Order limited by lack of Tanks

When I first heard that Mythic was cutting some of the classes in Warhammer I didn't really think it would have that much of an effect on the game. After all, each faction had multiple classes which could fulfill the same purpose in the game's PvP or PvE content. There shouldn't have been any problems. Of course I forgot to factor in the popularity of human races in fantasy games. They're almost always the majority in any game since people are more comfortable using humans as avatars then misshapen fantasy races. This seems to be holding true in Warhammer and it looks like Mythic has greatly lowered the overall number of tanks for Order by cutting the Empire tank class.

At first I thought the tank shortage would be limited to only the Chaos vs Empire scenarios. Nordenwatch in particular suffers from a lack of tanks which can make it hard to take chokepoints (that damn bridge). However, problems remain in the scenario even after cross server queues were added to the game. There simply aren't enough players trying out the other tanking classes for Order to have a balanced fight against Destruction. It also doesn't help that a lot of the scenarios are specifically balanced around having a tank for flag holding. No other class has the survivability necessary for running a flag between objectives while taking damage.

It's not just scenarios either as I ran into problems gathering tanks for a Keep Raid in Troll Country. It might not be as bad in the other racial areas, but in the Empire/Chaos zones its very rare to see any tanks. I had always thought that the lower tier Keeps would be a goal that a pick up raid could accomplish. The other battlefield objectives in the zone had easily been captured and over time Order players gathered at the keep. It was nice to see how the mechanics of the keep raids work and someone even brought a battering ram. That's as far as it went though since we only had one tank who was even close to being appropriate level for tanking a Keep Lord.

So far in the game I've only seen Order capture keeps in the Elven and Dwarven areas. I am not sure if these were captured by a pick-up-raid who could get tanks or if it was the result of a guild raid. Either way the tier two keeps aren't that hard to capture, though fighting a Keep Lord and five Champions can be rough. It was really only the lack of tanks that kept us from winning. Thankfully, healers aren't that hard to find since the Warrior-Priest in particular seems to be popular. I'm hoping as more people switch to Order to take advantage of the shorter queues the tank issue will slowly resolve itself. Still it would go much quicker if Mythic quickly introduced the missing Empire tank class.