Any ideas to entice people to play tanks?

fred4 · January 8

I think the following might work:

Incentivizing people to play their tanks via greater rewards. I've been in lots of trials where, eventually, one of the DDs switches to their tank. People have tanks. They just don't want the stress and responsibility.
Re-instating the Tormentor set or other fun option(s). That said, Tormentor was never meta for trials. Scribed chains work and sustain well on every class nowadays (use the 600 mag/stam restore option), and you probably want chains as a secondary taunt anyway, e.g. a skill that does not risk taking the other tank's primary targets away from them. That was always the risk with Tormentor in trials. I've had a lot of fun with that set as the sole tank in normal trials. For veteran DLC trials it was never really suitable.

Here's what I think will not work:

Tutorials. It's not the tanking basics that hold you back. It's fluency with trial and DLC dungeon mechanics. It's the very high damage in some cases. It's the fact that you cannot really be carried by other players, e.g. if the tank dies, the group is much more likely to wipe than if a healer or DD dies. It isn't about knowing how to tank per se. It's about breadth of mechanics knowledge. So unless ZOS tell you: "Don't stand too far from Yolna as the main tank in vet Sunspire, or we'll screw you over", and they do so for all content, there really is no point. The game is full of examples where it's hard or impossible to see how you screwed up unless an addon warns you or another player tells you the mechanics. The real historical answer has been guilds, e.g. the player community. ZOS underestimated the fragility of that ecosystem when they released U35.
Easier access to armor sets. I simply think this is unnecessary. You can very well start out with something like Plague Doctor, Torug's Pact and Tremorscale, and go straight into vet DLC trial PUGs. I've done it after rearing a character on another server. Wearing group support sets in a PUG is honestly just icing on the cake. Too much is made of it. Specifically PA isn't going to make or break a PUG.

Soarora wrote: »

I disagree about extra rewards for tanks because it’d lead to more fake tanks because some fake tanks overestimate their fake tanking skills or underestimate the necessity of a tank.

I agree the rewards must not be all that significant, just enough to nudge some players.

- Low DPS: what people don’t understand when they tout “there’s no DPS check, I can do as low of damage I want” is that tanking gets increasingly harder the lower the DPS is. If people keep dying or not understanding mechanics, that’s even more on the tank’s plate. I’ve had to do every mechanic and res people while tanking a vet dungeon and that is genuinely more difficult than most HMs and Tris. There are more tanks than you see, but many are against PUGs entirely because their skill level is so much power than guildmates.

I find it hard to say what's better, pugging as a tank or DD. Assuming you can't simply solo the content, you need competence in both departments. I would only say that, for healers, the competence requirement kicks in a bit later.

- Not enjoying tanking: not everyone will like tanking. That doesn’t mean tanking is bad, but not all people like every role.

I don't buy that that's a main reason for the shortage. For me it's the additional stress. If I'm a bit tired or I just want to farm, I play a healer. Besides tanking being more demanding, there's also the unfortunate tendency in PUGs for a tank landing the group leader role mid-trial and suddenly being responsible for managing the group finder, calling for portals, and so on.

The only realistic solution to all 3 of these problems? Friendship.

I think voice chat and patience is enough, not that the latter is always in supply.

Letting tanks do meaningful damage would shift the entire balance of the game towards making content too easy, and while you can make a tank that does some damage, if you’re combining roles you need to be good at all roles involved to begin with.

Depending on the dungeon difficulty, that is exactly what you do. I've tanked non-DLC vet dungeons on a templar DD with Tormentor in the past. I've soloed or tanked a bunch of stuff with a Brawler sorc build. Having just the right build for the content you end up in is tricky, though. If you don't do meaningful damage, you might as well play a concentional tank. These days there are Arcanists in addition to the ubiquitous heavy attack builds. The chances for good group damage have gone up a bit.

Changing how tanking plays to encourage people to find it less boring would alienate current tanks and then there would be no one to teach new tanks.

Going to take this as a springboard to circle back to some of the other comments. IMO the game is only fun when it challenges you. That's been the problem with healers already. Those are genuinely redundant in a lot of mid-level content. Couldn't let the same happen to tanks. I would not like for tanking to become easier.

I think ZOS' decision to nerf Tormentor was done so tanks spend their time chaining stuff in when they have nothing else to do. That said, I don't agree that Tormentor was ever a threat to the tanking meta. It was most fun and most useful in mid-level content, notably as the solo tank in normal trials. I do, however, suspect that is where ZOS were coming from.

I would say that tanking is already easier than ever before. If you understand chains, the "lesser" nature of those skills as a taunt, that's a way to coordinate the two trial tanks and make things easier. As Code (of Code's Combat Alerts) has pointed out, DK is also not necessarily the optimal tank anymore. He recommended wardens as being easier for dungeons. From my personal experience nightblade is also extremely comfortable nowadays, whereas sorcs possibly make for the best hybrid tank / DD builds.

Vaqual · January 8

Having maintanked in many other MMOs, the big turn off for me is how braindead the tanking is in ESO. And by that I don't mean the process of doing all the supporting and the garnish, I just mean that the actual process of acquiring aggro and holding it is basically not there. The no-CD guaranteed taunts are a huge turn-off for me. Between taunting and blocking the actual tanking is so minimal that you are expected to run a support-kit, and with that expectation come needless conflicts and discussions. If you end up tanking on any non-meta build just to have a bit of fun or DPS - already sacrificing bar slots for pulls/taunt and debuffs (the latter could be provided by anyone) - you just get all the brilliant comments from people telling you in how many different ways you are doing it wrong. And that in situations where it really doesn't matter.
The only other game in which tanking was comperably bad was GW2.

I like to sweat for my aggro with DPS and hate modifiers, while doing 90 % of the heavy lifting in encounter mechanics. I like non-taunt based frequent tank swapping, tactical long cooldown panics and limited healing. ESO doesn't have any of this. I don't dislike the overall gameplay at all, but you won't see me "playing the ESO tank" that people are wishing for. I have experienced better tanking gameplay and I am just not enjoying my time tanking in ESO.

A tank should be a monster, not a support with extra responsibilities.