The reason most play DPS (it is not because they like DPS or because they hate tanks)

[sponge5307]

Chiming in here a little late, but speaking as an ex hardcore 25m raider now casual, I don’t tank not because I don’t like it, but simply because I can’t be bothered to learn all the fights for the entire game.

As a DPS, I can just login and faceroll mythic+ and not give a shit about mechanics other than move out of stuff.

I thought about tanking more in DF, but again, I’d have to have the added pressure of having to know every single fight, dungeon and raid and unfortunately I just don’t play the game like that anymore. Even in LFR if the raid wipes that’s on me because I didn’t know when to tank swap

Like to add on that I used to raid pretty hardcord back in WoLK. Sever first I think. Like you fights back then isn't as complicated as it is now mostly becasue DMB/Big Wings/WA doesn't have as much function as it is now. Those addon were mostly use as reference but you still have to rely on your experience with the fight look at the cast bar/hp bar. Anyone remember when certain boss would do a huge AoE to everyone everytime 25% of his hp going down? You are to make sure everyone is top off before pushing that.

Now these addons tells you everything the boss does all people do is follow what the addon tells them. I think in SL in one of the raid tiers WA was way to powerful on one of the boss (forgot what it does but blizzard made a big stink about it and remove some API to break the WA people are using).

When addons get out of hand like this blizzard have to design on fights with them in mind and that's not a healthy design. What really blizzard should do is limit on what addons can tell you and slowly close its API. Be more strict on what addons and boss mood can show.

You hardly need addon in FFXIV even in savage raids. Heck a lot of people got ban coz there was an addon that place an extra maker on a platform during p2 in a fight and that's not allow.

[Xath]

That's a double standard; you are trying to prove that it's hard to be a tank; if you ignore DPSes with skill then you should ignore tanks with skill too.
Yes it's easy to be a mediocre DPS but it's also easy to be a mediocre tank.
In fact it's easier to be a mediocre tank since they're carried more often.

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Yes all that is very true, but on the OP I was describing the resultant force that pushes the 'average of the majority' of people who want to compare themselves to other people towards that direction.

Besides: even a very smart guild who knows how to ignore the meters of people who failed in mechanics: will often have a "Patchwerk" fight to compare themselves on pure numbers.

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Since I had personal experience on what you say (both as seeing it hard and easy), I believe it depends enormously on whether you started an expansion as exclusively a tank or not.
E.g. I dropped into tanking at the end of BfA and it was hellish but if you start an expansion as only-tank: it's easy because nobody knows the routes either so there's no pressure.

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I get the argument about very low difficulty parts of the game, but I don't believe the game has that many people on low difficulty brackets but it has more characters on them.
I imply that many of those "noob characters" are often a real life person with another main character on high skill brackets and those are usually DPS.

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Of course, but this is a subject about people basically pumping their ego (not necessarily in a bad sense), and it's much harder to convince people you're amazing at tanking if it goes through defenses and routing than to convince them "muh numbers big!".

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I empathize with them, because people will personally attack you if you drop on mythic+ tanking in the middle of the expansion because they have the delusion everyone else is playing for months just like them and don't realize not everyone bad is stupid (they may have just started learning).

But of course those tanks should be conscious on that and they shouldn't say "tanking hard" but "tanking hard if you everyone else knows the routes perfectly already" in that case.

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Sure but I believe they're also a big technical error they do even if they think at first a leadership role is fine for them. E.g. many of them appear to love to tank for low level levelling-5mans because it's easy for them and then explicitly say here "but mythic+ [not heroic or normal] is hard".
That's where I'm a broken record telling them here it depends a lot on if you started an expansion as exclusively a tank or not; if you drop in Shadowlands right now as a tank: you will be unironically personally attacked for not knowing routes; but do it at launch: nobody cares.

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Not entirely true. A team of god-like players will often "99th percentile themselves" by just being too fast in encounters as a team together.
By the way I mentioned "99th" first in this thread and I didn't have 5mans in mind but simpler raiding encounters where ranking is clearer.

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I don't believe most of that is true, with the condition that you're exclusively a healer or exclusively a tank since the start of an expansion. E.g. If you start as exclusively a Disc Priest: you may learn how to heal an encounter so well: that you don't give a shit if they blame you; you know you did your job well and it was easy to do your job well because that's what you do since the start of the expansion; other skilled people in the group would know that too and they will easily single out the moron who whines and they will support you.

