Problem is tanking isnt as easy as it once was, I am not talking about the “overpowered” style that brought all tanks to be gods and unkillable. The floor for is higher and need more thought than any other role. The nerfs were needed. The way thier was going is not “fun” way. I don’t know where this being OP tank baseline and can do everything without anyone is fun. The reason the most people don’t play tanks isnt because the nerfs. No one was playing tanks (even before the in shadowlands) Because the knowledge checks are insane. No one cares about being OP if the role is not fun if you have to know EVERYTHING before doing anything.
I understand being be able do everything is cool. It shows being OP isnt the mark that makes people play tanks. Its was the ease of it being less stressed as dps way and could focus on being tanky and arrgo. Now its everything.
It came into being because dps get to feel like gods of destruction when you can massive pull. Tanks feel like immortal gods when they can hold half a dungeon floor and be still standing. Healing feels godly when you have an answer for every problem and mistake others make.
All of this together is Fun. That feeling of excellence at your roll is enjoyable.
So tanks feel like crap because they are weaker. Healing feels like crap because you only have an answer for the expected dmg intake of a fight and feel helpess when mistakes happen. Being dps sucks because finding people that can overcome the problems of the other two rolls is farcical in a pug.
I think the tank problem is that we should be gods but aren’t.
I don’t think we have more knowledge checks now than we did before. But we were rewarded with a satisfying tank experience, because having our survivability be in our hands more than the healer’s feels good.
I haven’t heard a really good argument for why tanks needed to be nerfed other than it might make DPS players jealous that they still rely on the healer to stay topped off.
well if we are doing 80%+ of dps of a same ilvl dps or healer without any tradeoff yes we are gods.
sadly the bigger pool of players disagree on that. Its not rewarding if people dont like playing it.
Our survivability are meant to be the healers hand , thats the point of an healer.
Because any point is the reason why we are too powerful. If they didn’t tanks would be even more too much and dps and healers have less of point being there. Just have 5 tanks or an tank and 4 dps. OHh wait we have multiple times. In high end content
I don’t think it’s a tank deficit so much as it is a DPS surplus.
In literally every game that splits the game into Tank/Healer/DPS, DPS infinitely outnumber the other options. I’ve been playing Rivals and in comp you’ll have 4+ DPS instalocked before people realize that we can’t solo tank or solo heal and expect to win. (In QP they just dont care about winning cause the other side has 4-5 DPS anyway).
You can’t make people want to tank when they’d rather DPS. At best you can bribe them into tanking by making the role very overpowered and very overrewarding, but that still never brings the ratio into line because there’s just that many DPS.
I’m not having a problem personally, tanking keys lately. Kinda just cruising.
I did fail a +3 last night because the healer kept dying. The healer acknowledged it. It is what it is. It’s a pug and people have off days, maybe they flat out sucked, who knows.
I do find it funny though that people will survive trash and then start dying on the bosses. It was Siege and we were cruising through trash. That’s how you know when the dungeon is out of your control as a tank. People can start throwing on the bosses and the key is depleted before you know it, the tank is a bystander on most bosses.
I’d go bigger and say that the alt DPS surplus makes it egregiously worse.
Most people on their alts just play DPS specs, because they don’t know how to play the character that well. I bet a bunch of the DPS characters eating up valuable group spots are just peoples’ alts.
Then you honestly are only selectively paying attention to feedback that was provided. Tanks in DF, while probably fun for tanks which likely had a positive impact on total number of tanks around, had zero need for their teams going fairly deep up the difficulty scale of group content. It’s not healthy for the game when a tank who is appropriately geared or undergeared for the content they’re doing can pull every mob from one boss to the next onto that next boss and survive even if the rest of their team died/were locked out of the boss room. Yet that was fairly standard in DF, going all the way back to the first week of the expansion. I had many tanks that were 40 item levels below the gear that would drop from that difficulty pull like this with complete disregard for the rest of their group because they simply didn’t need their group.
The reason why tanks needed to be toned down has nothing to do with jealousy other roles feel toward them. It’s that they could reap the benefits of group content without any need for their group well before they overgear the content. And no role should be able to do this.
To be clear, I am not a big fan of tanks being unable to self-sustain for the average length of a pull. This turning every healer into a spot healing bot that a tank does rely on early into a pull play style is pretty miserable for all parties involved. But this should be accomplished by tank survivability having a shelf life for a pull. The healer can prolong that shelf life and the DPS simply allows you to kill the pack before that shelf life runs out, but the tank should be good to go on their own for slightly longer than the average time it should take to complete the pull. This way they have an incentive to pull such that their DPS and healer aren’t left behind that is self-serving, in addition to being in the best interest of the team.
I don’t agree with this statement, at least in a broad-sweeping general context. Healers are built in this game to have things they’re best at and things they’re weak at. If babysitting the tank is a requirement for a healer, that varied approach breaks down quickly because the floor for any healer has to have enough single-target healing to keep the tank standing, if they can’t do it on their own for the length of a standard pull. Follow those dominoes and that’s how you get resto druids whose HoTs serve little purpose of actually healing themselves, but instead whose primary function is to make our least efficient single target heal (that we can’t even get full value from when tank healing) stronger.
Like I said earlier in this response, a healer should be able to buy the tank some time to stay vertical longer in a pull as the tank’s own tools start to wane. But the tank should not be totally dependent on the healer at all times of a pull (save for during major cooldown use) for their own survival.
I mean this isn’t really all that unexpected with many dungeons. Most mechanics trash throws at the group are universal across most dungeons. If you’ve run dungeons enough at a difficulty where trash doesn’t fall over if you look at them funny, you may not know the artwork nuances or specific order trash is going to do things in a dungeon you’re less familiar with, but the swirly in dungeon 1 has similar counterplay as dungeon 2.
