Delves were introduced, LFR / Normal raids exist, … there is non-stressful content. If you seek the real challenge, then don’t complain that it becomes stressful…
This entire thread was made as a result of how long I waited as a healer for a heroic dungeon for a tank to show up in queue…and how if I had the option to also queue as a tank, that wait would not have happened.
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This is impossible in infinitley scaling content like M+, for the simple reason that if difficulty x is not stressful, then people succeed in it and move on to x+1 which is more stressful by simple logic. And if x+1 isn’t stressful either, then x+2 will be more stressful.
The only way to remove stress would be to outright cap the difficulty.
Now for raids is a different matter, but even there it became an arms race between players that push to the absolute limit of their physical and mental capabilities, and developers.
Yeah, Heroic dungeons were made 100% obsolete this expansion. That’s another issue.
- Heroics have a way too high ilvl requirement
- The gear it drops is far below Delve-8
- Any alt can (literally) instantly get 580-584 ilvl + some upgrades within mere days.
- Delve-8 is instantly accessible by any alt due to the above
Heroic dungeons do not really exist, as end-game content.
And well, as tank, a role in high demand, you can go into decent keys with quite a low ilvl…they have always skipped some levels.
Then you would have waited for half an hour for a healer. Heroic dungeons are completely dead. I queued as tank with satchel and in 20 minutes it didnt pop. I left and checked again; satchel up for dps. Heroic dungeons are just dead. Nobody plays them.
So that was the deeper reason of why I waited for so long XD
And I was just trying to get some Valorstones!
Since this week, we can farm infinite Valorstones by just swimming around the Siren Isle and picking up the chests underwater.
I disagree with you on this.
IMO the strategy is to make tanking fun. Instead of making DDing un-fun.
Especially because any punishment you can think of, for DDs or tanks, implies that the group needs to cover for them.
Like your suggestion to punish damage for failing mechanics. If that was the case then packs last longer so it hurts the healer/tank and the other 2 DDs that have been doing mechanics right.
In my opinion its the consequence of playing as a group. One slacker always has to be covered by the group or you fail the key.
Kind of like group projects in school. You can punish the slacker all you want. It will not change the fact that the rest of the group had to work extra because the report still has to be handed in at a certain deadline.
How? The specs are what they are, you like them or don’t…but that can’t really be resolved by “making them fun” as what’s fun for one is unfun for the other.
Tanking will always revolve around “staying alive”, so if that’s too stressful then that’s too bad - not gonna change.
So then you need to look at the responsibilities. And it’s kind of hard to shift those for each group. So there needs to be some kind of force, which implies a negative consequence for the damage dealers, yes.
I don’t see many alternatives. We can make tanks immortal, but just go Guardian then…they practically are already just that. We can give them more damage, but it’s not like Prot Pala, Guardian, or Prot Warr aren’t able to deal some serious numbers in big packs.
I’ve just accepted that people just don’t want to carry the responsibilities. So the solution in my opinion is to enforce a shift there. In that regard I like the spell queue change, as damage dealers need to be much more on top of that. But there are just way too many casts going on making it annoying.
I think it has more to do with dps being of higher ilvl per mythic key as supply is more hence dps get less blamed because having higher ilvl helps in some cases .
Sure. A tanks job is surviving. The question is surviving what exactly…
What is more fun: Tank busters or white attacks.
The answer is white attacks. Tank busters are more predictable but at the same time restrict the size of packs (aka: freedom to play how you want). If you design dungeons where every single pack has some “lieutenant” that does tank-busters… its simply not fun.
And second, lets talk about “fun” for a second. Usually, people react better to something when its a positive effect. In other words: I press X button and Y thing happens (that you can see). Tanks live in a weird situation where they press X button and Y thing does NOT happen (they don’t die). And hence, its an artificial feeling of not seeing an obvious result of your own gameplay.
Therefore. I ask: Why does the tank’s job need to be “not die”. How about make them immortal and make their job more about CC and control of packs ? In exchange lower down their DPS such that even if they never die, at the same time it would be impossible to solo things.
Basically, what a VDH used to be in DF S3 and S4. But for all tanks. That way, Sygil control (positive actions) produces a result that you can see.
And as a final point I want to make… we talk about spec design a lot. But we (and blizzard) somehow forgets dungeon design as well. And I find that a bit sad. Dungeons have to be made fun for all specs.
So the changes to mob spell quew and deliberately putting lieutenants in every pack (with tank busters, with nasty AoEs or DoTs…) to deliberately prevent parties from pulling large packs is, IMO, the definition of unfun. Especially for tanks and healers.
Don’t do this. Don’t ask questions and answer them yourself.
For me it’s tank busters. White attacks come all the time. There’s nothing I hate more than the funky white hits and crits in Delves. They are soul-draining to me. Nothing to predict, nothing to prevent, nothing to prepare for. You just randomly die at times due to bad rng…
How is this fun exactly?
I think the problem lies partly in the pressure of perfect-% and perfect route while having a “if I fail once, we wipe”-pressure. E.g. in Mists boss 2: one missed interrupt and you all die.
That pressure will always remain. And people may just not like that…
I wasent referring to Delves. That is a totally different game mode than M+. And because it can be soloed, there is absolutely no need for tanks to begin with.
