Playing as a tank you have much greater responsibility. You literally are the unspoken leader, and more rests on your shoulders than any other individual player in the group.
I think that added responsibility and difficulty should come with more payoff.
But it feels like Blizzard doesn’t take that into account when they “balance” the classes.
The main reason people who’d normally like to play a tank and take on that extra responsibility don’t play tanks is because it’s extremely boring with how little damage it does. You take twice as long to do solo content because you’re just smacking the enemies with your low damage attacks, especially single target.
This is mostly because Blizzard is obsessed with making every class exactly perfectly equal to each other. Tanks have high survivability? Better nerf their damage into the ground!!
If you increased the damage of tanks significantly it would not make DPS players irrelevant. I’m not saying tanks should do more damage or even perfectly equal damage to DPS, but you should be able to compete on the damage meter as a tank who knows what they’re doing and has their rotation mastered.
Most people still won’t want the responsibility or extra stress that comes with tanking, but far more people will play it than they do currently, because currently the people who are willing to take on the extra responsibility and stress aren’t willing to do it because it’s perceived as boring. And they’re right, it IS boring.
The majority of pugs are desperate for a tank, tanks are the main thing most guilds are looking for. There’s an obvious shortage, and Blizzard instead of doing something about it just offers little rewards for Heroic dungeons and raid finder as if that’s going to make people want to play Tank. (Hint: it doesn’t, not even for that lower end content, let alone higher end stuff without extra rewards for tanks)
Disingenuous people will say “oh people just don’t play tanks because of the abuse they suffer in pugs!!”
Excuse me, have you played WoW before? EVERY role receives abuse in pugs.
And besides that M+ and raiding guilds where you play with your friends in a better environment than a pug are STILL short on tanks.
As tank I don’t buy that excuse whatsoever, it’s not my experience at all and you have so much leverage in a pug as a tank (because there’s so few tanks) anyone who gives you crap is more likely to get kicked than you are, so it’s really not an issue whatsoever.
TL;DR: The damage of tanks needs to be increased yesterday, it’s a good thing for the entire community, and it will drastically reduce the shortage of tanks in pugs and group content.
