Or imagine struggling to keep a 2H Tank alive through a dungeon, break up the group afterwards, pick up a lower level Tank, one with a shield, and cruising through like it was nothing?
Of course, good DPS is central to this too, but from my experience, the shield does a world of good in keeping my mana bar filled.
I think you nailed the breakdown. I have healed wow since day one. Its what I like. This iteration of Classic we’re seeing some non-traditional tank methods.
The good ones who understand the group dynamic adjust on the fly. If a tank notices priest struggling to keep up and switches to sword and board, then he has situational awareness and I would like to heal for him again. Two handed tanking has a place. Sword and board has a place. If you can’t do both and at the appropriate time, then you really aren’t a very good tank.
If my tank is taking too much damage that I think I’ll lose him, I’ll comment he feels a bit squishy. I’d expect him to find some mitigation. If he notices Im wanding a lot maybe he can mitigate less and dps more.
Equipping a 2h won’t magically make a clueless warrior play well. There are no doubt a lot of players adjusting to the wildly different rotations of Classic.
I’d have nothing to complain about if I saw this happening. Sadly, I don’t. What you’ve written here actually makes perfect sense.
Or do what I and a number of healers do with 2H tanks, add them to ignore. No reason we should have to burn our mana, while not even be given the opportunity to fully recharge before the 2H tank rushes into another mob. I will simply tell the group I am out, add the tank to the ignore list, and jump into a group with a tank that knows his role.
Your equation is too simple. Not really commenting about shieldless tanks but:
More DPS = Less Healer Mana.
If a tank can create enough DPS to outweigh the loss in mitigation from shield then its fine. Really a shield only provides major benefit from multiple attackers. If the attacker count is 1 or even 2 then a shield is almost a waste.
Example: I was in an SM Armory run last night. Couldn’t find a tank so we went 4 dps and 1 priest. The priest was 35 and dps was all 36. Was the smoothest fastest run of the night. Everything just died so fast healer was barely working. No big pulls but at the same time it didn’t matter because everything was going down so quickly.
For many 5 man dungeons a tank is safe, but not always required. If a pull went south and a mob had run and brought back adds that is when you need a tank.
Seems like people haven’t adjusted to the flexibility of Classic’s system and aren’t thinking outside the modern MMO box as much in figuring out their place in a battle. I have a feeling we’ll see more of this as time passes and people adjust to Classic, though. There’s a lot of players coming into this from a modern perspective, a surprising number actually; ain’t really just players of old-school WoW in here.
If this where BFA and I were level 15 starting to do Randoms, yeah go for it and 2h tank. It’s easy to do and mobs are easier to deal with. Go back to retail and 2H tanks scabs
Right, but…for all the people defending complicated stance-dancing and threat generation and blah de blah, do you realize that we’re not exactly talking about 10-years-on-a-private-server theorycrafters here? That the vast majority of people tanking 15-30 instances at this point are less pros and more “Hm, we’ve been trying to get a tank for an hour I guess I’ll try it”?
For your average never-tanked-in-Vanilla schmoe, they absolutely should be learning their abilities and how to tank with a sword and board first, before they try to get all fancy. At this point, the vast majority of people who are trying out Classic for the first time need to go back to the drawing board on the style of “Pull everything, OMG why aren’t we all topped up on health, why should I care about mana, go go GO GO!” tanking that has been the norm in Retail since about Mists.
It shouldn’t be up to the healer, who may also be new to the role or re-learning their class, to work ten times as hard to prevent wipes because Tank McGee heard from a friend that it’s fine to tank with a 2-hander until endgame but doesn’t know anything else that usually goes into it.
Warriors here be wierd… was trying to find a party on my alt shammy, warrior invited me, then said we need a tank, I’m dps?!? LoL, dropped that party imediately, what kind of self respecting warrior doesnt carry a sword & board around for instances, lolol
Well, here’s the thing. I’m not a 10-years-on-a-private-server theorycrafter. The only MMO that I’ve played for any length of time is FF14, and I wasn’t even a tank–I was a ninja, a DPS dispenser in other words. I asked the question without really reading much of the discussion–and received answers that basically said I’d bumbled into a common tanking method for this system.
So it isn’t as if this is rocket science. I got the basic point of it on a lucky guess and I’m a complete newbie who can barely play gracefully on a keyboard and has had minimal exposure to party tactics as yet.
I think perhaps rather than decrying the complex nature of this tactic, it would be better to raise awareness of it and perhaps ask your tanks, before you run into a dungeon, what their exact approach is… rather than just judging based on the weapon in their hand. That two-hander might be a goof, or they might have a shield in their backpack ready to swap in after they’ve made that first big splash on the enemy mobs.
This confuses me as someone who is leveling a Paladin and Warrior on the side. How is it only 10% if they go from 29-31% DMG Reduction VS Current level all the way up to almost 49-50% DMG Reduction VS Current level?
I’m going board and sword. Going toward Prot, with some Arms as well.
A good tank makes sure “when its really needed” never happens. Thats the differentiation of tanks, our job is to make sure nothing unexpected takes place, or to normalise things as quick as possible when they do.
No, a warrior didn’t need a shield to tank.
They also didn’t used to pull 3+ mobs and attempt to hold threat against the mages aoe.
It isn’t fun to heal that.
True, but when a Tank is getting everything under control, who is keeping everyone alive? Healers need to have the mana available for those occurrences.
If your coming into a group as a “tank” you need to use a shield unless you talk to your healer about it/ your group’s overall dps can handle it.
Its common decorum and its whats expected of you. You don’t need to have a blue just keep a shield quest reward and a one hander to match its not that hard. As far as threat goes you can take the lead and communicate like a good tank/group leader. Please assist on skull, and wait for one sunder etc.
Hahaha, we including consent clauses in the groupmaking application now?
Just play with people you enjoy playing with. It’s really that simple, ultimately.
Tank does more damage = fight ends quicker and healer is less likely to oom.
2h Tank in SM with an average skill group can easily do as much damage as 2-3 other dps combined, significantly increasing clear speed.
Like imagine if you were taking extra damage forcing your healer to ignore the 5 second rule so you can hit for a little bit of extra damage.
This goes both ways chief.
Expecting the healer to adapt to your less than ideal tank style is pretty selfish. They could have every rank of their heals on the bar and depending on the size of the pull it simply won’t matter. Extra damage intake requires extra healing, so if the healer is forced to spam you they will oom insanely fast because you wanted to hit for a bit more damage instead of allowing them to do their 5 second rule for mana ticks that will overall, increase the efficiency of the run and preserve additional mana in case of accidents.
Not only does the 2hand warrior expect to be exempt from their core role, they also expect their healer to dedicate more mana commitment on each pull along with additional drinking (that costs money without a mage) all so they can pretend to be a blood dk.
This isn’t always the case.
That would come down to how many mobs were pulled and what they hit for on average. Watched a warrior tank try and 2hand Deadmines and we spent the first half of the dungeon letting the healer drink every single pull because the dude was getting chunked.
Forced him to put in a shield and all of a sudden they stopped melting and the healer only had to sit 4-5 times after that and we picked up the pace.
I get everyone has their own opinion on how tanking should work. But the core of tanking for warrior has always been with a shield. Just because you can sometimes get out of a pull faster and somehow the healer spends less mana, doesn’t mean that will always be the case. It’s dependent on how well geared the tank is and how much extra effort the healer is willing to commit to someone who could simply just do their job without showing off.