And WoW can exist in a world where if tank busters make sense in Delves, you have them there. But in M+ you can have none of them if Blizzard so chooses.
I said already why I think this is more fun. Lets do a rough comparison of a Tank to a DD as an example: I press Mortal Strike and a big yellow number appears on screen. I press Ignore Pain and nothing happens (on screen).
So the results of pressing buttons as a DD is seeing things happen. The results of pressing buttons as a tank is NOT seeing things (not dying). Its a stupid reason I know. But they did more successful advertisement campaigns based on even more stupid reasons and they worked perfect. So I suspect that it might have some modicum of truth behind.
So the idea would be to make tanks press buttons and have things happen on their screen. And other than DPS all I can think of is mob control. Hence the VDH example.
Oh really… But that’s where the white hits already are very prominent…that’s what you will get if you want to focus more on white hits. A pure RNG party. 3 crits in a row? Too bad. Let’s not try to go this way.
Tank busters exist for a reason; Cooldown management. A decent addition to a role. Now, we may need something similar to DPS checks…many DPS players refuse to press their cooldowns on trash packs. That needs to change.
Well, seeing that I take little to no damage during a tank-buster is very satisfying to me. Interrupting something that could otherwise put us in a very difficult position, same.
But you may be onto something; we want to see big fat numbers. Well…then we just have to accept that the tank-role is just not for the average player and this problem will remain present.
Or we try to shift at least the responsibilities a little.
I don’t think the average Joe wants to be a mob-control person really. That does sound dull as all hell to me at least.
Well it dosent have to be mob control. It has to be something that you can see. I just suggested that because I did not have any better ideas. But maybe you do.
In the end it could be something as easy as inventing new “red numbers” that pop up on top of your toon that represent how much mitigated damage you avoided.
Something more visible.
Maybe more white hits is not such a good idea as you say. But how about more yellow hits that are not Tank Busters.
My point was to have less abilities where you either pop a wall or you get 1-shot. Those “lieutenants” that are in every pack basically. And that is not just a tank issue. Its a healer issue because 99% of the time those guys also do really nasty AoE or ST casts on the party.
@Uda in the answer of what I think is fun as a tank
Being able to fight a foe or many foes beyond what a damage dealer can handle.
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Most of the problem you two are talking about is mostly dungeon design, not tank/heal design (except for the massive gap in dispell possibilities for healers).
We cannot align all tanks right now in terms of skills available, therefore some tanks are basically BIS for all dungeons available and others are fighting teeth and nails to survive a double pack…
Blizzard needs to review dungeon design to be in favor of tanks and healer, meaning the pressure should be on the DPS to pull the damages, not on the healer to dispell all in time or the tank to rotate a perfect kick sequence.
That’s where the problem lie, right now in good group each dungeons are a ballad in the park until +10 because the DDs know what to do, what to kick, when to deal big.
If DDs doesn’t know how to do it, it’s a nightmare for the tank and the healer.
From my POV, the solution is to push for more steady damage input on all packs until +10, no more tank busters/ 1 shot mechanic every pack. Instead replace it by CC and damage reductions targeted on other people than the tank and ensure the debuff is not a MS debuff.
Therefore, tanks and healer will stop sweating every dungeons, and we will start to see the DPS getting a bit more work to do.
Of course, such changes should be moderate, but knowing blizzard it’s all or nothing. They need to review the cast queuing to be either less violent or to ensure that kicks are not going on CD if used at the same time as a CC on target.
But again, such changes needs to be targeted only for M+, otherwise I cannot imagine the nightmare for casters in Pvp (for example)…
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There was a time when tanks could not get critted. It was the basic gear check in order to step into raids. That means they could either get missed, dodge, parry or block. Warr and pala have an ability they had to press on cd to keep up their block chance. Warr had it easiest because their ability gave more, palas needed a bit better gear to get their block up and druids had it worse farming pvp gear for resilience which gave crit reduction then.
This is what led to shenanigans like the one posted above, where you could also block everything and not get damage at all. Back then block was a fixed number, your block value, and not a percentage of damage. So low hitters for your gear would not be able to get any damage through. Soloing doomwalker in hellfire, not getting any damage from rogues and almost none from warriors in pvp etc.
The point is if you want more damage from white hits that don’t involve criticals because of rng it can be done and it has been done before. But it can also be a simple “tanks no longer get crits” in the same way extra threat is just implemented into tanking specs. There are solutions and pretty much anything can be done with the right design.
That said DDs really have allot of responsibility in higher keys and of course things like route are discussed as a group. In pugs that falls on tanks. But a simple change of designing dungeons that require all trash for 100% would just remove this problem and leave only the choice of how many groups to pull together. It feels also wrong putting resources into designing a complex pack that noone ever pulls in m+.
With Motherload and Workshop in Season 2 then the tank shortage will be worse. I hate those dungeons so skipping the season.
I have vivid memories of guild only groups that I was in, failing spectacularly while attempting to do skips in Motherlode. Of course we were all friends so it was all just laughed away.
But I can imagine how angry a PuG can get in there
A hunter tank spec where they are at range but use pets to tank would resolve all of these issues. The pets charge in and do the tanking. The hunter uses skills to damage the mob and aid thier pets from range.