The tanking dilemma - role and design of tanks in Legion

[Indigenously Abled]

They've tried giving tanks more to do.

Heroic Amber-Shaper anyone?

[Kuntantee]

Insightful post? More like a unnecessarily long wall of text. "Blizzard made tanking too easy" would be a better post.

[Delimit]

It doesn't matter how fun or boring tanking is. There's nothing Blizzard can do to make more people tank.

The real question is, do we actually need more tanks?

Raidspots. While you have an easy time regarding to lfg and lfd you have a harder time to get a tanking slot in a good mythic raiding guild. Most of the Raiding groups will already their tanks and if they loose one they tend to fill the tank slot internally is a lot of cases.

That's where I see the issue. Have you ever tried finding a top 100 mythic guild as a tank? If I wanted to move up to top 50, chances of getting a tanking spot become few and far between. Tanking spots are traditionally the most stable and are usually the least recruited. Healer spots get dropped on farm content. The only thing that is consistently in high demand is good DPS (ranged specifically).

[Deleted]

Insightful post? More like a unnecessarily long wall of text. "Blizzard made tanking too easy" would be a better post.

At least better then "I found a mission table in my order hall. LOL, ROFL, WTF BLIZZARD?!?!?!" or "WTF Blizzard, LFR is dumb remove it or i quit my sub" topics.
While i don't agree with everything either, a discussion about tanking is not that bad. As i said before there a things going wrong with tanking and that couldn't so easily answered with "its to easy", "its to hard" or "its not accessible enough". So it is a least worth a discussion.

[Akka]

Threat was difficult to scale properly, because DPS are always doing widely varying numbers of damage.

I don't see how it makes threat difficult to scale properly in any way. Not anymore than scale DPS at lest.

If you scale tank threat coefficient high, threat might as well not exist, it doesn't matter, yet if you scale it too low, threat will require cooperation from DPS and they wanted to get rid of that and let DPS concentrate on DPS.

And THAT is the whole retarded problem. Requiring cooperation from the group IS what made playing as a team fun, and a large part of what made a player a good or a bad one beyond tunnel-visioning his "rotation" (notice how in TBC it was about "playing well" and in WotLK onward it was about "knowing your rotation").

The ideal world of threat being solely a tank game (so, if you didn't manage to keep it, you are bad, and if you did manage, you are good) seemed unachievable, so they removed threat.

No that's not ideal, that's actually the source of the problem.

[rda]

Requiring cooperation from the group IS what made playing as a team fun, ...

This wasn't fun for DPS. Maybe someone somewhere didn't mind, but that's it. At least that's what Blizzard thought and I agree with them here completely. You can make a poll, if you want, DPS don't like threat, they merely tolerate it. Stopping your damage because some undergeared tank can't keep up is the antithesis of fun.

[Deleted]

At least better then "I found a mission table in my order hall. LOL, ROFL, WTF BLIZZARD?!?!?!" or "WTF Blizzard, LFR is dumb remove it or i quit my sub" topics.
While i don't agree with everything either, a discussion about tanking is not that bad. As i said before there a things going wrong with tanking and that couldn't so easily answered with "its to easy", "its to hard" or "its not accessible enough". So it is a least worth a discussion.

I am pretty certain we can put it on the progress asymmetry. For what it's worth that is my reason to drop tanking or at lest not main a tank.
5er you got 20% tank.
10 you got 20% tank.
25 you got 8% tank.
30 you got 6,66% tank.

I'll just assume that 10% of the playerbase plays tank. This means half of the 5 player groups lack a tank while 20% of the tanks don't get to raid.
The exact percentage of tanks really doesn't matter here as there is always the asymmetry.

So the best solution to that problem would be to create more 10 player raids.

[Akka]

This wasn't fun for DPS. Maybe someone somewhere didn't mind, but that's it. At least that's what Blizzard thought and I agree with them here completely. You can make a poll, if you want, DPS don't like threat, they merely tolerate it. Stopping your damage because some undergeared tank can't keep up is the antithesis of fun.

The POINT of playing in a group is to play WITH others. That this entire principle has been gutted from the game is precisely the main problem of WoW today and why it's so often derided as a single-player game with bots.
Having to play WITH the tank actually made for much more interesting dynamics, and allowed to increase skill level, if only to check who was a navel-gazing oblivious retard and who was able to actually check they were hitting the same target as the tank.
It also allowed to be cautious and smart about how you used your abilities - when to AoE, when to single-target, when to use your short CC to save a healer in an emergency, when to kite a mob 'cause the tank had his hands full, and so on. Playing with a frost mage in a world where aggro matter a lot was orgasmic. Playing a rogue able to stop a mob dead in its track or to act like an emergency tank was rewarding. Being able to BE a good tank was fulfilling.

