To Homogenize or not to Homogenize

[Tatt]

I still disagree....Tom, are you saying that warriors never successfully tanked Hyjal trash? Every encounter you are pointing out can and has been done by every class. Hengist, you are saying that you want things to be as easy as possible...good for you, but not everyone feels that way. The point of 3 drakes is to be difficult, if you wanted to do everything as easily as possible you would kill the drakes before you even engaged Sarth.

[Hengist]

I still disagree....Tom, are you saying that warriors never successfully tanked Hyjal trash? Every encounter you are pointing out can and has been done by every class. Hengist, you are saying that you want things to be as easy as possible...good for you, but not everyone feels that way. The point of 3 drakes is to be difficult, if you wanted to do everything as easily as possible you would kill the drakes before you even engaged Sarth.

I can't complete Sarth 3D by killing the drakes, and that is the goal, to kill Sarth 3D. To do that I will use everything available, and that means NOT using paladin or warrior as Sartherion tank. It wouldn't be a problem, if that would be some gimmick fight favouring DKs because of some fancy skill, but it is not. It is testing EH which is an absolutely basic and most important thing for a boss tank.

I didn't said I want things as easy as possible, but that I won't make them more difficult by myself purposedly. If some people enjoy using subpar tanks and subpar dpsers just to prove some point, that is ok, they can even remove their pants as far as I am concerned, but I won't join them. If me as a tank won't be an optimal/equal to others on most encounters, the design is simply bad. In order to achieve the balance, I can accept classes being homogenized even further, because for me balance is much more important than uniqueness. My class didn't have the information about being "hard mode" on the character creation screen, so I do not want it to be like that.

[Typhus]

Personly im not that big fan of making all tanks the same. When i first read about DK and that they should excel in magic mitigation i was happy, thinking it would be something like a Lock tank for certain encounters in the game where you could tank with anything rly but a DK would make it easier, and the otherway around for physical fight, other tanks would be better but DK could be able to do it.

Seing how they were turned out im not that kind of a happy panda. And with blizzard altering other tanks and DK tanks to be more of the same isnt that fun. I like the idea of different playstyles when it comes to tanking. How you should gear, what you should think of. What skills to use and when.

Personly i love Warrior tanking, its something epic with the whole sword and board type of play, you and your shield protecting the innocent raidmembers from the huge dragon. But i also love DK tanking, mainly couse they are so different from eachother. If blizzard brings them closer together, whats the deal of having two different classes in tanking, or four as it is now.

Nope i say Nay! To Homogenize.

[TomHuxley]

I still disagree....Tom, are you saying that warriors never successfully tanked Hyjal trash? Every encounter you are pointing out can and has been done by every class.

That wasn't even remotely what I was saying; I said the fact that it could be done by working your butt off didn't change the fact that the majority of guilds would still take pallies for AE encounters and warriors for boss tanking in TBC. The fact that you could overcome those situations (if only barely) never threatened the role of other tanking classes.

Now there are no roles, but some broken mechanics mean that certain classes and specs can trivialize not just some niche role, but all difficult tanking encounters. That is broken, plain and simple. While individual classes may not have to work as hard at specific encounters, when one class starts winning all the time due not to skill but class imbalance that is not ok, especially since that once class can tank all the encounters.

The point of 3 drakes is to be difficult, if you wanted to do everything as easily as possible you would kill the drakes before you even engaged Sarth.

I have to be honest; that's not just wrong but rude. No one is asking for the encounter to be easy, we're asking that the encounter not be made easy if you bring a specific class. That's not even remotely the same thing. If the goal of Wrath (as stated ad nausium by the devs) is to achieve tank parity, then you cannot do so when one or two classes can trivialize an encounter when others can barely due it even when backed up by a very skilled raid.

[Pizzashark]

I'm fine with homogenization. Blizzard does a pretty good job of keeping things relatively balanced overall (especially considering the sheer size of the job), but I do think it'd be a hell of a lot easier if the tanks were equal in all respects. That doesn't mean that Pallies and Warriors should suddenly get Paladin Anti-Magic Shell or whatever, but when you give one tank a special ability that none of the others can really emulate, it's going to cause problems somewhere down the road.

