think always
the biggest thing and the thing that people tend to overlook is,
is just raw damage output. It's just like damage is king,
especially obviously for the DPS role.
People look at things like Vengeance, Stephen Hunter and
Paladin from the previous seasons and they're like, well,
you're only bringing them because of their sigil utility
or because pals and utility. But in reality, I don't think
that's really it. Like you build a comp around
what can do the most damage and as a tank player, what can live
the poles that you need to do? And then you say, OK, what
utility do we have and what kind of poles do these utility
abilities enable? If they enable us to pull bigger
because we have all these AOE lockdown abilities, great, we'll
pull bigger. If they are not enabling us to
do that and we instead need to pull 5 moms at a time, we'll do
that. And we saw Brewmaster comps,
like I was talking about, even in Season 2 when everyone's
talking about how great Vengeance, even Hunter is, those
Brewmaster physicoms, we're doing like -1 key level only.
So they were still well above title range, barely below the
the bleeding edge players. And so they're clearly showing
that it is not just about the utility kit.
It is more about the throughput and the synergy of the specs
that you're playing. And, and I think a big factor
for this season is how strong DPS specs are because I think
tuning is not just solid on the tank front.
There's a lot of good DPS specs right now, more so than I would
say in previous seasons. And you can kind of build these
comps with good DPS specs around all of these other tanks, right?
You can build a magic based comp around a Demon Hunter.
You can build an attack based comp around a prot warrior.
You can build a physical base comp around a brewmaster monk.
And you can build kind of these general comps around stuff like
guardian Druid and protection paladin, right.
So there's you have a lot more flexibility and they're just
being more strong DPS specs kind of enables these tank specs to
be played as well. And so with all those options,
you gave us 5 which lack core DK out in the gold there.
So let's let's talk about that. What what's holding DKS back
right now? What does blood lack that the
other tanks are bringing? So they lack consistency, I
would say, in terms of the ability to mitigate melee
swings, like we talked about Blizzard kind of moving towards
melee swings being the vast, vast majority of your damage
taken, especially in Mythic Plus.
And when you're dancing rune weapon is up, you're happy,
right? Like you're vibing, nothing can
kill you. You're death striking your life
away. It's great.
The problem becomes in all those moments between your dancing
rune weapons where you don't necessarily have a lot of
coverage, right? Like Vampiric Blood and
Umbilicus can do some work. Obviously you always have
purgatory to lay back on, right? But they basically just have to
work infinitely harder than every other tank spec to live a
lot of these poles. Boss fights, they're better, but
boss fights don't tend to be the focus in a dungeon, right?
Like you're usually more focused on trash poles or trash poles
onto boss fights, right for for a lot of these higher keys.
And so being really good against fighting one mob is not as
valuable, which blood decay is obviously very good.
And blood decay is obviously also a staple and raid right?
Like we even saw get the world first kill.
So it's not like blood Decay is bad LED DK is a very good tank
spec, but it's almost like a raid specialist at the moment.
I really think they need something in the talent tree,
maybe on a choice node with something so they don't take it
in raid, but something that kind of scales their defensiveness
against those melee swings, especially in AOE in particular
like that. They need, they need something
to help in that specific situation, I think.
And you know, they've, they've kind of steered away from the
dancing run weapon Cdr because as we saw in shadow lands in
season 3 and season 4, if they can just have dancing run weapon
all the time, they, they're crazy, right?
They're they're, they're kind of insane.
So Blizzard has steered away from that.
I personally kind of like the idea of giving dancing run
weapon on the Deathbringer sides 'cause that would have given
some like oh Deathbringer is like hey this is really good in
mythic plus and lanes the raid 1, whatever.
I think that would have been cool.
They ended up scrapping that idea and giving you bone storm
instead, which I I think is definitely significantly worse.
So I would like them to also go back and experiment with a
little bit more like 100% guaranteed 2 or 3 seconds of
dancing room weapon when you use a deathbringer scythe.
I think that could also help, but I really think the talent
that scales into AOE is kind of what they need instead.
OK, you actually mentioned something that I'd love to talk
about because The War Within is the introduction of hero
talents. And we have seen, of course, all
specs have access to two different different hero
talents. Some specs have loved both
options, other ones have said that one is king and the other
one is just absolute popper. Unless you're doing it.
That's for the themes. How has that been in The War
Within? You were just talking about
Death Night, so we can start there.
