Your Theory on the Tank Shortage

I have a tank from 4 years ago. I stopped all dual roles except for my main character once I saw what I spent on my dual role main for artifacts breakthroughs. That's 7 more dual role characters only doing DPS now.

Some Tanks can get away with DPS-As-Tank Artifacts; Earth Battle Builds and Fire (especially Fire) both benefit from the Strat Trans combo. The Strat Trans combo also makes a good Art pair for Electricity Heals or DPS. Food for thought.

Thank you. I will stay DPS on those 7 toons until breakthrough failure is removed. It's no difference to me. I just see no reason to invest in them other than DPS. Only Diva gets the full treatment. The other 7 can just be end game DPS. Cheaper for me.

That's pretty much my case too.
Artifacts made it all a giant hassle, thankfully I finally got my tank arts high enough to give it a go. And it's a lot of fun actually
By next artifact exp week I'll be able to make a new page of destiny and all will be well, being able to switch whenever mood and an available 10 bucks allow it

Lasso was great when i was earth! But when i went fire i dumped it into everyday man

This week my TotD experience basically highlights why most no longer pug tank. My tank is set up for survivability. My concessions to damage are weapon mastery combos, Cyborg on damage, and an Orbital Strike. So of course the first group I landed wanted me to solo tank it EVEN THOUGH there was another tank. That tank, mind you, just changed stance to DPS, but stayed in tank gear. Tried to explain I needed to kill the essence and I can't do that and tank everything else at the same time with my setup. So did the trolls freeze the adds....eh, sometimes. The DPS though kept pounding on Ares doing 1 damage each time. At one point one of the trolls thinks he should go DPS to help. 30+ minutes and 3 wipes later they leave blaming me. Heck, 1 of those wipes they blamed me even though they started the fight while I was outside explaining the mechanics since they obviously didn't know them.

Next group I land in is about to disband since there was only 1 tank. We 2 tank it and the rest of the run takes less than 10 minutes (might have been five, it was that quick once that hurdle was jumped). That one little change in group makeup and it became easy but no...must have more DPS.

Here's a challenge. Do COU as a tank with no arts. If you can successfully beat it with no wipes then you don't really need arts or tank arts to be successful. Here's a crazier challenge, add Lernaea's Amulet lmao. Works better on Fire or Atomic. The eyes that spawn on COU was pretty crazy when I ran it using the amulet made it feel like I was doing elite lmao I ran it without any arts and it became way way too easy. Of course a good healer helped. The only hard part about that raid was just the first boss fight lol this is end game content I was certainly not weak nor did I ever feel weak. The group praised me for being so godly I do hate that we can inspect others gears. They happen to notice I didn't have any arts hahaha

Tank shortages in my opinion aren't true but then again I'm always a tank tank I don't notice it as often. I pug 100% if I see another tank in the group I don't mind it. Players should really try out being a tank. It's much much more better than a DPS.

Already, if the role would be more respected, we would surely see more tanks.

In normal and sometimes elite the DPS rushes like kamikazes on the next pack of mob, in short, often, it is "one makes fun" of the presence of the tank...

the tank sometimes lags behind because of the movement malus (besides the tank should not suffer this I think).

a tank can sometimes be as powerful as a DPS, which really doesn't make sense !!!

And let's not forget that the community is very often disrespectful towards tanks, which has the easy tendency to accuse the latter while, most of the time, DPS don't block boss attacks when they should, play cocoa on bosses, or are sometimes badly equipped

Wow i didnt even know this Post existed.... I just wrote a VALID reason why there is a TANK SHORTAGE.. check out this POST..

It mentions that the DEFENSE stat is actually not working CURRENTLY... Take a look!
Mystic artifact and PROTOTYPE artifact becomes useless once you read this post!

https://forums.daybreakgames.com/dcuo/index.php?threads/big-problem-attention-devs-tanks.319312/

Just me personally, but the reason why Tanking is my least favorite role to play is because Tanks don't actually feel "Tanky" in DCUO.

We're supposed to be superheroes. The Tank superheroes are supposed to have powers specifically that make them so tough that they stand between enemies and other superheroes. The people who save the Universe still look to you for protection.

Except every single random piece of trash can continually stun, slow, knock-down, knock-back, knock-up, etc. I feel like I am weaker than the average Joker goon lacky that has no powers. "Aww crud. It's a random fat guy in a clown mask. He'll hit me with his stomach, and I'll fly across the room. My super strength is helpless to stop him."

One small, simple change. If our Dominance stat applied some small percentage of Control Resistance so that I stopped feeling as though every single thing in the world was constantly knocking me on my rear, then I would be massively more interested in Tanking.

