Countless posts analyze this question, including some from me. They are all wrong as they try to give some sort of social explanation like "responsibility" (or the non-reason "itz no fun lol"). It is wrong, especially in the dancy raids of today. The flyer on Alysrazor or the driver of Rhyolith is no less wipes the raid with fail. Actually everyone can wipe the raid with fail.
The "25-man raids only need 2-3 tanks, not 5" is also a bad example. At first most people don't raid 25. Secondly, if it would be the problem, Blizzard would already fixed it by forcing 25-raids to have 5 tanks by a 20 second cast, 80 seconds duration "you must not tank" debuff.
The problem is completely in game-design, and can be easily fixed. The first design problem is indeed the "you must not tank" debuff. It's a well-known mechanic forcing using more than one tank. One tank can't tank Occu'thar because he get searing shadows debuff that increases shadow damage taken, rendering him one-shottable. This is a terrible design because it does not create tank spots. It creates a spot for a rage-starved damage dealer in tank spec and gear. Because that's what the tanks do half in their time. Would you like bosses throw -50% damage done stacking debuffs to damage dealers forcing them to spend half of the fight off-healing (with bandages for rogues)?!
To make people like tanking, we must allow them to tank instead of doing pitiful damage half time. There is a mechanic for it, used by Marrowgar, Patchwerk, Gruul and others: multiple tanks are needed front of the boss and his damage is distributed between them. However it alone wouldn't fix the problem or would be introduced already. With this system, the second (third, fourth, fifth) tank are merely used to avoid the first tank to be one-shotted and to allow healers use economic group-heals instead of single-target heals. The tanks themselves are not needed to do anything better, they are merely needed to exist. You can offtank Marrowgar while AFK-autofollow on the main tank.
Let's see why there are no tanking meters at all? What do the tanks do? Mitigate damage. One could easily create a "mitigate meter" that calculate how much less damage the tank got compared to a plate DD. The more they mitigate, the less healers have to heal. So this value can be considered healing, could be merged to healing meters. This case adding a new tank would allow the group to have less healers. Until the optimum point (5 tanks, 5 healers in 25-men), adding one more tank would give more healing/mitigation than adding a healer. Also, tanks could compete on the meters if the bosses would attack them evenly. The 500% threat mechanic made aggro irrelevant anyway, could be completely removed from the game, replaced with a spec-given "tank aura": the single-target attacks hit randomly one of those with tank aura (with some Magmaw-like mechanics against kiting), the cleaves hit every tank (or everyone in frontal cone) equally. Since all tanks would get the same incoming damage, they would be differentiated by mitigation. A better tank would mitigate more, climbing higher on the meters.
The problem with this is that mitigation is percentage-based and the incoming damage is much higher than player DPS/HPS. That's why there are multiple healers on a tank. A 10% undergeared/underperforming tank need all healers to do 10% more, while a 10% underperforming DD need just one DD to do 10% more (or all other 4/15 DDs to do 2.5/0.7% more) to carry him. This would be very unwelcoming to new tanks and trivializing to overgearing ones. A single overgeared tank could carry a whole raid. They handled this with diminishing returns. A seriously undergeared tank mitigates only a little less than the normal, and the overgearing mitigate only a little more, making gear and skill progress invisible and irrelevant to tanks.
The solution would be a fix-value mitigation system. I mean avoidance would be talent-given and equal to all tanks, a naked tank would avoid the same as the top geared. No gear or skill gives more avoidance. Armor value would take X fix value from every physical hits (so 10K from both a 20K and a 100K attack), and using skills would create absorb shields modified by stats that also absorbs all damage until a fixed value. This absorption-mitigation model could be normalized with heal and damage, so his "mitigation per second" would be half of the HPS of an equally geared and skilled healer while also doing 50% of the DPS of an equally geared and skilled DD. This would prevent both tank stacking and understacking: Until mitigation optimum it's preferred to bring one more tank than 1/2 healer + 1/2 DD as he does the same damage and healing, while can be healed with group and smart heals increasing the efficiency of healers. After the optimum a new tank would mean that all tanks receive sub-optimal part of the damage, so they start going rage-starved and their damage drops. Seriously over the optimum they would start to "overmitigate", their shields would expire unused.