But also, I know for sure that every time I tells people that
I'm a Fell scarred vengeance Demon Hunter, they look at me a
little funny. So how how's it been for our
tanks? It's been, it's been fun.
Like I think thematically they're a lot of them are pretty
cool, right? Like they're they have cool
ideas. Some of them seem like misses.
I do wonder going into midnight if they go in there and actually
like delete a hero spec and add a new one in its place.
If there's been like a lot of negative feedback.
I'm trying to think of why maybe light Smith is one that I can
think of that has has had a it had a negative reception
initially. And then a lot of people I still
see are like, man, I don't want to be a light Smith.
I want to be a Templar. I want to I want to swing
hammers. I don't want to play this light,
even though it's like it was the best in season 1, It's looking
like the best in the current season.
A lot of people don't like playing it.
So I do wonder if, you know, they would be willing to just
scrap a hero tree and put a new one in that.
That's an interesting idea. But but overall, I think like
you said, it's either the situation where one is the best
at everything and then you just don't play the other one, or
it's the situation of 1 is mythic plus and one is raid and
you don't ever play 1 and the other right.
And so I think that is maybe a little less interesting.
It's maybe this is from a tank perspective, right.
I don't know what the DPS situation or the healer
situation is if they're switching up, but I don't know.
I don't hate the whole mythic plus versus raid one because at
least then you have some field variation potentially, but it
definitely feels a bit a bit weird when you were only playing
one and you're never playing the other in any form of content.
Like I think Stan Lane is that right now for DKS.
Now like that hasn't always been true given the season as they've
been tuning and adjusting them, they like certain to one
suddenly become, Oh well, now this is the one we bring into
raid. Has that been interesting
enough? Or do you really feel like both
should be viable and you should be able to like either stick
with your guns or switch it up as you as you feel that you want
to? I know perfect balance is an
ideal that will never touch, but like, do you think they should
strive for that ideal or do you think they just should?
They should say, you know what? We understand that this will
never happen. So we're going to focus on
making sure you have one that's viable for for any content.
Yeah, I mean, I think, I think no matter what they're going to
do, yeah, there's there's going to be one that's better in some
form of content, right. Perfect balance is impossible.
And I think they've done a fine job at that.
Like, I don't think it's they've done a poor job at it.
And you know, it's, it's, it's almost like it's a player
mentality, right? Where like, oh, Sanlein is 1 1/2
percent ahead and Deathbringer, Deathbringer is unviable.
Never play Deathbringer. You know, it's like, guys, it's
it's 1 1/2%. You're not even playing at 100%
capacity. It's chill.
You can play what you want. Don't don't worry about it.
But like there are some that have like a super significant
gaps that I also think should be addressed.
But we can talk about Guardian. This is I think the most
egregious example where the entire expansion you have a
loons chosen in Mythic Plus and you have drew to the claw in
raid. If you tried to play loons
chosen versus like drew to the claw in raid, you were actually
like 20% less DPS. Like it is actually that high
because just the cat weaving damage absolutely owns a Loon's
chosen, which the build historically, just looking
throughout all three seasons is really, really bad at single
target damage, right? It's just it's just not built
for that. And so that's like a situation
very obviously with how the talent trees are built.
A Loon's chosen is for mythic plus true to the claws for raid.
You don't mix, right? You don't mix because true to
the claw has a lot of consistency problems in in
mythic plus situations. You're reliant on procs for
defensiveness. Which is not ideal, whereas
Elunes chosen is the complete opposite, right?
You have so much rage generation, you can spend a lot
more on iron furs and you are very, very consistent with a new
defensive button in lunar beam that drew to claw doesn't have
in their build, right? So it's it's kind of built for
Mythic plus, whereas Drew to claw is built for single target
And and they just been that way the entire expansion.
And you just have, I mean, it just has to be the intention,
right? Like there's, there's such a
massive gap between them that it just, it can't be by accident, I
feel like. But I mean, this might lead to
another discussion of Guardian just kind of being the forgotten
stepchild of the tanks potentially and just being tuned
all expansion, but that that's another discussion entirely.
Oh. Man, I thought that was Red
Paladins, but again, OK, so you've had that discrepancy.
Have there any, have there been any tanks that are just like the
success stories where they're like so close that yes, you you
could be a that 1.5% behind, but go for it.
