Most mechanically easy tank?

Community General Discussion
21

Here’s my breakdown. FYI, I dont play prot pally or prot warrior, so I cant give too much input on those, but I believe both rank in the ‘harder’ category for tanking (not that they’re actually difficult, just that they have more mechanics to follow/learn).

  1. Guardian Druid. Honestly, it’s super easy and quite effective until you get into exceptionally high m+ keys. Your rotation consists of charging into the bad guys, getting them all bleeding with thrash (which is an aoe, so easy to hit with), then using swipe on aoe packs or mangle on single targets. Your mitigation comes from using ironfur every few seconds, and if you get too much rage and dont need the mitigation you use maul/pulverize as a rage dump and to dish out heavy single target damage and threat.
    That said, guardian druid isnt in the best spot for pushing endgame content right now, but you can always swap to feral, balance, or restoration easy enough when you arent tanking. I regularly play all 4 roles.

  2. Brewmaster Monk. Very similar to guardian druid in terms of abilities, though I find it slightly harder to manage threat (their prime abilities arent as aoe-centric, and require more mashing). Their mitigation is spectacular though via the stagger mechanic and brew chugging.

  3. Blood Death Knight. The problem with tanking as blood, at least before you overgear content, is that your health bar will be Very spiky. That green bar will look like a yoyo, or a game of table tennis. Death knights take a lot of damage, but can also restore most of the damage they take pretty quickly via death strike, blood worms, blood drinker, etc. They have a lot of self healign.
    As far as aggro, It’s honestly almost as easy as guardian druid: drop death and decay, use blood boil to put blood plague on everything (it also generates a lot of threat and is free to cast, cooldown aside, so spam it like no tomorrow), and heart strike as you have time/runes to spend. Your mitigation simply comes from keeping bone shield stacked; you want to keep 8-10 stacks at all times if possible, which usually isnt too difficult if you arent having downtime between pulls.
    Gorefiend’s grip and death grip both also make it very, very easy to keep groups of enemies together, even wayward casters that are usually troublesome for other tanks.

Honestly, if it wasnt for the spikiness of their health bar, death knight would be my go-to tank for everything.

Paladin and warrior would go somewhere next in here, I’d imagine.

Demon hunter is dead last. The reason I say this isnt because it’s super complicated (there are few buttons to press as a vengeance DH), but because the class design is just terrible. Your sigils, unless you sacrafice certain talents, have a stupidly long delay before detonating and have to be ground-placed (delay can be shortened slightly and placement can be changed to always directly at your feet via talents), but because sigils are very important to maintaining threat and control as a DH tank, it’s a very troublesome mechanic.
Demon hunters also do not have 100% uptime on their active mitigation, which means much of the time you’ll be taking full damage with no way to stop it other than kiting enemies around. Granted, they kite very well due to leap/glide/speed, but kiting is a somewhat advanced mechanic for tanks and not something easily learned.
And, all that aside, demon hunter tanks have pretty poor damage output, pretty lame cooldowns overall, and very low mitigation in the first place; they’re squishy as all hell.
I know that a lot of healers, including myself, will often drop group rather than deal with a DH tank, and as such they’re always my least recommended class for tanking.

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22

So i have a 120 if every tank in the game and experience playing all of them. They are all easy, some more than others. But id say dontngo DK. Its literally too easy and its not worth the reward. For low keys and raids they are fine. But remember if you plan on investing time in this toon the rotation is so easy it will get boring.

If you want to do mythic + go prot warrior or paladin. Pallys have self heals and i feel are the easier of the two. The prot warrior is the kings of mythic. Great damage.

If you wany to raid go brewmaster. Probably the hardest of the tanks to play in my opinion. But well worth it. They have some of the lowest damage out of all the tanks but who cares when your slogging booze and beating everything to a pulp like you’re in some crazy bar fight.

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23

I have a Prot Warrior alt, it’s definitely not in the “harder” category lol

Pretty easy to play, and very sturdy when played correctly. It’s strength comes from being proactive, which is my preferred playstyle anyways.

24

Keg Smash, then Breath of Fire. If mobs are Kegged, Breath of Fire puts a DoT on them. Easy AoE. The problem with initial AoE threat is people Breath of Firing before they Keg Smash. Then it’s a sad day.

How. Press Ironskin Brew. Then do DPS until you need to press Ironskin Brew again. Or Press it 2-3 times on pull to give you a good window of not having to press it while still having 1-2 free Brews for initial burst purifies if your healers are asleep.

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25

Bear isn’t especially good, but it’s certainly simple. Bind Mangle to one key, /castsequence Thrash,Swipe,Swipe,Swipe to the other, and a couple defensives and you’re pretty much good :confused:

26

This feels like the sort of question Blizzard would ask so they know which class to nerf next.

27

You can only trust yourself and the first six Black Sabbath albums.

28

…

  

29

Offhand icey-veins is your friend, but below are my observations.

