Quote Originally Posted by CKNovel View Post
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I can recall what people said on this forum ten years ago. Don't worry, you're not the only one. But I'll be reading your words back to you every single time that you make a 'confident' contradiction. Judging from the trends around the length of expansions, I expect we'll get a good three years or so out of this quote.

But it's not really a competition between roles. If your goal was to absolutely push the limits of DPS optimisation, you'd be maining an actual DPS job. That's just common sense. It's good to broaden your experiences, but at the end of the day there's always an opportunity cost involved with how you invest your time. What I'm questioning is how we can make tanking worth that investment again. That means playing to your strengths. How can we make mitigation more engaging? How can we make positioning more engaging? Are there elements of enmity generation (especially snap enmity) that can be used to keep tanks engaged? It's the combination of these things that makes tanking unique. Without it, you're just left with a third-rate DPS subcategory on training wheels. You might as well get rid of the role altogether at that point.

I want tanking to have a skill differential again because I want the role to be worth going back to. I've watched them progressively rip out everything from the role that I once was passionate about, only to replace it with this auto-regen, on-demand burst healing nonsense that caters to the lowest common denominator. Let's bring skill expression back to tanking. Part of this is encounter design dependent, I get it. But a really good starting point would be to rebuild how defensive toolkits are put together from the ground up. And I think actions like Bloodwhetting, Shake it Off, and Holmgang are at the epicentre of this defensive powercreep.