The concensus within WoW is that there is a tank shortage, the designers built wrath around a tank shortage (enter the DK), there is also a shortage of healers, not as huge but it’s there.
I disagree, there is no shortage of players who play healing and tanking toons, who spend a lot of time on them.
Let us look at two guilds, firstly Team Pirate. This is a small guild of 10 active players, we manage to get into some 10-man content. Currently the guild has access to three tanks who are geared enough for ICC10 (a total of 6 players with tanking alts capable of at least all the Wrath 5-man heroic content) and five ICC10 geared healers (I think seven players with healing alts capable of Wrath 5-man heroic content). We are at the point where there’s rotation going on to bring in the alts on ICC10 runs just for fun and frolics.
Secondly there’s the 25-man raiding guild. I’m not sure about alts but we’re running with a 6-man tanking team and a 8-man healing team. Team tank has an almost 100% attendance record. We’re there, we’re tanking boss and we’re sitting standby / filling in as dps where needed.
What is the problem?
PUGs, it’s as simple as that.
Pugging is brutal on tanks, there are some runs which are a breeze, but then there are the others, the horrible runs. The runs where the DPS are yelling “gogogogooo” the instant the tank zones in, the runs where the dps are already pulling or ripping aggro with suicide storm (or other aoe of choice) on trash packs, “helping” the tank by pulling the next trash ready for the tank to speed things up.
All the while complaining, about the speed, about why the tank isn’t keeping aggro.
These aren’t the bottom of the pile but personally I’ve not encountered “puggus insultinus” in any of my runs yet but the likes of dear_gnome are full of stories of complete fail where the only responses are insulting at best and worryingly abusive at worst.
So, everyone in dpsland, we understand your queue times are horrible (I’ve sat there as well on my caster alts) but if you want more tanks to queue make it less of a pain for them to do so.
A bit of balance
To all elitist “you need me more than I need you” tanks, please go die in a fire, a big one. You are entitlement morons of the first order. Just because we’re a role which is in demand doesn’t make us “better” than the other players. Stop giving us a bad name.
