My favorite part of tanking for pugs is when you don’t follow the exact ultra refined MDI pro gamer route so the dps start spam pinging and sitting afk typing until you come back and do what they want you to do because you pulled 1 extra mob that the MDI players don’t pull.
Or even better is when they decide you aren’t pulling fast enough, so they run ahead and pull 1-2 extra packs and make the pull super sketchy and awkward for the tank and healer so we can try to save 15 seconds on the timer that wont make any difference anyway.
Or a fun one was two days I was tanking a timewalking ZF dungeon with 3 other levelers who grabbed the quests at the start. We go to do the side basalisk and warlock boss and our 1 lvl 80 completely ignores us and sits AFK at the stairs event and lets us clear the rest of the dungeon without him.
Then after the event we go to the side towards Ghazrilla for the quests, meanwhile the 80 sits on the ramp to the final boss spam pinging and telling us to ignore it and come finish the dungeon so he can get his weekly done. Wound up kicking him before the final boss so he gets to go sit in queue again for another dungeon.
The basic point is that a lot of pug DPS players are painfully awful, rude and toxic. It’s why I switched my main from healing to dps, and why I refuse to tank for pugs on my druid lol.
It’s not even rare to run across people like I’ve described here, it’s stupidly common actually.
TBF, these are classic dungeons. The majority have been around for close to 20 years. If you don’t know the optimal route for doing these (even without timewalking, cata chromie time and using classic dungeons is one of the best ways to level), you really should sit it out.
I see this on the forums frequently and it didn’t jive with my runs. Last weekend, I pulled my tank out of retirement and ran alot of 4-7 keys for crests. Holy Creap. It was uncomfortable how often people would pull for me. I’m pulling 2-3 groups and when a random DPS or heals helps me out it totally screws up the 2nd group pull. But ya it happens alot at that level.
What’s wrong with this community? attention deficit disorder. Instant gratification.
These boys and girls would not be able to handle a game like Everquest. There is no pulling the entire dungeons. It’s SLOW I honestly think they might exit out of this life through their inability to sit still.
The solution? Next time you see a poster spouting off at the mouth complaining about “tanks need to be brought down a notch, please nerf them,” slap that poster instead of agreeing with them.
The solution is, and you may want to sit down for this;
Treat tanks like human beings.
Tanks aren’t grown in a Florida orchard to carry you through whatever content your heart desires. They’re fallible human beings with thoughts and feelings of their own who can and do make mistakes.
If you lay into tanks who don’t live up to your expectations because you got carried by a really good tank once then eventually the tanks are all going to take their balls and their bats and go home and then you and your healers are left kicking rocks in the sandlot.
The good tanks that pug end up finding a group that they like running with. Usually its some guild that was pugging a tank (raiding guilds only have 2 tanks, but tons of DPS need their crests) So whenever those groups find a good M+ tank who likes to do only M+, they snatch them up.
That leaves less tanks wanting to do pug groups because of how bad it can be, and how high their repair bill is. Also, after reaching your crest cap for the week (which is extremely easy for a tank) theres no real incentive to keep playing unless you’re pushing rating.
Also, tanking is extremely punishing, so no new players want to spend the time learning routes, learning which packs you can chain, which packs you should do solo, extra tricks, etc that make the run more successful. They just want to shut brain off, hit big shiny buttons and see big numbers pop on their screen.
Part of that is new players have no idea those routes and tricks exist in the first place. If players don’t provide room for tanks to grow into their role new tanks are going to decide the social friction isn’t worth it and give up before they get to routes and tricks.
I definitely feel like WoW could use some ‘role check’ tutorials that teach the roles how to engage with endgame content. Like teaching tanks pathing, healers timing, and DPS how to CC and interrupt. Exiles Reach does a little bit of that, but nowhere near enough for endgame content.
Currently working on my fourth tank capable character. However, my end game is made up of delves, follower dungeons, and story mode raids. The current method of running instances in player groups is just not how I want to play.
They had that in WoD, the issue is will it teach to zerg like how it is now or use your tool kits? Which would make them pointless because the trial really did not do its job.