plenty of tanks around, but they don’t go with pugs because pugs have repeatedly soured their grapes.
“lf tank kara”
“hey i can tank it”
“nice” invites tank leaves after Kaigy because no neck drop / can’t meet dps check on lich/rider tank (and the rest of the group) now has a bricked daily lockout nobody wants to join because first boss is dead / lich rider no-kill because dps andy couldn’t push his buttons properly.
yeah… you bring plague into town and you’re wondering why the townsfolk are avoiding you like the plague.
healers and tank players have had it with rude, selfish, and/or bad dps andies who doesn’t respect the time and effort the tank and healer players put in just so the game can happen at all.
healers and tanks go with their guilds for nax raids and kara now, and most pug dps andies who can’t find a group have nobody but themselves to thank for that.
so much for that offspec option eh?
why don’t you just play the role?
6/9 classes can tank.
6/9 classes can heal.
3/9 classes can play both roles.
every class in the game right now, except for hunters, can perform either one or both of these crucial roles, yet somehow there is a shortage?
playermade issue tbh. you have no excuse not to have healing/tank role available on your character, if you don’t find yourself playing hunter, specifically.
if you chose your offspec to be a “pvp spec” when:
A: there is a healing/tanking spec available.
B: respec costs are in the silvers.
you’re just griefing yourself…
also, rank 14 has been available for quite a while now and tbh, if you still aren’t high warlord (or the alliance equivalent) and you still dedicate your offspec to pvp, then what are you even doing?..
Honestly this. Met alot of people from retail who thought the threat system was same as it is on retail. It grinds my gears when i’m mid-charge and i see the rogue shadowstep and starts bashing the mob.
From my PoV the most annoying part of tanking is DPS players but i still prefer to tank dungeons over dps. I personally cant stand other people’s tanking style .
Tanking requires a specific mindset which alot of people simply dont have or dont want to put the effort into developing it. Same as for healers, tanking is a different game compared to dps. It’s not for everyone and that is fine.
To make it more popular, you would need to rework the threat system.
Retail has the same issue. Barely anyone wants to tank or heal because it is punishing. You don’t have to struggle for threat but more responsibility which makes the roles less desirable over the zugs. If the content was easier but the rewards would stay the same, pretty sure more people would love to tank and/or heal because the difficulty would be lower and less responsibilities than you wouldve had before.
As for healers: The role is just dead boring for the average joe. It sucks to try to snipe heals because you dont know the damage profile of the pack/boss and see other healers - who put the time and effort into learning the raids/dungeons and reading healer notes about the given content - pump. In dungeons, you dont have to do anything. Especially in SoD, i have never seen a single group where people complained about the healer not doing dps. They just semi-afk. A ret paladin can just heal with consecration in any dungeons. (Except DMW/DMN, UBRS, DFC and KC) This is my personal opinion about healers. Maybe my perspective is skewed thanks to being geared and never having to worry about my healer being bad and letting me or the group die.
There’s a tank shortage and there is a lot of reason to that. Differences in tank proportion between dungeons and raid groups, tank playing with guildmates doesn’t help for sure, but in my eyes, the most important part is that players doesn’t forgive tanks mistakes, even tho’ it’s probably the most difficult and frustrating role to play.
This won’t change until people stop being harsh to their tanks. Be kind to your tanks.
I will answer to OP’s post’s questions in order, as a classic content tank-enjoyer (played tank through vanilla, bc, wotlk, SoM and SoD). As I’m browsing the answers, you will find in my message a lot of points that has been said by others, but I guess you’ll have a summup here
No it’s not your luck, there is definitely a tank shortage
This is kind of true. Coinruns now are mostly a way to catch up if your late, or do a few golds if you need. AQ40 opening event proved that nobody need gold anymore (considering carapaces fragments would sell 5g a piece in the first days) and players that are late either are :
coming back from a break and usually find help in old guilds or friends;
rerolls that hadn’t been kept up-to-date, which are rarely tanks (for a lot of reasons that doesn’t really matter for this answer).
There is a game design issue that create a shortage of tanks for dungeons which is that you need proportionally way less tanks for raids than dungeons. Dungeons require 1 tank every 5 players so 20% while raids require :
In vanilla/SoM : max 4 tanks (MT/OT) for every 40 people in a raid (10%)
In BC/WotLK : max 3 tanks for every 25 people (12%)
In SoD : depends on your group size due to flex raid size, but at best 3 tanks every 20 people (15%)
In addition to this difference, tanks usually play in guilds and spend most of their time playing with their guildmates (because it’s way easier to play with ppl you know, and for your dps/heals it’s easier to build their group fast if they are guildies). So not only we are the least populated role but we also don’t seek PuG very often.
