Loading ...A Rare Post: The Number of Tanks I want in Cataclysm
If you’ve read this site for any length of time, you’ve realized that I don’t like to talk about “nothing” too often. However, I really like this topic.
Where we are
It’s pretty clear to everyone that we use 1-2 tanks in 10s and 1-3 tanks in 25s. 10s seem to do a pretty good job of giving 2 tanks something to do on every fight. 25s are the same way.
The problem with this debate
Everyone wastes their time pointing out ratios. Blizzard doesn’t care about ratios. Or, at least, I don’t think they do and I certainly don’t, so I’m not going to list the tanking ratios of 5s, 10s and 25s and pretend like that matters to the discussion. It doesn’t. This game isn’t about everything fitting in a pretty, mathematical package. I would be really surprised if we ever saw a 15 man again.
What really matters
That fights are interesting.
Constantly switching roles really isn’t that interesting. Even the people that take a shining to it initially eventually get tired of it. It’s just not fun. I want to be a tank or I want to be a dpser. I don’t want to be both.
Less Complaints. More Solutions.
Fights where you got it right, Blizz.
- Hydross
- Fathom-Lord
- A’lar
- High King Mul’gar
- Magtheridon
- …maybe a few more I can’t think of.
Why you got those right
They use a lot of tanks. They fall in the 3-5 range. What happened to those fights? They’re the best kind. When you gave us a 4th tanking class, I really expected these fights to be the norm in 25 mans, but they’ve pretty much disappeared.
The best part of these fights is they all literally fall in the 3-5 range. You could do them with 3, 4 or even 5 tanks. They gave you options. This meant that if your guild liked to run a lot of tanks that there was stuff for all of them to do. This meant that if one of your tanks didn’t show up, you could still do the fights by tweaking things a bit.
This is really what you should have gave us and it’s what tanks need in Cataclysm.
Better Still!
These fights really tested our healers without giving them carpal tunnel. A lot of these fights isolated healers and forced them to work in teams. They even gave you the possibility of adding interesting things like mana drains that force healer rotations. Healing was about survival, mana management and communication.
Basically, communications needs to be about more than me and my healer shouting back and forth at each other whenever we use cooldowns. I want more than that and you’ve given me more than that in the past. Gimme it back!
War isn’t about tanking 1 Dragon
It’s about armies. Stretch us. I’m still waiting for a fight that forces us to break into 5 smaller teams to accomplish a task. Really make us move. Not just out of fire move, I mean really move around vast landscapes. I’m talking Supremus size rooms. Make abilities like aspect of the pack useful in a raid or at least, aspect of the cheetah. Give me more reasons to love intercept, charge and intervene. Make the Warbringer talent an absolute no-brainer for tanks.
Just stop even considering a single tank fight on a 10 man level. Stop even considering a 2 tank fight on a 25 man level. Give raids a reason to run lots and lots of tanks.
November 21st, 2009 at 6:23 am
I dont think you could have expressed this better
If this was a petition, I’d sign it twice
PS. Yay! First post after 1+ years of reading!
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Onlyhuman reply on November 21, 2009 3:58 pm:
I was first with with my UK time
you jumped in front of me with your transatlantic clock
I call that cheating
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November 21st, 2009 at 6:59 am
There is one thing common to all those great encounters you have listed Vene.
They have been designed as pure 25man fights.
And strangely enough I remember every single one of them today.
But they are not compatible with new fast and simple deployment model. Which is same fight for 10/25 or heroic only with tweaked parameters. Amount of damage/healing, shorter enrage timer. They simplified everything, class exchangeability, buff availability and encounters to be able to deliver more content in a shorter time.
How to make 10 man into 25, add more adds so 3rd tank is busy
Or make impale shorter so boss needs to be taunted more often.
This is the price we pay
There are plenty encounters in WoTK which are very enjoyable because Blizz has learned a lot in different areas.
I cannot imagine how cood encounters they could deliver it they were designed sole for 10 or 25 mans.
But that is not going to happen
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Treos reply on November 21, 2009 8:41 am:
I completely agree with this. While still not the most challenging fight, an example of this is when a fight like the 4 Horsemen is designed for 40 people. Not hard. Then they scale it down to 25, where you can still find 4 tanks or “Tank Like” beings, to stand around and take the hits. However, when scaled down again, to 10 man, the fight is significantly harder than its 25 man counterpart. At least in my opinion. So yes, the interchangeable 10/25 mans seem to be the death of needing more than 3 tanks.
On a side note, hey Vene it’s Treos. I posted a blog today and wanted you to check it out if you got a chance. Don’t tell the guild I have a blog though, I don’t want to get made fun of like you do.
jk
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Bhig reply on November 22, 2009 1:26 pm:
Sorry to off topic slightly…
4 Horseman on 10 man with only 8 people… Now that was an interesting encounter…
Those extra two people make such a difference.
Ok.. sorry going back on Topic…
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Veneretio reply on November 21, 2009 1:40 pm:
Yup, all those fights were designed as pure 25 man fights, but I can imagine how all of them would scale down to a 10 man fight. It’s also entirely possible they could just have 1 or 2 less of a big add on the 10 mans. Fights don’t have to be identical.
That’s really what I’d like to see, some differentiation between 10s and 25s in Cataclysm. Not a lot, but a bit. Give both 10s and 25s their own unique encounters so both feel like they’re being given something that the other doesn’t get.
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November 21st, 2009 at 7:02 am
I started play WoW the year WoTLK came out and began tanking after level 59. All my tanking experience has and only has been Tanks and Healers talking in raids. As well as 2 tanks for 25mans; 1 tank for 10 mans. I figured that’s how it always been because it’s all I experienced. :/ IT would be real neat to have divided groups to complete a single task with multiple tanks to do so. Once again vene, /agree lol
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Valalvax reply on November 22, 2009 12:11 am:
I remember the days where each class would have a leader and they were the one that was supposed to talk in vent (course, that crap never happened, I chat too much ^_^)
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November 21st, 2009 at 8:08 am
WoW developers design for the lowest common denominator.
