Feels Impossible To Learn Tanking or Healing These Days

Community General Discussion
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So, to preface, I’m sure posts like this have been made in the past but Google didnt turn any up so here we are.

I’m a returning player. Stopped playing around Warlords. Just came back last week. Back in the day, I played mostly dps and occasionally dipped my toes into tanking and very rarely healing. But it never felt like I COULDN’T learn those roles.

I just did my first handful of dungeons tonight, two as dps and two as a tank. And I can’t help but wonder what the heck happened? It was a shock to queue in as a level ten and have a group of 70+ players with me, but fine. I’d heard Blizz had played with scaling so whatever. But my first two dungeons, i wasn’t even able to enjoy because the group may as well have been five solos. Everyone off in different directions, pulling everything they could see, kiting them all the way to the end and killing everything in a matter of seconds. I think i was able to cast two or three spells in the first dungeon. When i tried tanking, i was the lowest level in the party. I announced that i was trying to learn to tank and asked the party to bear with me, and next thing i know, a 76 druid dps is taking off ahead, pulling different groups from me, healer neglects me completely and im dying left and right. The only reason i had a semi-normal experience in my fourth run is because some guild mates came in and basically made it so the party HAD to go at my pace.

I don’t mean to complain. And i like a lot about where retail is at. Whats been changed. But these more focused rolls seem almost impossible to properly learn when nobody sticks to a group dynamic anymore. Dungeons dont even feel like dungeons because unless i stomp my feet and force the group to go at my pace, the whole thing is wrapped up in five minutes.

I’m almost afraid to even attempt a healer if this is how the dungeon runs go nowadays. I cant imagine trying to stay on top of everyone’s health when nobody is going the same way, half the party has switched specs to solo the content and im not even familiar with the dungeons yet.

Is there any advice you guys have or is this just how it is now? Is every dungeon just a free for all?

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Follower dungeons are your best option to learn new roles now. Everyone else is speed leveling and don’t care about roles. I’d also find a place in the open world where you can pull a bunch of adds at once to work on your active mitigation and rotation.

3 Likes
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First of all, welcome back!

Secondly…

Your guildmates trolled you a bit. The 20th Anniversary is running right now so they have a dungeon mode for Timewalking, which means that anyone from when LFD gets unlocked to max level can queue for a Timewalking dungeon. If you just want the “correct” level brackets you stick to a particular expansion’s dungeons, not the timewalking stuff.

But with that said I can’t say I would be recommending whatever nonsense your guildmates are doing. Forcing a group to go at your pace isn’t going to make you learn how to tank or heal for that matter.

As a returning player, the best way to learn how to play any role would be to just level a character using the specialization you want to learn. As a dps that’s the easiest but if you want examples of this whilst levelling in regards to being a tank or healer; pull larger groups of enemies whilst questing and try to test your limits, how to still combine defensive and offensive cooldowns, how do you keep yourself alive, etc.

This is especially true if you are levelling a new character since ostentatiously… that’s how you learn a specialization. Once you have learned said specialization, you then hop into dungeons to try to apply it and you gotta test things in more difficult and difficult content until you hit a wall. At which point you start practicing on how to overcome that wall.

You got a guild group that wants to help you out, then great! Level your character you wanna play to max, get some basic gear, and then tell your friends that you want to tank or heal a Mythic dungeon (not Mythic+, that comes later). Mechanics are lethal in those dungeons but the numbers aren’t so high that it is insurmountable to overcome it. But you still need the lethal stuff in order to actually learn how stuff works, once you know how your specialization works that is (which is why the levelling aspect is more important than spamming dungeons whilst levelling).

If you want to learn how to play a role, do not use follower dungeons. They aren’t good at learning how mechanics or player behaviour is like. Follower dungeons are just good as a tourism tool or to complete a quest without waiting for a LFD queue to pop.

Best of luck to you and if I’m going to offer one piece of advice as to how to get better at tanking or healing especially: read the debuffs you and other players receive. Doing that is genuinely one of the absolute best things you can do to improve quickly as a tank or a healer (dps as well, but not quite to the same extent).

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Does one need to learn to tank…?

Popping a minor CD and a aoe on pull will take you to 5+.

I guess you could mage tower… that is on par with or beyond CE tanking though.

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As a 19 year tank, I can give you a small piece of advice:

If they pull it, and they don’t bring it to you, let them try or die. Just stick with your healer and you’ll be fine. Tanks only lead raids not dungeons.

