As I am sure that some of you know Greg Street, aka Ghostcrawler the Lead Systems Designer at Blizzard Entertainment posted a tweet about a potential change that they are thinking about putting into Patch 5.4 to stop Tanks doing a ridiculous amount of damage and healing.
The proposed change is to cap the Attack Power gain from Vengeance at a fixed percentage of your health, currently at 30% for 10 man raids and 50% for 25 man raids. Before we go any further let us keep in mind that these numbers are not in any way shape or form anything more than numbers for numbers sake right now. They are definitely subject to change and I think that they will change. As I am a 10 man raider I will be talking about it from that perspective.
So let’s dissect this a little bit. I’m not going to lie, the first time I saw this tweet my mind went into overdrive, I heard the voices in my head telling me that this was going to kill the amount of damage that my Brewmaster was going to do while raiding, that we would need our DPS to do more damage (shocking, I know) and that the era of Tanks being kings among men was over.
However, after a moment or two the voices subsided and this beacon of clarity shone down upon me. A question popped into my head, a very simple one in fact, “Is this going to change anything?”, and I had to think.
Like a lot of you I’m sure, I look at Skada (or Recount) during a fight to see how I am doing with my DPS compared to everyone else. Normally as a Brewmaster (and main tank) I pull very competitive numbers, always near or at the top. One thing that I have done before while raiding is check how much Attack Power I actually gained from Vengeance (I did it during our Lei Shen kill, you can see) and the only time that I have ever seen my Vengeance above 30% of my health was after soaking a Decapitate from Lei Shen, and hitting near 300k Attack Power from Vengeance alone.
The damage that I did from there was insane, I beat all our DPS for that fight, and was hitting so hard our Paladin off tank couldn’t keep aggro (granted I wasn’t helping with that).
So right now, the way the numbers stand, nothing will change, (except Lei Shen antics) from how much damage we are doing right now, to how much damage we would be doing with this 30% cap in place.
If nothing is going to change with our current raiding tier, then what about Tier 16? This change seems much more targeted at the next raid tier then the current one (I know, a little obvious) and Blizzard is trying to re-balance the structure of raids in a way. DPS should be doing the DPS, Healers should be healing and Tanks should be tanking.
This doesn’t mean that Tanks shouldn’t care about the damage or healing that they do, let’s face it, more DPS means the boss dies quicker, which makes everything easier. But Tanks shouldn’t be out DPSing the DPS in almost every fight, granted, there will be gimmick fights (like Windlord Mel’jarak) where it will happen, but it should be every once in a while, not all the time.
It seems like the current concerns at Blizzard in regards to Tank damage and healing is that, right now, as a Tank you are trying to take as much damage as you possibly can without dying so that you can have more of this precious Vengeance. This system is effectively rewarding you for standing in the fire; something that we all know (or should know) is bad.
From a DPS viewpoint as well, it isn’t very fun when someone that isn’t a DPSer can do more damage then you, without putting that much more effort in then they normally would. After all, it is their job; it’s what they do during a raid.
So the main things that I wanted to get across in this post are;
1) Don’t worry. Yes, the damage we do as Tanks is probably going to go down from the numbers that we are seeing now, but that’s how it should be.
2) The numbers aren’t fixed, don’t take them as set in stone, they will be changed.
3) Ghostcrawler said in a response tweet that he thought tank damage should be something like 50-80% of the damage a DPS does. I think this a fair range, which will probably change.
So that is it from me today, I apologise for not posting in the last week, that will be changing, I will be putting up more tanking guides, and the elusive Brewmaster tanking guide that I have been promising soon.
Please feel free to leave a comment below to discuss this topic, leave me suggestions or criticisms, I can take them. If you want to get in touch with me you can follow me on Twitter, email me at [email protected] or chat to me when I am streaming, I love talking to people about this stuff while I stream.
I would also like to thank all of you for reading my Blog for the past half a year, and I hope you will keep reading and commenting, I do enjoy hearing other people’s opinions about topics or questions that you might have.
Posted in Brewmaster Monk, General Monk
Tags: Ghostcrawler Tweets, Patch 5.4, Tanking, Vengeance
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