I mean, I think right now that's Brewmaster Monk, right?
Like I think Master of Harmony and Shadowpan are both like
solid. I don't know the actual number
discrepancy between them, but I'm pretty sure people are
playing both at a relatively high level.
Maybe they're leaning a little bit towards Master of Harmony
and Raid and a little bit towards Shadow Pan and Mythic
Plus, if I remember correctly. But they're both like really,
really good and usable in both forms.
But, and also to be clear, like, yeah, viability wise, I think
everything really is usable in in both forms of content.
Outside of that, I think it's kind of waffled on the season,
you know, like it's, it's been kind of dependent on like the
tier bonuses, right? Like for example, in season 1
for paladins, just as an example, the tier bonus really
favored light Smith. It was about wings and and like
wings damage. And obviously they do a lot more
damage in their wings because of their just how the the talent
tree functions. Season 2, it's kind of swapped
in the favor of Templar a bit. And then season 3 we're going
back and like the light Smith tier bonus is just better than
the Templar tier bonus. So that's another layer as well,
right? The specific hero tree tier
bonuses in this tier are really impactful for affecting which
hero tree you're playing. I think Bratwur is another
example which is waffled back and forth.
It was like Thane and and colossus in season 1 in mythic
blessing raid and it was all colossus in season 2 and now
it's all thane in season 3. So like it is not a bad thing I
think for to swap up from tier to tier.
Like, I personally am a fan of new gameplay, every tier playing
the same spec just because you know, whether that's through
tier bonuses or whether that's through your hero tree switching
or whatever it is. I'm a fan of that just because
it it, you know, you're playing the same thing, but it feels a
little different, you know, And I think I like that between
tiers as opposed to just only between expansions, you know?
Yeah I I definitely agree that I have loved it but like also I
play enhancement shaman and both DPS shamans got like a almost a
rework in season 2 so it got switched up a bit.
And then you're right, the tier set bonuses that are doubling
down on our hero talents has switched things up as well.
So same as you or same as many tanks rather?
I have had a different hero spec that I have played in the
different tiers going back and forth between them.
So then looking at the tier bonuses in season 2 in Undermine
we had a lot of tier bonuses that were proc based and had the
like jackpot and so forth. Kind of cool for DPS, not
something I would like if I was a tank and looking for some
consistency. How was that feeling for the
tanks in Season 2? Man, never give me those tier
bonuses again. That's OK.
Here's here's the problem with them.
OK, just just real quick, I won't I won't go too far, but
it's like, OK, tanks hate RNG defensiveness, right?
What can make that OK is if the RNG defensive either is not too
low of a proc rate, right? It's got like a fairly decent
decent proc rate or the duration on the random proc defensive is,
is decent so that you don't have to react in a 2 second window
and you can see, oh, I got this proc, I'm good for the next 8 to
10 seconds. The undermine tier bonuses were
neither of those. They were both very RNG, very
low proc rate. I would go polls with a 0 procs
on some boss fights for example. Sometimes you get one or two,
sometimes you get like 10. And they were also I think 4
second duration defensive procs. So if they propped when you like
weren't actively tanking for example, or they propped when
you had just pressed your defensive, like a different
defensive, right, it's just entirely useless almost.
So if they're going to do something like an RNG defensive
proc for tanks, they need to either make the proc more
frequent or make the proc a longer duration, and either of
those would have made them infinitely better.
I'm going to also throw in from my little bit of tanking, which
I don't do anywhere near your level, but I would also be fine
with the procs just reducing a cooldown on a defensive so that
like, yeah, so then I can use it again or I mean, type use it.
But yeah, you're you're right. I I kind of baited that question
because I just needed it that with somebody with, you know, a
bit more authority. So then moving from Undermine
Casino madness and then going into this latest season, I was
annoyed again because of the Rishi wraps.
Yeah, I feel that they once again did that.
But the tier bonuses are are much different this time around.
And so The thing is, because they are based on the hero
talents and because they are very impactful on those hero
talents, there are some definite winners and losers this tier.
So tell us about that situation. Yeah, I mean, not only are the
tier bonuses like, yeah, they're hero spec base so you can feast
your famine almost depending on tier bonus, but the actual
throughput value of these tier bonuses is way higher than the
last two tiers, like 20 plus percent across multiple of the
specs. Like it's it's pretty normal for
it to be around like a 20% output increase.
