I’m trying to pick a tank I’ll use semi-regularly. This is not for raids or M+. I would mostly use it for WQ or BG Blitz.
When I say, WQ, I mean things like Honey Smasher. When it was often 2-3 people (including me) trying to kill it.
I’d love to play a warrior. They’re easily my favorite tank. But I feel like Honey Smasher took so long to kill that you needed a tank with self-healing. Let’s assume something like HS is back in TWW - would you recommend Paladin/DK or should I just play what I love because all tanks can solo Honey Smasher?
I would probably stay away from Prot Pally unless they do some reworks or massive tunings, it’s in a pretty rough shape right now. As it stands Warrior and Vengeance have the most amount of damage out of the tanks IIRC, but you know, it’s still tank damage, Single Target is mostly terrible but decent enough in AoE.
not sure how helpful this will be but i say go blood dk. i was running around 250 ilevel in the radiant event, pulling five or six things and had zero issue. killed faster than my bear and, i think, my veng dh.
then i realized how bad his gear was and went… huh.
^^This. Play the one that is off-spec for one of your other favorite characters. If you main warrior, play prot warrior offspec. If you play ret pally more, use prot pally. Bears and DKs also great choices. VDH & BrM are a bit trickier to learn, but are fun to play. You do you, all six choices are valid.
To a point, if we get stuff like the elemental storms again then having access to AMS to clear magic effects < 1 min apart can be huge for survival. Thinking specifically the gnoll area. BDK is also the best tank at handling bleeds if you aren’t a dwarf usually. The rot damage just doesn’t matter much to them.
Something like a Prot warrior that doesn’t have a ton of healing can struggle with some of those debuffs at low gear levels and less optimal trinkets.
You’ve given the best response (and it seems you read my post) so let me ask you, you’re saying BDK>Prot Warrior.
Is Prot Paladin>Prot Warrior?
I think DK is fun, but something about it has never jived with me. As much as I hate Paladins (the light bothers me), they feel a little more natural to me. Will they have the same problem as Prot Warrior?
Dude , try a frost death knight and take the stam buff talent. It isnt quite as sturdy as tank class but does enough damage to solo WQ, Ret palladin might be a thing too , as they self heal.
You will be trading armor rating for dps , but you will still be less squishy.
Walrocks can probably faceroll what you are talking about as well , at least demon and Destro.
Yeah, seconding a Frost DK, usually a death strike is all you need here and there also, and on the up side you can always go blood if you need to like solo something like ZQ rare if no one is around, even then you can solo them as frost once you get some decent gear.
Prot Pld is getting dogged on right now with prepatch tuning because of higher end content on the forums, but you’ll have all the tools you need for outdoor survival. Dispel, heals, BoF to handle annoying mechanics, and bubble if you flub up.
Historically the single target damage isn’t great, but WoG should far exceed anything you have coming at you in world quests so an extra few seconds in combat shouldn’t matter. Your shield is your biggest gear slot for damage mitigation, craft one early and you’ll notice a difference unless one of the embellishments is just busted.
Shield tanks may be better suited to aoe grinding since block is so potent at low damage high frequency mitigation but I dunno.
Mechanically, heroic leap and demonic leap are both pretty clutch in overworld questing and nothing really compares for the other tanks. Not sure if you played during korthia in SL, but there was a small tree right night to the quest area that you had to parkour up to grab a daily/weekly item. Heroic leap made it very easy to get to. Tree was rage inducing on my DK before I learned the trick to getting up, because I didn’t need it before her lol.
If you’re looking for something that can handle something like the world boss on your own while everyone else just pecks away at it, probably BDK or VDH. Everything else should be fine with any tank.
Hmmm… Do you have a balance druid?
For what you’re doing Prot Pally should work great. Their self-heals are a little down over historical average atm, but that shouldn’t matter to you because
They are plenty good for world content.
They could get buffed again tomorrow (tuning is always ongoing).
As a basic playstyle, Prot Pally can excel in all world content. You can immune dangerous attacks (both Divine Shield and Blessing of Protection), and you get additional cheat death like mechanics (we call them mini cheat deaths) in Ardent Defender and Gift of Golden Valkyr. Also you can heal yourself with Word of Glory and Lay on Hands.
Prot Warrior and BDK would also be fine imho. Prot Warrior has less self-healing but that’s because they take least damage. BDK takes tons of damage, laughs at attackers, then heals it all back with Death Strike.
And don’t forget bears! They are super tanky, have frenzied regen, and quality-of-life stuff like stealth (cat form) and flying (bird form) and even swimming. I’ve always liked bears for outdoor content.
PS: I play all the tanks, and can honestly say I would not hesitate to solo any world boss on any of them… except maybe Brewmaster. Brew has more self-heals than it used to, but is still the tank most likely to need some external support.
My worgen prot warrior finally has a reasonable one hand, but in DF he is just tickling the bosses, while dps kills them . There are self healing mobs that give him a hard time, My prot palladin equipped an 1 handed axe and that gives me just enough whack to end an eternal shaman mob fight, but Over all, the tank dps isn’t quite sharp enough .
Bear form isn’t too bad with some talents on the feral side of the tree, I will admit that.
I always level as Prot, we have so much stuff, we can take a beating, have heals, can heal others, have aoe, bubble and so on. Big toolkit.
I like piling as many up as possible and seeing if I can come out the other side alive, I rarely bubble tbh, but it’s cool to have for elites when you’ve bitten off too much.
I may take a Prot Warrior through also, I have all the tanks so all depends on how long I hold out before saying to hell with it and switching to DPS.
Good luck whatever you choose, but if you fall on the noob side of WoW then Pally is very easy to play I feel.
