CC or not to CC, that is the question...

At least it seems to be the entire rave on the Tankspot forums these days. I, personally, don’t get what the issue is. The way I see it there are 3 groups of people:

Group one:

Tanks against CC

This is the group of people who are tanks and for whatever reasons are against using CC. These people are typically your 'leet' tanks who just can’t fathom not having every mob possible wailing on their face; I call this "Rocky" syndrome. The tank glorifies his position by flexing his ePeen and proving that he can take a hit, while the rest of the group doesn’t really give a hoot… it’s your bloody job. You make the healers job more difficult, can’t focus threat on one mob ergo making everyone watch their threat more and in general increase the chances of wiping your group or raid.

Now, to be fair there are some excellent times when tanks actually want or need more mobs wailing on them. For the Warriors and the Druid tanks out there, this is more rage. While this is a distinctly more pronounced problem for warrior tanks, which generate very little rage from attacking, it can still feasibly affect our more fuzzy counterparts. This will usually occur when the tank in question is well over geared for the instance and isn’t getting hit enough or hard enough to build a reasonable amount of rage to maintain good threat rotations. This problem can be rectified in three ways: gear swapping, rotation change or having more mobs tickle the tank.

Most good tanks have a couple sets of gear, a DPS set (for soloing mainly) amongst them. Whether they have that gear on them at the time is another question, but that’s beside the point. The point is, DPS gear doesn’t have tanking stats (save for Stamina, which is fine) and will let you take more hits, take more damage and deal more damage, all of which generate more rage.

But before that a tank should be mindful about what abilities their using. Our job is to survive, to take a hit and not die and to hold agro in the process. As such, most tanks are diligently hitting Shield Block, Thunderclap and Demoralizing Shout to lower the amount of incoming damage. Stop (why?). You’ll take more damage and gain more rage without having to swap out gear or…

Let more mobs tickle the tank. This should be a last option IMO. CC is there for a reason, it lessons the chaos by eliminating mobs until the party is ready to deal with them. The theory however is sound if the tank needs more rage. If they don’t have gear to swap out and have already changed up their rotation to allow for more damage to be incoming, then by all means. The tank needs rage to do their job, no rage = no threat = dead party members, nuff said.

Paladin Tanks want to get wailed on for a different reason however. Much of their threat and damage comes from being hit not to mention that the Bread-and-Butter Consecration spell is AoE, which is a little more dangerous around CC’d mobs. Now while that shouldn’t be an excuse for the Pally Tank in question to be lazy, it can be a valid concern. Pally Tanks don’t use rage, so the above reasons are moot for one. Basically if a Pally Tanks wants to get hit more, let him… as long as he can actually take the beating and doesn’t have a case of the Rocky syndrome.

CCers against CC

This is short a sweet. Its people with the ability to CC (Mages, Hunters, etc…) that openly tell the tank they should ‘L2Tank’ or the like, requesting that the tank take on more mobs and allowing them to not CC.

Don’t be lazy… you have a CC ability for a reason. No one cares about ‘how much more DPS’ you could do if you didn’t have to Sheep. Chances are you got the spot in the group because you’ve got the ability to CC, so don’t complain when you’re asked to use it. If things are going smooth with the CC… why should you change it anyway?

Suck it up buttercup, its part of your job.

Everyone else

These are the rest of the people that already understand the above and are thinking, much like I do, “WTF is the problem here?”

The point is that there are actually people out there that don’t like to, or don’t want to use CC when it’s a perfectly viable option, for whatever reason. 99% of the time it’s tanks with a Rocky complex, or its DPSers trying to flex their ePeen, in both cases it’s time for them to wake up and realize that no one cares about it, they care about a quick and easy run with no wipes.

If you have CC and there’s no reason not to use it, then use it. If there is a valid reason not to use it then don’t. Evidently some people just don’t get it…