With this model tanks could tank all the fight, they would show up on the meters and could compete with the other roles, being able to be proud of their performance.
The "25-man raids only need 2-3 tanks, not 5" is also a bad example. At first most people don't raid 25. Secondly, if it would be the problem, Blizzard would already fixed it by forcing 25-raids to have 5 tanks by a 20 second cast, 80 seconds duration "you must not tank" debuff.
The problem is completely in game-design, and can be easily fixed. The first design problem is indeed the "you must not tank" debuff. It's a well-known mechanic forcing using more than one tank. One tank can't tank Occu'thar because he get searing shadows debuff that increases shadow damage taken, rendering him one-shottable. This is a terrible design because it does not create tank spots. It creates a spot for a rage-starved damage dealer in tank spec and gear. Because that's what the tanks do half in their time. Would you like bosses throw -50% damage done stacking debuffs to damage dealers forcing them to spend half of the fight off-healing (with bandages for rogues)?!
To make people like tanking, we must allow them to tank instead of doing pitiful damage half time. There is a mechanic for it, used by Marrowgar, Patchwerk, Gruul and others: multiple tanks are needed front of the boss and his damage is distributed between them. However it alone wouldn't fix the problem or would be introduced already. With this system, the second (third, fourth, fifth) tank are merely used to avoid the first tank to be one-shotted and to allow healers use economic group-heals instead of single-target heals. The tanks themselves are not needed to do anything better, they are merely needed to exist. You can offtank Marrowgar while AFK-autofollow on the main tank.
Let's see why there are no tanking meters at all? What do the tanks do? Mitigate damage. One could easily create a "mitigate meter" that calculate how much less damage the tank got compared to a plate DD. The more they mitigate, the less healers have to heal. So this value can be considered healing, could be merged to healing meters. This case adding a new tank would allow the group to have less healers. Until the optimum point (5 tanks, 5 healers in 25-men), adding one more tank would give more healing/mitigation than adding a healer. Also, tanks could compete on the meters if the bosses would attack them evenly. The 500% threat mechanic made aggro irrelevant anyway, could be completely removed from the game, replaced with a spec-given "tank aura": the single-target attacks hit randomly one of those with tank aura (with some Magmaw-like mechanics against kiting), the cleaves hit every tank (or everyone in frontal cone) equally. Since all tanks would get the same incoming damage, they would be differentiated by mitigation. A better tank would mitigate more, climbing higher on the meters.
The problem with this is that mitigation is percentage-based and the incoming damage is much higher than player DPS/HPS. That's why there are multiple healers on a tank. A 10% undergeared/underperforming tank need all healers to do 10% more, while a 10% underperforming DD need just one DD to do 10% more (or all other 4/15 DDs to do 2.5/0.7% more) to carry him. This would be very unwelcoming to new tanks and trivializing to overgearing ones. A single overgeared tank could carry a whole raid. They handled this with diminishing returns. A seriously undergeared tank mitigates only a little less than the normal, and the overgearing mitigate only a little more, making gear and skill progress invisible and irrelevant to tanks.
The solution would be a fix-value mitigation system. I mean avoidance would be talent-given and equal to all tanks, a naked tank would avoid the same as the top geared. No gear or skill gives more avoidance. Armor value would take X fix value from every physical hits (so 10K from both a 20K and a 100K attack), and using skills would create absorb shields modified by stats that also absorbs all damage until a fixed value. This absorption-mitigation model could be normalized with heal and damage, so his "mitigation per second" would be half of the HPS of an equally geared and skilled healer while also doing 50% of the DPS of an equally geared and skilled DD. This would prevent both tank stacking and understacking: Until mitigation optimum it's preferred to bring one more tank than 1/2 healer + 1/2 DD as he does the same damage and healing, while can be healed with group and smart heals increasing the efficiency of healers. After the optimum a new tank would mean that all tanks receive sub-optimal part of the damage, so they start going rage-starved and their damage drops. Seriously over the optimum they would start to "overmitigate", their shields would expire unused.
