It has just gotten boring and mundane. But on top of that there’s no consistency across the tanking diaspora - if Blizzard truly cared about buoying the number of hours players play a tank, they should make it very comfortable (but not too comfortable) to play
but as it stands, it only seems a couple of specs are in the sweet spot…and this goes back to my main point in that you can only rotate the flavor of the month so many times across 6 tanking specs.
And what do I mean by that? Prot Pali and Prot war feel just right: outstanding mitigation that is due armor and shields (baked in) while all the other specs, except Brewmaster, rely on some tomfoolery for mitigation or heavy amounts of self-healing. If we’re being honest with ourselves (looking across the evolution of the tank meta in WoW’s history), the shield-wielding tanks always had a baked-in mitigation advantage, irrespective of ilvl, and it always felt good.
So what options does the dev team have? Well, they could just give every other non-shield wielding the same passive that scaled their armor or stamina - but they did that before and it didn’t work out.
Or… or…
They could go the route of forcing themselves to really care about balancing tanks (and well for that matter healers) by introducing several new tanking specs and/or classes that would force them to deal with this disparagement - in the same way they introduced Augmentation Evoker to deal with the fact that at the time before Aug they couldn’t really accurately report the DPS increase a priest should have seen via giving another DPS power infusion.
I don’t even have ideas on these tank specs, because I’m sure the dev team can do a much better job at creating the ideas that form them than I can. I’m merely saying: force yourselves into that same position on tanking, tanks, and player-tank-engagement by adding several new tank specs to the game.
I’m confused what the problem is. Is it that only the shield tanks feel good to play?
It seems like that’s more a matter of preference. Paladin feels good to me, but Warrior doesn’t. DK feels good to me too. I like tanks that rely on self-heals.
Tanks have been the lowest played role since the game came out for one simple reason: They have the most personal responsibility in grouped content, and the majority of players do not want that responsibility when playing a video game.
If you screw up, you’re dead, and the rest of the group is dead as well. In a dungeon, a dps can die and there’s two others to pick up the slack. If a healer dies, the tank and dps can chain defensives to get through the pull. If a tank dies, the pull is toast unless an immediate brez and recovery happens and even then still sometimes doesn’t work.
Tanks are the fundamental leader of the group. I tanked from vanilla to wotlk, raids and dungeons. Loved it. Quit for a while, came back in BFA and with the addition of M+, I don’t want the pressure of leading a group like that any more, so I don’t play tank.
The easiest way to get more people to tank M+ is to remove mob % and make every dungeon linear. However that’s a double edged sword, because then you’re also removing the ability for people to customize their routes and create new strategies or adjust things on the fly, and that removes one of the things people find fun about M+. It’s cool to see new routes and strategies develop throughout a season, it keeps the dungeons interesting. It would get incredibly boring if every dungeon were the exact same every single time.
TBH the baseline “tankiness” of Tanks are all roughly similar. Every Tank has had their time in the sun (even Brewmaster!) with most of Dragonflight being dominated by VDHs.
The tank gap mostly boils down to other stuff, like damage or utility with Paladins this season being the kings of both.
Adding more tanks doesn’t really solve the issue. You’d still end up with Brewmasters being the gods of pure physical mitigation, or Blood being the “tankiest” overall when situations need raw mitigation.
All adding more tanks does is give more toys for existing tank players to play with. Which I’m not opposed to TBH, but every class added to the game has added more tank specs (except Evoker) and Tanks are still “rare”.