Just being a dumbfuck who spam his rotation while being oblivious to whatever everyone else is doing is boring.

Also, there is plenty of way to make threat a game for everyone. Misdirection is an obvious one. Threat management through threat dump is another. Using smartly your prayer of mending (when it gave threat to the person healed and not the healer) was a way to take it into account. There is plenty of little mechanics like that, that Blizzard could have integrated in the game to make threat even more interesting, instead of rewarding being an autist and dumbing down the whole tanking game.

[Deleted]

And THAT is the whole retarded problem. Requiring cooperation from the group IS what made playing as a team fun, and a large part of what made a player a good or a bad one beyond tunnel-visioning his "rotation" (notice how in TBC it was about "playing well" and in WotLK onward it was about "knowing your rotation").

I agree with you that cooperation became a bit rarer than back in the days and that the whole theory crafting, simcraft, perfect rotation etc. take away a bit of the games soul and feeling.

On the other side the solution given in vanilla/BC wouldn't work these days, because besides nostalgia etc. the threat system of vanilla/bc is really out to date.
Watched a couple of days ago the Nihilum vs Illidan first kill video and have to say that the fight feels to slowly paced especially for the DD PoV.

Changing something? Yes. Going Back? not alway the best solution.

[rda]

The POINT of playing in a group is to play WITH others.

DPS do play with others, they damage things and things die. But threat isn't fun for them.

If you say DPS should take this bullet for the team, fine, but then I am not sure why we are having this thread, tanks gameplay gets boring, so what, they should take one for the team, end of story.

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PS: And no, it wasn't interesting for DPS in the least. I repeat, stopping damage because the tank can't hold up isn't fun at all. Again, make a poll if you don't believe me. Doing damage is fun. Doing great damage by lining up cooldowns in the right moments is fun. Avoiding boss mechanics is fun. Kiting things is fun. Obeying threat isn't fun. Simple.

[Edoran]

I don't understand people in this thread saying "raids should require more tanks" and then turning around and complaining about accessibility or figuring out why people aren't playing tanks.

IMO, tanking SHOULD be a niche role. Trying to create more tanks through new specs and classes and the simplification of the role as a whole has accomplished the opposite of what Blizzard wanted to. Tanks generally lead and guide their groups in traditional settings. In my experiences, some of the best raid leaders I've played with were tanks. Too many cooks...

As for why tanking is less "fun," to me, it's completely about threat. Once the main mechanic to tanking was gutted, tanking instantly became less fun. Also things like the decreased need for CC (it was fun as a tank to coordinate what to CC and how) and the insistence on tanks swaps (which are moot as soon as a tier launches with DBM) have watered down the tanking experience.

And besides that, the LFD/LFR culture makes tanking unbearable at times. DPS pulling, being rushed, being berated for things out of your control... all reasons for new tanks to be overwhelmed or just turned off in general from the role.

[Celarent]

I don't think positioning or pacing are going away -- especially for 5-man content -- so good tanks will still have a market, and a reason to play well.

[Cwimge]

I disagree. Tanks are fine as they are, the last thing we need is more self-righteous players narcing up like they're gods gift to gaming for picking one of the three vital roles. Something we'd see if tanks are given so much as an inch to feel smug and superior about

[rda]

Also, there is plenty of way to make threat a game for everyone. Misdirection is an obvious one.

By the way, suppose they add threat and make it "a game for everyone" by giving everyone Misdirection so that everyone is responsible for their threat. But then it wouldn't exist for you as a tank, so nothing has changed, we just made DPS jump through extra hurdles and tank's game didn't get better.

So, no, threat can only exist if it's solely tank's game and no one else's. Unfortunately, there's no way to make it such, and when it's partly tank's game and partly DPS's game, it isn't fun for DPS. /shrug

[Lorianus]

Current tank gameplay is fine with me, but they have to work on the god awful hitboxes on bosses, i move 2 meters to the right and the boss moves right through me on the other side....

[judgementofantonidas]

Hi all,

since Alpha is running for quite some time now and tank design seems to be more or less set (not individual spec toolkits, but general place in PvE gameplay), I would like to start some discussion about high-level tanking philosophies in Legion.

I strongly request you to read this post with an open mind and with the will to think about tanking and its place in Legion.
I absolutely accept that my point of view is heavily biased by my personal situation, but who´s is not? I also do not claim to have the master knowledge of all tanking topics or be the voice of the whole tanking community.

