Druids work great as offtanks or add tanks, but tanking a boss is not a good idea since you’re going to eat tons of crits/crushings
Paladin on the other hand, is just total and utter garbage in raids because:
-no taunt
-very little gear (all the tier is healing)
-threat scales with spell damage instead of strength, again tying into “very little gear”
-no cooldowns (last stand, shield wall, lifegiving gem)
-threat is garbage because very few damage abilities
-can run out of mana
-less defenses overall
-much less base health
-etc. etc.
As a vanilla druid I tanked just fine - I had to specialize my gear in getting defense and dodge. Many times I was competing with rogues to get my gear. Anything with defense or dodge was optimal gear even to the point of dropping a blue piece for a green piece. So yeah saying druids can’t tank is BS. (Nef would turn you into a kitty but even then if you had the dodge gear you would live through it.)
If I remember correctly you needed 6% defense (might be less) to avoid crushing blows.
I can tell you that a guild that will be decent at raiding won’t take a Paladin as a core tank. You can get away with a couple meme spec dps, but a tank being a meme spec is a big hindrance to the raid. In addition, tank spots aren’t so easy to get even as a Warrior, so your chances are virtually zero unless you are buddies with the GM maybe.
Thats why you make your own guild - trying to get into a bleeding edge guild won’t work in a situation where you have potentially 1000’s of people trying to get into that spot.
And that guild will almost certainly just gear people up for the better guilds if you are doing it as a Pally tank. Druid tanking is actually great, but Pally tanking is a meme.
That you saw. We had paladins in naxx and aq40.
And you will see them in classic i can 100% bet.
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We had paladins tanking all the way to sapph in naxx in my guild.
Was it rare and hard to play yes. But it was rewarding.
First of all, Paladins can remove crits off the table at the same time warriors can. They can almost reach armor cap during BWL. Threat isn’t actually that far behind a shield warrior. They have ways of achieving a mana neutral rotation as long as they don’t spam Consecration.
You are correct, but Warriors don’t need defense cap to do it due to Shield Block. It requires an insane amount of avoidance + block to push crits off the table with Holy Shield.
Are you aware that the armor cap against level 63 mobs is 21855? To almost reach it, that would imply they can get about 20k armor fully buffed during BwL. That isn’t possible in BwL gear except for maybe Feral Druids in Bear Form with every possible armor buff.
Sure, they do close to the tps of a shield Warrior in mitigation gear with a lot of spell power gear.
So basically it’s like a permanently rage starved Warrior or Druid.
Are you aware that that is an impossible number for even warriors to reach in classic? The actual armor cap is ~17300 for level 63 raid bosses.
…no.
Druids will likely be able to tank most of the raid content. They might even be preferred over warriors when folks get started on MC. Even once the warriors get geared, druids will still be able to deliver respectable threat. They’ll also be able to hit the soft armor cap with BiS pre-raid gear. Combined with their dodge and insane health pools, I don’t think crits and crushing blows will be wipe-causing (so long as the healers are doing their thing.)
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Huh? Is that supposed to be an analogy? Because you can always just pay someone else to do it 
Just give em a little more time to get aggro and watch threat meters, druids and pallys both viable tanks. Properly geared of course which is hard in classic, but there ya go another challenge for druids and pallys that wanna tank, i say go for it!!!
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Right…
It’s not like you have to wait for sunders or watch threat meters…oh. 
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Arguably, paladins and druids might have better threat at the beginning many pulls.
Maul generates heaps of threat, and is fairly rage efficient. Swipe is solid for AoE pulls.
Paladins gain most of their threat from spell damage. Concecrate is great for snap threat on packs of mobs.
It’s not hard to find where these classes might shine if you just look!
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You need mana to produce this threat. On actual raid boss fights, paladins are the equivalent of a rage starved warrior.
Paladins and druids can shine in a lot of 5 man content, no question about that. It’s in RAIDS that we are talking about.
I’m well aware of mana issues on long fights. Paladins can work, but it takes work, gear and consumables. Having a prot paladin in a raid to tank trash seems like a fairly reasonable tactic.
Druids, on the other hand, are quite capable of tanking MOST of the raid content. There are a few bosses that’ll cause problems due to mechanics, sure. Overall though, I think most guilds should consider having a druid in their #2 tank spot. They’ll have an easier time gearing up both of their main tanks simultaneously.
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How much mana do you actually think a paladin needs? Because a paladin can spam judgement and Holy Shield in any boss fight if they wanted. The only other mana ability to use would be Consecration and there isn’t even a need for it in most cases beyond the initial ramp up.
And? For paladins it takes a lot of work and group coordination, but it can work well. Feral druids just need a little extra throughput healing and they can tank just about everything.
The only time you see rage starved warriors is in pvp dealing with shielded spellcasters.
While warriors are obviously the best tanks in the game, because a few devs couldn’t contain the idea any other class could, other classes actually can in a raid setting.
Actually I take that back. According to devs, t3 and t1-t2 gear updates which pigeon holes hybrids into healing roles, was built around raid player feedback.
Now what are you confused about?
Or warriors that are the off tank that aren’t taking damage. That’s more of what I was comparing them to.
Not confused about anything. I know how it went back then and know that in AQ40/Naxx, it really started being a very serious min/max game where hybrids, prot paladins and feral tanks weren’t really a thing. Good example: I want to say that when we finally killed 4hm, we had 6 prot warriors and 2 ferals. But that’s a fight you can kind of get away with a feral on. Definitely not a single prot paladin though because they don’t have taunt and there is no way they could maintain threat and mana for 20 minutes straight. Yeah, it was a 20 minute fight for most…