Are Tanks Obsolete Outside of Operations?

This is an ideal goal and IDD with the basic logic of your entire post, it's idealistic and sounds really good on paper (not sarcasm).

Unfortunately developers are averse to this sort of solution because in practice, it requires significantly more effort and resources to try to shape / condition player behavior and usually turns people off instead (since they lose interest or become impatient).

ie, as enough of a drowning tide of players floods the game and the devs are under pressure to keep them interested and playing, it becomes increasingly more expedient for everyone involved to observe population tendencies and behaviors and allow those to gently nudge and shape the design envelope.

So basically — following the trend is winning because it's the path of significantly least resistance, giving players what they "like" and respond well to, and allowing the most population to engage and complete the content the devs spend weeks and months producing.

The more dedicated route of simply stubbornly forcing players to learn, adapt, train, practice, condition, be punished for being uncooperative — this is slow, has low success rates, leads to player disinterest, etc.

When populations in games were low and market appeal was a much lower priority than "gamer appeal", you could design 'serious' content around the assumption of a dedicated gamer personality that would put up with the crap you force them through in order to get that dangling-carrot reward of finally "figuring it out" and achieving success.

Meanwhile, everyone else was content to just know "dungeons are hard", "raids are really hard", and "I think i'll just stick with questing, RP, and fishing".

Fast-forward to 2014 and devs want "everyone" to see "everything" they produce and feel involved and like they're getting their money's worth and not left out and ... etc.

Hence the birth of the Queue — LCD content which shows a watered-down version of "everything" to "everyone" and doesn't try very hard to filter them out, since it's meant for everyone. (see: Tacticals, SM Bolster)

You can argue, perhaps convincingly, that this is depressing. And you can argue for the devs to turn this around and start asking more from the entire population again, and just "letting it happen" if many players implode or can't cut it or give up.

But — for better or worse — that's increasingly not the design era we're playing in. I guess it really comes down to whether you want to try adapting to the reality of where matchmade-level content is headed, or keep stubbornly hoping for a better solution.

I'm not saying either approach is right or wrong. Brutal pragmatism and realism is my approach, though, and it fuels my arguments here.

The issue here is how Threat works. If one person Aggro dumps it doesn't necessarily go to the Tank, it goes to the next person on the list.

If everyone Aggro dumps and the Tank doesn't then yeah, I guess we've now accomplished the same thing, but was there any point to that besides giving everyone an extra button to press every pull vs. just making Tanks a walking magnet?

You'd have to give it like no cooldown too, because as soon as you finishing dumping you're right back to square one if the Tank is still tunneling or forgetting to tab around. At this point you're approaching a "Just delete Threat" stage which is more extreme than just making Tanks mob-magnets.

That's an interesting alternative, but it actually takes power away from Tanks more than just supercharging their Threat abilities, because now every Tank (not just 'bad' ones) is semi-reliant on their Guard doing something useful, and to the correct targets.

It's basically again doing the same thing, but with actually less involvement from the Tank player. What I'm trying to do is design a solution where the Tank still has to actively play, but the margin for error in turns of button chosen and target order is much wider at the low end.