There is numerous other points that, in my opinion, make people don’t want to play tank.
1. Tanking is the hardest role in classic content.
Not necessarily in terms of class mechanics (hello swipe/maul drood spammers) but more in a macro way :
A dps has to apply his rotation and all his focus goes on that.
A healer has to take care of mates hp and all his focus goes on that.
A tank has to : apply his rotation, be careful of threat on all mobs, stay alert for aggro loss, position the mobs correctly, be aware of patrols, know all mobs mechanics in order to pull them properly… and I won’t detail raids and dungeons specificities…
There is a lot to think about at all times.
It’s not a problem per se, but I realized by meeting people in several guilds that WoW Classic players usually don’t play the game to think. Zog Zog, I guess.
2. In addition to this, tanking mistakes aren’t forgiving.
Let’s see some scenarios :
I’m tanking 4 mobs that have a conic aoe spell. At some point during the fight, I lose aggro on one of them, aoe goes off. Oops I lost 50% of my casters.
Second scenario, one of my DPS put everything on the wrong target (yes, they do that even with raid markers). I taunt it back to prevent it to do further damage but oh, another mob reset aggro and must be taunted quickly before it OS a healer. Unfortunately my taunt is on cooldown and I lose 3 healers before I can get it back.
Last scenario, I’m fighting a boss that has a 180° Cleave and some ground aoe I have to get out. aoe zone pop next to me, I side step but have to go toward my raid. Side step a bit too much and poof, cleave clears out your melees.
Do you think those are ultra specific cases that never happen ? I saw all of those mistake happening in some of my raids, and every scenario exists in the two first raids of the game (MC/BWL). And all of those are frustrating. Because the mistake seems small at first but has huge repercussions.
Most important part according to me is that not only you are aware you did a mistake and it’s your fault, but your mates knows it too and won’t mind blaming you. Especially in PuGs. And that brings me to my last but not least point.
3. Community doesn’t permit tanks to play peacefully
I don’t know where to start. Examples are plenty in the past answers.
Let’s have a try and take the trip through your typical first tanking adventure :
Fresh start, new Warrior let’s go through leveling. At first no issue, you have to do the starting zone, nothing new.
You reach level 20 and head for your first Deadmines. You find yourself struggling with threat, because first you don’t know your class well and second your DPS engage mobs before you can charge and end up with no rage. One mate die, people start complaining because you are too slow and can’t hold threat. You end up cleaning the dungeon anyway and at the second you kill VanCleef, people leave group.
Fast forward 40 levels, you kept trying anyway, learnt your class, don’t struggle with rage or threat anymore, runs are more smooth, everything is great. You’re in your most chill BRD pickup with a warr dps and a rogue you found, trying to get some stuff for your incoming raid next week. Everything goes smoothly, you kill Thaurissan and HoJ drops. Knowing your bis list up to BWL, you roll it and win. Rogue and warr dps starts insulting you because “it’s better on a dps, it’s a dps item”, willingly ignoring the fact that your dps = your threat therefore it’s also a threat item. You know they are morons, yet you find yourself blacklisted from two guilds because you didn’t know they were both officers in their respective guilds. Unlucky.
Doesn’t matter, you played with your guildmates, ended classic and did the BC leveling. You unlocked heroic dungeons and tagged in a pickup group for your first heroic ever as a tank. First pack, no mate use a CC, you find yourself dead in 8 second of fight and your group disband. No word, no explanation. Turns out you don’t play paladin and you had a group used to crush dungeons with overtuned paltanks and doesn’t want to take things a bit slower.
You might think that it’s exaggerated but it’s only because I’ve packed them all back to back. Most tanks lived similar situations at somepoint, just because everybody has to learn. And I didn’t even talk about tanks trying to get offspec gear in order to be able to do stuff alone when they need nor any kind of raid drama that exists.
With all the points above, it’s clear to me why nobody wants to tank. Hopefully this will change when people will stop being harsh to their tanks. If that happens someday tho’.
I have been really long, but I wanted to be as exhaustive as I could. It’s not everyday that we raise the issue of the tank shortage question and hopefully this can be a step forward to a change in the community mindset. Yes, I’m a bit of an optimist.
The problem is that with such high gs in a normal dungeons they just dont care because they wont die if the healer is semi ok.
This is the problem with classes that need nerfs and the human controlling it knows how strong the class is. In this case that guy clearly dont respect the roles, would kick him and move on.
Warriors need their tps increased about 3 times to compete with other tanks, even rogues got it easy all because of one rune.
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