Tanks have become passive, maintenance healing targets – they’ll get splashes of AoE, bits of Beacon transfers, rolling Rejuvenations, but largely, a well-played tank will keep themselves alive longer than a healer possibly can.

The other gameplay shift has been in the amount of external healing that tanks require, or in Legion’s case, don’t really require. There are outliers (Kil’Jaeden Felclaws, for example!) but largely, most tanks can get smashed in the face and reconstruct that and move on. At current gear and damage levels, you can in a lot of cases survive and fully recover from not properly mitigating incoming damage. It is, however, unlike any other time since this model started in Mists of Pandaria, something that does not matter as much.

Mitigation is still semi-important, don’t get me wrong. Threat only really matters tank to tank – if you are too good at it and your co-tank isn’t, you might have a tug-of-war tank swap until you’re both established, but seldom will anyone be even minimally capable of peeling a mob off of you, even if it is one that has barely been touched by you. No longer does a tank need to worry about or prepare much to mitigate damage or manage threat. These two changes are in a sharp contrast to the checkered history of WoW tanking. They are in an interesting spot at this point in the game, with Legion making them move in two relatively new directions – every tank has some form of semi-reliable self-sustain, and tanks are now expected to make up a proportionally higher amount of a group’s overall damage. Now that I’ve had a chance to unpack my thoughts about what I played at Blizzcon and what I saw, I’d like to discuss class changes, since the implications are interesting.

Battle for azeroth tank changes