Originally Posted by
Goldfingaz
I feel it isn't reasonable to do damage as a tank because WoW is based off of a "Trinity" when it comes to your roll. Heals kept people alive, Tanks kept aggro, DPS did the damage. There is more to it than just that, but that is the basic.
When we look more into it, Healers kept people safe, they predicted who was going to need heals and they managed their mana.
Tanks kept the aggro, to prevent "the weaklings" from getting "smashed". This included watching their own threat, vs the rest of the group, which could be challenging at times, and challenge to some people is "fun". They alwasy tried to manage the damage they took via abilities and passive avoidance/mitigation.
DPS were the ones who brought the "boom". They are the ones who brought the damage to the fight, they were relied on for just that. DPS also had to keep an eye on their threat, to make sure their damage didn't go overboard and pull threat. When most DPS classes started getting to the same threat levels as a tnak, they had to weave another ability into their rotation. Whether it was Soulshatter, Fient, Fade, Feign Death, Misdirect, Invis, Cower, Hand of Salvation (Blessing of Salvation) or simply only white hit for a matter of 2-3 seconds, there was a lot more to manage than hitting 1,2,3,1,2,3,1,2,3 (Exaggerated rotation). These Players also had to avoid as much damage as they possibly could while keeping their damage as high as possible without pulling threat, and use any damage reduction cooldowns they had in order to help save the mana of their Friendly healers.
At one point in time, DPS weren't just about "Blasting things as hard as you can and loot", that was a Hack and Slash model, not an MMORPG based off the Trinity Roll system model. However today, with vengeance and insane threat buffs, half of their job was removed. No longer did they need addons like Omen to keep an eye on their threat. No longer did they need to balance their DPS and their threat levels. No, now they just sit there whacking away at the boss and moving occasionally to avoid extra damage taken.
The Tanks have now become "And important part of the raid DPS" which shouldn't even be considered. When you do this, you skew their viability and cause for "Balance changes". It causes the problem when tanks might start to hit too hard in PvP (Early Prot Wars in Wrath as an example). Now not only will people pick a tank on their mitigation/avoidance, they will pick them on their DPS capabilities, which causes a huge imbalance between tanking classes.
Tanks should never be about how much damage they can do, they should be about how much damage they can take (Avoid/mitigate), their reaction times on "lost mobs", and their ability to move the fight under "high stress" situations. Just because you see high numbers on your screen doesn't make your job more important, it just makes the DPS's job less important as they won't have to worry about aggro.
Why you and the rest of the people like that can't understand taking away responsibility from other classes just so you can go "Lul I pulled 50k dps there hur hur hur", boggles my mind.
Again, develop the game around bad players, and you end up with a bad game.
Little note: Sorry I didn't talk about you healers much, you're still the best <3