Players have found out how to Warlock tank in WoW Season of Discovery, and it's absurd

World of Warcraft: Classic has recently been blessed with the Season of Discovery, a new twist on the vanilla format that lets players adventure out into Azeroth again, with new skills and spells at their disposal. However, if you want to try out the shiny new tank Warlock, the steps to unlock the required rune are frankly absurd.

But first, some context. In Season of Discovery, new spells are available for all classes, assuming you're able to go out and discover runes. These runes require you to complete a certain special event or quest chain for your class. This might be as simple as killing a certain enemy, or tracking down books hidden across the world. This is where that discovery bit of the season's name comes in.

This has lead to a brilliant community effort to find out and note down the steps needed to get all the different runs. It was in the early hours of this morning when those at the forefront of rune-hunting finally finished their expedition into the Warlock tanking rune Metamorphosis. Their findings have p**sed many in the community off.

The steps are available online, courtesy of helpful folks like Chemistrynerd1994 on Reddit, but we'll break them down here. First, you need to pick up a quest in The Barrens. This quest requires you to create an orb from scattered shards. These shards can be found in two locations - Shadowfang Keep and the new Blackfathom Depths raid.

So, we've already run into the main problem. In order to even start tanking as a Warlock, you need to get into the raid that acts as the ultimate bit of content for this current patch of the Season of Discovery. Not only that, but the fragments drop from mobs at the end of this raid. As such, you essentially need to have already beaten all of the challenging group content before you can tank.

This sucks for two core reasons. For one, people have started the Season of Discovery with hopes of trying out Warlock tanking. However, those who get the rune have likely already beaten the raid in the meantime. Warlock tanking also benefits from having different stats to regular damage-dealing Warlocks. This means you'll either have to go through easier content to re-farm gear (again without tanking), buy gear on the auction house, or jump back into the raid as a DPS and take tanking gear out of your peers' hands.

Then there's the fact that other classes haven't suffered nearly as hard in order to access their fancy new roles. For example... me! I've been levelling a Mage over the past few days and have been enjoying healing as an Arcane Mage. The ability that allowed me to start doing so - Regeneration - was something I could grab by simply killing some mages out in the world. Sure, there are tricky-to-get runes I could hunt down that would make my healing better, like Mass Regeneration or Rewind Time, but I don't need those to start healing. I'm having my fun already.

Discovery is obviously the point of this season. Hell, going out and completing long and challenging quests has always been a part of Classic WoW in general. Just look up the Quel'Serrar quest chain or the infamous Scepter of the Shifting Sands event. But these special moments allowed you to access rare, valuable weapons or mounts that added onto your class and character identity. If I had to do a long, difficult, or expensive quest chain in order to dual wield swords on my warrior, I'd set myself on fire.

This, as you can imagine, has gone down a treat with the online World of Warcraft community, which is aflame with complaints and dejected Warlock tanks in waiting. Some believe that this sort of rune should be hard to get, but right now there's a real sense of sadness among a portion of the community.

Ultimately, it's unlikely that Blizzard will want to or even can roll this back. Future patches won't have any of these runes that'll allow you to access different styles of Warrior, Warlock etc, so maybe this problem will dissapear over time. But for now, Warlocks will have to get to grinding before they even start their dreams of tanking dungeons and raids.

What do you think of this? Are you a fan of this rune's placement, or do you hate this situation? let us know!