Now, as long as all of the tanks can still do all the same content (OS10+3 being a good example, since it typically favors DK tanks), then it's a fairly minor issue at best. It only becomes an issue when one tank is clearly superior to others (Paladin tanks versus Warrior tanks in many places in TBC), or one tank simply can't do the content at all.

I've got no problem sharing tanking duties with the nancyboy Paladins or emo-style DKs.

[Pul]

I don't see why some people are mentioning vanilla and BC. Many of the specs that are currently viable were a complete joke specially in vanilla, wich is clearly NOT the case in LK. And in TBC how many fights were there trully avaiable that a warrior couldn't tank? My guild never downed Hydross because we didn't have 2 plate tanks. I think that's more of an issue than the fact warrior's had *problems* (not impossible) tanking Hyjal trash.

Is there any fight out there that 1 of the tanking classes CAN'T MT?
Blizzard is already changing mana regen in raids. I am not sure how much it will affect but I was assuming it would come out to affect a druid tank with 52k hp but 30% avoidance because he would become a mana sponge and probably a big issue overtime. Blizzard decided to make HP more close by for all the tanks, fine with me. But lately, and I don't want to insult anyone active in this thread, all I read is warriors (not all) complaining that they are not a wise choise for MT at 3D or this other new fight in Ulduar (Hodir or Thorim? I am not sure). Because there are 2 fights in the ENTIRE GAME that they are less preferable - but still viable. All the idea I'm getting out of this is that warriors simply want to do every encounter slightly better so there is NO reason for them to not be first MT choise.

[Berith]

I guess I should further explain what I mean by homogenization/parity. To do this I need to do a bit of a history lesson.

Once upon a time... Paladin's didn't get a taunt. Now paladin's still tanked as there will always be those people that will push the envelop of accepted norms, but it was much harder for them to tank without a taunt. Many paladin's complained about this disparity and blizzard essentially said what they are saying now "That they don't want the tanks to be the same" well guess what? Paladin's have a taunt now. All 4 tanking classes have a taunt, because it's an essential element in order to be able to tank. I would argue that there are other essential elements that should be even across tanking classes:

- Ability to take BIG hits from bosses
- Ability to tank multiple targets (AoE tanking)
- Ability to off-tank (generate agro without receiving consistent damage)
- Ability to survive magic attacks
- And the obvious Agro generation and effective health

There may be more, but I think you got the idea. Some tanks are simply better suited for certain of these "niches" and I don't believe this should be the case. They should be able to perform all these tasks in their own way.

[Finelle]

<shrugs> The matter is simple. EH is a core requirement for any tank. It is what makes a tank, well, a tank. Until you have enough EH, nothing else matters very much. Cooldowns are just a better way of stacking EH than stamina. The central point of EH is the minimizing of percentage health lost.

EH balancing is not optional and between that kind of homogenization and the alternative of the progression tank divide, I'd rather take the former. My perspective comes from almost exclusively raiding 10man progression, as was promised by Blizzard in Wrath. We do not have the option of switching tanks, like a 25man raid group does. We have one warrior, one paladin, and that's it.

Easy/hard is not an acceptable solution. Warriors tanking Hyjal? I've seen it. More painful on the raid? Infinitely. Especially when the "hard" part is finding more classes to spec a certain way to chain specific cooldowns. Again, not an option open to 10man raid groups.

Do I have a problem with sharing tanking duties? Not at all. I raidlead as a tank, but nearly every boss is maintanked by our paladin, and on sizeable upgrades for both of us, I don't contest him for it.

I just want to raid, not spend my time tracking down particular classes and convincing them that our already full-to-bursting roster can somehow accomodate a few more people and forcing everyone to do sitting out rotations. It's the whole reason why I came back to raidlead 10mans after burning out late TBC on trying to raidlead 25s for two months.

[Hengist]

Is there any fight out there that 1 of the tanking classes CAN'T MT?

No. But that doesn't mean equality. You can also complete the heroics with dpsers doing 1k dps and with ones doing 3k dps - what you will choose given the choice? In both cases job gets done, but when one way is obviously better, we cannot speak of equality.

