In World of Warcraft: Legion the tanking should become more challenging again. However, the changes may not be liked by everyone…
Take less, suffer more
With the upcoming expansion “Legion” for Blizzard’s flagship “World of Warcraft”, the aim is to make tanking and healing in group play exciting again. In the official forum, plans have now been presented that at least broadly explain how this goal is to be achieved. It is directly warned that most changes here can simply be seen as “nerfs”, but there is hope that the community sees the “big picture”. The goal is to make healing and tanking fun tasks again.
These are the goals set for tanks with WoW: Legion:
- Tanks should require more direct healing.
- Active abilities (like Shield Wall) should feel rewarding and powerful.
- Healers should consider mana costs and casting times and act according to the situation.
- Abilities with long cooldowns from tanks and healers should count as a valuable resource. They should be strong but not available in every situation.
- Tanks should have more survivability skills but not necessarily be “sturdier” so that there is no big difference among group members. Otherwise, dangers would become trivial.
- In raids, tanks should spend more time tanking rather than waiting to finally taunt.
- Tanks should be able to handle solo content alone. Their damage should be lower than that of damage classes, but the difference does not need to be significant.
With the aforementioned goals in mind, the following changes have been planned, which will soon be reflected on the alpha test server of Legion.
- Tanks will take more damage and will not be able to reduce damage as much.
- Active protection abilities will have a longer cooldown.
- Passive healing will be reduced.
- The fights in the instances will be adjusted to these changes. Ongoing damage should occur more frequently, in contrast to gigantic damage spikes.
- The damage from enemies that must be tanked as a group will also be reduced.
- All tanks will deal more damage, and this damage will scale better with gear to be improved similarly to damage dealers and healers.
Mein-MMO says: At least on paper, the changes sound good and right. Tanking has been trivialized throughout the last expansion, and while the adjustments are definitely to be understood as “nerfs”, they should significantly improve the gameplay feeling of tanks and healers. However, whether it will be as much fun as planned on paper remains to be seen.
