Once upon a time, in a raid instance far, far away, warriors were the one and only acceptable tank. Naturally, the hybrid tanks did not enjoy this situation. They wanted to tank, and may have spent the bulk of their pre-raid careers tanking, only to find out that their role at the end of the game was limited to healing.

When I first started playing WoW, I already knew what I wanted to be. My first choice was crowd control, as it was my forte in Everquest. I was disheartened to find out that true “crowd control”, as I knew it, was non-existant in WoW, and the chaos of my first few instance groups (as a priest) left a bad taste in my mouth. I nearly quit the game at that time, as it had seemed that grouping in WoW was designed as nothing more than 4 people soloing in the same vicinity with 1 hapless sucker trying to keep them all alive.

By chance I happened upon an article explaining some of the basics of warrior tanking and the concept of abilities having innate threat. Wait, you mean sunder armor wasn’t just a crappy debuff that nobody used? You mean tanking more than one thing at a time was not only possible, but ideal? I was intrigued, and after doing some more research on the available tanking classes, decided to roll a warrior and become a tank.

It wasn’t long until I found myself tanking my first Deadmines run…and failing. I could keep them off the healer just fine, but couldn’t keep them off the wild DPS that attacked whatever was closest or spammed AoE. The priest was impressed though, and we quested together. I found myself tanking 4, 6, 8, 10 and more non-elites at a time, keeping their attention and slowly wearing them down while the priest kept me alive. I’d found my CC class. I would learn to integrate DPS into this strategy by using the more familiar procedures of Main Assist and focused fire, and the journey of truly understanding threat and group dynamics in WoW would begin.

Not everyone was so lucky though, and some picked the “wrong” class for doing exactly what they’d wanted to do from the start.

Blizzard made moves to rectify this disparity in The Burning Crusade, and continued to make more changes to further equalize the tanks without homogenizing them. This has resulted in an interesting - and often frustrating - situation of interdependence in which there are no main tanks, only niche tanks. No one tank class can handle every situation to an acceptable degree. Mob has a massive spell attack that has to be reflected? Use a warrior. Ten thousand adds? Need a paladin. Need an effective off tank who can stay second in threat when needed and spend half the raid contributing significant DPS? Find a druid.

Can’t find enough tanks of the proper classes to fill those niche roles for every raid? Your dps and healing specced druids, paladins and warriors don’t have the proper gear to pinch hit? Tough shit.

While I’m pretty sure it was Blizzard’s intention to create this state of “every type of tank is needed”, I doubt it was also their intention to create the perceived tank shortage the community is suffering from. The problem with “every type of tank is needed” is precisely that. Tanks are already hard to find, because with the exception of feral druids, they’re terrible at everything else. Rare is the person who wants to spend 100 gold on top of their repair and consumable bill to go tank an instance or raid and then go back to their normal spec after. Finding a good, dedicated tank among the already slim pickings that actually knows what they’re doing and isn’t a nightmare to deal with is even harder. Tanking is not a popular role or spec, but there are still tanks out there. The problem is you need so damned many of them to do anything efficiently past the 5-mans. And woe be to you if you are a tank and want to do anything else efficiently.

This puts younger guilds in a very difficult situation where they not only have to find at least one tank of each class and backups for those, but they also have to gear up each and every one of those tanks instead of gearing just a few main tanks, and may even have to swap out tanks in the middle of the raid to handle content they are just barely geared for, further hampering the collective gear progression of their tank corps. The addition of the deathknight class, assuming they will follow the trend of only being viable tanks if they are specced for tanking (but wont be good for anything else if they are specced for tanking) and will have their own tanking niche created for them, will only exacerbate the problem with Blizzard’s current model.

What is needed is a paradigm of “any tank will do”. Suddenly all the options are open, the tank shortage is partially mitigated, and the best tank truly is the best tank. All you were able to recruit was 3 feral druids and a prot pally? No problem. Nothing but prot warriors? Works just fine. Deathknights? Sure. All the content is still open regardless of your composition of tank classes because “every type of tank is needed” became, simply, “tanks are needed”.

There was a time when Blizzard suggested that they wanted the tank classes to be roughly equal, so that no particular class stood head and shoulders above the rest and players wouldn’t feel the need to min/max the tanks down to the thousandth decimal point to find which class was the best. But they wanted to have their cake and eat to too by having certain encounters “favor” one particular tank. Thus creating the current problems, because it’s a world of absolutes; you can’t “get by” in an encounter that favors a particular type of tank with another type of tank unless you’re overgeared for it, but you can’t get that gear unless you had that particular type of tank to start with!

The case today is that the tanking classes are not only entirely not equal, they are not even complete! Druids and paladins are crippled against bosses and even some trash without a warrior present to use thunderclap. Large AoE situations can be incredibly more difficult, or even impossible, for warriors and druids to handle. The ability of warriors and paladins to help DPS or heal in situations where they are not required to tank is so feeble that they may as well not even be participating. Paladins, with a large portion of their threat and longevity being dependant on actually getting hit, are woefully inadequate as shadow tanks (staying second on the threat list). Druids take so much extra damage over the course of a boss fight from crushing blows and lack of blocking that they can end up taking far more total damage than a warrior or paladin, despite their higher armor.

And who knows what new problems and inequities will be introduced with the deathknight class.

The question is, how do you make the tanks complete and competitive in all situations without further homogenizing them? The answer is, you don’t. It’s pointless flailing about that only makes things worse and even harder to balance in the long run. It’s far simpler and more effective to bolster the glaring weaknesses of each tank class so that they can at least perform comparably to the others in every situation. And suddenly the server wide pool of (random numbers) 100 tanking warriors, 70 tanking paladins, 50 tanking druids and 35 tanking deathknights becomes a pool of 255 viable tanks to spread among the guilds and pick up groups, each and every one of them able to handle every encounter without crippling disadvantages or reliance on the presense of other types of tanks.

I suppose that’s enough ranting for now. In part two of this article, I will blather on about my own pet theories of how to elegantly and effectively equalize the tanking classes in all scenarios while maintaining their unique flavors and styles. At the same time I’ll present ideas to improve the non-tanking capabilities of tank specs so that they’re not as useless as a hat full of busted assholes when not tanking, without overshadowing the non tank specs or other classes. So that, just maybe, more people would be willing to stay specced for tanking.

Since, you know, I’m way smarter than the devs and they will totally listen to me!

This entry was posted on Monday, April 14th, 2008 and is filed under Soapbox, Tanks, ~ Aensu. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.