Is tanking in Classic hard?

11/13/2018 12:49 PMPosted by Melhann
I'm planning on rolling Warrior in Classic and know tanks are usually in high demand because they were the best ones then, was it very complicated or just like it is today but slower?

No it was more complicated then it is today, but yes its pretty easy.
People didn't tank because they didn't want responsibility, of doing it.

It all depends on your party, and how well you communicate.
You don't want to be one of those warriors that just run about and focus on one target ignoring the rest of the adds and having to have dps tank those adds.

I been in a bad group with a warrior a few expansions ago and a bad healer that wouldn't heal dps because he thinks healers only heal tanks, even though we saved him from adds attacking him do to the tank being bad.

If you are playing on live and you are tanking try to learn line of sight pulling and mark targets with priority marks.
I done that in retail and so many people don't understand line of sight pulling and focus on marks.
I've had the displeasure of being shoehorned into a tanking role for having the kahones for wanting to play a dps warrior on an unofficial server when I've literally never done it before, and this wasn't ragefire chasm but one of the scarlet monastery duingeons.

Let me tell you, no matter how easy you think it is, if the person has literally no idea what they're doing, it's not, and depending on the kind of player it is can be extremely stressful.

There's numerous reasons why the tank role is the least popular role by a country mile, not the least of which is not wanting to be in the position of responsibility for multiple time wasting party wipes.
rolling a Warrior for others , how kind you are . dont worry you will find it very easy compared to BFA .. shield forward and Charge right in ...you will be Good .
if anything goes wrong ( witch is highly unlikely ) it will be the Healers fault.
Best make sure you have trained up in your sword.axe or mace skill before hand .
Oh the game was so good till they nerft everything
Don't forget to use Mocking Blow, thats a handy ability to use to get a target to attack you, i remember constantly running UBRS back in late vanilla, and it was considered a raid with no lockout, I wonder if they are going make it a weekly lockout for it in classic.
The tunnel vision tank existed in Classic and TBC, if you pug you might be "lucky" enough to group with one, threat was not just given to tanks then and only Paladins had complete easy mode with consecrate at the time. The tunnel vision tank will be working on 1 mob while the rest go kill your healer, tab targeting and hitting other mobs...is not what the tunnel vision tank does.

I rerolled a tank of my own during Classic and ended up being the MT of the guild i was in, cleave/tab target sunder/intercept/mocking blow and a ton of other abilities are all there to use and are part of the divide between a good and a bad tank, to name but a few.
One more thing that comes to mind, even though combat mechanics and class designs got dumbed down a lot, the most challenging part of tanking has always been taking the leading role and setting the group's pace.

Being the leader of the pack and having good awareness of all that's going on around while keeping a proper speed is not something many people can do. Tanks are also the first to get blamed when anything goes wrong so there's that pressure as well.
My experience tanking in vanilla as a warrior was that the better your gear got, the harder it was to hold agro. Tank gear didn't increase damage at all and better gear meant less damage taken meant less rage generated which meant less threat. Tanking bosses was easier because you basically had infinite rage so you were always generating max threat, which made threat management "Somebody Else's Problem".

The whole "charge, TC" thing doesn't really help unless you intend to tank everything (as was mentioned, it will break CC). That works, and is helpful if you're overgeared for the content, but until TC was usable in defensive stance, it wasn't huge threat. If your gear isn't good enough, the healer is going to pull off those extra mobs you're trying to hold with just a thunderclap.

Druids made better 5man tanks since their threat scaled with their gear. (Bear gear pulled double duty as cat gear, so they had much higher AP and Crit than warriors did.) However, they couldn't avoid crushing blows, which made them unacceptable as main tanks for raids.

I didn't have a ton of experience with Pallies, but my wife did, and according to her, their threat was terrible until a couple of patches into BC.
11/13/2018 05:49 PMPosted by Dealloc
11/13/2018 01:45 PMPosted by Teedo
The above have good points - and those factors make you much more reliant on the other players - Everything I did had to revolved around is the healer targetting me? Did the hunter blow all his cooldowns before I had enough rage to gain proper threat? It is like you have to play all the other group members, or atleast know exactly what they are doing, because your threat is so much lower than retail


In vanilla, threat responsibility generally falls on the DPS. There's a famous saying that goes:

If the tank dies it's the healer's fault. If the healer dies it's the tank's fault. If the DPS dies it's their own fault.