I say this in reference to how fights work and the size of boss encounters (sheer spacing of a room). They can’t make huge distances to cross for all tanks, because only Warriors can cross them quickly, just the same that they try not to make any fights where Intervene/Charge/Intercept are required. Why? Because Pallies and DKs cannot do these things.
Consistency is another thing that they avoid in design 90% of the time. For instance, lack of consistency in stats on gear, set bonuses not making sense sometimes (or complete downgrades from prior set bonuses), and designing 3 fights to use 3 tanks and 7 fights to use only 1-2 (in the same instance). Often gear seems to have a very “dartboard” feel to it, as if they toss darts, determine stats then ‘make it work’ after the fact. Encounter design should be consistent throughout an instance. If ONE fight takes 3 tanks, they ALL should use 3 tanks. Why? Because the novelty of Dual Spec’ing for Prot/DPS has worn off. You can’t be competitive in off-spec gear unless you have really really good off-spec gear. It seemed like a good use of Dual Spec at the time, but now it is an annoyance. I used to like to DPS, but falling behind the curve makes me feel more useless than useful on fights where I hafta DPS.
Give us an instance that requires the same number of tanks for EVERY fight inside it, so you can bring a set group and get it done. If we eventually overgear something that requires 3 tanks and only bring 2, that’s fine. Design it from the get-go to use 3 though if that is what some fights will require at the beginning.
Good article.
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November 21st, 2009 at 9:14 am
Not sure if you were familiar with Everquest encounters, but they had a fight there that would have been your dream battle. It was called the Rathe Council. It was a 72 man raid encounter, where you had to control all 12 of these council members and kill them all within 7 minutes of the 1st one’s death in a room the size of let’s say Orgrimmar’s main area. Similar to the Majordomo fight, half could be CC’d, and had to be throughout the entire fight. They also pulse an AE that makes keeping more than 1 or 2 near each other impossible. I could get more into it, but you get the idea behind the fight. The fight takes about an hour if not more when it was the top end of progression.
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November 21st, 2009 at 9:24 am
I agree. As a healer, I’m in the same boat. In BC, it was possible to bring 8 or even 9 healer to a 25 man raid. All fights with many tanks very much favored a healer heavy lineup. In the actual content though, it makes very much sense to cut back on healers.
The first problem you’ve already explained. Boss encounters are designed around few tanks and rather few healers. Healing a Tank is a lot less dynamic in the world of infinite mana, it’s all about keeping a tank at 100% all the time and clever management of cooldowns.
But as soon as you get into hard modes, it isn’t only a thing of boss design, which favors few healers and few tanks, especially cutting down on healers is often a necessity to have enough DPS. All encounters requiring heavy DPS will lead to lineups with as few healers as possible. This isn’t really fun.
Having more tanks wouldn’t only be a good thing for tanks, it would also add more value to us healers, which I’d love to see in future instances.
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November 21st, 2009 at 10:25 am
Variety is a good thing. The switch up. There’s always a place for the one tank fight, or the 4 tank fight.
Switching rolls is interesting. Who wants to do the same thing over, and over. How many healers are pumped about the ICC fight where they have to heal something to death? Adding in something like Faction champs where you have to use new abilities in unique ways that blur the rolls of tank, healer, DPS, support are great.
And hey. I don’t mind at all the challenge of trying to contribute as DPS once and a while so everyone can have a chance to tank.
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November 21st, 2009 at 11:01 am
They made an extra tank class for wotlk because of a tanking shortage. There’s no reason at all to expect going into that premise that we’d have tanking in the scale and numbers you’re talking about. The percentage of the population actually tanking stuff hasn’t increased enough either to accommodate down the road in cataclysm.
I’d love to see a balanced raid instance as otherwise mentioned here. I’d love to see more people that want to tank get more chances to do so. I’d love to see squad based stuff… I’d love to see everything everyone is talking about here but onlyhuman is right in terms of the design process not affording this and the user base isn’t there to support it on a consistent basis either.
/dreams of a hydra fight where you need many tanks for all the heads….
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Veneretio reply on November 21, 2009 11:42 am:
Well that’s just it… the percentage of tanks won’t increase unless demand increases. The only way that’s going to happen is by making more opportunities for tanks to tank.
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Dje reply on November 23, 2009 2:21 am:
On the topic itself, i’d rather like to have such fights again because they were more fun to handle (i mostly dislike the “plan a CD rotatition for the next 3 minutes” part of many current fights) and there are more things to react too as a raid (ie more fun for me as a raid leader).
However i don’t really agree with this argument of yours. I’ll stray a bit from the “what the tanks want” topic to look at this from a raid leading/guild management perspective. Even if the demand increases, the number of tanks won’t increase (or at least not enough to accomodate it for everyone).
Or rather, the “top” guilds (with a rather loose definition) will be able to find the new tanks, the good PvE progression guilds will too but will have to lower standards, and the rest plus pugs will be in a world of hurt having to accomodate with lots of bad tanks in fights where the quality of those tanks would be an even bigger factor of success.
I consider my guild to be at the lower end of “good PvE” guilds (2/5 ToC 25 hm), and we already have problems getting enough good people to raid 25 hm consistently, especially on tanks and healers. All the guilds above us are recruiting too so good recruits are very rare (and have to be geared up by ourselves before being usable in hm’s).
Having to find more good tanks in order to be able to do even the normal content does scare me a bit.
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Dreador reply on November 23, 2009 11:44 am:
I disagree that they made more tanks because of a shortage. Most guilds had too many, the only “shortages” were to people not wanting to fail over and over in pug heroics. If anything now as predicted there’s a tank overflow, too many batters at the plate and not enough pitches coming in. Hell, in my old BC guild we had 8 tanks at one time and had to trim some fat because they didn’t want to respec.