With this model tanks could tank all the fight, they would show up on the meters and could compete with the other roles, being able to be proud of their performance.
33 comments:
Obviously I don't speak for everyone, but the reason I quit tanking is certainly the sense of responsibility.
Not on raid bosses -- I always rather enjoyed that part. No, it's trash and especially 5-man dungeon runs, where the tank is expected to know how everything goes and lead and pace the whole run. That's what I don't want to deal with.
You're completely misinterpreting the situation. There isn't a lack of tanks for raiding. Generally, unless you've got a particularly bad rep as a raid leader, it's a simple task for a pug raid to fill its tanking slots. Because of this, pointing out non tanking positions of authority in raid encounters is moot.
There is a tanking shortage in 5 mans. This is because there are more people doing five mans, but not significantly more tanks. This is mainly due to the responsibility that is placed on tanks in 5 mans. While DPS occupy positions of responsibility in raids, there is only two encounters where the minor failure of a non tank entity can wipe the group. That's Corla and Foe Reaper. Outside of those two encounters, there's more than 30 encounters where the DPS can AFK auto attack their way to victory, and only a couple others where a well geared tank can make even the most incompetant healer look like gold. People in LFD treat it as a naturally transient activity, and shun responsibility.
You want to get more tanks into the LFD pool? Either continue bribing them with increasingly valuable items, or reduce the responsibility a tank bears in 5 mans.
You forgot one of the reasons most socials play DD though. They like big numbers to show off to their friends how good they are. That's one of the core reasons why DPS addons have the spam function. But under your new method, socials still wouldn't want to tank, they would only be doing 50% of their friends numbers which is nothing to show off. It would still only be the people who want to do the job doing it.
@Korsic:
Having a "damage mitigated" meter would definitely be a step in the right direction if our goal is to get more 5man tanks.
In fact, using that, we could make an epeen meter that checks each players role, and displayes Damage Done for DPS, Healing Done + Absorbs + Damage Mitigated (to account for things like Power Word: Barrier) for Healers, and Damage Done + Damage Mitigated for Tanks.
All of this could be done by 3rd party addon developers, and I think would make a noticeable increase in the 5man tank population.
Actually, the problem is that tanking is completely disconnected from all normal gameplay, and its rewards are non-transferable.
If I DPS in a raid and get a sweet gear drop, I can immediately turn around and use that gear while questing, in group content, or even PvP. Tank gear? Only useful in group PvE. There was a brief period when Prot warriors/paladins were actually on par (or better!) than their DPS counterparts in PvP, but that was eventually nerfed to the ground (although Blood DKs are still pretty ridiculous).
I know many RBG strategies can use tanks in tank specs, but most of the time they are in PvP gear; changing specs is easy, whereas grinding high-level PvP gear wearing just crafted pieces is hard (compared to grinding while blowing people up with PvE gear).
In any case, the social reasons are not to be hand-waved away. Especially when your own end goal is for tanks to "be proud" of their performance.
I'd go one step further, there is no tanking shortage. There is a shortage of tanks willing to PUG.
I'll tank anytime I'm available for the guild and people I know. I'll only tank for PUGs if I really need the points or orbs (or if CtA is up and it's a 'normal heroic' for the quick extra gold).
As a Tank i have to admit, this is the dumbest solution for tank shortage i have ever read. The "you must not tank" debuff" is not a problem, it's a good solution for employing more then one tank. The 500% threat mechanic didn't made aggro irrelevant it made the aggro of the DD's irrelevant. On Bosses like Ragnaros we play the game get the Aggro back without taunting.
