120 Unleashed

Recording the podcast on Friday went very well, if I do say so myself. I was able to talk at length about hero classes in WoW, including my submission for the next hero class. I didn't get into as much detail there as I do on this blog but got the main thrust of my idea out there. The other thing I did was what they call 120 Unleashed. It's basically a 2 min long rant on a given subject and they gave me free reign to rant about whatever I wanted. I have included the text of that rant below as a preview if there is anyone reading this, or as a transcript for anyone who visits this site after the podcast in which it appears goes live (I'll announce and link when that happens). Until then, enjoy!

The Tank Shortage or Social Responsibility? LOL

When a damage dealer queues up in the dungeon finder, they have to wait upwards of 45 minutes before they get a group. When a healer queues, it’s, at most, a third of that time. When you queue as a tank? It’s nearly instant. There’s only one tanking slot for every 3 dps slots in a party, so the odds favor dps if it weren’t for one simple fact: DPS outnumber tanks 600,000 to 1 (I didn’t fact check that number).

Look, tanking is hard, it carries responsibility. Tanks are asked to lead the groups, are expected to already know the fights and to have the best gear. If that’s not enough, the tank will be blamed when the group wipes. So, instead of trying to gear up a tank, then learning the fights and how to manage aggro, a concept that didn’t show up at all as you solo’d your way to 85, then still having people yell at you for everything that goes wrong, people just roll another DPS. What a shock that the hardest roll to play is the one being played the least. Add the fact that fewer tanks are required for raid material and we have our shortage.

Well, it’s Blizzards fault. They should give rewards for tanking! OK, now they will. Will that help? Nope. No matter the rewards, tanking is still not as easy and familiar as DPS. It’s not a problem that can be fixed by giving tanks a pony. The shift has to come from the community. Tired of waiting for a group? Use your hybrid and get a tanking set together!

I’ve seen complaints that patch 4.1 is unfair to pure dps classes, setting up yet another reverse hybrid tax. Right. . . . so you’re saying that if you could tank with your rogue you would right? Or is the reason you rolled a rogue so that you wouldn’t have to tank or heal? If every class in the game could tank a 5 man, there would still be a tank shortage because people don’t want to be responsible when a dungeon run fails.

The solution? Get rid of tanking altogether. Force everyone to get enough defense or dodge so they won’t take an un-healable amount of damage, and then have them juggle aggro while balancing crowd control and interrupts. “Why should I put all that thought and planning into gear and strategy that will just lower my recount numbers? I just want to pwn face!” Well, in that case, you can take your 45 min queue time and you can choke on it!

So there it is. In retrospect, I can't believe I was able to get all that in within the 2 min time limit. Guess I've been taking queues from Yatzee Croshaw.