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November 21st, 2009 at 11:06 am
I Always Love you articles. I’m with you on this one, i loved Mag and Alar in BC and in naxx my fav fight is Thadd. giving tanks alot to do is prety important, to tanks anyways. i do think there should be some straight Tank and spank gate keepers. DPS love to just do as much damage as they can as well. and its always fun to try to have a perfect rotation as a tank. One thing i do miss a little is the clothy tanks. like HKM and the like. let the better clothy players shine a little instead of the common ” i pew pew’d more then that guy” Tanking is HARD. thats why i love it.i have 2 toons Enhancment shaman and a prot warrior, i think they are top of the dificulty level. Whats your game?
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November 21st, 2009 at 11:38 am
I’d love it if they did this.
The other really cool thing about multi-tank fights is that tanks have a few different roles available. So if you get bored of tanking the main boss, you can always ask your raid leader if you can be on adds, or some other tanking role in the fight. I find that sort of thing keeps my skills sharp and keeps encounters interesting.
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November 21st, 2009 at 12:20 pm
It’s not that there weren’t some great multi-tank fights in TBC, but the self-same dungeons had vastly different raid makeup requirements across each encounter.
BT had:
Najentus - 1 tank
Supremus - 2/3 tanks
Akama - 3
Teron Gorefiend - 1
RoS - 1 (depending on strategy)
Gurtogg Bloodboil - 3
Mother Shahraz - 3 (though 2 did nothing but stand there)
Council - 3 (plus caster tank)
Illidan -3
I think what’s happened now is that the outlier fights that need just one or four tanks have for the most part gone, leaving just the median values. This helps better with having a balanced group that can deal with all the content well, without swapping people in or out to stack tanks or healers.
I can only think of two fights in WotLK that use a single tank - Sapphiron and General Vezax (and the latter only on non-hardmode). If anything this number should have increased with dual-spec, but I guess someone at Blizzard sees the need to let people play the spec they want rather than switch.
The other factor is that as you increase the number of tanks over above maybe three, most of them just have “offtank this add” as a job. This gets very samey very quickly.
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Cleaved reply on November 21, 2009 2:12 pm:
Hodir is a one tank fight AND a DPS race (for hard mode especially), where a non dual-spec prot/dps tank is a liability. This kind of encounter design is what I was posting about above. An instance should require 2 tanks throughout or 3, but always the same number, so no one should have to sit or re-spec.
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Bodasafa reply on November 21, 2009 2:58 pm:
Naxx
Heigan - 1 tank
Lotheb - 1 tank
Saph - 1 tank
Ulduar
Hodir - 1 tank
Mimiron - 1 tank, (someone wearing plate/bear could tank in dps spec for assault bots)
Vezzax - 1 tank
Yogg - 1 tank
Malygos - 1 tank for the most part, adds in ph2 requires one extra, so for ph1 dps burn you have a wasted slot.
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Namthe reply on November 21, 2009 3:58 pm:
Heigan / Loatheb I had completely forgotten about, mostly because Naxx is my least favourite instance ever. Similarly Hodir slipped my mind,
Mimiron and Yogg I’ll disagree with. I wasn’t thinking of assault bots but head vs base tanking on mimiron (we’ve always used a warrior spell reflecting for that). If you don’t employ a warrior, you need a caster tank.
For Yogg you really need a way of having more than one faceless one up in phase one and three, especially when you’re working on the encounter for the first time.
I was mostly thinking in terms of “at the right gear level”. Mimiron, Yogg, and Malygos all fit into the bracket of being able to get away with one tank when overgeared. Back when i213 was the norm, you’d struggle to have only a single tank on phase 2 of Malygos, and to be honest malygos is far more about phase 3 (where neither gear nor spec matters) than it is about the first two phases.
Unfortunately there still seems to be only room for one tank in any tanking team who does nothing but tanking. I suspect this is down to how much variation you can get between encounters. - you can either have up to three tanks that play “taunt tennis” (viz. Northrend beasts heroic) or up to two that offtank smaller additional creatures.
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Cleaved reply on November 22, 2009 6:20 am:
One-tanking Mimiron is easy, even on Firefighter. You have a hunter or lock tank the head in P3, or you can do it yourself as a Warrior. In P4 you tank the head as well as the base, with spell reflect doing all the work. You tank Assault bots and don’t worry about junkbots as they don’t hit hard at all. When bomb-bots appear, a plate dps or druid in bear form eats them. (or root/chains of ice them and nuke)
Yogg, could be single tanked as long as you are quick on P1 adds, and equally fast on DPSing the P3 adds. Given you are going with 1 tank, the increase in DPS would be pretty high (on 10man). However, on 25man it would be better to 2-tank, since the increase in DPS isn’t as great, but the damage from 2 adds at once is a lot greater as well as the DPS requirement. Basically, it’s just easier with 2. My old guild liked to use three, out of laziness. They’d have one tank stand near Sara in P1, then 2 tanks picking up Faceless and kiting them near mid for the other Tank to Taunt and bring to the middle to explode. This, was a colossal waste of DPS most times.
One tank on P2 Maly was always fine, if you had marks and reliable DPS. All you need is one idiot trying to pick-off an unmarked mob, and they will die and lower DPS for P3, possibly causing a wipe ‘back in the day.’
Some of the “one-tank” fights, depend on what type of tank that is. Mimiron is a good example. If you don’t have a Warrior tank, then you need a Hunter/Caster-tank for the head in both P3 and P4. Certain bosses used to be one-tanked by DKs, and we even had a DPS DK that spec’d dual spec Prot JUST for those fights, and didn’t tank any other fights at all.
All of this has shown that we should have a consistent number of tanks on every fight. I say 2 tanks per boss, for the entire instance, or 3. But not 3 on one boss, 2 on another, 1 on some… it just gets annoying as all hell.
Bhig reply on November 22, 2009 1:38 pm:
Cleaved. For mim are you referring to 10 or 25 man?
We found on 10 man there was no option but or me to sit there and spell reflect/heroic throw/shoot. We simply didn’t have a suitable long-range tank. This isn’t true of every group, but for mine we didn’t have that utility. And I think this is one of the issues with scaling down some fights. Doesn’t always work well to scale down stuff.
