The problem is many tanks will tend to form groups with a healer and dps that they know well, and run exclusively with them.

I've basically given up on PuG running, as more often than not I end up with people who have no clue what they're doing. It's annoying to the point of me just not bothering if the people I know and trust aren't on.

So, to me at least, the problem isn't a tank shortage. The problem is the tanks that are there refuse to run with 90% of the player base.

You could always go the other way, have 1 tank (which are mini DPS now) 2 DPS and 2 healers be a standard form for heroics (it could never work for regulars I admit). Whether or not that would work, or instead result in endless agony trying to form groups would depend on how well the dual spec feature is received. I'm not sure if you could make a 2 tank 2 DPS 1 healer group work, and that would absolutely never match up with tank counts in raids.


And I don't buy you can't make a 5 tank encounter interesting! It's the perfect opportunity for there to be much more than TPS for the tanks to worry about.

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Q u o t e:
And I don't buy you can't make a 5 tank encounter interesting! It's the perfect opportunity for there to be much more than TPS for the tanks to worry about.

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Original 4 Horsemen comes to mind where you HAD to have 4 tanks because of the mechanics of the fight.

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Q u o t e:
Original 4 Horsemen comes to mind where you HAD to have 4 tanks because of the mechanics of the fight.

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The original took 4 tanks at 70. And you were better off with 5.

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Q u o t e:
And I don't buy you can't make a 5 tank encounter interesting! It's the perfect opportunity for there to be much more than TPS for the tanks to worry about.

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Yes, but can they make 60 interesting 5 tank encounters? Enough to fill an entire expansion's worth of raids?

Sure.

It gets much easier if you use the extra tanks as control mechanism for various aspects of the fight that may not even influence anyone other thank the tanks so long as the tanks are alive... rather than primarily DPS thresholds and simple damage soaks. It gives the tanks something more interactive to do too.

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Q u o t e:


Original 4 Horsemen comes to mind where you HAD to have 4 tanks because of the mechanics of the fight.

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Original required 8 (6 w/ a specialized strategy). It was an incredible and memorable fight.

And I hope nothing like it ever happens again, because guilds had to recruit around the idea of 8 Warriors and, to reduce the risk of failure, had to gear as many of those tanks as possible in 4 piece Dreadnaught. It was a guild destroying encounter for many guilds and, no matter how cool it was, it had too high a cost in people to be an encounter worth repeating.

The current balance is not bad.

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Q u o t e:
Original required 8 (6 w/ a specialized strategy). It was an incredible and memorable fight.

And I hope nothing like it ever happens again, because guilds had to recruit around the idea of 8 Warriors and, to reduce the risk of failure, had to gear as many of those tanks as possible in 4 piece Dreadnaught. It was a guild destroying encounter for many guilds and, no matter how cool it was, it had too high a cost in people to be an encounter worth repeating.

The current balance is not bad.

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I remember that. I didn't do the fight myself but I remember the grief the tanks required caused.



But seriously, if the basic functions that defined the fight was the hard part, I'd start my own MMO.

That was one of the weakest responses i have yet see from you GC. I rolled this character to tank. I am desired as a tank in 5 mans, I am desired as a tank in 10 mans, but there is too much competition for those tanks spots in 25 mans. Can I respec when dual specing (and it seems it will be months before this is implemented) and dps as ret or heal as Holy? I can but I want to tank. DO healer need to respec when moving from 10 mans to 25 mans? no Do dps need respec when moving from 10 mans to 25 mans? no. Only tanks are required. SO we don't get to choose our role, we are forced different roles on us if we wish to continue raiding. This is broken, and as a progressive developer i would though you would understand this and attempt to fix the problem, i guess i am wrong and will continue to build my holy off-set.

duel spec should resolve this issue

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Q u o t e:
That was one of the weakest responses i have yet see from you GC. I rolled this character to tank. I am desired as a tank in 5 mans, I am desired as a tank in 10 mans, but there is too much competition for those tanks spots in 25 mans. Can I respec when dual specing (and it seems it will be months before this is implemented) and dps as ret or heal as Holy? I can but I want to tank. DO healer need to respec when moving from 10 mans to 25 mans? no Do dps need respec when moving from 10 mans to 25 mans? no. Only tanks are required. SO we don't get to choose our role, we are forced different roles on us if we wish to continue raiding. This is broken, and as a progressive developer i would though you would understand this and attempt to fix the problem, i guess i am wrong and will continue to build my holy off-set.

