Dane
Cadet
To start, I hate the concept of tanking. It is a very unrealistic means of combat. Imagine your group of five friends was fighting another group of five friends. Your biggest friend runs into the fray and while the enemy group was wailing on him, you and your pals would proceed to circle them and beat on their backs, usually uninterrupted until they died.
Unrealism aside, the entire concept requires that you always have a tank and a healer and makes anything else secondary (devaluing other options) because of their sheer abundance in comparaison.
Mind you, this is all based on the agro/hate idea of monster targeting; the concept that a monster will attack a player with the highest DPS on them. Every so often for fairly stupid creatures, this wouldn’t be such a bad problem, but for creatures that are supposed to be as smart as us? Not so much. This was all pioneered by the first incarnation of everquest (to my knowledge) and for the time was a rather intelligent way of handling a self regulating targeting system. It was elegant for the times, but expectations and ideas have evolved and changed since then.
Ideally, sentient enemies would attack in groups, target casters and healers, and avoid the tank if possible. Perhaps if you killed the enemy group leader, they would either resort to hate/agro or simply flee for their lives. Other options include a frenzy mode, where an animal simply attacks on sight and will not let up.
This means that if players had tangible hit boxes to enemies (hostiles could not run through you and vice versa) you would have to intercept and interpose yourself in between enemies and the casters/healers. This also means that positioning is important and having attacks that knock enemies aside or back have very important value. Then anyone could tank/off tank, especially if healing is effective. However, this is assuming a head on approach always. Each class has its own means of combat and mitigating damage, which is really just the whole reason for tanking.
Rangers have kiting (and pets?)
Rogues have stealth
Mages have boom (gogo glass cannon)
Warriors have armor.
Et Cetera…
When all in a group, you can rely on other tactics; especially since positioning and formations are important under this model (think flanking bonuses as well). Tanking requires cooperation, but in order to have a dynamic, and adapting combat experience, you would need to offer more options than the Tank and Spank concept. WoW has been deviating from this model a lot because it isn’t a very fun thing to do –every- time. But they can’t get rid of it because it has become too integrated with their own game, so they simply try to make tanks more abundant, change the fights a little, etc…
Unrealism aside, the entire concept requires that you always have a tank and a healer and makes anything else secondary (devaluing other options) because of their sheer abundance in comparaison.
Mind you, this is all based on the agro/hate idea of monster targeting; the concept that a monster will attack a player with the highest DPS on them. Every so often for fairly stupid creatures, this wouldn’t be such a bad problem, but for creatures that are supposed to be as smart as us? Not so much. This was all pioneered by the first incarnation of everquest (to my knowledge) and for the time was a rather intelligent way of handling a self regulating targeting system. It was elegant for the times, but expectations and ideas have evolved and changed since then.
Ideally, sentient enemies would attack in groups, target casters and healers, and avoid the tank if possible. Perhaps if you killed the enemy group leader, they would either resort to hate/agro or simply flee for their lives. Other options include a frenzy mode, where an animal simply attacks on sight and will not let up.
This means that if players had tangible hit boxes to enemies (hostiles could not run through you and vice versa) you would have to intercept and interpose yourself in between enemies and the casters/healers. This also means that positioning is important and having attacks that knock enemies aside or back have very important value. Then anyone could tank/off tank, especially if healing is effective. However, this is assuming a head on approach always. Each class has its own means of combat and mitigating damage, which is really just the whole reason for tanking.
Rangers have kiting (and pets?)
Rogues have stealth
Mages have boom (gogo glass cannon)
Warriors have armor.
Et Cetera…
When all in a group, you can rely on other tactics; especially since positioning and formations are important under this model (think flanking bonuses as well). Tanking requires cooperation, but in order to have a dynamic, and adapting combat experience, you would need to offer more options than the Tank and Spank concept. WoW has been deviating from this model a lot because it isn’t a very fun thing to do –every- time. But they can’t get rid of it because it has become too integrated with their own game, so they simply try to make tanks more abundant, change the fights a little, etc…