Gaurdian TAnk in Arena, I did it

Classes Druid
21

I’m going to be 100% honest with you. When I first started wow, this was my class fantasy. I wanted to play a bear for pvp purposes. Bears are my favorite animal and I would routinely duel without ever going cat and just trying to make it work. As I got older and more experienced and thus I quickly realized that it simply wasn’t designed to be what I wanted it to be.

So I don’t blame you for trying and playing it. I’m glad you’re having fun and at the end of the day, that’s all that matters. But from an arena perspective here’s my unadulterated thoughts:

Tanks shouldn’t be in arena. They serve to do nothing but annoy every other player. It’s not tank players’ fault, it’s just the way the game is designed. The only spec that does what you’re wanting to do actually well is prot pally and no one likes fighting those. Guardian in 2’s against any competent team will get demolished because your off healing isn’t free or instant. The reason it only works with classes who can kill by themselves and don’t die easily is those are the classes that can carry.

Double hybrid dps in this meta is borderline busted anyway because if you play healer/dps, a lot of the time you can’t lock down one target long enough to kill before he “tags” his partner. Playing against double feral at 2300mmr for instance is so annoying.

Tanks are just forgiving, that’s why they have the appeal that they do. You can make way more mistakes on a tank and not instantly die so it gives the illusion that the spec is better or that you’re better. Again, not a personal attack, it’s just how it is. If you practice the game more I promise you you’ll have infinitely more success as feral doing the same thing.

With that said, if your goal is 1600 or something then by all means, you do you man. Not hating on you, just giving some insight on why people don’t like tanks and consider them a training wheels spec. I can objectively say at least one thing though, guardian is by no means “OP” or even good in arena. That’s not why you win the games you do. I also can promise that if a random design change happened and bears were somehow actually viable in high rated arena pvp, I’d be the first to switch. 100%.

1 Like
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When I was a geared guardian doing 110 PvP in BfA, sometimes people would say to me that they didn’t think tanks should be in PvP. I would say, “The tank is like a rogue. The purpose of the rogue is to annoy a player. The purpose of the tank is to annoy the whole team.”

One day I said that in a group of players who I had played against. And one said, “Yeah. You were really annoying.”

23

Well… I’m not sure what the purpose of that story was lol. Rogue’s purpose is certainly not annoyance though.

Tank’s design is something blizz has often struggled with in its cohesion with arena. They are typically played by people who want to feel invincible. They’re extremely forgiving, they do very little damage, and they do nothing but draw out the game for both sides praying someone makes a massive mistake.

The only main tank seen in any capacity is prot pal because the way they heal is cheesy and they can bypass the mana minigame. Tanks have never even in their best iteration been a respected or viable spec for high end arena. It’s typically played as a meme by people like bung for prot pal or supa for bear when he can think of ways to cheese with it. Blizz has a pretty clear stance as the one thing that made guardian even able to sort of arena was immediately nerfed hard.

They’re just not fun to play for anyone except the tank.