Shaman Tanks Karazhan 11/11 World First

WoW Classic Cataclysm Classic Discussion
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Keeping the Shaman strictly in P1 gear:

If they could kill Gruul fast enough, a Shaman could maybe MT him before Growth led to a one-shot. I don’t think they can do Hurtful’s no matter how fast you kill him.

Maulgar is more dangerous than Gruul, at least on the pull and for the first min or so, and has plenty of burst opportunity throughout the fight. I don’t think a Shaman can reliably endure any of that.

Mag’theridon swings pretty slow and his cleave is on-next-hit, BUT he hits very hard. Pretty sure a Crushing Blow would just outright flatten the Shaman.

Looking at the Kara video, the Shaman lacked the EH to reliably weather Nightbane, Netherspite, and Prince.

Even with P2 gear and S2 Arena pieces, I’m not sure Shaman can catch up to clear these thresholds, let alone step up to Lurker, Leo, etc. Hydross is probably the only thing a Shaman can manage and that’s only because the fight is a pure Resistance fight. The Priest add on Fathom-Lord is doable, but she’s also so anemic that you can throw any DPS Warrior on her and be fine. Shaman can probably do the Hunter or the Hunter Pet, but not both.

Everything else is a big no-go.

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They will if they can’t clear content with them.

I’m curious if, given enough Stamina, could Warlocks or Shadow Priests reach a point where they’d be able to mitigate the hurtfuls?

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Warlocks have better Stamina scaling, but crap-all for Armor. Same with Priests. :frowning:

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Was wondering because Shadow Priests still have mitigation in Shadow Form and Warlocks have Soul Link. That will mitigate about 2-3k damage from the Hurtfuls. Only thing left at that point is a high Stamina pool.

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The absolute BiS Shaman Tank Defensive gear setup has recently been figured out because of new people joining and contributing their research. If more shaman tanks would’ve been present in the beginning of phase1, we most likely would’ve seen a Shaman MTing Mag or Grull by now or a shaman tanking other content much earlier (Kara, hero dungeon) just out of shear research/data being shared.

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If it took you this long to figure out how to calculate EH…

…and you still don’t understand EH it seems.

I think Shaman would do just fine on Leo having done him last night. I didn’t realize how weak he hit. 2-3k melee swings and half the time he’s just zooming around anyway. Next week I’m going full Hit/Exp gear. There are trash mobs in Heroics that hit harder than that…

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:rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

He’s reaching through all their computer screens and putting a gun to their heads, yep

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Yeah if you’ve never been in a guild where you felt obligated to do what the GM wanted because it was the GM you’ve either never raided any meaningful content or you’re definitely in the minority of raiders.

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That or you’re a pushover. ./gquit if I had officers or a GM speak to me in a undermining tone.

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Is there a reliable EH calculator out there?

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I’d guess, but I doubt a standalone EH calculator exists since it is like… one equation?

Lemme get out of this BG and I’ll post it up.

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I searched google for one, but it wasn’t accurate.

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The simplest version should just be:

Actual Health / (1 - Damage Reduction) = Effective Health

It only gets kinda more complicated when you have multiple forms of damage reduction, like Armor and Defensive Stance. For a Shaman, it would just be the DR (Damage Reduction) from Armor, for anything like Hurtful Strikes or simple melee swings.

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Dear Lord.

It’s not like tanking is a super secret recipe only unlocked by Shaman.

It’s frequently much harder to calculate other tanks capabilities due to multiple interactive tanking abilities and timers…for Shaman it’s avoidance (now without Parry) and AC, and HPs with a very small amount of block thrown in.

For Paladins alone, in addition to the above listed values, you have to add Imp Righteous Fury, Spell Warding, Argent Defender, and then Holy Shield + Sanc interaction. Sacred Duty + Combat Expertise for Stamina scaling. Not to mention that Paladins can use Ironshield Pots instead of Mana Pots on longer fights to boost EH levels.

Shamans are simple, it didn’t take this long to compare gear…nor did it require The Cabal of Shaman on Discord :male_detective: to uncover the “Secret Button of Win” that suddenly makes Shaman not rely on luck when tanking hard hitters in a raid.

More people thinking about Calculus…does NOT suddenly change Calculus.

Math is Math.

Shaman simply do NOT have the necessary EH to withstand more challenging hitting mobs in any of the Tiers without seriously outgearing that Tier…and then only sometimes…much much later.

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I’ve never been in a guild where the raid leader was forcing me to come to raid. lmao

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The “ridiculous” pre-pull ritual adds a layer of complexity and challenge that this game sorely needs.