On the always needing two or three tanks. I’m not entirely convinced. Sure I hate having to dps in my sub-par gear. But I also welcome the variety. Although I feel that every fight (when done with on-par gear, without late progression nerfs, and done “to design”) should have use for two/three tanks.
Examples.
Koralon. I do nothing but sponge in that fight, but it’s quite fun IMO.
XT Hard. More than one (proper) tank limits your chances if you’re just beginning that fight.
Ok.. enough unstructured waffling…
Cleaved reply on November 22, 2009 4:27 pm:
Bhig:
On Mimiron, 10 or 25, I have single-tanked the entire fight, even on Firefighter hard-mode. A Warrior can do this with ease, as I stated above and as you laid out. However, you ONLY need to spell reflect. The damage he does to himself via this and your taunting when needed should give you a high threat lead when people are not DPSing him. Maybe you misread what I put above, but I said that if you DON’T have a Warrior tank, THEN you need a Ranged-tank for the head while the DK/Pally/Druid tank handles the body or adds in P3. A Warrior is perfect for 1-tanking this fight, or as the OT that tanks the head.
XT, we 1-tank on both 10 and 25, including Hard Mode. Hard Mode is actually easier with 1 Tank (increased DPS), and you won’t have many if any bots at all before he enters hard-mode. I have everyone bring their light-bombs up withing 5-10 yards of me opposite the gravity bomb/void zone side, and I taunt the ‘Spark’ as soon as it spawns. DPS kill it before it floats away from me very far as I stay on XT after the taunt. On regular mode, I just taunt Pummelers and tank them with XT, or we have an OT stay Prot just to make things easier.
Having a consistent number of tanks for each fight makes planning easier for raids. On top of that, we all chose to be Tanks for a reason (least I hope this is most people’s reason), because we like to Tank. I used to go Prot/Fury or Prot/Arms, but now I am Prot/Prot and I Tank or I sit out. Honestly, as I said in prior comments… I hate doing lackluster DPS in half current gear and half a set from 1 Tier of content ago. To me it is less useful than if I go Prot/Prot and have 2 very good specs for different situations along with different glyph sets. I used to argue with Vene that Prot/Prot was bad, but now I’ve come around to see the light. Honestly, you cannot compete or do respectable DPS worth a damn, UNLESS you are handed current-tier gear to do so in or had a really good set from the prior tier of content. Even then, along with all the Prot sets you carry around and misc. trinkets and pieces of gear, it makes for too much crap in your bags.
Still say, 2-3 tanks for EVERY fight, keep it consistent from the 1st boss to the final Raid boss and that includes HM’s.
Bhig reply on November 22, 2009 6:06 pm:
Hmmm..
Definitely agree you sure do end up with a lot of stuff in the bags. And that lacklustre dps is a bit rude.
I think I’ve always been lucky. My DPS set has always been half reasonable. I don’t challenge the true DPSers, but I can hold my own most of the time.
I would much prefer a game where Prot/Prot was the norm/given. But while the game still has call for times when I am not needed in Prot I’m happy to chuck on the DPS set and swings some weapons.
I would say that even though blizz has been a bit rude making solo-tank fights, I would also say that those fights are reasonably well set up so that (personally) I’m better off DPS spec, adding an additional 500-1000dps above my prot is an advantage to the raid as a whole, while if I stayed in prot I would not hurt our chances.
One again I’m waffling I think.
To sum up.
I agree. Raids should call for 2-3 tanks (personally I’d like to see 4 tanks in 25) in every fight, with extras above this being “special cases” that don’t require an actual prot tank.
November 21st, 2009 at 1:59 pm
It would be great to have three guaranteed tank spots in every raid encounter. That’d probably generate an equivalent +50% availability of tanks for PUGs.
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Ruphi reply on November 21, 2009 3:20 pm:
Tanks generally stop doing heroics because they gear very quickly and get impatient with pugs. This is a large reason there is a shortage as time goes on.
For pug raids there would be less tanks because more would be needed for raids. So the odds of finding a tank who got the night off is less likely.
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November 21st, 2009 at 2:48 pm
For pure tanks at heart this is a big issue.
None of us want to be that 3rd wheel that gets forced to flop to off spec instead of what we really love to do.
You got accepted to a guild because you showed them you had skill, ability, and a reputation to excel at being a TANK, not a mediocre DPS/Healer.
Yet Blizzard continues to design instances that require you to have 1-3 tanks available depending on the encounter in 25’s. So the lesser 2 tanks of the 3 are forced not only to work harder at gearing their main spec so they don’t get forced to flop, but to also to build a great DPS/heal set so they are not a total waste of a raid slot.
In the end its futile, because there can only be 1 MT on 1 tank encounters. Most are established and not subject to replacement.
So really by designing 1-3 tank encounters your making it so there only gets to be 1 REAL tank in a guild.
That’s not what I would call fair and Blizzard wonders why there is a shortage of tanks.
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Bodasafa reply on November 21, 2009 3:54 pm:
One last thing.
I think ideally the best set up would be this:
5-man 1 Tank
10-man 2 Tanks
25-man 3 Tanks
Make it a hard set rule. That way when you bring a specific number of tanks they all get to tank. Sure the jobs will vary. The most qualified will take on the toughest assignment and so on down the line.
But I think that is a much better way to approach it than only allowing 1-2 true tanks in a raid.
To Blizzards credit I think they almost got it right with TOC 25. Whereas can bring 2 pure tanks to the raid and give them a job for the whole instance. The only exception is on Anub. where you need a third.
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Dreador reply on November 23, 2009 12:23 pm:
You can do Anub with 2, it’s harder on the healers but possible. http://www.premoguild.com there’s a vid of it for download, world 3rd.
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Kavtor reply on November 24, 2009 3:05 pm:
2 tanks is easier on healers than 3 tanks. You’ve only got two guys to heal, and the block tank isn’t taking much damage.
