And we don’t even really need more classes, just change or add specs.
Like a BM hunter could be a tank spec. Assass rogue could be ranged with throwing skills and poisons, or even Sub as tank with dodge, parry and glancing blows instead of block and high armour like normal tanks. Disc priest could be a tank making their spells use lots of shield enhancing abilities on themselves.
Why? Why not, there are only 6 tanks, 5 healers and the melee to ranged ratio is way off and that alone means some melee classes just won’t get chosen over others, especially when most raid compositions favour more ranged and add in the M+ affixes favouring ranged, more melee classes means more can miss out.
People like doing dungeon and raids in one spec and pvp, open world in another. I wanted to play a rogue tank and assassin for pvp/open world but it doesn’t have a tanking spec so I just switched to DH. I’m sure people don’t want to switch what they wanna play and just continue playing dps even though they are interested in tanking.
Players have been saying “adding more tanking specs will fix the tank shortage” since Vanilla. All three new classes that have been added to the game can tank. Blizz has literally doubled the number of tanking classes and we still have the exact same shortage. Healers have viable DPS specs (and tanking specs) to encourage players to play them. Nothing has changed. Adding more classes/specs is not going to make a difference. There’s not even a real shortage of tanks or healers. The shortage is only in PUGs, and it’s a social issue that Blizzard has refused to address for years.
FWIW in the Preach interview Ion said he’s aware raids and M+ aren’t taking many melee and he wants to address that. Whether it actually gets fixed is a whole different matter.
I see it more in the way of people wanting to play tank on a class they actually like. Even if Blizzard adds monks, Dh, and DKS, it won’t make people want to try out tank because it’s not the class they have been playing and/or like playing. However if a rogue player gets a tanking spec, they would be more open to actually tanking because it’s already on a class they like playing instead of a different class that is not the same class fantasy.
I’ve said this in the past too, adding more tanks won’t help.
The issue we have is that tanking just isn’t that fun. Staring at a boss’ legs all fight isn’t particularly interesting.
Raids only require 2 tanks out of the 20 or so slots (sometimes even just 1 will do).
Aside from meme arenas and a couple of bgs (flags), usually tanks are less efficient at everything else in game (pvp, questing, etc.).
Then to top it all off - you would need to gear into tanking and Blizzard keeps putting arbitrary restrictions into spec swapping (AP, Azerite, Conduit energy, etc.).
Oh and let’s not forget M+, where the appropriate way to play is to basically tag mobs, then run like hell between cds.
So yeah a new tank class won’t change anything. They can add a tank spec to every class that currently doesn’t have one, and it won’t change anything.
If they had a hunter tanking spec I probably would be playing hunter right now.
But we also need more ranged specs because there just aren’t enough and if someone wants to play rogue, but can never find a group because you have a very low chance of getting in, than they can swap to ranged and still play the class they want.
It’s not always about the spec itself, it’s also got to do with the class and race and we need more class/race combos, it’s about time they added more.
Not entirely, the other week my guild had a handful of groups wanting to start keys, but none of us could find a tank. Sometimes it gets too much to always be the guy who is called on to tank because we don’t have enough.
It’s got more to do with classes and how the community treat certain ones. I’ve seen videos of players in the ‘wrong’ spec get kicked from groups, like frost mages, feral druids, fury warriors, prot warriors, and this is across all forms of the game, like being kicked from an LFG group to being accepted, than kicked from an M+ when they see your spec.
If tanks were viable in PvP, I bet we would have many more people playing tanks. Instead, tanks are punished for playing their specs outside of dungeons and raids. To add insult to injury, it is difficult to change specs and the gear can’t always be shared by specs. It requires a sacrifice to play a tank.
It’s similar for healers. If healers could do real damage so they could quest and defend themselves in PvP, many more people would heal. And note many healing weapons are completely useless to a dps spec.
DPS are viable in all aspects of the game. Tanks and healers are not. Either make tanks and healers viable in all parts of the game or make it super easy to swap specs.
When they changed SV Hunter to melee, I thought Assassination should have become a stealthy archer and roll the melee stuff into Subtlety. Seemed weird to have Pirate, Ninja and Ninja Lite. But I don’t main Rogue.
Its a monkey paw issue. The reason ranged classes are brought is because of uncapped AoE, so they’re likely to just nerf powerful AoE performers into the ground in lieu of throwing melee a buff or uncapping their AoE. Gotta be careful what you wish for with this company, everything comes with a price.
How exactly can the devs address the social issue?
It’s player made and has to be resolved by players. Any game with a role system will inevitably have have more dps players than anything else; mobas for instance have an almost instant queue for tanks and supports while core roles have to wait up to 10 mins for a game.
well my bm hunter is more mobile and can pull the same amount of dps if not double my 200 ilvl fury warrior thats sad, and the mechanics are alot easier to deal with as a hunter
In guild M+, we’re more short of heals than tanks. Healers all have PTSD from affixes like necrotic and grievous stacked on top of a baseline difficult season. There are players who are happy to tank if someone who knows the route is on discord telling them what to pull next, and what packs will need big mitigation cooldowns.
Would more tanking or healing specs work? Hard to be sure. You still have to have trinkets, legendary, and often different secondary stats to flip over to a tanking setup. Plus the practice at all the different abilities and learning how to handle packs of mobs. As far as clothies tanking, that’s a no from me. I think it’s weird enough that DH and monks tank in leather. lol
This isn’t a tanking and healing problem. This is because Blizzard refuses to balance wildly OP specs or address the issues with unjustified group kicks.