Tanking has gotten really boring.

[Brodeo]

if your finding tanking boring your simply not doing it right, the tanking role has changed, you have to maximize your mitigation now and also have maximise your damage done, tank damage meant something for a few in cata but before that it meant nothing, you could get aggro then afk until somebody got close for all of wrath, in bc/vanilla you had to read essays to raid tank.

tanking now is in the best spot its ever been.

Somehow i dont think the gain 60 rage, dump 60 rage model is engaging. The hardest part of maximizing your DPS as a tank is remembering to push the button that isnt on cooldown when the GCD is up.

Adding Maul or HS to the mix doesnt change much. I'd rather go back to low damage, high threat abilities.

[Hellkung]

Tanking used to be more challenging when tank AoE had limited targets. Most of the boring AoE spamfests we call dungeons now can be attributed to this. Combined with the fact that mobs used to kill people who werent tanks, it actually made good play distinguishable. Good tanks had threat on things, good DPS waited and lived.

Active mitigation doesnt really fill that void. If you spend your class resources on your AM abilities, cool, you saved some healer mana, maybe a wipe in the long run. Outside of the actual challenging content though, mostly irrelevant. If youre the best tank in the world maybe you can juggle it and still only pinch off a few extra thousand DPS.

I do like the idea, and i feel like it was well-implemented for Monks and DKs, but warriors, druids, and paladins all have a pretty boring setup.

Theres no challenge anymore. Nothing about tanking is hard. Juggling 5-6 mobs with lacerates and 3-target swipe used to be engaging. People died if you were awful. If youre not a tank, you probably love this, but honestly i think its negatively impacting people interested in that role. I've all but quit tanking as a result. At least when i DPS i can benchmark my performance.

Theres more to this and i didnt think this out much, but i am interested how other former/current tanks feel about the direction the role is heading in.

I strongly disagree and I think anyone who's giving 5-man dungeons as an example is just not really a correct way to figure out where the problem lies, for some people.

I prefer the AM system and really the importance and difficulty of the tank's role is different on most bosses.

You have crap like Sha (of Pride) where you pretty much do absolutely nothing and then there's fights like Dark Shamans where a bad tank can easily kill your raid or himself.

This isn't even including HC raids.

[Blufossa]

It's a legit criticism. Back then I was tanking with my bear and I remember switching target to keep my aggro a lot.

I dunno what you do, but I like to tank adds or anything else with "moving a lot", so I get to Lacerate the hell out of stuff (which means switching targets a lot).

I enjoy bear tanking as much as I did back in Vanilla/BC.

[Quibble]

So.. yeah no... tanking hasn't really become to easy, when we start out in an expansion, when we have the gear meant for those dungeons, people wipe and not just once..

If you compare the start of the expansion with now, yes then it seems it has become to easy.
But this isn't any different from how dungeons was in end of cata or end of wrath. In all 3 cases I can run in with my tank char, pull half the dungeon before I stop and let dps start nuking..

back in wrath it didn't even require a real healer, I was running the dungeons signed as healer, healing in shadow spec (mostly by VE, which were different back then)

[Fauxpaws]

Agreed. It was one of the things that really made tanking fun.

The only time I felt like it was an issue was when they made raid fights specifically require a paladin offtank or you were in for a bad time. It wasn't fair to the warrior/druid main tank and it wasn't fair to the paladin to be shoe horned into the role of add tanking.

For 5 man content, sure I'm with you. Being a good warrior tank made heroics easy. You could stance dance to break fears/disorients, and keep threat by smashing the hell out of thunderclap and tabbing. Plus, warriors had great mitigation tools. Was it fun having to keep shield block up constantly? Not really, but you could macro it if it was too much of a chore.

DPS also had more of a role with CC and could take some of the burden off of a not so stellar tank by creative play. (Mind controlling an add, fear kiting with curse of reck, trapping, etc.) The only problem there was that your class actually had to have in combat CC or you were boned. Perhaps not so much for organized guild runs, but pugging you were almost always better off with having a mage and lock in your party.

