Suggestions to make healing/tanking role more attractive

Community General Discussion
1

The lack of Tanks and Healers is more and more evident as a patch progresses and becomes harmful to the game, giving a sense of a “dying game” (as many people prefer to say). Pugging group content becomes time consuming in search of these roles and harms the playerbase in the sense of “If I have 2 hours to play a day, why waste 1 of it waiting? I better play smth else”.

I am not here to instigate more complaining. The purpose of this post is to ask the community of their own suggestions to the problem that might hopefully attract some “blue attention”. In order to assist your thought process, please start with answering a simple question: Why aren’t you playing a tank or healer?

Of course simply answering “cause smashing things is more fun”, is a legitimate reason, but let’s try smth more thorough. Please follow suit as below while posting:

"Why I don’t play tank or healer:

Tanking:

  1. I love tanking and I used to tank but I changed to dps because it’s hard to find raid groups. The most common setups for raids is 2/4/14 which means for every 9 people you need 1 tank in the raiding environment. These spots are quickly filled in raiding. With my tank alt I barely find groups under formation lacking tanks and even when I make my own groups, I easily find my second partner with multiple applications. The demand of tanks in raiding isn’t as high as in M+. I never see guilds recruiting tanks either.

Healing:

  1. I am afraid of the responsibility and the resulting flaming from other players.

  2. It’s a role that is unplayable without macros or addons (at least for me). I am a hybrid clicker-button player, playing with buttons for the main rotation and clicking cooldowns, stuns and interrupts. The healing playstyle has me have my mouse hovering above the raid grid, have macros for hover targeting and button combos (alt/ctrl + 1.2,3…) to manage all the healing, buffs and dps which is way too complicated and unfamiliar for me.

  3. Playing in the world or solo content is unsatisfying, taking me significant more time to complete quests and generally kill a thing. Of course the problem for some classes is less evident cause they can switch to boomkin/ele shaman/spriest keeping the same gear but as a holydin or monk, you need at least a different weapon. Regardless, spec switching is unsatisfying.

Suggestions:

  1. Give incentive for tank and healing roles. Give a gold bonus or 1% reward for a past rare mount (a past implementation for the lfg system) for completing m+ or raid bosses in this role. Perhaps this can be active when there’s evident lack of these roles, monitored by some system if possible, or generally keep it active all the time.

  2. Add a dps side on the healing talent tree or dps oriented choice nodes on strong healing cds. People want to feel powerful as they gear. Making healers a bit more hybrid would be great. You want to remain a healer, but why not switch strong healing cds for strong dps cds when you do easier content or content with self sufficient dps that interrupts and uses defensives, reducing the amount of emergency healing required?

  3. Make the UI more healing friendly without addons or macros. People need to invest in configuring these things and preparation scares away potential healers. Providing a faster solution through interface options (a toggle for specific keybinds to have a hover priority for example) is much more welcoming to new players. Edit mode is a good start. It helped me greatly moving the raid frames above my action bars. "

1 Like
2

I’m terrible, I just stick to what I like. I play a class that can heal and tank but there is nothing they can do to the game to make me want to do the other two roles. I just don’t enjoy them. Then again I only really play one class.

Some love to vary everything they do including their roles. Others will stick to one role and vary the class. It’s a matter of preference and I don’t think there is a right or wrong. Some people love to experiment, try new things etc.

I’m not a big fan of incentivizing on the whole. Leads to people doing things purely for the rewards or to clock off a task. It’s fine at lower level like the automated queues (LFR, Nm/Hc Dungeons) but it would seem inappropriate to do for PuG content IMO.

Macros and mouseover actions are part of the standard UI. Healing addons obviously try to embrace all of that and make it easier and give you a ready made version.

I don’t personally think making healers even more of a dps than they already can be in keys is a good way to go. Players have the choice when levelling to do it as a healer or just swap to a dps/tank spec.

1 Like
3

  • Why i play tank: I find this role easy. I take the packs 2 by 2 (unless complicated) and I put the bosses in the corners of the rooms, their backs turned to the group. I use a def cd when my life drops too often around 40%.

  • Why I play heal: I find it relaxing. I just need to follow the group and click on the life bars when they are not full and I use my CDs when my mates take/are going to take a lot of damage. When I’m bored I cast offensive spells.

I play without addons except for a weakaura which highlights important enemy casts and I really like doing macros to simplify things.
I have very very rarely been criticized, even at +18/+20.
I’m not interested in pushing beyond !

The only thing I would like is to be able to exchange their defensive/healing CDs for offensive CDs or damages in open world to make them less boring in solo play

1 Like
4

I play healer but i also have alts that tank and dps. That doesnt help the pugging scene one bit since i never pug, and i will never pug no matter what incentives or changes they make to make healing or tanking more attractive. Why would i spend time playing with strangers when i can play with people i enjoy spending time with?

1 Like
5

I personally think this the method of approach to the problem isn’t going to bear much fruit.

