Melee Worthlessness - The Biggest Balance Problem There Is

[Jimjam]

Around Dragons of Norrath expansion, there was a Dev post that revealed Bash/slam had been broken since implementation - it was meant to have generated aggro similar to spell stun, but it was bugged since inception.

Bash was meant to be the mechanic for tanks to build aggro (hence why plate fighters had it).

All that time the had Devs thought the players were just a bunch of idiot munchkins using duel wield / 2 handers just to be awesome, and the players hadn't realised the super aggro of bash! Of course, by the time this bug was discovered and DoN was out, the player meta of the game had adapted to offset this (warriors using off hand proc weapons and low delay primary to build max aggro).

Rather than fix the bug, the Devs just started adding far more 'Furious Bash' shields and some shield related aa.

Similarly, taunt had been broken to never work on anything yellow or red for years too.

So yeah, while pets being OP was a big part of things (and this is despite pets being repeatedly nerfed), another problem was tanks (especially warriors) had their two main tools of acquiring / consolidating aggro in a bugged state since day 0.

Classic.