THE WAR WITHIN SEASON 2 RELEASES IN
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THE WAR WITHIN SEASON 1 CLASS GUIDES
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In The War Within, all character Stamina has been increased by 60% as part of an overall adjustment to the pace of healing gameplay. This increases the relative value of abilities that heal a percentage of a character’s maximum health. Many of these ability changes are to counteract that relative change. For instance, the percentage health that Frenzied Regeneration restores has been reduced by about a third, but the amount of health it restores has remained the same.
Death Strike is a powerful ability that allows Blood Death Knights to mitigate a percentage of any form of damage taken in the last 5 seconds. In a way, Death Strike works like a retroactive shield block. Instead of reducing damage up front, it “mitigates” the damage you took from a hit by healing you. If used in succession, Death Strike can affect a single hit multiple times, which would be comparable to blocking a hit, then going back in time and blocking it again, in some cases restoring yourself to higher health than where you started. In The War Within, we’re changing Death Strike to only heal the death knight for a percentage of damage taken from a given damage event once, to make it scale more like other tank mitigation mechanics.
We’re also reducing Runic Power generation somewhat and reducing some of the mitigation death knights get from high-uptime cooldowns like Enfeeble and Dancing Rune Weapon, but increasing armor from Bone Shield. Overall, death knights should take damage more smoothly, and they will remain one of the strongest tanks for encounters with high magic or periodic damage.
Like Death Strike for Death Knights, Soul Fragments give Demon Hunters strong recovery against any type of damage, as well as strong self-healing. Because Demon Hunters consume Soul Fragments steadily, we’re not changing the rules for how often they can affect a damage event. We’re increasing Vengeance’s overall damage taken by weakening the damage reduction of talents like Void Reaver and Illuminated Sigils, while keeping the power of core abilities like Soul Fragments and Demon Spikes. They will continue to be one of the stronger tank classes at self-healing and surviving magic damage.
With high armor and Ironfur uptime, druids should be one of the best tanks at surviving physical damage. We’re slightly increasing the damage they take from all types of damage and balancing the power of their self-healing. We’re also reducing the durations of some of their cooldowns to make timing their use more important.
Healers have more time to heal monks than other tanks because Stagger spreads out the damage that they take over time. Our goal is for monks to take a little more damage overall than other tanks to offset this effect. However, we feel their overall magic damage mitigation is a little low compared to other tanks and are improving it somewhat by buffing Stagger and its value against magic. To increase their physical damage taken overall, we’re primarily reducing the dodge granted by Elusive Brawler and some of their other talents.
Paladins have a balance of good defenses against both physical and magical damage. They can be in danger if they lose the defensive power of standing in Consecration or if the armor bonus from Shield of the Righteous drops, so we are not reducing any of their passive physical defenses like armor or block. Like druids, paladins have high uptime on their defensive cooldowns, so we’re pulling back some of their durations to make timing their use more important. We would like paladins to have slightly more self-healing, so we are increasing the power of Word of Glory.
Warriors are the strongest tank against physical damage, though they can be vulnerable to magic or periodic damage. In this round of changes, we’re increasing their damage taken across the board by reducing the power of Defensive Stance. Warriors also have some strong heals that scale with their maximum health, like Indomitable and Impending Victory, so we are reducing the power of those abilities to compensate for the 60% increase to Stamina.
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.
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.
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:
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!
