Dungeon Finder: Call to Arms

4.1 Preview – Dungeon Finder: Call to Arms

Of all the godawful ideas. Good heavens.

I have two tanks (feral druid and prot paladin), one healer (disc priest), and two pure DPS (hunter and warlock) at the level cap. All of them are geared for heroics and running them pretty consistently, although I’ve found myself taking the DPS queue on my feral druid more often than not simply because it gives me the time to do dailies.

On the surface, rewarding tanks and healers for queuing with a goody bag containing gold, gems, flasks, mounts and pets is a good idea. (I’m certainly happy that I’ll be getting extra shinies for something I do anyway.) And yeah, more people will queue as tanks or healers, so it’ll help with the queue length.

But it won’t do anything to fix the real problem with the dungeon finder – the attitude of people running heroics.

Tanks have instant queue because there are so few of them. And there are so few of them because of the prevailing attitude towards tanks in the dungeon finder. Jinxed Thoughts has an excellent post on the scarcity of tanks and reasons for it, and I agree with it. I keep tanking in the dungeon finder because ultimately, I enjoy it, but if I didn’t enjoy it, not all the goody bags in the world would get me to do it.

This change might help keep tanks from dropping mid-run when their item doesn’t drop from a boss (at which point the run dissolves and the DPS are left staring at the screen and going “I sat in the queue for 45 minutes for this?”), but that’s really all it’ll do.

On the other hand, my absolute lack of any faith in humanity predicts we will see an increase in:

• People queuing as tanks or healers when they don’t have the spec. The dungeon finder doesn’t check your spec. If your class can perform the role of a tank or of a healer, it’ll allow you to queue as that, no questions asked. People already do this to queue-hop, with no intention of performing the role they queued as – and then they try badgering the DPS who sat through a long queue because they wanted to DPS into healing or tanking instead of them. Now that there’s a goody bag as a reward, it’ll only get worse.
• People queuing as tanks or healers when they don’t have the gear. As far as the dungeon finder is concerned, if you have the right ilvl you’re fine. This tends to lead to people trying to tank or heal in PVP gear, or wearing completely inappropriate gear (for example, a protection paladin trying to tank in mostly healing gear).
• Disrespect and abuse towards DPS coming from tanks and healers. You know the type. “You guys are a dime a dozen, that’s why you have long queues, you should’ve rolled an useful character instead.” “DPS is easy.” “Oh just go ahead and drop if you don’t like it, it’ll take 30 seconds to get a replacement for you anyway.”
• Disrespect and abuse towards tanks and healers coming from DPS. If you’ve ever tanked or healed, you also know the type. “Go go go go go go.” “lol we don’t need CC” “WTF healer why are you OOM all the time” “lol your [health / mana] sucks, you’re not geared for this GTFO” “we don’t need marks keep pulling” “HOLD THREAT BETTER STUPID TANK” “WTF WHY DID I DIE STUPID HEALER” and so on. The dungeon finder is a toxic environment in general.
• People rolling on tanking and healing items against tanks and healers. “I’m trying to gear up my offspec so I can get shorter queues and the goody bags.” More often than not, these people then proceed to complain if a tank or healer rolls need on DPS items. Never mind that such behaviour only decreases the amount of tanks and healers queuing in the dungeon finder. (I enjoy tanking a lot, and I even enjoy healing on my priest, and yet nothing will make me drop a run and go play something else faster than people needrolling against me for their offspec without even asking. And never mind that “tanks and healers get shorter queues” has been the case since the dungeon finder was launched, and it’s incredibly easy to level 80-85 as a tank or healer entirely through the dungeon finder (there are crafted pieces to start you out, or you can just quest through Hyjal or Vashj’ir to gear up a bit) and be heroic-ready the moment you hit 85.

tl;dr – yeah, this change will probably succeed at its stated goal, which is to make DPS dungeon queues shorter. But it won’t make running heroics any more pleasant, and in fact, it’ll probably make it less pleasant instead.