All tanks in World of Warcraft are in trouble. They were simply too strong – and Blizzard is taking action. But even the weak Brewmaster Monk is affected.
In World of Warcraft, both Season 1 of Dragonflight and the “World First” race will start in a few days. However, there are still some issues with class balance, and tanks are particularly a thorn in the developers’ side. They currently withstand too much and do not want to fall. In many cases, they are not even reliant on healers. This is set to change.
What does Blizzard have planned? Blizzard wants to significantly restrict all tanks in their survivability. Whether you play Death Knight, Demon Hunter, Monk, Druid, Paladin, or Warrior, all tanks will take nearly 10% more damage starting from the weekly reset (December 14, 2022).
To achieve this, Blizzard is nerfing the individual passive abilities of tanks that previously provided damage reduction. This value will be reduced by 10% for all tanks, which in some cases even means that the damage reduction from such traits will completely disappear if the value was previously at 10%.
Why is Blizzard doing this? The developers feel that tanks are currently much too strong. Regarding the patch notes, Blizzard stated:
In general, we have found that the new talent trees brought a lot of power across all classes and specializations. Talents that were previously exclusive to a talent tree, legendaries, or covenants can now be selected simultaneously. Through our latest tests, we found that the damage taken by tanks needs to be increased.
While we are happy that players enjoy playing tanks in Dragonflight, and we want the role to remain ‘healthy’, there are some negative effects when tanks are too strong, and we want to avoid that. We want healers to play a key role in keeping tanks alive, and tanks should not be able to handle large parts of a fight alone after the rest of the group has already died. […]
We believe that tanks will still feel powerful after these changes and that this will lead to a more balanced gameplay experience for everyone.
The community receives it negatively: The changes are rather poorly received by the tanks. While some understand that tanks currently just live too long, this does not apply to the Brewmaster Monk, who is regarded as the tank that falls the fastest. Therefore, understanding is low that the Brewmaster is also affected by the nerf. Here are some opinions from the community:
- “The tank nerf is well justified, except for the monk. I feel the Brewmaster was simply overlooked in this tuning. The poor Brewmasters really have my sympathy. This is the tank with the most buttons of all tanks, and playing it well already required a lot of skill.”
- “Yes, let’s make sure that even fewer people play tanks. We really didn’t need this.”
- “I understand the nerfs. I healed 16 Mythic-0 instances in the last two weeks. I can’t remember ever having to heal the tank. Only the group needed healing.”
What do you think of the changes? Are they good and sensible? Or is Blizzard messing up again?
