Is The Weight Tanks Hold in M+ Good Design?

[chiddie]

And you can do that. Just not at the higher level of gameplay. And that's something that has always been the case. In all games. Ever. The problem is that people with a mentality like yours want to do their +14s and +15s.



Being good at the dps role requires way more experience in the dungeon and with your class. Yes, tank requires more "reading up stuff" than dps but tank also requires way less in its rotation and cooldown usage to be halfway decent at tanking. Which is evident when you look at many raid tanks who don't like M+. Their tanking is awful. Their cooldown usage is awful. Their dps is awful. But you can still beat bosses (up to a point) with that performance, so most of the time nobody will say anything about their awful performance, because hey boss is killed, right?
And like I said before, dps sit in the queue for half an hour or longer and tanks get instant invites. That time that tanks save, they should put into reading up some stuff. And it's the same for healers. The problem is simply that people want to do 14s and 15s while doing the bare minimum. Yes, you have to read up a guide outside of the game. That has always been the case. And if you didn't do that in previous expansions then you sucked at the game in previous expansions.

Oh but I do 14 even with this mentality of mine as an healer, without any issue. It’s more difficult getting in the groups that doing the content itself (but this is another story).

What you call “content that you can do without caring about right routes and pulls and whatever” is normal/heroic/M0. Past that you’ll be blamed by everyone at the first mistake. Because people want simply to time the dungeon.

Also, reading is boring. An in-game training mode would be far better imho. The game unfortunately does not allow different approaches to the same situations.

[Malania]

Lol, tank does that too. As a paladin tank I heal prides, I use my offensive CD to do more dmg to the prides or push bosses. It's not complex rotation or anything, but if you "only tank" you are not a good tank.
I also purge poisons and diseases, use my external CD or BoP/Spellwarding on tyranical bosses.

As stated, the tanks job isn't to DPS, it's to keep all the targets hitting you. You can't outdps the DPS unless you vastly over gear them or they're clueless. If you're trying, you aren't doing your job. So no they can't. Sure you can do extra to support your team but it's not your job. It's like saying a DPS can do a healers job because they can bandage.

[Lord Pebbleton]

I challenge you and everyone in this thread, name something unique only a dps does, that a tank also does not do.

Feign Death

[erifwodahs]

As stated, the tanks job isn't to DPS, it's to keep all the targets hitting you. You can't outdps the DPS unless you vastly over gear them or they're clueless. If you're trying, you aren't doing your job. So no they can't. Sure you can do extra to support your team but it's not your job. It's like saying a DPS can do a healers job because they can bandage.

If you can do more dps than you are currently doing but you are not - you are not doing what you are supposed to do. If DPS are not cc'ing mobs are not helping you, they are not doing what they are supposed to do either. Saying that tank is only supposed to tank is the same as saying dps is only dps which is some +12 mentality.

[Wuusah]

Oh but I do 14 even with this mentality of mine as an healer, without any issue. It’s more difficult getting in the groups that doing the content itself (but this is another story).

What you call “content that you can do without caring about right routes and pulls and whatever” is normal/heroic/M0. Past that you’ll be blamed by everyone at the first mistake. Because people want simply to time the dungeon.

Also, reading is boring. An in-game training mode would be far better imho. The game unfortunately does not allow different approaches to the same situations.

Absolutely nobody cares if a tank doesn’t know anything about M+ in lower keys. Nobody really gives a damn about a tank not knowing prideful in a +10. It’s a learning curve and people expect learning to have happened on the way up. That is reasonable.

Also didn’t you complain weeks ago about having a super low completion rate for timed runs? Maybe your mentality how you play healer has something to do with that…

[Kalisandra]

I used to do a lot of Tanking in the pre-M+ era, and can recall when Blizzard decided to make tanking more interesting for players who were getting bored with it. This was the beginnings of Active mitigation. Previously we just held threat and used our big CD's on certain boss abilities. Mitigation wasn't part of the rotation.

It was if you were a Pally (or a Warrior, as I recall). You kept Holy Shield up, or you got wrecked.

Anyway, when that happened, suddenly there were a lot of bad tanks getting wrecked because they weren't maintaining good uptime on their defensives.... over time, there were less tanks overall.

Now, with M+, Tanks need to know routes (which change with affixes) and how to adjust on the fly to accomodate for mistakes as to not waste Prides.
Again, we saw plenty of "Bad Tanks" who aren't necessarily bad at Tanking, just bad at M+ routing.
Then over time, we see less Tanks as people give up due to the responsibility and or/the abuse when they get it wrong.