Getting back to the prot pally tank. What made them so great for offtanking in raids, also made them great 5 man tanks as well. Why bother with all that CC, when you could grab a Kara/badge geared prot pally and rush through instances with little regard for CC? Yeah, they were squishy at first, but when heroics got nerfed and pallies started gearing up - it fundamentally changed the way people did content.

[Deleted]

tanking now is in the best spot its ever been.

Opinions are like those holes and all that.

I find tanking right now to be at its ultimate worst (well, except maybe vanilla early bear tanking but let's not go there) it has ever been. Because DPS is so fucking brain dead that my left shoe is more intelligent than 99% of the player base they've had to give ridiculous amounts of threat generation to tanks and AoE power that trivializes everything but the most "difficult" encounters in the game.

And active tanking? Oh please. I have so much rage as a bear I don't even know what this downtime is people talk about. And saving mitigation talents for when you need them? Oh my god that is almost rocket science, phew - I don't know how people can deal with such complex variables.

[Brodeo]

Go do challenge modes but after 50+ runs those become boring aoefests too.

I did some with my old guild. They were good players so it was fun while getting a feel for them, but it didnt take long. After that point, youre right, it got boring/easy.

[Purenight]

I play all 5 tanking classes. My main which is a BrM is freaking amazingly fun to play and I like the new active mid they have. However pallys are a joke to play. I am serious when I say pally is the easiest out of all the classes to play for tanking. BrM and DK take skill to be good at, bear just doesnt rely on active's its more about passives for them. Warriors are always back and forth right now as of the last patch they are easier to play but still not where they need to be.

[Johnkie]

Tanking used to be more challenging when tank AoE had limited targets. Most of the boring AoE spamfests we call dungeons now can be attributed to this. Combined with the fact that mobs used to kill people who werent tanks, it actually made good play distinguishable. Good tanks had threat on things, good DPS waited and lived.

Active mitigation doesnt really fill that void. If you spend your class resources on your AM abilities, cool, you saved some healer mana, maybe a wipe in the long run. Outside of the actual challenging content though, mostly irrelevant. If youre the best tank in the world maybe you can juggle it and still only pinch off a few extra thousand DPS.

I do like the idea, and i feel like it was well-implemented for Monks and DKs, but warriors, druids, and paladins all have a pretty boring setup.

Theres no challenge anymore. Nothing about tanking is hard. Juggling 5-6 mobs with lacerates and 3-target swipe used to be engaging. People died if you were awful. If youre not a tank, you probably love this, but honestly i think its negatively impacting people interested in that role. I've all but quit tanking as a result. At least when i DPS i can benchmark my performance.

Theres more to this and i didnt think this out much, but i am interested how other former/current tanks feel about the direction the role is heading in.

Ye tanking has been severely "bored" down... I recall when TPS was actually something you had to work for.
Damn it was fun to be prot war in tbc/wotlk.
Constantly changeing targets when aoe tanking. Fun stuff 2bad its gone.

Ow yeah tanking in early cata was fun to actually.

[Brodeo]

I strongly disagree and I think anyone who's giving 5-man dungeons as an example is just not really a correct way to figure out where the problem lies, for some people.

I prefer the AM system and really the importance and difficulty of the tank's role is different on most bosses.

You have crap like Sha (of Pride) where you pretty much do absolutely nothing and then there's fights like Dark Shamans where a bad tank can easily kill your raid or himself.

This isn't even including HC raids.

What i said applies to everything up to heroic raids. Im convinced you didnt play a tank prior to wrath if you think there is anything difficult about the tank role in the game right now.

[Dastuross]

So, if you want something harder, do heroic raids? tanking in heroics is MUCH more difficult than in cata/wrath/tbc. You need to watch your AM, time CD well, keep your various personal buffs up, watch boss movement, etc. i don't think this is a "tanking is boring" as much as a "the content i'm doing is too easy" thing.

