Tanks, and to a less degree healers, receive all the flaming, blame, and stress of the group, although, their relative importance to the group has diminished. On the other hand, poorly played, a tank/healer will immediately KILL a group. So, Tanks and Healers have deeper floors than dps, but also relatively lower ceilings as well. Whereas, dps classes have high floors – it’s harder (not by much, if you look)–for dps classes, but also higher ceiling, good dps players are instrumental to group success.
I recently re-rolled to alliance, and need to build up my rio, and I find lower keys <5, insanely more difficult and unenjoyable than >9, primarily because you usually just get a bunch of apes at lower levels.
So, the current game design pivots on tanks/healers being able to immediately torpedo a group, but also are unable to lift it from nothing. While, dps classes are very, very important, but generally, their efforts are masked, blended amongst 5 others, so even if they suck, they won’t get shamed.
There’s little glory to Tanking, at the moment, so few see any reason to play the role. I like the way that Vengeance plays and have pretty much done so since DH launched. I may not play Vengeance optimally, but how I play works for me; that said I do have a setup for ‘Group Tanking’ but see very little opportunity in the content I play to use it… it mostly gets saved for Elite WQ (that need Groups where you choose your Role).
The only other Tank spec. I play is Prot-adin… but the one I have is still levelling to 120.
As to those saying, “we need more tank specs”, its like throwing more good money after bad–it won’t help, if you introduce more specs that are not fun to tanking. After an initial bump, people will wise up and come to the same, painful conclusion: tanking is all thankless, joyless, stressful endeavor.
In the vanilla, there was one tank, bears/palas were pure trash. Not until the middle of TBC, when bears and palas were gud, were there 3 tanks. There was no such tank shortage like today. Then came Dks, then later monks in Mop. Then, recently DHs.
The more tanks introduced, seems to have an inverse effect! So, simply adding more can’t be the answer.
EDIT: I guess I forgot to mention, I am biased. I WANT to tank! But, it has progressively gotten to be a worse and worse experience. Even when I can almost convince myself to " jump back on the saddle," I say ‘no thank you.’
That… does kinda make for a shortage of tanks though. If there are tanks, but they do not want to engage with random groups, that still means there are a shortage of tanks. Do you think these guild groups they tank for don’t have dps and healers in them? the proportion is still such that there would be a shortage of tanks overall.
How to remedy that I do not know. I’m still hoping they one day add an earthwarder tank shaman spec as a 4th spec, but I suppose they need to perhaps improve some of the existing tank specs as it is.
I wouldn’t be opposed to a shaman tank spec. They already have shields, earth shield and wear mail, which would seem to lend itself more to tanking than leather tanking classes.
However, as you astutely mentioning, “fixing” tank in generally should be a higher priority.
At least with the new reaping 10+ affix, there will be a crumb of enjoyment again for tanks (and aoe classes).
Pretty much the revamped Diablo 3 GR system. Yeah, it might help, if the only reason to rush the timer was to unlock and when you could farm a difficulty of choice. I think it could work for WoW with some adjustments. On the other hand, there will be a ton of people with the “diablofying WoW, we’re doomed” mindset.
I think this more or less happens as soon as you have an rio score to do +10. Most probably just do one per weeks, others might farm around 10, with fewer pushing above 10.
Lots of riff raft, that just wants to get a completed run below 10, though some of those want to push to be able to easily to +10 at least once per week.
As people have said, if the players fix their attitude towards tanks, then maybe tanks will be more willing to sign up. Without changing the attitude, it doesn’t matter even if you have more tanks than dps or healers in the population, tanks won’t sign.
Being able to just pick +10, for a lot of slack jaws would be a god send. Five could just jump into a +10, spend 90+ minutes in there, and get their loot.
If thats such a needed addition, I will remain skeptical.
Palas got taunt in the TBC? I remember the weird mechanic where you had to taunt the boss’s target so you’d macro it, but was that as soon as TBC ? I had a pally at the time but was healing if I recall correctly, tanks were warriors and druids (mostly warriors).
This would be helpful, imho. I feel like WoW would have been a better place if there were no pure-dps classes, such that everyone could either tank or heal.
But the real problem is largely that tanking is hard, and players are scared of it. Heck, I’m a healer, and that’s scary - but I think tanking is scarier. People don’t want to do their first mythics as tank because if they mess up, everyone dies. So they go dps - and now they’re familiar with playing as dps and they don’t know how to tank so why would they start?
