I used to tank and would still tank, but they’d need to make DPS and healers much worse for me to go back to that role, because I’m having too much fun as DPS or healing.
For example, after playing Discipline Priest, I picked up Mistweaver Monk, and I’m having the time of my life right now. It looks like Season 2 is going to be even better for MW monks, so I’m learning and progressing with it. Not even Dragonflight, where tanks were OP, changed my mind about it, because in Dragonflight healers and DPS were also fun.
But going back to history, in Shadowlands, I only played healer because I found the DPS and tank roles kind of boring. Resto shaman had earth elemental with earthquake i had a lot of fun with that gameplay
This isn’t a rule in WoW. It’s not against ToS, CoC or End User Agreement to tank a dungeon without leading it.
It’s just a social convention, the default position. If the Tank doesn’t want to lead he doesn’t HAVE to. Although in a PuG situation it would be seen as unconventional at the least.
The main reason why Tanks are leaders is because Pulling is a key part of Tanking. The tank decides on which mobs to pull, in which order and how many. This is so they can control aggro and avoid either DPS or Healer being thudded in an ouchie way.
If the Tank has a friend in the group that wants to lead then most groups would be ok with it but it might slow things down somewhat at they’d be showing the Tank where to go and explaining the mob packs and the mechanics. This is ok in a Heroic and maybe in a +2 (just about) but some groups will balk at this.
LFD used to have a Check-Box to tick agreeing to Lead the dungeon. Has this been removed? I haven’t used LFD for a long time.
Not that it did much.
It still exists, but it doesn’t have any effect whatsoever outside of giving the player a green flag next to their name. I wouldn’t be surprised if 95% of the playerbase doesn’t even know what it is.
Many have pointed out that it’s unecessary and I won’t disagree with that.
However, I don’t think that this is a solid argument:
Tanks need to know how much comfortable healer is when pulling, I don’t see how much different it is for an experienced player with lead role to acknowledge both tank and healer comfort after some pulls.
Thats not true at all, tanks generally need about 40% of the damage they take healing up externally. “Not needing a healer at all” is just rubbish. It’s not deagonflight anymore.
and get like 2 times the healing done.