Call to Arms: Excuse me?

I touched on my idea for making tanking more attractive in my post before this.  I wrote it yesterday before this call to arms announcement was made and only added a tiny bit about the call to arms in the beginning of the post.  I'd like to address it a bit more in its own post.

I am against the idea of rewarding tanks just for being tanks for many reasons.  Most of which are logic based.  Some of which are preference based.  One of which is jealously based, which is the one I will start with.

Reason #1 - But I Can't Tank
I've been running mount runs for a long as I can remember.  As soon as I noticed I was capable of soloing the things that dropped mounts I started to try to get the mounts.  I have the worst luck in the world so of course there are no mounts for me. 

Sure, I can still run them and still get a chance to get them but that is where the problem is.  So can the tank.  If I can solo them to get it the tank can solo it to get it. 

Why should the tank get an extra chance just because they are a tank?  If they want the extra chance they can run it solo another time just like I did.  Tanks are not special snowflakes and should not be treated as such.

Reason #2 - White's Only
There is a reason that there is a lot of strife around the world when it comes to racism, classism, sexism, you name it.  Because it is wrong to treat one person differently just because they do not measure up to your standards.

Discrimination is wrong in any aspect of life, even gaming.  Might as well just label the bag whites only.  I know how wrong that sounds, because it is wrong.

Reason #3 - Pay to Play
There is a reason I do not play any of those pay to play games.  I do not like any game that sells prestige.  Pay to play games sell items, pets, gear, so forth and so on, to whomever is willing to spend the cash on the game.  I am in the position where I could afford that, I am lucky, but I would never spend money on it.  I think it is wrong for the spirit of the game to buy your way to prestige items.

Even if it is not game changing, it is prestige items they plan to give tanks for doing nothing but their job, tanking.  At least if you see someone with a sparkle pony you know they spent real life money.  If you see someone on the baron mount that happens to be a warrior did he get it just because he is a tank or did he grind it like everyone else in the game had to? 

There is a certain prestige in earning something even if it is only cosmetic. I am not alone in that feeling either, just look around your main city and see all those people on prestige mounts.  Ashes, guild 25, rare drops, grind mounts, refer a friend, retired mounts, achievement mounts, etc. 

If he got it by being a tank, which you would never be able to tell, he basically paid for it.  I do not want to play a pay to play game.

Reason #4 - Instant Queue
Tanks already have the greatest perk in the game when it comes to LFD.  Instant queue.  If that is not enough to get them to tank, screw them.  They get instant gratification and they do not want it, that is their problem.  They do not need anything else.  What they need is to be happy with what they have.

Reason #5 - I Still Won't Tank
I want the pets and mounts.  Really I do.  Even if they were made BoA so I could send them to my main if I got them I would still not tank in a random.  You could offer me 1 free piece of 359 gear (or the top at the moment) of my own choice each time I tank a random and I would still not tank a random.

No matter what incentive you offer nothing will ever make up for having to deal with the average player you run into when tanking.  When there is even one bad DPS in the group it can make a tanks life hell.  A healer can just let them die.  The other DPS can pick up the pace.  The tank has to play yo yo with the moron that is always on the wrong target. 

Being there are three DPS in each run, that means if even 33% of the DPS suck you are bound to get one in your run.  I would bet every cent I own in real life that more then 33% of the DPS in this game suck.  This means more often then not you will always have at least 1 problem in your group.

Reason #6 - Bad Tanks
I'm average at best, and that is over evaluating my skills I am sure, when it comes to tanking.  If I have a group behind me that knows what it is doing I can hold my own.  If people start missing CC, start hitting wrong targets, start pulling more mobs then intended my ability goes downhill fast and it becomes a 50/50 chance if we will survive.

The sad part here is, that a 50/50 chance of survival is a lot better then it sounds.  There are not many great tanks that can recover in this content when someone messes up.  So my 50/50 is probably even over estimating.

Now add all those new tanks that just want to get mounts and pets.

Never tanked before, you are down to 25/75.
No tank gear, you are down to 5/95.
No tank spec, you are down to 100% chance of a wipe.