I think what you should be interested in is how to make pugging more attractive to these roles. Currently, unless you struggle with building out networks or you are not part of a community, there is little reason to do keys with pugs.

There are also key ranges that struggle more than others do, but that Blizzard can solve by consolidating the key levels. Instead of 20 we can have the “end game” be at 15 instead, and scale the scoring/rewards down accordingly.

Otherwise you run into the situation with having multiple dead zones like 19 keys later into the season, to sub 20 keys having less and less participants as those who can easily do 20s only go higher after they are done with their currency farms.

For raids I am not sure now the situation can be solved. I personally do not want more tank slots added because that will only mean more coordination will be required between the tanks (and this is with the general observation that a solid amount of tanks cannot taunt swap on time.)

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6

Stop flaming people for every mistake. We’re humans behind the keyboard and we can make mistakes, especially in high keys.

There you go, sorted the issue.

7 Likes
7

im surprised there isnt more tanks, prot paladin tanking is just :weary: :100: :+1:

8

This won’t work. It solves nothing and will force people into a role they don’t like. Playing something because you enjoy it is incentive enough, why else do it? It’s a video game.

This already exists and most healers have this, but the problem is that you don’t have enough talent points to pick the DPS talents and not sacrifice stuff that actually matters for healing. Most healers do dps when there’s nothing to heal, and disc priests even heals by dealing damage. Holy Pala is a melee healer so also automatically does decent damage and a Holy priest (my main) has a decent dps CD when there’s downtime.

Again already implemented but maybe not as clear to new players like you said.
I personally use healbot because I can move it around at will and I’ve used it since 2007, but you can enable the ability to click on raidframes with certain button combo’s and activate a spell to that person, all without addons. Also good luck getting rid of Weakaura’s for any class and spec.

9

I think people missed the point of my post.

1)I want to hear people why they don’t play these roles and 2)what they can suggest to help the situation

What I suggest is just a thought, so stop bashing me on them and say what you’d do to improve the situation.

10

Many people haven’t even tried once those roles. A set goal might have a few try and actually enjoy it.

On the other hand, they are roles far harder than dps and it’s not bad to reward those already playing them. + it gives a reason to the already geared tanks and healers to involve themselves with easier content and help with the draught.

11

As a suggestion to blizzard; they maybe can implement more interesting stuff specific for the tank and healer-roles. Right now the default for the open world is dps.

I don’t know how to get more people into tanking/healing. Both roles can be very intimidating. As a newer tank it also very often isn’t clear what is going on anyway. Like why you lose treat, or do not have treat or why you die even with a shield up (physical vs magic?).

My first try to tank (season 2? shadowlands) i wanted to start from the bottom, but i died so many times on my prot warrior, and the dungeons that did finish were so hard amd took so long that i gave up somewhere at lvl ~23.

12

The problem with lack if tanks and healers is a pug issue only and there is a reason for it.
The pug enviroment isnt really forgiving or pleasant for a lot of people and theese two roles have a lot more expected out of them than dps.

If you play DPS the only think you really need to do is do decent dps and dnt stand in crap. Ofcause you need to do interupts and such but who can tell if you do or not since there are three of you.

Tanks are expected to know everything about the dungeons and choose the expected path for best timing. This path changes from pug to pug so it is impossible todo the right one. Tanks are also expected to hold aggro 100% of the time no matter what the dps does.

Healers are expected not only to heal but to conteract, dispell and on the side do damage. Running around doing 1000 of thinks at the same time as keeping the party alive.

If either of theese two roles fail in what is expected of them they get abuse and flaming.
Id desnt matter If they actually played ok but as long as they didnt play as expected or didnt counteract, grabbed aggro or healed a stupid dps, it is allways their fault.

You asked what would have to be done for more people to play those roles.
Well… the only answer is… Change the community.

13

This is not the answer. The community stayed same. Healers and tanks were easier to find in legion for example. They both got weaker and their task became harder, especially with heal nerfs of DF.

14

Well… It is not a good answer but the only one I can think of or I should have phrazed it “Change the attitude” of the community. Because I dont see any changes in the gameplay to tackle this problem.

15

You are correct that the roles, especially healers, have become more dificult to play and ease their gameplay up a bit whould ease the stress to play them but I have played this game since vanilla and even though the elitistic and abusive enviroment in pugs have gotten a bit worse du to timed dungeons, not but much. Back then though, if you were abused, you could just leave and join another group until you found a nice one, but you cant do that with todays system.

16

For me it was always the pressure… yeh you can get flamed as dps but tanking or healing is make or break whereas you can and i often see dps getting a carry.
I have dipped my toe into healing and its a pressure thing. I didnt have add ons so had deaths in a dungeon cause i didnt onow something had to be dispelled. I also found it boring, tank had self heal so i was doing dps as healer then tank moaned at me to concentrate on healing.
Tanking however, im currently pushing keys to get 2k rating on my blood dk, done the raid on normal and have done 3/9 on Heroic. I enjoy tanking, after i built a bit of confidence with the role and im considering maining my blood dk next season or expansion.
Healing however i still find daunting
People can practice in follower dungeons ofc but i dont know what else can be done to make people want to heal/tank.

