Today while I was queueing for the daily on my warlock, I got to talking with my tank friend about why tank dps is so high in LFD groups.

We all are familiar with "and I'm always the highest dps!" coming from the tanks -- even alt tanks -- in guildchat. But it got me wondering: Why is that?

I agree that to be a truly great tank requires more awareness than to be a truly great DPS.

But it's too cheap an answer to just assume tanks are high DPS in heroics due to some mythical "skill" they acquire by respecing into a tank role. I've grouped with some amazingly, incredibly bad tanks who were still out-dpsing the other DPS.

So while "TANKS R HARD!" may be part of it, I think there's some other factors at play that lead to the odd discrepancies in heroic meters.

The ideas we had (luckily Violet Hold had plenty of downtime for chatting):

The minimum gear requirement is higher for tanks? Due to player perception ("looking for 40k tank for heroics, PST!") or reality (the defense cap), on average tanks may enter LFD with a higher initial level of gear. Since over time the system's average gear doesn't actually increase (new alts entering all the time, geared alts leaving), a higher minimum requirement would always be a factor.

Tank AE DPS is very strong? This is definitely true: on my moderately geared alts, while I can smoke a tank on single-target DPS, I often fall behind on AE packs, or am at least a lot closer.

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I admit, this worries me a bit from a tenuous-tank-balance standpoint. Perhaps someone more knowledgeable about tanks can comment on this post and enlighten me, but I remember this kind of aura changing up what tanks were good in Sunwell, favoring HP-based tanks over avoidance-based tanks.

Update: Kal, who blogs about tanks at WoWThinkTank, commented on this at:

ThinkTank: [General, Druid] Icewell radiance, bears, and you

His summary:

my conclusion is similar to yours: this should favor tanks with higher health/armor more. In some situation – for example, in a fight like Brutallus 2.0 where you could take 4 hits within 1.5 seconds that could kill a tank, tanks with higher avoidance will have a better chance of being ‘lucky’ and surviving (about 20% vs 10%) but it won’t change healing patterns; both tanks would have to be healed the same way, and it’s very likely that superior bear health will allow bears to take an additional hit where other tanks cannot.

His article is definitely worth clicking through and reading though, he goes into good detail. Thanks Kal!

The Blizzard post is now below the cut since this article has gotten long.

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