Am I the only one who wants more Tanking ability, not DPS?

[Inuakurei]

Hello, I've been around since 1.0 but I haven't posted much on these forums because I'm terrible at organizing my thoughts so sorry if this is a jumbled mess.

I am a DRK main and the reason I'm making this post is that I feel like the actual role and idea of what a Tank class is supposed to be has been lost in the transition from 3.0 to 4.0. However anytime I bring this up I seem to get a lot of hate, so I want to formally express my concerns and I want to know if I'm the only one who feels this way.

First I'll explain my issue with the tank classes currently. There appears to be a very high emphasis placed on doing high dps, and very little placed on damage mitigation, which seems very wrong to me. To me a tank class is supposed to be about doing your best to mitigate damage while keeping up with enmity and dealing with raid mechanics. Right now though a tank seems like its being treated as little more than a tankier dps class.

I don't blame the community for this though, I blame SE for being very inconsistent on what they want tanks to actually be. From 3.0 – 3.9 they spent the entire time turning tanks into exactly what we conceive them to be now, a tankier dps class that doesn't vary all that much from the other dps classes. We got used to that and people who enjoyed that play style came to the tank classes. However in 4.0 so far, it seems like SE doesn't want us to think of tanks as simply tankier dps classes, and while I agree that is a good thing to do, I don't think they've done a good job at doing it.

Currently it feels like from 3.0 to 3.9 they gave tanks a bunch of dps, then in 4.0 they suddenly took away that dps without compensating us with anything to fill that void. In fact most of the new skills DRK got were simply flat dps skills. The logic is very confusing to me, why give make an attempt to lower tank damage, then give tanks more damage skills?

So I want to ask the community, am I the only one who wants more tanking in my tank class? Take away the damage, but give me some kind of active damage mitigation to replace it with. Give me more skills like The Blackest Night, make the dps/tanking stances better / more defined and mobs hit harder so you need to tank in tank stance, but still off tank in dps stance. Stuff like that is what I want, not more dps.

Right now TBN is the only thing keeping me interested in tanking right now. IMO we need more skills like that.

Or maybe I'm just old, and these days people do just want to be a tankier dps. Please let me know.

[Gravton]

Most tanks don't want dps numbers, dps is a sign of personal progression / engagement. I don't want more mitigation through skills or gear. The more mitigation I have, the less I have to be engaged. However, if I had to hold hate through my dps...if enemity where even a factor, I would concentrate more on that. Mitigation is easy, enemity is easy, more hp means I can do less. What's left after that? Dps.

[Falar]

I don't get what else there is?

Like people want to just sit through a whole fight spamming provokes and defensive cooldowns.

[Inuakurei]

Most tanks don't want dps numbers, dps is a sign of personal progression / engagement. I don't want more mitigation through skills or gear. The more mitigation I have, the less I have to be engaged. However, if I had to hold hate through my dps...if enemity where even a factor, I would concentrate more on that. Mitigation is easy, enemity is easy, more hp means I can do less. What's left after that? Dps.

Ya that's something I forgot to touch on. Tanking is simply too easy. Tanking in this game can be summed up to "use a CD on the tank buster", and the rest of the time is spent maxamizing dps.

But this is why I find the game to be badly designed for tanks right now. Mitigation shouldn't be this easy, enmity shouldn't be this easy, things that make tanks different shouldn't be the part that's downplayed. That stuff is supposed to be what being a tank is about, instead things like enmity and mitigation take a back seat to dps.

What I mean is that I want more engagement in my tank from skills to do tank things, not so much from gear. and stats I guess what I mean is, if I'm main tanking make me divert some of the time that I'm usually spending doing dps rotations, to actively paying attention to damage mitigation.

[Inuakurei]

I don't get what else there is?

Like people want to just sit through a whole fight spamming provokes and defensive cooldowns.

That's the point I'm trying to make though, that currently its badly designed. Right now outside of dps, that IS all tanking is. My argument is that it shouldn't be that way. There should be more active ways to tank, not just dps. The active part of being a tank shouldn't be dps, but currently it is.

And its even worse that SE seems to want to reduce tank dps, but not change how tanks work. Theres more ways to make something fun than just dps rotations.