Quote Originally Posted by Kabooa View Post
Good idea.

Lets skip over damage adjustments and go straight into making their tank duties more prevalent.

Start putting in your suggestions now.
Let's do both.

1. Positioning and movement
- Address whatever legacy coding issue forces animation locks on ability use. Bosses that can cleave without delay while continuously moving? Yes please.
- Build your fight mechanics and fight choreography around your tanks. Want the boss to go somewhere? Force the tank to reposition. If the boss is moving on its own, nobody is tanking it.
- Keep the tank that isn't active busy. Add spawns don't necessarily need to be just a dps check. They can also be a "don't let the healers get eaten check", especially if there are a lot of them.
- Council fights should be much more commonplace. Especially ones with interesting swaps. You don't need an animation lock for the swap either, so long as there's a soft tether check as opposed to a hard one. The intro to Warcraft's Thaddius encounter is an example of a creative council fight swap.

2. Mitigation
- Keep up the pressure on your tanks. A series of quick untelegraphed cleaves is much more intimidating than a telegraphed tankbuster with a 2-4 second castbar that you're going to just invuln anyways.
- Ramp up the rate and amount auto damage such that it quickly oneshots non-tanks. There's much less need to place so much emphasis on raidwides as your big healer checks if a tank death is a wipe condition in itself, by virtue of the boss or adds tearing through your team.
- De-emphasize invulns, and force the use of the rest of the tank's mitigation kit. You can just as easily force a swap by cooldown attrition as you can with an artificial debuff.

3. Damage
- Increase tank damage output relative to both healers and dps. This becomes less important depending on how well 1 and 2 are performed.

The problem is in the formula. We've been patting the devs on the back for their fight design. Look at how elaborate the choreography is! Look at how elaborate the mechanics are! And that's true, from a dps perspective. But the existing raid formula doesn't really carry much appeal for tanks. And the only thing masking that fact until now is the fact that you could play pretend melee dps in your downtime. To make people play tanks, you have to make them value tanks. And value comes from the impact and contribution that they provide.