Suggestions: BLU Spell changes for the Tank Role

[Ravenguard]

I've been playing some Tank BLU tank lately, and it's been a wild ride so far. It requires a pretty extreme knowledge of fight timings for every Tank buster and mechanic or your paper defense just falls apart, more than the other Mimicry roles.

While its been an interesting puzzle to try to figure out how to excel (beyond just survival), there are some things which I feel could really help when tanking fights:

• Increase Damage Reduction of Mighty Guard to 50% (up from 40%).
• Reduce the cast time of Diamondback to 1 second (down from 2 seconds).
• Increase the Max HP increase duration of Devour to 60 seconds when Mimicry is set to Tank (currently 15 seconds).

Note: BLU is notoriously squishy while tanking, and this would be to give some better, more reliable mitigation (passive and active).

• Increase Blood Drain mana gain to 1000MP (up from 500MP).
• Reduce Bad Breath's mana cost to 400MP (down from (500MP).
• Increase Toad Oil Duration to 5 minutes (up from 3 minutes).

Note: Less time spent getting MP to ensure Diamondback readiness, so other spells can be cast.

• Add an increased Enmity Gain to Fire Angon when Mimicry is set to Tank.

Note: This would be to give BLU a ranged enmity puller (choosing Angon since noone uses it currently).

Let me know what you think. Is it fine as is, or would you like to see some other tweaks?

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

Sounds good, but I wish more would be done to encourage using cactguard instead of BLU tanks being Diamondback bots...

[Ravenguard]

Sounds good, but I wish more would be done to encourage using cactguard instead of BLU tanks being Diamondback bots...

I was wondering how to address Cactguard.

A lot of the tank busters in ARR didn't have cast time, and in HW they were very quick. Without any changes to BLU's passive mitigation, if they allowed Cactguard to be cast on self, it seemed like BLU Tanks would be expected to rotate it every 4 GCD to make up for inability to survive fast damage spikes (outside of Diamondback).

Maybe extend the duration, and give it a cooldown? (I feel like would just be reinventing Rampart lol)

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

I was wondering how to address Cactguard.

A lot of the tank busters in ARR didn't have cast time, and in HW they were very quick. Without any changes to BLU's passive mitigation, if they allowed Cactguard to be cast on self, it seemed like BLU Tanks would be expected to rotate it every 4 GCD to make up for inability to survive fast damage spikes (outside of Diamondback).

Maybe extend the duration, and give it a cooldown? (I feel like would just be reinventing Rampart lol)

You aren't far off with rotating it as a cooldown, formerly Inner Beast on WAR used to have such a role, a (damaging) GCD action that provided -20% damage taken for 6s. Tankbusters in ARR without cast times have been dealt with by learning the attack pattern (ex: Titan - Rock Buster (frontal cone swing) -> Mountain Buster (frontal cone earthquake)) and using mitigation ahead of time.

But there lies a big problem due to Diamondback existing:
- the damage penalty of Mighty Guard (-70%) is too severe to encourage any damaging actions over using Blood Drain until you have Diamondback ready and letting your BLU healers do the extra damage instead
- as you said, it requires a 2nd BLU tank to actually use Cactguard on the MT to make any use of it.