Tank is necessary in World of Warcraft as you decide to challenge instances. Have you thought what tanking will be in the future? Ghostcrawler has been fairly active in the thread on AoE tanking, which has been filled with complaints from tanks that don't feel like they can hold threat well enough in multi-target situations. This thread on AoE tanking has been getting quite alot of attention. The concerns about AoE tanking made me think about the evolution of tanking since I used to play one pre-BC. I played a Warrior in vanilla WoW, and I've gotta say -- tanking looks pretty easy nowadays in comparison! Tanking without any sort of threat meter was a far cry from the extreme 3rd party modding available now where you can practically have mods tell you which buttons to press.

This post made me think of learning the Vaelastrasz encounter which required you to have 5 or so Warriors sacrifice themselves in an aggro chain while the rest of the raid furiously mashed buttons trying to burn through his then massive 999,000hp pool. Not knowing whether you had enough threat or too much threat was more exciting than trying to hold aggro on huge packs of trash.

I think it's kind of curious that tanking has devolved to the point where your greatest concern is how to hold threat on 5 different mobs as you smash your way through the now not-so-aptly-named 'heroic' instances. Blizzard may be taking the wrong approach to tanking -- I know people dread a return to Burning Crusade heroic instances, but perhaps a return to instances with more difficult and complicated trash that required crowd control, but with less trash to clear might spice up the game a little bit. That'd be my answer to their question, do away with the long and boring but unchallenging heroic instances. They're the only place that AoE threat is even an issue, any raid is going to have Rogues for Tricks of the Trade which paired with Fan of Knives is a simple solution to any AoE aggro issues. Just some food for thought.