Shield Slam!
They won’t one shot a tank because the tank will (hopefully) be defense capped.
Me, though? Squish.
You don’t need to get one shot to see the impact on healing performance. healers can’t spam rank 3 healing touch(with 700+ healing power) if you are getting two shot. Their healing per mana can go from 7-14 healing/mana to as low as 1.5 healing/mana(eg power word: shield). This means you are paying with down time waiting for the healer to drink, or they have to use mana pots and dark runes to keep up, which is exactly what’s happening in higher raids when dps-geared people are tanking bosses.
Yes they did.
All tank tier gear in Vanilla was/is packed with avoidance stats and +defense. You don’t walk into brand new fresh content trying to tank as a fury warrior wasting 39 other people’s time in case you end up being the reason your guild can’t clear new content.
Fast forward 15 years when everything is completely figured out and that’s hardly the case due to everything else being so completely optimized.
Less than 1% of guilds ever full cleared Naxxramas, and tanking the orthodox way was the reality on new content. Regardless of your opinion or “personal raid history.”
And yet plenty of Tanks swapped out a variety of pieces rather than use full tier. I get that the Tanking pieces had it, but people weren’t shooting for Defense cap or trying to shove Crushing Blows off the table. Some people were proud to hit that 440 magic number, but in the end people slapped on the newest and shiniest epic piece and called it a day.
Naw, you walked in as an Arms Warrior so you could cast Mortal Strike. Seriously. Going deep Protection in the early stages of the game was just… not very common…
I like how you try to malign any personal evidence or experience I have having done Vanilla through the start of Legion content as if what you put has any bearing on it. There was no orthodoxy because there was no understanding of the rules, it was only guild politics. If the raid leader said wear 8/8 T2, then damnit, you’re wearing 8/8 T2 or you’re out of the raid team.
I mean for crying out loud, people worried that Druids might be too hard to heal because of the occasional Crit/Crush melee hit landing… while 500% Mortal Strike exists on Broodlord. People were frankly, quite silly. But don’t mistake their silliness for some kind of grand plan. You had Frost Mages and Arms Warriors and Subtlety Rogues and so forth all part of those Naxx clearing guilds. People were successful because they showed up, avoided fire, and used consumables from time to time, week after week after week.
The attitude of hating on bear tanks comes more from the prevailing attitude on games like Everquest where hating on and pigeonholing hybrids was commonplace. I think it’s pretty obvious by now that attitude was wrong for a lot of reasons.
In vanilla just having T2 and AQ40 loot was considered “geared” by the average player, tanks didn’t have a lot of options outside of tier gear they had to go with whatever was most available to them. It was extremely hard for tanks to get big ticket items like DFT, Accuria, etc that always had big competition from dps and would always lead to loot drama. They had to just take what was most available to them which was almost always pure avoidance or really specific tank items.
Which undermines your point. People taking “what they can get” is not the same as conscious gearing preferences.
That’s also because there was less gear in general.
Things weren’t put on farm during the 1st week, a lot of loot was missed out on while guilds were still progressing etc… guilds didn’t have non-tier loot to throw around the way people in classic do because the circumstances are completely different.
Which, again, undermines your point. Tanks weren’t getting what they wanted to idealize a proper set for the content… they were tossed whatever their guild could cobble together that week, if anything at all, valid reasoning be damned. I’m not disputing that.
If Blizzard releases classic TBC servers it would be no different.
You can’t compare the circumstances on classic to the time when TBC was actually retail because those circumstances are again, completely different. TBC was a lot like the case in actual Vanilla where tanks were just able to accept whatever they could get a hold of or whatever was most accessible to their class, and gear wasn’t thrown around the way it is in classic because the content took time to clear and a lot of loot and resets were missed out on too.
If classic TBC servers come out they will come out on a later patch when the content was already made much easier, or you will see tanks having way more loot and gear options then they ever had available in TBC too.
No. I absolutely have no problem looking back at my own play, my guild leaders’ judgment calls and strategies, the strategies that floated around the official boards, the ad hoc nonsense that called itself theorycrafting, etc, and calling it out for the bunk that it was. We had the tools to analyze this stuff back then, we just didn’t. It isn’t like Excel and knowledge of differential equations hit the scene in the last 8-10 years.
