At least the healer gets appreciated for keeping people alive. At the end of a raid or dungeon you know how many times I hear “nice heals” but never hear “good job tank”.
Nobody cares about the tank only when someone dies or tank loses aggro then they rage and call the tank bad.
A lot of the times DPS pull and don’t let the tank do his job too which is honestly really toxic. Or run ahead of the tank and start without him, I really feel it’s the role that is treated the worst on average.
Meh, I don’t tank for good job little buddy.
It’s nice but like real life hardly any one remembers the good stuff you do but make one mistake and bam…
I tank becusa I enjoy it
Nobody congratulates the DPS unless one did something epic like end the boss while the only one left alive. Nobody respects DPS because they’re a dime a dozen.
Meanwhile no one ever thanks the dps -_-
Well okay I have some people say thank you for the lock cookies. You guys are cool.
Unless it is a high m+, DPS dont need to wait to pull trash that is easily killed and ranked by even DPS, usually people want to be done with a boring heroic or base mythic they are only doing for a quest and dont want to waste time with slow tanks.
I’ve never had issues with dps disrespecting the tank in m+. If a dps does pull before you, you shouldn’t have too much of an issue grabbing aggro. I’d maybe even argue that dps have it worse. Trying to find a mythic+ group as a new player without rio doesn’t sound fun.
I’ve had people tell me good job on tanking before. Not often, but it happens… Usually when I’m able to just chain pull nonstop and the DPS don’t accidentally butt pull something that wrecks the whole group.
It still amazes me that some people still haven’t figured out that backing away progressively further while strafing side to side with every instant cast is probably gonna get you into something’s aggro range.
I’ve had plenty say “nice tanking”
No one ever thanks me for showing up and looking cute either. 
People actually hate tanks and don’t want them to have a good time, so yeah. Exhibit A:
dps is least respected. when you’re a solid dpser no one cares. When you’re a solid tank every group and every guild wants you.
Guilds don’t need tanks, many have would-be tanks just playing as DPS waiting for one of the existing tanks to quit the game. Good luck finding a tanking spot in a guild.
Thank you for showing up and looking cute. In appreciation: 
.
Healers aren’t much better off since guilds also actively recruit healers who can actually play a dps spec as well since you can have fights that require 3 healers like most of the bosses, or 5 healers like Shadhar.
Of course tanks aren’t respected. Haven’t been since WoD. Back when tanking was hard. Back when blackhand’s autoattacks could 1 shot. Back when KRSI was a thing.
That’s when it was difficult. That’s when good players enjoyed tanking. That’s when randoms would talk about tanking as if you didn’t just stick your worst 1/2 players on them to down a boss.
Tanks don’t have a metric. A thing to optimize. They have checkboxes, more than dps for sure, but once a tank has done a bossfight once, and learned all the checkboxes(position x at y time, defensive CD A on B ability), there’s nothing else to do. Every tank will eventually learn those checkboxes and there’s no way to discern them all from eachother. DPS have it different. DPS can do all the checkboxes they have on a boss(don’t stand in fire/etc) and at the end you’ll see 2 dps of them same exact class/spec/ilvl have wildly differing amounts of damage done. This is how us common people can differentiate DPS.
Their stuff is always logged. They can compare to others of the same exact spec. Percentiles are a thing. Optimizing endlessly on their DPS, seeing bosses you’ve killed a bunch of times get downed faster and faster and faster is something the whole raid can see and always attribute to “Damn we DPS frikkin GOOD now woohoo”. Tanks do a boss on farm for the millionth time and see no difference in that experience compared to the first time they tanked it full.
And the community of tanks wanted this, because by the end of WoD tanking was perceived to be too hard, and Blizzard made a big announcement that in order to bring new players to the role they’d make it easier for Legion. And a lot of people rejoiced at this. It was sad. That’s when people started to again see tanking as something only babies play. Just think about it: Do you really think Kruul was the hardest mage tower boss? He wasn’t, tank players simply didn’t have it in them. Still don’t.
DPS are always a more respected role because you can compare them, with metrics, to other dps of the same exact class/spec.
Oh absolutely, the disparity in healers between fights is incredibly annoying to me, as a raid leader.
I really wish they would just make Mythic scale with raid size, like every other difficulty. Let people play the game, Blizzard.
I don’t think that is necessarily a good idea though. People already game that system on heroic with 2/2/6 being 20x easier for a majority of the bosses this tier. They just need to make fights require roughly the same amount of each role for each boss. 3 or 4 healers is whatever. 3 or 5? Come on that is almost double. There has also been a fairly common 3 tank strat on a boss every tier this expansion which means you need a mdps with a tank spec as well.
Our 3rd tank is a boomkin or a mistweaver.
Whichever. Ours has been a havoc dh. It is generally easier for mdps since weapons and trinkets don’t REALLY change a lot of the time. It is semantics really.
Generally you don’t want to swap a healer though since Vexiona is still a 4 healer boss with the 3 tank strat.
I have heard this before, sometimes directed to me.