Should Raid Bosses Be Designed To Require More Tanks?

[LedZeppelin]

i would be fine with the occasional "soft tank" like we had in some tbc/wrath fights

[Wavebossa]

I don't recall off the top of my head, but was there ever a time in expansion's past where raid size/composition ever required more than 2 tanks? Nowadays, or at least for the past 5 expansions, the number of tanks required have always been 2; no more, no less.


How many healers and DPS you bring fluctuates depending on how big you want your raid to be but never more than 2 tanks. Was it always this way?

BC had multiple bosses throughout the expansion where people brought more tanks, but they were almost all council fights.

As far as in the last 5 expansions?
No its rare that it happens. Unusually if you are bringing more than 2 tanks you outgear the content and aren't worried about the dps check. Just last expansion we would always bring an extra DK tank to hivemind mythic. Did we need to? No. But our DK didn't mind going blood for that find just for the grip on the darters.

But my point isn't that back then we always needed more tanks... my point is moreso if this is something can happen in the future.

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i would be fine with the occasional "soft tank" like we had in some tbc/wrath fights

Yeah its crazy how often we needed this in TBC.

High King
Kael
FathomLord Karathress (Sham tanked this one a few times)
Hexlord (once people got smarter they just cc'd)
Illidari Council

Probably a few more i'm missing that aren't coming to mind this second. And there were also bosses that we ran 3 tanks for just because it raised our chance of success greatly. Like Mother and Shade of Akama. Shoot we even 3 tanked Supremus back then.

[munkeyinorbit]

Just thinking to myself about how many people are discussing the Tank shortage and this popped into my mind.

In a 5man dungeon, you need a tank and a heal (unless you completely outgear it)
In a 20man raid, the tank number will go up by 1, the heal number will go up by 3 or sometimes even 4, and the dps number can go from up from 3 to possibly 15.

So what happens a lot of time is someone joins the guild and says something like "My main is a tank" and then the response is "We already have our tanks", so this person focuses on DPS. So then the person who used to tank keys other content all the time kinda falls back off his tank spec. And then there is one less tank in the wild for non-raid content.

I don't think 3 or more tanks would be game breaking for Blizzard to design around. I remember back in BC brining 3 tanks to Mother in BT for the cleave, or 3 tanks for ilidari council, even 3 tanks for that boss before Gruul, or even 3 (not including the lock tank) for Kael. Now all of these except for Mother are council fights, and I dont think turning everything into a council fight is the way to go... but I am interested in single target fights that would require more tanks.

One issue I foresee is 3 tanks would have to become the standard, or the same issue will arise when you drop the 3rd tank for the 2tank bosses. Another issue is tanks may be bored in a 3man rotation.


Anyway, just thinking of some things. What do you guys think? Is it 2tank all the way? Or would 3tank (or more) bosses be somewhat interesting

No they shouldn't. If anything they need to be designed to be tanked by one or by a tank and a dps that picks up some kind of buff.

[Wavebossa]

No they shouldn't. If anything they need to be designed to be tanked by one or by a tank and a dps that picks up some kind of buff.

What would be your goal with reducing the number of tanks in raids?

[Zig Zug]

Maybe...

It's anecdotal but half of my guild were rolling tanks at the beginning of the expac, tanks and healers. They soon abandoned them when they were asked to do something else in raid.

This was my situation too. Had a lot of people return, hoping to be raid tanks.

I can entertain the idea of more than 2 tank encounters, but as part of the encounter design or the raid system?

Creating a demand for extra tanks via an encounter is probably going to be more practical, but obviously transient.

To make 2+ tanks more permanent, the entire approach to content would need to shift slightly.

[Hastis]

Raid wwith more than 2 tanks would be really fresh but it will be boring when every raid require that, so there should be more tank new boss mechanics just for them, holding barrier for your team was too many timee already so its nothing new

[TEHPALLYTANK]

I'd prefer the opposite, my favorite fights as a tank when raiding were fights that I could solo tank ('cause paladin). Allow more fights to be done with a single tank, so the one tank gets more challenge and the OT gets to play a different role for a different experience. Simple taunt swaps tend to get boring week after week. MoP remains my favorite expansion as a tank, because it had those fights you could get away with 1 tank (H-Tortos remains one of my favorite fights ever as a tank, along with H-Thok, being top dps/hps as the solo tank was absolutely hilarious).

[sephrinx]

I think it would be really awesome for some raid bosses to require 3-5 tanks.

Unfortunately with LFR and "Flex" raiding it's not possible to design an encounter around having multiple tanks in that way.

[Thelyron]

Yes. Raid groups should always be designed to be multiples of an entire dungeon group. A dungeon group is 1/3/1. A 10 man raid should be 2/6/2. A 20 man raid should be 4/12/4. While we're at it, static raid sizes should come back.

[Smallfruitbat]

I'd prefer the opposite, my favorite fights as a tank when raiding were fights that I could solo tank ('cause paladin). Allow more fights to be done with a single tank, so the one tank gets more challenge and the OT gets to play a different role for a different experience. Simple taunt swaps tend to get boring week after week. MoP remains my favorite expansion as a tank, because it had those fights you could get away with 1 tank (H-Tortos remains one of my favorite fights ever as a tank, along with H-Thok, being top dps/hps as the solo tank was absolutely hilarious).

The downside with solo tanks is it puts a great deal on one player. Don't get me wrong, I think it's worth looking at. IIRC Pally tank was pretty broken in mists, I don't think I want to see a return to the state where one particular class was significantly out performing DPS and healers in their respective roles.