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How do you propose to fix this? You can't design around having 5 tanks all tanking at all times, its severely limiting.

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Q u o t e:

How do you propose to fix this? You can't design around having 5 tanks all tanking at all times, its severely limiting.

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I can't think of anything really. Making people take x amount of tanks would be annoying because then you'd generally need more healers. If you could take 5 tanks and not need more healers; then the healing would be waaaaaaaaay too easy.

Fights like Al'ar, Kael, and what not were annoying due to the amount of tanks you had to bring; as those tanks weren't there for much during trash pulls and for some of the fights.

Duel speccing will help a bit; but it won't help those that want to tank specifically. Not sure how to fix this.

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Q u o t e:

Duel speccing will help a bit; but it won't help those that want to tank specifically. Not sure how to fix this.

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Its easy to fix, but there's nothing Blizzard can do about it. Its up to individual guilds to figure out who to bring every week.

The OP makes an excellent point. I brought this up in BC, yet few people acknowledged the issue and I'm sad to read that the developers don't give a dam either. Frankly, tanking is a %!%@ty job in this game no matter which side of the fence you sit on. You are either THE main tank, and thus don't get a night's rest from raiding...or, you are a rag doll OT who gets tossed about between DPS and tanking (or healing), in which case you are pressured into building and maintaining two completely separate sets of gear.

GC, the reason people could never find tanks for five mans is due to one thing: lack of work in progression raiding. Period.

From what I am getting for GC, some of the tanks need to be "in the closet" tanks. Spec prot and do heroics and 10 man raids but when it comes to 25 man raids you put away your tanking mantle and do something else. Off-specs cant tank heroics or 10 mans, you need actual speced, experienced tanks for these, but if you want to step up to 25 man, well, you are out of luck?

So my choices are:

If I want to tank full time I cant look any further than 10 mans. If I want to do 25 mans, i might have to accept that i might not be bale to these as a tank. The later option is not very encouraging to tank, and made ever so much harder as tnaking gear does not work for dps or healing (unless you are a druid) so you also have to build up multiple sets of gear... Very upsetting that this is how its going to be.

Example: Did the 10 man WG instance the other day, after finishing we decided to merge with another 10 man and form a 25 man. The problem is that we ended up with 4 tanks. One of the tanks was a Druid so he went cat but one of the tanks ended being dead weight as he was not needed. GC suggests that we do a random 1-3 to see which of us was not gonna do what we enjoy most?

I believe it would be easy to carry the 1-3-1 ratio over.There are a sundry of ways to do it but here are a few off the top of my head just to illustrate it's viable.

To bring more tanks:

-Adjust trash to do more burst damage. If trash did a 25k to 30k hit on it's target every once in a while you would think twice about holding more than one of them on you. This would remain manageable due to the fact they wouldn't hit again for a while. Benefits of this include healers having to think more strategetically than before. Actual reactionary game play instead of button mashing!

-Make tanking take teamwork for single target bossses. This has been done a lot in the form of mortal strike or teron gorefiends DoT but it can be done BETTER. For example a boss stacking a debuff on a tank and then exploding all of them at once (each debuff being like 10k physical on a 23k armored tank, and he uses it around 10 times before exploding them. So you'd need a pool of 100k hp to abosrb it all through changing who the tank is. This would take about 3-4 tanks) For another example you could have the tank hit in rapid succession for 20k then 10k then repeat that proccess for however many tanks you would want in the encounter. Adjust the non burst damage around it so it's not too stressful, but make sure it's unhealable and needs to be taunted. Think patchwerk hateful strikes that need to be manually adjusted by taunting. The staggering of the damage from 20k to 10k would allow for player reaction time/latency. It COULD add an MS debuff or maybe instead code a delayed healing time debuff (lag the time it takes for the heal to work. Say, you don't get your heal until the end of the strikes but it doesn't negate it).

-Give us more mobs to tank! The simplest solution would be to just have more council type mobs too. More Adds etc. Once again you can make sure that the encounter requires a tank this way without over stressing healers by making it SLOW BURST DAMAGE. This ensures a tank is holding a mob and only one mob even if it's total damage output IS NOT THAT HIGH OR HAD TO HEAL THROUGH. One could even coordinate the mobs to do the burst at the same time to ensure each tank is on one mob. There are so many ways this could be done (boss orders cronies to coordinate their attack in a yell! etc etc )

To bring less healers:

-Interuptable boss moves. Make it so DPS interupts boss moves by a % of how much damage it does. Suddenly DPS has immediate effects on how much damage it prevents. Maybe at a certain point you mitigate LESS damage by bringing another healer instead of DPS? For example Rogar the mighty raises his sword for a crushing blow! *raid blows it's DPS cooldowns* Rogar the mighty stumbles back and fails his attack.