Like it's, it's kind of wild, especially when the previous
tier bonuses were absolutely nowhere near that.
Like I think especially for tanks, they were like sub 10%
and and now we're up over 20, which is is wild.
And yeah and yeah, you're seeing you're seeing some massive
swings like mountain thing is the is probably the biggest
example, right? It has never been a raid spec
really right. It was the mythic plus in season
1, not used in season 2, and now the tier set is so powerful.
One of the most powerful tier sets in the game right now, by
the way, like not even just across tanks, like across all
specs in the game is mountain Dane, Prowl warrior, and they're
just owning like they they're it is fun too, right, because this
this is a good RNG right? Your thunderblast procs.
I think it's like a 35% chance, so high chance when you get this
proc that you get quite frequently to just hit again or
a reset, sorry, is basically what the tier bonus is.
And so that's cool or that's fun.
You get an extra button press. It happens quite frequently,
deals a ton of damage. It's good.
I'm a big fan of it. And I think again, not all RNG
is bad. RNG can be good, but it needs to
be the right level of RNG. And I think, you know, the
mountain thing is a is a good example of that.
And I think just generally a lot of the tank bonuses are a lot
more offensive focus this tier as opposed to defense like we
saw in liberation of undermine the RNG defense.
It's almost like they went pure damage here, which I know I'm a
fan of, but I know there are some people that are just like
tanks should tank. They should just be tanky.
Don't worry about damage. I I like doing big numbers.
I don't know. I do like the the big numbers.
I do love this one because not just that that it is damage, but
because it gives you the button to press, you're always able to
capitalize on it unless like there's some like proc that you
munch because you didn't hit the button fast enough.
But as an offensive proc, there's no reason not to hit
that that damage as soon as you get it.
So it you're right, it's a lot of fun.
It is basically ADPS. It is ADPS tear set on a tank.
But there is another part that it it helps with is that as
you're getting these procs, as you're doing more damage, that's
helping the threat issue that tanks had.
And I, I got to ask you about this because the war within it
felt like it was going OK. And then suddenly in season 2, I
just kept hearing about threat issues after threat issues.
And that's when I started learning about particular spells
that because you weren't in combat, they weren't doing
damage and therefore not threat. And so I, I guess I got to wrap
those two questions in together. What's been the issue with
threat and what's been the issue with these bugs when you're
tanking? Yeah.
So I think initially the problem started kind of twofold, right?
And tanks got these pretty mediocre defensive oriented, a
little bit of damage in some cases, but mostly defensive
oriented tier bonuses and DPS did not.
And so, you know, the scaling in season 2 just went drastically
in DPS players favor over tank specs.
That was combined with the, the, the vengeance even hunter
effect, where you know, like all these tank players were swapping
to Vengeance and Vengeance notoriously just has bugs, which
at this point might be considered features of the spec
where the aggro doesn't work right.
Like if you're not in combat with the mobs when you sigil a
flame, you're not doing any aggro.
If you're you're glave, whether it's a reaper's glave or not
doesn't do any aggro. There's you know, there's a lot
of, you know, quirks to Venice team hunter combined with the
the, the fact they're playing a capped build.
They were heavily target capped, but they were doing gigantic
pulls. And so it became quite an issue
maintaining aggro if you're trying to do those poles because
you basically had to go in and make sure that you had built up
an Aldraki Reaver uncapped flurry ability because that was
the only thing you had that was uncapped.
So if you're doing any of these big poles, you had to make sure
you had one of those ready to actually build threat.
And even then, you would randomly just lose threat on
like the one priority mob 30 seconds into a pole because the
arcane mage is just doing 30 times your damage to that mob
and there's nothing you can do about it.
So you just have to be ready to taunt.
So it's it's stuff like that, right?
It's just a big portion is just the damage of DPS out scaling
the damage gains of of tanks. And I think these tier bonuses
is an acknowledgement of Blizzard that OK, maybe we do
need to give tanks a bit more damage.
Maybe maybe we went a little bit too hard and out of the
direction because he's on a multiple Band-Aid buff threat at
the end of season 2 and that didn't really help out too much.
And it was still a pretty pretty significant problem just because
of that damage gap. But I think it's been not not a
problem, but much less of a problem so far this season.
There are still issues on grouping and DPS getting antsy
and and pulling stuff or whatever.
