Four Ways to Die - why the Tank Meta feels "off".

[Anthius]

The more tanks were able to focus on DPS the more people flocked to play a tank class.

Have they though? You're saying you notice more tanks. I myself haven't noticed any difference in the number of people playing tanks, none of the people I know, have switched, and in fact some people I know who do play tanks have stopped. My wait time as a melee dps in 2.0 was never long aside from when ninja's were first released and it's not really any different now so I don't notice this big influx of more tanks you seem to be talking about.

That being said I do think tanks should contribute to DPS, maybe a little less than they are now but not much. That is really up to SE who have the numbers to decide on where they want it to be though.

I honestly hope while they're adjusting numbers for tanks in 3.2 they remove the damage reduction from tank stances. Tanks should be at their best while tanking, and for me dropping my tank stance while tanking a boss just feels wrong. I do it, but I don't like it.

[AniCelestine]

My wait time as a melee dps in 2.0 was never long aside from when ninja's were first released..

Yeah an old post but really? Not long queue times back in 2.0-2.1? I gained atleast 3 levels crafting and gathering material for crafting per queue wait. I spent the rest of the 2.x patch doing dungeons/roulets as a tank cause of the 30+min queues as dps at the start. Now in 3.0 I get on my monk, select a duty, go on the queue (solo) it's about 20 seconds of waiting, rarely longer than 1min.

I guess Cerbeus didn't have tanks back in 2.0 and they migrated here from other servers during 2.1-2.5

/shrug.

As for people who don't enjoy the tanking meta in this game, don't tank. I see no reason to play as a class you don't like, but guess that's just me being weird.

/shrug

[Anthius]

Yeah an old post but really? Not long queue times back in 2.0-2.1? I gained atleast 3 levels crafting and gathering material for crafting per queue wait. I spent the rest of the 2.x patch doing dungeons/roulets as a tank cause of the 30+min queues as dps at the start. Now in 3.0 I get on my monk, select a duty, go on the queue (solo) it's about 20 seconds of waiting, rarely longer than 1min.

I guess Cerbeus didn't have tanks back in 2.0 and they migrated here from other servers during 2.1-2.5

/shrug.

As for people who don't enjoy the tanking meta in this game, don't tank. I see no reason to play as a class you don't like, but guess that's just me being weird.

/shrug

My bad on phrasing there by 2.0 I meant 2.X generally I don't remember 2.0 well enough but I don't remember 30 min wait times either, aside from right after the patch ninja's were released where we had hour long queues. Back then when I was queuing as dps it was 5-15 min as melee, and when I tried queuing as my ninja earlier this week it was more than 10 minutes before it popped.
Though thinking about it I do remember queues taking longer as a caster back then, to the point where I believe ranged dps gets a different queue than the melee for some reason, maybe something happened with the balance of casters vs melee to even out the queue times? I'm not even sure if that's how it works but from my experience in the 2.x patches it seemed to

I don't know, it's speculation I don't have the numbers.

As for someone's earlier comments on tanks being boring to play and eating while raiding. I think that's less class design and more on the fights since most fights seem to have less mechanics for the tanks to deal with than the rest of the raid.