-mini DPS checks. This can be anything from adds to shields like Kael's pyro shield. There are so many ways this can be done and has been done my head is spinning. Everything from the top 15 on the damage charts get an add like leo (instead of them being random for no reason?) which they need to burn down fast before it casts an instant kill on them. Oops, brought too many healers looks like he died instead of getting his.

-More bursty boss damage. Not only does this help one bring more tanks but it helps healers too! Think about it, if there is less constant damage and it's all more bursty then if you bring more healers than that specific burst damage takes it's ALL over healing. What a waste. Should've used that extra healer as DPS instead of watching his entire cast feed the over heal tab of recount. So now the only reason to bring an extra healer is to uh... sit around until someone else is out of mana.

I just don't buy having more tanks and less healers isn't viable. It's a poor design choice that has carried on from the original release because that's what players are used to. I'm not trying to say any of my suggesstions are amazing and should be implemented. I'm only trying to illustrate that what we take to the encounters is completely arbitrary and decided soley by how it's balanced. I promise I could come up with an encounter which took 25 tanks if I had to using only already available mechanics. (or 25 healers or 25 DPS)

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Q u o t e:
It would be elegant if a 5-player run took 1 tank, 3 dps, 1 healer and a 25-player run took 5 tanks, 15 dps and 5 healers.

It just doesn't work out that way. We don't think we can offer enough interesting encounters if they all have to require 5 tanks and we would have to severely punish stacking healers if the encounters were designed for 5, otherwise you'd probably be able to trivialize the encounter. (Usually we do that in the form of berzerk timers.)

It's just two competing design goals and we're pretty okay with how it has landed. We did try and make it so that non-tank specs can tank 5-player dungeons, and dual spec will help as well.

Our goal with dual-spec though is more that you can tank heroics on weekends and raid as dps during the week, not that you tank the trash then switch to dps for the boss. Doubtless players will still do the latter, but we aren't designing raid encounters knowing that players have access to dual spec. Don't expect to see 12 tank fights or that sort of nonsense.

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But GC its hard on us because we have 4-5 solid tanks in the guild and you throw so many encounters at us that are one or two tanks.

On new progression nights, 3-4 tanks sit. Unless you take 2 extra prot warriors and a prot pally wearing heal gear (and miserable hes healing) - and have them do virtually nothing compared to a DPS class - for no reason other than "getting people raid time" and keeping people happy.

I understand its not possible to mix in tanks on all fights, archimonde with adds would really suck. But, when learning archimonde, that means 4 tanks sitting on the sidelines for THREE straight evenings while we learned him. That doesnt make people very happy. ESPECIALLY when you do four hyjal bosses with three, sometimes four (throw in a feral) tanks, and when the raid gets to archimonde 2-3 of them get swapped for dps / healers. They hate it.

Then what do we do? Introduce another tanking class. Christ >.< Now we have 2 DK's as well to find tank time and seven tanks

TK was your best at this; each encounter could use multiple tanks, everyone gets playtime and things to do. Other zones suck at it.

If we have less tanks in the guild, then when we hit an encounter for 3 tanks, one of them is on VAC or couldnt be there that day. Also, tanks are needed for 10 mans and heroics fueling the guild activities.

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Q u o t e:
Original required 8 (6 w/ a specialized strategy). It was an incredible and memorable fight.

And I hope nothing like it ever happens again, because guilds had to recruit around the idea of 8 Warriors and, to reduce the risk of failure, had to gear as many of those tanks as possible in 4 piece Dreadnaught. It was a guild destroying encounter for many guilds and, no matter how cool it was, it had too high a cost in people to be an encounter worth repeating.

The current balance is not bad.

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I agree the original 4 horsemen encounter was a complete pain and ruined guilds. The many reason it was so bad was no other encounter in the game required that many tanks and most guilds were good with only 2-3 prot tanks and 2-3 off tanks. Had every encounter in tier 2, tier 2.5, and tier 3 required 8 tanks to be successfully completed the 4 horsemen fight would not have had any impact on guilds. The problem was not the amount of tanks the encounter required. The problem was the HUGE shift in raid group setup and tank gearing for only a single encounter.