They really want to encourage people to cause wipes?  That is an interesting way to go about solving the tanking issue Blizzard.  I would have never even thought of that one and I come up with some really crazy ideas. 

This might actually be worth watching.  I'd love to see how many different ways failure can happen.  I would have guessed I saw them all but this opens so many new doors for failure in interestingly new ways.  It might make for some fantastic blog posts of venting from extreme frustration.  Maybe I am starting to like this idea.

Reason #7- Best Case Scenario
Lets say that new tanks come in and they are good off the bat, in the right spec, in the right gear and learn faster then expected.

The queue time goes down.  As time passes more and more of these tanks start to get the mount or the pet they where after and they stop doing the randoms because they got what they were after.  The number of tanks begins to drop again and we are back where we started.

So what now?  Offer them more things?  Maybe more valor points, maybe more gear, maybe something else.  Where does it stop?

Even if it works perfectly to start, it will not last forever.  You will need to add more incentives sooner or later.  You will be starting a slippery slope and you never know where it will end.  The long run implications of what could happen have never been thought about or they would have never done it.

With all that said I'll continue being grumpy...

Some might say that something needs to be done and I agree 100%.  I had a suggestion that could help, even if only slightly, in my previous post and there are other suggestions I could make.

The biggest problem with tanking is not the tanks.  That is what Blizzard does not seem to understand.  It is the DPS that is the problem.  They suck to extremes that are sad on many levels.  Being there is no way to fix the DPS problem unless you want to lower the threat of all attacks so you need to address it from the tanking standard.

They seem to want to encourage people to tank solo, not with guild, which is what is needed to get the goodie bag.  I think there is a much better way to do this without giving the tanks a goodie bag at all.

For my suggestion, as OP as it is going to sound, I can tell you exactly why I do not tank randoms and why this would fix it.

I do not tank randoms because DPS are stupid.  They could not follow a kill order if you tattooed it on their forehead.  They could not CC if you even told them what key their CC was bound to.  They do not understand what threat is and don't understand they have aggro even if they see the mob charging them.  This is why I do not tank randoms.

Make it so if a tank queues solo that all threat generated by anyone in their group (besides them of course) is reduced by 90%.

OP?  Hell yes it is.

Would it work?  Hell yes it would, for me at least.

My biggest problem with random people is that they all attack whatever target they want even if they are marked with a kill order meaning that keeping solid aggro on so many mobs at once is hard and frustrating.

It will not fix all the problems with DPS.  We will still have them not interrupting because they are afraid it will hurt their DPS.  They will still break CC every chance they get.  They will still pull packs that where not intended.  However, with holding threat being a non issue you have one huge issues less to work on making tanking more bearable.

With that one change tanking would be a cake walk compared to what it is now.  Sure, I still would not tank any more then one a day for valor once I am geared up but I would be more likely to gear up every character that could be a tank as a tank because it would make tanking easy as pie.

The best part of doing it this way is if a mob goes after a DPS and kills them they will know that I let it happen because getting aggro is so damn easy.  No more, you are a fail tank, comments if someone dies.  They will know that they died because I wanted them to die because they were acting like an idiot.

It might even teach DPS a thing or two being they know that the tank let them die and no longer blame the tank for being bad.  Before it was always easy to say, I died because the tank was bad.  Now it will be, even with the 90% threat reduction I still died, maybe it is not the tanks fault.

Until they can figure out a way to make DPS not act like complete morons, which is impossible, the only way they will ever get me to tank a random alone is to make me so OP that I can compensate for all the DPS being retarded.  This would help.

Some bag with mounts or pets is not going to get me to tank a random alone, sorry.  I'll solo the content on my main and I'll get them sooner or later.  I'll tank for guild because at least I know them.  I will not tank for the unwashed masses however.  There is no way you can convince me to do that unless I had the ability to compensate for their collective inability.

Blizzard needs to look at the DPS problem if they want to fix the tank problem.  Randoms do not have tanking issues that need to be fixed.  They have a DPS issue that needs to be fixed.