Druid and paladin raid tanks

Druids didn’t have huge amounts of dodge until BC, in vanilla warrior dodge+parry gave them more avoidance.

I don’t think that’s correct. Druid damage was incredibly spiky due to this and nightmare for healers because of it if I remember right.

The whole thread was TLDR; I got to the bogus statements in the first several posts.

I’m kind of sick of seeing the inherently false crushing blow/crit argument against Druids. Druids usually have higher dodge, and will get missed by some of these blows. Druids also have a higher HP/Armor pool that allows them to absorb blows that would kill a warrior, without hitting critical points of HP.

Druids are just as good if not better tanks than warriors in 80% of raid encounters. Yes, warriors are better at some bosses due to block/parry, and a few of their defensive tools. In most cases none of that really matters though. Druids will never be rage starved, which can happen to a warrior. Druids do decent damage in bear form and don’t have to shift/stance dance. Druids build threat on a multiplier while warriors just stack threat in an additive sense.

Oh and yes, Druids do have an effective taunt OP.

Are warriors better overall tanks? Yes, but just BARELY. Can Druids tank every boss in game? Yes, but there are 5-6 encounters where even as a Druid I would question your choice to have a Druid MT…

Keep in mind, I don’t play pservers so that’s not where I get my info. My guild in Vanilla had a Druid tank as a second tank/off tank. He tanked all the way into Naxx, and even main tanked on several bosses at all raid levels.

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it’s nothing - crushing blows are lulz at best

When you add up a warrior’s dodge+parry+shield block they were taking less damage over all than a druid.

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Because most Druids in Vanilla didn’t know how to properly gear themselves. A Druid in our guild was a beast. He ate crush/crit and spit them back out like nothing. 15k HP/Armor buffed in AQ gear.

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It’s been so long you could be right and people were just worse at the game back then.
I played a druid all through vanilla and I did some off-tanking and even some main tanking. I remember it being very difficult on some bosses and I would drop really low. Was it do-able with pro healers? Yeah sometimes but not ideal when you are learning certain raid bosses.
But this was so long ago. I think people who play druid tanks on private servers would have better idea maybe.

That highly depends on the boss…

it comes down to lack of taunt for specific encounters, gear availability, and resource management

paladins don’t have taunt and use mana as a resource which can be an issue in longer fights. also their isn’t gear sets tailored to prot making it harder to gear in the later raids

druids have large HP as their form of mitigation over block/crush immune. this taxes the healers more to get them to full. which is an issue on longer/new fights some of the time. also the gears sets aren’t tailored to bear form. in theory they can tank everything though(although nef is tough cause of mechanics

This was generally due to Druids only worrying about gear stats. Most didn’t hunt down leather with oddly high armor or off pieces with defense rating. The Druid in our guild sometimes required less healing because he did the leg work for the gear.

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Not really, people are confusing 2.0 and BC druid tanking with vanilla tanking. 2.0 significantly bumped dodge and bear form armor and BC also improved itemization for bear tanking with an abundance of +armor weapons/rings/necks.

Interesting. Can you link a gear list if you havn’t already? Or bis for feral tanking?

I’m not confusing anything. By 2.0 TBC I ended up in another guild. So the only time I experienced a Druid tank was in Vanilla. Again, I’m not saying they are the best tank. But a properly geared one is the best off tank you can have, and they aren’t taxing at all on healers if they stacked correctly.

I don’t have one available. I think a private server dude built one.

Google Taladril’s guide. He has a wealth of information.

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Right off tank, the tank for easy stuff.

Generally they don’t tank in raids. But I’ve seen them offtank some trash.

Lol, he main tanked a lot of raids when our GM (MT) was out…

Then since druids are just as good as warrior tanks we should see plenty of druid MT in classic right?

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ya i don’t dps. i bear. period.

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Whether this happens in Classic remains to be seen. Pservers have aaccess to a nearly unlimited supply of BL which allows raids to fully flask, and while unconfirmed, is highly suspected that debuffs do not calculate correctly on pservers allowing bosses to take far more damage than they should be able to.

Again, depends if fights are super quick on Classic like on pservers. Having healed druids I can say that it is certainly less stressful in terms of damage spikes, I find that I rarely cancel a heal on them. If mana management is a thing, druids will eat through a healers mana more so than a warrior will.

See above.

The higher armor isn’t as big of a deal as you think, according to a spreadsheet posted by a druid defender, it was maybe 10% more damage reduction. Druids also start to scale really bad after BWL. Also, Druids dodge is still less than a warriors dodge/parry.

I’m still not saying they can’t, I would take a druid over a paladin any day. But if the druid can’t keep nearly 100% uptime on MCP on both trash and bosses…a fury warrior OT will be better overall since they do a ton more damage when not tanking, and are more than capable of OTing.