But I think it's much less of an issue if you like losing threat
30 seconds into a pole. Which is just the most
frustrating thing because like if you're a tank player doing
your rotation correctly or even like 80% correctly, I don't see
why you would ever lose threat like you.
You shouldn't mechanically, right?
If you're kiting and doing weird stuff, sure right?
Then that's probably why threaded exists as a mechanic.
But if I'm doing my rotation 80% correctly with ADPS doing their
rotation 90% correctly, I should still hold thread on them?
I feel like. I don't know, maybe that's a hot
take. It's not a hot take.
You're gonna get pushed back from here, but I I generally
have had like a couple of times where like, you know, the burst
has gone off and I'm sorry I had procs.
And I feel like that shouldn't result in an absolute scare
situation, not even like, oh, we have to think panics and is able
to put it together. I don't think there should ever
be a panic. I think that at least initially,
maybe snap threat needs to be like something that tanks should
have. And then over time, if you are
consistently there, that's when the tank needs to start looking
at the threat. Yeah, there is of course a lot
that you need to do as a tank to make sure you're on top of the
threat, even know what the threat is.
And a lot of that's being dealt with with add-ons back in the
day was Omen threat meter. And since then it's been baked
into a lot of things. So now it's on the name bars if
you're using using like tidy plates or plater or any number
of different add-ons. And in fact, a lot of things
that we do are using add-ons. What are the kind of add-ons
that like currently are must haves in order to do tanking at
a sufficient level? And like with Blizzard now
looking to pare back the add-ons, especially in combat,
what are the things that Blizzard has to have baked in if
they're going to stop the US from using these add-ons?
Yeah, so I think, I think the big ones people always talk
about, right, Like I want a way to display my ability
information, which a lot of people use weak wear packs for.
But I think the cooldown manager has kind of been their initial
answer. Obviously the first iteration of
the cool down manager was not great, but the update coming in
next patch 1125 looks solid and I expect this to get updated as
well over the next year or two. And I think it'll be in a
similar spot. It'll be able to replace
essentially those weak word packs, which I think is is a
good thing, right? It's, you know, lightweight in
the game included intuitive for people to use.
I think that's only a positive and that's also just my general
feeling about Blizzard adding these in game alternatives to
add-ons. I think it's only positive for
the game assuming they get them right before they turn off
combat add-ons, right? That's my that was my concern.
It looks like they are taking their time right?
They announced they're going to be adding I think what name
plates, damage meters and boss mods in midnight.
And it doesn't necessarily. Boss mods as a full package but
at least timers for. Timers yes, yes, yeah, but it
doesn't seem like they're turning off other add-ons at the
same time, right. It seems like they're going to
be in game and you know, getting iterations while we still have
access to other add-ons. So that is good because it gives
them time to actually make them usable as opposed to just
ripping away all our add-ons and us having what do we do here?
What is this so I'm I'm positive feeling about it.
They definitely need to make sure they get it right though,
right plater a big one you're talking about their name plates
apparently is going to show threat is what they were talking
about threat they were talking about I think back hits as well
like you will get an indicator on the name plates if a mob is
behind you attacking from behind.
That's amazing right like that. That is a great change for new
tank players that do not understand that if a mob is
behind you, you are not really effectively mitigating it at
all. Especially on certain tank specs
that rely on like block, Perrier, dog.
That's a great indicator. It's great for new players, it's
built into the game. Love it.
Are you going to be able to recolor certain plates?
Are you going to be able to just choose what debuffs and buffs
you show on it? Who knows, that could be
overlooked. I think it needs to be included
for it to be a viable nameplate solution and something you would
use over something like Plater, right?
The ability to recolor, the ability to emphasize, even to
make disappear for certain mobs, to whitelist and blacklist
certain debuffs and buffs. That kind of thing is all very,
very important because there are some specs, for example, that
blanket debuffs on mobs and you only really care about the
duration of one or two of them, right?
There's multi daughter specs and maybe you really want to know,
OK, I want all the name plates to be blue that have my shadow
word pane and then anything that's not blue, I know I need
to continue dotting it, right? Stuff like that I think needs to
be included, but we'll have to wait and see what the first
iteration of it was. The images I saw from the the
panel at Gamescon, they looked like they were much further
along on those than they were on the the cool down managers.
So that's a good sign. But yeah, we'll have to wait and
see. OK aren't there are some things
that weak ores and plater and everything include that some
people might consider superfluous?