But lately, and I don't want to insult anyone active in this thread, all I read is warriors (not all) complaining that they are not a wise choise for MT at 3D or this other new fight in Ulduar (Hodir or Thorim? I am not sure). Because there are 2 fights in the ENTIRE GAME that they are less preferable - but still viable. All the idea I'm getting out of this is that warriors simply want to do every encounter slightly better so there is NO reason for them to not be first MT choise.

1. Sartharion is just an example of the problem. Problem is completely unbalanced EH between tanks. Are you trying to say that EH differences won't have any impact on future progress fights?

2. How you are getting that warriors want to do stuff better while what we are asking is being equal? There is a lot of space between being the best choice and being the worst choice, don't you think? I am saying that I do not want to be the worst, you are reading that I want to be the best.

[Pul]

No. But that doesn't mean equality. You can also complete the heroics with dpsers doing 1k dps and with ones doing 3k dps - what you will choose given the choice? In both cases job gets done, but when one way is obviously better, we cannot speak of equality.

So what happens when the melee and ranged DPS argue that some fights are a lot harder for ones than others? They do the same role nonetheless.

1. from my previous post

... just one class is better here and another is better there.. but all can do it - maybe a bit more equalize is needed like you said.

I'm not saying it doesn't need a balance.

2. No there isn't a lot of space between being worst and best. It would be if you wouldn't in fact be viable, wich clearly isn't the case. Will anyone point at 1 tank class and say he's the worst in 90% of the encounters?
I was reading EJ forums pre LK launch and most the posts said similar 'Warriors were the original tanks, Blizzard will always keep us a bit favorable'. It didn't happen that way in the end because not all guilds have Warrior tanks, or druids, or Dk's, or paladins - hence despite the slightly diferences in a series of fights all classes can do the job.
Imo if Blizzard makes the role of tanking 100% equal between the tanks it will be a mather of time until the ranged and melee DPS do the same, and the healers. I mean it's a game what's the problem if you are less good in X and Y fight aslong you can do it. If you are skilled your guild won't replace you as MT because of a minor diference.

[Ricovega]

One class should not be pigeon holed as an off-tank class, an AoE tank, a trash pull tank, burst damage tank, or a magic resist tank. All 4 tanks should be able to perform all these roles interchangeably with equal success. One tank should not be the obvious choice for a certain fight over another.

agree with this, a bit like how healers are all able to do the same jobs (except priest can't cure certain things etc so some tanks will have some advantages but the gap does need to be closed as it currently stands)

[Rastus]

Cookie cutter builds with generic tanking gear shouldn't be able to tank all encounters.

But, each tanking class should have the talents, enchants, glyphs and gear available to fill each tanking niche.

[Petninja]

agree with this, a bit like how healers are all able to do the same jobs (except priest can't cure certain things etc so some tanks will have some advantages but the gap does need to be closed as it currently stands)

Except that healers aren't all homogenized, and can't do every job as well. Blizzard has stated that they are aware of this, and don't really care. They expect us to bring different types of healers. So that doesn't really work :P. There's a reason pallys don't raid heal. They aren't good for it. Druids aren't really good for MT healing either. It's not that they can't do it, but they're not on par with paladins and priests.

[Petninja]

Imo if Blizzard makes the role of tanking 100% equal between the tanks it will be a mather of time until the ranged and melee DPS do the same, and the healers. I mean it's a game what's the problem if you are less good in X and Y fight aslong you can do it. If you are skilled your guild won't replace you as MT because of a minor diference.

The difference is Blizzard has acknowledged that they expect a variety of healers and dps in every raid. They do not expect that with tanks. Two of any class tank should work fine, as well as any combination of two different ones. It's also important to point out that if one or two dps classes have a hard time in one or two fights it's not a big deal unless there is a very strict enrage timer.

A typical 25s raid
3 tanks (chosen out of 4 possible classes)
7 healers (chosen out of 5 specs)
15 dps (chosen out of 20-21 different specs)
If one or two of the tanks you bring aren't good for a particular fight you're at a disadvantage with 66% of the tanking team. In order to reach that number with dps you'd have to have ten dps that aren't viable on a boss.

