Solution To Your Tank Shortage

Call to Arms…to put it bluntly, is not good. Like, at all. That temporary buff rune is nice but…very very easily ignorable for players. Nothing like a consistent source of gold and tangible currency that can be spent on something they want.

I mentioned such a thing wouldn’t work for M+, not with it’s pure reliance on player made grouping, so trying to a short term fix there is doomed to failure from to failure.

Doing something like increasing dungeon size would not only necessitate readjusting all dungeon to account for the larger party size, but damage and healing outputs will also need to change and would generally require significantly more work, in my opinion for very little change because if anything, knowing there’s more chances to get into a group as DPS just encourages more people to DPS and puts more burden on the few tanks/healers around.

Like I said, trying to look for a short term fix isn’t going to work here. There needs to be an actual long term plan to get more people tanking or healing, instead of just having that 20% as you were carry more of the player base than they already do.

Dude, I’ve had people get uppity with me in Normals spamming the ping button anytime I took longer than 2 seconds to path to the next objective while jumping around impatiently in a silent “HURRY UP!!!”, you kiddin’ me?

EDIT: BTW, is there a way to turn that stupid thing off so that I don’t have to hear that annoying sound or see the markers? Worst fricken thing they ever put in the game. That should have been left as an add-on only thing.

Call to arms used to be significantly more rewarding, but dps who refused to respec to take advantage of it whined until most of the good stuff was taken out. It used to have a chance to drop rare dungeon mounts/pets, significant chunks of gold, etc.

I feel like this is an over simplification. To me, there are a lot players who want to lead. They just don’t want to be the leader who gets blamed when things go wrong. There are plenty of people who are willing to do whatever they want until things go sideways.

In my eyes, there are two main problems in addition to that;

  1. There’s nowhere to learn to tank. You’re thrown into the deep end and expected to sink or swim. In content where you’re supposed to learn the fundamentals, players don’t need tanks, they know they don’t need tanks and they act like they don’t need tanks by barreling through every pull and pulling ahead without allowing aspiring tanks to get their feet under them. It happened to me just yesterday in TW.

  2. There’s an obscene amount of homework that goes into the bare minimum necessary to be considered an effective tank that other roles don’t have to do until much later.

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mythic zeros exist.

Mythics shouldn’t have to be the place to learn the fundamentals of tanking because players don’t have the common decency to let new tanks learn in normals or heroics.

The reason people don’t tank is because there are a shortage of Raid slots for tanks that’s true. In raid i’m forced to DPS which i do on a different class than my blood dk. However i’m tanking keys on my blood DK. And the reason there is a shortage of tanks in M+ is because it’s alot of upfront knowledge that you will absolutely get flamed for if you don’t know what you’re doing.

Bad route? You’re gonna hear about it,
Dying to trash packs randomly? “Hey tank, you suck.”
Failing to do a tank mechanic properly? called out.

The pressure on tanks is huge in M+ and the trash gets progressively harder and harder and you’re expected to figure out how to pull more and more as you go up in difficulty and you’re the de facto leader of the group. It’s too much pressure for most people and you can tell cause DPS alot of times do not kick or move out of mechanics, but are the first ones to blame others for problems.

They haven’t figured out how to make even two tanks feel necessary outside tank swaps or “sometimes there’s two bosses/mobs that can’t be tanked on top of each other”.

The vast majority of raid tanking for the past two decades has basically just been fights where you’d only need one tank if it weren’t for a “taunt on X” mechanic.

Like I’d be down for some proof of concept fights where you can get multiple tanks doing interesting things. But I think the “taunt on X but make the debuffs longer so you need 4 tanks to handle it” would be the likely outcome.

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yeah, that certainly worked coming into tww

I tried some tanking on this character yesterday.

First dungeon the priest kept casting angelic feather on me even though I was always ahead of the group.

2nd dungeon I always pull at least 2-3 packs of mobs; the dps kept pulling additional packs making the fights more hectic for me to grab aggro and taxing the healer.

After the 2nd dungeon I went back to questing. I guess I am too slow to be an acceptable tank.

Or add shaman tanks. I dont think it would actual help i just want shaman tanks

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I’m sure every Mage, Rogue, Warlock, Hunter around would loved to have Q’d as tank.

Oh wait, they couldn’t.

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All dps only classes should be given a 4th spec that is tank or heals. Only have 4 classes who need this.

This will make everyone hybrid. It will allow everyone to play the class they wish to gear without being locked out of mythic plus groups that already have all 3 dps slots filled.

It’s not about creating a new character to play, sometimes players love the char they have and just need more grouping opportunities.

So maybe the warlock turns into a life stealing healer that removes life from the boss and feeds it to his allies. Maybe the rogue becomes a swashbuckler and tanks. Or we have a mage tank with mana shields and duel wielding wands. Perhaps the Hunter gains a spirit pet that heals the party while shooting holy arrows.

But regardless of what you’re ideas on this are…… always be nice to your tank and feed them bacon!

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then get this: raids should require every player to be a tank

now we get maximum complexity of fight design and the tank shortage is solved, right? :slight_smile:

Everyone gets a Druid minion that can tank by standing still, radiating agro, unkillable and then we can just focus fire down all the bad guys.

Now we need an easier way to focus fire. We all know once the tank issue is resolved we’ll go back to terrible DPS issues like inability to focus fire and not get killed which will lead to focus back on heals.

Even the trilogy is on a treadmill with this game

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As someone from the outside looking in, the solution seems to be more in the hands of Blizz in regards to routes taken to complete the required % of mobs requirement. I’ve seen many tanks drink in the fact that they are responsible for learning the best paths through dungeons while others have said that the one of the reasons they don’t want to tank is because they do not wish to study/memorize all of the correct paths/shortcuts to take in a specific dungeon.

So maybe part of the solution would be to remove the % of trash mob requirement and to instead bake that requirement into the dungeon pathing such that they can’t be skipped?

“OH NOES THE DUNGEONS WOULD BE LINEAR!?”

I can hear the whining now if dungeons didn’t have a bunch of extra trash nobody wants to kill and a bunch of optional paths that newbies might get confused into taking that people could then complain and kick said newbies for.

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I really don’t see this being an issue most of the time that I’ve played in a tanking role (went full-time tank in WoLK). Save the Cataclysm expansion where pug tanking was a miserable experience, pug or guild, I’ve always had a spot. Yes pugs do tend to find their tanks early, but that’s when I switch to m+. In all honesty, I hardly pug raids. Most guilds that I joined and tanked for had a rotation. The rotation helped them to determine who would be ideal for pushing bleeding edge content as they farmed mythic bosses. People have lives and the perfect MT and OT combo today might take a break for a few weeks/months.

Now the real challenge comes in when you don’t have Tues/Wed or Sat/Sun off. Good luck finding a guild that raids outside those days or late nights/early mornings…

LOL - Yeah, you are probably correct. Though, couldn’t it be argued that they are already linear? I mean, isn’t there already an unspoken agreed upon linear’ish path for each dungeon?

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Oh, absolutely.

But just like talent trees, people absolutely love the illusion of “choice”, if for no reason other than to laugh at the newbies who fall into the newbie traps.

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Thats the problem - there are a lot of possibilities to route out a dungeon but a lot of players want to follow a single route and they expect every tank class to smoothly go through it. On top of that, some pathing decisions taken in order to make tank’s life easier can translate into putting extra work on healers.

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