I'd like to see Blizzard trying different style of encounters. I remember rogue tanks and mage tanks from back in Gruuls, why not have encounters where caster tanking is a thing.

[Acidbaron]

The shortage of tank if any is due to how the community view and act towards these players.

As a tank you need to;
Know all the routes, all the mob abilities, all the boss abilities, position them correctly so others who don't know any of this don't die.
You need to push out enough threat so DPS can simply play without concern.
You need to kite or use defensive abilities to aid your healer.
You also need to be the one calling out mobs to interrupt, stun and CC. This is why tanks who have these abilities on hand do better in M+ pugs.

And if anything goes wrong or does not go according to what a random team member believes is the best possible way to do something, you get blamed for just about anything.

This however has always been the case, from as long i can remember even in wrath when people failed the three ICC themed dungeons rather badly (and still do the TW one)
However now with M+ being made more and more challenging each iteration people expectations of others most notably the tank is greater as they expect to do a 10 or 15 as easy as they did it in Legion.

So that's why i can fully understand people saying "fuck no" to pugging content.


Adding more tanks to a raid roster also won't solve anything it would just make things more complicated in the long run.

[Better]

IIRC Pally tank was pretty broken in mists, I don't think I want to see a return to the state where one particular class was significantly out performing DPS and healers in their respective roles..

Pallys did well, but to get to true levels of broken in MoP you needed to be a monk tank. Once they reached certain thresholds of vengeance in a fight they became self-sufficient for nearly infinite damage (due to a scaling massive absorb shield). They didn't even need any weird cheeky debuff resets to be able to one tank bosses, they just did it.

[Smallfruitbat]

The shortage of tank if any is due to how the community view and act towards these players.

As a tank you need to;
Know all the routes, all the mob abilities, all the boss abilities, position them correctly so others who don't know any of this don't die.
You need to push out enough threat so DPS can simply play without concern.
You need to kite or use defensive abilities to aid your healer.
You also need to be the one calling out mobs to interrupt, stun and CC. This is why tanks who have these abilities on hand do better in M+ pugs.

And if anything goes wrong or does not go according to what a random team member believes is the best possible way to do something, you get blamed for just about anything.

You hit the nail on the head with community vs tanks. Personally, I think the current mythic + tanking model with unending kiting doesn't help. There are tanks who get disheartened when they are forced to kite and assume that they are doing something wrong because the healer is struggling to keep them up.

On the other side of the coin, I played with a DH tank for a couple of weeks who was getting pissy with the DPS for not doing enough damage. Sounds fair enough but, he was CCing too much and then stopping between packs so resources and procs were fading so any class with a ramp up had to start afresh every pack. The guy was effectively trying to solo the dungeon.

The easy access to mythic plus and the fairly gentle difficulty curve catches players unaware who is doing the heavy lifting of the group. We have a player in our guild who is completely oblivious to the fact she is being carried and has been for years. (Yes, that's essentially our problem), there are plenty like her on the circuit. I don't see there is a way to educate players, they either see the key completed or not. They rarely look to see why something failed other than an emotional outburst blaming the easiest target (usually the tank).

I play druid main and switched to tanking late in BFA, just to see if I was any good at it. I realised pretty quickly the difference it made when your DPS and healer are helping out with things rather than just hammering buttons to get higher numbers. I had the benefit of corruption and massively over gearing stuff.

There will always be a shortage of good tanks, I think that raid encounters with more tanks will encourage players to stick to tanking if they think they have a better shot at a raid spot.

[Azerate]

No. Tanking is that job that barely anyone likes. If anything, we should go towards the reduction of tanks rather than increase.

[Xath]

no the core problems are that tanking raids is boring and that tanking m+ includes a lot of running which i agree isnt much fun. But i really disagree about the being bait arguement. Tanks are beefy meatshields and id like to believe the majority of tanks are ok with that.

The problem is there is a decided lack of beef atm for basically any tank that isn't a vdh or guardian.

[Wolfrick]

Greta idea, I think there should be more Tank roles in a Raid... maybe make the Adds do huge damage or something...

I am not a tank, just feels sad that we have like 2 tanks... and 156 dps... and 38 healers ^^

[Jonnusthegreat]

For the sake of other activity queues, yes, it would be optimal to need more tanks in a raid. However, most fights right now have a meaningless tank swap mechanic that's not even fun or engaging.

[gobio]

Yes, there should be individual mechanics that encourage players to take on the role of tanking.
No, the status quote of % tank / heal / dps across M+ and mythic raiding should be left alone otherwise there will be lots of back up tanks angry.

Meaning one of those LEGION fight in which mage steal a spell and started 'tanking'... and likewise, design a mechanics that a dps can pick up a shield on the floor and gain taunt as extra action and start 'tanking' in that phrase or something like that.

[Squigglyo]

If the goal is to increase the number of people playing tanks, making the role 'harder' wont bring more people to it.

People arent leaving because they are bored.
People arent becoming tanks in the first place.


Easiest way to bring in more tanks, give more classes a tank spec.
If you had twice as many tank specs available, the odds of finding a dps that could fill the tank role skyrocket.

[Naturalis]

For M+ I think 1 Tank, 1 Healer and 3 DPS is a pretty good format.

For raiding, I think there should be more. One of the biggest problems is what would the other tank do? Tanks jobs, generally, are pretty dead. They just swap back and forth exchange stacks or dragging a boss away from the other. But making them more interactive makes it harder for the raid group and an increase in overall difficulty would be probably not ideal for the average player.

The other option is the scarcity. Tanks are already difficult to find so increasing their requirement would be even worse. They'd have to increase the amount of classes that can tank or make some type of incentive to make people role swap.