One of the things that came out was not being able to track
externals cooldown. So like when you are going
through a Mythic Plus or when you are doing a raid, knowing
that you have abilities from your healers is something that a
lot of tanks use. Do you?
At one point Blizzard had sort of said, OK, that's not
something that we want you to have, But I think since then
they've sort of gone back against that.
Yeah, I think they backtracked it, if I remember correctly.
I don't, I don't remember 100%. But I mean, I definitely think
that's important to know because what is the value in hiding that
like there are some things where I'm like, OK, this makes sense.
Blizzard does not want us to have it.
An example, the spell CDs on name plates from little wigs and
big wigs, we're just right next to the mob.
Hey, this ability is going to be off cooldown for the next 24
seconds. I can see them being like, hey,
not only is this break immersion, we don't want you to
have this information. Don't you don't have that.
So they'd take it away, right? That that I would be totally
fine with. Taking away the ability to see
other people's cooldowns is a bit odd.
I don't want to hear that it's for some PvP reason.
I'm sure they can fix it for PvP, but like for Pve, I feel
like like if you're just communicating with the players
in voice for example, it's just another advantage to being in
voice versus in a pug environment.
Maybe people will just make macros that spam all the time,
you know what I mean? It's just there's no reason to
hide that information. I guess that's the point I'm
getting at. Yeah, I had suspected that if
they had stuck with their guns, we were going to get the
basically analogous thing to the macros where it would, when you
used it, it would send a command being like, it's on cooldown for
Bing, and then create A and create it anyways.
So I did think that there was a good way for them to stop it
without like, utterly shredding the API in general.
But yeah, my question was going to be, are there some things
where you're like, yeah, this is superfluous and if we don't have
it, we're still going to go along just fine?
There's certainly some weak aura stuff, right?
Like, and, and this also comes kind of hand in hand with their
encounter design where they're like, we have to design stuff
thinking that you're going to have weak auras, right?
Like we, if you look, we're progressing on Mythic Nexus King
right now, right? You get into phase three and
this map just pops up on your screen showing you exactly where
to drop your your stars where so that you'll get pulled to a
specific spot in the room. It's like.
Man, this boss would have been so much cooler if that didn't
exist, right? Like that, that kind of
functionality. Fractalis is the perfect
example. The Tetris boss that is just
solved by a text week aura that tells you where to stand at all
times, whether it's the safe spot, where to put a wall, where
to break a wall, it just tells you where to go.
That boss could have been way cooler if they maybe slowed it
down a little bit and you just didn't have that week aura, but
you just had to play the fight as they intended, right?
So I think, I think there are a lot of situations where we would
be better off with them removing some of the things we currently
have access to. One thing that they did provide
for us that is a little bit unique for tanks is the single
button rotation that helps DPS get to like a percentage of
their damage. It is something that very spec
to spec, but obviously that doesn't do much help for you as
a tank. Do you think that there's
something that they could add to help people learn tanking or do
you feel that the SPR is good enough as a start?
And it's like no, no, no, things happen.
You should learn how to manage it just from like raw effort.
Yeah, I mean, well, the single button rotation problem is that
it never presses anything off the global cooldown, right?
So it's like if you're playing a warrior, it's not pressing
shield block. I don't think it's pressing
ignore pane either, right? It's not pressing any of.
Your it doesn't press defensives or utility at all, Yeah.
Yeah. So it's like, I personally would
more recommend the rotation assist setting 'cause I think
that's a bit more, it's, it's also a better learning tool in
my opinion to see that abilities highlighted and kind of get a
feel for like the frequency of things.
I still don't know if that recommends defensive abilities,
to be honest with you. I haven't used it personally,
but I think that's just a, a better general thing for someone
trying to learn the game. Like if you don't care about
that stuff, go go to town with the one button assist.
But if you're trying to learn a spec, I actually think that's
bad to use the one button assist and you should use the rotation
assist instead, which is the highlighting thing.
I think that's a better learning tool.
But yeah, I mean, I wonder if there's like almost like
tutorial type things that they could do for for tank and healer
players because this thing doesn't really work for them as
well as it does for DPS players. You know, I know they said
they're redoing the whole tutorial island, I think in
midnight. But yeah, you know, giving some
sort of tank tutorial or healer tutorial I think would be
beneficial to get players into those roles which, you know, are
less popular. Yeah, I mean, I, I definitely
think that things like the interrupt tutorial that they're
speaking about and so forth are going to help some new players.