Plus, you’ve got a lot less health leech by only needing to keep 2 tanks at full health rather than three, so the encounter ends faster, placing less stress on healers.
Properly played, positioned, and geared, a block tank takes trivial damage. 85-90% of the damage that a block tank takes in the fight is from Leeching Swarm. Better to have one guy taking that damage than two.
mister six reply on November 24, 2009 2:06 pm:
Fixed amounts would just increase the scale of the problem you identified earlier. Are you’re doing is trading up 1 MT for 3 MT… Blizz has already down that essentially.
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Bodasafa reply on November 25, 2009 12:25 pm:
I’m afraid I don’t understand your position.
3MT’s in a guild would be a lot better than 1 MT. Tanking is a unique role situation, whereas every other role is not. You are always going to have more than 1 healer or DPS in a raid.
So Blizzard is providing more chances for DPS and Healing classes to play the role they wish and not giving that chance to tanks by limiting the need for how many you bring.
Essentially no Blizzard has not done that already. If they had we would not be having this conversation and Vene would have not made this thread.
November 21st, 2009 at 3:26 pm
At one point GC posted that if all encounters had 5 tanks the fights would quickly become boring because they would have to find something for all 5 tanks to do. This would keep the ratio, this would also increase the demand of healers, or the tanking jobs would be so weak that a cat druid could go bear, or a real tank could do the job of 2 of the tanks. This would set the healer ratio off instead.
If you look at the number of heroic groups forming there are usually 2-3 groups within a few minutes of one another all looking for a tank and or healer. This is, and don’t quote me, but I’m going to guess most people would prefer to DPS, especially on PVP servers.
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November 21st, 2009 at 8:46 pm
Dunno. This might have been a good design five years ago, but Blizzard didn’t go that way.
We used to have hybrids. Hybrids were people who could tank or heal, but not as well as those who specialized for the role. If raiding in Molten Core was as you describe, these people might have been able to shine. As it is the fights were very static, they demanded just a few tanks (for the size of the raid) and hybrids had nothing to do until Blizzard fixed it by giving us:
- Encounters with a very set number of healers and tanks
- A new concept of hybrid which is 2 specialist specs in one toon
I’d also prefer fights that are more dynamic, where the requirements change each encounter, where every raider has to deal with mobs in some way rather than throw abstract DPS or healing numbers into a pot and generally fights that are varied, disconnected, and fast. I’d bring up faction champs as a good example but my only reservation is that fight relies on PvP tools, which aren’t as well designed as our PvE tools for this kind of task.
So, I agree and disagree. I agree with more varied fights if it means blurring the distinction between tanking and melee DPS, as the old concept of hybrid did. I don’t agree if if just means make more jobs for specialist tanks.
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November 22nd, 2009 at 2:05 pm
Right.. after waffling on several other replies…
(assuming gear is on-par, fights are on normal mode, and progression is new with no late progression nerfs)
Personally, I would like to have seen 25 man groups NEEDING 2 tanks, with plenty of fights calling for 3 or 4. Or probably more specifically someone who can take a few hits to do something for a short time. Ala plate dps, or a ranged tank.
One of my biggest “gripes” has always been how 25 man fights seemed more like 10 man fights with more dps, and a few extra healers.
I can’t really see any excuses for not making more tanks useful.
Cleaves, AOE type attacks etc.
I went to apply for a job at blizz (missed the deadline by a day or two though), and it made me think how I’d handle making raids. And my thoughts went down the path of bringing more mechanics like Koralon where you need a soaker or two, or the initial rock trash in VoA (whirlwind attack that spreads damage amongst all those struck). Also, adding in the extra “big add” on a boss fight to keep an extra tank busy.
But then again, I really like fights like Moroes (kara) where there was several tasks that had to be done during the fight.
I would also like to see more fights where certain tanking traits do make a difference.
Someone mentioned not making areas too big because only warriors can move that fast. But I think this is the perfect sort of mechanic for the game. Make the area a bit big, this makes a warrior tank and advantage. Make the boss hit a bit hard, this would make bears advantageous. etc etc. Balancing would always be a sod, but at least some of those flavours would make the game interesting.
Okay.. enough waffling again…
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November 22nd, 2009 at 5:24 pm
Completely agree, nice post.
Now, if Blizzard would remember what it was like to walk into an instance and cower at the sight of 4 mobs, forcing us to use, um, tactics (no, not the small white minty things); and consider things like CC (remember that ?) then we’d be on to a winner.
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November 22nd, 2009 at 7:55 pm
Thank you for this post Vene, my personal beleif is that you’re doing some awesome job for WoW tanking community (not only warrior tanks as site slogan suggests).
The main issue with tanking in WoW at the moment is lack of awareness from Blizzard of who’s sitting on other side of tanking character. They made tanking less challenging in Wrath, they created universal tanking class, they made encounters less tank-oriented (outcome of most fights depend on your dps/healers performance much more than tank performance and situational awareness) for the sole purpose of bringing more people into tanking, but…
What they actually don’t understand is that tanking isn’t really a role, it’s actually a mentality. Tanks don’t want to be in infinite rage situations, tanks want to battle for threat, tanks want to work with difficult clustering (a lot f CC that can be easily broken), tanks want to struggle for little edges and take responsibility for their mistakes. You cannot create that mentality, you can only develop it through hard work, determination and mitigation of a lot of incoming criticizm.
I understand the reasoning behind “You don’t have to have this exceptional person online every time to do the raid” concept, but it’s not actually helping anything, but creating a culture of “it’s ok to be average and not trying to improve”. But let me remind you that the theory of games clearly states that the game is only fun for as long as player is still following the learning curve and we as tanks need it back.
- Handle tanks as tanks, give them work in each encounter, so all the tanks feel that all the experience behind their backs is actually helping the raid getting through the content.
- Doesn’t matter how much tanks instance requires, make sure it’s the same amount of tanks for each encounter (real tank that is asked to fulfil different roles can easily loose confidence and motivation pretty fast which is not helping and this is currently an issue for a lot of guilds).
