I tanked as Shaman in vanilla too. There were no “carved in stone” rolls for the entire duration of vanilla like there is now.
Retail people seeing something “out of the ordinary” and freaking out.
If all the mobs are dead and no one in the group is dead, that is a success. I don’t care if the healer has to drink after each fight because I’m using a 2h’er, because as a Shaman tank I have to drink too. We make up for that downtime with really fast kills.
Wearing a shield = mitigating damage.
Mobs dying faster = mitigating damage.
Tanking is as simple as being the person soaking the damage. Anyone/anything can tank with or without a shield. Doing a good job tanking, well that is another story.
My advice to healers who do dislike or are uncomfortable with shield less Warrior tanks is two fold.
Firstly, when going to PUGs ask about the tank and if they have/will use shield or not. Try to find as many ‘acceptable’ tanks as you can and add them to your friends list.
Secondly, as unfortunate as it may seem, offensive tanking is here to stay. It arguably has always been here. However, dw/sword and board mixed tanking specs are a real thing. So my advice for finding tanks that tank the way you like and adding them to your friends list, goes doubly here.
Here is how I usually handle this as a tank in PUGs.
I start in with sword and board. Then one of three things usually happens at this point.
- Healer gets board. This results in either them dpsing, or asking me to go 2h/dw for tanking. Then everything dies faster, looting occurs, happiness ensues.
- Healer has to stop to drink cause the party is a bunch of dopes, doesn’t get runners, and other ‘inconveniences’ resulting in ‘fun, but resource intensive game play’.
- Everything dies fast, and I can chain pull w/o healer needing mana, and we all have a blast regardless.
In a group of friends I have a guy healing who I’ve tanked for on/off since MoP. We know each others play styles well enough. Some times I’ll go more offensive, sometimes he does, sometimes we just pull big and watch the dps roll mobs over.
In WoW user mileage tends to vary by miles. Good luck folks!
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Yea… it doesn’t sound like these 2H tanks are weapon swapping like you’re saying; they are just staying 2H the whole time. What you suggested is pretty smart in all senses that I can see.
I don’t recall anyone using 2H to tank in all of vanilla. Hell, I only saw a paladin tanking a handful of times.
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Holy Jesus.
Lol. Have you seen people clear mc? Retailers are loving classic right now due to the lack of effort neccesary to get things done.
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This exactly. Spiky damage makes even the best healer a bit more cautious, this can lead to a lot of overheal and oom. This will eventually cause a wipe.
This whole prolonged discussion exists because most of the newer tanks simply don’t get the Tank/Healer relationship. Both need to be aware of the other. Personally I dont care if you tank with your Pe**s. If I’m ending pulls just north of 50% mana go for it. If I’m struggling to keep you up and occasionally losing a dps I’m going to tell you you’re really squishy. Thats healer speak for please mitigate more and frankly I dont care how you do it. Thats your job.
If you see me wanding a lot or ending every fight at 90% mana you can assume I have a lot more capacity.
Now assuming we have perfect balance between tank and healer, the tank needs to decide if the DPS is causing issues such as standing in bad things, not focus targeting or not off tanking as needed.
Tank needs to control the run with input from the healer. No discussions need to be had, simple clues. Are you spiking up and down quickly from high to low health? Is healer ending every pull thats not a boss at about 50% mana? Are DPS dying more frequently than expected?
Adjusting on the fly is your responsibility as tank.
With more responsibility come the perks, don’t want the responsibility go DPS.
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the only time i’ve ran into an OOM situation with a 2h tank is simply when the DPS is too low in the group for them to kill stuff fast enough.
if you’re a healer you should be in the 5 second rule as much as possible so it means let the tank take some damage as you tick mana and then big heal/renew the tank and continue to 5 second regen while he goes lower again.
If you’re struggling to maintain a decent reserve mana even doing this, then yes, you probably need to tone down the pulls or add a shield to make the run more fluid.
having to full drink after every pull is actually slower than if you just did two smaller pulls where the healer can continue to move with the group.
the AoE everything mentality is poisonous not because it cannot work, but because every group assumes the tank/healer have the gear to make it work fluidly. If one of the two is undergeared/underleveled you immediately run into OOM situations and the group SHOULD adjust.
unfortunately they don’t and often blame each other for the sloppy pulls and wipes.
You probably dont want all your healers shelving their heals and rolling tank classes … just sayin. I heal as well and mana - especially low levels is less than ideal. We can basically cast 3 - 4 heals before we go from 100% manna to OOM. So when youre going into a dungeon as the tank but youre in dps spec/gear … its a major inconvenience to your healer.
Yes. Very much this.
In fact ElvUI has a data text to show your mana regen rate.
If you’re at zero you’re not in 5 second rule.
Tanks. This is a thing. This slows down or speeds up your run. You have a large effect on this.
Healers. If you aren’t paying attention to this you’re doing it wrong. The absolute ideal situation is to snipe killing blows for spirit tap, don’t cast for the duration and watch your mana go up.
Why don’t you all pipe down until you understand the reasoning behind using a 2h to tank low level dungeons.
