I have been voicing my distaste for the current state of tank specs for a while. They are obviously not designed with arena in mind, and hardly with BG’s. They are only played in arena when they are overtuned and can dampen matches to extreme degrees.
But they don’t have to be this way. There are numerous examples of mmo’s where tanks serve a valid and not nearly as toxic role as they do in WoW. Warhammer online for example tanks are basically utility monsters. Aoe slows, knockbacks, buffs, debuffs, bodyguard mechanics, along with very limited damage and almost 0 self healing.
I felt that bfa season 1 prot warrior was actually a well designed pvp tank, although again, stormclap was overtuned, pushing it into toxic territory. Tanks should not top DPS ever.
I believe tanks could be implemented in a way that doesn’t cause me to sigh in disgust every time I que into one.
honestly I played Swtor and the tanks in pvp were not as cheesy as they are in wow. Your guard and taunt abilities work different in PvP vs. PvE. In PvP, put your guard on a team mate that is being attacked, and it transfers 50% of the damage they take to you. So basically it’s a “defocusing” tool. When the enemy team is trying to focus all DPS on a single target to bring it down fast, instead it forces their damage to be split over two people.
For taunt, when you taunt an enemy it does not force them to attack you in PvP, but instead reduces their damage by 30% (I think 30, right?) if they attack anyone ELSE besides you. Taunt does nothing to healers.
And you may have noticed from these two descriptions, that guard and taunt are useless to you if the enemy is attacking YOU!
And then you want to your your many CC abilities to generally harass and prevent the enemy from attacking your team. You’ll usually focus on protecting your healers (if any) first, and then your other team mates that have a clue.
I dont know if that would transfer well to WoW tho just my food for thought, I love tanks in pvp games Swtor League stuff like that but they will never commit the resources to make tanks actually support allies in pvp. Instead they will just make our damage or healing over the top and say they did a great job.
I used someone else description but it was way better at explaining the concept then the dribble I typed up.
Fr though, I hate how Blizz makes them so cheesy and “”“unique”"" if they were just more normal, I’d like it, but fighting an unkillable heal machine in prot pal for one, is not what I enjoy. I liked old glad stance, bit disruptive, not awful damage, but it got scrapped. idk.
Tank damage and healing are the issue, both are completely out of control. Insane damage, insane healing, insane survivablity… I’m surprised we haven’t seen a 2x tank + 1x healer comp yet.
Balance team isnt capable of tuning Ret pallies and Fire Mages.
The odds of them being capable of bringing more specs into competitive PvP and maintaining a semi-balanced state is beyond unlikely.
If anything, expect to see a reduction of specs in arena.
Blizz makes no effort to actually balance tanks to be viable in pvp. They occasionally accidentally allow one into the meta, and without fail, everybody hates the spec. They either suck, or are despised. Anyway, my problem here is that blizz makes no effort to bring them in, and as such, they should simply remove all of them.
Allowing tanks to randomly wander into the meta due to balancing / mechanical oversight once every few seasons is irresponsible, and it ends up screwing over the players that took up the spec when it inevitably gets deleted after months of forum crying.
Balance them all or disable them all - my vote is to disable them all since we don’t need more crap to balance RN
OT: Yes, every spec should be in every kind of content. In their current iteration? Most of the tanks would need a rework to be really viable in 3s, honestly it would probably be easier for Blizzard to come up with a PvP tank spec for each class that has one.
Personally? No. I think its legit that tanks are 100% not viable in arena. I’ve played tank a LOT for raiding in the past and never once did I think “ugh prot warrior should be viable in arena…”. Instead I played arms in pvp like every warrior should.
I also think people who say they only play “a spec” rather than the whole class are bad.
Can you explain why. that’s not a shot btw, I hated WoD so quit early on, but the idea of a tank that’s basically a diff way to play a dps was way more interesting then this cheesy support role they keep going for, and failing. As is, if they keep trying to push that role, it’ll either be insanely bad and unviable, or too strong / unfun to play into.