I just love tanking.

I will accept any different point of view or opinion, in fact I ask for them to get the opportunity to peek at the bigger picture through other tanks´eyes.


About me

I am a protection warrior for over 10 years now. Having raided on the highest difficulty regularly (fresh 13/13m) and played most other tank classes at multiple occasions over my WoW career, I think I have a good understanding of tanking, even if I am not a bleeding edge progression raider. I have witnessed the evolution of tanking from early vanilla to Legion Alpha (although I unfortunately do not have Alpha access myself) and see it as my primary role and goal in this game.


General tanking responsibilities

A tank is one of the pillars of a raid group. It serves as a "service provider" for the whole group, bringing stability, control and general directions onto the battlefield. The tasks a tank is fulfilling during an encounter are manifold, but I will sum up the ones, I see as the most important:

• Maintaining threat, so that he is the one being attacked (or swap it with his co-tank, if encounter requires it)
• Position all enemies that attack him in a way that the rest of the group can fight them to greatest effect (stacking, splitting, moving around)
• Reduce the incoming damage to a manageable amount, by using active mitigation and cooldowns to reduce spikes as well as limit overall damage taken
• Contribute to raid dps, interrupts, CC
• Deal with encounter-specific mechanics

I think every single tank out there will see another point in that list as the single most critical one, but more importantly, every single tank out there will find different aspects of this role more fun and some would say that balancing between them (like survival <-> dps) is the greatest fun of all.
All of these tasks are important and failing at one of them (expect dps output) usually initiates desaster. Improving in any one of these points makes a tank better and increases the chance of a raid to successfully complete an encounter.
With this role design, we can now try to shed some light on the:


Skillcap of a tank

Since it is inherent in the variation of a tanks list of tasks and their criticality to the outcomes of an encounter that the role of a tank is a bit more difficult to perform to the same effect compared to other roles (and I want to underline that I do NOT underestimate the importance or complexity of dps or healer roles), I will dare saying that the skillcap of a tank is a bit higher than it is for other roles.

Since tanks usually come in pairs and they only have limited impact to the performance of their partner (although a good partnership between tanks is priceless and of substantial worth for both, the playing experience of each tank as well as the smoothness of an encounters flow), each tank on its own could be perceived as a:


Single point of failure

Yes, a tank can be viewed as a single point of failure. In most encounters, the tank has to react to abilities or circumstances, that affect only him and only he is able to prevent a disastrous outcome, not matter what other players do.

For sure, there are countless occasions where players of other roles will wipe a raid if they do not handle a boss mechanic properly. But a big part of their jobs is also covered by other players. Burning down a critical add is usually work of many dps together, not just one. Pushing a boss to the next phase before a certain mechanic happens again is also a feat the raid has to achieve together. Healing up dying raid members is usually (not always) covered by several healers. Of course for ALL roles there are examples and encounters where you have all of that critical wipe potential burdened onto one player of other roles. But a tank deals with this in most encounters.

A tank´s tasks can sometimes be assisted by other players, like external CDs, hunter pulls or similar. But more than not, a tank will be the only player in the raid that can prevent wipe due to a certain mechanic.
This, combined with the skillcap described above lead to a situation we all know. If a tank is terrible, a group suffers tremendously and a good tank will make the life of a group so much easier. This makes entry into tanking much more barring than into other roles and groups will often be more picky with tank selection than other roles. This might also drive some people away from the tank role and leave a tank shortage for certain forms of group content. Dungeon queues come to mind.
So what does Blizzard do? Of course the answer is:


Reducing the impact of a tanks gameplay performance

Blizzard is having a hard time dealing with tanks in general. Over the last expansions they tried to reduce the skillcap of tanks on various ends.

• Massive threat multipliers to reduce threat gameplay impact
• Reducing effectiveness of AM to be able to reduce boss damage to allow tanks survive even when not playing for optimized survival
• Reducing the availability of cooldowns to be able to reduce boss spikes without leaving tanks immortal
• Reduce overall tank mitigation tools to remove survival from tanks and shift it to healers (this distributes a task from a single point of failure over several players)

This makes GCD to GCD decisions of a tank less and less meaningful and combined with a dps contribution half of a dps of similar gear and skill, a tanks major tasks are reduced to:

• Hit enemies at least occasionally to maintain threat
• Position all enemies that attack him in a way that the rest of the group can fight them to greatest effect (stacking, splitting, moving around)
• Reduce incoming damage taken to avoid the largest of all bursts and conserve healer mana
• Contribute to raid dps (as well as possible, but impact is low), interrupts, CC
• Deal with encounter-specific mechanics (which are rarely more than taunt-swaps)

Many others have said this before, but I will include that statement for completeness´ sake:
Tanks will lack things to do that are meaningful. Most of their tasks will only be performed with limited effectiveness, as allowing them to have more impact would raise the skillcap.
Unfortunately for veteran tanks, this leads to a heavily impacted:


Fun!