17

This is about retail, correct?

We can switch specialisations anytime, so that’s not really a problem. For me.
Learning multiple is work, but in this case it’s tanking and roaming, and the latter needs very little optimisation.

As a tank I want…

  • Simple dungeon design - obvious skips in the corner which you pick while leveling for xp and usually skip at max. Otherwise, let’s not stress about it, please. Especially about those with a high chance of a wipe.
  • Threat to matter. Let me pull. Let the team face the consequences. I have cooldowns, the team should respect that.
  • Ability to see what’s going on. Packs of 3-4, one pack at a time, duration matching my major pull cooldowns (30 seconds).
  • Room to learn dungeons. I love to run them all, but need a “normal mode” where everyone knows that we’re here to observe which pack stuns, which pack applies a healing debuff, and so on.

As a healer I want…

  • Impactful heals over spamming.
  • Foresight and resource (mana) management.

I think I just described WLK pally and classic / BC druid, both of which I’m very fond playing.

1 Like
18

Just reintroduce vengeance for tanks pls.

19

No amount of “bribes” will remove that fear, even if you may feel that stronger incentives would accomplish this. You’d find new reasons to avoid what scares you, and you’d continue to let anxiety rule your life.

What will lessen the fear is doing that which you’re afraid of. In this case: playing a healer, confronting the discomfort, and actually experiencing that this fear is largely unfounded as this is not something that happens frequently. You can start small, too, e.g. by making a new character and leveling a healer through dungeons when you only have two or three spells and when a healer usually isn’t even needed.

If you want to do end game content, you’ll need addons and keybinds and weak auras even (and especially!) as a DPS player. That is just how the game is, and has been for a long time. The customizability is the game’s strength as it lets you tailor the UI and the controls to how you like them. You can use mouseover macros or click-casting (which the game now supports out of the box) as a healer, for example.

Auras and addons make information more accessible and digestible, and that is great because otherwise you’d have a harder time healing. If anything, as a healer you have an easier “rotation” than a lot of the DPS specs in the game now, and the APM requirements are often lower. I don’t feel that in M+ (speaking to up to +22, I haven’t healed or DPSed anything higher than that) healing is the most challenging role. You’re always only as good as the group, and your impact as a really good DPS player is stronger. A great DPS can carry a group, a good healer can’t do that past a certain point.

I do everything as a resto shaman. I have no problem doing world quests. Even while leveling from 60 to 70, without good gear, I soloed some of the 3-man quests. I was surprised how well it worked. It worked better than and more smoothly than it did with some other casters I leveled (evoker for example).

It is far, far easier now with most gear being multi-stat, with multi-specs, without fees for changing specs. This was very different when we had only one spec, respeccing cost 50 gold (a lot back then), gear had +healing or +damage, etc. I suppose what they could do to is to make stat priorities for specs of the same class more compatible. For resto shaman, I want crit/versa/haste/mastery, in that order. For elemental, I want mastery/haste/versa/crit, exactly the opposite weights. That doesn’t matter for open world content, but it is the reason why I am not incentivized to do M+ as an elemental shaman.

LFD and LFR already give you a bag with 1000 gold and a bunch of runes when there is a shortage. It’s 3-4k for healing a normal/heroic dungeon or an LFR wing. Rewards in non-queueable content are not needed, would be unfair, and would degrade the quality of tanks and healers trying to get into M+ groups. It would make people feel “forced” to play these roles even if they don’t want to, with the appropriate results.

There was a time when the LFD and LFR bags could contain rare mounts and it caused all sorts of complaints, so they removed this again. You don’t want people to heal or tank who just do it for a chance to get a rare mount in your M+, and it would make other players (for example players of classes that don’t have a healing or tanking spec) feel more resentful toward healers and tanks.

There is already a strong incentive to heal or tank: Short queue times for everything, the ability to easily find M+ groups even when comparatively lesser geared or with a lower score, and the ability to build your own groups with ease.

1 Like
20

No it didn’t. Not in the slightest.

2 examples. Back in cata I was a colossal noob.

I finally got the gear to tank a heroic and queued up. Zone in (I think it was stonecore that has a scary start for a noob) and got smashed. The group were really supportive.

In another group I died to a boss mechanic I just couldn’t get right and after a couple of attempts I just left out of utter embarrassment. I went and watched a vid on how to do it and then requeued. (It was very very off peak hours). So queue pops and its the same group waiting patiently at the same boss for a tank. I explained why I left and how I hopefully got a bit smarter in the interim and again, they were really supportive.

Now tell me the community hasn’t changed. Any of those actions now and I’d have been utterly crucified…

1 Like