The Call to Arms thing is under lots of discussion in the blogosphere. It’s THE topic to discuss.
Bribing me to tank randoms for randoms as a solo queue for mounts/pets/gems/gold/flasks? No thanks.
My main [the death knight tank] has all the mounts and pets she can get. She can cut her own gems and I have alts to farm raw materials. She has the gold to buy what she needs and I have a flask maker of my own as well as several guildies who’ve given me a hand.
My alts? Well…
the pally that was prot/ret went holy.
the feral kitty/bear doesn’t use her bear spec anymore
the prot/fury warrior is now fury only… I paid the money to drop the tanking spec and leave it blank.
I might throw a tanking spec on my second dk… maybe. But I won’t be queueing for random heroics with her – normals at best as a tank and I’m not really enticed to do that.
No Blizz, this isn’t enough to get me into LFD tanking randoms for morons who sit there and sling abuse at me.
What would?
If tanking were an easier job I might throw some tanking specs back on my toons and queue. Fighting the people AND twitch gaming in the instances is too much to ask. If I queue on my main solo – it’ll be as a dps – even given these perks. I’d rather wait the 30-40 minutes than deal with the abuse of pugs. Well, personally, I’d rather just run with guildies and short-circuit the whole LFD thing.
From queuing on my hunter in heroics it seems the expectation for tanks is to now be chain pulling groups without CC – even in heroics. If the tank or healer can’t handle that – abuse is thrown their way.
Blizz, you’ll get a small upswing in the number of tanks queuing for heroics… but you’re addressing the symptom – not the problem. In a month or two, we’ll be right back here where we are now – presuming this upcoming patch drops sometime in the next couple months.
But yeah, I’m declining this bribe. Here’s hoping you can hook some actual tanks and not more dps tanks.
You Yank It, You Tank it: Blog of a Tanking Death Knight Lady 
The LFD reward system announcement really made me laugh. Just like you said, it addresses the symptom, not the problem. IMO, tanking is just too difficult. There’s no room to learn how to tank at 85 because every single group expects the tank to be perfect. If you didn’t start tanking while leveling, learning at max level is brutal.
Seeing Blizzard continue to make these poor decisions makes me glad I don’t pay for WoW anymore. Going from rofl-easy Wrath Heroics to pwn-your-face hard Cata Heroics is destroying the game, and I’ll be watching while playing something else.
Most agreed. I’ll try it once or twice, but the more I think about it the more I’m guessing that for most tanks this incentive will fall short of expectations.
All in all this LFD CTA idea sounds very much like something the new crew at WoW cooked up. The old team which now primarily works on Titan would never have published such a half-hearted attempt at equalizing queue times, imo.
My sister and I discussed this news at length when we heard. We were pretty much unanimous in our assessment of why it would do nothing to fix the problem. As you said, this only addresses a symptom.
The real problem with LFD group at the moment is the behavior of the players in it. Nobody wants to tank because, as you have said, it has a steep learning curve that very few people are willing to put up with. This impatience is unleashed as a torrent of mean, rude, hateful behavior that has would-be tanks and healers heading for the hills. The biggest problem right now is that there are absolutely no consequences for this outlandish behavior. None whatsoever. Blizzard almost never enforces even the slap-on-the-wrist outlined in their ToU/EULA.
sarcasm/ It’s almost like Blizzard stuck a bunch of people that range from socially awkward to violently antisocial and just threw them together in an anonymous and consequence-free social environment. Who could have foreseen trouble arising? /sarcasm
You know, after doing a couple random heroics, I realized I would never get into endgame, due to people I’ve met there. Such a buzz kill, the pro people in the random dungeon finder… I guess I’ve never met a single nice person in the RDF since Cata came out. Since I don’t enjoy doing dailies either, I joined the leveling game.