- Get rid of “any class can equaly fulfil this role” mentality, give us space to compete with other classes on certain encounters (MH trash as a warrior in TBC is a good example).
Thank you.
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November 23rd, 2009 at 12:38 am
Spot on.
We’ve currently got 6 very active tanks in a raider core of about 35-37. Quite frankly there’s never enough offspecc gear to go round so I find myself passing for dps gear a lot to at least give the people that want to have a good dps kit some. I would much rather focus that dps kit on 1-2 people than take the occasional piece to mix it in with my ilevel 200-219 gear.
Frankly with only really needing 2-3 tanks wherever we go I think we get to disappoint people too often. I at least know of one good tank that spent the last raiding week doing mediocre dps. While our tank ratio’s too big, in my opinion, it’s still not a lot of fun to limit us in such a way
I’d like to see more interesting trash. I’d like to see more interesting encounters too - battles, small group tactics… Hydros like encounters too… Bring them on!
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November 23rd, 2009 at 8:52 am
Vene, after your podcast stressing “love thy healer,” I’m a little surprised that you forgot something in this blog.
I admit it’s not quite as bad, but if they’re going to normalize how many tanks we need per raid, they should normalize how many HEALERS we need per raid as well.
Granted, the difference isn’t as noticeable in 25 man (5/6 healers compared to 2/3 tanks), but it’s just as big an issue in 10 man, and I swear our healers are at least as loathe to pickup dps gear as any tank I’ve known.
The path we’ve taken for the tank issue in 25 man is to have 2 plate tanks and a feral druid. Since the feral is MUCH more flexible in terms of being able to switch tank / dps on the fly, it works very well for our needs.
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Dreador reply on November 23, 2009 12:39 pm:
That’s what I did originally as well. We had myself and a paladin and a druid that could switch easily. Eventually our DPS DK became a mainspec tank as well to fill in needs when others couldn’t make it. Most of the time though the DK and druid would both DPS due to having an easier time and gear for it.
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Veneretio reply on November 23, 2009 1:08 pm:
“Love thy healer” doesn’t mean that this site is going to focus on healer issues even when they are similar to tank issues. It’s still a tanking site. The only reason I mentioned healers in my podcast is because the situation was about how tanks treat them.
That said, I don’t disagree that normalizing the number of healers required for 10 and even 25 mans would be nice.
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November 23rd, 2009 at 9:18 am
Great post Vene, I agree with everything you said with the caveat that I really don’t want to see the 4th and/or 5th tank sitting outside the instance waiting for that 1 encounter the raid needs them for again. Even with dual spec, having a tank set and a dps set that makes you viable as either in a hardmode 25 man encounter just doesn’t seem likely.
Unless 4 or 5 tanks was needed for the large majority of encounters I would fear the days of sitting outside SSC waiting for the hydross encounter, only to be replaced again as soon as that fight ended.
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Dreador reply on November 23, 2009 12:42 pm:
Having a player sit outside SSC for use in 1 encounter is retarded. You needed at least 3 tanks if not more for most of the fights. The only ones where you wanted two were Hydross, Vashj and Morogrim. Leo was a toss up, FLK most guilds wanted 3-4 and Lurker called for at least 3 at the minimum (although once we got into BT and went back to SSC for fun we only used 2 and I would tank a few during the dive). I don’t know why they’d sit you unless one of the regular tanks didn’t farm his resist set, in which case I’d take you over him.
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Veneretio reply on November 23, 2009 1:11 pm:
Ya, I more envisioned the 4th and 5th tanking roles as those that could be played by any of the tanking classes in their dps spec. Basically, as long as the target isn’t squishy, they can control the adds in that portion of the fight and things like threat aren’t really required of them.
My hope is that 3 tanks will always be needed for every fight on 25 mans in Cataclysm.
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Gravity reply on November 23, 2009 2:33 pm:
Mine too. Three should be the mandatory minimum (ie. not a warlock, a proper tank).
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Dreador reply on November 24, 2009 7:03 am:
3 tanks would be ideal. Doesn’t seem like it’s gimping DPS. As such, one of them being a feral druid has benefits as well.
mister six reply on November 24, 2009 2:09 pm:
I wonder if plate dpsers would get cheesed by fights like that? Playing faux tank isn’t what they signed up for honestly.
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Kavtor reply on November 24, 2009 2:55 pm:
They signed up to be a plate class. Sometimes you’re going to take some hits. A player who’s just interested in contributing to the raid in one narrow roll is limiting both himself and his guild. And that goes for tanks as well as DPS.
Bhig reply on November 25, 2009 1:28 pm:
Emergency tanking in my DPS gear makes me feel like a GOD as I try to save the raid from certain DOOM! RAWR. But seriously, I don’t think most of the plateys will get too upset being asked to play sponge once in a while. As long as it’s not every fight.
Koralon can make use of the high HP plate wearers… They still get to dps, they just take a big flaming punch to the face at the same time.
Bhig reply on November 25, 2009 1:30 pm:
Hmmm.. just thought of something else.
I’ve spent an entire fight playing spare emergency tank (in prot gear) because in the previous runs our “tanks” could stay alive (pretty sure it wasn’t a healer issue in this case).
Same run I spent a full three minutes tanking in DPS gear when the tank went down… I almost did a better job too, but caused the healer to oom which caused my demise. (although another minute and we would’ve had the fight!)
November 23rd, 2009 at 11:00 am
Like most tanks, I agree that pushing tank requirements (in skill and numbers) upwards is a good direction. We use three on all 25 heroics, but five would be more fun! I’d also like to see more skill and pickup requirements.
However, there’s also some burden on tanks and the guild to adjust for the reality as it stands. Tanks are mostly unhappy splitting between tanking and dps because we suck at dps, due to lack of gear and skills.
