The perceived lack of tanks

Following the early break up of Karazhan run on Friday night, the other current issue with WoW highlighted itself nicely. That is, for the PvE endgame - whether you're just after better gear, want to see the content, or whatever - you need to group, and for a group you nearly always need a tank and a healer. And at the moment there's a perceived shortage of tanks. On Thursday our guild had a four man group looking for a tank to go to Shadow Labs. And at the same time there were 3 other groups on the Horde side of the server, all doing a "LF1M: need tank for SL".

Of the three tanking classes, the Horde are very short of level 70 paladins (most of which are holy anyway), there are a fair few feral druids, and very few tanking warriors.

The issue seems to be two fold:

Firstly, tanking for a bad group is a nightmare - hence why I (and wowinsider.com) say a "perceived lack" - it's hard to find a tank for a PUG, less hard for guild groups and easy for raids.

Secondly, while there are plenty of warriors around (who after all are the main tanking class) they're predominantly arms. Not only is arms the best spec for PvP / arena, but questing / grinding / doing anything other than instancing is horrible when prot spec'd. So although arms warriors are able to tank if they feel like it, they don't feel like it. Which isn't really surprising: by now they've been 70 long enough to get the instance gear they want, and without a tanking build a PUG just doesn't appeal. Instead arms warriors will PvP, or perhaps tank for a guild group, and prot warriors will level a warlock (or other solo-friendly class) until their next scheduled raid.

I'm wondering if the Death Knight class is Blizzard's response to the lack of tanks. And if so, I'm wondering if it'll work - which part of the tanking / dps hybrid will players prefer do you think...?

Anyway, in response to all of this my alt-ism kicked in again. I've deleted the orc hunter I've decided had a dopey face and a name I wasn't totally happy with, and I've started levelling a BElf paladin. There will come a time that I'm going have to settle on one of my alts and only (or nearly only) play him. So I think one that can either tank or heal (with the proper gear and talent build) might suit me best. I quite like the idea of a character who can tank or heal and also stealth, so there's also my Alliance druid under consideration, but I'm a bit to attached to my guild to switch factions permenantly. And our guild's awash with druids already.

All the priests are shadow...

OK, that may not be quite true, but for some reason it certainly doesn't seem too hard to get a main healing spot these days as a resto shaman.

I've healed Shadow Labs once (while still level 69) and Steamvaults twice, and so far had no problem with mana or keeping people alive. This seems to be pretty promising for my intended route as a healer in the end game, especially as I still have 4 or 5 pieces of my "starting" healing gear to collect.

The runs may have been helped by decent groups (two PUGs and a guild group), so I may be being over optimistic, but the changes to the restoration tree with Burning Crusade (especially the addition of Earth Shield) certainly seem to have made resto shaman very viable. My main problem at the moment seems to be that the ranged DPS all tend to spread out, so Chain Heal can't really be used. I'd also really love an aggro dump, but lacking that the options seem to be to whip out my earth elemental really quickly (hoping that the 20 cooldown is up), or die (since I when I do get aggro, I seem to get 2 or 3 mobs at once).

In the process of these healing runs I've collected 2/3 of my Karazhan key, and reached Revered with Cenarion Expedition, so that's a couple of goals ticked off. I still need to get a heap of mp5, and a slightly larger mana pool, before I'm ready for Karazhan though.