Obviously, there will be a DPS hit, but wouldn’t the additional tanks provide better overall sustainability for everyone?
I’m just thinking out loud a little and was wondering if anyone has ever tried running with 4 tanks. Seems 4 tanks would spread the agro damage, reducing it as a percentage across 4 tanks, while maybe making it easier for healers to heal them?
Seriously, just curious.
Mostly because raids are tuned/designed for 2 tanks. Not to mention the flustercluck that would ensue with more tanks ripping aggro and spinning bosses.
If you can pull solid DPS numbers in Tank spec by all means, but there’s the problem of most, if not all Tank specs passively pulling aggro.
Previously you could disable your ‘Tank stance’ so you wouldn’t pull aggro if you’re not tanking, but that’s not really a thing anymore as far as I know. So you carry that inherent risk.
There are a number of factors that will come into play for the average raid group.
How tightly is the fight tuned? How geared are you for the content? How many raiders are you carrying? Can your top performers make up for your carries? How long is the enrage timer?
3 tanks actually isn’t that uncommon, don’t know if I’ve ever seen 4 outside of 40man raids.
Depends on the fight, but bosses are usually tuned for 2 tanks.
Sounds like Druids are the only class that could 3rd tank 
since they could swap out of tank spec into caster or feral
That would likely be the only real problem.
We’ve run 3 tanks in 5 mans. Hilarious passing the bosses back and forth. Made it easier on the healer since we were damage sponges and could keep the boss from wailing on one player so hard.
Lots of fun.
Its been done before. The most popular time was during BFA when you could get massive health and use it as a dps increase for TD.
In fact 29 tanks and 1 healer was the way I did most Nylotha pugs.
Generally speaking though as you said you take a fairly large DPS hit and most bosses are designed with dps checks in mind (Berserk timers.)
I hate 3 tank fights with the fires of ten thousand suns.
since most fights aren’t 3 tanked, you’re likely not going to have an extra tank hanging out on the roster, so you have a DPS swap who may not be used to tanking, and he’s going to either try to be a superstar, or not have a clue what he’s doing. Additionally, an inexperienced third tank can need more handholding than just doing it myself.
one of the things I enjoy most about tanking is the long-term rapport with my co-tank. we’ve been tanking together for 6 years. a third person in that mix just screws everything up.
this doesn’t make much sense. healers are going to have to heal regardless of how many tanks there are. someone will be taking the damage.
My guess would be that there is more active mitigation up, because you have longer periods to wait for CDs, meaning that there is far less damage taken over the course of the fight.
Seconding this, one of the things that makes me the most nervous is when I’m tanking with someone who’s habits I don’t know. I don’t care if my long term co-tank has habits that annoy the crap out of me. I know them and I can adjust. But having insert random person here suddenly tanking just causes problems as I have to suddenly adjust and coordinate with someone while all the other things are going on.
That might work the day discord implements NASA style loops where the other tanks and myself can be on a “tank loop” and just listen in to the raid loop but until then a lot of communication needs to be implicit and just understood between tanks.
Uther’s light that would be amazing
Makes me miss Ventrilo’s ghosts.
The tech was invented in the 1960s (if not far earlier) for the space program and no game voice chat has replicated it since AFAIK. Airline pilots use a version of it as well too, they listen on the guard frequency (121.5MHz) while also listening at higher volume to the main ATC frequency for the current area.
Man I just solo tank several bosses at this point
3 would be overkill
in ventrilo, you could set up what they called bindings, and have a separate PTT button that would allow you to only talk to select people. it was pretty great, and I miss it since discord has no such functionality.
Some bosses benefit from a third tank, but in general you lose a lot of damage and often don’t really have a purpose.
In theory, you can bring 10 tanks and 10 healers if you want. The DPS hit is probably the biggest hurtle.
As nearly all fights in recent and unrecent memory are tuned to only need 2 tanks, the 3rd tank isn’t really gonna do much but be a bad DPS, though it may be an option if - for whatever reason - your DPS is higher than it needs to be and there’s an interesting theory you have that may simplify certain fights if you have that 3rd tank, or if there’s a problem you’re encountering unique to your raid that makes certain mechanics challenging for 1 or both of your current tanks.
Tanks dying in a raid normally isn’t a bottleneck so I don’t think adding more would do much of anything.
And likely not worth the dps loss to the raid.