I woke up one morning thinking I’d get in a quick heroic and then go to work. I queued up and one hour later it popped. 10 minutes into the dungeon I had to leave, I had ran out of time. I told a buddy of mine he could probably make a fine penny selling people tank queues. In Wrath of the Lich King people were selling tanks for the entire dungeon. Fast forward to today and people are selling the ability to skip the line. Not even doing the dungeon with the person. Just queuing up and leaving so that this person doesn’t have to wait an hour to get into a dungeon.
My buddy had it figured out as he offered tank queues as a DPS DK.
4.1 offers an interesting mechanic as an incentive for queuing as a tank. I must say compared to Blizzard’s usual fixes this one is well imagined and brave. I say brave because while it will probably fix the problem it is also likely to anger any class that doesn’t tank.
So right now the main problem is that every single tank out there is either queuing as a DPS or only queuing once. They queue as a DPS because they want to get their dailies done and it allows them an easier time in heroics. As an alternative problem pure DPS are choosing DPS as their off spec because of requirements in specific encounters.
As an example of that last point many DPS DKs are asked to kite for Heroic Magmaw, Nefarian (normal and heroic), and Conclave (normal and heroic). Their max DPS spec is unholy but for Chillbains (a snare talent) and Howling Blast (massive AoE threat) they need frost.
Blizzard introduced a new dailies mechanic that is designed to appeal to the vast majority of tanks, that is tanks who have not killed Nefarian, and Cho’gall. If you do every single raid every week and do your heroic daily every single day you will cap out on valor points for the week. Capping out on valor points is presumably important because it is the points that has no cap. People are thinking that in the next tier these will not reset and so you will immediately get a gear lead on everyone.
However for tanks who are not completing their raids every week valor capping is impossible. I should note that it’s not just under-progressed guilds that can’t do this, but also progressed guilds. If you are working on a boss for the week it means you cannot kill any boss after that and it also means you’re probably not killing normal modes in other dungeons.
Blizzard’s new Looking for Dungeon (LFD) update will create a Call to Arms every time there is a 15 minute or greater queue time. This LFD will give insanely powerful rewards for doing it. Blizzard hasn’t said what it will be yet but it is thought it will be massive gold and more valor points. Because it caps weekly there’s no real balancing problem with it.
A lot of the response to this has been that it won’t fix anything because they won’t queue up for the Call to Arms. But that’s the point, YOU, the geared tank are not supposed to queue up. It’s the other 80% of the game that will queue up. A new problem they may show up is that you’ll end up getting bad tanks more often and Stonecore will be an unbeatable dungeon.
Spose we’ll have to see but I suspect this change if it doesn’t totally fix queues, will definitely drop them in half.
