as the title suggests – really hard to find these roles in LFG 
and they just get flammed on CD when anything goes wrong. Mainly speaking about this from an M+ perspective –
But I get why participation is very low when this season feels like tanks/healers rely on each other a lot more now - especially for a PUG standard… And if someone gets 1 shot, they get flamed non stop and I bet some folks stop queing.
rebalanced is entirely the wrong word.
You don’t want them to be rebalanced, you want them to intentionally made over-powered to funnel more players into them.
In your ideal world, a Tank player would zone in to a dungeon, /flex, then walk out with loot.
I personally hate the precedent that buffing = improving. It’s just lazy.
Want to improve the Tanking experience? Make changes to M+ that are actually good. Meta pathing routes for example of a level of knowledge that an average player wouldn’t know, but is expected to know, and just becomes a barrier to entry.
Healers should heal. The whole Healers having to DPS thing is also very off-putting to many people.
Laughs in blood dk
But seriously, normally when someone asks for a balance or rebalance they mean between the specs. Are you asking for a healer/tank buff here? It’s not really clear.
Blizzard said tanks wouldn’t die as fast but then seemed to forget that part of the tank changes.
So they didn’t hit the nail on the head with that one. Maybe if tanks had a health buff.
I want to be as strong as a prot paladin
Players who play less popular roles queue faster and therefore gear faster. They’re literally gearing themselves out of group finder faster than other roles.
As someone who tanked and quit to relax just being another dps I don’t want my bear to be over powered. I would like a reactive tanking style that bears are supposed to have (take damage and heal back up using FR) instead of having to have active mitigation up for every tank buster in a +10. It would also be nice to have enough CD’s to rotate for the amount of tank busters there are if they are going to one shot. Finally with a tank like bear that requires ramp time to get their mitigation going they really need something that allows them some form of protection on pull instead of having to waste almost 33% of a major mitigation CD going into combat.
Moving from bear to ret pally was maybe the best thing I could do. I feel far more tanky, I get to participate in the measuring contest for once, I need to know almost nothing up to a +10 compared to tanking, if I do die somehow I don’t end up wiping the group, and questing is faster and easier.
I really didn’t know how stressed I was in dungeons until I swapped and started to look forward to M+ runs instead of low grade dreading them.
The problem is systemic. The following are some broad stroke, zero nuance suggestions.
Tanks need to be about 900% sturdier, and have less self healing and damage.
Healers need to do about 99% less dps, and we need to chill out on the ground effect + damage overlaps. Healers also need more external DRs.
Dps need to lose all (or almost all) defensives and self healing in PvE (keeping them in PvP makes sense). Replace with an heirloom trinket that heals you when you kill enemies that give XP, but has no other stats. (Don’t want to have to go back to sitting after every mob while questing).
Create more dps checks in dungeons. Bosses with limited phases or hard enrages.
Cut down on the number of kicks and stops needed.
These last 2 are more controversial, but I believe would lead to more people playing more things.
Cap m+ at ~15.
Remove the myth track entirely. Mythic raid and vault just drop fully upgraded heroic.
So a tank and a healer are on opposite ends of a seesaw.
What happens?
In Wow they get tiny!
No, DPS needs to be made difficult enough it’s brought up to parity with tanks/healers.
How? Beats me. But it’s the go-to brainless zug zug role isn’t it. So fix that. Imagine a healer rolling up to a dungeon, “lol i don’t have dispel on my bars.”
Not sure what you’re playing but as a healer who usually does +10 and +11… I almost never get flamed. People are pretty chill even when I make a mistake. If you’re talking about higher keys I don’t really have experience to draw from this season.
I’m not sure if class or role power relative to other classes and roles is really the problem. That said they definitely need to do something for brew master in 5 man content and blood DKs are even more stressful to heal than in DF i feel like.
In regards to m+ specifically, I think not having relatively chill levels of m+ to learn in is this season’s biggest detriment and reason for low tank/healer turnout.
In season 3 of DF there were plenty of easy key levels for you to progress through where mistakes as a tank or healer were really no big deal. If you want to learn routes or how to play a specific class, the jump from m0 to m+2 feels insane unless you’re heavily over geared. You have to learn in an environment where mistakes result in bricked or +1 runs with pugs.
It does nothing to increase people’s confidence when the start of m+ is equivalent to a 12 in the old system.
It sounds like the devs are aware of this and plan to address it in season 2, I know ion said something about smoothing the progression from heroics into m+.
Healing is the most difficult role, but it’s not significantly more difficult than DPS. It’s also probably more accurate to say that it can be more difficult than DPS, and is on average. Tanking is the easiest by a large margin though. If healing sets the bar at a 10, DPS is an 8 and tanking is a 4.
He’s playing the fictional game a lot of WoW players have in their head of how healing and tanking go.
The primary difficulty these people face with healing and tanking is their crippling social anxiety rather than actual things that actually happen in the game.
I haven’t had an issue with Brew from either side, but Blood is just the type of design that never should have made it out of the pitch meeting. It’s cool, and they even did a good job of it in my opinion, but the way the spec functions is something meant for a single-player game or PvP.
I raised one as my second tank to 80, so I’m a lot less stressed about healing them now, but the spec absolutely crosses the line of really needing to have played it to not have an aneurysm healing it. The idea of “if they have runic power they’re fine” is way too simplified of a metric to go off of with confidence. They need to, like, double its healthpool and reduce its mitigation as necessary, so that its gameplay still revolves around reactive self-healing but the ping-pong happens more in the 50-100% zone and the 1-49% zone is a much clearer danger area.