If a tank has a very hard time with one encounter the entire progression of the raid is at stake. It's just easier to bring a class that doesn't have disadvantages to the raid for tanking.

[blackhand]

@ pretty much everything Hengist has been saying. If all tanks can do a fine job at any encounter I'm cool with that. As long as a raid is not hitting a wall because of a tanks class design (which there really isn't as bad as people think) a guild should have no problem working as a TEAM and getting through the situation at hand. No one player should be the reason a group of 25 people live or die. This game is a social game, if you're going to get benched because some people on a forum say that this tank is 3% better for a fight then you might just want to find a better guild.

A lot of the MTing drama over Sarth+3 is that people don't want to worry about using external cool downs on the tank. If blizzard has those cool downs in the game why not use them?

[Lightmgl]

I'm all for this concept of diverse tanks that are equally effective but right now the system is just absolutely terrible giving tremendous advantages to Druids and DKs. If they wanted to do this then it should have been in the testing phase a long long time ago, it is months too soon the way it is now.

Blizzard also has to put much more thoughts into their encounters if they are going to use diverse tanks. Obviously attacks that do large damage are going to favor tanks with a higher health pool unless the tanks with the lower health pool have significantly higher mitigation that is consistent. Obviously anything involving a resist fight is going to drastically favor tanks that can get crit capped easier. Right now you are seeing a trend in the content fights that makes them significantly easier for the high health tank or the high avoidance tank. Blizzard needs to find some way to balance this out if it is ever going to work or else Paladins and Warriors will just get left in the dust.

Don't even get me started on threat either. Threat needs to be completely streamlined across all 4 tanks or else you are just going to end up with dumb roles. It already bothers me that the aoe threat of some tanks can compete with the single target threat of other tanks. There is no reason at all that threat should not be completely equal in all situations for all tanks. You can get there in different ways, you just need to ensure the scaling works equally for all 4 classes.

I think the largest problem comes in the form of gearing up and hard mode encounters. In anything not hard mode the differences are annoying but not gamebreaking. They become gamebreaking when you can go into a new raiding tier/difficulty level and have some tanks instantly tank hardmode encounters just fine and other tanks needing to spend months gearing up to do so. Not to mention a learning curve radically favors tanks with high health pools or cooldowns simply because it provides more room to adapt to mistakes or unexpected circumstances. That cannot happen. All tanks should be able to handle the same caliber of encounter in the same ilvl of gear.

Anyways from my personal design aspect I really felt that if Blizzard would just unlink the formulas for PVP and PVE creating two seperate systems from the ground up that they would have alot more flexibility to fix their PVE imbalances across the DPS and the tanks. As it stands now their biggest fear with tanks seems to be making them too hard to kill in PVP while giving them too much sustained damage and that spills over into PVE forcing them to cap off some key moves and try to not allow spammable high damage abilities.

Anyways other obvious solutions would be to implement more unavoidable attacks, provide partial mitigation to magic through avoidances/armor/something, high damage threat abilities that simply do not work on players, properly scaling mitigation on shields, avoidance caps, partial dodges/parries, attacks that do %s of health in damage, and so on. They could come up with lots of balancing factors that would allow them to give one tank a slight advantage but still limit them from being able to tank unintended situations (Razuvious anyone?).

Also warriors really aren't viable for alot of those fights. When the disparity is large enough that one tank can be a single OT for Patch while another tank needs a second OT or a warrior cannot MT sarth+3 10 man at all without having to rely on extreme cooldowns such as guardian spirit or when one tank can solo tank Hodir but every other tank requires a partner. Thats not acceptable. No advantage should be so significant in a game such as this. Taking 10%-15% less damage over the course of a fight would be an acceptable advantage. In some cases it is as high as 40% to 50% less damage, or simply being able to survive attacks that one shot other tanks, or being able to wear resist gear for an encounter that no other tank can wear due to game mechanics.