So no, I don't think it's a good design.
I think it's great for those who enjoy it, but it's made tanking a real niche which hurts the game overall.

It's what happens when you look to keep the very skilled entertained by giving them a new challenge - the less dedicated look for something that isn't too much effort for them and their circumstances. I tanked in BC, I tanked a fair bit in LK. I tanked from time to time in Cata. After early MoP I'd pretty much given up.

In BC you did your rotation, target swapped to maintain threat as required, and hit what big cooldowns you had when things went badly wrong - Pallies didn't have a reasonably short duration defensive, and using BoP or bubble meant the mobs would go off looking for someone else to kill, so you had to time their use carefully. In LK you just did your rotation, and sometimes did something else (dispelling Fusion Punch was one, because you had 100% Hit and the healer wouldn't and that mattered in those days). In both cases the main skill was situational awareness, pulling right and not pulling extras, picking up adds from careless DPS (Hunters, according to the meme), etc., just as one still does now.

In Cata there were short-term CDs to use, and boss abilities that demanded them. Also, tank swaps became something that happened in pretty much every raid boss fight. Rotations started getting more complex, because apparently tanks needed 'interesting' rotations to keep them occupied - on top of managing pulling, etc., managing threat, and so on (and threat did still matter sometimes in Cata, though nothing like LK and earlier).

In MoP it was active mitigation, short CDs, complex rotations, and all the rest. By Legion and onwards it was all that and routes, etc.

As you say, fewer and fewer tanks over time. In my experience this is especially true for pugging, and is it any wonder?

If I had my way tanks would largely have simple rotations, and most of the time not getting one's short CD timed quite right would be something to recover from with good use of remaining CDs, kiting, and/or something the healer fixes if they're good and if you do it too much pays for in mana once their CDs are gone, so do it too much and you lose time (and thus don't make the timer in M+) or wipe because they OOMed (in a raid boss fight). Failing a short CD button hit/active mitigation use shouldn't normally be fatal. Also, these days active mitigation seems to be largely rotational, or at least "keep up as much as possible, saving a use for big hits", which isn't really what it originally meant, and thus is mostly a test of "do you know your spec's rotation?" with a side-order of (at least for Paladins - don't know the rest at all these days) "because it's not 100% you can't just commit it all to muscle-memory". That latter doesn't help with getting people into tanking.

[Loveliest]

Well, for the Myriad of Routes: There is an addon that helps with it. And to be honest, if you dont play MDI, you do not need to adapt 90% of the route every week. Sometimes there are slight changes, but the majority of the routes stays quite stable (at least from my perspective as a tank).

And to be honest: Especially in PUGs it absolutelty is the fact that the Tank must know the rout.

Well here's the thing. When you pug you have a more or less unlimited supply of the key you want on the week you want. This allows you to have a whatever route and fuck the key as many times as you want until starts align and get a grp that can play by your route. But when you don't pug and play with your friends and they have a limited time to play and sometimes you don't see a key for at least a month, you have to have a perfect route. You can't take unnecessary risks, you cant make it too slow, it has to count for your specific team comp that is fully non meta. Also, when you get that SD key finally, you have to bloody do it that week, cause your grp needs it, you can't skip cause you don't want tyrannical on that level in that week, cause fk knows when you're gonna get that key.

My point is: I would rather each speak for themselves, not try to dismantle somebody else's experience and opinion because they have a different experience. You won't change somebody's experience and how they feel about it with generic arguments that most often than not don't apply (like "If you don't play mdi, don't need to adapt").

[Kalisandra]

Every single thing a DPS does, the tank has todo on top of everything else regarding the tank role.
I challenge you and everyone in this thread, name something unique only a dps does, that a tank also does not do.

Hit Hero/Lust/Warp.

[Crimson Spears]

To be blunt tanking is by far the easiest role in the game to the point you can get away with simply spamming your keys so long as you hit your active mitigation when you have too..

Yes, if the tank is very weak the run is doomed since the tank has the hardest check/fail test of the group but it doesn't change the fact that the skill check is the easiest one by a metric mile.

[ONCHEhap]

Every single thing a DPS does, the tank has todo on top of everything else regarding the tank role.
I challenge you and everyone in this thread, name something unique only a dps does, that a tank also does not do.

Pull packs the tank and healer aren't ready for.

[erifwodahs]

Hit Hero/Lust/Warp.

It's not unique to DPS tho.

[prwraith]

When people started running the MDungeon Tools and expecting the tank to know every path I quit tanking dungeons over night and never looked back.

