Dual specs really won’t make much of a difference after all

It seems that every tank (and every other fellow adventurer as well) goes all out on their opinions about dual specs right now. There’s essentially – who would’ve thought – two sides to it from a raiding point of view: Looking forward to, or fearing them. And now I’m telling you that they really won’t make a difference at all.

The short version of all the stuff below:

A raid has always been built by the same principles: How many dps do we need? How many tanks do we need? How many healers do we need? This is not gonna change. The only difference will be that in fights where some of the tanks or healers are not needed, they can perform better than ever before instead of just staying around feeling useless.

I think the “fearing” kind of people are dedicated tanks who now think that they are gonna loose their tanking spots. Spots they worked for really, really hard. And why not? The content right now, as long as you’re not trying to push all those achievements, really doesn’t require much skill to be tanked. There’s essentially two kinds of challenges: 1) Taunt at the right time. 2) Move at the right time.

Pretty much anybody with the appropriate talents and gear can tank everything right now. This is a thing Blizzard worked towards, for there was a shortage of tanks. This is a thing the tanking community didn’t like. Tanking has been trivialized. Back in the days it took a hell of a lot of commitment and skill to tank raids, but not so much anymore. There’s no such thing as a threat-minigame. There’s no such thing as Crowd Control. As of this time all a tank has to do, really, is to stay alive – which can be achieved easily by getting some decent gear and pressing the right buttons at times.

The difference between a good tank and a bad tank used to be wipe or success. These days it’s more about being a tad easier or tougher on the healers and pushing out 200 or 300 more dps. That’s that. You can essentially “out-heal” a mediocre tank performance. Back in the good old days we didn’t even look at damage meters. These days I find myself enchanting/gemming for threat & dps, for survival is not an issue. I find myself outperforming dpsers all the time, and I’m still not sure if I like that (and, to be fair to blizzard on this one, if it isn’t the dps’ fault for a decent part of it).

We now think that every Jack and Joe is gonna collect tanking gear and every encounter will be played with as little tanks as possible, so we are gonna be left out in favor of some hybrid who can switch to mediocre-but-working tank in a blink.

So I’m gonna loose my raiding spot

No, you won’t.

The truth is that raid composition has always and will always be a question of guild philosophy. If you have been playing in a hardcore guild that always brings the perfect setup you now either don’t have to respec dps/tank depending on the encounters, or you finally get the chance to see more content, for you don’t have to be switched out.

If you have been playing in a casual guild, then why the hell would they decide to suddenly start doing things all so differently? They won’t – because for them, more than for the hardcore guilds – the person behind the player is more valuable than the character on screen.

And then there is this other quality a good tank brings to a raid. It’s his state of mind. Staying calm, even when it’s close call. Keeping an eye on patrolling mobs, keeping a good atmosphere, knowing how to communicate with his healers and in general just giving the people behind him a good feeling: I’m in control, I know what I do. You don’t have to worry, I’ll take care of it. This is a quality that you only realize your tanks have when it’s missing. You know that feeling of stepping into a dungeon with a PuG, and on the first pull everyone starts to get itchy. Something’s wrong. You can equip someone with gear and talent trees, but you can’t exchange your emblems for concentration, calmness and instinct.

Loot drama?

While dual-specs may bring some extra drama to the immature and greedy amongst us in the beginning, they will on the other hand result in a lot fewer disenchanted pieces, which is great. There’s now double the chance that a drop will benefit somebody. This means faster gearing up for the whole raid. Until now if you brought a warrior tank and dps plate dropped, it was essentially lost loot (well, maybe for pvp or an offtanking-set, but not really of much use). Not so much anymore, for you can use both and bring more value to the raid with either piece.

You will also have more variety. I don’t know about you, but either after some couple hours of raiding, or running the same farm content over and over again, things lost their glory tanking-wise, but we’d still do it, because we like our raids, guildies and the dungeons. Now, in these sweet dual-spec days, we can just give our druid-healer a shot at tanking and go dps ourselves. Or let that dps-DK have his shot every once in a while. Heck, on some fights you might want to just do something else than until now.

Improvement through understanding

In the end, it will make us better tanks when we dps (or heal, for those druids and paladins out there), for we get another point of view and learn to understand other roles. Same thing goes the other way round – that moonkin is gonna understand what you do when he finally gets his own feet wet with that tanking gear that’s been passed to him. You get the idea: A better understanding of each other will make us stronger as a group.

A tank is a tank is a tank

You haven’t decided to be a tank for nothing. It takes a certain state of mind to perform our duty. You are a tank because you are a tank. You like to stand in front. You like to be in charge. You can participate fully focused and concentrated without a break throughout up to 7 hour raids. This is not for everyone. You are good at what you do because you like it. That dps to your side has rolled dps because he likes to dps.

You will always give your healers an easier time than those off-spec dpsers who give tanking a shot. Your dpsers will alway put out more damage than you in your off-spec (if one of both turns out not to be true, the main-spec one should lean back and think about it for a moment).

Looking forward to new content

Here’s still hoping for new, really challenging content. I pray for trash that requires CC. For mechanics and situations that require us to think about survival and threat rather than dps. For the moment when that freshly-baked DK tank can’t get about with this conversation, that I really started to hate:

To DKTankazoid: What markers are you gonna tank?
From DKTankazoid: I’m an AoE-Tank, I’ll tank whatever I can get. 

Better you guys learn how to focus-tank one or two targets, for my personal and our healers’ sanity, as well as for the content that I seek to be released where running into all five trash mobs and spam-tanking them will bury you dead before you can click those cooldowns.

Further dual-spec-thoughts in tanking blogosphere:

• I’m Buying You All A Round Of Tranq Shot
• Dual Specs – Why it adds more imbalance to an imbalanced Game
• My take on dual specs
• Dual specs bringing back the hybrids?

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