4.1: Call to Arms, Tanks: A Balanced Viewpoint

Having tanked nearly three thousand heroics since 2.2 - here's my opinion on CtA:

The difference will be very marginal.

Most skilled tanks will continue to shun LFD for the reasons they already do, and no rewards short of the truly exorbitant - certainly not the CtA goodie bag - could convince them to brave the horrors of LFD. Some incompetent players will try their hand at tanking, and as now, they will get chewed up and spat out in short order, and go back to being carried as DPS, just as they do now. A relatively small number of individuals will commit to the sword and board. Not enough to make a substantial difference.

I think what we will see is tank and healer supply becoming more similar. Some players who are currently healers (and thus do not disdain responsibility) will feel compelled to answer the call, and in effect get a bonus to do a bit more than they currently are. Some healers may get disgruntled and stop healing randoms with the influx of inexperienced or incompetent tanks we will see in the first few weeks post-4.1. This, together with DPS-gone-tanks, will increase the tank supply while marginally reducing the healer supply.

This change represents a grey-area compromise. On the plus side, Blizzard is making a perhaps desperate effort to correct the tank gap in LFD. Some such system of incentives - however crude or unfair it may seem - is clearly necessary to increase tank supply. The alternative "solutions", most of which involve fundamentally reconceiving PvE as we know it, are completely impractical.

There are, however, several serious downsides to this change that must be considered.

First off, this change, like the similar (and oft-ridiculed) Oculus bag, is ultimately a shill for bad content. There's a word for developers trying to get players to repeatedly do content that isn't fun in its own right by offering in-game rewards. It's called a grind. Do we want WoW to be more grindy? How ought the developers make WoW less grindy? Simple: don't buff the internal rewards, improve the content itself, so that it becomes more fun.

Second off, this change makes the game even less immersive and more disjointed. How does it make any kind of sense that sitting in Stormwind/Orgimmar, pressing a UI button, AoEing down waves of dragonkin or lion-men or cultists, gives you a skeletal horse or a sporebat or a hawkstrider? What is the point of this activity? What is the setting for the activity? It makes the game less like a drama and more like prime-time commercials - a rapid-fire juxtaposition of shallow images. Ultimately the audience becomes desensitized; the images no longer shock or awe, they are merely a brilliant and tedious annoyance.

Third - and perhaps most perniciously - this change ultimately represents Blizzard going further down the wrong road. Growing up, did anyone read that Bernstein Bears' story where Gramps shows the kid a wagon he abandoned in a swamp? He couldn't take it upon himself to correct his mistake, so he kept plodding down the wrong path, until he couldn't get his wagon out of the mud.

Understand this - this change to LFD will remain into the foreseeable future and we will in all likelihood have to live with it for at least a few years to come, until the end of the expansion. I say this, because Blizzard is typically very reluctant to admit error by removing incentive mechanics that don't work out. They may retune failed mechanics, but they seldom remove them prior to the end of an expansion.

Something had to give, and in that sense, this change was appropriate and necessary. But this falls short of correcting the underlying problems. At best it is an interim measure. At worst, another ineffectual step down the wrong path.

Personally, I believe Blizzard developers currently feel much more desperate than is generally known, and this change reflects that sense of desperation.
What needs to be done is the entire anonymous and incentive-driven nature of LFD and dungeon dailies to be fundamentally reworked. Responsibility needs to be offloaded from tanks and healers onto DPS. Instances need to be made more fun, not through adding rewards or nerfing them into the ground, but making them more random and interactive. If this meant retroactively re-doing the Cata heroics - taking the unpalatable dishes back to the kitchen - then that was what ought to have happened.

I think this change would have been much more positive if Blizzard created new and unique items for this bag, rather than a random selection of "last season's leftover merchandise".

Unfortunately, Blizzard's overly cautious pursuit of half-measures will prove self-defeating.