Are Tanks Obsolete Outside of Operations?

Taking your second spoiler's advice is exactly what has the random GF in the state it's in, and as you can see from subsequent posts, I'm not the only one taking your advice. You can't fix people, and people are the problem with GF. Even a time machine can't fix it, unless you use it to distribute condoms at the right time and the right place? Nothing they could do with game design, other than making every fight mind numbingly boring tank and spanks will change it.

Blame the hybrid system. The exact same question can be asked "What use are healers outside HM FPs?" The new style of MMOs is to have everyone be a healer/DPS/tank where you put more emphasis on one of specs but why are DPSs tanking almost as good as me? Likewise I went with Power in my last set of mods and am almost a DPSer. Why are heals on a consular/sin healer almost all channeled?

I know the movement in MMOs is away from the "Holy Trinity". I was part of those discussions early on in this Forum QQing over how I didn't have a role anymore as a professional healer. The idea was that with this do everything but no one thing (except DPS of course) really well you can run solo. OK but then why does BW make a game with such an emphasis on 2 and 4 person heroics and social points and missions like Aurora Cannon where you HAVE to have 4 people. You know what BW? You want to make this a game where people have to group? Then make tanks that can tank, DPSers that kill and healers that heal/buff and no more of these hybrid little-bit-of-everything classes.

So to answer the OP, I don't know. Do we have any true tank builds?

Maybe I should follow SW_display_name's advice and not queue anymore with my characters.
Yes, that includes my tanks and healers. I planned to level my next Op as heals and only through FPs/TFPs, but if game doesn't need more healers then I'm out.

I think I finally see what you've been trying to say (took me long enough). Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you're saying:

• We already have people who know how to tank and like doing it. But they're not in the group-finder queues, because when they group with randoms, they get berated anyway - not because they can't tank, but because a significant proportion of players in group-finder don't know good tanking when they see it, or how they need to interact with the tank, and have no desire to learn.
  
• Little changes like making it easier to gear or get aggro could allow more people to be effective tanks. But it wouldn't matter, because they would get berated anyway. Because the cause of the abuse isn't (always) tank incompetence, but the group-finder crowd who have no interest in cooperation, learning how the roles work together, etc. (The people who do care about those things, it sounds like, are all in guilds and not using the group-finder. Which makes sense to me - if I had any interest in group play, I can only imagine that I'd join a guild.)

So to solve that problem, you would need to make it so that the group-finder crowd wouldn't even need to care whether the tank was doing their job right or not. Those would be some pretty big changes. Whatever came out the other side, I don't think it would be recognizable as a tank, as we know them.

And as much as I like tanking, I'm not really opposed to that. If online games are going to make the move to having everything solo-able, as I hope they do, it's not going to happen overnight, but step by tiny step. Doing away with tanks as we know them would make group play less group-y, and so it would be a step on that path.

That's pretty much it, in a nutshell. It doesn't matter what we do to tanks, or to tanking in general, when people aren't interested in the group dynamic. They need the group for the FP, but other than that, if they could, they'd just solo. The vast majority of this game is rather easy to solo, class stories, planetary stories etc. Hell, a good player can solo the majority of the Heroics, at or near level. But the only way to fix group finder is to fix the target audience, and we can't do that. The only PuG I run is AC/LS on Sec X. Mainly because it really doesn't matter who you get, it's pretty straightforward. Yet, you can still run into players that have no idea what an interrupt is for, or how it can help the group, and if you try to explain it, no matter how you go about it, it's "don't try to tell me how to play, I got to 5x"...

SW_display_name you are right that, given the time i'm playing MMOs, my perspective is in some way old fashioned, but in my opinion the role of the tank and the healer are still group roles, dependant of the others and supporting them. Why change things in a way that would increase the development into further "solo and independant" thinking, instead of giving more incentive to truely play together, to change the direction the new MMO players are going to? From the beginning, the early game, and not only the endgame, as there are already so many players having a rude awakening, when they reach 55 and want to play HC FPs or operations after leveling with KDY most of the time.

I have no objections against bringing more fun into tanking, although tanking in a group with at least some degree of teamwork is a lot of fun for me already. The idea of emotes or yells as taunts is great... Huge rancor boss at the end of the room, my sin yelling at him "ey doggy come here, sit up and beg!..." priceless!!

