I know what you’re thinking: why on earth would you suggest tanking as shaman in p5 gear? Well, I’ve tanked a number of raids as shaman in p4 and was pretty geared and let me tell you: it wasn’t very good lol. The lack of mana, Stam and tps on mail gear kept tank shaman from ever being as useful as other classes in 40-man content. However, thanks to new massive upgrades to mana, survivability AND tps, the class now definitely has a shot at tanking all content proper.
1.) Black Grasp of the Destroyer
Not only does this have respectable physical damage for mail hands but it also gives 8 mana per melee hit, whether drained or not! Factoring in Flurry, WF weapon on Annihilator and raid boss parry+dodge% this offers a whopping 30 mp5 vs. raid bosses. It’s worth noting as well that the mana gain counts towards threat: it adds roughly 2-3 additional tps depending on the speed of the 1h (~10 Str worth).
2.) Stormcaller’s Hauberk
Thanks to spell damage scaling with Earth Shock and Lightning Shield, this offers way more threat per second than SGC. Let that sink in. It just so happens to have 24 Int and Stam as well. This is one of the strongest items in the game for tank Shaman; unfortunately other classes will certainly roll for Carapace of the Old God - a drop from C’Thun (albeit 100%) - also making Hauberk one of the harder pieces of gear for Shamans to get their hands on.
3.) Ossirian’s Binding
Loaded with stats and then some: 20 Agi, 1% crit, 1% hit and 19 Stam plus some Int to boot. Not as exciting as the above items but it still blows melee Shaman’s other raid belts out of the water, including other p5 belts.
These are the three pieces of gear that will enable tank Shaman, Binding being the least necessary since a number of mail AQ40 and BWL belts aren’t terrible substitutes. In p4 and physical dps gear I OT’d ZG with some success (granted Shaman can’t naturally hold AoE threat in 12+ mob pulls) and solo tanked Rend runs very successfuly, but anything beyond that such as tanking Hakkar or the rest of UBRS proved to be either a struggle or nearly impossible. When MT’ing Ony in physical gear before p5 I popped Stoneskin instead of a mana pot, and because of that and a fat-finger or two I went OOM in 20 seconds lol. These three gear upgrades are so impactful that together they will absolutely take shaman tanks from floundering like that to FINALLY fully functioning in 40-man’s.
Other new gear upgrades will help as well of course, and thankfully there’s plenty of them:
Stormcaller’s legs/Scaled Sand Reaver Leggings
Stormcaller’s boots/Boots of the Fallen Prophet
Stormcaller Pauldrons
either AQ40 Defense neck (worth using over Pendant)
p5 tank rings (even more valuable than Master Dragonslayer’s Ring)
Cloak of the Golden Hive/Cloak of the Fallen God
These are less valuable than the above, but are still worth mentioning:
Barrage Shoulders (if you don’t already have either Stormcaller’s or the 40 nat dmg shoulders from MC, or just want to be as tanky as possible)
Staves for helping pull trash w/Chain Lightning
Totem of Rage (Shock spell damage)
The biggest differences between tank shaman before and after p5 is that absolutely no gear from p4 compares to the vast majority of non-class-specific gear now at Shaman’s disposal, and on top of that shaman finally has a non-healer raid set in Stormcaller’s and it’s a fantastic set! All non-Warlord mail gear either had a bland and underwhelming mix of stats or some offense and little to no Int or Stamina. Non-resto shamans have mostly been dealing with scraps up until now.
Disclaimer: while sham has strong single target tps the class has no natural AoE threat; keep that in mind if you’re willing to try it as it definitely needs at least two other tanks that will grab AoE threat while you focus down stronger mobs in pulls. dps as enh in anything beyond MC or 20-man’s is subpar - the whole point of shaman tanks is that they can generate a lot of threat despite not having as much sustained damage as dps.
General things worth noting regarding tanking as shaman:
- You can train Engi to help alleviate the lack of natural AoE but Sappers will be very expensive for the foreseeable future.
- When OT’ing, Shaman should join trash pulls with a 2h on until holding top threat on multiple mobs and should use a 2h on bosses to help catch up on threat when behind other tanks.
- Rockbiter is useful for trash pulls, but thanks to armor shred shamans are way better off using WF on bosses.