(Short Mechanic: when tanking you get Burning Wound Stacks. Each Stacks does Damage and also increases Damage done. After four or five Stacks you have to watch your Aggro after the other tank taunts the Boss)
And as other already have said, the problem is not the number of tanks for raids. I play since classic (with a few breaks because of RL) and there was never a shortage of tanks for raids. One a Raid you have multiple tanks and healer. So everyone can take a break at least while doing trash. In a 5-man-party a DD could go afk and, at least at the current dungeon difficultiy you could kill every Boss. When the Tank or the Healer goes AFK you have problems with trash. Dying is the same problem. A DPS dies on Akil'zon because he is not in range for the Electrical Storm. No problem, maybe the fight take a little bit longer, but you will kill him. When the tank or the healer dies, and the boss is not under 10% to 6%, then the party will wipe.
5 mans shouldnt need tanks. the mists of my memory remember vanilla doing BRD runs with 5 DPS.
then again a BWD geared lock mate used to solo incendius to get FR gear for newbie 60s gearing up for MC. so perhaps it wasnt tuned for lvl 60s.
There's no shortage of tanks for guilds.
There's a shortage of tanks for PuGs. I wonder why THAT happens, no really.
As a tank who prowled high and low, very few guilds are specifically looking for tanks, and those who do, expressly demand that the tank is competent in either DPS or healing too.
The shortage is perceived as such because in a PuG, a solid tank is solid gold, while tanks that are bad aren't even perceived as tanks (and are perceived as WTF NOOB /kick).
While solid DPS is good to have, but bad DpS are perceived as poor guy who needs help. I need not remind you the bleeding heart syndrome going around on the forums when DpS are kicked for doing under 10K DpS in dungeons, while no one cries over tanks getting kicked over the first mispull. Despite the fact that a dungeon-length sub-10K dps can lengthen the dungeon significantly, while a wipe recovery should be 2-3 minutes at most.
You were closer to the truth with your previous articles. This one just seems arcane and off-putting. Granted, I'm already a tank, but I wouldn't exactly care whether I do more mitigation than the next tank, or more DpS or whatever.
There is no tank shortage in raids because there is disproportionally low tank spots in a raid. Not enough tanks in 5-mans is a problem and Blizzard is trying to fix it.
As the above commenters pointed out, the tank shortage rears its ugly head mostly in 5-mans.
Fortunately, MoP offers a two-pronged solution to this problem. New heroics will be responsibility-free AoE fests, and challenge modes will reward tanks for playing well (if you can mitigate or avoid damage, you can pull more and finish the instance faster, earning higher score).
It's not just any 5-mans though. It's heroics most of all and 85 normals to a lesser degree. The leveling LFD queues are pretty fast (at least on my battlegroup) and tanking them is much less stressful than tanking pugs at the level cap. Any analysis of tanking motivations has to explain why tanks quit pugging at the level cap. Lack of meters doesn't really cover it.
Grumpy had some good comments about this yesterday.
I don't give a damn about the responsibility of being a tank. I do care about the assholes in LFD, tho - or, rather, I don't care for them. Which is why I will tank raid and will tank heroics when I have a guild group, but will only queue a random heroic as DPS.
I honestly can't think of what they could do to make me want to tank for a random LFD group.
I haven't tanked outside of a guild group for 6+ months. I haven't run an instance as a tank for 3+ months. I only tank with guild an in Raids.
I'm my guild's second tank, GM being the main tank. We only run FL content with 2 tanks apart from Staghelm where I get to go DPS.
Why don't I tank outside of raids? Because I don't need to. Why would I put up with brain-dead window-lickers in a LFG pug? Why would I waste my time when the rewards are non-existant for 5-mans?
I like your idea. The synergy between the healer and tank will be more homogenic. But the solution you present would remove on of three types of gameplay. Tanking and 'dd' would pretty much have the same mechanics. Aggro, even though nerfed into the ground, gives tanking another aspect of gameplay than dd.
As someone else said, there is no tank shortage in raiding. Don’t believe me? Roll a fresh ding tank outside of your guild and try to get anywhere.