But changing things until i could play along with a group of NPCs in the same way just as well... what for am i playing a MMO, if i'm doing nothing different than playing my solothing side by side with 3 others doing just their thing?
The thing of MMOs is to adapt to each other in a group, to work things out together. If the tank is the only role left that has to do that to have fun, something has gone wrong and the other roles should be brought back in line, not the tank.
I don't mind leveling outside of FPs and heroic quests being soloable, especially in a game as story based as SWTOR, but as soon as you join a group for group content, you should need teamwork from everyone and punish players who don't even try to play together.

The question is, would it work the other way around, instead of changing the tank, change the DPS role into something more dependant like the other two. At least while playing group content.
Someone wrote about what a DPS, a healer and a tank has to think about in a group, why not change those who don't have to plan ahead or think about what to do that much into doing more instead of making tanking "brainless".

Make it more difficult for a DPS to gear properly, make them more difficult to play while they are grouping for FPs. Make the FPs much more demanding towards the DPS, for example something like weak NPCs are not possible to be tanked and shooting the group down if the DPS don't do their job killing them first. Would not be much differnce to how it is now except of nobody can blame the tank, anymore why he isn't doing "his job" which was in fact the job of the DPS since this game started.
Special mechanics to be solved only by a DPS by doing more than "tab and shoot". Something to force the formerly independant role into group support and teamplay. One DPS attacking a shield generator to make it possible for the tank to tank and taunt a boss in the first place or the other DPS to attack. There are enough possibilities to put more weight on the DPS role to force them into doing more than just damage.

If a fault of a DPS would lead to a wipe as clearly as a fault of a tank, if they have a clearly recognizable job to do with certain mechanics, the social pressure would not concentrate only on the tank but on everyone in the group. The potential new tank player would not have to fear more hassle then the potential new DPS or healer. There would be no real difference in the perceived difficulty of the roles, each would have its own challenges.

If there is no possibilty to avoid their share of responsibilty in a group, everyone would need to learn how to play together and there is much more incentive to adapt to the group, because the teamwork is needed from everyone in roughly the same degree.
Important but different mechanics to follow for each role, if they aren't played right the group dies and clearly recognizable who is the one that didn't his part. It would not change the gaming experience of those who are already playing together and supporting each other, but force those who don't to do so or to keep playing the soloable content if they really don't want to team up

Is it possible to get people more interested in real grouping again, by forcing everyone to be more dependant and supportive? Or is it too late for that and players would just leave this game? Would the devs even think about this or is the course already set towards players playing side by side instead of together? As it is easier to just avoid the more complex mechanics, than to create them and balance more advanced tactics until every role has the same level of difficulty.

So, to summarize, the biggest problem with a multiplayer game is the players. Has proven accurate about SWTOR PvP since the beginning, and I see it also applies to PVE.

Thank goodness my in-game observations of player behavior aren't as dismal as those portrayed in this thread.

That's what I'm saying though, I'm not saying it's "good" from the perspective of dedicated coop gamers but it is realistic, you can have:

• Slow queues with lots of wipes and votekicks and slowdown because you're mashing too many different skill levels together
• Extraordinarily slow queues because you're filtering by skill level (and basically excluding most players from getting a pop)
• Faster queues because you just let everyone in and you tune around a lower skill average, rather than expecting higher skill averages to teach & carry

With the first two it's like... we've been trying this for years in MMOs and it's a repair-filled nightmare.

Why not just concede defeat vs. human nature / reality and design engaging difficult content that is meant to be hand-PUG'd or run with friends / guildies... and then leave the queue for sightseeing?

Which is exactly not what I said, and is just surgically-removing a somewhat out-of-context observation to create drama.

(spoiler'd to reduce thread length-clutter)

I'm not saying "Don't queue", I'm saying "If queuing makes you so unhappy, why do you do it?"

If it doesn't actually make you unhappy, then why stress about it?

Yeah we're approaching a unified argument now.

(spoiler'd for length-spam)



So the goal isn't quite this:
Instead, it's to make the Tank's job no longer nearly as reliant on Group cooperation in low-end content where group cooperation is difficult to achieve (wrangling cats, etc).

Similar to how DPS and Healing requirements are much, much more stringent in PUG+ content — you can design Tanks to be fairly loose / easy in low-end (Matchmade) and then tighten it up progressively more as you move through HM and NM (Threat "nerfs" along damage increases, new mechanics, etc).