This I hard disagree with. Gear was far easier to come by in TBC than in Vanilla. You had smaller raid teams but bosses still dropped 2-3 items. Tier gear was specialized for the hybrids and it came from tokens, not a 1/9 chance like we have in MC/BWL. We also had Badge gear and PvP gear to gap-fill, and the crafting professions got some fantastic items at every tier. Outside of a few very rare items like Dragonspine Trophy, if there was something you needed from a raid, it was only a matter of time before you got it. People pugged Gruul, Kara, and ZA regularly, and that was on my tiny tiny server of Ysondre.
I imagine we’ll get all raid bosses with their appropriate bug fixes in place, but I don’t think we’ll see some of the progressive nerfs that hit old content when new content was released. On Retail it is basically standard practice that when NextTier releases, CurrentTier gets blanket nerfs to make the content accessible to those that want to still take a crack at it. I couldn’t care less if Kael’thas gets some of his progressive nerfs once Hyjal/BT release.
As for gearing… that’s a foregone conclusion. People are going to min/max and be mostly done by the time the next tier releases. That’s exactly what any top raiding guild on a server experienced. It’ll just be more common now that Classic has a huge population of people and doing the Lady Vashj football or jumping off of a balcony on A’lar won’t be some scary feat of strength.
None of this will excuse some of the stupidity that persisted throughout TBC as well, notably regarding Tanking. Ferals cemented themselves quite well in TBC but were still considered the go-to OT. Paladins on the other hand still had a lot of nonsense about not being a “real” tank thrown at them until AoE threat mattered. I expect that to change dramatically now that people aren’t so fixated on Warrior Kings vs Druid/Paladin Peons.
Yea pallies and druid were really good back in tbc but ima still play my original warrior just tougher better stronger💪
Because TBC mobs and bosses hit harder
That giant reaver walking around definitely does hit harder I still remember getting squashed by it lmao
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Itemization. The swap from hit chance to hit rating on gear is MASSIVE for all classes. Additionally, the skill trees are outright better at their purpose in TBC. Much of Classic tank itemization choices are compensating for what can’t be found in the skill trees, even going so far as to abandon deep prot entirely.
Do a side a by side of the prot trees and you’ll find a lot more threat baked into them. Feral continues wearing leather dps gear.
I don’t know why people keep referencing boss damage as if player health pools don’t also explode in TBC, and then again in WotLK.
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You can’t get really defense capped until basically raid tier gear arena geared. And its not so much a one shot, as an instagib. Buncha mobs hit all at once and they hit fairly hard.
That’s not correct at all. Pre heroic tanks can def cap. The changes to rating from skill makes def cap a very simple affair for anyone who goes out of their way to grind the right rep and normal dungeons; they can even mix resilience gear for a combined 6% reduction to being crit. After that is the avoidance cap for crushing blows, which is accomplished pretty painlessly on the shield tanks.
Not really. By the time good resilience gear is available you should have t4 on your tanks already.
You simply can’t get def cap without gimping yourself till then. Nor should you bother trying. Karazhan is easy, as is Gruul and Mags lairs.
I MTed those raids using the Bold armor dungeon set back in TBC. 0 issues, server firsts, while specced arms + last stand. Better off stacking as much HP or threat as you can get and getting whatever defense comes on the gear.
Because even with our increased health pools, bosses flatly hit for bigger percentages of those pools than they currently do in Vanilla, even without stacking EH gear. Gruul’s Hurtful Strike pales in comparison to Patchwerk’s Hateful Strike, but it isn’t like the MT or the OT on Gruul were taking light damage. Morogrim Tidewalker is a great example with the dude just nailing us for 4-5k (less for Ferals) with every swing and whose specials were 4-5k Frost damage and 3-4k Nature damage. It wasn’t even a matter of getting combo’d to die, the damage was simply very high, notably for Warriors who couldn’t guarantee zero Crushing Blows and had the lowest EH of the three Tanks.
Again, look at the current Tank killing bosses: the three Drakes, Broodlord, and Twins. In order for them to kill us they have to have skills that do 3-5 times their melee damage and on top of that can still land 1-2 melee swings in the same batch. Twins and Broodlord essentially can smash us for 800%+ of a melee swing. Literally nothing in TBC has to have such a massive modifier combo to kill us because the individual melee swings are that much bigger.
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The difference is that threat is the biggest issue tanks face in vanilla, so they gear for threat.
In TBC, threat is so much easier, and thus you can gear for defenses so your healers don’t have to have heart attacks every time you get chunked for half your health.
I think this depends on paladin vs warrior. It’s pretty easy for paladins to stack to def cap and be extremely good tanks early into TBC.