I have multiple tanks and they sit in the AH as bank alts. There is absolutely no chance of getting them into a decent raid guild. Granted not all guilds are 25 man but even in the 10 man guilds the spots are sewn up by officers and GM’s and without raid gear no one will recruit you aside from those guilds that even if you were desperate you would never want to join.
In contrast as a healer I can easily join a decent raid team in my welfare VP gear earned from 5 mans.
Sure you struggle to get tanks for FL trash runs or BH but that is because the active tanks don’t need to do it.
The shortage is limited only to dungeon finder five mans and the reasons for that are obvious.
Unlike DPS the tanks are not permitted to skip grinding normal dungeons and jump straight to troll dungeons in PVP gear. Instead they must over-gear even the regular heroics before tanking. That means grinding normals and buying BOE/crafted items. That is hardly a worthwhile investment for a toon that will never get a raid spot? Too much effort for too little reward…
Also unlike the DPS the tank is expected to spend hours studying videos and learning the tactics. I saw someone mention on the WoW forums just yesterday an interesting point about this: you can watch boss tactic videos but there is very little teaching you the basic route through the dungeons, the correct techniques to pull certain tricky trash packs, which trash mobs needs to be CC’d etc. You could learn that with practise but sadly you will be kicked before you get chance to learn.
Imagine tanking ZA/ZG for the first time? Unless you spend hours watching full-clear videos on youtube and you have a Cyborg-like memory you wouldn’t even have a clue as to where you are going let alone which trash to skip, how to handle the trickier trash pulls and how to avoid pats. The people that would kick you wouldn’t know any of this either (M&S DPS who can’t nuke a scout) but hell they would kick you anyway because technically speaking the wipes were YOUR fault because you have all the responsibility whilst they follow like drones.
Again why make the investment in memorising all this and taking the weight on your shoulders when you won't even get to raid at the end of it?!
Lets be honest here, tanking raids is a lot easier than tanking 5 mans.
Gevlon, now you're just reaching on the old fallback positions of those who don't have the right facts. There's not a lack of tanks in raids because raids require fewer tanks proportionately? This isn't BC anymore.
The overwhelming majority of raiding is done at the ten man level. There's less than 5k active 25 man guilds, and 25 man pugs are non existant. There's over 36k ten man guilds and virtually every pug raid is run in 10 man mode.
In a five man the group is 20% tank, 20% healers, 60% DPS. In the average ten man raid, the group is 20% tanks, 30% healers, and 50% DPS. The ratio actually calls for fewer DPS per tank than it does in five mans. By that expectation, there should be too many tanks in five mans if that was actually the issue.
And once again, the difficulty of raid encounters has nothing to do with the LFD pool. You cannot look me in the eye and tell me that DPS have it just as hard on tanks in encounters like Karsh Steelbender because Alysrazor is difficult. That's like saying the sky is blue because the moon has no atmosphere. It's two completely different bodies.
The problem with tanking is that its mostly a snoozefest where adding additional effort does nothing to help beat the boss.
I've tanked since ICC and am trying to switch to DPS now just because tanking is fucking boring.
I call it the Baleroc syndrome because Baleroc is the epitome of this, but almost every boss since forever is guilty in some way. Tanking is just standing there and doing some amount of threat. Any amount is enough and was even before the 500% change. If you try really hard to do optimal threat... good job! You now have 5 times the threat of the highest DD, instead of just 3 times! Sometimes you have to step this way or that, or switch-tank, but that's mostly it.
There are good examples though. Like Putricide abomination, Atramedes adds, Shannox HC, Alys`razor are all fun to tank. Make more fights that require the tank to do something and there will be more tanks.
This applies to 5mans as well. Almost all 5 man fights are guilty of the Baleroc syndrome (the heated-armor boss of Blackrock is the only counter-example I can think of).
I have levelled all tanking classes BECAUSE I tank in 5-mans. NO qeues, I can run in, greed/need DPS/tank gear go out and keep questing.
The current system of having all the quests inside the instance (Horrible design) makes going inside a good XP boost.
