As a tank main, I feel that the enjoyability of tanking in dungeons has declined significantly in TWW. I believe many tank players share this sentiment, and I have two specific criticisms that I hope (though not expect) will be addressed in Midnight.
- Tank Nerfs
As we know, TWW started off with massive nerfs to the self-sufficiency of tanks. Many tank players despise these nerfs for taking away our ability to feel invincible by surviving insane pulls but I don’t hate them for the same reason. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to expect tanks optimize their survivability. I think it’s unhealthy for the game to have a meta where you just pull the entire dungeon and melt it down in a single lust window. So I get it, we were too tough to kill. My issue is that we weren’t compensated with anything at all after being gutted in this manner.
Tanking is less enjoyable today because it comes with many responsibilities but no skill expression beyond the bare minimum. The responsibility of a DPS player is to kill things as quickly as possible, and their performance is measured based on how well they do this without wiping the group. This granularity does not exist for the act of tanking. You are either dead or alive, and after major nerfs to our survivability, limit-testing with bigger and bigger pulls is both very unintuitive due to the opaque nature of mob tuning and very risky for the group as an arrogant tank can cause a wipe faster than anyone else.
My wish/proposal would be to allow tanks to contribute more meaningful damage to the group. Blizzard clearly doesn’t want tanks to measure their skill by how long they can survive after pulling 40 mobs (hence the nerfs) so at least let us pump some damage while surviving the reasonable pulls that we are forced into. I’m not saying tanks should do as much damage as DPS specs, but I do strongly wish that our damage was close enough that a good tank who could survive without problems would get more value out of optimizing their throughput. I almost never have issues surviving or interrupting in group content so all my focus goes into maximizing my DPS but tuning has made that hugely significant part of my gameplay feel unrewarding due to the vast chasm between tank and non-tank DPS.
- Utility Disparity
My second major issue with the state of tanking is the vast disparity in the amount of things different tank specs can do. I dislike the fact that tank utility is balanced like DPS utility, where each tank spec is expected to have their own niche. But tanking is an all or nothing role. Every dungeon group has a single tank. If your tank is missing a valuable tool that another tank can bring because they were designed without it, you can’t invite a second tank to fill that gap the same way you can customize your group’s damage profile by inviting different DPS specs. This means that one tank (usually VDH unless its tuning is so bad it can’t survive) is strictly superior to every other tank in every meta because it has the superior tool (sigils & brand) and every other tank spec has a permanent handicap built into their design. In Midnight, I wish to see a homogenization of tank-specific utility (specifically, stops and cleanses) so we don’t have this unbalanceable monospec meta every season.
Thanks for reading. How do you feel about the state of tanking? I doubt anything will come of this but I just had to vent my feelings because I love this game and it saddens me to see my favorite role in this state when everything else is in a great spot.