I feel like I am pretty unbiased with regards to this as I do play Prot Pal from time to time and I have to say allowing tanks to play in their own bracket is really bad for the game.
Some specs just require a healer to perform in 3v3. It’s a miserable experience if you are one of those specs.
Allowing certain specs to avoid the larger meta creates a host of issues.
The tank bracket will be smaller therefore increasing the odds of people being able to win trade/cheat.
Prot Pal isn’t the only “healer” tank spec. For example Bear druid has at times been able to heal as well as prot pal with passive resto affinity, regrowth bombs, and other abilities that absorb damage for teammates.
There’s more too, but this issue has been re-hashed so many times I cba to go over it in minute detail every time. Tanks taking the role of healers is obviously bad. Just look at this forum and reddit lol. People hate it. They need to have tanks take a dps slot and only 1 tank per series so there is never a side with healer/tank/tank.
I also think this bracket could be making queues longer as well since it’s splitting the queue 3 ways with a healer queue, a tank queue, and a prot pal queue.
I agree, and if you reread my posts, I am not in the “ban tanks” crowd. They should absolutely be allowed and viable. No RPG company is ever going to just completely disallow an entire role from any endgame competitive content type.
The issue is lack of healers in the tank matches. That completely changes the format of the match for the dps players. You are playing the same format every time you queue as a tank, and your format is considerably narrower than the other format. Many things that will increase in rating in the other format don’t work in your format. As you climb, you are consistently advantaged in your matchups as a tank because of this.
I tried making sense of that and couldn’t make it work without repeating a team combo or having 2 tanks on a team together. Only way was 1 tank per series.
People queueing tanks in arena is no worse than people who queue Rdruid/Outlaw 2s, Destro Locks S2/3, Demon Hunter in BFA S4, Outlaw RMP, etc.
At least you see far less tanks than any other oneshot cheese or predatory-control specs played by total psychopaths who unironically use evasion the moment anyone even glances in their direction because they know it will be up again quickly anyway.
Tank queues werent so bad because they were relegated to low mmr however more and more people are just swapping tanks and it is getting to the point where every game last night I got as boomy (basically got 0-6 because most of the people I vs are dh/spear warrior) was a tank game and I just had to stay in stealth the entire time and hope the dh didn’t find me and I won more games then coming out of stealth always fun.
Atleast I can play my class. In solo shuffle tank queues everyone realizes im the only caster and just piles me every time where it is better for my team to just not come out of stealth, that is now how the game should be played.
And this is an extremely valid criticism. Not so much about tanks, but rather about arena as a whole.
Casters have almost nonexistent survivability without support and somehow, ironically, they have extreme amounts of survivability with support in most cases.
As far as tanks go, are they still forcing tanks to only queue against the same tank spec? Because soemthing like Prot Paladin vs Brewmaster, for example, is an extremely unfair matchup. Prot Paladins are head and shoulders above other tanks with regard to support potential and any prot paladin who uses their tools should absolutely not be losing to other tanks.
You’d have two repeat matches. I don’t know if it’s better to have that or if it really matters whether both teams have a tank and a dps if both teams have healers.
Tank specs do not belong in solo shuffle because there’s more and more people just rolling tanks because of quick queues and because it just straight easier to get mmr/rating because all you do is go 3/3 with every other tank and you ONLY GAIN RATING.
How the mmr system works is the more percentage of a role like (dps/tank/healer) of the ladder the highest sustained mmr you can get from your actual role (dps/tank/healer) and because tanks queue into other tanks and theres more tanks being added in the pool there’s a point where you basically go 3/3 every single match and gain rating to a certain point…
Thats why at the start yesterday they were all at 1400 now they are getting upwards of 2k mmr and its rediculous.
I understand that people feel that way but I don’t think it would be a good idea for Blizzard to straight up block a whole role from one of the endgame pillars.
Personally, I enjoy playing prot because I like being a melee healer. Holy used to be able to do that, but that spec got absolutely butchered by extreme mana costs. If they ever make that spec an actual thing again, odds are I’d play Holy.
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy Ret more but Ret is poopie in 2s.
Also, Prot/Healer/DPS is an issue in 3s. I dont think anyone would argue that… except maybe Mortalx.
Then they need to change the entire rating system to account for a MMR/Rating with 4 classes (Blood/Brew/Bear/DK) and 1 class (Paladin) because if there is a single reward the requires a static rating then these classes will actually have the easiest way to those rewards and they are even the EASIEST specs to play.
It is far easier to just not allow you to queue tanks or they have to properly tune them so noone plays them anyway.
