Maybe i’ve missed them, or we’re just gonna continue on being gatekept by a lack of tanks?
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How are you being gatekept?
What exactly do you want them to do about a player made choice?
Have you thought about just playing a tank yourself to help with this problem?
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I’m working as fast as I can!
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The fix for the lack of tanks lays with the WoW community. Most people who can tank, myself included, just don’t want to put up with demanding and entitled DPS players, so we don’t do pugs. When they chill out and stop complaining or running ahead of the tank, the tanks will come back.
Until then, enjoy your queues.
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The tank population issue is 100% a community issue and not a Blizzard issue.
A lot of players have bad attitudes towards tanks and give us a hard time for everything, including wipes that aren’t our fault.
Tanking has become a thankless job where you just get yelled at for 30 mins. Therefore, nobody wants to do it.
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Tanking is just not that interesting. Puts me to sleep.
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What incentives could Blizzard give tanks for a problem that is community made? Blizzard can’t just bribe tanks to put up with rotten people.
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What, exactly, do you expect them to do?
Also, I’d like to point out the irony of you posting this on a druid. …who can tank…
EDIT:
And 90% of PuG tanks are self-important self-righteous DBs who don’t actually do their job. Your job isn’t (just) to live. Your job is to make sure your squishies live. When you pull half the instance and rest of your team dies to AoE, but you solo the pull, that’s a FAILURE.
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Tried to unlike the above post after the edit. We should be able to do that. 
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No worries. I agree. Not sure which part you disagree with, though. Maybe the hyperbole of 90%. Unfortunately, we won’t know, because clicking a heart is easier than talking. ::shrugs::
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Increase the dungeon size so that we actually don’t need more tanks. The issue isn’t how many tanks we have it’s the ratio have tanks:dps we have doesn’t come close to the ratio of tanks:dps you need for a dungeon.
Even going from 5 man to 6 man would be a 33% increase in dps per tanks which is a huge increase!
I’d even suggest 10 man dungeons 1 tank:2healers:7dps.
The community members interact with each other through Blizzard’s systems. So any community problem is also a system problem.
Also, what is more likely blizzard making changes to the system to change player behavior or millions of people collectively agreeing to change their behavior?
If you’re solution is ever “well if everyone just started doing x and not y then it would be fine” then you have a bad solution.
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Undo the tank changes they made in TWW pre patch would be a start lol
there is way less tanks compared to DF for a reason
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The thing about this post, is that you are talking to a huge variety of players. To the players that run heroic dungeons, or queued content for the most part, their experience with tanks is very different. They’re looking at this from the perspective of people having arguments or being rude or pulling extra for tanks in the content they play. Obviously this isn’t really where the problem lies, but that’s their world.
The tank shortage that affects the bulk of players is primary a mythic+ concern. I do believe it is a blizzard problem. It is a design issue. Why do I say this? Because other games have the same types of players, but not nearly the same shortage problem. Why? Because tanks aren’t fighting for their lives in those games. They’re powerful. Like a tank should be.
The dungeons in other games are also very linear. The margin for error is also way more forgiving in other games. Other games also don’t throw a disproportionate amount of extra things on tanks and healers the way wow does. They tank and do DMG. It’s pretty straightforward. Healers heal and do DMG. In wow I’m dispelling players, dispelling affixes, doing DMG, stunning, interrupting, knocking hard cc’ing, soaking, spreading, dodging, etc.
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Tanks aren’t free anymore once theyre geared up.
You can become friends with one or pay them. Aside from that you’ll only see them do content with satchels or other bonuses up, plus 1 kill of queen a week.
The thing is tanks got geared super stupid fast and then probably leveled something else or are being paid for their time in gold or happiness.
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There will always be those who find a way to game the system. That way then spreads and becomes the “right” way. Any deviation becomes wrong and people get mad.
You’d be right back where you started.
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This. My buddy wants to come back once he builds his computer. Hes always been a pally tank and quit the last time due to “elitists dps” being toxic complaining about his mob pulling.
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Basically if they copied ffxiv it wouldnt be as big of an issue for dungeons. However, I think at this point if they keep copying ffxiv design, people will just go to ffxiv.
6 man groups have always been the optimal dps to healer and tank ratio: a full 2 to 1 ratio of dps vs others. Ffxiv even had 10 person battlefields , basically boss raids balanced for 10 consisting of boss fights that each tell part of a story for that group of battlefields and drop weekly loot.
It also allowed for the support dps role ( bard, support mages, debuffers etc)that already got abandoned with augvoker falling off.
Of course a big issue is that some specific tanks can do similar dps to dps, with zero chance of death in the case of specifically prot paladin in m+. They’d need to make some sort of restriction on double tanks or double healers like literally having the keys not start with 2 healers or 2 tanks, and booting everyone if they try to use the outside spec swap trick.
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Tanks will always be in short supply. Any game with the trinity, tanks and healers are always the bottlenecks. That is because it requires more responsibility than DPS.
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Yes and no. Yes when you change a system players will find the new “right way” of doing things. This is called “the meta” aka the generally acceptable best strategy.
Right now the meta for leveling dungeons is to pull as big and as fast as possible because leveling dungeons have little to no threat of a wipe. This is antithetical to learning how to tank because everything is moving so fast you can’t even get your hands to the homeroom keys before the next pull is happening.
And leveling dungeons mobs are so weak that a dps will just pull and tank without fear because they will not die.
This can absolutely be slowed down by blizzard. You just make mobs auto attack significantly stronger but than increase tanks armor by a significant amount. This would result in any dps pulling for the tank to be instantly punished. But the net effect on the tank’s damage intake would be zero because of the armor buff.
I was tanking a +10 stovevaults, and I had a high io score dps start pulling for me and at that level a dps will not love very long with aggro. Which is why you let the tank pull. He died each time he did thing because I didn’t have an aoe spell to grab snap threat. He stopped doing it after two deaths and we still timed the dungeon.
I’d also suggest increasing the health of leveling dungeons mobs so they live long enough to practice your rotation – this is would be an improvement for everyone to learn their class and it would feel much better for specs with ramp time.
Now obviously these changes would slow down dungeons and make pulling for the tank very punishing so we’d have to compensate that by rewarding more experience per mob and for each dungeon completion. So that the exp/hr of dungeon grinding stays the same or people will just stop leveling via dungeons.
You could even have tanks take more damage so they get used to that aspect of tanking as well but I’d suggest to increase their health pool significantly to give the tanks and healers lots of time to react (again they’re learning here) to taking treating amounts of damage.
Lastly, you could add end of dungeons rewards given to other players by the players. Heroes of the storm has this. Everyone votes for the most helpful or most epic player in their group. So there is a little social incentive to be kind and helpful. I’m not sure if this would fit into wow or not. There could even be in-game rewards for this such as a small amount of gold or a coin to roll for another piece of gear. But you’d have to look at making it only available in pugs and I’m leveling content. But I haven’t fleshed this idea out so it could probably be gamed in many ways I have thought about.
If you read this little rant thank you. I’m certainly not a professional game dev so take my suggestions with a grain of salt. Think of the suggestions as merely examples of how changing the system can change player behavior to make the “right way” of doing a dungeon a better environment for learning.
Join the dungeon and turn chat off and then play the game. Players will always criticize you and because tanks set the pace and enable the other players to play the game they are often subject to the most criticism.