So honestly I don’t think I know enough about tanking to talk about how to improve upon it in depth, but I know one thing, I absolutely despise doing it. I could just be a horrible tank (likely, especially since I’m new to it) but man, I feel like quitting every time I do it. I think the main components for me are the fact you’re considered the sort of leader for the group, and thus there’s this pressure that you must always know what you’re doing at all times, so you feel you’re kind of not allowed to be new to dungeon or experience. I also hate tracking the mobs for %, it feels so weird and technical, lacking immersion.
When I dps or heal, I’m able to focus on the task I need to do which feels like a natural part of the gameplay experience. Dps? Kill stuff! Healer? Heal stuff! Tank? Hold aggro! Aaaand make sure you’re keeping track of routes and percentages because there’s some arbitrary meta god who won’t let you succeed until you do so. I also feel the whole percentage thing leads to these very specific mob pulls and routes everyone expects you to know and do. I’ve had many dps pull for me or tell me I gotta double pull some packs etc because we need %.
Idk man, it just sucks imo. Not sure if the tanking shortage thing is true, but I feel I can understand why from my experience because tanking just doesn’t feel fun imo. Less about being the big strong guy who protects the party, and more about being the technical mob tracker trying to hit his quota before the timer runs out. Then get yelled at by your coworkers for messing it all up.
So let me share why I stopped running M+, because I used to do it on my tanking alts.
Non-obvious routes. When it’s a pretty straightforward progression from start to finish, it’s easy enough. When you start running keys and need to remember what packs to skip, what packs to pull, how much % you need by X point because if you don’t have it, you have to run back 30 seconds after you kill the last boss, then it sucks.
Ever-changing dungeon lineup and affixes. Apparently this is something that people really love, but personally, it pisses me off. Every 6 months there’s a new set of dungeons to learn. Or re-learn, because when they bring back old dungeons, they don’t even leave them the same. Personally, I don’t want to have to put up with this crap. I don’t want to have to learn new mechanics in dungeons every 6 months, never mind all the new routes.
Cross-faction groups. Yeah, good for you, you couldn’t find a group before. Guess what, you still can’t now, except now I see 90 groups looking for a tank instead of 20. I want to run a same-faction group, and I don’t always want to have to put it together myself. But searching for same-faction groups is not an option.
Blizzard could probably fix all of these, but I’m in the minority here. I know there are people who love finding the route skips this pack for that one, people who get bored of running the same thing for an entire expansion (yet love it when a dungeon comes back?), and who swear that there just aren’t enough people on the same faction to play.
But they might be the hardcore ones, pushing keys to the limit. Maybe these changes are for them. But for the more casual players like me who only do them for tangible rewards? Yeah, screw it. Not worth my time. Besides, delves give pretty good gear.
I would change the players to be less rude to them, tanking in WoW is fine but if you are also tanking the party there’s just no motivation to protect these people (the job of tanking)
If all the dps were as adorable and stinky as Elmy here I would be tanking for them, I will protect you stinky babies
People have a tendency to overthink the whole route and percentage thing. On lower keys, you can just about hit ‘W’ and be fine. Most of the time, thinking about routes and percentages is more important on upper keys, like keys past 10 lol.
The real issue is pugging, randos are dumb. Find a group of people to run with and the comment about hitting ‘W’ becomes very real.
Tanking, mechanically, is fine. Tank Swaps in raids are a bit boring and forced most of the time, basically just an excuse to bring 2 tanks instead of 1. Dungeons are fine as they’re more active in general for the tank. Active Mitigation class rotations are fine. Damage intake is reasonable. Self Sustain is reasonable. All fine.
But yeah, the M+ routing stuff is annoying. Last time I spent a lot of time on a tank (S1 Shadowlands - our Raid Tank quit so I switched from Rogue early on to cover), I basically just casually ran some dungeons and ended up with a workable route (not from a guide) for like 4 of the 8 dungeons. And then I just ignored those other 4 the rest of the season because I was going in for gear anyway, not KSM/H.
You can kinda get away with passively learning common routes by maining DPS first and then switching to Tank a month deep, but that’s awkward.
I’d almost rather dungeons just become slightly more linear and require all trash be killed. Not even really linear, it’s fine to be able to choose your boss order or whatever, but the space between them and their associated trash doesn’t need 5 packs that people will just weave around and never pull. Just don’t put those in to begin with. Keep the Trash % Meter as a visual reference of progress, but “kill everything” will be 100%.
“Go open a literal pull map on your 2nd monitor” or “download an addon to analyze percentages” should not be a part of a tank preparing to do a dungeon. Ever. And it’s ridiculous that it ever came to that.
I get why it happened. But the solution needs to be at an earlier stage of design, not this tacked on “you have to kill this many mobs” thing.
This would cut out the idiotic “ok jump against this wall until you stick to it then jump again to clear it so we can skip this one pull of 2 mobs – doesn’t matter that it’s going to take the Rogue 2 minutes to figure it out just do it because if we skip that pack we can end at 100% instead of going over and ending on 102%” crap we keep seeing.
Improved taunt swapping tools and remove taunt immunity
Give tanks vengeance damage back, let it decay slowly over a minute to encourage intelligent swapping for more overall damage. Balance to be 75% of an equally skilled dps at least.
Enable a ghost of your past run or a bnet friends run in a dungeon. Basically just a visual marker for your path. Let it replay if it goes too far away.
Lean more into movement skills for tanks and skills to force group mobs. It doesnt have to be up every pull, but some could really use it.