How different is it tanking lightbane than it is dpsing lightbane with the door strat? Nothing but the size of the numbers on the screen, and that dpsing requires a faster switch. Oh and btw the dps need to use defensive cooldowns, and the tanks don’t. Tanking that fight does nothing but hide our poor performance on the meters, so step it up, gear it up, and take the important role on that fight: dps. Or be the third tank who runs around soaking all the orbs. Or bring in an alt and heal that sucker.
As a raid leader, it’s a great thing to be able to point at plate or fur and say “you. you’re tanking this”, or the opposite. The key is to do it _more_ often, not less, so that the players are skilled and confident, and not sitting out. Get the orbs, craft the gear, and push people to do something new. I don’t see any gear shortage for anyone but the top progression guilds. If you have a tank who can’t do anything else, then I’ve got to question how good they really are, and whether they deserve the highest level of trust in their tanking skills.
I suspect if respecced tanks topped the charts we’d be ok with a 50-50 split on tank/dps time. Try letting tanks roll equally on 10s dps gear, and in exchange let plate dps roll on tank gear in 10s. Everyone will end up with better skills and a new perspective and respect.
Put another way. I love tanking. If you tell me I only get to tank 3 25s bosses per week, I’m going to be motivated to tank every last 10 out there, pushing the guild through instances, and grabbing some nice dps gear on the way. I’m also going to tank those three bosses with every skill I’ve got. If that’s not a good thing for the guild, I don’t know what is.
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November 23rd, 2009 at 5:51 pm
That’s why guilds recruit 1-2 persons that do nothing but tank. Then they recruit DPS with decent/good tank spec/gear to swap whenever it’s needed.
If you get recruited into a guild, you have to ask them what job you’ll get. If you say that you only want to tank, that you have 2 prot specs and they still ask you to the 3rd wheel tanking job, well then you should find yourself another guild. It’s not easy, granted. But it is possible.
It’s true that WoTLK didn’t bring a lot of encounters like we were used to in BC, but on the other hand having only/too much of 3-5 mini bosses type of encounter can and will get old easily too.
I kinda agree with the maths behind the ratio. Do I want Blizzard to do something about it? Not really. They gave people Dual spec for a reason. If you don’t like dpsing or healing, well then don’t even spec or gear for it, go with your single or dual prot spec. Find a guild that wants you for what you are/play. If you don’t mind doing both, you’ll probably find a spot easily, and if eventually Blizzard changes drastically encounters to a point where 3+ tanks are always needed you’ll stand up.
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November 24th, 2009 at 8:28 am
I like the 2-3 tank model. It allows tanks to gear up faster making overall progression faster and you dont have to worry about folks not being there. If there is anyone on a raid squad that HAS to have near 100% attendance it is the tanks. It is easier to expect 2-3 people to be there every raid night rather than 5.
One thing I would not mind more of are fights that we need ranged tanks like hunters and locks and the occaisional spell stealing mage, those were always fun to watch.
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November 24th, 2009 at 9:05 am
I like the 2-tank model for 10s, I don’t really see a reason why 25s can’t be tuned to 3-4.
Iron Council is a good example of a 2-3 tank-n-spank, maybe they will do more fights like that in the future.
Dual-specs are a curse in a way, as much as they are useful. To a point, it would have been more useful if Protection Spec was pathetic damage like it was in TBC/Classic - then I might actually switch to Arms for something other than letting someone else get their tank time in
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Kavtor reply on November 24, 2009 10:53 am:
10’s don’t even really have a 2 tank model. You can single tank just about everything, and the benefit from having 7 DPS instead of 6 is pretty big on a small scale.
Just like the difference between using a total of 2 tanks instead of 3 on heroic Anub is huge in terms of effective DPS, since a second add tank is a pretty big net loss in DPS.
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Bhig reply on November 25, 2009 1:32 pm:
I’m going to be a cynic here and say…
Spoken like a true 25man geared tank running 10man raids.
I’ve really only ever run 10 mans. And even almost fully geared I would not be putting solo tanking on a lot of the fights out there.
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Kavtor reply on November 25, 2009 2:16 pm:
I think many people exaggerate the difference 13 ilvls make. My experience has always been that most people can see bigger increases in effectiveness by playing better (timing, anticipation, positioning, movement, eliminating mistakes, etc) than by adding another piece of gear. And that certainly applies to myself.
Bhig reply on November 25, 2009 8:18 pm:
http://greedygoblin.blogspot.com/2009/08/ungeared.html
That link above is an excellent example of what you mean Kavtor. Ulduar cleared in all blues. The player means a lot more than their gear!!
And I personally don’t disagree that skill, knowledge, and tenacity are worth more than 13 ilvls.
But, across a full set 13 ilvls is worth what? 10%? It shouldn’t be alot. But for some reason it is. That little 10% is a whole extra person’s worth of stats. 11 people would make some of the encounters near trivial (granted the 11th person is 1/5 tank, 1/5 healer and 3/5 dps). As you’ve said, dropping a tank and/or healer for solid DPS can make a huge difference. Now just add 10% more dps with no losses, 10% more tank hp for no losses, & 10% more healing output with no losses.
13 ilvls might not be much, but it is definitely something.
And additionally, most 25ers also get to run 10s, can you say double shot at loot? (okay.. now I’m just being a little bitter about it)
My second wish for cataclysm is to properly figure out someway of separating 10 from 25.
November 24th, 2009 at 12:27 pm
Vene, thanks for your post!
I’m weird - my warrior is a tank. Dual-specced tank. He tanked for the past two years. I don’t even know how fury or arms works anymore! And I have Stam gear, avoidance gear, threat gear, now I’m supposed to fit my DPS gear in there as well? Nah! My warrior is my tank. If I want to DPS, then summon my rogue, cat, mage, or heck, even my DK in - and that boss that needs fewer tanks better drop some kick-butt DPS leather or cloth!
In my opinion, the fix to the perceived tank shortage is not to add another tanking class and at the same time limit the number of tanks needed.
