The Tank Shortage is an Outcome Problem

Everyone is complaining about the tank shortage. Having tanked since Wrath, I've definitely had my fair share of enjoyable expansions, and expansions I would never even dream of picking up a shield during.

A large part of WoW’s tank shortage comes down to how much responsibility tanks carry compared to how much power they have to actually handle it.

My hypothesis is that strong tank agency makes imperfect groups more enjoyable to play with. You can accept some disorder because managing disorder is part of your toolkit.

When that agency shrinks, a rational response is to become more selective: tank only for friends, require stronger teammates, run easier content, or switch to DPS.

If you were to break down everything a tank must do:

Job	What the group expects
Combat role	Survive, position enemies, manage defensives
Navigation	Know the route, skips, and required pulls
Pacing	Judge how much this particular group can handle
Coordination	Organize interrupts, CC, and dangerous targets
Recovery	Catch accidental pulls and stabilize mistakes
Social leadership	Make decisions and absorb complaints when they fail

Now, all three roles require skill, and good DPS can absolutely save a pull through interrupts, CC, and utility. But selecting tank often means volunteering to lead the dungeon, whether you wanted that job or not. You’re expected to know the route, set the pace, judge the group’s capabilities, and handle unexpected pulls on top of playing your class.

There is an effort/reward curve that needs to be satisfied here. When tanks don't have the utility and skillset necessary to do heroic acts and are increasingly dependent on the group, less people play them. Tanks need greater ability to control the outcome.

Legion Protection Paladin was the most fun I ever had tanking, and it was because I had more personal control over the outcome. We were doing Elerethe Renferal, the boss was at ~15%, and all of our healers were dead and our off-tank had just been yeeted off a cliff by the bosses wind knockback mechanic.

Normally this is a call for "reset" but most of our DPS were alive. Renferal has a taunt-swap mechanic called Raking Talons that hits you for roughly 50% of your HP, and does 100% more stacking damage on consecuctive casts. If I remember, she casts this twice, so absorbing more than one hit is basically a death sentence.

As a Prot Paladin, I had the toolkit to pull this off. But it took a crazy amount of skill, planning, and timing.

• Shield of the Righteous - Big % Damage Reduction
• Ardent Defender - Smaller % Damage Reduction + Survive a Hit that would otherwise kill you.
• Guardian of Ancient Kings - Big % Damage Reduction
• Eye of Tier - Smaller % Damage Reduction
• Light of the Protector - Moderate Self-Heal.
• Lay on Hands - 100% Self-Heal
• Avenging Wrath - More Self Heals %
• Spellwarding - Immunity to Shadow Damage
• Divine Shield - Immunity to all Damage + a Debuff Wipe
• Various other small % Damage reduction from versatility, standing in consecration, etc.
• Self heals from Avengers shield and other small absorbption shields.

I solo tanked, and healed, this boss from ~15% to 0% by rotating through my defensive toolkit. Using the small cooldown abilities at first, then rotating through the larger cooldown abilities, resetting my raking talons debuff with divine shield, and then rotating through the smaller cooldown abilities that had come off cooldown, and using Ardent Defender at the end of the cycle to absorb the big "you die now" hit. I don't remember the exact math, but by properly rotating defensives I was able to get to 8-12 stacks of racking talons before needing to hit Divine Shield to reset it.

When we killed the boss, I felt like a goddamn champion who snatched victory away from the jaws of defeat. It wasn't easy, and a single mistiming or using the wrong ability too early would have meant defeat. It also took a tremendous amount of effort from our DPS to stay alive as well. This doesn't imply or mean that I could just solo everything like this amazingly invincible tank, but when things went wrong, I was able to use some emergency measures to try and stabilize the situation and buy us time.

Tanks no longer have the same amount of emergency measures, or if they do, they're not able to bring the full toolkit out on demand. Shadowlands, and future expacs, saw changes to Prot Paladins that has Shield of the Righteous, our main mitigation, require Holy Power. Word of Glory, our main self-heal, also requires Holy Power. Thus there are constraints, you can do one or the other, but not both.

The memorable sequence here was: "Things went wrong → I understood the danger → I made good decisions → those decisions kept us alive."

However, the experience lately has become: “I played correctly, but someone else’s mistake killed me.”

Solving the tank shortage is less about getting more players to play a tanking class, but improving the overall tanking experience by giving tanks a stronger emergency reserve, while also keeping those resources finite.