How Blizzard could make tanking more engaging in Battle for Azeroth

Legion was a fantastic expansion in many ways, but as I look back over the raid fights as a main tank, I can't help but notice the developers have fallen into a rut with the design of tank encounters. With few exceptions, tanking every fight is about taunting the boss when the other tank gets a set number of debuff stacks. Sometimes the debuffed tank has to run away, but there's little variation. Two fights in Antorus — Aggramar and Varimathras — add an element of a dance, but even those encounters have a debuff to force a tank swap.

I’d like to see the development team improve on this in Battle of Azeroth. And instead of just pointing out the problem, I’d like to offer some suggestions to make fights more interesting for everyone.

Change up the number of tanks needed for each fight

Every fight in Legion requires two and only two tanks. The number of healers and DPS may change, but the number of tanks stays the same. In previous expansions, the number of tanks would fluctuate throughout the instance, with some fights needing three tanks and others only needing one. This was even before the improvements that made specs easier. Back then, whatever spec you were at the beginning of the raid was what you were throughout unless you were willing to go through some hassle. If you weren't needed to tank on a particular fight, you either did what little DPS you could or you hearthed back to Ogrimmaar/Ironforge, paid gold to respec, and got summoned back. But now that switching specs is simple, tanks rarely have to do it.

There were encounters, even in Legion, that could have lent themselves to three tanks with some minor tweaks. Portal Keeper could keep two tanks down below while the third handled the portals. To be fair, some guilds used this strategy while progressing.  Eonar could have one tank for each level. Kin'gorth could have two tanks on the boss, then one tank responsible for each platform.

A change like this would add an extra challenge for both tanks and raid groups, as well as mixing things up for hybrids with a tank and DPS spec.

Encourage multiple tanking roles

A corollary to varying the number of tanks needed for each fight would be varying the tanking roles needed for each fight. Off-tanks to pick adds were once common, but now they're rarely needed. While most tanks aspire to the main tank role, needing defined off-tanks would give guilds a way to break in new tanks — and, again, add some variety to the role. It would also allow for nights where the main tank takes a less intensive role to ward off burn out. This could also encourage different talent builds, gear sets, and trinket usage.

This kind of variety just makes things more interesting for tanks.

Make threat matter again

I’ve tanked long enough to remember a time when threat mattered outside of Skittish week in Mythic Plus. While the developers would once again have to solve the issue of scaling between tanks and DPS, threat brought an interesting dynamic to raid. Every role influenced and interacted with the other. Tanks and healers have obvious interactions, but DPS were involved too — the entire raid had to consider threat.

Threat also opened up interesting options in raid design, like Void Reaver in Black Temple. He hit his current tank with a knockback which wiped away all threat, then he attacked the next player on his aggro list. You wanted the next person in line to be another tank — otherwise, he could one shot your poor Rogues. And Void Reaver was immune to taunt (another mechanic which would spice up raid encounters), taking away the easiest way for tanks to grab aggro. Tanks had to grind back up the threat list and pray they got to the top before the next knockback. Even without a debuff forcing a switch, most guilds ran three tanks and every one got a chance to tank the boss. Gurtogg Bloodboil was another example of this kind of fight in Burning Crusade. Though these were still basically tank switch fights, they were much more challenging than today's back-and-forth taunt tanking.

Even if Blizzard didn't want to bring back threat as a mechanic, having at least one non-tauntable Skittish raid boss could make for an engaging fight.

Give non-tanks a chance to tank

Sometimes it might be fun to put a nontraditional tank class in a tanking role. The High King Malgar encounter in Burning Crusade had both a Mage and a Warlock tanking. Instructor Razuvious in Naxxramas used Priest tanks in vanilla, and any class could tank him with the crystals in Wrath of the Lich King. In Upper Blackrock Spire, a skilled Hunter could kite General Drakkisath away while the rest of the raid dealt with the adds.

This would allow players who never considered the tanking role to give it a try in a familiar class — and give them a moment to shine as well.

Why should Blizzard change tanking?

Each of these strategies opens up different mechanics for tanks — and the raid as a whole — to deal with. With so much of the player base having come to game after these early raid fights were no longer current, these ideas would be new to them. Still, they're are only suggestions and I'm sure the developers have some fantastic ideas I haven't even considered — but I would like to see them get away from the stacking debuff mechanic for a while.