Something I noticed in many discussions, particularly around Druid Tanks in Classic Anniversary is the heavy focus on cheese-tactics to hold threat. I can’t in any reasonable manner assume that Blizzard designed Ferals to only be able to tank by farming a bag of Manual Crowd Pummelers. I played back in retail-TBC so I missed the OG WoW but I always recalled that the general attitude was that if a tank (who is using the proper threat-generating skills) lost threat to DPS, it was the DPS fault. It was put thus imperative upon the DPS to manage their threat output to ensure they didn’t out-threat the tank… this was the whole concept of why we had threat add-ons.
Now with Anniversary at least the attitude seems to be that it’s a crime if you deprive the poor DPS of their ability to click buttons as fast as possible. In 5-mans it’s often expected to tank with your taunt on constant CD instead of using it as a backup and allowing your tank time to pull. I’ve seen so many PuGs where people don’t even give tanks the option to pull, mark CC, or LoS pull.
I just feel like the attitude towards tanks changed dramatically at some point. Is it just retail slipping in? I get that there are a certain subset of progression hardcore raid guilds that need to speedrun every dungeon in sub-1-hour or they feel like a failure, but it feels so weird to see comments like “Deep Prot Warriors are bad” or “You can only tank as Feral with a bag full of MCPs”. I haven’t actually gotten into the raiding yet for Classic, but I remember it from the TBC and WotLK days of retail, and it felt so different then. I know there’s some QoL changes for Anniversary that affected raids quite a bit like stacking world buffs but this speed-run mindset that seems dead-set against traditional tanking methodology seems very new to me. Am I misremembering or did something change?
You’re not misremembering, it is different now. My only perspective is from Maladath but it feels like number chasing is the norm, speed running is a step above that and people that care for neither are few and far between.
You’ll still meet some cool number chasers who play their way and respect that you play yours but you’ll also meet some insufferable people like those you described who’ll hurl abuse at a tank for waiting on healer mana or pulling too few (I thankfully only ran into the one).
A tip if you’re looking for a guild that’ll suit what you described for raiding, check wowlogs for a group that clears bwl between 45m and an hour. They’re probably a happy balance of competence without the hyper optimised speedrun strats and mindset.
In general, fresh progression servers are not where you’ll find many traditional mindset MMORPG gamers. FrEsH progression servers attract a LOT of wannabe#1’s. Classic Era is the mixing pot where you’ll still find many number/speed chasers, but also a larger spread of casuals, including returning players who haven’t played for 10+ years.
Deep Prot warriors are absolutely viable backup tanks in raids when the fury/prot warrior loses their world buffs and the threat ceiling is lowered dramatically.
Dying and losing world buffs is not a reality most established speeders/parsers face, so their portfolio of PVE strategies and mechanics handling is extremely narrow (one-dimensional gameplay). If they lose all their buffs, some will often struggle or outright give up.
Isn’t that more of a Classic thing than a Retail thing? Isn’t Retail more about everybody just being able to do whatever they want in whatever spec they want and still getting their goodies?
While I very much lean towards the #NoChanges side of things, I’ve always maintained that a reasonable change to Classic would be to make MCPs repairable to replenish their charges, that way you’d only have to farm a few, and could just repair them after raids.
and somewhere along the time the attitude changed, from it was OK to take it easy, learning, waiting for Healers to drink, waiting for tanks to build up aggro … waiting for players on a bio-break, or with impatient babies …
You’re probably as old as I, and no, your memory is fine The times they are a-changing
100% people used to give tanks a moment to position mobs properly, build threat, LOS ranged etc to clump stuff up better. Not having threat meters though in a raid is a wild move, I’d rather not have my face pummelled by the boss because I hit it too hard too early LOL
I think it also has to do with everyone’s comfort level of having done this before like dozens or hundreds of times in some instances. Like we all know the mechanics of the princes fight in Mara or SM cath etc so well that nobody is particularly worried about the consequences of pulling aggro. Honestly sometimes in these lower stakes environments that’s when things get the most fun? Like over pulling by accident and then everyone scrambling to contain and survive is what makes it enjoyable a lot of the time.
You remember correctly but circumstances have changed. Tanking expectations have changed.
For example it used to be a sword n board warrior bow pulling, mark a kill target, don’t attack until you see a sunder…Now it’s charge in, sweeping strikes whirlwind to snap aggro, sunder targets your close to dropping threat on and taunt runners. The DPS goes full blast and drops stuff quicky
To be fair, the new way is much faster. It’s the whole metaing of a game that was never designed to be played this long
Once TBC hits I think it’ll all get a lot easier in terms of maintaining aggro. The original mechanics weren’t really meant for the play style of DPS now.
Wrath and beyond, threat isn’t even a major mechanic anymore. You can fart and generate 100K threat, it’s so lame. Even in TBC as Sunaa mentions, it gets significantly easier for tanks to have to worry less about managing threat which is a core gameplay mechanic.
The tank gameplay turns into watching DBM and WeakAura timers on when to use your defensives. That’s about it. Faceroll and wait to use your defensive ability when the encounter timer informs you to do so.
Vanilla is actually really terribly designed and balanced. Yes the attitude changes because people are hyper optimizing. Nothing is a challenge now. 2004 difficulty isn’t the same as 2025. So people want to min max damage. If the tank can’t hold aggro that’s on the tank for not being hyper optimizing his threat. In 2004 no one cares because they would wait for threat. However we aren’t boomers we figured out how to play the game. This is why modern wow is designed and balanced the way it is. To remove these problems.
not tanking
The times they are a-changing 