As for raids... IF the design is still ppl will raid and not talk/plan/interact at all then by all means tank&Spank + fire on the floor.
If raiding means planning and communication: Adds, Forced CD use to make switches mandatory, more than 1 mob on a boss. Stuff liek that.
This seems to me it's the Blood DK tanking style, which strikes me as being the most fun, challenging and controllable out of the 4 tanking classes.
They did announce "changes" in the way the Paladin and Warrior works by moving to an active mitigation model. Frankly as a tank, I am getting bored or annoyed running 5 mans, depending on the group. The real interesting stuff comes up in the raids, were you have tank switches, adds needed picking up and positioning games.
I'm a fan of the blood dk active mitigation playstyle, and I'd like to see it added to other classes in such a that you'll have fun playing, be challenged and really worry about missing a timely crusader strike (right now you can basically eat a sandwich while tanking)
Give the fun and challenge back to the tanking classes!
The problem with tanking is that its mostly a snoozefest where adding additional effort does nothing to help beat the boss.
I couldn't agree more. I was extremelty unhappy when I fulfilled myself the dream to become one of the main tanks in our guild in cata, because you could do nothing to make a bossfight successful.
Tier 11 boss fights were mostly standing somewhere, waiting for the rest of the raid to make no mistakes.
There is no tank shortage, there is "serious" tank shortage in 5mans.
The reason is simple: good tanks are in a guild and either do 5mans with guildmates or don't do them anymore after they outgear the drops and have less need for Valors (being capped or almost capped just with raids).
In 5mans you end up with tanks which are either offspecs, alts or not in a raiding guild and only very rarely with a "serious" tank. You tend to end up with subpar damage dealers and healers for the same reason.
I like to tank on raid bosses... But I hate tanking in 5mans, and (main tanking) on raid trash packs. Why? Well first I dont like to go ahead. Second, as a tank I have to pay 100% attention from the first pull, till the last. Dps and even healers can slack a bit, just the mobs will die slower, or the tank have to use some cd. What makes it worse that overgearing doesnt make the tanks job easier, ot only helps the healer! You have to pay the same amount of attension in 346 gear in zazg then in 380+ gear. Aggro doesnt matter, and more gear makes you only more easy to heal, not more easy to tank (active mitigation could help this).
Of course if im fresh and all ( on weekend morning for eg) this much attention is not a proplem, but after 8 hour work when you want to do just a "daily hc"... well i dont really want it. And i think many people feel the same.
In 5-mans I quit tanking because it was all GOGOGOGOGO fuck you tank we died... GOGOGOGOGO... this could be my fault I agree...
I think if I put more effort in and could read logs and figure out WHY we failed.. was it something I did, did the healer suck, was my mitigation too low, did the DPS fuck everything up... then I might have felt better about tanking because I could say "No, the dps did not interrupt X or the DPS pulled Y".
Obviously something that takes more effort to learn, and that you are going to be yelled at if you do one thing wrong is going to attract less people. If you have less tanks in the early dungeons then you have less of a pool available for raiding also.
I think Blizz is trying to "make up" for the tank shortage with those PVE Scenario things.
"They will scale with player level, so that high level players can go back and complete any PVE scenarios that might’ve missed. Because they’re designed to be casual, there will be no role requirements in the tool that you queue up with, and the devs said that it’s designed to be short enough that you can complete one while waiting for your dugneon/battleground queue to pop.
As a part of their plan to let players progress through whatever content they want to play, these will reward Valor Points (the currency used to purchase high-level gear)."
hey, no more tanks needed for the average player.. the raiders will be the only ones needing tanks after this...
I have read your posts about changing parts of the game and I must say that it looks like it would a game i would never play for any lenght of time due to how boring it would be, as someone pointed out even in raids there are fights i would rather skip, being them Baleroc (N and HC) and also Betty HC, as I am the up tank and last night I fell down the web twice ( yeah, i know, scrub)
because I was so fucking bored that I started to try and see what was going on below the web instead of watching for meteors, whereas ally HC (normal after nerf boring as hell and the only reason I will be talked into doing it would be to go dps ally on the air after birds are down) is a active fight, wich means there is always something going on keeping everyone engaged.
