There’s an alarmingly large shortage of tanks in this expansion. In my circle of friends, where we have enough people to form three full M+ teams, not a single one of us wants to tank anymore.
One thing is that tanking requires a deep understanding of dungeons—everything relies on the tank. It’s on you to know the route and so much more. But the most important part is that while DPS players can relax, the tank is always one wrong GCD away from dying. What harm would it do if tanks could keep themselves alive without healers? I really don’t understand the changes that came with TWW.
When no one wants to tank, there’s no one running M+. I’ve taken on the role this expansion, but I wish I could just play DPS or healer. But NO ONE wants to tank!!
The biggest problems imo:
Healers are responsible for keeping tanks alive, when tanks should be the ones keeping themselves alive. That mentality clearly hasn’t worked out well. I also want to relax and lean back, just like DPS and healers often do. Right now, it’s honestly too hard and stressful to tank.
All the AoE stops make mobs cast instantly again. Yeah, let’s bring the Prot Paladin.
Tuning. Brewmaster hasn’t been meta for ages. When tanking is in a good spot, there are plenty of M+ runs. This often is when e.g. blood dk is meta.
Can we somehow separate raid tuning from M+ tuning?
PS. why do you think the aug evoker was there for every run? To keep the tank alive
It’s the groups responsibility to keep the Tank alive. The Tank needs to Mitigate as best they can. The Healer needs to heal and dispell as best they can and the DPS needs to not pull, use CC and not stand in the bad thus taking healing away from the Tank.
M+ is a test of a group. Not a test of five individuals.
This is why PuGGing is struggling to work for M+ just now.
Then we need to remove tankbusters or give tanks way more mitigation or more immunities. (not sure what the difference is between CD or healing though). And remove BDK of course.
You’re correct in saying that M+ is a test of group but the problem with Pugging is communication, how can you communicate in chat while you’re in combat. The voice chat is never used in chat and the fact that Blizzard never did a rework of the one of the important tools in the game since vanilla and without voice you can’t communicate clearly by typing. There is no will to fix the problems in M+.
They could make the difficulty curve a bit shallower at the lower ends but this would probably make it a bit steeper later on.
Make it easier for the key levels that provide gear / vault / weekly rewards.
Make it harder for the higher keys which are for titles, achievements, pride.
Between finding the right class and learning tanking I struggled mostly with the attitude of the other players and that my tank sometimes was incredible squishy.
And then for me personally delves where demotivated me too.
I am a solo player for a long time and I was hyped for delves and that are really great so I thought while learning how to tank I ofcourse will also do delvs.
Well for some reason mobs have so much live when you are a tank it takes ages to do delves and it didn’t feel like I had better chances at surviving since most of my DDs didn’t struggle with that.
So in the end I choose to keep being a DD since tank is obviously the more stressful role that gets more blame when I do group stuff and then my solo stuff was also just worse as a tank
When it is about delves; from my experience tank is by far the best spec. On dps you just die (and healers kill nothing so they are basically not allowed to play delves).
This for sure I would agree to that, give them titles, achievements and pride but do not deny the casuals the way for progression in the game. Right now it just feels like you come to a point where you can’t progress your character any further. My highest ilevel character is 621 and that’s how it feels, I don’t know how to progress further beyond that point.
I also agree that it’s not really a fix but a workaround.
Delves are just a misconception, they weren’t really meant for solo players. I’ve played Delves, I have upgraded my characters but it just feels like the more I get my character progression up the mobs are still on par with my item level and still keep killing me with ease. Tier 8 Delves have a minimum item level of 603 (correct me if I’m wrong) as a requirement, then why does it feel that my 621 item level character is not able to do the delve with ease? I cannot even do a Tier 11 solo and I don’t want to group up for Delves because they were advertised as solo able content for casual players so I should be able to solo that content on my own which at the moment is clearly not the case.
What annoys me most during tanking except
a) the constant danger of dying when I just need a gcd to grab / target a mob that’s not in melee range is either
b) the lack of threat and losing aggro because dps do absurd AoE /burst damage (though that got at least buffed lately) or - and that’s the worst - c) tank busters that have no indicator that they are about to happen, so I need to remember every mob & their timing. Yes yes, there are “addons” but god damn, I want to play the game and look at what is happening with the mobs, not at timer bars I have to get from outside the game.
Yeah, because mobs didn’t onehit tanks back then but instead did weak white hits about 90% of the time. Back then you could even “tank” as overgeared dps, because a little gear made you sturdy enough, nowadays a non-tank dps dies in a hc dungeon even if they are mythic geared (a bit exaggerated, but you get the drift). Plus, we had classes added where “healing themselves” is a large part of their “mitigation”; without it, they would be a different class/spec.
This is half-true half-false. There is a disproportionately high amount of tanks in the overworld every time there is a group for a world boss or the Theatre event, almost as many as 15 tanks in a 40man. There were also many tanks for Chromie’s Codex.
Tanks are rare in group content where there are clear requirements imposed by the larger community in regards to time spent doing that content. ← This is lawyer speak for “Tanks are rare in speedrunning content”
False. Tanks should be primarily responsible for: Controlling the enemy so that they don’t go haywire on the group, reduce the amount of damage taken and setting the pace of the run in coordination to the group’s capabilities.
Because tanks couldn’t self-heal in combat without limitation as they (almost) currently do. Their strong oh-damn abilities were on a 5min or even longer cooldowns, some even longer than 30 minutes! (Wasn’t Lay on Hands initially on a 60min cd?). They were once-per-dungeon abilities, not 2-3 times per boss fight as they are now.
They are soloable, they just require attention and a bit of preparation. For example, you may have 621 ilvl, but do you have close to best enchants and full gems on your equipment, as well as using full consumables as if tackling a high M+ or Mythic raid?
That’s honestly no problem I face. Sure I don’t do 11 but I have no big problems with dyeing as a DD.
I think they work well as a solo and with the addition of a tank bran so healers can better play them they just need to reduce the ho modifier they put in for tanks cause right now it feels like a slog
Indeed, Lay on Hands is possibly the only ability left on such long cooldown. But other abilities with large cooldown, like Shield Wall from Warrior for example, were on a 30min cooldown initially, while now it’s on a 3min cooldown, with some procs also reducing its cooldown further, and also gets 2 charges.
-=EDIT=-
Shaman ankh is also on a somewhat long cooldown, from 1 hour initially to 30min now but reducable down to 17min or so if at full health all the time.
Yeah, this is a 1 time per dungeon and it does not reset when you put the key in. So when you used it in a previous dungeon you cant use it for the first ~half of the next
I love tanking in this expansion.