I already talked a bit about fun for tanks above, but I will focus a bit more on that specifically.
Most tanks I know became tanks for one of two reasons:

1. They were forced to, either by others of by circumstances, simply because a tank was direly needed
2. The love the tanking role with all aspects of its control, impact, responsibility and rewarding gameplay

While the first group will probably not enjoy tanking at all, until they belong to the secound group eventually, for the second group rewarding gameplay is a keyword for tanking experience, as you will learn a lot while tanking, get better every single pull and feel a direct improvement of the overall encounter flow when mastering a problem.
Situations that I find rewarding and satisfactory as a tank include:

• Seeing my dps-players are able to push out some additional dps, because I positioned mobs very effectively or reduced the amount of movement required by them
• Getting a big hit and seeing my HP bar move little, because I planned properly
• Being able to motivate the lowest dps to push on or be (b)eaten by the tank
• Managing my resource, defensive, offensive and utility cooldowns to find the perfect balance of all for a given encounter
• Feel that *I* am the one that brings order to the chaos of the battlefield, as I collect adds and direct the whole raids movement through a minefield
• Know that healers need to heal up the raid after an accident and prepare to allow them to let me go for some seconds
• Survive through the last 15 seconds of a boss with half the raid dead and fishing for a kill that already seemed impossible to get

Being able to get that fun out of the tank roles requires that role to be a bit more difficult to play.


Dealing with the problem

I think at this point we have seen that there are two major aspects of tanking colliding every single time tanking is being touched:

Accessibility <-> Fun

Making tanks more accessible, filling up queues and bringing more people into tanking will inevitably affect the gaming experience of long term tank players by taking away control, overall impact and purpose. Yes, purpose. Bringing a boss to a position it will stay on for most of the fight, grab some adds every minute and spend the rest of the fight reducing healer´s mana costs is neither engaging nor rewarding.

Making tanks more fun and their role more meaningful (or at least leave it alone and not reduce their impact) will make the tanking role less accessible and leave some groups with tanks that will struggle a bit, until they find the way into proper tanking or force some players out of the tanking role.

Both aspects cannot be ignored. Unfortunately there is little room for compromise.

A possible solution could be, to let tanks keep their toolbox, mitigation strengths, cooldowns and output potential and simply make a much stricter scaling based on content. Let an normal boss be well tankable by a tank that only knows the mere basics of tanking, a heroic boss require proper understanding of the tank class and a mythic boss challenge a tank to make use of his whole set of resources. That will lead to good tanks being immortal in lower tier content and needing very little heal in heroic.

But where is the harm? A tank that good will surely not stay long in normal and will not endanger any balance. But a mythic tank wants to feel that he is contributing.
I do not see myself being a simple mana conserver in a raid. I want to have the feeling that I can make the difference.

I also see no harm in tanks being much more independent of healers. Healers have 18 people to heal in a raid but tanks. So is it necessary to make tanks rely on healers to give healers more gameplay? I do not think so. Survival of a tank should be mostly the responsibility of a tank, strongly assisted by healers. A tank should surely not be able to kill a boss alone, if all healers are gone. But let him have the tools to bridge the time until he needs proper healer for longer periods.

But then again, what can be done in mythic+ dungeons? Here we have small-group content that requires more tanks per player than a mythic raid does. So the demand of tanks is much higher than in raids. If tanking requires a higher skillcap, mythic+ dungeon groups will suddenly be tank-starved.

There will probably not be a one-size-fits-all solution. And I do not say that it is easy. But it is worth exploring!


Final words

I hope you are all still with me and more interested in having a nice and insightful conversation than in nit-picking and flaming me for individual sections of my post. I am a tank with very specific preferences and I might find other parts of this dilemma more important than others might.

I recently saw and spoke a lot of long year tanks that actively considered to drop out of the tanking role. Of course some of the won´t do and some of them never will, but then again those were people never even thinking about doing something else. So this is a shift in perception of the overall tanking design, stronger than ever before.