Your talents seem more like dps and your gear has havoc stuff like blade dance in it. Just for tanking as vengeance demon hunter, you should switch your gear and talents around to tanking things.

In my gear, I have revel in pain, infernal armor, cycle of binding, earthlink. Cycle of binding speeds up sigils and you can use sigils of silence and misery for interrupts and making trash packs cower for a bit. (I’d often lead packs of trash up to a chest or mining node, let them cluster in close, drop misery, open chest/mine node, jump away or kill trash.) Resounding protection would be good/best to stack up too, I just didn’t have any in my pieces of armor at the moment.

For talents, I like razor spikes - you should trade your abyssal strike for that since tanking involves being in the face of junk 99% of the time. Felblade I like for getting in the face of the thing and picking up a bit of rage on the way.

On the level 104 I liked fracture to spam for rage I can use to keep other things like soul cleave and sigils and all going.

On 106 I like quickened sigils, but your sigil of chains might be alright for crowd control if you’re good at using it. I made macros to cast my sigils on the ground at my feet and like silence and misery for massively reducing damage from things near me, and flame one for a bit of damage. Quickened sigils also does a nice job feeding my cycle of binding azurite trait.

I have fel devastation instead of spirit bomb because spirit bomb consumes shards to do big damage and was nerfed I think. So I like leaving shards for my spirit barrier talent to make a stronger absorb shield based on shards it consumes. And just have fel devastation for shooting things. You might consider gluttony though because it metamorphosis you and being in meta form reduced damage taken too I think.

Soul barrier is my last talent.

Lastly, have fracture on your 1 key to spam to generate rage. And be sure soul cleave is in easy reach to heal yourself in an on demand way.

I’m not the best anything by any means, but when legion was current I was walking up to world raid bosses and solo them for many minutes until other people showed up to help get them killed faster. I could also solo normal difficulty level dungeons in current content at level both in legion and in bfa, though I had to get pretty far into gearing for that. (My ilevel looks bad right now just because I’m wielding warglaives of azzinoth for one. The second one dropped the night before classic launched. :))

30

Yea the buttons light up so you know which ones to use, you can’t go wrong with Prot Pally! lol

31

Great tips thank you!

Looking and going over the specs I don’t like having a vulnerable window, so no paladin.

I don’t understand monk.

Already have guardian.

Blood DK seems too weak in its current state.

So I guess it’s either demon hunter or warrior that interests me.

Your right that my talents were left over from havoc, and I should correct those before judging demon hunter. :slight_smile:

32

What is there to understand ?

You push Ironskin Brew, you’re unkillable.

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33

prot paladin

34

Always feel like I’m dying and take tons of damage. That’s not fun to me. Haha!

35

Then you’re just not pressing Ironskin Brew at all. Easy fix : Press Ironskin Brew, bang, best tank.

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36

Also I fixed my description of fracture just now. But basically the only world raid bosses I couldn’t solo indefinitely were ones that throw you 1000 yards and reset and ones that debuff you 90%. :slight_smile: And keeping my armors and barriers up and being able to soul cleave as fast as soul cleave comes up. Probably my best pvp fight was against another vengeance demon hunter and we spent a good ten minutes going up and down a warden tower and all over the zone. My hands eventually got tired and I stopped fighting and it still took them another 15 or so seconds finish killing me. :slight_smile:

If you have warmode on and are outside instances, illidan’s grasp is badass - you can pick a rare up by the throat and throw it at other trash to stun the trash and rare too. :slight_smile: And solitude and demon spikes and some other pvp talents that might be obvious choices for damage mitigation.

Edit: And general concensus is dh isn’t the best tank, but from my perspective it’s the simplest mechanicly speaking. If you have decent healer and dps backing you up and you know mechanics of fights, you should be okay with vengeance dh. I think blood dk is the acknowledged best tank able to solo some instanced raid bosses in current content, but it might require brains and skillful timing that I lack. :slight_smile:

37

Oof. I was gonna say Demon Hunter, but…
Probably Paladins, if not DH, since they have on demand heals, bubbles, and other Oh $h!t buttons (especially for soloing content).

As far as taking the least amount of damage, I wan’t to say the Monk, since they chop a lot of their damage in reeses pieces peanut butter bites and dodge a lot…but I also hate every iteration of the Monk after MoP.

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38

This was me playing havoc demon hunter. I could do 2-3x as much damage, but it felt like everything was doing 10x damage back at me.

With vengeance demon hunter, I’d roll up, punch a rare, rare die in 10 seconds, fix my hair and go fight another rare without stopping.
Havoc dh, I’d roll up, punch a rare, get rare to 25% health in 3 seconds right before rare kills me. :slight_smile:

39

It’s bear.

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40

(If you haven’t already) One tip for DH that makes things way easier to to bind all your ground targeted stuff to macros like this:

#showtooltip
/cast [@cursor] SPELLNAME

Instead of having to press things twice, you just put your cursor where you want it to land and it will.

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