If that mess continues through Icecrown, I may have to park the warrior and take a close look at my cat-bear or pally
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November 24th, 2009 at 4:24 pm
I think one of the issues is the inflation of gear that 25 man raiders have going into 10 mans. A lot of the fights that initially require extra tanks take less damage and so can pick up for offtank duty for fights like Jarraxus. Even on 25 man heroic we just have one tank take everything when it is clear the fight was designed for multiple offtanks.
Look at Hodir too. Seemingly the initial design was to have it be a 2 tank fight with one tank there to specifically taunt and soak frozen blows while in frost resist gear. However, the damage wasn’t enough to force this so you end up with just a single tank.
As another poster mentioned Anubarak is the same way… reducing the number of offtanks increases the amount of dps that you can bring.
High King Maul and Alar were awesome tank fights because you didn’t have a choice. I’m not sure… but I don’t think you could tank all of the melee of HKM even in sunwell gear without being gibbed.
Designing an encounter for more then 3 main tanks becomes problematic. Gearing them all equivelantly is impossible which means one or two are going to lag behind. That means from a design stand point that creating a fight that doesn’t allow for a lesser geared (or dps spec in tank gear) means gearing up 4 tanks, while allowing for the lesser tank will see one of the 3 main tanks playing double duty.
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November 26th, 2009 at 12:46 pm
The design of a boss fight is very simple at the core:
There’s a room with a good pot and an bad pot. They both start out full, but the bad pot is bigger. The bad one has a few million stuff in in, and the good one just a few tens of thousands. There’s also a clock and two teams. Let’s call them the helpful team and the angry team.
They two pots bang together and the clock starts ticking. The angry team has to throw large numbers in the direction of the bad pot, which cause it to empty gradually. Meanwhile the good pot is leaking and the helpful team have to throw large number into it to refill it.
If the bad pot empties before the time is up, and the good pot never goes dry, the players win and get to do the same thing again in the next room.
So the main thing this design does is make the good pot more important than the people in the helpful or angry teams. I don’t think it’s improved much by having two, three, or five good pots.
A better design might be to get rid of these big pots and have instead a defending team and an enemy team. You then have something more resembling a battle: The enemy team poses a danger. The defending team keeps it under control. The angry team kills off the enemies. The helpful team keeps people from dying.
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Bodasafa reply on November 28, 2009 12:35 am:
The part your missing is that one part cannot function without the others.
Therefore all parts are important because it takes a team to win.
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November 26th, 2009 at 12:53 pm
To put it simply, I love you !!! Thanks for this great post!!
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November 29th, 2009 at 11:18 am
No thanks. Having so many tanks is a guild management nightmare. I’m happy with the one MT and an offtank, that’s it. I’ve found that usually in the server that my guild is currently at, my expectation for recruiting a tank are usually extremely low, not because I place myself as an MT high enough as it is in terms of “pve skill”, but because the tanks I’ve seen go through our recruiting process are so bad I wish that I could do both the MT and the OT job at once so I didn’t need to bother in the first place. I much rather have to recruit DPS than a tank.
There’s just too many thing tank recruits do wrong as opposed to DPS recruits: taunting mobs or for no apparent reason, mess up hardmodes even when placed in such an important position (i.e. not moving from Icehowl’s charge), have such a huge ego that they think they need the entire raid to revolve around them (i.e. having the raid move to them if they have paralytic poison, instead of them to the raid or at least expect both situations), not be communicative at all, and so on…
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Nimchip reply on November 29, 2009 11:25 am:
btw, by “mess up hardmodes even when placed in such an important position (i.e. not moving from Icehowl’s charge)” I mean you cannot usually kick the offtanks from the raid because either they are better geared, there are no other tanking apps or members online or able to raid, and so on. If they are placed in such a raiding position they are expected to deliver, sorry.
I apologize for the numerous grammar and spelling mistakes on my previous post.
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December 1st, 2009 at 9:54 am
Currently, most content (from Naxx-Toc 10/25-ToGC 10) can and is 1-2 tanked. I know in my guild, we 2 tank Ony and ToC 25. I am not saying myself and our bear tank are really good, but it just isn’t that difficult to grab 2 adds on Anub 25, and actually gives you good practice for doing it in ToGC 10. ToGC 25 Anub is the only fight I can think of where you actually need more than 2 tanks because of the amount of damage going out.
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December 14th, 2009 at 11:45 am
The problem is that in order to create fights that challenge multiple tanks, you must reuse the same mechanics over and over.
Say you have 4 tanks. Well, what do you want 4 tanks for? Maybe there are 4 bosses to kill. Well, if you kill them in the order A, B, C, D, then as the fight goes on, more of your tanks are standing around. Since you must sacrifice DPS in order to tank, the tanks whose mobs are dead have nothing to do.
Or maybe you have to kill the enemies at the same time. This is the same effect whether or not they have a shared health pool. In that situation, sure, you can have a group of tanks doing something for the entire fight and it can make really cool fights, but it’s a single mechanic for a single fight; Not the kind of thing you can put into effect constantly.
Maybe you have a boss with a stacking debuff that needs to be taunted off- Lady Deathwhisper, Gormok the Impaler, Saurfang. That’s a mechanic that forces multiple tanks and rewards tanks playing well, but it doesn’t make the offtanks feel useful for anything more than the few seconds they’re tanking.
Then there’s the damage-split mechanic, Saber Lash style. Shahraz, Marrowgar, etc. Again, forces the use of multiple tanks but doesn’t actually engage the offtanks. Offtanking any fight like this, you feel like you could reasonably be swapped with a sack of meat and the fight would go just as well. The worst offenders, you feel like you could AFK for the duration of the fight with no issue.
Ultimately, while it’s possible to design fights that engage a multitude of tanks for an extended period of time, the mechanics necessary would feel gimmicky if every fight included them. So we’re left with mechanics that either make offtanks feel like they’re not contributing for a significant portion of the fight, despite how necessary they are.
I can conceive of a shift in design that would bring the game to higher tank counts, but given the number of people that actually want to tank high-end content, especially given the level of responsibility it takes, I don’t feel that increasing the number of tanks in content by 50% or 100% is a good idea.
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