Everyone complaining hasn’t got the slightest clue that us warriors use a 2h for a reason to tank lower level dungeons.
Let me simplify it for you simps.
- Rage generation. Damage = rage generation. 1h = less damage. Less damage = less rage. Therefore 1h = less rage. Less rage = less threat.
In this era of mongoloid DPS and “go go go” the dps don’t give us any time to build threat anyway, so our only chance is to try to out damage them while throwing sunders on the target. Doesn’t help that nobody focuses one mob either.
- The damage mitigation with a shield at low levels is abysmal. I mean up until level 35 or so I had a shield with about 500 armor on it. And I mean really, 500 armor? You’re gonna make a big deal about 500 armor?
Both of these reasons are also reasons leveling solo as a prot warrior blows.
So before you all keep whining about 2h tanks, understand there is a reason for it, and realize that if you’re not complaining about this, you’re gonna complain about us not being able to hold aggro and you getting nuked because we can’t generate enough rage to hold aggro on 4 mobs (especially without a real AoE threat generator).
All because you think you know everything and follow a belief that “every tank needs to have a 1h/sword”
Stop being selfish. It gets groups killed.
“Oh you’re a trash tank not equipping a shield with 450 armor for the extra 2% mitigation. Making me use all my mana every pull. Waahhhhhhh”. Shut up. At least I ask what the healer prefers before each run I do and actually most have told me to just go with the 2h.
Quit complaining and appreciate that we’re actually trying to tank for you.
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how do you enable that in Elv? I use it, i jsut don’t know if i’m oblivious to it or have it turned off.
I just have an alternate mod that counts ticks. would be nice to know if i can scrap it for elv.
stack some +healing and down rank your spells.
If what I’ve seen from 2H tanks are something I’m supposed to appreciate, then I’d kindly thank you to roll another class and let tanks who understand the importance of a shield step in.
Just because you can run a dungeon with a 2H doesn’t mean you should. If your Healers support it, fine. But rest assured that from this point on I’ll be asking for a shield or dropping groups if denied that simple courtesy.
The obvious answer is to just run dungeons with bear tanks: problem solved. Then the warriors can do whatever they want. Fury DPS away!!
Well, my warrior is level 21 at the moment with barely 1k armor (29%) and when I put on his 500 armor shield, he goes up to 44%, so it’s still more than 10% at the least.
He’s in mostly level 16-20 green mail armor.
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Do what you have to do. But you obviously didn’t read my whole post. Up until around SM Armory, a 1h/shield makes hardly any difference whatsoever. Like I said, I’d prefer the additional threat generation over the 3% physical damage reduction increase, so that my healer and the DPS aren’t pulling aggro and dying, which makes me look bad and requires the healer to work twice as hard.
I will say I fully intend on using a 1h/shield for higher instances, starting around level 40 with RFD/ZF, but for lower levels is entirely unnecessary as it makes such little difference in damage, and you’re only hindering your rage/threat generation.
Every run I did up until around 38 with a 1h, I had issues with rage generation, and therefore couldn’t maintain aggro on bigger pulls. I found I was using taunt on CD, the healer was spending mana healing DPS, the damage mitigation was negligible, and it just wasn’t as smooth as if I were to use a 2h.
Threat is everything when tanking, and if you don’t understand it then you have no business being in this discussion. Threat affects more than just who has aggro. If your only concern as a healer is how much mana you’re spending per pull then maybe you should be the one to reroll. There’s more going on than what’s inside your little bubble.
If you really intend on blacklisting tanks because they used a 2h in your SFK run, you might find your list of reliable tanks relatively small at 60.
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2hnd tanking doesnt start till 30-31 with SM
2hnd tanking doesnt stop till UBRS
now that is tanking from start to finish with a 2hnd, Starting the pull with a 2hnd and swaping to shield after SS-WW is from 30-60 all dungeons you shouldnt ever not do that.
Unless you want the real authentic Vanilla experience and pretend your the terrible player you were 15 years ago.
It did when I was tanking RFK like 4 levels below when I should have. We still got it dead. If you’re below an instance level, sword and board helps greatly. If you never do them until you can roll them… you are quite correct.
Did instances from 20 until now and rage generally hasn’t been a huge issue. But then if you let rage build towards the end of a fight when you have agro, you can use that to get early agro on the next pack and one thing feeds into the other.
But its something you have to be very cognizant of, and do. It won’t just happen.
If you’re dancing, you basically have a 25 rage max bar to play around with and will have issues with rage gen because you’re always having to scrape the bottom.
You are correct. But part of that rage management is ending the fight at the higher end of the bar so you can dump rage early on the next mobs and can then build it as the mobs are hitting you while getting cleaned up. Early agro begats solid rage generation during a fight, and solid rage generation during a fight begats early agro on the next.
Its particularly easy at lower levels but its something you must actively do and control.
Your physical damage mitigation is only accurate against enemies of your level. It scales down when facing enemies higher than you.
Also I agree you should pool your rage at the end of pulls, it helps with threat generation on the next pull, but when your healer has to sit and drink…you lose that rage. It’s just an endless cycle.