On that kind of fights I dont give a shit if someone messes up and wipes us, if it's on a baleroc (patchwerk) one I would rage and just kick the offending player from my Raid.
TLDR: It's the dance that keeps fights interesting and engaging, standing there and tank/dps would make the fights just an exercise in masochism, nothing else and do not pretend that pressing buttons on a perfect order is "fun" because then it would be better to turn wow into whack-a-mole.
I think one thing that is largely overlooked is how the WoW UI handles tanking (and healing). There is almost no information given to tanks on what they're doing, and the most you get are warnings like "changed target". Add-ons like threat plates are mandatory to be a successful tank. Healers have a similar situation, but you can manage to heal 5-mans with the default. At least healers can see all of their targets and their health bars in one static position. Tanks have to find all the name plates and keep them in view.
The other problem is experience -- everyone learns how to DPS just by questing. You only learn how to tank through dungeons. If you level without dungeons, then you get to max level without any tanking experience. And max level is an unforgiving place to learn to tank. While most low-level dungeons are tank-and-spank, higher-level ones are not. The same is somewhat true for healing, except you learn to heal yourself while leveling, or to heal in battlegrounds if you do PvP. Again, the default UI enables you to heal without having to find add-ons or do research.
I think those to factors are significantly overlooked in your (and many other's) analysis.
Gev,
As a tank myself, I fully agree with the idea of making tanking more interesting and engaging. You're quite right about being "bad dps" during 50% of the Occu'thar fights, which is a waste.
However, I don't think you're considering the full implications of the crappy community WoW's engendered within the game (not here, insulated among like-minded individuals who all read and want to be informed). I don't tank 5 mans because the first time some snot-nose punk mouths off at me, I'm done having fun and want to stop. It's not about responsibility for me (though I don't claim it's not for others), it's about not wanting to play with jerks, and the 5 mans are RIFE with them.
I think that the likely truth is that the problem is with all of the elements you listed as well as bad raid boss design.
Going in with Sullivan and Renaissance on this one.
They don't go far enough, though. The whole 'threat' model is a stupid model, and is the fundamental reason for the problems.
It gives poor feedback, it can't be properly balanced, (500%?) and it doesn't even make sense - apparently every monster is a total idiot.
I know of at least one better model, which starts at getting in the way. Physical interception. For example, this one can be tuned - you can partially get in the way, whereas aggro is all or nothing.
Being a tank myself since TBC I have been doing everything for ever have not had any issue. But people learned in WotLK that any instance can be face rolled, and now instances just fail time after time after time in PuGs and it gets old really fast, especialy considering all the trigger happy DPS or the just enough healers that when faced with a prolonged fight either go oom or just cannot provide enough healing for that situation that has gone wrong. Also, good tanks are people that take their job seriously, thay have invested time and effort to gem/enchant/reforge properly, have researched mechanics, have made macros, keyboard layouts and even special peripherals (like me and my n52te) to have all pertinent capabilities and options available. We think on our toes and must react fast. We almost always had to, even on the kiddie rides in WotlK.
Not so in Cata. Now everyone must know the fight, must know cooldowns, dance moves, coordination with classes and target priority. And that is just too much for a PuG, now it is not enough to just do your job, now everyone must not fuck up for the group to advance. And on this thankless job of ours, where the highest praise of a PuG is the game's sounds of the instance finishing, but do a mistake and you never hear the end of it, we prefer to simply group with people we already know that they know the instance (and that is not pug), appreciate our work (not a pug) are calm and wait for the tank before engaging (not a pug) and can communicate with us (not a pug). At least, not in Cata!
Yes, the problem is in the 5man and the LFD. But I don't think the problem is the dps crowd only. I lately leveled a warlock and tried to run a few heroics. And than I saw the problem.
As a tank you really do not have any feedback. The agro doesn't matter any more and so even with random choice of abilities you can hold the agro pretty well. And this makes tanks think they are doing good job. But they aren't.
