The War Within beta went live, and with it, a challenging change – the effect of damaging trinkets and cantrip effects (weapon procs) are going down by 33%, but only for tank and healer-spec characters (and also maybe the same applies if you use a tank or healer trinket on a DPS character, apparently?).

This is an interesting change that I think unveils some problems with the game and Blizzard’s approach to it, and I wanted to try to quickly discuss (while the beta servers were being hammered to death by players).

So…on the surface, this isn’t necessarily a bad idea. A part of why tanks and healers ultimately take these options is because they’re enjoyable, high-impact, and relatively safe choices, and they expand the kit of those roles in small but meaningful ways. Why remove them, then?

Well…Blizzard is, in my opinion, treating a symptom and not the actual problem that leads to this behavior.

Tanks and Healers Have All The Tools They Need for Their Core Roles

One thing that prevents tank and healer trinkets from being good choices most of the time is that tanks and healers don’t really need the effects of their role-appropriate trinkets to do their jobs effectively. Tanks are self-sustain and mitigation machines, so tank trinkets rarely enhance that potential in useful ways. A trinket that gives me a shield for 30% of my health? Sure, I’m more tanky with it, but it also kind of doesn’t matter in most scenarios in the current game, when I’m designed as a tank to be able to either just not take the damage at all or to be able to heal it right back up with a Death Strike or some other effect. Healers kind of end up in a similar boat with added caveats – if a trinket procs or benefits healing, great, but when I can top an entire dungeon group off in two globals, a 5% net boost to healing isn’t going to revolutionize my gameplay. That is one of the major problems that leads to taking damage trinkets – the kinds of effects that are tank and healer specific on trinkets aren’t needed with the current state of the roles and how they play, so what can you take that is a weak spot? Damage. Speaking of…

Tank and Healer Trinket Designs Generally Suck

Oh, you mean my choices as a tank player are a trinket that randomly stops some minor amount of incoming damage or a trinket that I can use for a damage absorb shield? Wow, such gameplay, much fun. The healer trinket choices are a thing that stores some amount of healing to pop on everyone, adds extra healing, or has some mana restore function – no way, that’s…dull. Tank and healer trinkets, while outliers exist, are generally just bad holes of meh gameplay. They don’t matter, they don’t feel exciting, it’s just bleh all the way. The exceptions, perhaps ironically, often add damage as a component. In Dragonflight, Decoration of Flame was a strong tank trinket in Season 1 and still decent in Season 4, and a trinket like Rashok’s Molten Heart was great for healers because while the core effect was a mana regen helper, it also had healing amplification and a group Versatility buff that was pretty decent. These effects add a gameplay component to maximize around – Decoration does its best damage and shielding in bigger AoE pulls, while Rashok’s for healers specifically incentivizes periods of overhealing to trigger the buff on your party and raid mates. But those are exceptions, and most things designed for tanks and healers are just very bland and boring effects that add to core competencies – they don’t meaningfully enhance a weak spot.

Tanks and Healers Are Damage Dealers and Having Them Do More Damage Matters

The last major component I want to discuss about current state is this – most tanks and healers are expected to do damage to clear content, and it’s no longer really optional. Tanks are largely judged on how much damage they can do and how much they can enable a healer to do damage by reducing needs for spot healing, and healers are judged on how much damage they can do while maintaining strong healing. Vengeance DH has high burst damage, consistent baseline damage, and a strong self-sustain kit, so they’re meta (heh) right now, while the healing meta largely loves Restoration Druids and Mistweaver Monks, both of whom can throw out HoTs and then do damage while maintaining healing at a high level – Grove Guardians can carry the load while a Druid healer can shift into cat form and catweave, and Mistweaver has a boatload of synergies that feed them doing damage while healing and make it optimal to do so. WoW’s current design is sold on the idea that tank and healer damage matter and matter a lot, and while that is a topic unto itself (maybe not the best design for everyone, it turns out!), for now, it is what it is and what the game largely builds around in most forms of content.

Through these lenses, it is understandable why tanks and healers take and use damage trinkets. They have all the survivability and healing they need, and played well, they don’t need much more of either, so attention turns to a big weak spot where they can offer the most contribution to a group – damage. While there are tank and even healer trinkets that do damage, they often do less damage because of the added effect, and the problem compounds here again since the damage is the desirable part of the effect, with the rest being useless or fringe at best.

