Gear is partially to blame for tank shortage

1. I never claimed you said Warriors could heal.
2. 'You better make sure' comes off as a threat, which coming from you makes me snicker a bit
3. I'm eating waffles right now, you are not
4. I understood exactly what you meant. But you're here whining about a base mechanic of a game that is using the same mechanic as most MMOs in the past decade-plus.
5. I'm a tank and have no issues with how the gear system is set up. In fact, I prefer it this way.



6. The root cause is more that people want to pewpew and steamroll dungeons instead of worrying about mechanics, responsibility for their teammates and being one of the anchors of a group/raid. If the tank dies, the group will wipe more often than not. If a single DPS dies, most fights won't miss a beat. In addition to this, until you hit HM/NM raids, you can DPS in subpar gear and no skill change. As a tank, you need to either have decent gear or the skill to make up for it.
7. Calling yourself 'Godlymuppet' does not make me want to take you seriously. At all.

There was an alternative. It has always existed. Rift, if I'm not mistaken, took this approach. Bioware chose not to. Deal with it. If you want to DPS, take the gear that the existing DPS do not need (if you're tanking) or ask at the beginning of the run if you can roll. Crap, I see a lot of new DPSers using the free set of Recruit PvP gear. FREE SET. Use the GTN. Credits are ridiculously easy to come by if you want them.

Anyone know if rift had more tanks? Be good to know if what I'm suggesting has any merit.

People complain that mmo's have no innovation. This could be useful innovation rather than keeping things as they are.

I don't think gear is at the root of this issue. You don't need double gear as long as you have a decent team that doesn't screw up all the time.

The problem is more in the fact that tanking, as usual, is a thankless job and it's a lot trickier than say ranged DPS.

What I usually see (and yes I have 2 level 50 tanks, 2 level 50 dps and a level 50 healer), is that the problem is the DPS.

Now it's not always the fault of the DPS'ers, but when for example you have a DPS in top gear and as a tank you are geared one step below, good luck holding aggro against him. Especially melee DPS can do a lot of damage and take aggro. The taunts themselves only make the target attack you but as far as I can tell don't actually add threat and taunts have a cd that makes it tricky also. Then there is the issue of needing a certain amount of dps to build threat, without having enough high threat skills. And then the knock back situation. You get knocked back, you lose threat. Have to start over again.

All these mechanics can be fine if you have a team that knows what they're doing. That means the DPS need to understand the tank job. They should know that when a tank gets knocked back aggro is lost for example and that tanks may need a few seconds to build up threat.

Reality is that most DPS don't pay attention to this. So you could say well just stay in your guild and play only with them etc, but guildies are no guarantee for brilliance.

All in all, it's not just the encounter but the other players in your team that can really make your job impossible. In FP's I don't even care anymore. I let people take aggro and have them deal with adds or mobs, because they will screw it up anyways and we usually manage. But a lot of tanks at that point get fed up. And then I havent even talked about breaking CC and all that....

So the problem is then that a lot of people don't like to tank. They just wanna Pew Pew or feel invincible but a tank is hardly invincible in this game. So yes I think that the game should be easier to tank. Not because it's impossible to do it right but because so much is against it that most people automatically retire their tanks at level 50, if they even rolled one to begin with.

Start by making threat building easier for tanks and damage reduction more effective. Hell, even healers might like their role better. It's not that this must happen but in any Ops ( and I rarely play Ops at all these days) I do not want to tank and half the time I don't want to heal either. Why? Because also a lot of boss mechanics are specifically tricky for tanks and healers and not so much for DPS.

So really, why would anyone, except for a few weirdos (no disrespect ) want to tank? It's not rewarding generally and you have to to all the annoying stuff. I actually quit playing Ops because KP was meh and EC just wasnt fun for me. Some people love that stuff but it does mean that most people don't wanna play those roles and bingo: tank shortage.

The fact they nerfed the hell out of tanks in 1.3 is a factor (for me at least) in not tanking. I haven't played my tank since 1.3 other than to run the HK quest chain. Sure, they increased our threat 50%, but they drastically nerfed our damage...like 25%. IMO they should have just increased our threat 25% and called it a day. This might not matter much for group content, but tanks were already painfully slow to level and do dailies with, and now it's just torture.