Tanking changes and how they aren't killing the tanking game

So it's been a few weeks since my last (and first) blog post as I have been pretty busy with work. Turns out that finding time to blog among everything else is more difficult then I had anticipated!

This week Blizzard discussed it's planned changes to tanking and implemented a hot fix that increased threat generated by tanks from 300% damage to 500% damage and vengeance stacks up faster. Essentially these changes make it impossible to pull threat off of tanks. There's been a lot of crying on the Internet about this so I thought I'd throw my opinion out there, focusing on two main points.

1) This makes tanking easier.

As a raiding tank I can tell you now that this change hardly effects me at all. Maintaining threat against a raid boss is very very easy, not once has a raid boss been pulled off my by anything but another tank. When it comes to adds occasionally they can be tricky to pick up but I have never found it to be a big issue. Heroics wise once I've picked up mobs I can count the number of times threat has been pulled from me (even by raid geared DPS) on one hand. For end game tanks I would say this change is almost a non issue boiling down to a quality of life change at most.

Where these changes really shine is on under geared and new tanks and even more so in the often unfriendly environment of the dungeon finder. I know there's people out there who think the game shouldn't be balanced around the LFD system but it IS part of the game which anyone who wants current content gear is participating in (except for progression raiders clearing all of Firelands every week). While I am very fed up of troll heroics I am still running them every week to get VP capped as are many others.

Tanks (and Healers but I am talking about tanking) bear the brunt of negativity in the dungeon finder itself and this creates a barrier to entry when it comes to learning those roles for many people, barriers for entry are bad! The most common bad attitude I have spotted in the dungeon finder is speed, people want their runs finished quickly and many don't want to spend the time helping someone learn their role by doing. DPS can practice their rotation on dummies (yes this is an imperfect system but gets you used to where everything is) but tanks don't really have any practice area to learn when to hit their big cooldowns or how to keep up with high DPS, normals don't even come close to preparing you. If you've never tanked before how can you really prepare for a heroic? You can (and should) read up in preparation and you should run normals to get a basic feel for your class but the only real way to learn is by doing.

These changes mean that new tanks can concentrate on their own survival; they don't need to learn how to make up for other peoples mistakes in the form of DPS pew pew and they don't need to deal with "omg tank hold aggro" comments from DPS that overgear them.

2) This makes DPS lazy.

DPS are already lazy, at least the DPS this is aimed at (i.e the random kind) are. Don't get me wrong, I have encountered some fantastic DPS in my time in LFD (I especially love when I arrive at mobs to find all the dangerous ones living as sheep or blocks of ice) but I have also encountered many many bad ones who: complain when the tank is marking CC, sprout "go" constantly, blame the tank when they over aggro, shift blame whenever they die, don't bother with boss mechanics, moan about explanations to people new to the instance etc etc etc.

When tanking I have the confidence to know when people are being jerks and to ignore them but new tanks aren't always going to have that kind of confidence in their abilities, especially when they are first learning.

Many DPS already just pew pew without even glancing at Omen nothing Blizzard can do will change that. The bads will always be bad.

The future

Blizzard have also given us hint about the future of tanking (in 4.3 I assume) with it looking like all tanks will be moving towards a DK model of being more in control of their own survivability. Hopefully without the endless Death knight spam though ;)

Till next time

Adriaria