I can sympathize with this viewpoint. Because it seems that everything in the raids nowadays is just a bunch a 1shots to everyone but the tank and even elite adds can take big chunks of your health. I mean I don't expect things to be super easy, but just having massive damage is not how to make things engaging for tanks. And personally I love tanking, but in the past several DLCs I don't find tanking super engaging and I find much more enjoyment in DPSing, even though I've long said that I hate DPSing. But when I find DPSing more engaging and fun over tanking or healing, their is a big issue...at least in my mind.

Thats why I leveled up my alt toon secondary role (which happens to be DPS) on x2 XP weeks and buy a bunch of seals on the holiday sales. I had almost 30 completion seals that I bought in the 2020 holiday season and used all of those through the course of the year. And now that we can basically get 4 seals/month for free, it lessens the amount I spend on seals which is great. My strat for leveling up artifacts is use preservation up to 120 then use completion on 140-200. It may sound daunting and expensive, at first. But I slow rolled it and just slowly chipped away until now every artifact on my 4 toons is 200, except my 4th toon just plays 1 role (DPS)...all the others play both roles.

I find it very weird that we have a shortage on support roles (tank-troll-healer).

Any instance can be done with only supports, but no alert/raid can be done without any supports.

Doesn't the inconsistency of instances also motivate to scare away the game's tanks to go for a more coherent game?

In some instances, we sometimes find ourselves facing bosses harder than the other bosses in the instance, sometimes, we take really incredible damage without knowing where it really comes from and without having the time to understand what it is. knows how to pass, there may be a fed up with that too!

Other possibilities, the abuse of powers, sometimes certain tank power do better than others depending on various situations, thus being able to create a lot of frustration for those who want to play such power, sometimes I have the impression that the devs have forgotten certain power mechanics, your impression that depending on such power, it is unplayable against certain bosses ...

I honestly think the content right now is a big part of it. ToTD reg beneifts from 2, Elite from 3 (yeah, you can do it with less, but why?). TDE/FRE pretty much need tanks, you can't 'tough guy' through it without a tank (again...you CAN probably do that, but why?) like you can without a heal or troll. Even the reg alerts seem to benefit more from tanks than healers as the heal buff helps with healing but the tank buff won't scoop up adds to make things smoother. I think once a regular DLC comes out again, we'll see it go back to a single tank in raids, and none in alerts as has been the usual procedure, and likely 2 tank raids won't be a thing either except for Elites or specific feats.

I think there are plenty of tanks...they are just in high demand...higher than normal right now.

And I find the calls of 'trash tank' are about 1/3 as much as 'trash healer'. Not to me directly, but in groups that are going badly, it seems like a slippy tank gets more slack than a slippy heal. Trolls are seeming neutral unless you are getting fancy with 'battle' or 'buff' builds done incorrectly. They are the vanilla ice cream of DCUO. The best ones are nice to have, the worst ones aren't generally going to lose a run for the group and they are the easiest to make 'fancy' with a few artis sprinked on them. No offense to trolls intended. I personally like Vanilla ice cream.

Tanking can be a chore/annoying on Elite raids so tanks usually play with decent groups or above . No decent tank wants to play with „noobs“ and these „noobs“ are the types of people that put random claims in such as there are no tanks which is so false imo.

Finding a buff troller is harder and tanking is not difficult like it used to be, the content is very dps centric but only good groups (meta powers,buff troller,high artifacts) have high dps output the „noob“ groups do 3 -4 times less damage and then cry for not finding a tank maybe if the gap wasnt that large between groups there would be less gate keeping happening im open to play with many groups but if the damage output is so different and such a massive gap isnt fun.

Why would a decent tank waste 30 minutes on content if another group (aka the DPS there) can do it in 15 minutes?

Because sometimes all that's on is noobs, and I need the run done. And I wouldn't be worried about a 15 min run vs 30....I'd be worried about that 15 min run vs failure. 30 sounds like a bargain if you are running with noobs really.

Ok maybe i wrote abit differently its not that it takes longer it also more difficult on the tank and can get annoying to tank when the burn is much slower. Mainly talking about elite raids. Not even considering that those „noob“ groups may not even be capable of completing it.

Agreed. Even in reg, I'll ask if they plan on me solo tanking it. I'm fine with doing it, but 2 tanking is just easier, especially if the group isn't bringing enough burn to knock Ares out in 2...maybe 3 Essence rounds. I was in there for 8 one time, tanking all of it...it was quite a PITA...even if we got it done in the end.

Tanking my not be as difficult as it used to be, but its definitely harder than any other role comparatively speaking. "Finding a buff troller is harder", well that may be true but a buff troll isn't necessary to get content done, a tank is however. Also they need to get away from this shield penetration thing they're doing and they also need to get away from this pattern where everything is practically a 1shot to everyone. Because just adding a bunch of 1shots to something is not how you make it fun and engaging and its a lazy way of making something "hard". Because DWFe was like that, the devs just threw a s**t ton of 1 shots, randomness, and a ton of adds and looked upon it and said "see? hard." Which is was more chaos and annoying than anything.