They don't wait for the healer and don't check its mana. They do not watch what the rest of their group is doing. And they do not use their CDs and than blame the healer. I usually do not have any problem to finish a troll HC as a DK tank. As a dps its a pain. I even saw DK tank pulling the first room in Vortex Pinnacle and than telling healler: "Do not make me use CDs on trash".
Back in TBC tanks were under stress to make a good agro. But they did not had any usable CDs (30min shield wall). Now they have more survivability tools but they are not aware they should use them. There is no feedback for them. And since 5man tanks have no waiting time in the queue they do not have any incentive to improve themselves.
Its a good idea to give tanks some sort of a "mitigation meter". But I don't think this would make a big difference in the anonymous LFD. But in a raid it would be interesting.
But its clear now how Blizzard wants to solve this. PVE scenarios will not require tanks, 5 man LFD will be WotLK style zerg fest again, there will be more ways how to earn valor points. I only hope 5 man challenges will make enough incentives for my guildmates to enjoy them. Because I like a good 5 man runs.
From my experience I can prevent much more wipes as tank than as damage dealer. I consider myself skilled in both roles, but the impact I have on the group is much bigger as tank.
So, even if my paladin had another main spec I would still tank for LFD. I think that every reasonable and skilled tank would do the same.
In my opinion, tank shortage comes from the role itself and it's place in game. Tanks have only a place in PvE which eventually is raids. Think what a raiding tank needs from a zandalari. Nothing. That leaves the few people that want to gear for raiding.
Damage dealing specs on the other hand have many roles in game. Apart from PvP all players that don't raid will be damage dealers because they don't want to kill one mob every minute. In PvP there are some healers and the majority is damage dealers.
With the new mitigation system with block tanks even lost utility outside raids. On my paladin I used to pick many mobs together and aoe them down, being able to farm effectively. Now that I block only 30% even of a small attack I hardly can survive a few mobs. I made a suggestion on paladin forums once, to make a base block amount similar to dk healing from death strike, but of course that won't happen.
No one cares about meters in 5-mans. If they did, you wouldn't consistently see the tank at #1 or #2 on the damage meter. For me I see the tank shortage in randoms as twofold. First, DD are stupid and/or lazy. Doesn't matter if I mark kill order and CC targets or not, most of the time all three DD are killing a different target and I'm lucky if any of them are my main threat target. It wouldn't be so bad if I could run in, gather everything up and hold agrro while it all got nuked, but this is often too much for even a well geared healer and there are often abilities that must be interrupted by multiple players either because multiple mobs need it or a 10-sec cool down is too long to get everything.
Secondly, the dungeons are far too time consuming. Even speed running a troll heroic with a good guild group will take the better part of an hour. Pugging one takes at least an hour usually and it really doesn't matter if I run them anymore because the gold per hour is terrible and I don't need the VP because the cap is taken care of through raiding. Everyone and their mother can do at least 6/7 now and with BH you are capped for the week.
So you have almost no incentive for good players to run randoms, the dungeons themselves are overturned for the quality of players queuing for them and they are a serious time commitment. Meaningful tank meters would be nice, but they don't solve those fundamental problems with the system.
By the way, I agree that the tank "shortage" isn't a shortage at all. My guild has four good tanks we rotate in and out for comp/attendence or bring them in on their off spec. If guilds comparable to ours or better were in need of tanks, I'm sure they all wouldn't have stuck around with us this long.
I think part of the reason for tanking shortage is because in raids, dps now have more responsibility relatively and tanking has become easier.
A lot of the people who liked raid tanking enjoyed that they were the focus of the raid, that their play could make a big difference. In modern raiding, that responsibility is more shared out I think. I can't think of many raid fights this expansion where great tanking makes a big difference. So actually tanking getting easier AND raids getting harder for everyone else puts off the players who liked it for the challenge. (That's my theory.)
Plus it's still intimidating for new tanks because they get a lot of hassle in 5 mans.
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