[Finelle]

@ pretty much everything Hengist has been saying. If all tanks can do a fine job at any encounter I'm cool with that. As long as a raid is not hitting a wall because of a tanks class design (which there really isn't as bad as people think) a guild should have no problem working as a TEAM and getting through the situation at hand. No one player should be the reason a group of 25 people live or die. This game is a social game, if you're going to get benched because some people on a forum say that this tank is 3% better for a fight then you might just want to find a better guild.

A lot of the MTing drama over Sarth+3 is that people don't want to worry about using external cool downs on the tank. If blizzard has those cool downs in the game why not use them?

Because it forces all raids to bring a fixed number of a certain class/spec or forget about hard hitting bosses/hard modes.

[Nycthilys]

Hey y'all, I'm new to posting on Tankspot but have visited this site for many months now to research how to squeeze the most out of my toon. What follows is my experience of the recent changes introduced by Blizzard and so keenly debated by many. I am not here to flame other tank classes, only to give incite into how my guild decides which tank classes to take along and why…

I am a prot Warrior in an endgame guild on Azjol-Nerub and have MT'd and OT'd all BC and WoTLK bosses up to and including Sarth+1.

The guild runs two 25 raids, grp1 is the progression group, grp2 introduces newcomers to the guilds raiding style and prepares them for eventual promotion to grp1 (a proving ground you might say). As a long time member of "grp1" then I'll focus here, the grp1 raid runs 4 tanks (1 Druid, 2 Pallies and until recently 1 Warrior – me).

I have been benched by the guild, replaced by a DK, imo not because I can't play my toon, not because my gear, gems or enchants are subpar but because of how we (people) have a way of narrowing similar choices when presented with so many.

Warriors do not appear to be the single target threat kings they used to be, I've noticed in game play that my co-tanks are equally as good and I understand from other posts that DKs also are very respectable at tps, this seems inline with Blizzards goal to allow all tank classes to be able to tank any boss. There may be some boss subtlety’s that could influence a guilds decision for a given fight but for the most part any tank class can generate the required tps to allow the guild to dps at full speed.

So what does influence a guilds choice in tank classes you might ask...

By “homogenizing” to a degree the question becomes which tank classes bring the most utility to a raid.

Druids have a decent buff, can switch from dps to tps without the need to respec. As a result, from what I have seen, they inflict the most damage amongst the tanking classes (haven’t been able to compare to a DK.)

Pallies offer great AoE tanking, can buff several stats and damage done is very respectable

I have no direct working experience with DKs but understand they can buff, AoE tank and are just as survivable, if not better than a warrior.

The Warriors buff is a nice-to-have not a must have, imo the guild prefers buffs which improve dps. For the life of me I cannot beat the Pallies in damage done and consistently bring up the rear.

Conclusion: Why would you take a Warrior when it is easy to see you get more value in the raid from the other tanking classes?

[bludwork]

Actually the issue is not so much the 4 tanking classes but the encounters. How many times have we seen GC say if maly was a fast hitting boss warriors/palies would be a better tank? It's like trying to make a hole that can accomode a circle, square, triangle and rectangle. So you make this octoshapedabomination hole that doesn't fit. Sometimes your hole works perfectly for the circle but the square gets screwed, I think you get my point.

They can make tanking classes different, but bosses will need to be homogenized. Or they can make the encounters varied but the tanking classes homogizined. Can't have it both ways.

[jere]

Conclusion: Why would you take a Warrior when it is easy to see you get more value in the raid from the other tanking classes?

A lot of it boils down to skill. That isn't to say you don't have any, but you might not have enough to be competitive. There are warriors out there who do the same or more TPS/DPS than the average pally. Shoot, it might take more skill to get there. However, I am willing to bet that there is more to who gets chosen than the things you listed. Do you think <Premonition> is gonna replace Xav anytime soon cause he is a warrior? And they are a top tier guild. There is more to tanking than raid utility.

The whole point of this new expansion is that you don't "need" to take certain specs as much (or at all if lucky). The tank is there to provide tanking value, not raid utility. You get raid utility from the entire raid, not a single person. You can get all the utility you need in a raid and not even include the tank (or at least that is the goal they are working on). Things we should be worried about as tanks are how good we are as tanks.