Hi all. As a fan of the class fantasy of the sword and board wielding immovable tank, I’m wondering if there’s hope for us in Season of Discovery.
I’ve read several topics and been told by numerous players that “deep prot isn’t viable” or “just go fury prot” or “go DPS and tank with a 2H/dual wield” but I feel that these canned replies miss the entire point.
I don’t just want to play a warrior who tanks. I want to play a protection warrior who tanks better than a DPS warrior should be able to.
If this is a season all about doing something new with classes, why is DPS tanking still the most effective option for threat generation?
Currently tanking Gnomer I have little to no hope of holding aggro on trash pulls when a charge+shield slam+3 devastate hits immediately loses aggro to a melee hunter, chaos bolt, ambush, etc.
We’re having to run salv on every fight and trash just to let me keep threat on some of the enemies in a trash pack, because Thunder Clap’s aoe threat is laughable when everyone is hitting a different target (and let’s be honest in the modern gaming landscape nobody is waiting to focus the marked threat priority target)
I’m not looking for nerfs to DPS warriors. Let them do their thing and kill everything with brute force as they are wont to do. I don’t want Prot to do a ton of DPS and put other tanks or DPS to shame. I don’t play Prot to top meters. What I want is a boost to threat generated by a substantial amount.
I understand that you might not want Threat to be a foregone conclusion that requires no thought, but when I literally cannot generate enough threat to hold aggro without switching to a DPS spec, that feels like a severe failing of the spec, and something that should be addressed in a season all about fixing shortcomings of classic specs.
Thanks for your time in reading this topic, and here’s hoping for some positive movements for tanks going forward.
Aggrend said they don’t want to fix tank threat, because tanking being a frustrating nightmare is a core part of the classic experience. To facilitate this experience further they’ve added insane AOE to every caster and are considering nerfing threat
I wish I was joking.
This game wrecks tanks at every turn. Chain stuns, disarms, parry haste, attack table RNG. The only viable way to tank in Classic is to be a better dps and get threat that way. It would be cool to explore the prot tree for once, but Aggrend made it pretty clear they don’t intend on that.
It would be cool if they had worked with long time classic players to make a list of all the things specs are lacking to be viable. Feels more like they back-filled abilities that sounded good.
This is how vanilla tanking works in the modern meta of everything being minmaxed. Traditional “sword and board” tanking is only for raids where things actually hit hard enough to warrant wearing a shield. And even then you still have warrior tanks dual wielding for even more threat.
I had hoped sword and board requirement would come out of SOD, but Aggrend’s comments killed that idea.
I’ll probably be switching main from warrior to warlock as a result. DPS’ing to tank isn’t really my favorite thing. I love shields in RPGs and I want that to be viable in SOD, but it’s not yet and may not be.
this was also my hope, to be able to sword and board again be an actual tank. and i quickly found out that it was killed at the start, so i switched classes quickly.
instead they made hunters melee and mages healers, but warriors an actual tank? nah thats stupid!
I don’t mind the new options for other classes, I’m actually really glad they’re testing out stuff like that! I love my melee hunter (and will continue to do so after they get nerfed, lol) and my guild’s resident mage healers are awesome!
I just wish that warriors would get some love for being able to be viable tanks as tank spec warriors instead of just arms or fury with a 1H and shield - if that. Especially compared to the potency of Shaman tanks and Paladin tanks getting major love this phase.
I guess there’s an important definition to be made here, and that is that of tank. What does it mean to tank?
if it means to mitigate or avoid damage that’s one thing, but if it means to maintain threat above all else, that’s another.
I suppose it could make sense for a boss to get angrier the more it misses or has its hits mitigated or avoided, and for those things to increase threat, though this might especially help rogue tanks.
I’m not sure, but I feel like you’re not alone in wanting a deep-prot, damage absorbing/mitigating meat-shield of a tank.
I’d say that in Classic content, where everyone says everything is super easy and trivial, traditionally tanking (and/or holding threat) has been the one thing that isn’t. Reworking threat might trivialize this role, which is maybe what they’ve done for Paladins and Shaman, seemingly in an effort to appeal to people outside of the scope of those who traditionally play Classic tanks.
For me I would classify a “tank” as someone who holds aggro via high aggro generation (not necessarily high damage output aggro) and is able to mitigate that incoming damage better than a DPS or healer would through the use of equipment and cooldowns.
As far as the logic behind threat goes, it’s never really made much sense. If I was hitting something - anything, really - and I saw it being healed, I would immediately go and try to beat the healers to death first. In which case, healing threat would be untouchable.
I can see the argument for trivializing content by making threat easier, but on the other side classic has never had the kind of damage output it has now with the new SoD changes, so I feel like tuning threat up appropriately would only make sense. The answer to ‘higher DPS threat’ shouldn’t be ‘make tanks play dps to try and out-DPS the other DPS for threat’.
While I appreciate where you’re coming from, I don’t feel that you’ve in any way given any support for this statement.
Why shouldn’t the answer to higher DPS threat be to make tanks out threat DPS with similar DPS abilities?
I feel that you’re right about threat mechanics never really making a ton of sense, and of course that if you were facing a group you’d want to prevent the healer from healing through either attacking or CCing it, so I’m not arguing your logic with that. What I am saying though is that just saying, “tanks shouldn’t generate threat through using the same sorts of abilities that DPS use” doesn’t make any more sense, imo.
Personally, one of the things I like about Classic is that is has more difficult threat mechanics which makes tanking more challenging and more interesting (at least with regards to holding threat) than later expansions where threat is generally not even something to consider.
I suppose my logic is more in the vein that tanks should be relying on their own abilities (Sunder/Devastate, Shield Slam, Thunder Clap, etc.) to generate threat without requiring a DPS spec or DPS gear to increase their overall damage output to be on par with DPS variants of their class.
If I’m relying on my DPS and Bloodthirst/Heroic Strike/crits to hold threat, I’m really just a DPS in defensive stance, and that doesn’t feel like playing a tank to me, personally, just a DPS with a threat buff.
I suppose it depends on the encounter, but being able to change dynamically on the situation between say sweeping strikes and big whirlwinds with a two handed to initialize threat on a group of mobs, then swap into defensive stance and even slap on a shield for shield block damage mitigation while both holding threat and mitigating damage and having the toolkit to support on-the-fly adjustments as needed is part of the fun and complexity of the warrior playstyle, imo.
That playstyle could certainly be interesting for those who view Warriors as the ‘master of weaponry’ archetype that swap between weapons for different situations, even in the middle of combat, but it would be nice to have just using a sword and shield be a viable option as well. Right now, the 2H whirlwind/SS build is the meta for tanking, which is great for people that like that, but not so much for people who don’t.
We do have salv, unfortunately 15% can only do so much when DPS jump on targets as you charge in, and in dungeons you might not always have a pally for salv.
“that like that” meaning what? The complexity of the warrior tanking playstyle? I feel like Paladins are probably great Sword & Board tanks that don’t have the complexity of warriors to deal with, for those who want that.
Of course, who knows what they’ll do with warriors. In Phase 1, spamming Sunder Armor while using the Devastate rune with a shield and 1hander equipped was a viable tanking setup, and felt (imo) like an absolute gutting of warrior playstyle in one of the most dumbed down, boring, anti-warrior ways possible, to the point of feeling embarrassed for whoever was in charge of warrior design for P1. But that’s me.