Whereas boss mechanics are more unique from dungeon to dungeon. Even when trash leading up to a boss gives you a preview of the mechanics, oftentimes those previews don’t include everything and the timings aren’t the same which creates new overlaps. You need to spend more time in that dungeon specifically to pick up the boss mechanics, whereas any time spent in any dungeon will help with most trash mechanics.
Siege in particularly is especially rough for boss mechanics. Three of the four bosses have a special rule set or intermission phase where at least one player needs to know how to counterplay, if not the whole team. If you have inexperienced folks in Siege at the key level you’re running, it’s not that surprising the boss would give you fits even if the trash was fine.
Place is laughable. If you don’t know the mechanics by now you’re just noob. Like running the dude into the bomb or you know, DPSing the adds that come out and don’t let 20 adds pile up, which you think would be a no brainer.
This was not my experience. I don’t know how good the tanks you were grouping with were, but I don’t remember being able to punch 40ilvls above my weight class in DF. And I think if that was as easy to achieve as you suggest, we would’ve seen an abundance of people queueing as tank in M+ for easy gearing.
In fact, in DF I will say tanking was still the hardest role. Certainly easier than DPS at least.
Well I would like to see the stats of how many players like playing tanks and don’t play it for hte sake of others compared to other specs be fore I am ok with saying get rid of tanks
I think indirectly this is a problem. But it’s less “people are bad and play DPS on the alts” issue and more of a “the game treats DPS as the default role, so unless people specifically play a character with the intent of tanking or healing, they will default to DPS”.
Like you have to go pretty out of your way to learn how to Tank or Heal, but as DPS you can just kinda wing it and the game lets you, no matter how bad you are at it.
Or just haven’t played Siege that much. Yeah if you were doing M+ during BFA you probably ran it enough that you know what to do. But for anyone who wasn’t playing then and/or focused on other things in game at that time, this could be the first time it’s come around.
How many bosses in WoW have a mechanic like the bomb? There are a few, but you probably don’t need more than one hand to count them all.
How many of those mechanics only select specific roles? That’s going to further reduce the amount of times some players have experienced the bomb mechanic, even when they run Siege.
Most of my Siege runs this season have killed the boss so quickly adds aren’t stacking up fast enough to threaten the tank or prevent the healer from keeping up with the group damage. Killing the adds is a waste when that’s the case.
Do not twist what I am saying, I am not suggesting the boss mechanics in Siege are some complicated things that can’t be learned quickly. Just that because people learn by repetition and having mechanics that are mostly unique (if not truly unique) to a single place means they only gain that repetition in that place. Elitist drivel aside, it makes perfect sense that the knowledge required to kill bosses in Siege would be collectively lower than the knowledge required to kill trash by virtue of this fact.
Perhaps I was just lucky enough to get tank gods in my random queues, but this was by far the norm in the dungeons I used to level alts and when I was doing my M0 world tour in the first 2 weeks before M+ opened. Even the tanks that didn’t go all the way from boss to boss, we were pulling the entire dungeon in 6 pulls or less, generally.
I don’t think we can make this association though because M+ does change things pretty significantly in a few ways.
The incoming damage scaling is steep enough that being so undergeared quickly becomes a death sentence pulling more than a few packs at a time.
The mob health scaling creates more of an incentive for a tank to pull in a way their DPS doesn’t get left behind, lest even pulls they can survive can take minutes longer. In lower tiered content the difference between having the DPS there or not is measured in seconds.
There is a lot more knowledge required to tank a M+ than any mode that lacks enemy forces and the timer. When I’m leveling any character that has a tank spec and no heal spec I’ll tank because it’s basically just hold W for the route, but I do not like the added responsibilities of routing in M+. That is likely to also drive tanks away from tanking in M+ even if they were unkillable in other content.
I don’t know if this post was strictly talking M+, and if it was, then I likely wouldn’t have responded. But since a lot of people’s perception of the game come from difficulties they play prior to M+ and M+ wasn’t specifically mentioned, I do think we need to consider that lower content.
M+ tanking actually worked out well in DF, I think. But that’s because the mode itself added the teeth required to keep appropriately geared and undergeared tanks from doing the kinds of absurd pulls that are commonplace in every other dungeon difficulty.
To be fair, tanks need to know how to route to optimize the run becuz THEY are the spear of the group.
Healers need to know where’s the pain points and where’s the overlaps and healing checks so they can prepare.
DPS need to plan WAY ahead of time AND also have a rough route in their head alongside tanks so dps CAN plan their CD.
It’s not as simple as ‘‘you pull i wack’’. All 3 points of the trinity have always required background knowledge to a certain deg in order to optimize their roles in addition to the basic requirement of skills and class base knowledge.
DPS should not ‘‘waiting’’ to see which pack the tank will huge pull, all 3 of them SHOULD ALREADY have some sort of educated guess where and how that pug tank is gonna be pulling and also prepping things like kicks and CC in order to help him group, as opposed to insta CDs. If the tank speaks up, great, if not, no big deal either.
Every role has it’s challenge, if the tank is not confident of a 5 pack, feel free to pull 3, this is where DPS mind their own businesses and dun pull extra for him. Healers will thank you for it even. Even when i am not the tank, i still make a mental point to take note of the healer’s mana from time to time becuz if the tank dun seem to be aware, i can at least help call out.
There’s alot of factor at making a run as smooth and successful as possible and make everyone feel like their time is worth it. It’s usually not as simply as A do X, B do Y etc then we forget about the rest after pack 2.