Now of course this isn't true 100% of the time. But it's a pretty good guideline.


Agreed on that ^

The hardest dungeons to tank I found where the early ones, honestly.

RFC, you'll get people just Yolo pulling like it's retail, and that can get ugly but the dungeon itself was tuned to where going in as a shaman I could play as a full hybrid damaging with a 2h, main healing, or even tanking some parts because it's balanced around having zero gear, talents, or all that much of a clue.. Basically if you can get the dps to settle down to vanilla pace and let you do the pulling yourself, it's fine.

WC was where I had the most trouble by far, however... It's early enough that it might be the first dungeon people run, and so the groups can be a real mixed bag. Some of your dps are going to Yolo pull things. Others are going to Frontload burst damage into the mob as hard as possible, and getting threat off of a cold start with no rage to spend can get a bit dicey. The dps need to learn in WC how to manage their own theat and give you the tank a moment or it can get ugly. Finally the other part that makes wc harder than later content is there are often multi pulls and DPS who aren't focusing fire on a main target are making it nearly impossible for you to hold threat on every thing.

TL:DR is that tanking itself isn't hard, but it's tougher really early on because the dps typically don't understand their role in an instance often involves waiting a couple seconds before starting dps rather than just opening up full throttle like you would on live.

Mythic+ tanking higher keys and mythic raids is way harder than anything in classic. It’s not even remotely close.

But for the most part tanking is about the same difficult level if we’re just talking about heroic or lesser raids.

If you think otherwise it’s just showing your inexperience with the game as a whole.

Yes and no.

There really isn’t much of a tanking ‘rotation’ in Classic - the notion of active mitigation was added in later expansions. So all you’ve got are long cooldowns that you might - from time-to-time - need to remember to use against specific abilities/phases.

However, positioning and threat management tend to be far more critical in Classic than they are on Retail. Retail tanks pretty much push a button and solve all threat issues. Classic tanks need their dps to work with them and carefully balance threat vs. mitigation. Likewise, on Retail, most fights are just “fight it where it lands” vs. the many Classic fights where you need to explicitly take advantage of the geometry and hit your mark.

In dungeons yes tanks are in demand, however in Raids, high damage Fury warrior that dont pull aggro are probably in more demand than a tank.

The toolkit is way smaller, so it’s easier on that end. Threat isn’t free in classic and the majority of your learning curve will revolve around managing threat.

Druid can pass as a 5 man tank, but many groups will pass and wait for a warrior.

I am (based on this) guessing you do not play Classic. Druids can easily tank 5 man dungeons and no group will “pass and wait for a warrior” because that group could be waiting for hours… :rofl:

Tanks gear up very quickly so there are not many tanks who need to run a dungeon these days…that’s why they can charge you to tank a dungeon. Even Druids do this…

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Classic is when tanking was hard. And it’s the hardest role to play with the most buttons to push. In TBC it’s because of dps itemization getting so good that tanking threat becomes hard to maintain.

Nobody have issue with druid tanking in dungeons, what are you talking about. Even Paladin and Shaman tanking is fine in lvling dungeon if high lvl enough for it.

Tanking is hard in Classic mostly because of the other players. It’s hard to establish threat when mages wanna blizzard .5 seconds into the pull.

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Not rly. If u only count moving from one spot to another as “hard” then yes… But in retail when u spec as tank, u immediatly get aggro, u only have to attack the boss and use any ability and it will do the job of keeping aggro… In classic u actually have to do your rotations well and hope your dps looks at their threat meters (unless u r godly geared) also u have to get enough hit rating and threat generating stats, its much more complicated in classic, the thing is ppl see retail as harder just because of boss mechanics

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“2 YEARS LATER”

My god let this die. You are all pinging ppl from almost 2 years ago

Don’t put these two on the same level.

Paladins are the best AoE instance tanks. If you play a Warrior, then a Paladin, you will feel that Paladin tanking is cheating. Shamans can tank, like rogues can tank.

Tanking in classic makes me hard

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