WoW How Affixes Affect Tanks

With the three new affixes now being live for at least one week a piece, today I want to talk about how they’ve affected pugs, organized groups and each tank in particular.

Entangled:
As we thought going into this affix, its actually pretty easy. Each tank has something to deal with this affix. Paladin can even freedom another player for extra value. If you don’t have something to deal with it in a global, you can pretty easily just, move out. Without Thundering this season and most bosses not requiring severe micro positioning. This is one I wanted to touch base on.

Incorporeal:
Incorporeal is a new affix that is most easily dealt with by a long term single target CC (its immune to AoE CC). Unfortunately a lot of pugs simply refer to this as someone else’s problem, when its not dealt with and the cast goes off, -50% damage and healing debuff will more than likely mean a wipe.

VDH: Imprison; easy grab

Monk: Paralyze; easy grab

Guardian: Hibernate; unfortunately we have to sacrifice something to get this talent and its a cast, meaning in the heat of combat, you should as the very least use a defensive before using, but its is spammable so if you and another both cast it on one target, you can easily swap to the other to deal with it.

Warrior: Intimidating Shout; for this to work you must be targeting the Incorporeal with the ability to gain the CC benefit, also on a 1m30s cooldown which isn’t the best ability to deal with the affix, but it is something.

Paladin: Repentance & Turn Evil; both are easy grabs in the class tree and both have casts, much like bear, be weary when using it but with proper planning can pretty easily handle the affix.

Death Knight: Control Undead; at the end of the first week of Incorporeal, Control Undead worked on them on live servers, for maybe an hour, actually taking control of the mob and applying that debuff to dungeon mobs.. Honestly kinda broken, so they reverted it. As of writing this on, they did re hotfix the ability to work again, but not cast the debuff on enemies. This is a spammable ability like guardian.

The next time Incorporeal comes around all tanks will have something to deal with the affix, which is nice, since they make up 20% of your party, just do your best to get the ones you can. Learn when group damage ramps are coming and target those times to try and solo them down when you can.

Afflicted: Afflicted requires an active poison, disease or curse dispel to deal with, something only 3 tank specs have, the other three, well they’re shit out of luck and reliant on the party to deal with the affix when they appear.

Paladin: Cleanse

Monk: Detox

Guardian: Remove Corruption; while this talent is really not fun to grab having to waste 2 points in 2 talents you’ll actually never use because they’re uncastable in bear form, being able to handle the affix that week becomes the higher priority.

Healing the Afflicted: The afflicted affix can also be healed to full, while this is not targetable by smart AoE heals, all three tanks above can help with this.

Paladin: Word of Glory; while it may feel bad to use holy power on an affix, -50% haste will feel worse.

Monk: Vivify; taking the talent to gain a free vivify every 10s may not always heal to full, but will if its crits, so its a gamble and I wouldn’t rely on this being the primary means of dealing with it, but it can be an added tool in your kit.

Guardian: Dream of Cenarius Regrowth; castable in bear form and can proc every 20s (if proc’d), this can fully heal an afflicted with 0 issues. Allowing bear to easily solo the affix with 2 globals (if planned correctly).

There’s clearly three winners with the new affixes, Paladin, Bear and Monk, and the other three are left to feel helpless in many scenarios, while there are many things you can do to help your healers and DPS deal with the affix by providing what utility you have during those encounters, ex. Casting sigil of silence on the dungeon mobs to spot all cast from going out on the party, requiring less healing overall or using intervene on the one you know may be dealing with it.

This season has become a tank utility season with the current dungeon pool, and these new affixes compound that issue. Tanks need utility, some have it all, some have none.

This season is also the first season with major changes to affixes, not having a seasonal affix, and the 2nd season of the first expansion with a constantly rotating dungeon pool, there’s quite a few lessons to be learned here, just look at the meta – Protection Paladin, not only do they have an answer for every affix, there’s also cases where they have multiple, while some have none which creates a heavy disbalance.

I’m not going to argue that every tank should have an answer for everything, but as it sits, the pendulum sways much harder to one side than the other.