[barackohmama]

500% threat, enough said.

[Fauxpaws]

So.. yeah no... tanking hasn't really become to easy, when we start out in an expansion, when we have the gear meant for those dungeons, people wipe and not just once..

LOL... People wiping in heroics at the start of WotLK, Cataclsym (yes even Cataclysm) and MoP would have wiped on the trash leading up to the first boss in any BC heroic when it was released. Don't give me that line of BS that it's just the gear.

I remember being excited for WotLK when it came out and being utterly disappointed by how easy the heroics were. Baddies wiping on Loken, King Dredd, Skadi, etc, didn't deserve to be there. They were horrible players that got us in the mess we are in now. Now unless people can run a heroic in 15 minutes they think it's taking forever. I remember when an hour long run in something like heroic SLab was a good clip. People are completely spoiled by the mindless zerg that instances have become.

[Deleted]

So, if you want something harder, do heroic raids?

Boring doesn't have anything to do with the difficulty level of an encounter. Learn the difference.

[Brodeo]

So.. yeah no... tanking hasn't really become to easy, when we start out in an expansion, when we have the gear meant for those dungeons, people wipe and not just once..

If you compare the start of the expansion with now, yes then it seems it has become to easy.
But this isn't any different from how dungeons was in end of cata or end of wrath. In all 3 cases I can run in with my tank char, pull half the dungeon before I stop and let dps start nuking..

back in wrath it didn't even require a real healer, I was running the dungeons signed as healer, healing in shadow spec (mostly by VE, which were different back then)

Well, youll notice i said tanking hasnt been hard since before then, they just keep making it easier. Hell, back in the day you had to position mobs so that your 3 target swipe wouldnt hit CC mobs or just resort to lacerating multiple targets to keep aggro when you had multiple targets.

That and a ton of other "QoL" changes made the role a joke.

[Deleted]

I don't think the current dungeons can be used as an example for this as they're so out of date, I find raiding I need to swap targets every now and then.

[Brodeo]

So, if you want something harder, do heroic raids? tanking in heroics is MUCH more difficult than in cata/wrath/tbc. You need to watch your AM, time CD well, keep your various personal buffs up, watch boss movement, etc. i don't think this is a "tanking is boring" as much as a "the content i'm doing is too easy" thing.

Youre missing the point, the role doesnt change in heroics, just the margin of error. If i just blow everything on savage defender/frenzied regen, i have tremendous uptime. That wont change in heroic, just how important it is to do so. If the 1mil DPS from missed maul opportunities wipes us, could just as easily be anyone elses fault.

[Dastuross]

I play all 5 tanking classes. My main which is a BrM is freaking amazingly fun to play and I like the new active mid they have. However pallys are a joke to play. I am serious when I say pally is the easiest out of all the classes to play for tanking. BrM and DK take skill to be good at, bear just doesnt rely on active's its more about passives for them. Warriors are always back and forth right now as of the last patch they are easier to play but still not where they need to be.

I'll give you the fact that tanking lfr/flex/normal as a paladin is easy, if you think a paladin is super easy in heroics, you're playing the class wrong, you need to be always watching for things you can you your Hand spells on, min/maxing your dps, min/maxing EF with vengeance, timing SoTR properly, timing things like HA (if you take it), etc. it's not a super hard class, but it's not easy at heroic levels either.

[Brodeo]

I dont understand why everyone is clinging to the one dungeon comment i made. It applies to all levels of content.

[Fauxpaws]

Youre missing the point, the role doesnt change in heroics, just the margin of error. If i just blow everything on savage defender/frenzied regen, i have tremendous uptime. That wont change in heroic, just how important it is to do so. If the 1mil DPS from missed maul opportunities wipes us, could just as easily be anyone elses fault.

People can't understand the difference unless they were a tank in vanilla/BC. They just can't. The game is fundamentally different than it was back then. You might as well be trying to explain to them how fun AV was when the resources mattered.