If You Were A Class/Job Designer...

[Shurrikhan]

Let's consider this:

WoW developers spent four years trying to balance Druid, Paladin and Warrior tanks throughout vanilla and BC, only to give up and make Druids, Paladin, Warrior and Death Knight tanks absolutely equal in terms of mitigation, DPS / threat generation and utility. The tanks used different skills to get there, but it was the same result. For once it didn't matter who the MT's class was, the only thing that mattered was their gear.

Now the new generation of WoW designers have tried to make different tanks have different strengths, and the result has been -- you guessed it -- raids abandoning certain tanks because others are way superior for clearing content.

So what would I do? I'd accept that if you design tanks to be have different strengths and weaknesses, all you are doing is intentionally creating a situation where one tank class will be viewed the most inferior while another is viewed the most superior.

Sure, tanks can have different flavor text and different ways of playing, but the end-result needs to be the same across the board. Equal mitigation vs physical, magic and utility. Equal DPS. Equal utility.

Unlike damage dealers and healers, tanks are the most essential role for a progression raid. It doesn't matter how much healing or damage is dealt, if the tank goes down, the raid wipes. Therefore raiding parties will always gravitate toward the tank class which offers the most advantage for the encounter and steer clear of the inferior tanks. This has always,always been how things are in MMOs when misguided designers try to make tanks have different strengths and weaknesses.

To be honest, WoW tanks even now do not have exactly equal mitigation, utility, or dps, except over an average. At different points in a given fight, one class's CD will still time out better than another, much like IB vs. Rampart/Shadowskin. And it's worked just fine. That's what makes composition interesting. There's no need for them to be bland copies of each other (as per Dark-Rampart, etc.).

Now, I'll agree that niches are not a place to look for class identity. No tank should be the master anti-magic tank, etc., unless every fight somehow includes a balancing element of physical anti-tank damage, etc. As you said, noticeable weaknesses, wherever possible, are dropped; not worked around--dropped. But there's nothing wrong with different dynamics that can highlight one's capabilities within certain niches, as long as they do average out in opportunity-reward across all content (and more tightly so where the fight's requirements tighten). Diversity in how they get there is what makes them interesting. There's nothing wrong with a personal/raid saver like Anti-magic Shell/Zone, nor gaining your mitigation through passive growth via Acclimatization, nor chugging through it with damage>absorption shields, etc. That's three very different specs and mitigation methods each equally able to handle a magic boss, albeit with slightly different positions (main-tank, swap-tank, and snap-tank), each performing in combo just as well as any other pair of tanks. (I use these DK examples because it's the only class on which I've done every role (tank/dps) in every spec in a raid environment - in this case ICC.) Warrior-Paladin (even, or especially at 60) already did a decent job with keeping identity, though I still feel PLD falls behind in specific components of parity. However, the unimaginative carbon-copy DRK abilities make me fear for later tanks.