That and these DPS who say "well that's not our normal route" "that's not how the last tank did it" "are you sure about this route"

DPS can go fuck themselves.

[Kalisandra]

Also tank dps has been a thing 3 expansions now. You dont just get by "staying alive" anymore.

And back in vanilla, BC, and WotLK tank threat was a big thing, and it was generated using the buttons that did damage (i.e. tank DPS was a thing back then, just not for the (main) reason it is today).

[Kokolums]

Prideful really makes the routes important

Incorrect.

In vanilla, a hunter could tank some dungeons with their pets. Shaman had some tank skills and could step in for a pinch.

[chiddie]

Absolutely nobody cares if a tank doesn’t know anything about M+ in lower keys. Nobody really gives a damn about a tank not knowing prideful in a +10. It’s a learning curve and people expect learning to have happened on the way up. That is reasonable.

Also didn’t you complain weeks ago about having a super low completion rate for timed runs? Maybe your mentality how you play healer has something to do with that…

No, I complained about something else but as I said that’s another story.

I pugged a lot of keys in BfA as tank and even in below 10 bracket ppl were really not that much patient. But I’ve been probably not lucked enough.

This aside, the learning curve was just too much time consuming for me.

[prwraith]

To be blunt tanking is by far the easiest role in the game to the point you can get away with simply spamming your keys so long as you hit your active mitigation when you have too..

Yes, if the tank is very weak the run is doomed since the tank has the hardest check/fail test of the group but it doesn't change the fact that the skill check is the easiest one by a metric mile.

Idk tbh, every tank I've ever seen cross the street and become a DPS typically plays better than the DPS players do, both in survivability and parses. Certainly, I've maintanked CE guilds for a while, whenever I spend a tier DPS'ing it's absolutely bliss of ez-mode to me. Experiences vary I guess

[dcc626]

It would be nice if the game had more built-in tools to deal with Prideful.

Prideful really makes the routes important and in some cases nonsensical.

And tanks have always been important, but although common I see no inherent reason a dps or healer couldn’t control the route just by marking with skulls.

good thing prideful is going away in a few months.

[Kalisandra]

1) All human competitive activities have a time-factor involved. All sports have it, both physical as well as mental.

I was under the impression that baseball does not have a timer.

[Bagrod]

Well here's the thing. When you pug you have a more or less unlimited supply of the key you want on the week you want. This allows you to have a whatever route and fuck the key as many times as you want until starts align and get a grp that can play by your route. But when you don't pug and play with your friends and they have a limited time to play and sometimes you don't see a key for at least a month, you have to have a perfect route. You can't take unnecessary risks, you cant make it too slow, it has to count for your specific team comp that is fully non meta. Also, when you get that SD key finally, you have to bloody do it that week, cause your grp needs it, you can't skip cause you don't want tyrannical on that level in that week, cause fk knows when you're gonna get that key.

My point is: I would rather each speak for themselves, not try to dismantle somebody else's experience and opinion because they have a different experience. You won't change somebody's experience and how they feel about it with generic arguments that most often than not don't apply (like "If you don't play mdi, don't need to adapt").

Yes, if you are going for a Min/Max approach my statements might not fit, that is correct.

If you play the game in a more relaxed setting, is does not really matter if you have a Meta comp or not, the routes provided by the Addon will be just fine, as long as you dont chose the skip routes that require specific classes (although you can easily manage that with pots in a Premade grp)

[erifwodahs]

To be blunt tanking is by far the easiest role in the game to the point you can get away with simply spamming your keys so long as you hit your active mitigation when you have too..

Yes, if the tank is very weak the run is doomed since the tank has the hardest check/fail test of the group but it doesn't change the fact that the skill check is the easiest one by a metric mile.

I don't think anyone is arguing that mechanically tanks are hard. How good/skilled tank is does not go by how you press buttons, it goes by how aware you are of everyone and everything around you, which has nothing to do with your class.
As a class/spec, it's a joke kind of, maybe BDK is a bit higher, but still. But even if tanks were complex and interesting - there is nothing to show for it. Best case scenario is "look, I have managed to survive extra pack this time" which is not even relevant anymore unless you play with uncapped DPS team members. DPS has a bigger dick in the meters and can at least enjoy that. No-one cares about you mitigating 15% more dmg. Bosses don't fall over 20% faster because of some sick rng/skill you pulled out, at least not in most cases. I tank because I enjoy surviving and executing something what I perceive hard, but you can't even do that now because it punishes your team more often than not as the contrast is either you can't tank that OR your team can't survive that.