Blizzard has forgotten that when you drop the bar to make things more playable for the lowest common denominator, the lowest common denominator just gets stupider and lower. People genuinely go out of their way to exert the least effort possible for their best reward, and the game design choices have continuously favoured easier and easier encounters across the board, save for a few high-coordination raid fights. They have replaced the difficulty of coordinating all players in a 5 man or 10 man group with the difficulty of keeping a tank alive long enough to kill a boss – that is, they have shunted the responsibility to the tank and to the healers. Only a few encounters, such as the Skirmishers, require the DPS to do anything.

I feel sad when I realize that if I don’t spell interrupt a mob, no one will (despite having both a rogue and an enh shammy in the group).
I feel sad when I realize that if I ask a mage to sheep a mob, they will very likely complain about it, or AoE it themselves and break it.
I feel sad when I realize that if I ask anything of any DPS player other than to hit things, they are going to bitch and cry.

I will probably retire my tanks at the end of Cata. My own guild has more or less fallen apart, so raiding is not an option, and I don’t want to tank PUGs. As much as I have enjoyed my DK tank, my Warrior tank, and my Pally tank, I just can’t be bothered to work with these morons anymore. I’ll PvP for a while, probably. Who knows. I love tanking….but I don’t love the players anymore.

Personally, I think the only thing that can bring back quality play and quality players is a ranking system for PvE, one that’s not based on gear. Introduce arena challenges, say, where mobs have special abilities kind of like Nefarion does. Have those abilities be targetted at a particular class, and be neutralised or interrupted by that particular class, and that will instantly kill you and possibly wipe your group if you fail to deal with them. Or put challenge mobs in specific instances. Make gear available on an arena points type system, where you need both a specific PvE rating and some tokens or other items from mobs to get them. Or possibly make instances only available to people with a minimum rank.

Then you’ll only ever have to group with people who are in your ranking and who have only ability similar to yours.

Any tips on where to look? I’m a relatively new tank anyways, and would appreciate seeing/reading the “correct” way to do mah job.

- Hudge

I feel vindicated for every time I ask a Hunter to use freeze on Mages in H HoR (lol noob tank lern2holdaggro)
I feel vindicated for every time I ask people to spread out in Halls of Stone (fail healer…spam HoTs…{my main’s a druid})
I feel vindicated for every time I moved the boss in H VH away from the orbs and I got laughed at by the DPS…

It may be “just” a heroic, but I actually take the trouble to read up on the fights and try to counteract them as a tank (I’ve only been playing WoW a grand total of 2 months…only have 1 lvl 80 and no alts), and I’ve had to deal with a ridiculous amount of criticism, taunts and outright insults from pugs in the LFD Heroics.

Its nice to know I’m doing it right. ;)

If you choose to find things out as you go, learning by doing, and refuse to spend time outside the game researching to prepare yourself, that’s fine. I love doing that as well, seeing things firsthand.

But do it on your own time, with friends that know the plan going in, and are happy to figure it out and experience it together.

You mention in game honesty, but from where I’m sitting, honesty also incorporates respecting the fact that not everyone on the run with you has the same goals you do, and likely won’t appreciate being your guinea pigs for the testing experiment.

As always, a well considered and thought provoking post – and just this afternoon I was in HC ToC in my tree spec watching 3 wipes of the PuG at the 1st set of “on foot” bosses. When I asked the tank why he wasn’t marking a kill order his answer “Because everyone knows what the order is” seemed quite typical!! (and obiously untrue :-()

But my more contentious point is – I really don’t enjoy or see the “in game” honesty of researching an instance before I run it – part of the the joy of the game is (for me) working out what the hell is going on and adapting to it – as long as I learn and don’t make the same mistahe next time I think it makes me a better bear. What I do get really hacked off with though is in PuGs and (even more so) 10 man raid PuG’s everyone assuming that everyone has doen this (not only) plenty of times before but IN THE SAME WAY. OMG – there are times when there might be different wasy to complete a specific boss/encounter whatever, and 2 minutes of chat can make sure everyone is on the same page.

I think I tank well – I keep an eye on my group, and point out the critical steps (that I know of) for each engagement, I ignore the dps that constantly shout gogogo and I learn from what I see – but I don’t think its reasonable to also expect that I spend hours searching the web and researching each and every isntance before I run them – it seems to take all the excitement out of the run and make it dull before you even get there.

Maybe this does mean I make the rest of my party/group take longer than if I knew the whole thing backwards, but at least if we talk we can all know that we’ve all got the same idea before we barrell in and have some fun!!!

Yes, while I’ve worked hard to learn all the fight mechanics and my class, I’m lazy about communicating. I should not assume other people know what they’re doing. I will make some macros for the common issues and use them.

But when is communicating over-communicating? I was skull-marking priority targets the other day (communication, right?), and all 3 PUG DPS were ignoring the mark or immediately AOEing. I’m bitching because aggro is going everywhere and the priority mobs are getting their unhappy-making powers off, and the hubby says, “You didn’t tell them that the skulls should be killed first.”

Wha…..?!? These people made it to 80, are running heroics, and they don’t know the WoW meta-language that skulls are the kill priority? Congratulations on winning the too stupid to live prize.

So I type, “Please kill skulls first.” And say out loud, “I’m not going to taunt off those bastards any more. Don’t heal them if they pull aggro.” Sadly, it did require 2 deaths before they actually followed instructions.

I felt this most when I was gearing up the warrior and found that the more geared the dps are the more prone a run is for a dps or 2 to just pick a target and go all out on it, despite whether there is a mark on it or if it’s the tanks focus target. Then of course there are the mages, hunters, boomies that open up with aoe before all the mobs even reach the tank….welcome to warrior hell…population..1.

It got to the point where I was actually happy to see lesser geared people in the group as it meant I could actually chill out and enjoy the instance.

You can Alt+Tab all you want between the game and wowhead, but if the group just won’t cooperate then you’ve no choice but to have a hissy fit (not really recommended), vote to kick the moron out of the group (may just be me, but it feels pretty bad) or just simply /leave group.

I suppose the best you can hope for is to fall into a decent group who know what they’re doing, or are at least willing to learn. But still, it only takes one guy to turn a decent group into a hopeless one.

Pessimism? Or do the French servers suffer from a high concentration of idiots?