Being a competent DPS IS actually a lot of hard work…a hell of a lot more work than being a competent tank and certainly healer is.
But surviving a delve as a DPS and arguing it is “hard” is just LOL worthy. Spec Brann as heals and learn to stagger pickup his potions…and FFS actually move away from the big swirlies and other telegraphed/castable stuff. Like it isn’t that hard. Like no cap for realsies actually inviting multiple people to a delve SIGNIFICANTLY makes it harder. If you invite a tank, you lose any practical ability to take damage since mob damage goes way the frick up and mobs gain a MONSTROUS amount of HP that make killing them a slog. It’s just far more efficient to do it alone…especially when you realize the vast majority looking to group up in delves are inherently undergeared and left of bell curve types hoping to low key high key just be carried.
I do delves on ret paladin, elemental shama, and destruction warlock. They aren’t that hard (although the voidwalker can be a bit squishy if you aren’t paying attention.)
I find duo delves not that much more work. Sometimes I take my friend or partner along and last week I took some random rogue along when I listed my group.
I did try a 4man group once with 3 dps (because of course it’s all dps wanting to group up for delves) and you’re right, it was like pushing a boulder up a hill with three toddlers hugging my ankles. Definitely not worth it.
Solution, at least to the m+ group stuff, is really, really painfully simple. Make tanks as tanky as they used to be in eons past. Like, where the whole game up until maybe Shadowlands/BFA tanks were really tanky. Arguably BFA probably fits too but tanks were still a lot better off. Fix brewmaster so it’s not just a bad dps that is slightly more tanky. Boom, more people playing tank and less stress on healers at the same time plus more potential groups for DPS as a result.
Currently, small misplays once you pass relatively low keys (7s or so) can result in very quick deaths and a group wipe usually. Threat is a struggle early pull for most people and later in pull if the DK/shaman bursts a little too hard. Fighting to maintain threat was interesting, well, never. It wasn’t fun on retail release and isn’t fun now 20 years later.
For healers, the damage is just exceptionally bursty. There’s a reason why disc is so popular at the moment, and having played it for several seasons now the main thing is it adds a lot of reaction time/buffer. It ain’t great to play in raid with the long ramp but man does it feel great in keys to actually have healer agency back.
edit: bonus points for reverting the stops change so there aren’t random bolts slapping people for 1/3 or more of their health so much. Favorite of mine is the diffuser pulls in rookery where a poor shaman can sit near half health in an 11, then get deleted by a crusher + oracle (forgot the other mob name oops).
No, you died to the crab rider or the void boss that would kill you with a channel you were suppose to kick. Maybe they resolved that later into the season, but prior to that if you had either of those you were against a brick wall on Disc.
I have to agree that a lot of the issue just comes down to tanks being akin to paper towels in their current iteration. I don’t mind having to do my rotations properly on them at all, but playing tanks feels extremely bad compared to previous iterations by leagues. I mean, I mained as a tank for most of my early WoW gameplay, from MoP through to mid-Legion.
Honestly, it’s sort of the expected power fantasy, especially to new players. The stalwart wall of defensives that protects the group is kind of the whole visual that people want to feel like. Fighting for aggro and dying on a single missed global doesn’t really match that whole “tanky” feeling and really pushes people away from wanting to touch tanking in general. Playing my Prot warrior still feels like I’m fighting up a hill with defensive use. If I space out and forget Ignore Pain and Shield Block/Shield Wall for a global, or don’t go into some pulls pre-popping mitigations, I am hitting the floor.
The process of upkeeping that feels a lot more labor intensive than it used to be for sure. Defensives used to be a responsive action to specific abilities on fights, and now they are required to be cycled constantly while in play or you die near instantly. I get the intention, but I just don’t agree that the punishment of hitting the floor instantly feels very good in execution. I know that I personally do not want to tank when the game is just constantly threatening to kill me every global, I can’t imagine new players and people who never tanked before are wanting to jump at the idea if I have no interest.
Mythic+ are dungeons. Dungeons have always been central to the game. At first normal, then heroic and now mythic. I fail to see your point.
Ah yes, since that is the basic nature of dps.
What? I mean, what? Warlock is one of the most powerful dps classes. If you are having difficulty as a warlock in a Delve you are either undergeared, overestimating the level of delve you should be doing or - dare I say it - not quite playing the class right. In some way.
They aren’t very good at balancing tanks. The intent coming into this expansion was to make it so healers had to focus on healing tanks (on top of everything else) more. So they nerfed the tanks heavily (terrible, terrible idea). What they didn’t account for is this just made the reaction window close to 0, and force proactive gameplay completely for the tanks whereas you might have had 1-2 globals before on things outside of bear/dk. That proactive gameplay is something that was still necessary before, but now it just starts a LOT earlier.
They nerfed all the healers at the same time so they weren’t very good at keeping people up with single target healing, and hence, not as capable of handling the now incredible amounts of incoming tank damage. They then spent months walking back that change partially. We still have a situation where healers with external DR cooldowns are the only way to accommodate incoming tank damage once in sufficiently difficult content. Stuff like Chi Cocoon is just a strong fart from removal.
Lastly the stops change means all the random bolts shift focus constantly, sometimes hit the tank (further increasing tank damage), make healing more stressful because you can’t necessarily predict the incoming damage sometimes, and further emphasize group builds with more stops. It was a real double whammy to m+ and I don’t think it made things better than it was in Dragonflight at all.