I am asking myself, if it is worth to lose some veteran tanks that loved their role for years in order to allow other people step into tanking that were overwhelmed by the responsibilities earlier.

I personally think that tanking improved over the last expansions, the only issue I ever had was tank classes being unequally suitable for certain encounters. As a warrior I dread the return of rage through damage taken and even as one of the tanks that already relied on healers the most, I think that increasing this reliance is not required.

So I happily invite you to leave your thoughts and comments here and have a civilized conversation about the role I love for so many years now.

I agree with your wall of text. There are many more ways to defeat a raid group than hamstringing a tank.

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You waste too much "time" talking about the basics of what a tank is. Most people only remember the beginning and the end, if they even make it to the end.

For the majority of people the change is worth it if it puts more tanks into the LFG/LFR.
I myself decided to leave tanking behind even before I knew what was going on with Legion since while you do get instant invites in LFG and fast invite in LFR you have almost no chance to get into a guild if you aren't a nepotist.

more available tanks is not the answer.
lowering the skill cap and abilities to where a monkey could push the shiny button is not the answer either.

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I don't agree that any tank should be immortal in normal raid modes just because he can play his class, or that playing a tank should be *significantly* harder than playing any other class, even on mythic, just so that the tank has things to do. This may be slightly controversial, but tanks are often the better players in a group, and sometimes they do like playing in a particular group for social reasons or whatever - a good tank greatly simplifying an encounter by becoming near-immortal is not a good way to go. No single player should have this power.

Admittedly on some fights tanking is relatively boring, while everyone else is busy dealing with mechanics, while on others its swapped - and thats fine as long as these cases are balanced. It would of course be great if on all fights everyone is equally engaged, but that would probably lead to rather overcomplex fights.

Giving tanks this much power takes power away from healers. Maybe they should bring back threat to some degree and make you work for that a bit more, but they should not make tanks all powerful and either making them too strong on the easier modes, or taking away the healers responsibility to keep him alive.

you are correct. no tank should be near imortal JUST because he is a certain class. however a skilled tank should seem that way.

[Deleted]

DPS do play with others, they damage things and things die. But threat isn't fun for them.

If you say DPS should take this bullet for the team, fine, but then I am not sure why we are having this thread, tanks gameplay gets boring, so what, they should take one for the team, end of story.

The one is overabundant the other is in high demand.
If you can't see this there is no point in explaining it to you.
Although I agree that threat isn't fun for me as tank aswell as a DD.

I disagree. Tanks are fine as they are, the last thing we need is more self-righteous players narcing up like they're gods gift to gaming for picking one of the three vital roles. Something we'd see if tanks are given so much as an inch to feel smug and superior about

Don't fool yourself, tanks are in much shorter supply than DDs in 5er.
Healer are what you will be looking for in raids.
DDs are always a dime a dozen.

more available tanks is not the answer.
lowering the skill cap and abilities to where a monkey could push the shiny button is not the answer either.

We are looking for solution to different problems.
You want tanking to be fun (for you).
I just want to be able to form groups.

[Nihilan]

I disagree. Tanks are fine as they are, the last thing we need is more self-righteous players narcing up like they're gods gift to gaming for picking one of the three vital roles. Something we'd see if tanks are given so much as an inch to feel smug and superior about

Tanks are in the position of being able to effectively dictate whom they play with. They are rarely, if ever, lacking for willing party members if they decide to put together their own private runs. If they dont want to play with bads, or put up with the lazy or the incompetent then they do not have to do so. If this to you makes them the bad guy for wanting to be in an efficient run, i suggest you step up your game.

Nobody owes you anything here. And no tank is obligated to carry you just because you expect it of them.

[judgementofantonidas]

It doesn't matter how fun or boring tanking is. There's nothing Blizzard can do to make more people tank.

I went into WoD looking to main Blood DK tank. The amount of venomous crap that was thrown my way was too much BS to deal with. New tanks aren't given the patience to become a good tank.

well, not defending the venom, but if I am PUGGING IN a tank I expect him to already have the knowledge required to complete the tasks that I am bringing him in to do. Not teach him each fight. If we are talking about a GUILD tank, then he should have learned these fights along side of me and be as knowledgeable if not more each step of the way.

so the only way a "new tank" is receiving venom is if they step into a group unprepared to complete the tasks required of them. either by being obviously under geared, not knowing their class completely and using their ability to best advantage, or not knowing the fights ahead of time.

[Nihilan]

^ Yes. Telling 19 other people to stand around waiting while you google a fight vid is not going to earn you much in the way of goodwill. Especially in LFR.