Many people play a shaman tank because it pushes them to think critically about a problematic situation in order to overcome a challenge. It makes them feel passionately invigorated viewing the game for a different perspective. There’s a sense of personal progression and goal.

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I’d appreciate it, if you’d be honest Kanshu and provide context when you drop info.

The Ele/Enh combo is being experimentally applied for heroic dungeons and is not suggested for the average player to perform with pugs. It is by no means the conventional way to spec a shaman tank.

It’s a spec literally being tested out by 1 person…

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I can pre-HoT myself with weapon swaps before a pull… and add another 300 threat. This pre-pull ritual would certainly be more complex, but it has all the usefulness of making sure to go through a complete animation cycle of your /dance emote before you do the next action.

Popping a wizard oil so you can get an amped up Chain Lightning for one time and one time only isn’t thinking critically about a problem, as the only thing a Shaman is actually “strong” at doing is putting out a decent hunk of threat at range. You aren’t solving a problem, you’re just throwing gold at an action you can already achieve.

Now if you could spend that kind of gold to amp up your EH… THAT would be a problem worth solving.

No. This is the equivalent of using Dexterity based weapons while exclusively slamming points into Faith and Intelligence on the off-chance you can get a full cast off before a boss runs you down in Dark Souls.

You’re wasting a lot of effort to achieve little to no work.

The “experimental” spec is garbage because it tries to act like a physical DPS Shaman while building none of the stats to support those talents. See: Dark Souls analogy above.

If you’re going to put deeper points into Elemental, you shouldn’t waste points on physical crit/haste or points that amplify Lightning Bolt/Chain Lightning. The former does nothing for you when you have no physical crit rating above baseline, the latter is nearly entirely wasted because you only use LB/CL on the pull.

Shaman struggle with sustained TPS, which means you need to amp up your weapon imbues, shocks, and Lightning Shield, while ensuring your mana lasts the entire fight.

Shaman also struggle with EH, which means every piece of gear you wear needs to be the highest Stamina/Armor you can get while keeping you uncrittable. This point is the most important because if you can’t reliably survive the hits you’re taking, no amount of Spell Crit or Spell Hit is going to matter.

What’s there to test? MAKE A MODEL

Shaman aren’t complicated. They are actually pretty braindead easy when it comes to Tanking because you have virtually nothing to do. That none of you can come up with a basic model and you don’t even know what EH is (or worse, think it is hard to come up with) tells me you have zero ideas how to even approach a build.

You’re all hopes and dreams, zero substance.

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There is no conventional way to spec as a shaman tank. The entire thing is unconventional by default.

This is pretty much it. We have Lightning Bolt or Chain Lighting for pull. After that, all we have is Frost Shock, a one-handed Stormstrike, Lightning Shield, and the bitter hope that our avoidance will be enough to sustain us through and through.

Caperfin, when you have folks like Largid making strange suggestions like 2/2 Improved Ghost Wolf for a build that is going to function indoors 99% of the time, you gotta acknowledge the ridiculousness.

On top of that, Largid also suggests putting wizard oil on your weapon for pre-pulls only before switching to WF. How is that in any way financially feasible? Given the amount of pulls in any dungeon, that’s quite a few wizard oils to consume just for that bit of pre-pull threat!

Well, he might know what it is, but probably never uses it or factors it in to any given fight.

Really, it comes down to how much stamina you have in addition to your armor. You can realistically factor avoidance in there because avoidance is RNG-based.

There’s other aspects too like the fact that Warriors have Defensive Stance and Paladins can shrug off 30% of damage when brought below a particular threshold.

But every mainline tank (Prot War, Prot Pally, Bear) has some way of boosting their own stamina as well.

Shamans have avoidance, that 10% extra armor they get from toughness, 10% damage reduction from elements, and the brief damage reduction provided by Shamanistic Rage.

That’s it.

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Lets bottom line this.

The Shaman in the video had 11k AC sans Mark or Dev.
The Shaman when GoA was up had sub 30% total avoidance…prior to boss level erosion.
During the Nightbane fight was taking ~2k DTPS with spikes over 3k DTPS for 8 to 10s intervals.
Lost threat once.
Wiped once on Nightbane.
Then got lucky and dropped him on the 2nd attempt.

I say “luck” because if you watch that fight he was chunked to near death on multiple occasions…on Nightbane…in friggin Kara.

It took a Herculean effort on the part of his THREE healers. They were popping consumes and both Paladins were running on vapor…only the Priest, who could use air phases to exit the 5s rule had more than a de minimis amount of mana. All three healers were geared…in friggin Kara…

The video says 11/11 Kara Shaman tank. Yet I don’t see a vid on Prince…nor do I know how many attempts were made to down him or if there was outside tank intervention.