The new changes that are proposed:
Tormentor:
This set now only taunts the first enemy hit by the ability that activates the set, rather than taunting any and all enemies hit by the ability. Due to this change, the set can now trigger off blinks, such as Streak.
This set now also heals for 45% of all damage done from the ability that activates the set.
I must admit I am disappointed in these proposed changes. Changing this to a 5 piece set adding a single-target taunt seems fairly redundant, as most applicable abilities already apply soft-taunt like DK chains or silver leash. For abilities that gain a taunt from this interaction, like streak, it seems impossible to control which enemy the taunt would apply to, as if you streak into a group of mobs, one "at random" would get taunted.
For the healing change, does this apply to something like the 2H ability Stampede to become a heal-over-time from the ground dot, healing for 45% of all the damage that ability causes for the full duration? That seems like a lot of extra healing, but with a weird taunt interaction. Who is this change for?
Developer Comment:
This set has flown under the radar at allowing an Area of Effect application of a taunt for quite some time, but like all things in life, it must come to an end. While this is a very old functionality of the item set, Area of Effect-damaging movement abilities were spread few and far between during its introduction to the game, so its AoE taunt capabilities went effectively unnoticed. Over time, however, we've added significantly more of these ability types and this item set has enabled behavior that goes against one of our core philosophies for tanking - where taunting should be an individual action meant for one specific target in the moment of activation. To prevent a complete loss to this set, it now works with blinks and we added a new healing functionality to help ensure chain activating the abilities still provides something fun and impactful.
Why exactly must this come to an end? It seems to have been a fun, harmless, off-meta setup that required a 5 piece set bonus to utilize. And it has been in the game effectively since launch as a well-known interaction. How core of a philosophy could this have been to be ignored for so many years? Is the philosophy a worthwhile one? It's also very odd to see the change occur randomly now. As players, when we see changes like this proposed that appear to be out-of-the-blue, it makes us wonder how something innocuous like this can get priority and attention from the team when so many other things in the game seem to go overlooked.
My main is a templar tank and I have this as one of my 10 loadouts in my armory and it was may favorite one and what I spent most of my time playing this game with. It was very fun, not meta or OP at all, and it's such a disheartening change to see especially with so many other things in Templar toolkit (or elsewhere) that could use some attention.