I'm not talking about defensives a good tank will pump especially in keys.

[Darkeon]

I would rather tank - but fuck if I'll be yelled at by some sweaty dude in M+ lol

[epigramx]

goal is to kill the boss

My point there was the it makes no sense for people to play for months and years just to kill bosses if it was a single player game. And multiplayer games are always strictly tied to competition because people are instinctively hardwired to compete with other people.
Most people who claim they don't care about competition obviously do; they love the thought of being better than others; it's perfectly natural and not "evil" too because that's what every organism on the planet does to survive.

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I raided Ulduar as a feral druid tank and I never had any issues with threat. Not on hardmode either. You also didn't need any resistance gear.

Because you were probably in a hard core 25man guild. I was in both types of guilds. The 10man one with 2 average healers couldn't easily keep up; when I joined a world-class 25man guild it was another world; I felt like healing was raining on me.

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Also: blood death knights were extremely low passive defense. That was their thing because they were supposedly the high-HP spec that could self-heal a lot for the first time in the game but that obviously needed healers' support in hard mode bosses.

It was the best class for tanking in the history of the game; it had 3 specs for tanking in the same single class; I never learned all specs well (especially unholy) but it was better than being restricted to one (though monk's is the best).

[Capultro]

The reason why everyone plays with DPS instead of TANK is obvious: DPS is much more fun, TANK is just boring, and it's boring because blizzard has no imagination, even though many of us have given them great ideas....if They gave the warrior tank a permanent horse and changed it to "knight/rider" with 2h sword + shield, I'm sure many more would play it,and the same if they gave us back gladiator attitude... they don't have visible auras or interesting buffs, tanks are currently very boring, I'm now playing a blood DK and it's a big bore .....in fact I think there is no skill more boring than lethal blow....

[epigramx]

if They gave the warrior tank a permanent horse and changed it to "knight/rider" with 2h sword + shield, I'm sure many more would play it,and the same if they gave us back gladiator attitude... they don't have visible auras or interesting buffs

Visual stuff are ignored after the first few days of excitement. People's main purpose is gameplay itself after they've grinded this game for weeks on the same visuals even if they were the prettiest visuals in the world. And the main problem with tanking gameplay compared to DPS (and even HPS to a lesser extend) is that they can't as easily say "I was a better tank that other tanks".

[Gorsameth]

Yes this really is the answer. Hopefully with the changes to Halls of Valour the dungeon will be a lot more straightforward.

Also I take issue with people saying DPS don’t have to know tactics. There are always lots of stuff for the DPS to know too. Yeah you can run a dungeon and just dodge fire and be okay, and that’s fine if you just want to be mediocre. But there’s a lot more you can do as DPS to make the run easy, like soothing, cleansing, prioritising targets etc.
Plenty of times I’ve seen DPS flames for being idiotic. The only difference is you tend to just drag crap DPS through the dungeon and fail the timer.

I did do Upper Karazhan last week and legit felt bad for the tank.

Sure, DPS can learn and prepare a lot aswell, but it should be really obvious that we're not talking about people interested in doing that work here. If they were interested they also wouldn't mind learning the routes as a tank.

As you said yourself, a DPS can go into a dungeon with no specific knowledge, dodge fire and be 'ok'. Once upon a time you could do the same as a tank, that is no longer the case and that is a problem for those who don't want to put in the time and effort to be 'great' but want to just relax, have some fun and do 'ok'.

[epigramx]

Once upon a time you could do the same as a tank, that is no longer the case

You never could. The 5mans were just extremely easy (and the hard mode raiding was always hard for everyone).
The "hard" 5mans of Cataclysm were practically a 10+ of today but people never had harder 5mans before that.

[lllll]

My point is that the dps meter is a really bad way to judge who is best. There are too many variables - class balance, who’s good on a specific fight, roles you need people to fill, who got lucky with gear, kill timing…

This game isn’t about meters - competition winning the meter is a sideshow that’s mostly just annoying to the other people in the run. Yes you have to do good dps, but the difference between good and great individual play is small. Bosses are beaten through good collective effort. Instead of focusing on how to “beat” (lol) guild mates, people should be focused on play that improves the performance of the entire group.