DPS never experience a situation where they are required to pump good numbers, while handling mechanics, in a 5 second window or everyone dies. They get rotational complexity of needing to use x>y>z like other roles do, but there’s no real consequence for screwing that up, a momentary blip of dps loss that completely vanishes into the background. There isn’t any do-or-die dps check that they have to plan every 60 seconds around and wipe if they failed to save enough cds for the right window.
All-star dps at all times is quite hard, but anyone not pushing 95+ parses rapidly falls off the difficulty scale entirely. Average dps barely needs a pulse.
Every tank should be brought up to prot paladin’s level. This would not negatively impact game balance, and it would definitely help with class distribution. Instead, they’re just kicking prot pally in the knees.
Nobody wants to play with anyone because everyone is a jerk.
I mean, they absolutely do. Most pulls that are this stressful on your healer are going to be equally stressful on a DPS. You aren’t getting through a full hallway pull of SV without your DPS simultaneously pumping and handling stops. The shard boss requires relatively coordinated swaps done while aware of the party’s health and the state of the healer’s output. But yes, on average healers are harder and that’s why I literally said as much.
Neither does your average healer. Pretty sure average tanking can be done without one entirely. Feels to me like you’re conflating your actual job as a healer with the maximum potential possible healing that could be required, and then assuming that the same situation doesn’t exist for other roles. Your issue with DPS is also odd given the 99% of the time healing is stressful it’s a tanking issue.
Adding that this is a gross misrepresentation of reality. Healer and tank baseline rotations are, on average, much simpler than DD rotations. They exceed or bridge the gap through their reactive gameplay and the relative weight of each decision.
You’re also pretty obviously coming at this from the common healer perspective of only remembering the worst-case scenarios. Healers have a higher maximum possible mental load, but DPS have the lowest minimum mental load. There is no run where DPS aren’t expected to DPS. Healers and tanks have a job to do, and once the conditions of their job are satisfied anything beyond that is (relatively speaking) optional. DPS can never possibly reach that same point.
In push content every player on any role has to play at max capacity, but below that healers and tanks can have groups where they get to cruise control. Tanks and healers aren’t being flamed for not optimizing their DPS and utility contribution to a key that is otherwise timed and smooth, but DDs are absolutely expected to still perform near peak. They may fail at it, but the expectation remains nonetheless.
Your argument flip-flops between comparing the average tank/healer to the best DPS players, which undermines its validity. For example:
You dismiss tank and healer contributions by stating, “average tanking can be done without a pulse.” Yet, when discussing DPS, you shift the comparison to high-end content where “DPS are expected to play at max capacity.”
This is an unfair standard. If we’re discussing average performance, then average DPS players also don’t face the intense demands you describe—they’re often standing in fire, missing interrupts, and playing sub-optimally in low keys.
If we switch to high-end performance, then all roles are pushed to their limits. Tanks and healers in high keys don’t get to “cruise control” as you imply. Tanks are under immense pressure to manage aggro, route optimization, and defensives while DPSing effectively. Healers must constantly balance reactive play, offensive contributions, and resource management.
The rest of your post raises some interesting points, but I believe it oversimplifies the nature of roles, especially when discussing expectations and contributions across tanks, healers, and DPS. Let’s break it down systematically:
The claim that DPS are crucial for handling “stops” like interrupts or crowd control ignores the reality that utility is a shared responsibility across all roles.
The idea that tanks and healers have “optional” DPS contributions in lower keys might be somewhat true, but it misses the mark entirely for high-end content.
The proportional nature of DPS output is also worth noting. Tanks and healers are expected to contribute a meaningful share of damage relative to the DPS they’re grouped with, as this directly affects the speed and efficiency of clearing content.
The importance of using personal defensives is another area where your post overlooks shared responsibility:
Healers naturally bear the brunt of party-wide healing, however specs like Enhancement Shamans or Ret Paladins can meaningfully contribute in clutch situations, reinforcing the idea that healing isn’t a solo responsibility.
The distinction between roles isn’t as sharp as your post implies, at least in terms of raw mechanics. What really sets roles apart are meta expectations (here I am on referring mostly to pugs and around the +10/11 area:)
At lower keys, every role can function with minimal effort. The higher the key, the less this is true. Success becomes increasingly tied to teamwork, individual optimization, and leadership.
Ultimately, the most difficult role is whoever the shot-caller or leader is, as they bear the responsibility for coordinating mechanics, calling adjustments, and adapting strategies mid-run. This isn’t inherently tied to any single role but rather the player filling that position.
Yes. Needing a bunch of external addons and websites just to have a prayer of knowing what you’re doing is bad for any game. M+ routes in particular should be a baseline in-game thing that everyone in the group can clearly see.
No. Healers being able to throw out some damage when healing isn’t needed is a good thing and fun. This is particularly true as pulls tend to be hardest at the beginning when all the mobs are alive, but incoming damage lessens as those mobs start to die. At that point, the healer helping to speed things along with a damage spell or two can really add up over the course of a dungeon. Not to mention, we’ve all had that boss wipe the group at 2% - every bit of damage from the healer helps avoid those kinds of situations.
the guy thinks tanking is the easiest role in the game. There’s no point in indulging a discussion with someone who says that. Leave the trolls alone.
Also, nothing wrong with tanks man! They’re perfect:
https://x.com/YoDaOrie/status/1863706572565762212