I know there’s a lot of opinions regarding tanks not being allowed to queue, but I doubt that will happen so we have to look for the best possible option available. And as it currently stands there are 3 types of queues
Prot Pal has their own queues, so they ALWAYS face other Prot Paladins + 4x dps
Remainder of the Tanks fight each other + 4x dps
Healers vs Healers + 4x dps
Now as it is right now, the Tanks are always fighting Tanks, so they are gonna be able to gain rating as easy as Healers can, so you’ll still fight Tanks at the higher / highest ratings because they are just competing against other Tanks so they won’t have issues gaining Rating.
And I don’t think a single person enjoys these Tank/DPS/DPS vs Tank/DPS/DPS games, and since you can’t even “outrating” them by gaining rating and leaving them behind there needs to be a better solution
I think allowing them to take 1 dps spot (and only 1 Tank per game) would be the better solution, because then you don’t have the possibility of getting a round which is “Healer/Tank/Tank vs Healer/DPS/DPS” which would just be horrible, but rotating the tank would be the better option rather than having these 2x Tank games
With this option it would also be harder for Tanks to actually climb rating because good players are going to shut them down rather easily I believe once they occupy a DPS spot instead
And they’d make it intolerable for the worse players since they’d not know how to shut them down and just make PvP insufferable for people who don’t figure it out.
Tanks don’t belong in arenas design-wise. It’s a deathmatch design and tanks are a role literally meant to survive taking a lot of damage while holding aggro. The only way Blizzard could even create space for them in arenas was to turn them into hybrids, giving them things not typical for tank roles in game design.
The answer is to simply disallow the tank role in arenas. There’s natural space for the tank role in RBGs, since it’s objective-based PvP, but there’s no room for them in the deathmatch design and this hybrid nonsense Blizzard have been doing to create room for them in this deathmatch design have only made it worse for players. It made the quality of the content worse overall.
Nobody enjoys facing tanks in arenas, since they’re antithetical to the content itself. They’re targets you don’t want to hit because they’re tanks. It’s only fun for the sadistic a-holes who queues as them. Even the people who queues as tanks don’t like facing other tanks in arenas, because they know exactly what makes it so unfun to face one.
Long story short, just disable the tank role in deathmatch content. They belong in objective-based PvP, not deathmatch.
Yeah I absolutely know this is a common opinion, a lot of people agree with you. But I highly doubt Blizzard will completely disable them in Arena. And since they haven’t and probably wont do that. As I said we need to try to find the best possible option when they’re not removed. And if they’re not removed. What do you think would be the best option?
They’ll do it if people are noisy enough. Blizzard have proven to be susceptible to heavy pressure from the player base in the past.
And Blizzard are clearly following flawed reasoning trying to make mismatched puzzle pieces fit, so push that line that tanks don’t fit in deathmatch PvP and eventually you might see them listening to reason.
Btw, following the line about how Blizzard are weak to pressure, solo shuffle has only been unrated in SL. So obviously people haven’t really been that invested in it as content. But once they slap a rating on it, whenever that will be, it’ll make people care about it a lot more than they care about it now. So that’s when tanks will REALLY face opposition from the player base, and will also likely force Blizzard to respond in one way or another.
Tanks in rated arenas thus far, has only faced opposition from the player base when they’ve been “strong”. Because people don’t like tanks in arenas, but when they can choose to not play with one and almost never face one, it’s not really something to care about. So it’s only when they’ve been strong enough to become popular to play as that people have raised their voices as a player base against them. Pretty much a “if you can’t see it, then it doesn’t exist”-kind of problem.
But rated solo shuffles will make it unavoidable for players, and they’ll have to suffer through those games, which will make that problem so much bigger for players and they’ll care about it a lot more than they care about the unrated solo shuffles now.
So that’s when Blizzard will likely be forced to take a stance, once and for all, and that stance will either make people quit the game or they’ll disable tanks from queuing for rated solo shuffles once and for all. One or the other.