Feels to me like a good way to go would be trying to shift some responsibility off the tank and healer and onto the dps. Spread the load a bit, make it so that everyone has to be equally on the alert, rather than needing one hyper-alert tank, a fairly-alert healer and everyone else is sleepwalking.
Seems you brutally confused by a major issue: The community itself.
Game mechanic point of view blizz stated that the drop reward - 15ilvl is the recommendation.
However the community want reward drop +9000 + curve of 2 expension later boss.
And why is it hard to get new players to tanking?
This toxic community:
I had a DH alt. I created a group to go gear up in mythic dungeon, NO KEY. The title was “m0 gearing and learning tank…”
group was formed, than after a few pack, the players started to project volatile acid on me. “wtf tank only 155k” “get out i swap to tank, you go dps noob”
Btw we didnt even wiped, there was maybe a few mechanic mistake (as a dps main I dont really focus on tank specific mechanic duh…)
So they expect tanks are only appear, when a 410 dps is bored and tries out tank spec in high end gear?
Raid and guild composition
On this I mean the current setup for a raid is 2 tank, 3-6 healer and 12-15dd.
So lets say this raid goes to dungeon, where the setup is 1-1-3.
The 20 player above can brake down to 2 group only because of the tanks.
So 1-4 healer and 6-9 dps will be left out.
This goes to the other way. Even if you level up as a tank because you like the role, if you join a guild, it will be most likely you will be forced to play your offspec, since the main tank position are already filled…
I think after so many years maybe what blizz could do is to change dungeon and raid setups. Raid where 2-4 tanks are mandatory and make 6 player dungeons maybe.
But I’m afraid the way community would react is just the usual overgear pressure, to bruteforce the boss in the “usual” way…
Leveled my horde pala because I though Holy looked so cool for alliance.
Once max level, I couldn’t find any groups (I guess it really is an old topic). Bears were broken, and prot pala? Beyond garbage. I didn’t know any better, so I said,“ok, gonna do this.”
Spec’d prot, geared up as best I could, and went for the glory. It was rough, my expectations were low, just wanted to do normal dungeons.
By the time I got “gud” blizzard had revamped both bears and prot pala to be quite good. We still had the funky taunt you remember–for a while, not sure when it got changed.
That was the ultimate fun of tanking, insane, dreamlike snap aoe aggro, that you could never drop–esp. on melee packs, and back then 75%+ were melee packs. All I need was three AoE monkies, and it was impossible to fail.
I know this will sound like an old tale and “blablabla heard it all before” but there are genuinely a lot of guilds that currently use OS tanks as they’re looking for MS tanks, just put up on wowprog that you’re looking for a guild as tank and hit up the PvE recruit forum and you’ll get tons of bnet adds (assuming you add your btag in there) and whispers
There are plenty of reasons that prevents people from getting into tanking, here are some of them:
The role is more involved and people have high expectations from the tank when it comes down to knowing routes and tactics.
People have zero-tolerance for mistakes made by the group but especially when it comes down to tanks.
A tank needs to have a thick skin, good memory and know how to work under pressure and some people lack these qualities.
Some people tried to tank but couldn’t handle the pressure from groups so they stopped.
Some people would like to tank but toxicity, anxiety, stress or fear from failures isn’t something they can handle or want to deal with.
Some people can be good tanks but don’t like it, don’t have the time to learn it or don’t want to learn it at all.
Funny thing is that some people pick a specific reason and say that this is THE reason people don’t tank whereas in practice as I mentioned before there are plenty of reasons, some reasons have to do with people and other reasons have to do with the game.
People expect the tank regardless to experience to perform just as good as an experienced tank.
Now that they added AI to the game maybe they can use it to allow players queue with AI players for educational purposes, meaning, you get no loot but you can face the actual bosses, learn the mechanics, the routes and slowly build your confident there.
Absolutely not, healing is stressful and hard because after all it is casting, can be interrupted, it is slow, can go wrong in so many ways. Tanking, which is exactly the same as melee DPS, is largely passive and there are no interruptions or long casts you got to time. Tanking becomes a bit more interesting when you got to manage Shield Blocks uptime etc, not so much on DKs, but that is all. As long as you are alive no one cares how much damage you took, and what you could have done better . DPS is another story as you wipe on progression and everyone looks at the DPS meters, there you will be judged against another 15-20 players.
Short version: as a tank you simply need to be there (right up to the mobs) and this is more or less all there is to it.
Yes this is right, you got to know the tactics for each fight, and it is easier to “lose yourself in the crowd” if you are DPS/heal. However this happens more, or only, when you outgear the content. For M+ and progression raids you need to know the tactics as there is enough complexity to keep everyone occupied.