It's a decent way when you compare to others of the same spec.

I'm playing with an enhancement shaman who is absolutely crushing, doing like 60k dps overall in some of the runs.

Meanwhile, other enhancement shamans are sitting at 12-15k dps, maybe 20 tops and think they're doing great dps.

[potis]

My point is that the dps meter is a really bad way to judge who is best. There are too many variables - class balance, who’s good on a specific fight, roles you need people to fill, who got lucky with gear, kill timing…

This game isn’t about meters - competition winning the meter is a sideshow that’s mostly just annoying to the other people in the run. Yes you have to do good dps, but the difference between good and great individual play is small. Bosses are beaten through good collective effort. Instead of focusing on how to “beat” (lol) guild mates, people should be focused on play that improves the performance of the entire group.

Excuses of bad players with a tiny spec of truth in it.

DPS doesnt matter when everyone is equally good and can trust the rest of the raid to do its job or to not care because everyone is good enough to react instantaneously.

You either play in a proper guild that provides that , or you dont care enough and the only thing left is to goof around and some mocking/competition during the raid since you know you need to wipe 20 times cause the weaker players will make sure that happens.

Replace guild with group and you have pugging world.

People arent equal in skillsets and experience and intelligence/reflexes call it whatever you want as an excuse as to why people are bad/dumb, WoW aint any different.

There are players that are top DPS, least damage taken, perfect interrupts, full knowledge of every fight from the PoV of Healers and Tanks and then there are people like you, telling them it all doesnt matter and its a collective force when they join a shitty ass pug,hell even LFR, cause they are bored where the average Little Billy is doing 30-60% of their DPS (in similar gear also if you want that example) and is too proud/unknowledgeable to simply shut up, realize he is dead weight and at least do the mechanics for the rest so he can get carried.

Yeah its the collective effort in WoW that kills things.

[epigramx]

My point is that the dps meter is a really bad way to judge who is best. There are too many variables - class balance, who’s good on a specific fight, roles you need people to fill, who got lucky with gear, kill timing…

This game isn’t about meters - competition winning the meter is a sideshow that’s mostly just annoying to the other people in the run. Yes you have to do good dps, but the difference between good and great individual play is small. Bosses are beaten through good collective effort. Instead of focusing on how to “beat” (lol) guild mates, people should be focused on play that improves the performance of the entire group.

Oh of course I agree with that. I thought you were talking from the angle "nobody cares to be compared to other people", because I had a lot of arguments of that sort lately.

[lllll]

Because you were probably in a hard core 25man guild.

No, we raided twice a week, 3 hours each evening.

[Subrias]

I am a tank, I am almost always a tank. I don't like tanking mythic plus because you have to run around like a chicken with your head cut off or at not be able to attack because you have to drop stacks and all that. That is not fun gameplay to me. Necrotic is the worst thing ever invented. I'm not saying I want to just sit there and afk like I did in hyjal or most of wrath as a paladin, but kiting is not what a tank is supposed to have to do. They are supposed to be meat shields.

[OrangeJuice]

when you first play the game, the only thing on your mind is you gotta kill shit. nobody chose their heal/tank role willingly, regardless if they learned to love it afterwards.

[epigramx]

when you first play the game, the only thing on your mind is you gotta kill shit. nobody chose their heal/tank role willingly, regardless if they learned to love it afterwards.

I don't think that's true. People want to feel they won at the game but that doesn't always come by killing stuff in a game unless they have some weird fetish with killing in real life.
Thing with healing and tanking is that it has less clarity on that; you can still derive the best tank or healer but it's a more complex assessment; DPSes feel clearer the "best".

[Sansnom]

Healer is sooooo boring to play.

You just sit and stare at health bars while using click casting to keep the bars full.

Tanking is probably the most difficult role to play IMO.

I disagree. I find healer the most difficult role to play because it is the role that the main focus is on other players.

Tanks and DPS focuses on the enemies, which are scripted and so is predictable. People are unpredictable and do unpredictable things, like not stepping out of the fire when they are suppose to.

It is the role where the difficulty is inversely proportional to the skill of the group. The better the group, the less work you have to do.