Is this a problem though? In the current model of the game, I’d argue it isn’t – it might not be to everyone’s liking, but the current design isn’t inherently bad and it’s not the worst thing that healers and tanks all take damage trinkets. It’s only bad if you want tanks to largely be about slow attrition of health, in which case a defensive effect on a trinket will slow the bleeding more, and for healers it is only bad if you want them to be so focused on healing that they constantly need more of it, need more mana, and are so unable to contribute damage that content is tuned around it. But that’s not the case today, isn’t the case from the limited Alpha testing I saw of TWW, and so it puts this change in a weird light. Reducing the effects of damage trinkets for non-DPS specs is just an irritant in that light – tank damage still matters, healer damage still matters, and the toolkits of the specs under both roles are so fleshed out and built at this point that they don’t have huge weak spots to shore up other than just the damage they deal. Making tanks and healers not want damage trinkets will require more than nerfing their effects – it will require a substantial change to gameplay and spec design to introduce new weaknesses, which is a controversial gambit to say the least.

My one fixer theory is that they could make healing and tanking trinkets more interesting if they rewarded proper gameplay of the role, but that’s also a can of worms. My immediate thought was a trinket for tanks that would put up a shield that would explode for the amount of the absorb remaining at the end of the effect, which would reward smart tank gameplay by incentivizing you to stack cooldowns and play a tight defensive game while it’s up, which could synergize with encounter design by bringing new gameplay to points in a fight where a tank will just absolutely get blasted in the face, but even that is a hard target because some tanks can take practically 0 damage played very well (Protection Warrior says hi!) while a fundamental part of the design of Blood DK is taking damage to heal it back up and buff the heal and shield that follows, so such a trinket would be miserably bad and purely defensive on Blood while a Prot Warrior could turn such a thing into a huge damage bomb – and maybe that’s fine for an off-the-cuff example, but it would need to be balanced. There’s a lot of potential in skill reward trinkets, but those could also be skill cheese where you deliberately use them poorly in a way that optimizes the damage output, and that’s no good either. Trinkets could become more stat-stick style, but that’s also boring and the powerful stat sticks they’ve made in Dragonflight end up being boring but powerful choices, especially when they reward a party or raid for having multiples across roles or stat preferences. Like, no one is genuinely excited to play Whispering Incarnate Icon for gameplay interaction, it’s just good because the math on it maths big.

What worries me more to an extent is the note on cantrip weapons being hit, because it implies that tank and healer cantrips are coming, and that feels kinda bad if the current tank and healer effect design remains in play. Firstly, making a weapon for tanks is tough because they all use different weapons – a one-handed weapon with both strength and agility could, in theory, be used on both Protection specs, Vengeance, Brewmaster, and Guardian, but then Blood is out in the cold unless they bring back dual-wield tanking. If you make it a two-handed polearm with those stats, it could work for Blood, Brewmaster, and Guardian, but leaves the other 3 out. The bigger problem is that in most raids, those are going to be dead drops in two – assuming your raid wants them on both tanks, they then become off-spec or waste drops past that point, and if you can’t get every tank onto a single weapon, then you need at least two and that is even worse on dead drops, and this all assumes that you even want them in the first place! You also start wandering into dangerous territory with those kind of ideas, like at a certain point, are you making a cantrip weapon or a pseudo-legendary? With the current cantrip weapons, they’re all reasonably strong and enjoyable, but the effect is simple, tuned around damage, and doesn’t gain so much power or specificity as to ascend to legendary status. Gholak is great, but it’s a runner-up prize for Protection Warriors and Paladins who can receive Fyr’alath as a legendary but can’t use it as tanks, and the effect is clearly less-than. Tuning a tank or healer cantrip to both feel good but also to not be weirdly specific and thusly very powerful (or disappointingly below-average) in that application is tough. Random healing bursts as a healer feels bad since it’s not directed and may proc when unneeded, while random defensive procs aren’t going to meaningfully help a tank in the current design paradigm.

All around, Blizzard is clearly away from their intention on tank and healer design, but these trinket and cantrip changes don’t really address the actual issue and just inflame and irritate the players, and that’s probably not ideal!