It seems tanks have received some pretty solid stealth nerfs in PvP, as Rextroy explains how last week’s tank damage reduction nerfs actually (and possibly unintendedly) affected them in PvP as well – but disproportionately – bringing their increased damage taken in that environment to 67% (with it previously having been at 50%)!
You can check out the video below for the explanation and tests, or check out Rex’s written explanation under it.
Background:
Before last week, tanks took a considerable 50% increased damage taken in PvP (which not many people knew about) however the PVE nerf that happened (all tanks lost 10% damage reduction) was applied to PvP aswell! which makes a tanks total damage taken increase compared to DPS classes, a whole 67%!… Or 66.7% if you wanna be exact.
The way I noticed it, was from recording damage taken before and after the hotfix was applied, and I saw a considerable increase! A lot of people might think the nerf should apply to PvP too, but the passives that got nerfed was never activated in PvP in the first place.
So then how come our pvp damage taken went up? I can think of 2 different reasons. First is when they nerfed our passives, perhaps they didn’t tough the spells themselves, and instead slapped on a complete new damage taken increase to counteract the buff… Or maybe they did remove the passives but wanted to nerf tanks in PvP aswell at the same time, so they increased the damage taken aura. Since our damage taken is at a weird number (66.7%) I am leaning towards the former being the reason.
If you wonder how we tested the damage taken compared to DPS… We had a ghoul attack a frost DK, a blood dk, and a protection paladin. A ghouls melee hit doesn’t have the 5% variety that other sources of damage has, so it gives us an exact value. We had all the people being hit by the ghoul, remove their armor. So the result would be clearer. A frost DK took 2620 damage per ghoul auto hit, blood dk 4367, and prot pala 4390. The DK was a kul’tiran, so I had to calculate in a 0.5% damage reduction from the racial.
This showed that both blood and prot pala takes the exact same amount of dmg compared to the frost dk… and how much is that? Well pretty much 67% more damage. The best thing would be to look into the aura itself and change it from tank to tank, since certain tanks aren’t near the strength of others (brewmaster monk vs prot pala for example).
While tank specs might be underrepresentated and barely played in PvP, there are people out there who enjoy them. And blanket nerfs that completely ruin some tank specs doesn’t seem like a good solution. There are a lot of arguments about tanks in wow, especially in PvP. What should be their role? And how tanky are they allowed to be to not be toxic to play against? I think each tank needs to be looked into individually, and given their own strengths and weaknesses. Perhaps paladin being the best offhealer? Protection Warrior giving your teammates defense? Guardian being a mixture of healing and defense? Vengeance DH bringing control and damage? Blood DK bringing self sustain and damage? (they have usually been the most ”selfish / self sustainable tank) Brewmaster monk is an interesting one, that can be given a lot of control and different kind of support to their team (anti CC tools).
The suggestions above are already present in the game in some form, with honor talents and other things. But it should be expanded upon to make tanks both fun to play and play against, aswell as having a true place in PvP. I hope you all enjoyed the video, thanks for watching!