I worry that like returning players will say, oh, I don't
need that, not realizing how much the game has changed
because they're like, if you played in BC, yeah, crowd
control was king. If you play in like BFAAOE,
stops were king. If you play now, you can cause
havoc by just spamming AOE stops and and syncing them all up.
So learning that stuff as it changes is something that
Blizzard is going to have to make sure that they're updating
the tutorials along with that. But tutorials are definitely a
help. But looking at what you think
tanks would need, what do you think Blizzard should add to the
game to help tanks? And actually at the beginning of
the War Within, they spoke about a defensive clawback.
They had already said, OK, like healers are going wild and
dragonfly and we need to do some adjustments here.
They got into this, said, hey, next, next expansion, we're
looking at a defensive clawback. What do you expect from that?
Yeah, that's interesting. So they did mention at the
beginning of War Within. I'm glad you brought that up
because they have not mentioned it since then.
We'll have to see if they remembered or if they're just
like, oh, we don't have time for this.
Let's push that away. Because I think, I think this is
actually primarily focused not at tank players, right?
This is primarily focused at DPS players and healers where they
have too many defensive tools. And I think even the hero trees
were kind of a problem with that because every single hero tree
has an additional defensive node in it, which is kind of further
resulting in bursty healing profiles as opposed to rot
healing profiles, especially in raid.
Like you basically just playing putting all your cooldowns where
the burst damage happens and then you feel like a wet noodle
outside of your cooldown as a healer player is my
understanding. I don't do that.
I don't know what healers do, Who knows, but that's what
they're saying. And defensive bloat is a
contributor of that because they have to challenge for the amount
of defensiveness that your group is bringing, right?
We saw a similar thing in Mythic plus I think in Dragon fight
season 2 where you had the one shot meta where like you went at
a certain key level. Maybe it was season 3 actually,
I can't remember off the top of my head.
But like at a certain key level, it went from, oh, all this
damage is kind of free and literally one key level up.
Oh, everything is one shot in me.
And all of a sudden you had to come up with a defensive
rotation to cover every single ability and the meta comp could.
And if you didn't have that, you would just die to those
abilities, right? So it's, it's, that's clearly
what they're trying to avoid. Cuz that has never been as bad
as it was that season. And they've been doing better
with it. But yeah, I think the further
you go in expansion, the more problematic it seems to become.
I'm curious if the stat squish will do anything in that sense.
Cuz obviously they've announced there is going to be a stat
squish in midnight. So that might help.
I, I don't know. But yeah, it would be
interesting to see if they, the, the number of abilities they end
up pruning defensively from classes like mages are a great
example. They have like 5000 defensive
buttons, right? Are they going to leave them
with only like ice block and alter time and take away
everything else? It's possible, but it wondered
it's, it's just kind of how far they want to go with it, which
it's going to be very interesting.
On the tank front though, I am kind of under the assumption
that tanks are going to be excluded from this, but but who
knows, maybe not. Maybe we'll get collateral too.
I, I think it is a very strange thing to look at and I really
wanted to start this conversation with the tanks
because defensives are so important to you.
There's a number of things that you kind of look at.
There is the like if you have a tank death that might mean a
wipe because by the time that rez goes out the tank can get
the threat again. 2-3 DPS have already bid it.
There's also a matter of the fact that DPS and tanks and all
the specs have a lot of the utility and defensives on their
class tree, which means that if you're going to attack those,
it's going to affect the tanks in in turn.
Unless they do what they did with Paladins when they did the
Paladin revamp and they had a lot of this stuff on.
The classes actually differ based on your spec.
If they were to do a defensive claw and it did affect tanks, do
you think that it's, I guess going back to the early
conversation, do you think it's something where it's going to
have to be pared back enough in effectiveness that your
tankiness is not so far above DPS and healers outside of your
cooldowns? Or pull back the cooldowns so
that you don't have to have a cooldown ready at all times.
Yeah, I'm definitely more in favor of you just generally
being like your cooldowns being a little bit weaker and you
being baseline a bit stronger. Like I think a great example was
like Venthier Guardian Druid in Shadow Lands where you were just
a beast for 30 seconds in your cooldowns and then you could
have just done anything you wanted in the 2 1/2 minutes
between that and your next incarn and it would have made no
difference whatsoever. That is the worst as a tank,
like like especially like, Oh yeah, I'm going to pull 4 packs
together at once. We do that all right.
