Massive tank hotfixes dropped in the recent update and it looks like Vengeance Demon Hunters is the most popular tank. You’ve seen them in new mythic plus keys and they are the often played tank in the Castle Nathria raid, they are everywhere even in RPGs. There’s a reason Vengeance is that good. Apparently they take less damage than any other tank and for bug reasons too as in something is wrong with the spec in terms of how it’s performing and it’s been taking less magic damage than any other tank in the game so far. Let’s take a look at some of the things Blizzard is going to do for all the tanks in the game. As there is going to be a variety of different tanks that are getting buffed while the Demon Hunter is getting some nerfs but more or less this is going to make the playing field for tanks maybe a little bit more even in the end.
We also have one minor update on soul ash. Blizzard has removed the cap on soul ash completely. If you want to start farming soul ash for the next patch 9.1, you can continue farming inside of Torghast which is not a bad change at all.
1:39 TANK UPDATE
Blizzard made a blue post recently saying that players observed that Vengeance Demon Hunter seem to be receiving up to 50% less magic damage than expected. Long story short, it was a bug that allowed Demon Hunters to double dip into the ability to reduce the amount of magic damage they take which the other tanks did not have. The other tanks do not have anything baseline, Demon Hunters always had that but somehow they were able to bug it and double dip into that passive.
In expansion like Shadowlands, quite a lot of enemies are magical of sorts. Not a lot of dungeons like Freehold which is mostly a physical dungeon back in BFA, where all the tanks were heavy on physical mitigation like Prot Warriors for example, they were able to deal with things with sword and board. However in Shadowlands you have enemies that do a little bit of shadow damage to you or when you hit the Plaguefall and you’ll hangout at the sludge pit where you are literally covered in acid- magic damage galore. What I am trying to say is, in Shadowlands, there is quite a lot of magic damage whether you are raiding or doing mythic pluses. Out of all the tanks that are able to deal with magic damage, Demon Hunters really was able to do well with it.
Blizzard was trying to correct the double dipping aspect of their magic defensive but also they realized the other tanks are a little bit weaker. So before Blizzard is going to completely restructure the weight of certain classes’ play, they decided to apply this hotfix which happened recently- a buff to a variety of other tanks. To make them 10% more durable to all kinds of damage. The other tanks are quite a bit behind compared to Vengeance Demon Hunters. As Vengeance is a popular spec both in raid and mythic pluses.
3:48 Looking at the chart below, Blizzard is going to buff the effectiveness of all other tanks by 10%. All are going to take 10% less physical damage and 10% magical damage. That’s a pretty nice buff that is going to make them quite durable. 10% might not be a lot but it is 10% all across the board. And with how certain classes got different changes to legendaries or different buff from patch 9.0.5, overall these are looking quite good.
Not only are these classes going to get buffed, Vengeance Demon Hunters are going to get nerfed slightly as Blizzard wants to fix the problem that made Demon Hunters take less magic damage. To offset it, Demon Hunters will take 5% less physical damage. And overall they are taking 10% more magic damage compared to where they were previously.
This is an interesting update and Blizzard is most likely going to do more things when it comes to detail in terms of how they are going to adjust classes in patch 9.1. As back in the Alpha and the Beta, Demon Hunters was the only tank that was durable and Blizzard kept trying to nerf over and over. It turns out that the bug we are talking about now has been in the game since Alpha and Beta. It has been the bug that gave Blizzard reason to keep nerfing Demon Hunters in terms of tank and no matter how much the nerf, they kept really strong.
So we are most likely to expect some additions to what classes can do once patch 9.1 hits. And Blizzard is probably going to do big reworks in the future. Right now all we have is a 10% flat buff to all the tanks, slight nerf to Demon Hunters but a slight buff to their physical effectiveness. This is actually going to be meta changing or at least meta in terms of the viability of the other tanks compared to Vengeance Demon Hunters.
5:50 Will the recent nerf impact the Vengeance Demon Hunters? It is going to have some impact but not nearly as big as some people think. It won’t dethrone Vengeance DH as top competitor tank, definitely not what Blizzard is trying to do with this update. Blizzard is trying to make the other tanks a little bit better in terms of dealing with a variety of different damage they can do. Vengeance DH is still going to be top notch for they have great utility and mobility. They also have the advantage of Aggro, they can just get Aggro in a snap. And while you may just combust the enemies from afar, the Demon Hunter can just get a bunch of Aggro and start kiting enemies in circles.
A lot of the tanks in patch 9.1 are pretty strong and a lot of them can do keys above 20s for example. And most of them can do Castle Nathria just fine in the right composition. None of the tanks are bad for World of Warcraft. It is when you start to get competitive is where you start seeing the strengths and weaknesses of certain tanks. And that is where I think you are going to see more tanks to do some really high end keys. This is also going to help player perception in terms of which tanks are good because Demon Hunters have always had this advantage in giving 10s or 15s done and Vengeance were just tankier and stronger than everybody else. People would take a 200 Demon Hunter over a 226 any other tanks.
Other tanks are not terrible but the community perception is definitely something that is going to be difficult to change. With the nice hefty buff, I think we’ll see more tanks reach higher standards than ever before. Definitely consider other tanks in the future as they actually have been buffed whereas Vengeance Demon Hunters to some extent have been nerfed.