[Loveliest]

This wasn't a problem until Cata which is when parse culture really started. Nobody really looked at or cared much about logging or min/maxing at all. That's how we have come up with several situations in Classic that never happened during their respective expansions; ie: stacking 35 Warriors for 40 mans in Vanilla or Fiery Weapon being busted strong for Warrior during Wrath and nobody finding it.

Cata started with a massive lack of tanks. From the get go. This is where the bag was introduced in lfd as incentive. And it mostly had nothing to do with parsing.
Biggest reasons players didn't want to tank at the start of cata:
- aggro; it got boosted at 5x during firelands, but you actually had to keep aggro before that
- needing to pull without breaking CC (they changed CC later)
- needing to know actual tactics; as a dps you might fly under the radar learning on the fly, but the tank has to know; dungeon marks him as default leader
People would just not be able to complete so many encounters at the start of Cata. Like last two bosses in Grim Batol.
All of these were too much effort for most. Even when faced with 1hr queues, people would still not tank.

[epigramx]

It is the role where the difficulty is inversely proportional to the skill of the group. The better the group, the less work you have to do.

Thoughts like that are kinda an oxymoron, because all roles get to feel that anyway. If you are a very good dps: you will suffer if others are trash; same with tanks; generally any role finds it much easier in a team of pros.

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Cata started with a massive lack of tanks. From the get go. This is where the bag was introduced in lfd as incentive. And it mostly had nothing to do with parsing.
Biggest reasons players didn't want to tank at the start of cata:
- aggro; it got boosted at 5x during firelands, but you actually had to keep aggro before that
- needing to pull without breaking CC (they changed CC later)
- needing to know actual tactics; as a dps you might fly under the radar learning on the fly, but the tank has to know; dungeon marks him as default leader
People would just not be able to complete so many encounters at the start of Cata. Like last two bosses in Grim Batol.
All of these were too much effort for most. Even when faced with 1hr queues, people would still not tank.

WotLK in general had extremely complex tanking (and Cata inherited "I won't play tank this time" from it). It was exacerbated by the DK class which was new and everyone and their mother was playing back then. It had 3 specs for tanking; threat was a challenge before the later buffs you mentioned; and since most played blood spec and it had shitty passive-defense: it needed pro healers to feel right (in hard mode raiding) (otherwise you might have had to concentrate on defense and drop threat which was a vicious cycle).

[pinkspring]

Tanks have always been in short supply, and its always been for the same reason: The toxic playerbase in this game that minmaxes and screeches at anyone who doesnt get everything 100% correct.

The harassment and impatience with tanks and healers has been the reason why nobody wants to play those roles for as long as there has been WoW.
I enjoy tanking and healing, but I wouldnt dream of doing it for anything more then random heroics or LFR's. Anything higher then that, and the players get far too toxic, far too obsessed with their meters, and just allround far too unpleasant.

In a long ago time, the point of a dungeon was to clear it. These days, if you are not doing it in the absolute most optimal way, 90% of the players dont even want to talk to you.

[Subrias]

Tanks have always been in short supply, and its always been for the same reason: The toxic playerbase in this game that minmaxes and screeches at anyone who doesnt get everything 100% correct.

The harassment and impatience with tanks and healers has been the reason why nobody wants to play those roles for as long as there has been WoW.
I enjoy tanking and healing, but I wouldnt dream of doing it for anything more then random heroics or LFR's. Anything higher then that, and the players get far too toxic, far too obsessed with their meters, and just allround far too unpleasant.

In a long ago time, the point of a dungeon was to clear it. These days, if you are not doing it in the absolute most optimal way, 90% of the players dont even want to talk to you.

Yeah, I still play tank and I have since BC. I also (used to #rangedsurvival) like hunter when I dps'd. Everything is a lot less stressful as a dps. Even As a hunter and having to do most mechanics it wasn't that stressful. But the way M+ is now, it makes me not want to tank. Gotta make an efficient path, gotta cc, interupt, dispell, use Active mit at certain times, and my personal favorite.. kite like you aren't a tank (gotta drop them stacks). I'm fine with most of that tbh. The making the route and kiting are my least favorite parts. More so in this expansion because some dungeon routes completely change based on covenants. Lol