Improve the base ui for seeing mob casting and being able to target what you need.
Have a customer support staff well equipped to manually review reports and takes sabotagers and ragers seriously.
Ultimately this is the core issue. You can’t really avoid being the leader as a tank, because it’s SO MUCH HARDER to tank when you’re not the one actively making decisions about what to pull based on the tools you’ve got at your disposal.
Like the easiest way for a pull to turn to crap is for a DPS or Healer to pull something I didn’t explicitly ask them to pull.
TBH “routes” as a whole are overrated. You can W through every key this season. There’s nothing that overly punishes you for missing % like dungeons like Sanguine Depths did where you’d have to backtrack through half the dungeon if you missed some mobs.
IMO the biggest problem with tanks is that they are just a worse form of DPS (the gameplay feels like a less squish dps).
For me the best fix is to give tanks more control over the mobs at cost of damage.( like 3x the ammount of cc tanks have now at a cost of 30% less dmg.)
If tanks coud easly and actually solo control mobs it would be a different playstile enough to make it feel fun.
I personally think that tank abilities should be almost exclusively focused on mob management and not damage. Their job should be to make sure that the mobs are paying attention to them. If they start casting something that’s threatening the other group members then they should be able to interrupt that cast. Their DPS shouldn’t even be a consideration. The best tanks in dungeons would have extremely high Damage Taken Per Second and it should show how they’re capable of handling and juggling a larger numbers of enemies at once than a worse tank.
They should easily be able to pull mobs to them, knock them away, taunt them, bash them, silence them, stun them, and have an extremely hefty armor so their concern should be solely focused on their pack of enemies.
It should actually be a fairly low APM playstyle, though they could allow certain classes to have a bit more for people who like to feel busy with their fingers.
Right now they’re too much like DPS for my liking, especially since their aggro depends on their damage instead of active taunting abilities.
It’s tough because fundamentally tanks will always be responsible for leading the group as they are the ones making the pulls, and setting the tone/speed of the dungeon. Which means they are also the ones setting the route and needing that route to be efficient to give the group the best chance of success.
That alone means that tanking will always have more pressure on it than the other roles, and be the most open to receiving criticism. You have casuals who hate the “MDI style pulling” that tanks do and will be vocal about it, but then next key that tank could have a 3k+ player on an alt flaming them for not doing the “standard route” or pulls that are being done in 13+ level keys.
You also have the added pressure as a tank where if you die, it’s a wipe. Whereas if a healer or dps die the pull can still be salvaged and they can run back. As a tank dying your team either gets picked off and one shot, or you make it back to the pull with 0 aggro of anything and chain feed deaths.
I don’t think there are changes that can be made that change the reality of any of this. I think the core issue with tanking is you have too many backseat tanks amongst the community who love to give their input every chance they get, but don’t want to hop onto a tank and actually perform the role themselves
Low end, you can’t exactly die, so it feels like whatever buttons you push doesn’t really matter.
The only real impact is routing.
And I suppose tanking can become fun in harder content, but it feels like that’s going to be way too low of a bar to hit, then you’re left planning routes for efficiency rather than trying to live.
What abilities I use doesn’t really matter, and there’s no drive to seek perfection.
Routes are limited by party’s ability to live rather than tanks.
Think reworking/balancing tank utility would be a good start. Theres already a back and forth between magic and physical damage heavy seasons, or if they really mess things kiting efficency, so having the uneven utility with aoe interrupts, aoe stuns, group defensives or heals ontop of that leaves some tanks just feeling like absolute crap to play at times.
Going back and figuring out what every tank needs baseline in the control or group support areas to be desirable in keys and then giving them flavour utility on top of that would be good.
You try that on a tank who has the same awareness as a the average DPS and you’re just asking to wipe.
If you require high coordination from the group for the tank not to “lead”, you still don’t really avoid the situation of tanks needing to lead simply because tanks doing so lowers the coordination burden significantly.
People ask Tanks to lead for the same reason they ask Hunters to do mechanics. It’s just easier for them. Not impossible for others, but a lot easier.
Pointing in a general direction isnt what id consider “high” coordination. Ive come back to new dungeons and new raids and openly said “first time in here if someone would be so kind to lead the way”, and it worked out just fine
Because theyre usually the first ones to engage with mobs. Being in front doesnt always mean “leading”
10 years ago we could make an argument for it, but theres been so many QoL changes and addons (mdt shows you where to go and what to pull and in what order. Just follow along) that this whole “leading” thing has kind of lost its actual meaning.
Someone “learning” to tank, coming from a DPS, doesnt need to learn “routes”. Theyve probably done those routes hundreds of times already.
Again, this doesnt actually have anything to do with the functions of “tanking”
I feel like tanking is generally in a great spot (from an m+ perspective). Some nice qol changes would be:
Every tank has a 90 sec cd aoe taunt.
Every tank has a 90 sec cd aoe interrupt (that isn’t delayed like sigil of silence).
Every tank has a way to generate resources out of combat (like prot paladins hammers for holy power). This would fix the annoyance of juggling establishing threat whilst establishing active mitigation to survive.
Every tank deals 20% more damage. Let me outperform the bad DPS, it’s a fun mini-game.
Other than that I think tanks are in a good spot, they feel nice to play.
Edit:
More upfront soft-capped would be nice with tanks. I love Warriors for they can start blasting right out of the gate, allows the pug DPS who can’t chill for 3 seconds to start blasting as soon as I reach a pack. Druid, VDH and Blood DK feels like they’re a bit more prone to losing threat when DPS are impatient