06-01-2007, 07:29 PM
Quote:What I think the situation should be is that the tanks who put the most effort in get to tank. Instead it's decided by class not merit. Since TBC came out all of its bright new promises have withered: competitive tanking, options for end-game items which compare with raid loot. I think WoW has proved that you can't change direction midway through the lifetime of a MMO, even if some aspects are stupid and unfair you're stuck with them because once players are used to them they'll fight tooth and nail to keep them
I think my original point got lost, so I'm going to say it again in a clearer form before this thread dies.
Tanking isn't one job any more. If tanking is one job, which is to say, roughly the same in all situations, one of the three tanking classes will eventually wind up as the "best" at it, and the other two will be sub-optimal choices. This is how it worked out pre TBC, which is to say, tanking was pretty much the same wherever you were doing it, and warriors were the best at it, so no one else tanked. The only tanking difference between Golemagg and Sapphiron was that Sapph hit harder (anyone can run in and out).
In TBC raid encounters, the devs are, in my opinion, cleverly developing another tank role specifically optimized for non-warrior tanks. It's the only design method to ensure that you always want to bring prot tanks AND feral druids or prot paladins, not just the best of the three. The goal is to get something close to DPS, which is to say, there are a lot of classes that do DPS, but you don't just bring the top class, you bring a mix, because they're all strong in different areas.
I'm reticent to use the words "main tank" because I don't really see what's all that "main" about being the boss-target, except for (occasionally) taking more damage. Sure, if you don't tank the boss he'll run around owning the raid, but if you don't tank the adds or off-tank the boss, you'll also die, just in a different way. A failure in either area means you lose.
WoW 1.0 had brief glimpses of this other tanking role, but they were few and far between and never favoured non-warrior strengths enough to justify gearing and speccing a non-warrior for just one fight per raid instance. Furthermore, in 1.0, non-warriors just didn't have that many strengths to emphasize.
TBC is changing it. There's something for non-warrior tanks to do on nearly every fight, which means that it's now justifiable to gear and spec a character that way since they'll be useful all the time. And it means that warriors and non-warrior tanks aren't in direct competition for most roles. Being the boss-target is never the only tanking that needs to be done in a fight, and while warriors are the best at it, in nearly every fight in TBC raid content, there's another tanking role optimized for a non-warrior. That's why non-warrior tanks (currently just druids, but with some tweaking, paladins too) are viable. That's how they're useful.