Now I am pulling a singular pack at a time and I'm scared for my
life, right? Like this one singular pack is
absolutely owning me. I just that that is like the
worst thing for me about these cool down reliant tanks.
And, and to be fair to Blizzard, they've moved drastically away
from that right? It's we're nowhere near that
situation anymore and I prefer it that way.
I prefer not having the massive cooldown reliance, especially
when it comes to survivability. And it just kind of depends on
the number of tools that spec has as well, right?
Like some specs are built around you chaining a bunch of
cooldowns, some aren't. And I think that's also fine to
have these varying play styles. Paladin is that example, right?
Like Paladin is all about chaining your cooldowns together
to kind of build this cohesive defensive layer at all times.
And you are going to have some downtime on those and you kind
of need to, you know, figure out what am I going to do to solve
those moments of downtime? And it's kind of an interesting
puzzle. Now, is it a bit too challenging
and maybe a bit too far with the defensive terms they've received
already? Maybe.
But I, I enjoy that kind of play style and I also enjoy the big
burst play style like something like prop warrior, right, where
you know your main cooldown avatar is just just pure damage,
right? And your defensive abilities are
generally more shorter cooldown stuff that you can kind of use
as needed. All of shield wall, spell
reflect and demo shout short cooldown, but you're not
layering them right because you have this baseline defense of
shield block that is very, very strong to incoming damage,
especially when paired with ignore pain.
So it's like I I don't mind the differences between specs and I
think they're actually important to to maintain no matter what
they do with defensives that you don't make everything too samey,
if that makes sense. No, that definitely makes sense.
OK, so then we're we're running a little bit low on time, so I
just want to throw some quick fire at you in midnight.
We're gonna get Apex talents. Yeah.
And so I'm not gonna get you to guess what the Apex talent is,
but if you could solve each each class's weakness with their Apex
talent, what would be the general idea?
How would you help tanks with their Apex talent?
Oh, I mean, that's that's tough. So I think I think OK, here,
here. So for vengeance Stephen Hunter,
it's just your threat done is increased by 1000%.
OK, that's my vengeance team Hunter one for blood decays.
We'll we'll fix their AOE damage intake.
Yeah, just like the more mobs you're fighting, you get like, I
don't know, 10% increased armor or something like that.
I I don't know, making it up right make.
It up, yeah. Guardian Druid something not
incarn related. I'm begging just not incarn
related. Please, please pick something
else. Paladin.
Paladin is interesting. I'm actually not really sure
what you would do with Paladin something not related to
consecrate. How's that not consecrate
related? Something else?
A lot of something not they something they shouldn't do as
opposed to something they should do here.
What it what I'm missing Brewmaster and I'm missing oh
prot warrior? Let's do Brewmaster first.
Brewmaster first. OK, I don't know if I'm
qualified to talk about brewmaster.
Let's say Brewmaster. So because they they all love Ox
so much, let's just say something about about Ox just to
make all the actual Brewmaster Manes very mad at me.
The ox gets up and follows you. Pet class.
Wait, yes, it makes Brewmaster a pet class.
That's what I'm doing, yes. So you just have perma ox and
yeah, no, that's good. I like that.
And then prompt warrior, just give him spell block back.
There you go. Spell block, Yeah.
Apex talent we gave you back spell block.
Yeah, it's good. There we go.
OK, thank you so much for this. I, I wish we had more time, but
we've got a lot coming up in midnight.
I'm sure as we get closer to the alpha that will be in the coming
weeks, we're going to get a lot more information and see where
things go. Thank you so much for being on
the show today. And tactics.
Where can people find you when you are not riling up poor brew
masters? Yeah, I mean, I'm, I'm tactics
TACTYKS on on pretty much all platforms on on YouTube is where
I post a lot of guide content for dungeons, raid and tanks
stream on YouTube and on Twitch. I randomly tweet stuff on on
Twitter as well. So yeah, it turns out if you
spell your name incorrectly, you can just get it on all
platforms. Let's go.
That is awesome. And then for me, I chose to
spell my name incorrectly as well, so I have it on all
platforms. You can find me as true Villa
Manny. That's true without the E on all
platforms. And until next time guys, may
all your hits be crits.