Well, I'm not all-knowing, but EVERY SINGLE TANK I know won't use the random dungeon finder unless he or she has at least 3 of 5 people in the group of their choosing, either from the guild or the server. And I'll bet that's been the experience of a great number of players who tank or know tanks.

Cata heroics can only seem long when compared to Wrath heroics. BC heroics were MUCH longer - for many of them it was assumed that it would be the only thing you did tonight. Wrath were abnormally short by comparison, and thankfully they've moved a little of the way back from the "I have to burn through X heroics tonight to farm Y badges of justice and anyone slowing me down needs to be berated or destroyed" mentality. (There were charts that people made on sites like Wowwiki that showed the average length of time for each of the different heroics as a method for determining how one could most efficiently farm badges in the least amount of time, and they never seem to get any of the blame for the "gogogo" mentality, but I think they deserve at least some of it.)

Point being, Wrath heroics were definitely the anomaly, not Cata heroics.

@clundgren

While I see your argument sounds plausable, at least for my guild (including myself) and any other tank I know. Most if not all refuse to tank heroics outside their guilds or friends. Yes, it is anecdotal and not statistical. But, I fathom Blizzard would not be doing this if they didn't see the shortage.

I know it's anecdotal but of the 3 raid tanks in our 10 man guild none of them queue for random heroics. They'd rather just not get the badges for the day than to queue with out at least a couple friends/guildies to go with them. I'm sure my dk alt has tanked more random heroics than all of the raid tanks combined. Too many bad experiences have just convinced them it's not worth the time and coincidentally none of them seem at all interested in the call to arms.

Maybe it's because my DK didn't start tanking until later because it took a while for him to gear up but I haven't had too many horrible groups and don't really have another choice because he doesn't get VP from raids and if a guild group is available when I'm on my main gets first shot.

clundgren

if your hypothesis were true, you'd see universally long queue times, not long queue times for one role, and short, or non-existent queue times for another.

This is faulty logic - it's longer for everyone, so why would longer runs only affect tanks, if the same ratio of tanks are queueing as before?

Tanks. Don't. Run. LFD.

And who can blame em.

FYI this article was fantastic - my thoughts were quite close:
http://casualgamer4.blogspot.com/

I have been a tank since BC. Not only have I stopped LFD, I have stopped playing. More anecdotal evidence for you, but there ya go.

I kind of agree on the scepticism on the "leaving the random dungeon finder in droves" point. I've gotten instant healer queues on 2/7 of my dailies this week, which I think is pretty amazing.

What I find more amazing than the healer queues is the amount of people from my server that I've managed to be randomly grouped with in PUGs! It's crazy, I'll join a group and say "hi" and I'll notice that someone else doesn't have the server tag after their name. It's actually a pretty cool way to meet people, I got invited to a raid after one of the heroics I healed =).