I’d say the two main reasons for the lack of tanks is:
You have to learn all the routes. You’ve gotta do the pulls, so you need to know the routes. Especially at higher key levels where every second counts and you can’t wait.
It’s a big time and mental investment that you don’t particularly have to make on the other classes. A healer can just follow the tank around.
There is a learning curve and people won’t tolerate you failing it.
That’s basically it. You’ve got to practice and fail to get good.
I guess I’ll extrapolate on number 2:
Most DPS players have no idea why a key is failing in the first place. A good tank/healer combo can basically drag a group through low key dungeons. So, it is sometimes the tank or healer’s fault in low keys.
Once you’re hitting 10’s the lines really blur on who is at fault for a key going poorly. A lot of the time the answer is everyone. But they’ll all blame the tank.
So, it’s kind of a dunning kruger effect of people having no idea what their responsiblity is in the dungeon and they usually blame the tank.
When you’re running 20 keys people are pretty good at knowing exactly whose fault something is.
Any time tanks get something cool dps mains come crying on the forums to get it taken away. Remember vengeance or any time tanks had good dps? NERF. The bribe bags with mounts and pets and stuff? Its not FAIR. What people want is for others to do something they don’t need to do to help them while also whining about any incentive given to someone who is taking time out of their days for something they don’t actually need to do. Enjoy your queues (whether in lfd/lfr or lfg)
I agree with a lot of what you said but I this is a point that people always make and idk why.
They a dded paladins to the Horde in tbc
They added dks in wotlk
They added monks in mists
They added dhs on legion.
They have added tanks many times and it hasn’t solved it so idk why people think adding another one would when the last 4 times it didn’t.
I personally stopped tanking for pugs because other players expected me to know the dungeon or raid perfectly and treated me like a dog when I failed. Who wants to prepare 3x more than others and still get vitriol and vote kicks when you mess up? That’s not worth the instant queue for me, it’s much simpler to respec arms or fury and set my loot spec to protection.
Also, that was arounds Mists and Warlords. I’ve been made to understand that it’s gotten worse since the introduction of Mythic+ and raid pugging discord groups.
Blizzard punishes you for not raiding in WoW, but makes it difficult for a tank to find a slot in a raid. So a lot of people don’t want to play an M+ only tank. On the flip-flip, a lot of raid tanks in this game suck and can’t actually play M+ so the shortage is further exacerbated on that side of things as well.
None of your options include “Get all the gear you would want from only doing M+” and that seems to an oversight. If M+ tanks could get all the gear that they ever needed/wanted from just grinding out M+ you would see more people play the role as it would be a great way to gear up a character. But you can’t. M+ gear is trash beyond what you get from the welfare element of it. Valor upgrades cap at 272 and there’s no way to expedite tier.
I definitely feel this way sometimes. The WoW community are idiots and the jealous fools who whined about mounts from satchels simply pushed me away from ever doing queued content.
Since you are a druid, I have to ask this question. I know to maintain multiple specs like tank,healer, and dps requires different geat sets right? how easy are they to maintain, I heard there is stat difference between roles. I’m always curious how people manage multi-speccing without comprimising their optimal stats. Seems like a lot of hard work.
I literally just roll a new character if I’m going to play another role. The most I’ve ever really done with this was dabbling with off-spec in Mage Tower, and doing Feral Druid in MoP/WoD for Brawler’s Guild.
Oh I know you don’t, I checked your armory. I’m just wondering how people multi-spec in general. Like it must be hard maintaining 2 or 3 different armor sets right? on top of that, different legendaries, different soulbinds, etc. I wish spec swapping was easier in end-game honestly.
Resto and balance can use most of the same stuff. Guardian needs another set entirely. Then so does feral. Feral is hardest to gear cuz they have 483883834 niche legendaries you need to make to do even one form of content let alone multiples. For balance and resto it’s mostly rings and trinkets. Anything else you add on top of it adds more stuff on top of it. If you balance your stats you can play them all but I wouldn’t go above +10s or so without mostly different gear for tanking vs caster stuff.
With tier returned its less of a barrier as you can’t choose the stats and therefore you’ll use the same tier no matter what. Weapons have always been spec-specific, and you’re going to use different leggos, but otherwise you’re only talking about a few pieces of armor to swap, cape, neck/rings, and then your trinkets are spec-specific.
Maintaining two different specs is probably not that crazy. Maintaining healer/tank/dps is probably pushing it though.
I’ve always been a healer (it’s what I started doing 16 years ago, and, imo, I am pretty darn good at it). But over the years, I got tired of just healing and wanted to branch out. So I started doing random things (granted, the last 4 xpacs I pretty much have every class at max level at some point in the xpac). I got into tanking back in WotLK with frost DK, then quit when they made it blood because I was mad. I dabbled with it here and there, but it wasn’t until Legion that I really got back into tanking (after, ofc, I had capped my healer on gear).
Then again in BFA (once my healer was capped, until the last season when I mained a warlock instead of a healer and even then once it was capped on gear, I swapped to tanks).
SL S2 I actually tanked my way to KSM instead of healing my way to KSM. For the most part, it wasn’t that bad.
But, once again I am back to healing because I got tired of several things:
Relying on someone else (other healers).
People flipping their lids if you make one move that isn’t MDI style, because too many people think they’re good enough to do things MDI players do (not realizing they’re part of the 92% that aren’t good enough to do it).
The pressure of having to know every route for each seasonal affix, and lord forbid you don’t do one that someone in the group wants you to do perfectly, you get ridiculed.
3a. And my gosh the verbal berating you get if your groups DPS sucks, or if they don’t kill orbs, or interrupt, or CC, or whatever else and the tank gets trucked during a pull because of it.
After enough a-holes, the desire to tank for PuGs diminishes fairly fast. If people would just be nicer to one another, you know, that would be cool.
I enjoy tanking, but now that none of my friends play (hopefully they come back for DragonFlight), I quit bothering with tanking because tanking for PuGs is more obnoxious than any other role as a PuG.
You just gotta get past 15’s really. They drop off in higher keys. DPS know what they’re doing, know who is doing something wrong. Most of the time.
Sometimes the big damage classes have someone who is terrible get through. Like, Warlocks, Warriors, Monks. Anyone who does massive AOE damage can occasionally slide by being terrible. But that’s got a limit too.
I have 3 leggos and different sets of gear for my Druid and monk . Heck feral tbh. It’s too involved to gear and I’m likely too bad to play it optimally anyway. This guy only has resto and ele cuz enh is almost never fun. I have made two different ww leggos though but anything beyond invokers delight is trash now. I use that too for mw sometimes depending what I’m doing.
It’s not difficult but it can be expensive ish to multi spec atm because rarely will the same leggo work for multiple specs.
My first raid that I was a tank in was Tomb of Sargeras. I will never tank again. Kiljaden was the worst experience. When he died I was relieved, not overjoyed.
Have you ever since mythic+ has been introduced been a “new” tank and said so in chat? Or been in any group at all with one? It’s not an exaggeration. It’s just how people treat new tanks. On horde and alliance. Then dps are somehow surprised pikachu face when they have to wait longer than they’d want on a tank.
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