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I’d suggest making your own group and place in the description “Chill” or that you’re learning and there may be wipes. It will take a little bit longer to fill but you’ll get people that want to be there.

1 Like
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Everything else aside, I wanted to point out the Proving Grounds still exist and they’re pretty decent to learn.

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Here’s my learn to tank advice:

Pretend your a dps spec and just do damage and go through the dungeon. If you focus on doing as much damage as possible you will have threat. Don’t worry about defensives at all you can’t die in a leveling dungeon as a tank.

Don’t worry about picking up every mob if someone pulls for you think to yourself “oh I’m going to do more damage now” and don’t think “oh sugar, I need to get threat on those guys now too!”

Tanking while leveling is just damage but the tank can’t kite you and mastering your damage rotation will free up your mental capacity to start thinking about defensives and tank cooldowns and that’s when you should add those in.

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I would try a few follower dungeons to try learning a role , they aren’t perfect but do give you a better idea how it’s supposed to work. TW dungeons tend to be all over the place far as groups doing whatever and the scaling is a bit of a mess.

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Run content, fail, adapt.

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I was thinking of making TuT videos for the casual WoW player and newer n00bies. Teaching everything there is. but I feel like if I do that I would ruin the fun of learning the game like I did. Idk.

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Only advice I’ll give you is forget about these time walking things lvling dungeons outside of the actual lvling process of a new xpack.

These dopes up zoomer dungeon running tuning don’t represent what the game really is, which is M+ when it comes to dungeon. In there you won’t see dps pulling because they will instantly get vaporized, you will also get vaporized as the tank but just a bit slower, and if you heal you will watch people get vaporized before you can cast anything other than instant cast heals on them.

Semi-jokes aside, here’s the real one thing you need to know about the way this game goes: the only time where learning roles or content is tolerable, for both you and your team, is in the couple first weeks. Beyond that point you will only find people who already learned that stuff and don’t want their dungeon runs to feel like progression, this is why when you announce that you learn to tank, in a lvling normal dungeon where blizzard puts no threat to anyone, everybody just goes off and ignores you. That’s for pugs obviously, if you’re in a guild people will be more patient and understanding.

You would also get a better experience at the beginning of the next season, since most people will have to learn the new dungeon pool, but right now it’s hard to have fun doing that.

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Two approaches:

One - start by learning the basics of your class in solo content, then with NPCs, then with friends and guildies, keep learning as much as possible about your class and filling your role as you play with NPCs and people you know, slowly progress up into random group content and slowly up the difficulty of that content.

Two - just jump in and learn as you go. It will be bumpy, other players will say nasty / rude things and you may get kicked, but nothing in this game is so difficult anyone with half a brain can’t figure out how to reasonably perform with any class in any role in a short amount of time.

1 Like
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Ngl it wasnt until making posts about this stuff that i even knew what follower dungeons were. But ill definitely be making use of them. Thanks.

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it’s “late” in the season and it’s the toughest season we had.

not the most fortunate timing if youre just getting in now and starting to learn now.

youre gonna have a lot of negative vibes/feedback, probably :wink:

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Obviously i understand the basics. When i say learn i just mean getting comfortable in the role. Which is hard to do when my whole party is off pulling aggro and healing in a different part of the dungeon because they saw me say i was new/been away awhile and just dipped on me.

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Random is random.

I’ve gotten groups where no one seems to want to do anything without the tank more often than groups with everyone running off all over the place.

Most groups seem to follow the tank reasonably well with healers that toss heals and everyone gets through the instance without issues, though dps / heals are pretty prone to pulling more if the tank is trying to pull one / two groups at a time.

And of course you sometimes get the group with the speed tank (level 11 twink fury warrior or a DH exploiting double jump) that will leave everyone in the dust while tanking nothing and making a beeline for the last boss.

In that case, just afk at start till run is done and move on.

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It feels like a self correcting problem. Tanks don’t really struggle for groups. As you get into content where a tank is needed you will slowly be made to learn.

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Thats why u couldnt time a +2 and blamed your group on forums?

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RNG aside, there’s definitely been a general shift to this zerg mentality amongst the average playerbase. People will tell you it was always there, but the thing they always miss is that it wasn’t always there to this extent and severity. That is the crucial difference most people fail to realise. As to what’s caused this general shift in approach and attitude, well that’s another story.